The Book of Knowledge Read Online Free PDF Page B

sister.
    â€˜And also, you must not let Kate follow her.’
    â€˜I won’t. I won’t let her. I’m sorry.’
    In this brief exchange, Emma had exhausted her energy for recriminations. No one said anything for a few moments. Caleb knew his mother was quite right. He had not acted in a proper, brotherly, protective way. But still: he then felt it necessary to defend to his mother the reasonableness of what they had pretended at the sea, the logic of emulating lemming behavior to the letter if they were going to play at all. Roslyn had made that clear to them, he said.
    â€˜Not to do so would violate the laws of nature,’ he told her. Loyalty to Roslyn required him, almost against his will, to defend their leader against parental criticism. He put away the thought that, a few hours ago, he had angrily told Roslyn she might be entirely wrong about what she had read.
    That evening Roslyn pulled on the wire until Lionel shouted: ‘Yes, what is it?’ into his cardboard receiver.
    Roslyn shouted back: ‘Kate’s some dummy, isn’t she? Walking in like that.’
    â€˜You told her to.’
    â€˜Sure. But she didn’t have to do it.’
    Lionel said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said:
    â€˜She almost drowned.’
    â€˜She did not. I saved her. And Caleb helped. She’s a real dope is what she is.’
    On their veranda, seated beneath the mock telephone wire, the Hellmans gasped.
    The next day Caleb and Kate did not go over to play with the children on Linden Street. They walked into the village with their mother and watched while she examined the new books on the library shelf. Caleb read the jackets of a few and thought Emma should take out a book about children who are captured by pirates in the West Indies. Emma thought it sounded too much like a children’s book. But she accepted his suggestion, and added it to Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd Douglas, a writer she had not heard of before.
    â€˜What is an obsession?’ Kate asked Emma.
    â€˜What?’ asked Emma, using her deafness to play for time.
    â€˜An obsession .’
    â€˜Er … something that fills your mind so completely that you can think of nothing else.’ Emma looked at Kate as she spoke, suddenly remembering herself at that age when she could think of nothing but becoming a nun and living in what she imagined would be the happy, warm seclusion of a convent.
    â€˜Did you ever have an obsession?’ Kate asked.
    â€˜No,’ said Emma firmly.
    In the afternoon, while Emma took her customary nap to escape the heat, Caleb and Kate sat on the swing. Kate’s head rested on Caleb’s shoulder. He read to her from the beginning of A High Wind in Jamaica . He had persuaded Emma to let him borrow the book, from which now he was preparing a scenario for some future pretend session. From the idyllic picture of young contentment they presented to any spectator who might have passed by, there was no way of knowing that Caleb was planning cruelty and carnage of the highest order.
    One night, weary from an afternoon of hopscotch and king of the hill and hide and seek with Roslyn and Lionel, the brother and sister lay resting on Kate’s bed curled in each other’s arms. They had decided to embark on a new pretense. In a collection of tales by an Irish writer that Caleb had found in the library was the story of tragic lovers, his favorite subject. At once he recognized its dramatic possibilities. The parts seemed ideal for them. They played at being Héloïse and Peter Abelard until they could no longer stay awake.
    The next day, having spent a long afternoon at the beach by themselves with Moth (the parents of Roslyn and Lion had decided it would be wiser if their children did not go swimming unless their fathers were free on the weekend to accompany them), the tired Flowers children ate an early supper, carrying on their usual quiet dialogue. Silent and still