# Don-A-Dreams/Part 1/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.