“I go to my death wherever I go, killivillivippombom!”
The bridge-tender, old Moberg, was sitting on his porch, which was embowered in hop vines, drinking toddy with two farmers in the light of a round Japanese lantern. He was an old man who drank toddy every evening, and people said he couldn’t last much longer. But he was most unwilling to die. If he heard anyone speak of illness or death, it was to him as if he had heard something indecent, or indeed it was much worse, for indecent talk rather raised his spirits than offended his ears. But when he saw Martin coming along the road and heard him singing a funeral hymn to the tune of an insolent street song, he got up and advanced along the road with tottering steps till he halted in front of Martin. Martin stopped too and was silent directly. He looked around for Johan, but Johan had vanished.
Old Moberg had become blue in the face, as he said in a trembling voice: “And this child is supposed to come of respectable people! These are strange times, I may say.”
Thereupon he went into the house, without either drinking his toddy or saying good night to the farmers, and went to bed.
But Martin was left alone on the road, and everything around him had become silent all of a sudden. He heard only the sound of the farmers’ sticks as they went off in the dark without speaking.
Martin’s parents, however, had heard the whole affair from the veranda on the side of the house.
“Martin, come in!”
Martin was as red as his collar was white. Now he’d have to give an account of who had taught him to sing such things. But he said he had thought of it himself. Father explained to Martin how dreadfully he had behaved, and Martin cried and was sent to bed. His mother cried too when she said prayers with him. She was frightened and wrought up. For children’s offenses, like those of adults, are judged more according to the scandal they have aroused than according to their inner nature, and Martin’s misdeed had caused a terrible scandal.
The most beautiful days of summer were gone. In the daytime there was rain and wind, and the lake turned green. And at dusk the crows flapped around the slope with the oaks and the naked tree.
When it rained, Martin was set to read “The Bee and the Dove” and “The Toad and the Ox.” He read too “Tiny’s Trip to Dreamtown.”
“Little gold fishes in goodly row
Swim through the silver sea there.
Tiny is off to Dreamtown, ho!
Ere it is night he’ll be there.“Soon, soon
Close to the moon
He sees its outline fleeting.
Bright, bright
Many a light
Sends him a kindly greeting.“On glides the ship, it nears the land.
Lamps are a-gleam so pretty
Down at the edge of the murmuring strand,
Bells ring out from the city.”
The city! Tears came into Martin’s eyes. He had often thought of the city in the past days and had wondered if everything was the same at home. For in winter Martin longed for the green grass of summer and the strawberries in the woods, but when a flock of summer days had gone by and the green was no longer fresh and the wild roses in the meadows were gray with the dust of the highroad, he dreamed once more of the city’s gleaming rows of lamps, of Christmas and snow, and of the gray winter twilight in front of the lighted fire.
X
The wheel of the year had gone around, and it was again autumn.
In the city there was much that was new. Long Row was gone with its gardens and sheds; in its place a great brick building rose aloft, growing higher every day, obscuring both the lindens of Humlegård Park and the Observatory on its hill. Everywhere people were pulling down and building up, and dynamite blasts resounded every day in the district, which was now no longer to be called Ladgardsland but Östermalm. And Mrs. Heggbom had become a lady. If anybody called her by her former title, she would answer politely but decidedly, “Not any more!”
Martin went to school, but it was a modest little school and not nearly so terrible as he had thought. One had only to learn one’s lessons, and everything went well. And Martin felt with pride that his knowledge of the world was enlarged with every day. Space and time daily extended their boundaries before his eyes; the world was much bigger than he had dreamed and so old that his head grew giddy at the multitude of the years. If one looked ahead, time had no limits—it ran out into a dizzying blue infinity; but if one traced it back, one at least found far back in the darkness a beginning, a place where one had to stop: six thousand years before the birth of Our Saviour it was that God had created the world. That stood clear and plain in Martin’s Biblical History, on the first page.
In six days He had made it. But the teacher said that days were longer at that time.
But if possibly the days of the creation had been a little longer than ordinary days, it was just the opposite with Methusalem’s nine hundred and sixty-nine years. “At that time, you see, they didn’t reckon the years as long as now,” the teacher said.
There was so much new to learn and digest; school had in reality none of those terrors with which Martin had arrayed it in his imagination.
But on the other hand the way to and from school was filled with all sorts of perils and adventures. Those ill-disposed beings who were called rowdies and who called Martin and his comrades stuck-ups might be in ambush around any corner. The worst of these rowdies were the fierce
