“Why should I?” answered the youth, who felt the draught of her fluttering skirts on his throbbing temples.

“Because I want you to,” said the girl.

“Let me come up, too, and I’ll swing you, Gussie,” pleaded Theodore, springing on to the board.

Now he was standing on the swing, facing her. And when they rose into the air, he felt her skirts flapping against his legs, and when they descended, he bent over her and looked into her eyes which were brilliant with fear and enjoyment. Her thin cotton blouse fitted tightly and showed every line of her young figure; her smiling lips were half-open, displaying two rows of sound white teeth, which looked as if they would like to bite or kiss him.

Higher and higher rose the swing, until it struck the topmost branches of the maple. The girl screamed and fell forward, into his arms; he was pushed over, on to the seat. The trembling of the soft warm body which nestled closely in his arms, sent an electric shock through his whole nervous system; a black veil descended before his eyes and he would have let her go if her left shoulder had not been tightly pressed against his right arm.

The speed of the swing slackened. She rose and sat on the seat facing him. And thus they remained with downcast eyes, not daring to look one another in the face.

When the swing stopped, the girl slipped off the seat and ran away as if she were answering a call. Theodore was left alone. He felt the blood surging in his veins. It seemed to him that his strength was redoubled. But he could not grasp what had happened. He vaguely conceived himself as an electrophor whose positive electricity, in discharging, had combined with the negative. It had happened during a quite ordinary, to all appearances chaste, contact with a young woman. He had never felt the same emotion in wrestling, for instance, with his school-fellows in the play-ground. He had come into contact with the opposite polarity of the female sex and now he knew what it meant to be a man. For he was a man, not a precocious boy, kicking over the traces; he was a strong, hardy, healthy youth.

As he strolled along, up and down the garden paths, new thoughts formed in his brain. Life looked at him with graver eyes, he felt conscious of a sense of duty. But he was only fifteen years old. He was not yet confirmed and many years would have to elapse before he would be considered an independent member of the community, before he would be able to earn a living for himself, let alone maintain a wife and family. He took life seriously, the thought of light adventures never occurred to him. Women were to him something sacred, his opposite pole, the supplement and completion of himself. He was mature now, bodily and mentally, fit to enter the arena of life and fight his way. What prevented him from doing so? His education, which had taught him nothing useful; his social position, which stood between him and a trade he might have learned. The Church, which had not yet received his vow of loyalty to her priests; the State, which was still waiting for his oath of allegiance to Bernadotte and Nassau; the School, which had not yet trained him sufficiently to consider him ripe for the University; the secret alliance of the upper against the lower classes. A whole mountain of follies lay on him and his young strength. Now that he knew himself to be a man, the whole system of education seemed to him an institution for the mutilation of body and soul. They must both be mutilated before he could be allowed to enter the harem of the world, where manhood is considered a danger; he could find no other excuse for it. And thus he sank back into his former state of immaturity. He compared himself to a celery plant, tied up and put under a flower-pot so as to make it as white and soft as possible, unable to put forth green leaves in the sunshine, flower, and bear seed.

Wrapped in these thoughts he remained in the garden until the clock on the nearest church tower struck ten. Then he turned towards the house, for it was bed-time. But the front door was locked. The house-maid, a petticoat thrown over her nightgown, let him in. A glimpse of her bare shoulders roused him from his sentimental reveries; he tried to put his arm round her and kiss her, for at the moment he was conscious of nothing but her sex. But the maid had already disappeared, shutting the door with a bang. Overwhelmed with shame he opened his window, cooled his head in a basin of cold water and lighted his lamp.

When he had got into bed, he took up a volume of Arndt’s Spiritual Voices of the Morning, a book which had belonged to his mother; he read a chapter of it every evening to be on the safe side, for in the morning his time was short. The book reminded him of the promise of chastity given to his mother on her death-bed, and he felt a twinge of conscience. A fly which had singed its wings on his lamp, and was now buzzing round the little table by his bedside, turned his thoughts into another channel; he closed the book and lit a cigarette. He heard his father take off his boots in the room below, knock out his pipe against the stove, pour out a glass of water and get ready to go to bed. He thought how lonely he must be since he had become a widower. In days gone by he had often heard the subdued voices of his parents through the thin partition, in intimate conversation on matters on which they always agreed; but now no voice was audible, nothing but the dead sounds which a man makes in waiting upon himself, sounds which one must put side by side, like the figures in a rebus, before one can understand their meaning.

He finished his cigarette, blew out the lamp and said the Lord’s Prayer in an undertone, but he got no farther than the fifth petition. Then he fell asleep.

