School's Out
by HUGO JOHANSON
1
BECAUSE his lack of education had prevented Herr Warrant Officer and Estate Owner Oscar Lundmark, the Sund, from obtaining an officer’s commission, he respected education for the power it wielded. According to him, education was the overwrought key that unlocked the doors to the commissioned grades in the Army and the Navy, the State Church, the upper strata in the Civil Service, and the moneyed professions — law and medicine. The “long-haired professions” — anything tinged with art — he sniffed at; and education for the sake of the enjoyment of knowing things, he considered a sign of muddled thinking or, to quote his own diagnosis, “tumult in the brainpan.”
He proved it (Herr Lundmark could prove anything when circling the smörgåsbord, emphasizing his basso-voiced and forceful reasoning with a dewy glass of cummin-flavored snapps) by saying that one didn’t study dead languages because one wanted to prepare for the hereafter; one studied them because they introduced you to Office. That was all they were good for. Once in Office, a speedy retreat to your former and saner knowledge would win you promotion.
The Lundmark children were not to be handicapped for lack of education. The procedure was certain to prove painful, and it was bound to be expensive, but life was a struggle against obstructing thistles, not a dance on rose petals. Svea, the oldest, showed great fortitude at wading through the thistles without whimpering audibly. By the age of nine she had sapped what little learning could be wrung out of Fröken Hellquist, an aged nobody who specialized in a firm, metallic touch on the piano and a vague grounding in French with an internationell accent that was laced with the German sch-laut. A more diversified gouvernante was sought and obtained after much scrutinizing of photographs and puzzled reading of diplomas which the applicants had forwarded.
But the newcomer was a failure. Fru Lundmark detested her because she was much better looking than could be surmised from her picture and because she flatfootedly stated that, while Inge showed possibilities if treated kindly, Stig should be taught a trade. Herr Lundmark drove her to the railroad station the day she insisted upon locking up the piano and asking Svea in the tongue of the country if she didn’t prefer weaving and the making of headcheese to music and French. Svea loved to Weave and cook. Herr Lundmark, who looked askance at any vulgar tendency in his children that might deter them on the road to Office, hurriedly entered her in the first form of the Higher Common Elementary School for Girls in Medelstad.
This severe institute of learning had nine forms. The teaching of French began in the first form, that of German in the second, English in the fourth. Having reached the fifth form, those of the class who aimed at a classical education took up Latin and Greek; the others went farther into living languages, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. A successful negotiating of the ninth form, at an average age of nineteen, entitled them to call themselves student (their status so far had been eleve), wear a cap of white velvet adorned with a blue and yellow cocarde, and enter the university of their choice. By that time the majority of the girls had acquired a morose dislike for education and a healthy appetite for love, and, as no university had a chair engaged in the advancement of the latter, they looked elsewhere for tutors, and soon were married.
Stig and Inge were destined for the Higher Common Elementary School for Boys when their age and knowledge had progressed sufficiently for them to enter a lower form. That day was still far off and seemed farther, for at seven Stig could take the kitchen clock apart and put it together in jig-time, but he couldn’t tell the lime; he could make gunpowder out of the few chemicals that could be scraped together in a country home and blow the uthus (outhouse) to Kingdom come, but he couldn’t spell “powder”; he could make a miniature steam engine that tooted and chugged, but he believed that the Holy Ghost was a hobgoblin that nested in church spires, and as for the Lord’s prayer — why should he say somebody else’s?
