Don-A-Dreams/Part 1/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.
Nannie found him there, and summoned him to luncheon; and Miss Margaret ate beside him in an imaginary chair from a wonderful blue bowl, long since broken, which he had once had for bread and milk. He sat in such a thoughtful silence and was so unresponsive to all Nannie's kind attempts to console him, that she lost patience and accused him of sulking. He ignored her temper, so that Miss Margaret might not be disturbed by it. When they had finished their meal, he started the musical box for her, and teased the parrot in the sun of the window till "Polly" squawked and screeched and bit at the bars of the cage; and Nannie scolded them out of the room, and they raced upstairs together.
They came down with all the fire-crackers and with a lead soldier in a match-box, whom they buried deep in the garden, crooning "Nearer My God To Thee" with no sense of irreverence. They split all Don's elderberry guns firing funeral salvos of crackers from them; and they blew up a fort with a "cannon" cracker and annihilated a whole regiment of men. No one came to disturb them until they began to set off pin-wheels and Roman candles in mid-afternoon; then Nannie interfered, and they ran into the house laughing rebelliously, and shut themselves in the play-room again.
"Well," Nannie complained to the cook, "his lickin' ain't done him any good."
When the family returned, he was cutting out figures from the "Graphic" supplements and acting new and wonderful games. He did not go downstairs; Frankie came up—full of the news of the picnic and the steamboat trip down the river and the glories of the merry-go-round—prepared, perhaps, to gloat over the fallen estate of his brother. Don did not even notice him. Frankie insisted on being heard. Don gathered up his pictures and barricaded himself in the bedroom.
He remained there until he was called to supper.
"You have been a bad boy, Don," his mother said to him that night. "Your father's angry with you."
He would not look at her. His face was still swollen from his morning's tears, and streaked with dirt, and smudged with powder. His fingers were scorched. There was a hole burned in the sleeve of his jacket.
"What have you been doing?"
"Playing."
"Aren't you sorry?"
He did not answer.
"Say that you're sorry, or I shall not kiss you good-night."
He did not feel that he was sorry, and he did not speak. She smoothed his hair with her thin hand, kissed him, and sent him away.
"I don't seem to understand him any more," she confessed to his father with a sigh.
His father replied: "He's growing too big to be running around here, wild. He should be at school."
And that was the decree of judgment which was to end Don's childhood. He was left to his imaginary Miss Margaret and his other make-believes through all that long, radiant summer; but in the fall, Miss Morris opened a "private and select" academy for boys and girls, and Don was enrolled as her second pupil.
Her first had been little Mary Morris, her small sister.