He awoke from a dream in the middle of the night. He had dreamt that he held the gardener’s daughter in his arms. He could not remember the circumstances, for he was quite dazed, and fell asleep again directly.

On the following morning he was depressed and had a headache. He brooded over the future which loomed before him threateningly and filled him with dread. He realised with a pang how quickly the summer was passing, for the end of the summer meant the degradation of school-life. Every thought of his own would be stifled by the thoughts of others; there was no advantage in being able to think independently; it required a fixed number of years before one could reach one’s goal. It was like a journey on a good’s train; the engine was bound to remain for a certain time in the stations, and when the pressure of the steam became too strong, from want of consumption of energy, a waste-pipe had to be opened. The Board had drawn up the time-table and the train was not permitted to arrive at the stations before its appointed time. That was the principal thing which mattered.

The father noticed the boy’s pallor, but he put it down to grief over his mother’s death.

Autumn came and with it the return to school. Theodore, by dint of much novel-reading during the summer, and coming in this way, as it were, in constant contact with grown-up people and their problems and struggles, had come to look upon himself as a grown-up member of society. Now the masters treated him with familiarity, the boys took liberties which compelled him to repay them in kind. And this educational institution, which was to ennoble him and make him fit to take his place in the community, what did it teach him? How did it ennoble him? The compendiums, one and all, were written under the control of the upper classes, for the sole purpose of forcing the lower classes to look up to their betters. The schoolmasters frequently reproached their pupils with ingratitude and impressed on them their utter inability to realise, even faintly, the advantage they enjoyed in receiving an education which so many of their poorer fellow-creatures would always lack. No, indeed, the boys were not sophisticated enough to see through the gigantic fraud and its advantages.

But did they ever find true joy, real pleasure in the subjects of their studies for their own sakes? Never! Therefore the teachers had to appeal incessantly to the lower passions of their pupils, to ambition, self-interest, material advantages.

What a miserable make-believe school was! Not one of the boys believed that he would reap any benefit from repeating the names and dates of hated kings in their proper sequence, from learning dead languages, proving axioms, defining “a matter of course,” and counting the anthers of plants and the joints on the hindlegs of insects, to knowing the end no more about them than their Latin names. How many long hours were wasted in the vain attempt to divide an angle into three equal sections, a thing which can be done so easily in a minute in an unscientific (that is to say practical) way by using a graduator.

How they scorned everything practical! His sisters, who were taught French from Ollendorf’s grammar, were able to speak the language after two years’ study; but the college boys could not say a single sentence after six. Ollendorf was a name which they pronounced with pity and contempt. It was the essence of all that was stupid.

But when his sister asked for an explanation and enquired whether the purpose of spoken language was not the expression of human thought, the young sophist replied with a phrase picked up from one of the masters who in his turn had borrowed it from Talleyrand. Language was invented to hide one’s thoughts. This, of course, was beyond the horizon of a young girl (how well men know how to hide their shortcomings), but henceforth she believed her brother to be tremendously learned, and stopped arguing with him.

And was there not even a worse stumbling-block in aesthetics, delusive and deceptive, casting a veil of borrowed splendour and sham beauty over everything? They sang of “The Knights’ Vigil of Light.” What knights’ vigil? With patents of nobility and students’ certificates; false testimonials, as they might have told themselves. Of light? That was to say of the upper classes who had the greatest interest in keeping the lower classes in darkness, a task in which they were ably assisted by church and school. “And onward, onward, on the path of light!”

Things were always called by the wrong name. And if it so happened that a light-bearer arose from the lower classes, everybody was ready and prepared to extinguish his torch. Oh! youthful, healthy host of fighters! How healthy they were, all these young men, enervated by idleness, unsatisfied desires and ambitions, who scorned every man who had not the means to pay for a University education! What splendid liars they were, the poets of the upper classes! Were they the deceivers or the deceived?

What was the usual subject of the young men’s conversation? Their studies? Never! Once in a way, perhaps, they would talk of certificates. No, their conversation was of things obscene; of appointments with women; of billiards and drink; of certain diseases which they had heard discussed by their elder brothers. They lounged about in the afternoon and “held the reviews,” and the best informed of them knew the name of the officer and could tell the others where his mistress lived.

Once two members of the “Knights’ Vigil of Light,” had dined in the company of two women on the terrace of a high-class restaurant in the Zoological Gardens. For this offence they were expelled from school. They were punished for their naïveté, not because their conduct was considered vicious, for a year after they passed their examinations and went to the University, gaining in this way a whole year; and when they had completed their studies at Upsala, they were attached to the Embassy in one of the capitals of Europe, to represent the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway.

