Don-A-Dreams

Front matter

DON-A-DREAMS

DON-A-DREAMS

A STORY OF LOVE AND YOUTH

Part I

PART I

THE MAKE-BELIEVER

AuxTOC|

Part I. Chapter 1

I

THE sun was an open hole in the heavens, like the uncovered pot-hole of the kitchen stove. The winds were made by the tossing branches of the garden maples fanning themselves in the heat. The rains soaked through the ground to the ocean of an underworld, on which the crust of the earth was floating; and the street hydrants connected with those waters by a length of pipe. He, himself, was as hollow as a rubber doll, and when he ate he filled himself with food. Up on the tops of the clouds the angels sat in Heaven; and God was a stern father—bearded like Jack's giant—who was engaged in large affairs all day but required a strict account from little boys when He came home from business of an evening and looked down awfully through the roof on children at their prayers.

In short, it was a child's world—that pathetically wonderful world which is such a little round and level of experience surrounded by imagination's so high and misty hills. It was such a world as the old cartographers used to map—with all the poetry and fable of the nursery located in a "Terra Incognita" just over the horizon. For though the boy was six years old, he was the eldest of a brood of three, his mother had become an invalid, and he had been neglected in his most inquisitive years for the sicklier infants who had succeeded him. The little nursemaid, Nannie, had taught him to read in an "indestructible" copy of "Jack, the Giant-Killer and what he had not been able to learn of the world from a volume of Grimm's "Fairy Tales" he had worked out according to his fancy.

When Miss Morris, a visiting governess, succeeded Nannie as his teacher, two small desks were set up for him and Frankie in the playroom, and he began eagerly to learn the game of figures which she called "Arithmetic." But she objected to his methods when she found that 1 was a tall, thin man, and 2 a little old woman bent double, and 3 a fat cook with an apron-string waist, and 4 a boy sitting. There followed explanations of things in general, and Miss Morris spent a morning asking questions and laughing at the answers she got. She set herself, with patience, to correct his mistaken fancies; and he bore it as a child must. But when she said that all fairy tales were untruths and denied Jack and his Giant any existence in reality, he began to doubt her; and after she had gone, he turned to the book itself, and found her word outweighed by the strong authority of the print and the pictures.

He said nothing; he had, already, the habit of silence. But, thereafter, when she taught him that "the world was round like an orange and flattened at the poles," he looked out of the playroom window and saw a level earth that stretched away from the brick-and-stone realities of the street into the sunset glow and horizon clouds of fairyland and "Terra Incognita." When she heard him describe a void of hunger by saying that his legs were empty, and explained to him the tubular construction of his insides, it did not prevent him from keeping his legs as straight as possible under the dinner-table so that his food might have an easy passage down to his hollow feet. And although she denied that the crust of the earth floated on water, he watched with as much anxiety as ever how the men dug in the street—afraid that the bottoms would fall out of the drain pits which they were making, and drop them all into the under ocean.

Then, one morning, when she was coming upstairs to teach him, he heard her say to his mother: "He has such babyish fancies about so many things."

His mother replied: "Babyish fancies?" in a tone that resented the criticism of her boy as a reflection on herself.

"Like Santa Claus," Miss Morris added hastily. "Only about other things."

"Well," his mother said, "I think I should leave the child his Santa Claus."

Miss Morris came up to the playroom in high colour. As soon as their books were opened, she said to Donald: "I suppose you believe in Santa Claus?"

She smiled as she said it; but he knew that smile.

"Isn't he?" he faltered.

"Isn't he what?"

"Isn't he—really?"

She did not answer. "We'll begin," she said, with yesterday's lesson again. You'll have to make better progress Donald, or Frankie 'll catch up to you."

He made no progress that morning; and when the lessons were finished and Miss Morris had gone, he found himself fallen on a withered day. All the witchery and surprise of his Christmas were threatened; and his mother's "Leave the child his Santa Claus" was as humiliating as Miss Morris's cold smile.

He spread the rug on the floor in the accepted configuration of a battlefield, but he lost heart for the game before he had his first fort built and his soldiers drawn up in rank for Frankie's cannonade of marbles. He took hold of the end of the rug, and tossed the whole campaign into the air with a jerk that threw his brother off his balance and bumped the back of his head against the table leg. Frankie went bawling down the stairs; and Don locked the playroom door against the visit of any avenging Nannie.

No one came. He was left to fret about the room in aimless discontent.

