X

The wheel of the year had gone around, and it was again autumn.

In the city there was much that was new. Long Row was gone with its gardens and sheds; in its place a great brick building rose aloft, growing higher every day, obscuring both the lindens of Humlegård Park and the Observatory on its hill. Everywhere people were pulling down and building up, and dynamite blasts resounded every day in the district, which was now no longer to be called Ladgardsland but Östermalm. And Mrs. Heggbom had become a lady. If anybody called her by her former title, she would answer politely but decidedly, “Not any more!”

Martin went to school, but it was a modest little school and not nearly so terrible as he had thought. One had only to learn one’s lessons, and everything went well. And Martin felt with pride that his knowledge of the world was enlarged with every day. Space and time daily extended their boundaries before his eyes; the world was much bigger than he had dreamed and so old that his head grew giddy at the multitude of the years. If one looked ahead, time had no limits⁠—it ran out into a dizzying blue infinity; but if one traced it back, one at least found far back in the darkness a beginning, a place where one had to stop: six thousand years before the birth of Our Saviour it was that God had created the world. That stood clear and plain in Martin’s Biblical History, on the first page.

In six days He had made it. But the teacher said that days were longer at that time.

But if possibly the days of the creation had been a little longer than ordinary days, it was just the opposite with Methusalem’s nine hundred and sixty-nine years. “At that time, you see, they didn’t reckon the years as long as now,” the teacher said.

There was so much new to learn and digest; school had in reality none of those terrors with which Martin had arrayed it in his imagination.

But on the other hand the way to and from school was filled with all sorts of perils and adventures. Those ill-disposed beings who were called rowdies and who called Martin and his comrades stuck-ups might be in ambush around any corner. The worst of these rowdies were the fierce and formidable “marsh rowdies,” who would now and then leave their gloomy habitation in the tract between the Humlegård and Roslagstorg, the “Marsh,” to go on the war path. Their weapons were said to be lead balls on the end of short ropes. But more than these marsh rowdies, whom Martin had never seen and of whose existence he was not entirely sure, he feared the horrible Franz, who used to live in the Long Row and still resided in the same street. For this rowdy directed all his energies and intelligence toward embittering Martin’s life by day and even pursued him into his nocturnal dreams.

But one day when Martin was on his way for morning recess, he found two of his comrades in a fight with Franz at a street corner; in fact they had already overcome him, thrown him down, and were pummeling him with their fists. At this time Martin had begun to read Indian books, so that he at once saw in Franz a parallel to the noble redskin and did not want to miss so favorable a chance of making him his ally against other rowdies. He therefore advanced and represented to his comrades how cowardly it was to fight two against one, said that Franz lived in his street and was a very decent rowdy, and proposed that they let him go in peace. While he thus drew the attention of his comrades, Franz managed to get up and run away.

In return Martin got all the licking intended for Franz. Furthermore he had to endure the scorn of his comrades for being the friend of a rowdy. And the next time he met Franz on the street in front of the dyer’s gate, the latter tripped him so that he fell into the gutter, then gave him a bloody nose, tore his books apart, swore at him frightfully, and ran off.

He had not understood that he was supposed to be a noble redskin. But this Franz was not a rowdy of the usual sort; he was a thoroughly awful rowdy.