Short Fiction

they have cut it open with a penknife.”

“Have they dirtied your book for you, too?” I asked.

“Yes, they’ve laid it in the gutter.”

“Why are they so mean to you?”

“I don’t know. They are stronger than I am.”

He knew of no other reason. But of course that was not the only one; they must have found something in him that irritated them. I saw it in him that he was not like the others. The exceptional, the divergent always irritates children and mobs. A schoolboy’s eccentricities are punished by the teacher with a well-intended monition or a dry satiric smile; but by his comrades they are punished with kicks and cuffs and a bloody nose, with a torn jacket, a cap carefully laid under a rain-spout, and his best book thrown into the gutter.

Well, he is an actor now; that was surely his natural predestination. He now talks from the stage to a large public. It would be strange if sometime he did not make his way; I believe he has talent. Perhaps he will gradually transform his peculiarity to a pattern, according to which others try to conform as to an inoffensive regular verb.

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 windowsill?⁠—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?”

Grownups 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.”

I perceived that things couldn’t go on any longer so; something must be done. It occurred to me that it was the sibilant sound that betrayed me: Signy, Signy; that wouldn’t do. So I changed Signy’s name to Ida. In that way I succeeded in having her sometimes in peace, but Ida never really got the same power of enchantment over me as Signy. One fine day we became enemies, I quarreled with her and called her a silly girl, and perhaps I even went so far as to scratch her. I regretted it to be sure but wouldn’t ask her pardon, and soon after I let her go to the deuce. At the same time I learned to think in silence⁠—and with a few exceptions have continued to do so.

But whence had I got Signy? In the same house with us lived a little girl, with whom I sometimes played. Her mother was in the ballet, and once she dressed herself in one of her mother’s ballet skirts. But she was neither Signy nor Ida, she performed no deviltries and had none of Signy’s magic power over my heart. I must, then, at the age of seven have created Signy as the German creates a camel: out of the depths of my consciousness.

Then, too, I was predestined.

After that the years rolled on, and my genuinely literary impulses arrived, only quite late. The first strong urge came when one of my schoolmates⁠—it was the present Professor Almqvist at the Caroline Institute⁠—during a lesson in Mother Tongue declaimed with powerful effect Viktor Rydberg’s “Flying Dutchman.” I became wild with enthusiasm and for months afterwards dreamed of nothing else than being able at some period in the remote future to write something equally fine.

So far I haven’t succeeded, but why should one give up hope?