Now before every Christmas in the past he had sent letters to Santa Claus with Nannie's help—letters that had been meaningless scrawls of lead pencil, because he had not then learned to write. He had "posted" them in a crack of the attic floor at the foot of a large post that supported the beams of the roof; and on every Christmas, the toys which he had written for, had been waiting for him in the nursery. It occurred to him, now, that he could use that post to put Santa Claus to the proof. He tore a sheet from his scribbling book, and after a half-hour's labour achieved a letter which was intended to read: "Dear Santa Claus—Please write me a letter. Miss Morris laughed because I believed in Santa Claus and I want a letter because I never saw you. You won't let us see you. I will write to-morrow or some other day about what I want for Christmas. Please excuse mistakes. I must now say good-bye. So good-bye."

The act relieved him like a prayer; for, of itself, it gave Santa Claus the reality of a being to whom a petition could be sent. He dropped his letter into the crack of the attic floor and felt himself confirmed in his faith.

But Miss Morris, as an educator, held that children should not be brought up on lies; and every day she explored his mind for more of this "nursery nonsense"; and every day, she let the cold daylight of common sense in on some cherished corner of his twilight world. The snow that had begun to fall, melting, on the warm earth, had not been shovelled over the edges of the clouds by any celestial gardeners cleaning the walks. Jack Frost was not a little man with a blue nose who came at night to breathe on the window panes. The dreams of a boy in a warm cot were an affair of the stomach, and there was no such place as Nannie's "Slumberland." Don took refuge behind an obstinate silence from which no questions could draw him, but his education went on none the less, and he could only oppose it with the conscious effort of a make-believe. She laughed at him one day when she found him engaged in a mimic war with his blocks and marbles, and he locked himself and Frankie in the playroom afterward. She was superior Science smiling tolerantly at the simplicity of Faith; he could only blush and flee from her.

However, she said no more to him about his Santa Claus, and Frankie and he, lying in bed in the mornings—with the light from the snow reflected on the ceiling, and the sound of Canadian farm sleds creaking down the road with a jingle of bells—"talked Ch'is'mas" together, and were happy. Don explained an idea he had of how Santa Claus could transport such millions of toys in one sleigh; he loaded the clouds with them, from the top windows of his towering ice palace, and sent them floating down the wind to the cities; then, with his reindeer sleigh that flew in the air, he delivered them from chimney to chimney; and when he had emptied his sacks of one cargo, he drove back to the nearest cloud for another. Frankie, blown about on high with this description, pressed his hands into the sinking sensation that took him in the middle, and gloated, round-eyed; and Don day-dreamed of Christmas in a heart-tickling content.

But, on the eve of the great mystery, his letter and the suspicion that had inspired it recurred to him; he caught the twinkle of a conspiracy in the smiles of the household; his elders repeated too often a strict injunction that when he went to bed he was to close his eyes tightly and go to sleep at once. Why? "Because, Donald," his mother answered him, kissing him good-night, "if Santa Claus sees you looking at him, he'll fly away and not leave you anything." He made no reply—being confused with much thought.

Their bedroom—Frankie's and his—had been moved to the top of the house to protect the slumbers of the new baby in the nursery. Their playroom had been built for a billiard-room, and it was divided from the bedroom by a pair of large folding doors with glasses newly frosted. Don had once licked at that frosting in a mistaken idea that it was the same as the icing of a cake. Finding it tasteless, he had scratched at it with a penknife, and so had made a peephole which he had since used when hiding from Miss Morris.

Now, just as he was falling asleep—he had explained that phrase "falling asleep" to himself by imagining a physical sensation of falling through the floor with his bed, and so induced sleep by confusing his brain with the whirl and giddiness of his descent—now, when the bed was well through the floor and was beginning to rock gently down to "Slumberland," the thought of this peephole in the frosted door came to him with a vividness of suggestion that might have made it seem, to an older mind, a prompting of the devil. It came with all the terrifying seductiveness, the fear and fascination, of a tempting against conscience. Santa Claus was to be in the playroom, on the other side of the glass doors. Their stockings had been hung there for him, and the peephole was on that side of the room on which he would leave his gifts.

Don started up in his bed, and gazed at the squares of light that were framed in the doorcase. Frankie had compelled the oblivion of young sleep by a stubborn silence, and now breathed a regular, small breath. There was no sound of any movement in the playroom.

He debated the situation with himself. If Santa Claus should see him watching, he would not leave any gifts; his mother herself had said so. Yes, but behind the frosted glasses how could Santa Claus see him? And yet, why risk it, since an answer to the letter would be enough. Well, if Santa Claus would not allow himself to be seen, would he allow himself to write? And if he objected to being spied on, what would he think of a boy who wrote to him to put him to the proof?

