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.
The minister rambled on and spoke of Christ’s precious wounds, but not one of them took his words to heart, for not one of them was conscious of having wounded Christ. He changed the subject and spoke of the devil, but that was a topic so familiar to them that it made no impression. At last he hit on the right thing. He began to talk of their confirmation which was to take place in the coming spring. He reminded them of their parents, anxious that their children should play a part in the life of the community; when he went on to speak of employers who refused to employ lads who had not been confirmed, his listeners became deeply interested at once, and every one of them understood the great importance of the coming ceremony. Now he was sincere, and the young minds grasped what he was talking about; the noisiest among them became quiet.
The registration began. What a number of marriage certificates were missing! How could the children come to Christ when their parents had not been legally married? How could they approach the altar when their fathers had been in prison? Oh! what sinners they were!
Theodore was deeply moved by the exhibition of so much shame and disgrace. He longed to tear his thoughts away from the subject, but was unable to do so. Now it was his turn to hand in his certificates and the minister read out: son: Theodore, born on such and such a date; parents: professor and knight … a faint smile flickered like a feeble sunbeam over his face, he gave him a friendly nod and asked: “And how is your dear father?” But when he saw that the mother was dead (a fact of which he was perfectly well aware) his face clouded over. “She was a child of God,” he said, as if he were talking to himself, in a gushing, sympathetic, whining voice, but the remark conveyed at the same time a certain reproach against the “dear father,” who was only a professor and knight. After that Theodore could go.
When he left the assembly-room he felt that he had gone through an almost impossible experience. Were all those lads really depraved because they used oaths and coarse language, as his companions, his father, his uncle, and all the upper classes did at times? What did the minister mean when he talked of immorality? They were more savage than the spoilt children of the wealthy, but that was because they were more fully alive. It was unfair to blame them for missing marriage certificates. True, his father had never committed a theft, but there was no necessity for a man to steal if he had an income of six thousand crowns and could please himself. The act would be absurd or abnormal in such a case.
Theodore went back to school realising what it meant “to have received an education”; here nobody was badgered for small faults. As little notice as possible was taken of one’s own or one’s parent’s weaknesses, one was among equals and understood one another.
After school one “held the reviews,” sneaked into a cafe and drank a liqueur, and finally went to the fencing-room. He looked at the young officers who treated him as their equal, observed all those young bloods with their supple limbs, pleasant manners and smiling faces, every one of them certain that a good dinner was awaiting him at home, and became conscious of the existence of two worlds: an upper and an under-world. He remembered the gloomy assembly-room and the wretched assembly he had just left with a pang; all their wounds and hidden defects were mercilessly exposed and examined through a magnifying-glass, so that the lower classes might acquire that true humility failing which the upper classes cannot enjoy their amiable weaknesses in peace. And for the first time something jarring had come into this life.
However much Theodore was tossed about between his natural yearning for the only half-realised temptations of the world, and his newly formed desire to turn his back on this world and his mind heavenwards, he did not break the promise given to his mother. The religious teaching which he and the other catechumens received from the minister in the church, did not fail to impress him deeply. He was often gloomy and wrapped in thought and felt that life was not what it ought to be. He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been committed, which it was now everybody’s business to hide by practising countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider’s web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled by the cruel threads.