My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to
compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old
people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying
to climb stairs.


IX.

On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one
were good or not. If not, Karoline was especially prone to complain and
Father and Mother were transformed into angry powers. Father was, of
course, a much more serious power than Mother, a more distant, more
hard-handed power. Neither of them, in an ordinary way, inspired any
terror. They were in the main protecting powers.

The terrifying power at this first stage was supplied by the bogey-man.
He came rushing suddenly out of a corner with a towel in front of his
face and said: "Bo!" and you jumped. If the towel were taken away there
soon emerged a laughing face from behind it. That at once made the
bogey-man less terrible. And perhaps that was the reason Maren's threat:
"Now, if you are not good, the bogey-man will come and take you,"
quickly lost its effect. And yet it was out of this same bogey-man, so
cold-bloodedly shaken off, that at a later stage a personality with whom
there was no jesting developed, one who was not to be thrust aside in
the same way, a personality for whom you felt both fear and trembling--
the Devil himself.

But it was only later that he revealed himself to my ken. It was not he
who succeeded first to the bogey-man. It was--the police. The police was
the strange and dreadful power from which there was no refuge for a