SIGNY
SIGNY was a little girl about as old as I, with a pink dress and a pink ribbon in her hair. Her hair was dark, with curly locks, and she had dark blue starry eyes with long lashes. She was not at all angelic. I didn’t care a great deal for angels, perhaps in especial because they always had fair hair. I had fair hair myself at that time, like most children, and light hair wasn’t much, I thought.
But I thought an awful lot of Signy. I could go about thinking of her for whole days. It was not seldom that she did something naughty, which I was blamed for, and sometimes I myself took the blame voluntarily. I cared no less for her on that account, but only wished that she would do more naughty things and I get the blame for them. But what was that bit of deviltry she hit upon? Let me think.—She ran off and hid somewhere where we were forbidden to go, in some dangerous place where there might be trolls and spooks. One time I remember clearly that she wheedled me into playing with matches—playing with fire, the most dangerous and most strictly forbidden thing there was. Didn’t she set fire to an old dry bush in the garden? Why, to be sure she did; and I got the switch from mother. Oh, how I cared for Signy. And sometimes she said words that shouldn’t be said. The shivers went up and down my back, but I only wanted her to say them again.
I don’t know just where she lived. It wasn’t in the same house as we did; the other children whom I played with didn’t know her. But she must have lived in the same street—I suppose—in a little home with a garden surrounded by a fence. Or did she live in a garret cupola obliquely across the street, with flowers on the window-sill?—I may just as well say right out that she didn’t live anywhere. She existed only in my imagination.
Signy was the first creation of my fancy, at least the first I can recall. I was a good six or seven years old, and at the age (just as, besides, at sixty, seventy or more) one often thinks aloud. To be brief, I went about prattling to myself as I imagined things about Signy, and one fine day it happened, of course, that my mother heard me.
“Listen to the boy,” she said to my father. “Listen how he goes around talking to himself!”
And to me she said, “What is it you go around talking about? What are you thinking about?”
Grown-ups have a terrible passion for asking children the most inconsiderate questions. I ran off and hid.
Another day it was the same story, and still another day. Pain and embarrassment, questions that couldn’t be answered.
My father said to me, “Other children talk to themselves up to four and five years old; you are too big for that.”