Those two little volumes became at once his most priceless possession and the foundation of his first library. To others they might appear quite commonplace books, without much value from any point of view. To him they were passports to a realm of action and freedom and colour, where he could roam at will in search of everything he missed in real life. One was bound in white with the picture of an African lion hunt on the front cover. The other one had a plain brown binding. Both had coloured illustrations and contained stories of hunting and travelling adventures in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. There were tales of lion hunting with Arabs and tiger hunting in the jungles of India, of whaling in the Arctic and hair-breadth escapes from giant snakes in South America, of cruises in southern seas and caravaning across the high plateaus of Central Asia.
One story in particular stuck in his mind, and more particularly one little detail out of that story. It was one of comparative repose and few sensational incidents relating the perfectly peaceful, but nevertheless strange and interesting experiences of a European traveller through some desert region back of the Caspian Sea. Arriving at a nomad camp far away from all civilization, this traveller was met with touching hospitality. During a formal visit to the chieftain of the tribe, he was offered tea. With the tea was handed him a bowl containing a single lump of sugar. In European fashion he picked up this and dropped it into his cup. Not a word was said, but something told him that he had committed some dreadful mistake. By and by, as he watched the others, he understood. Sugar was so rare that to use it in ordinary fashion was out of question, and so the solitary lump served was meant to be licked in turn by each, and he, as the guest of honour, had been given the first chance. To Keith's mind that story seemed as clearly realized as if he had played a part in it himself. And what occupied him more than anything else was the pitiful existence of those poor nomads to whom even such a common thing as sugar was an almost unattainable luxury. It was his first lesson in human sympathy, and it was typical of his own existence and bent that it should have come out of a book.
XIV
From that day one of his main objects in life was to acquire books. He had little pride as a rule, in spite of all his sensitiveness, and when books were concerned he had none at all. Having discovered that a friend of the family, who until then had been regarded with supreme indifference, held some sort of clerical position in a publishing house, his devotion to Uncle Lander suddenly became effusive and he begged so shamelessly and so successfully that at last his father had to intercede. Out of a half-hour sermon on things that must not be done, Keith grasped only that, as usual, he could not do what he wanted. Money was still a mystery to him, and he never suspected that Uncle Lander would have to pay his employers for every book taken out of the stock.
The sole check to his passion sprang logically from the very fervor of that passion: a book being such a precious object to himself, he could not dream of taking it away from somebody else. As in a flash the true spirit of his father's objection to borrowed books was revealed to him. That objection became his own and stuck to him through life: if he liked a borrowed book, the inescapable duty of returning it was too painful to be faced, and if he didn't like it, there was no reason for borrowing it. Books became sacred things to him, to be cherished and protected as nothing else. The loss of one was a catastrophe.
Soon he had a small library of his own, kept on a shelf in the huge wardrobe that stood in the vestibule leading to the parlour. Made up at first of odds and ends bearing no real relation to his desire for reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain homogeneity reflecting the boy's state of mind. Books of travel and adventure continued to prevail for a long while. Equally favoured were stories dealing with Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race. The grim record of the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first heroes of his worship were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom. To these should be added Garibaldi, of whose South American campaigns, so touchingly shared by the faithful Anita, he read graphic accounts in an odd volume of an illustrated weekly. The word liberty first came to him from the lips of the picturesque Italian, while Anita and the women of the old Germanic sagas struck him by their contrast to his mother.
In the main, all his reading made for escape and compensation. He read to get away from his own surroundings, and he revelled in characters of fiction and legend and history that possessed qualities lacking in himself. By nature he was a queer mixture of rashness and timidity, but through his mother's anxiety on his behalf the latter quality was constantly being nursed at the expense of all tendency to action. And so, in order to keep the balance, he revelled in the imaginary or real deeds of men whose very life-breath was danger. The more the books gave him of what he craved, the less he thought of looking for it in life.
Consequently his new passion seemed a godsend to his mother, who encouraged him in every possible way. It brought a solution of many difficulties and worries by keeping him at home and quiet. The only resistance came, as usual, from the father, who repeatedly counselled moderation and often made the boy drop his book and turn to something else--which seemed to Keith the worst of all the tyrannies to which he found himself exposed. But most of the time the father was powerless because of his absence from home, and soon Keith learned that his reading formed the only exception to his mother's general refusal to permit any circumvention of his father's explicit command.
It also became plain to Keith that the mother favoured his love for the books not only as a means of relief to herself. Evidently she held it admirable in itself and a promise bearing in some mysterious manner on his future. His mother's approval flattered him, but otherwise her attitude was a riddle which he did not care to solve as long as it brought him permission to explore at will this newly discovered world of perfectly safe enjoyment. In the end, however, that strange reverence shown by his mother combined with his own increasing ability to live the cherished life of his dreams at second hand into an influence that more or less warped his entire outlook on life. It robbed to some extent of his sense of proportion.