Читать книгу The Soul of a Child - Edwin Björkman - Страница 6

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All through his life Keith retained a queer inclination to arrange furniture very precisely at right angles to the wall as close to it as possible. It was a direct outcome of his first and most deeply rooted impressions, received in that parental living-room, where every inch of space had been carefully calculated, and where the smallest nook was filled by a chair, or a footstool, or some other minor object. In later years he often wondered how a single room of modest proportions could hold so much of furniture and of life.

It was bedroom and study, dining-room and nursery, workroom and parlour. There the morning toilet was made, and there his first lessons were learned. There the father did his reading, of which he was very fond, and there the mother sewed, darned, embroidered, wrote letters, gave household orders, told fairy tales, and received visitors. There the simple daily meals were served for all but Granny, who clung obstinately to the kitchen, and there friends were feasted and cards played at nameday and birthday parties. And there three people slept every night.

Of course, excursions could be made, particularly to the kitchen where Granny was always restlessly waiting for "one more kiss," and once in a great while to the "best room" which mostly was occupied by some stranger whose small weekly rent paid the servant's wages. But to the living-room one always returned in the end, and during his first years this narrow confinement did not strike Keith as a hardship.

The room seemed quite large to him at that time, with distances and vistas and diversions sufficient for his childish fancy. It was a pleasant room, with brightly striped rag carpets on the floor and two pretty large windows framed by snow-white lace curtains. Crammed as it was with objects needed for its many different uses, it was always kept in a state of the most scrupulous order and instant disaster followed any attempt as a disarrangement.

It was a whole world by itself, full of interesting things for a small boy to puzzle over. It was also a world in evolution. Every so often a piece of furniture would disappear and a better one take its place, to be studied and admired and tried out again and again. Back of every improvement lay a unifying ambition. Its key-word was mahogany. The superior social respectability of this wood could not be disputed, and it had a sort of natural dignity that harmonized with the father's solid taste--though the mother might have preferred something lighter and brighter. And a microcosm of mahogany might, after all, be worth living for when loftier illusions had gone on the scrap heap.

Practically everything in the room had a history as well as a special place. There was the main chest of drawers, for instance, known as "mamma's bureau" and placed near one of the windows, where a good light fell on the swinging mirror forming a separate piece on top of it. A journeyman carpenter had made that chest to prove himself a master of his trade under the old gild rules. Then he put it up at lottery to raise money with which to open a shop of his own. Keith's father bought a lot while still engaged, and won the prize which became the chief wedding present of his bride--to be cherished above all other objects to her dying day.

It was really a fine piece of work, of mahogany, with daintily carved and twisted columns along the front corners, and so highly polished that Keith could see his own face in the rich brown glimmer of its surfaces. It had four drawers. The three lower ones were divided between the parents and held all sorts of things, from shirts and socks to mother's mahogany yard stick, which had a turned handle and a tapering blade that made it pass excellent muster as a sword. The top drawer could only be pulled out halfway, but then the front of it came down and it changed into a writing desk, with an intriguing array of small drawers and pigeonholes at the back of it, and a suspicion of alluring and unattainable treasures in every separate receptacle. To ransack all of these was Keith's most audacious dream, but when the dream came true at last, it was fraught with no ecstasy of realization, for he was a middle-aged man, and in the room behind him his mother lay dead. …

The mirror was flanked by two small square mahogany boxes, one holding medicines and the other tobacco. Little mats, some crocheted and some wonderfully composed of differently coloured glass beads, were used to protect the boxes as well as the top of the bureau from being scratched, and on them stood several small groups and figures of porcelain. One of these was Keith's special favourite and his first introduction to that world where beauty takes precedence of goodness and truth. It showed a lady and a gentleman in dresses of a colour and cut wholly unlike anything seen by Keith on the real persons coming within his ken. They were seated on a richly ornamented sofa before a tea table, and there was something about the manner in which they looked at each other that spoke more loudly than their bright costumes of things lying beyond ordinary existence.

There was also a nice little girl with a doll viewing herself complacently in a real mirror, and a lady in bloomers, apparently of Oriental pattern, who rowed a boat hardly larger than herself, that was raised almost on end by terrific waves. All three groups had this in common, that when you removed the ornamental upper part, a previously unsuspected inkstand was revealed. There was a period when Keith seriously believed that all specimens of the keramic art were inkstands in disguise.

Art not represented on the bureau alone, however. The walls contained a number of steel engravings in gilt frames, quaint old coloured prints, family photographs, and pink-coloured reliefs of various Swedish kings made out of wax and mounted under convex glass panes on highly polished black boards. But all of those objects were flat and distant and colourless in comparison with the things on the bureau that could be touched as well as seen. As for the group with the lady and the gentlemen, it had only one rival in the boy's mind, and that was the big clock in a wooden case that hung on the wall between the windows over the dining table. The hide-and-seek of the restless pendulum with its shining brass disc was a constant source of fascination in itself, and so were the strange operations performed by the father in front of the clock every Sunday morning, when diversions were particularly welcome on account of the extra restrictions on play. But its main charm rested in the strangely pleasing sounds it produced every so often, preceded by a funny rattle that warned small folk and big of what was going to happen. It was Keith's first acquaintance with music.

The parents' bed occupied the centre of the right-hand wall, between mamma's bureau and another chest of drawers known as "Granny's bureau." It was all wood and made in two parts that slid into each other, reducing the daytime width of the bed by one-half. It stood parallel to the wall, instead of at right angles, and the extension took place sideways. At night it looked like an ordinary double bed. In the day it almost disappeared beneath a rectangular pile of bed-clothing, covered by a snow-white spread that was pulled and smoothed and tucked until it hung straight as a wall.

Granny's bureau, old-fashioned and clumsy, but made of some native wood that glimmered like gold, was largely devoted to linen ware for bed and table. At the top it had two small drawers instead of a long, and one of these constituted the first storage place set aside for Keith's special use. His impression was that it had always been his, and once he asked his mother if it really had been his before he was born.

"Of course it was," she said with a sly smile, "but we took the liberty to use it for other purposes until you arrived"

At first glance this seemed quite reasonable to Keith, though nothing to smile at so far as he could see. Later he became conscious of a vague sense of annoyance. It would have been more pleasant if no one else had ever used that drawer.

Across the room from Granny's bureau, in the corner just inside the door to the kitchen, towered the characteristic Swedish oven--a round column of white glazed bricks, with highly polished brass shutters in front of the small cubical fire-place, where nothing but birchwood was burned. In the narrow crack between the oven and the wall rested always a birch rod, which was often referred to at critical moments. A new rod, with brightly coloured feathers attached to the tip of every twig, appeared regularly on Shrove Tuesday and tended slightly to spoil that otherwise glorious day, when large cross buns stuffed with a mixture of crushed almond and sugar were served in hot milk for dinner. Though the rod was little more than a symbol of family discipline, Keith always disliked its presence as a threat to his dignity if not to his hide.

A double washstand, looking like a document chest in the daytime, the chaiselongue on which Keith slept at night, and the door to the best room occupied all the rest of that wall except a corner by the window, where stood his mother's high-backed easy chair, with the little work-table beside it and a hassock in front of it. To that chair she would retire whenever her household duties permitted, and thither Keith would be drawn even more powerfully than to his own "play-room" at the opposite corner--especially when his mother seemed in a happy mood. There he would kneel on the hassock, with his head in her lap, and if he could think of nothing else, he would say:

"Tell me about the time you were in London."