"All right, you go," said the father with a yawn, Keith and I don't care--do we, Keith?"
"No," Keith replied mechanically, but even as he spoke he became conscious of a desire to share his mother's enthusiasm rather than his father's indifference. If they would only promise not to shoot! ...
XVII
Three years he remained in the school of the Misses Ahlberg. Three times fall and winter and spring were followed by that painfully delicious period of almost unbroken daylight, when the very books seemed to lose some of their magic, when even the air of the old lane became fraught with some mystic urge, and when life within stone walls turned into an unbearable burden.
He rose by degrees from mere spelling to the study of a foreign language, German. He learned his Catechism by heart--or rather by rote, for the time-worn phrases dropped from his lips at demand very much as water runs down a mill sluice, without leaving any trace. In fact, little of what he learned appeared to touch his real life at all. Nor could he be made to take it very seriously, although, on the whole, he was counted a good pupil.
He used schoolbooks, of course, but he was rarely caught reading one of them. His mind seemed to master the offered knowledge by some mysterious process of absorption of which he himself was never aware. Study in the sense of close and painful application was quite foreign to him. Yet he seemed capable of mastering anything that aroused his interest--or that stirred his vanity, for he loved to shine. Unfortunately most of his schoolmates were dull plodders who had not yet reached a stage where plodding counted, and so his triumphs came easy and there was nothing to spur him into serious effort.
At the end of the third year he had practically exhausted the possibilities of the little school in the South End, and it was understood that he would not return in the fall, when he would be nine years old. But nothing had been decided about what he was to do instead.
He had not been unhappy with the Misses Ahlberg and his leave-taking lacked none of the expected emotional colouring. Yet he left without a pang, without regrets. It was as if he had passed through that school in his sleep, waking up only when he reached home and his books. He had made no friends and formed no ties at school, and outside of it he had never associated with any of his schoolmates. Not one of them left a mark on his memory as Harald had done. In a place full of girls, his little heart never was betrayed into a single quickened beat of anticipation. Nor did he make any new connections outside of the school during those years. One might almost say that he had ceased to realize the existence of things or persons except in so far as they administered to some immediate need within himself.
Summer came early that year, and with it came a marked change. His restlessness grew almost morbid, so that his mother found it nearly impossible to keep him indoors. He was every minute pleading for leave to play with Johan, and on several occasions when permission had been granted, he and Johan left the quiet lane to play with strange boys on the Quay. It drove his mother almost to despair, and she tried one thing after another to keep him at home.