Short Fiction Selma Lagerlöf (best book club books of all time .txt) 📖

court, opens the door very softly, and stands in the boys’ room without either of them having heard him coming. The boys jump up, red in the face, and Lennart quickly snatches a bundle of papers which he throws into the table drawer.

When the boys had been in Stockholm a day or two, they had asked which school they were to attend, and the father had replied that their school-going days were over now. He would try and procure a private tutor who would teach them. This proposition he had never carried into effect, nor had the boys said anything more about going to school. But in less than a week a school chart was discovered hanging on the wall in the boys’ room. The school books had been brought forth, and every morning they sat on opposite sides of an old writing-table and studied their lessons aloud. It was evident that they had received letters from their mother counselling them to try and study, so as not to forget entirely what they had learned.

Now, as father unexpectedly comes into the room, he goes up to the chart first and studies it. He takes out his watch and compares. “Wednesday, between ten and eleven, Geography.” Then he comes up to the table. “Shouldn’t you have geography at this hour?”

“Yes,” the boys reply, growing flame-red in the face.

“Have you the geography and the map?”

The boys glance over at the book shelf and look confused. “We haven’t begun yet,” says Lennart.

“Indeed!” says father. “You must have been up to something else.” He straightens up, thoroughly pleased with himself. He has an advantage, which he doesn’t care to let go until he has browbeaten them very effectually.

Both boys are silent. Ever since the day they accompanied father to the Opera, they have felt sympathy for him, and it has not been such an effort for them to be kind to him as it was before. But, naturally, they haven’t for a moment thought of taking father into their confidence. He has not risen in their estimation although they are sorry for him.

“Were you writing letters?” father asks in his severest tone.

“No,” say both boys at the same time.

“What were you doing?”

“Oh, just talking.”

“That isn’t true. I saw that Lennart hid something in the drawer of the table.”

Now both boys are mum again.

“Take it out!” shouts the father, purple with rage. He thinks the sons have written to his wife, and, since they don’t care to show the letter, of course there is something mean about him in it.

The boys do not stir, and father raises his hand to strike Lennart, who is sitting before the table drawer.

“Don’t touch him!” cries Hugo. “We were only talking over something which Lennart has invented.”

Hugo pushes Lennart aside, opens the drawer, and pulls out the paper, which is scrawled full of airships of the most extraordinary shapes. “Last night Lennart thought out a new kind of sail for his airship. It was of this we were speaking.”

Father wouldn’t believe him. He bends over, searches in the drawer, but finds only sheets of paper covered with drawings of balloons, parachutes, flying-machines, and everything else appertaining to air-sailing.

To the great surprise of the boys, father does not cast this aside at once, nor does he laugh at their attempts, but examines closely sheet after sheet. As a matter of fact, father, too, has a little leaning toward mechanics, and was interested in things of this sort in days gone by, when his brain was still good for something. Soon he begins to ask questions as to the meaning of one thing and another, and inasmuch as his words betray that he is deeply interested and understands what he sees, Lennart fights his bashfulness, and answers him, hesitatingly at first and then more willingly.

Soon father and boys are absorbed in a profound discussion about airships and air-sailing. After they are fairly well started, the boys chatter unreservedly and give father a share in their plans and dreams of greatness. And while the father comprehends, of course, that the boys cannot fly very far with the airship which they have constructed, he is very much impressed. His little sons talk of aluminum motors, aeroplanes, and balancers, as though they were the simplest things in the world. He had thought them regular blockheads because they didn’t get on very fast at school. Now, all at once, he believes they are a pair of little scientists.

The high-soaring thoughts and aspirations father understands better than anything else; he cognizes them. He himself has dreamed in the same way, and he has no desire to laugh at such dreams.

Father doesn’t go out again that morning, but sits and chats with the boys until it is time to fetch the food for dinner and set the table. And at that meal father and the boys are real good friends, to their great and mutual astonishment.

The hour is eleven at night, and father is staggering up the street. The little boys are walking on either side of him, and he holds their hands tightly clasped in his all the while.

They have sought him out in one of his haunts, where they have stationed themselves just inside the door. Father sits by himself at a table with a big brown toddy in front of him, and listens to a ladies’ orchestra which is playing at the other end of the hall. After a moment’s hesitancy he rises reluctantly and goes over to the boys. “What is it?” he asks. “Why do you come here?”

“Father was to come home,” they say. “This is the fifth of December. Father promised⁠—”

Then he remembers that Lennart had confided to him that it was Hugo’s birthday and that he had promised him to come home early. But this he had entirely forgotten. Hugo was probably expecting a birthday present from him, but he had not remembered to get him one.

At any rate, he has gone with the boys and is walking along, displeased