Fru Wachencrantz, the grandmother, was teaching Inge to read in a happy-go-lucky fashion. They hadn’t a textbook, unless the torn-off front cover of an eighteenth-century ABC book which was decorated with a rooster holding a cane in his beak might be classed as such, but they never felt the lack of one, for Inge had been taught to spell on Grandfather’s cigar boxes and on the labels of empty port wine bottles. “C-L-A-R-0 C-O-L-O-R-A-D-O,” spelled Grandmother, while smoking one, and Inge repeated. Then the result had to be translated, and that was easy and lots of fun. CLARO was obviously KLAR (clear), and COLORADO was KOLORERAD (colored). The torn cover of the ABC book was the authority that presented the scholarships; when Inge could copy TAMPA or NEGRITA legibly, or when other similar milestones had been reached, Grandmother manipulated the rooster on it so that he laid an egg — a piece of licorice which Inge might dunk in the port wine if he felt the need for a pick-me-up.
The school functioned elastically because Grandmother and Inge were opposed to compulsory education. If the pupil didn’t crave knowledge, he sauntered off; if the teacher wasn’t in the mood to spread enlightenment, she turned to something more worth while. Neither strove for perfection in their pleasantly vague undertaking, nor did they set any particular goal. Inge played putting together the letters into words in very much the same winsomely pensive manner that he put his empty bobbins on a string, and Grandmother liked to watch the beautiful display of color nuances that the boy’s delicate complexion managed to present and the pouting of his expressive lips when they fought a hostile sound.
2
AFTER the dismissal of Fröken Hellquist’s successor, Herr Lundmark decided to run a school of his own for the boys. The timid, diminutive Inge was easily persuaded to take a seat in the classroom (the office); the strong, non-compliant Stig had to be dragged by the scruff of his neck from behind the stables, where he had been trapping snakes. The first (and the last) lesson was given over to the teaching of penmanship.
He gave the boys pencils and sheets of foolscap on which he had written parallel staple copy and the signs of parentheses and integrals to be used as guides. He explained that the practicing of writing staples would give their hands steadiness and their minds orderliness, the parentheses would limber their wrists without disturbing the orderliness that supposedly had been stored in their minds by then, and the integrals would teach them the easy, yet methodical, swing and fancy that sets a penman apart from a mere novellist. Herr Lundmark wrote a few more samples to show them how easy it was. Then he ordered them to get busy, and left the office to tend to something else.
To Inge, whom Grandmother had taught to scrawl almost all the letters, the task didn’t appear difficult. He proceeded to fill his sheet, the staples suffering from an overabundance of the swing and fancy that should have graced the integrals. Stig watched him uncomprehendingly. After a while he asked him what he was doing.
“I’m writing,” Inge said.
“Writing! To whom?” Stig asked.
“Oh, to nobody, I guess; just writing,” Inge explained, feeling rather silly.
“Wouldn’t want to hear from ‘nobody’ myself, on a day like this. Let me know when you get the answer,” Stig said moodily, staring at his blank sheet of paper and the nice new pencil. The pencil reminded him of something, and he moistened its tip on his tongue. As he was testing the wet lead on the sheet of paper, his gloominess suddenly vanished and the sullen face became lighted with angelic fervor, a not unusual expression on Stig, and one that his mother ascribed to the radiance of his soul, but which his realistic father traced to the pernicious itchings of the boy’s finger tips. He split the pencil wide open with his pocketknife, removed the lead, and ground it into fine powder which, with the aid of saliva, he turned into a wet pudding on his father’s instruction sheet. Inge, suspecting futility in his own work, rested his pencil and admired Stig’s output.
His admiration changed into horror when the brother removed from his pocket a slimy, leathery strip, several feet long, of ivory-colored snake’s eggs which he dipped in the pudding with a tender thoroughness. When the strip was dyed nicely (the pencil was of the indelible kind, and the dyeing power of its lead was enormous, for both the eggs and the boy changed color — into a violent violet) Stig unbuttoned his shirt and draped his spare, bared stomach with the garland.
“Whatever are you doing, Stig?” Inge asked, filled with repulsion,
“I’m going to hatch them,” Stig said, and swiftly buttoned his shirt, afraid that the eggs might get chilly,
“But — but — why did you dye them?” Inge stammered.