He lay back on his pillows and blinked at the dim ceiling.

He was startled into staring wakefulness—it seemed only an instant later—by the sound of the glass doors being shut with caution. Someone must have looked into the room! It must have been Santa Claus making certain that he was not being watched!

Don clutched the side of his cot, frightened at the danger he had escaped and thankful that he had escaped it; and under both feelings he was glad beyond words that Santa Claus was "really." He listened, holding his breath with awe.

A box fell in the playroom. The noise was followed by a suppressed giggle. It was Nannie's giggle. And Don had no sooner heard it than he was over the side of his cot and tip-toeing across the room, with the truth already heavy on his chest.

He put his eye to the peephole. When he turned away from the door, he stumbled blindly to his bed, and buried his face in the pillows and cried himself to sleep.

Years afterward, when experience had discovered to him his own personality, he saw in that small incident the little gist and prologue of his life.

Part I. Chapter 2

II.

In the gray of the Christmas morning, he woke to his disillusionment; but he woke also to the thought that he must not tell Frankie; and he woke, in fact, no longer an infant, but an elder brother, desperately sophisticated and, beside Frankie's enthusiasm, even blasé. Thereafter, his make-believes were conscious always; and he began to play with his imagination for a game.

Being exiled from the nursery to escape the scarlet fever, he was on a visit to an aunt who lived at the other end of the town; and on an eventful morning, he woke, alone in his cot, to hear his two cousins whispering together within their high spindle palisade on the opposite side of the room. He opened one sleepy eye to see that they were playing "Mammoth Cave," a game which he had taught them. (It required that you cover yourself with the bed-clothes, turn flat on your face, and wriggle down through the

suffocation of "between sheets" until your head came out at the foot of the bed.) He did not rouse himself; for the three children had formed an agreement that no one of them should rise before the others, so that if one wished to take an extra forty winks while breakfast waited, they all lay in bed together, and the wrath of the powers of the household spent itself in a general thunder that did not strike.

But their restlessness continued; and when he heard a sly chuckle, he asked thickly: "What're you doing?" The over-prompt "Nothing!" of their answer wakened him. He rose on his elbow. Their wriggling ceased, and their two stolid faces stared blandly at him out of the bed-clothes.

One of them said, with a blink: "Who can make the highest cant'lever bridge?" (This was another of his inventions. To do it you stretched yourself out on your back, and then, with your elbows, raised an arch of body supported on neck and heels.) But while the elder cousin was getting himself up, he lifted the corner of his coverlet accidentally, and Don saw the black sleeve of his jacket. He cried, "You're dressing!"

They were already dressed. The playing "cant'lever bridge" had been a ruse by which they covered an attempt to draw up their knickerbockers to their waists. And all their other contortions had covered similar treasons.

They ran away to breakfast, shouting; and Don almost wept with chagrin and disappointment. It was so low a betrayal of his confidence—so treacherous a misuse of his beloved make-believes—that he felt he never would forgive them. He sulked through a cold breakfast, and went out alone to the lawn, refusing to speak to either of them, though his aunt attempted to placate him with a candy stick.

He took a picture book with him to console himself in solitude; but he found the hired man cutting the grass; and on his neighbour's veranda, a very young lady with a doll was watching the work. Don also watched.

"He—he's cutting the grass," she explained. "And when he has it all cut, he—he puts water on it to—to make it grow again— so—so he can cut it again."

He accepted the explanation in the spirit in which it was offered; she introduced herself as "Miss Margaret," a title which she had taken from the family servants; and in a few moments he was seated on the front steps beside her, their heads together over the picture book, and each sucking a share of the candy stick. And Miss Margaret's share was the larger.

Between bites, he explained the pictures. When there was a castle in the background, he could tell exactly in what room of it the princess was locked. On demand, he described the ogre, who was her gaoler, to the very wart on the knob-end of his nose; and he pictured every article of the gold and silver furnishings of the palace with a realistic detail that made Miss Margaret gasp. Before the book was finished, they had became such friends that she let him wipe his sticky fingers on her handkerchief. "You haven't remembered yours," she apologized for him.

"Oh," he said, "boys don't ever have them."

She thought the matter over. She said: "You can always borrow mine."

It was so delicately put that, with a masculine obtuseness, he did not get her meaning. It was Miss Margaret's surrender.

