My little boy goes away. But, presently, he returns:
"Father, have you written the letter to Dirty?"
"Not yet, my boy. There is time enough. I sha"n"t forget it."
"Father, I am so fond of Dirty."
"She was certainly a dear little girl."
A silence.
"Father, I am also so fond of Erna."
We look at each other. This is no joke:
"Perhaps we had better wait with the letter till tomorrow," I say. "Or perhaps it would be best if we talked to Dirty ourselves, when we get back to town."
We both ponder over the matter and really don"t know what to do.
Then my eyes surprise an indescribable smile on our mother"s face. All a woman"s incapacity to understand man"s honesty is contained within that smile and I resent it greatly:
"Come," I say and give my hand to my little boy. "Let us go."
And we go to a place we know of, far away behind the hedge, where we lie on our backs and look up at the blue sky and talk together sensibly, as two gentlemen should.
XVI
My little boy is to go to school.
We can"t keep him at home any longer, says his mother. He himself is glad to go, of course, because he does not know what school is.
I know what it is and I know also that there is no escape for him, that he must go. But I am sick at heart. All that is good within me revolts against the inevitable.
So we go for our last morning walk, along the road where something wonderful has always happened to us. It looks to me as if the trees have c.r.a.pe wound round their tops and the birds sing in a minor key and the people stare at me with earnest and sympathetic eyes.
But my little boy sees nothing. He is only excited at the prospect. He talks and asks questions without stopping.
We sit down by the edge of our usual ditch--alas, that ditch!
And suddenly my heart triumphs over my understanding. The voice of my clear conscience penetrates through the whole well-trained and harmonious choir which is to give the concert; and it sings its solo in the ears of my little boy:
"I just want to tell you that school is a horrid place," I say. "You can have no conception of what you will have to put up with there. They will tell you that two and two are four. . . ."
"Mother has taught me that already," says he, blithely.
"Yes, but that is wrong, you poor wretch!" I cry. "Two and two are never four, or only very seldom. And that"s not all. They will try to make you believe that Teheran is the capital of Persia and that Mont Blanc is 15,781 feet high and you will take them at their word. But I tell you that both Teheran and Persia are nothing at all, an empty sound, a stupid joke. And Mont Blanc is not half as big as the mound in the tallow-chandler"s back-garden. And listen: you will never have any more time to play in the courtyard with Einar. When he shouts to you to come out, you"ll have to sit and read about a lot of horrible old kings who have been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years, if they ever existed at all, which I, for my part, simply don"t believe."
My little boy does not understand me. But he sees that I am sad and puts his hand in mine:
"Mother says that you must go to school to become a clever boy," he says. "Mother says that Einar is ever so much too small and stupid to go to school."
I bow my head and nod and say nothing.
That is past.
And I take him to school and see how he storms up the steps without so much as turning his head to look back at me.
XVII
Here ends this book about my little boy.
What more can there be to tell?
He is no longer mine. I have handed him over to society. Hr. Petersen, candidate in letters, Hr. Nielsen, student of theology, and Froken Hansen, certificated teacher, will now set their distinguished example before him for five hours daily. He will form himself in their likeness.
Their spirit hovers over him at school: he brings it home with him, it overshadows him when he is learning the lessons which they zealously mete out to him.
I don"t know these people. But I pay them.
I, who have had a hard fight to keep my thoughts free and my limbs unrestrained and who have not retired from the fight without deep wounds of which I am reminded when the weather changes, I have, of my own free will, brought him to the inst.i.tution for maiming human beings. I, who at times have soared to peaks that were my own, because the other birds dared not follow me, have myself brought him to the place where wings are clipped for flying respectably, with the flock.
"There was nothing else to be done," says the mother of my little boy.
"Really?" I reply, bitterly. "Was there nothing else to be done? But suppose that I had put by some money, so that I could have saved Messrs.
Petersen and Nielsen and Froken Hansen their trouble and employed my day in myself opening out lands for that little traveller whom I myself have brought into the land? Suppose that I had looked round the world for people with small boys who think as I do and that we had taken upon us to bring up these young animals so that they kept sight of horns and tails and fairy-tales?"
"Yes," she says.
"Small boys have a bad time of it, you know."
"They had a worse time of it in the old days."
"That is a poor comfort. And it can become worse again. The world is full of parents and teachers who shake their foolish heads and turn up their old eyes and cross their flat chests with horror at the depravity of youth: children are so disobedient, so naughty, so self-willed and talk so disrespectfully to their elders! . . . And what do we do, we who know better?"
"We do what we can."
But I walk about the room, more and more indignant and ashamed of the pitiful part which I am playing:
"Do you remember, a little while ago, he came to me and said that he longed so for the country and asked if we couldn"t go there for a little? There were horses and cows and green fields to be read in his eyes. Well, I couldn"t leave my work. And I couldn"t afford it. So I treated him to a shabby and high-cla.s.s sermon about the tailor to whom I owed money. Don"t you understand that I let my little boy do _my_ work, that I let him pay _my_ debt? . . ." I bend down over her and say earnestly, "You must know; do please tell me--G.o.d help me, I do not know--if I ought not rather to have paid my debt to the boy and cheated the other?"
"You know quite well," she says.