“I want to better their coloring. There are too few violet snakes in the world today, Old Johannes told me in the cow shed. The price of brännvin is so high that a soul can’t afford to see them more than once a week, he said. So I’m going to give the poor a break. I’m going to raise violet snakes and sell them for an öre apiece. It’ll make the poor happy and me rich,” Stig explained.
Herr Lundmark had locked the door from the outside. Stig unlocked it with a wire contraption that he always carried in his pocket. He was inciting Inge to join him in fleeing when he noticed his father’s field glasses hanging on the wall. It was an expensive instrument with double lenses. Stig just had to take it apart. He skillfully removed the inner lenses that he intended to use in a laterna magica which he was building. He had barely time to put back the glasses where they belonged before Herr Lundmark returned to see how the boys were getting along with their lesson.
3
THINGS didn’t look right to Herr Lundmark. The lock had been tampered with, the boys didn’t sit at the desk, and Stig’s face and hands were daubed with indelible pencil.
“Let me see your work,” he ordered the boys.
Inge found that he had lost his and crawled underneath the desk to look for it, and Stig did likewise for lack of anything better to do. Herr Lundmark yanked him up on his feet. Then, pointing at the remains of the split pencil and the colored pudding, he stormed, “Explain this!”
Stig smelled trouble and made for the door. Herr Lundmark caught him and shook him so severely that the boy dropped the lenses of the field glasses, which he had kept hidden in his fist. That doomed Stig.
“Pull down your pants and bend over, boy,” Herr Lundmark said, reaching for a wire ramrod. Girdling his shirt carefully around the eggs with one hand, Stig pulled down his pants with the other. Herr Lundmark meant business —he couldn’t be bluffed, Inge knew; and he shrank in a corner, covering his face with his agitated hands.
Swish! The ramrod cleft the air with an ugly, whining sound and marked Stig’s taut buttocks with a red welt. Stig gritted his teeth and pulled the shirt tighter around the hatchery. Swish! Swish! Swish! The blows fell rapidly now, but they bounced off Stig’s stern and cut Inge’s soul to pieces. It made him physically sick at first. Then he screamed and banged his head against the wall, for he believed that his father was beating Stig to death, and he loved his brother and wanted to die, too, and join him in hell — Stig’s ultimate stop.
The commotion aroused the whole house. The women servants deserted the kitchen and swarmed outside the office; Grandmother, who had recognized Inge’s voice, could be heard waddling down the stairs, puffing laboriously and swearing hard in French; and Fru Lundmark came running, uncertain of the cause of the catastrophe that must have befallen the home but preparing for the worst by shrilling, “Help! Help! Help!” As soon as she saw Stig’s predicament she threw herself between her husband and the boy.
“Now, murder him if you dare!” she challenged Herr Lundmark, covering her beloved son with kisses. As this near-naked, habitual squirmer tried to get away her kisses fell in the most unlikely places. She noticed the indelible pencil stains on the boy’s body, and pulling up Stig’s shirt to show Herr Lundmark what a brute he was, she sobbed, “You have beaten him black and blue.”
The disturbed garland of snake’s eggs dropped to the floor. Some of them must have been decidedly ripened, as they hatched right then and there. A dozen or more of vigorous black and yellow banded snakelets (apparently Stig’s application of coloring matter hadn’t had time to sink in) hungrily darted their little forked tongues and wriggled about the office floor. Fru Lundmark and the servants shrieked and fled. Taking advantage of the panic, the imperturbable Stig collected the tenses, the ramrod, and as many of the snakes as he could find; and, leaving his pants behind as being of no particular value, he fled, too.
Grandmother walked slowly around Herr Lundmark, soaking up the rare spectacle of seeing her son-in-law standing silent and still in a pose that she later, when relating the incident, described as “shattered and abased.”
Having had her fill, she picked up Inge to carry him upstairs, and at the same time made Herr Lundmark come to by calling out, “Resurrect yourself, Oscar. School’s out!”