The Soul of a Child

by Edwin Björkman

He went about his daily classroom tasks as in a dream, doing mechanically what he was asked, and dropping his effort as soon as the demand for it ceased. Nothing happened during the lessons to indicate that the teachers noticed any change in him or were in any manner dissatisfied with him. Perhaps he was saved by an occasional flaring up of interest that drew from him flashes of that brightness of mind that had won Dally and given him the reputation of an exceptional pupil.

But as the spring term drew nearer its close, he found it more and more difficult to keep up a pretence at attention. More and more he sank into mere drifting, and he whose pride had been really to know, now trusted to luck like any dullard with a head unfit for studying. Worse still and more significant, he began to find excuses for staying home from school. He who had never known what it was to be sick, now developed disturbing symptom after another--headaches and colds and digestive troubles in endless succession. Most of the time these symptoms yielded quickly at the mere sight of the castor oil which was his mother's favourite remedy and the taste of which Keith hated more than anything else in the world. It was the one thing that stood inexorably between his growing indolence and the luxury of being ill.

With commencement almost in sight, all sorts of written examinations were demanded. These he disliked additionally because his handwriting never had developed in proportion to his mental capacity. No matter how he strove, the letters remained childishly awkward. No two of them seemed to point in the same direction. Not even his futile efforts at singing could fill him with a more humiliating sense of inferiority.

All his various resistances were brought into concerted action when at last the teacher in Swedish ordered him to prepare two brief original compositions on quite simple themes. In the days of Dally he would have revelled in such a task. Now it appalled him. His head was empty. The mere idea of trying to write about such things as the discovery of America and the beauties of nature seemed silly. There was any number of books, besides, that said anything you could ever hope to say on either subject.

The end of it was that he produced an indisposition real enough not only to convince his mother but to make himself willing to face the ordeal of castor oil. Thanks to the oil he was able to stay in bed the better part of two days. Those were the last two days before his Swedish compositions were to be delivered. He knew that if they were not delivered, he would get no mark in that subject, and this would prevent his graduation to a higher grade.

In that dilemma he conceived the brilliant idea of making his mother write the compositions for him, and he actually succeeded in persuading her to do so. He prompted her a little, but she did the main part of the work, and the handwriting was hers. Finally he got her to bring them up to school with the explanation that he was too sick to sit up and write, but that she had taken down what he dictated. He did not even look at what she wrote, and it never occurred to him to doubt her ability of doing it far better than he could. When it was all over, he experienced a tremendous sense of relief, and this was much enhanced by his mother's willingness to let the father remain in complete ignorance of what had happened.

Nothing was said to him when he showed up at school again. His first inkling of trouble came with the return of his copy book. It was full of marks and corrections in red ink. As he looked at these in a stunned fashion, he realized for the first time that his mother's spelling and punctuation would have been deemed unsatisfactory in a second grade pupil. At first he did not even consider the bearing of this discovery on his own fate. He could think of only one thing, namely that another blow had been dealt to his conception of his mother as a superior being. He actually felt ashamed on her behalf. Then came the thought of what the teacher must have thought....

Commencement Day brought the answer. He got only C in Swedish, which meant that he had failed to pass. It gave him the choice between spending another year in the same grade or facing special examinations in the fall.

At first he was too dazed to think. Then his former indifference changed into blazing indignation and resentment. He felt himself a victim of unpardonable injustice. In that mood he returned home and reported to his father.

"You talk nonsense, my boy," said his father in a tone that was new to Keith. "From some things I have heard, I gather that your escape from the same kind of mark in every subject was little short of miraculous."