A thought came to him. He rose, examined the reading-desk, saw that the damage was not irreparable, took off his boot and mended the desk with a few well-directed blows. He then calmly walked out of the church feeling that the power within himself was, after all, more reliable than the God whose help he had invoked. The mysterious interrelation between whole-hearted prayer and the dormant powers within ourselves is seldom understood. The child's logic humorously reflected the spiritual instability of average humanity.
His self-reliance was, however, fitful. Sometimes he wept bitterly, battling with an uncontrollable duality within his own mind, a divided will which made him unreasonable and capricious. He developed sudden antipathies, endured fits of shyness and self-abasement, during which he had to run away from other children and hide himself. At such times he would deliberately keep away when good things were distributed, and on being forgotten, revel in his martyrdom.
August's rebellion against learning lessons developed pari passu with his powers of independent thought. He did not make progress at Klara school, and his father transferred him to another, where he mixed with children of people in humble circumstances. Here he felt more at home; no one looked down on him; his boots and his knickerbockers did not give offence. His pity was aroused by the poverty of some of his school-fellows. They were expected to be clean, attentive and polite, but how could they? They came from homes where no one could afford to be clean, where families were crowded in small rooms which served as work-shops as well as nurseries, where the decencies of life were unattainable luxuries. The contrast between the two schools afforded August material for continued meditation on class problems.
Latin and Greek were the principal subjects taught. August wanted to learn in his own way and to translate in his own way. Both in classics and in history he refused to submit to the discipline of the schoolmaster. Having formulated his own method of learning and the proper form of examining pupils he defied the teacher's order. He was dumb when he should speak, and spoke when he should be silent. When the exasperated Latin master declared August to be an idiot, the father unexpectedly took his son's part and moved him to a private school. This school had introduced rational methods of teaching; flogging was prohibited, the boys were treated as individuals, and August felt that he could expand without fear of immediate repression. During the years that followed, the family attained a position of comparative affluence and comfort. August lost the dread of being trampled upon or suppressed from above, and mixed freely with titled youths who were accorded no privileges by the headmaster who lacked all reverence for the distinction of birth.
August was wont to parade his knowledge before his mother. At first she took great pride in her son's gifts and the time when he should wear the white cap of honour, coveted by every Swedish student, was often spoken of. But the mother's leanings towards a narrow pietism caused her to discern the vanity of learning in her son's mind. She warned him against the wickedness of such pride, and contrasted the humility of Christ and His contempt of worldly wisdom with the self-conceit of mere book-learning. The son listened, and concluded that the mother's resentment of culture was the result of her own ignorance. One evening the sons were called to the mother's death-bed. August was then thirteen. Overwhelmed with grief and shivering with the horror of Death, he sat hour after hour by the bed crying, and thinking over all the evil he had done.
This was the inevitable end. How could he live without a mother? The future seemed wrapped in impenetrable darkness and misery. Then oh, horror!—a shameful thought crossed his mind. Some time before his mother had shown him a little ring, and said that it would belong to him after her death. And now, at the solemn and awful moment, the promise of the ring rose in his unwilling memory. He saw it on his finger—one bright spot in this sorrowful hour, something to look forward to.
But only for a moment—such low covetousness, such a shameful thought by the side of a dying mother must come straight from the devil. The pangs of remorse and shame were so persistent that the incident fixed itself in his memory, and years afterwards the recollection made him blush.
The allurements of thoughts which we ought not to think, and which range from sudden inconvenient flashes of recognition of the comical in the midst of the serious business of life, to the haunting ideas which are the débris of mental combustion, could not be understood by the boy. Nor did he know that he was destined to live through the gamut of cerebral phenomena, an exponent of extravagant thought and lawless ideation.
When the stillness of death fell upon the room the unworthy thought was far away and August screamed like a drowning child. The father was softened and spoke kind words to the two boys. Strindberg tells us with his usual candour that his sorrow lasted scarcely three months. "Sorrow," he writes, "has the happy quality of consuming itself. It dies of starvation. As it is essentially an interruption of habits it can be replaced by new ones." After six months his father married the housekeeper.
August was now learning five languages, besides his own. Botany, zoology and the physical sciences aroused his keen interest. He had collections of insects and minerals, and a herbarium to which he devoted much time. He developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge, but he claimed freedom to find his intellectual food without extraneous interference or restrictions. He not only wanted to know everything, but he wanted to be able to do everything, to be endowed with all human talents.