XIV

From that day one of his main objects in life was to acquire books.  He had little pride as a rule, in spite of all his sensitiveness, and when books were concerned he had none at all.  Having discovered that a friend of the family, who until then had been regarded with supreme indifference, held some sort of clerical position in a publishing house, his devotion to Uncle Lander suddenly became effusive and he begged so shamelessly and so successfully that at last his father had to intercede.  Out of a half-hour sermon on things that must not be done, Keith grasped only that, as usual, he could not do what he wanted.  Money was still a mystery to him, and he never suspected that Uncle Lander would have to pay his employers for every book taken out of the stock.

The sole check to his passion sprang logically from the very fervor of that passion:  a book being such a precious object to himself, he could not dream of taking it away from somebody else.  As in a flash the true spirit of his father’s objection to borrowed books was revealed to him.  That objection became his own and stuck to him through life:  if he liked a borrowed book, the inescapable duty of returning it was too painful to be faced, and if he didn’t like it, there was no reason for borrowing it.  Books became sacred things to him, to be cherished and protected as nothing else.  The loss of one was a catastrophe.

Soon he had a small library of his own, kept on a shelf in the huge wardrobe that stood in the vestibule leading to the parlour.  Made up at first of odds and ends bearing no real relation to his desire for reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain homogeneity reflecting the boy’s state of mind.  Books of travel and adventure continued to prevail for a long while.  Equally favoured were stories dealing with Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race.  The grim record of the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first heroes of his worship were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom.  To these should be added Garibaldi, of whose South American campaigns, so touchingly shared by the faithful Anita, he read graphic accounts in an odd volume of an illustrated weekly.  The word liberty first came to him from the lips of the picturesque Italian, while Anita and the women of the old Germanic sagas struck him by their contrast to his mother.

In the main, all his reading made for escape and compensation.  He read to get away from his own surroundings, and he revelled in characters of fiction and legend and history that possessed qualities lacking in himself.  By nature he was a queer mixture of rashness and timidity, but through his mother’s anxiety on his behalf the latter quality was constantly being nursed at the expense of all tendency to action.  And so, in order to keep the balance, he revelled in the imaginary or real deeds of men whose very life-breath was danger.  The more the books gave him of what he craved, the less he thought of looking for it in life.