She was visiting the next-door neighbours; and Don and she, during the two weeks that followed their meeting, were together constantly. He deserted his cousins, and she left the youngsters with whom she had been playing. She learned to storm block-forts with battalions of coloured marbles that were cavalry at one moment and cannon balls at the next; to make siege guns of cuts of elderberry bush bored of their pith; and to lay out a national cemetery for lead soldiers with dominoes for gravestones. When she came to the game of imprisoned princess, she was already more than a pupil, and she dictated the behaviour of the regal beauty in a way which Don could not follow. She insisted that the prince should die of his wounds—after he had killed ten dragons and the ogre—and leave the princess to weep out the eyes of her youth beside his tomb. Don could see no right fun in that, and her contempt was galling. They compromised by agreeing to give the game a tragic ending every third time they played it; and he consented to the substitution of a little china doll for the "Noah's wife," shaped like a blue hourglass, which he had always used as the imprisoned beauty.

Their friendship thickened until he distinguished himself by climbing up the pillar of a side veranda to call "good-morning" through the window to her while she was still in bed; and she, at dinner, refused to eat stewed corn, a dish of which she was ravenously fond, because he had told her that it had once made him ill. She was a most unusual young lady, especially in affairs of the heart: she was impulsively positive in her likes and her dislikes, and she expressed either always unreservedly. She treated Don's elder cousin, Conroy, with a coldness which the boy demanded an explanation of: and she explained simply, "I don't like your face." She crossed the veranda to a visitor—to whom she had not been introduced—and sat herself on his knee, smiling the frankest admiration; and when she was asked to excuse her abruptness, she replied, "He's nice." She flattered Don with an adoration that went to his head.

She had already given him a handkerchief worked with her monogram in pale blue silk—for his sticky fingers, though she did not say so—and she came one afternoon to their playroom in the broken "summer-house" with a photograph of herself in her winter furs. He was busy making preparations for the burial of a lead hero who had been killed in the wars. He accepted the picture with a brief condescension, and directed her to line up, in funeral procession, the wooden animals from his Noah's ark. She obeyed him silently, but not with her usual enthusiasm; and when the last strain of martial music had died away, and Don had fired the last "Boom" of imaginary cannon over the soldier's grave, she said abruptly: "You ought to give me one."

"One what?"

"Picture. A picture of yourself."

He shook his head. "Haven't any." He was erecting a tomb of building-blocks over the grave. She watched him moodily. When he came to put on the roof, he found himself in difficulties; he had no blocks long enough to reach from wall to wall. He looked around him for a substitute and saw her photograph. He tried it; it could be made to fit exactly if the back wall were moved in an inch.

She snatched it from him. "No!"

He caught at it. "Give me that."

She shook her head, her doll's eyes big with indignation. "No!"

"I want it," he said angrily.

"No." She backed away from him. "No. You shan't. No!" She stamped her foot to stop him as he got up from his knees. When he clutched at her arm, impatiently, she turned and ran, screaming, "You shan't! You shan't!"

Well, there were other building materials as good as her old photograph. There was the cover of the tin box in which he kept his marbles. He tried it, and broke down a side of his mausoleum. He brushed the ruins away and began a towering monument of solid blocks.

But Miss Margaret did not come back, and he began to miss her. He went nonchalantly around the house to where the other children were playing "fire-engine"; but she was not there. He inquired next door from the maid-of-all-work, and she told him that Miss Margaret's mother had arrived and taken her down town.

Even then he did not suspect what was in store for him. He thought to make all right by finding a picture of himself to give her; and the only picture that he had was one of his Sunday-school, in which he stood in the front row of a group of little girls. He wrapped it up complacently in a newspaper and left it with the servant for her.

He learned next morning that she had gone away to her home. He learned also that she had not liked the photograph; the servant returned it to him in small pieces—pieces which she had swept out from behind a bureau when she was cleaning the guest-chamber. He gathered from his aunt that Miss Margaret had been jealous of the twenty-odd little girls who were in the picture with him. She had left him without even saying good-bye.

Part I. Chapter 3

III

Don went back to his play somewhat lonely for a day or two, but with no sentimental regrets. With the selfishness of his years, he forgot her in the excitement of returning to his home to find Frankie shorn of his locks and promoted to knickerbockers.

(Afterward, whenever he saw a boy in kilts, he thought the youngster wore them because he had not yet had the scarlet fever.) He did not recover Miss Margaret again until—the 24th of May.

These were the days when the 24th of May, "the Queen's Birthday," was a festival for all loyal Canadians. And they were the days before the invention of the giant cracker and the toy revolver. As yet only the "cannon"—that first improvement on the Chinese cracker—was in the toy-shop windows; and although Don had bought five of them (believing in weight of metal as against rapidity of fire), Frankie had bought only crackers of smaller calibre. It remained to be seen whether his rattling volleys would be a match for Don's great guns.