In these surroundings Theodore spent the best part of his youth. He had seen through the fraud, but was compelled to acquiesce! Again and again he asked himself the question: What can I do? There was no answer. And so he became an accessory and learned to hold his tongue.

His confirmation appeared to him to be very much on a level with his school experience. A young minister, an ardent pietist, was to teach him in four months Luther’s Catechism, regardless of the fact that he was well versed in theology, exegesis and dogmatics, besides having read the New Testament in Greek. Nevertheless the strict pietism, which demanded absolute truth in thought and action, could not fail to make a great impression on him.

When the catechumens were assembled for the first time, Theodore found himself quite unexpectedly surrounded by a totally different class of boys to whom he had been used at school. When he entered the assembly-room he was met by the stare of something like a hundred inimical eyes. There were tobacco binders, chimney sweeps, apprentices of all trades. They were on bad terms and freely abused one another, but this enmity between the different trades was only superficial; however much they quarrelled, they yet held together. He seemed to breathe a strangely stifling atmosphere; the hatred with which they greeted him was not unmixed with contempt, the reverse of a certain respect or envy. He looked in vain for a friend, for a companion, like-minded, dressed as he was. There was not a single one. The parish was poor, the rich people sent their children to the German church which was then the fashion. It was in the company of the children of the people, the lower classes, that he was to approach the altar, as their equal. He asked himself what it was that separated him from these boys? Were they not, bodily, endowed with the same gifts as he? No doubt, for every one of them earned his living, and some of them helped to keep their parents. Were they less gifted, mentally? He did not think so, for their remarks gave evidence of keen powers of observation; he would have laughed at many of their witty remarks if he had not been conscious of his superior caste. There was no definite line of demarcation between him and the fools who were his school-fellows. But there was a line here Was it the shabby clothes, the plain faces, the coarse hands, which formed the barrier? Partly, he thought. Their plainness, especially, repulsed him. But were they worse than others because they were plain?

He was carrying a foil, as he had a fencing lesson later on. He put it in a corner of the room, hoping that it would escape attention. But it had been seen already. Nobody knew what kind of a thing it really was, but everybody recognised it as a weapon of some sort. Some of the boldest busied themselves about the corner, so as to have a look at it. They fingered the covering of the handle, scratched the guard with their nails, bent the blade, handled the small leather ball. They were like hares sniffing at a gun which had been lost in the wood. They did not understand its use, but they knew it for something inimical, something with a hidden meaning. Presently a belt-maker’s apprentice, whose brother was in the Life Guards, joined the inquisitive throng and at once decided the question: “Can’t you see that it is a sword, you fools?” he shouted, with a look at Theodore. It was a respectful look, but a look which also hinted at a secret understanding between them, which, correctly interpreted, meant: You and I understand these things! But a young rope-maker, who had once been a trumpeter in a military band, considered this giving of a verdict without consulting him a personal slight and declared that he “would be hanged if it wasn’t a rapier!” The consequence was a fight which transformed the place into a bear-garden, dense with dust and re-echoing with screams and yells.

The door opened and the minister stood on the threshold. He was a pale young man, very thin, with watery blue eyes and a face disfigured by a rash. He shouted at the boys. The wild beasts ceased fighting. He began talking of the precious blood of Christ and the power of the Evil One over the human heart. After a little while he succeeded in inducing the hundred boys to sit down on the forms and chairs. But now he was quite out of breath and the atmosphere was thick with dust. He glanced at the window and said in a faint voice: “Open the sash!” This request re-awakened the only half-subdued passions. Twenty-five boys made a rush for the window and tried to seize the window cord.

“Go to your places at once!” screamed the minister, stretching out his hand for his cane.

There was a momentary silence during which the minister tried to think of a way of having the sash raised without a fight.

“You,” he said at last to a timid little fellow, “go and open the window!”

The small boy went to the window and tried to disentangle the window cord. The others looked on in breathless silence, when suddenly a big lad, in sailor’s clothes, who had just come home on the brig Carl Johan, lost patience.

“The devil take me if I don’t show you what a lad can do,” he shouted, throwing off his coat and jumping on the window sill; there was a flash from his cutlass and the rope was cut.

“Cable’s cut!” he laughed, as the minister with a hysterical cry, literally drove him to his seat.

“The rope was so entangled that there was nothing for it but to cut it,” he assured him, as he sat down.

The minister was furious. He had come from a small town in the provinces and had never conceived the possibility of so much sin, so much wickedness and immorality. He had never come into contact with lads so far advanced on the road to damnation. And he talked at great length of the precious blood of Christ.

Not one of them understood what he said, for they did not realise that they had fallen, since they had never bee different. The boys received his words with coldness and indifference.