PART I

I

The oldest part of Stockholm is a little rocky island.  Once it was the whole city.  Popularly it is still spoken of as “The City.”  At one end of it stands the huge square-cut pile of the Royal Palace, looking with solemn indifference toward the more modern quarters across the ever hurried waters of the North River.  Nearer the centre, and at the very top of the island, lies an open place called Great Square, which used to play a most important part in Swedish history, but which now serves no better purpose than to house the open-air toy market that operates the last week before Christmas.

Long narrow streets loop concentrically about Great Square.  They are lined with massive structures of stone and brick, four and five stories high, that used to be the homes of court and government officials, of army and navy officers, of burghers made prosperous by an extensive domestic and foreign trade, while on the ground floors were located the choicest shops of the country’s capital.  The shops are still there, but they have grown dingy and cheap, and they administer only to the casual needs of the humble middle-class people crowded into the old-fashioned, gloomy apartments above.

From the square to the water-fronts radiate a number of still more narrow and squalid lanes, harbouring a population which is held inferior to that of the streets in social rank without yet being willing to have itself classed with the manual toilers of the suburbs.  Halfway down the slope of such a lane, and almost within the shadow of the palace, stood the house where Keith first arrived at some sort of consciousness of himself and the surrounding world.

On the fourth floor his parents occupied a three-room flat.  The parlour and the living-room had two windows each, looking into the lane.  The kitchen in the rear opened a single window on the narrowest, barest, darkest courtyard you ever saw, its one redeeming feature being a glimpse of sky above the red-tiled roof of the building opposite.

In such surroundings Keith spent the better part of his first sixteen years.

He was an only son, much loved, and one of his first conscious realizations was a sharp sense of restraint, as if he had been tied to a string by which he was pulled back as soon as anything promised to become interesting.

At first he thought the world made up entirely of those three rooms, where he, his parents, Granny—­his maternal grandmother—­and a more or less transient servant girl had lived for ever.  Visitors drifted in, of course, but he seemed to think that they had come from nowhere and would return to the same place.  What instilled the first idea of a wider outside world in his mind was leaning out through one of the windows, with his mother’s arm clutched tightly about his waist.

There was something symbolic in that clutch, for his mother was always full of fear that dire things befall him.  She was afraid of many other things besides, and the need of being constantly worried was probably his second clear realization.