They had been forbidden to begin their celebration until after breakfast, and they raced through the meal neck and neck. They finished together and ran upstairs together; but Don stumbled and fell on the landing, and Frankie reached the toy closet first. There the crackers, Roman candles, pin-wheels and what not, were laid out on the floor in two long rows, in fond imitation of ordnance in an arsenal; and Frankie began to cram his purchases in his pockets as fast as he could pick them up. Don shoved in beside him, panting, to see that his brother was taking two cannon crackers which he did not own; and Don, as the rightful owner of them, snatched at them, to hold them till he could get breath to protest. He caught them by their long fuses; and Frankie, jerking back, plucked the strings out by the roots.

Now, Frankie was a sturdy little fellow—round-headed and bent-browed—and he had learned that he could domineer over his milder brother by flying into a childish passion whenever he was crossed. He struck at Don, at once; but Don, enraged by the loss of his two best crackers, closed with him; and in a wild interchange of buffets, Frankie took a blow on the face that sent him to the floor howling with a bleeding nose.

Don, stiff and white with fright, was still standing in the door of the closet, looking as guilty as Cain, with Frankie yelling on the carpet at his feet, when their father—home for the holiday—flung angrily into the room. He took in the situation with one furious glance; and then, without waiting for any explanation, seized Don by the collar and began cuffing him with a brutally hard hand.

No doubt he did not know how heavily he struck the boy, for he had never beaten any of his children before—being able to awe them with the mere threat of his voice—and Don was too stunned to cry out. As soon as he was released, he staggered back against the wall, his head ringing, the breath all out of his body, blinded with tears. His father, taking Frankie up, carried him, still bawling, out of the room.

It was Don's first experience of these passionate griefs of childhood—griefs that rend the body with terrible convulsions, griefs that seem to rend the very soul of the child with the pain of an injustice from which there is no appeal. It was his first experience of them, and he threw himself on the floor of the toy closet like a child in a fit. He flung the fire-crackers away from him; he beat the floor with his little fists; he ran to the door of the playroom, locked it, and dropped on the rug there, choked with the sobs that burst from him, in writhing and weeping, till he was too weak to do more than moan.

Nannie came, and tapped secretly on the door, and cried "Donnie? Donnie?" under her breath. But he knew from her tone that he was in disgrace with the household, and he would not open to her.

They're goin' on the picnic," she whispered hoarsely.

He knew they were; and he knew that his father would punish him by leaving him at home. He did not intend to go downstairs and take his sentence. He held quiet until Nannie had gone away, and then he crawled, numb and exhausted, into the bedroom and threw himself on his cot.

He heard knocking on his door faintly, in a weak doze, but he did not get up. He heard his mother calling him, up the stairs which she was unable to climb; but he did not reply. Only when he heard voices on the lawn, he peeped out behind the curtain and saw her in her invalid chair, his father wheeling her—with the baby on his arm—and Frankie walking proudly at her side. They turned at the gate to call a last good-bye to Nannie; and his mother looked up at the nursery windows with a face that often came with tears, to Donald, afterward, in dreams.

He jumped back and dropped the curtain. When he heard Nannie close the front door, he looked out again. They were gone.

There were no more tears in him. He went back to the playroom, dumbly, and sat down among his toys. The sight of the fire-crackers gave him a sickening feeling. He began to set up his soldiery as mechanically as an older person would turn from grief to an accustomed task.

But weeping had made him hungry, and he deserted his wars to look out a side window at the neighbouring fire-hall clock. Then, from the window, he went to a wall of coloured pictures which Frankie and he had cut from the "Christmas Graphic" and pinned up on the plaster; and, at last, he began to wander from picture to picture, playing "showman" as Frankie and he had done.

He was before a picture of Nelson at Trafalgar, glowing with an imagined eloquence which did not shape itself in words at all, and swaying a huge public with emotion—(let his father beat him then)—when suddenly he saw Miss Margaret sitting in the front row of his audience.

The audience vanished. Don had found for himself that strange companion of so many solitary children, an imaginary playmate.

He made a round of the pictures with her, played Imprisoned Princess and the Game of War, and took her on a tour of the empty house. He showed her the post in the attic where he mailed his letters to Santa Claus, and he assured her that Santa Claus never failed to answer them. He took her to his mother's room and let her tumble in the prohibited feather bed. He explored behind the big green sofa in the sitting-room, and took down all the forbidden books in his father's library to show them to her.