The Believing Years

by Edmund Lester Pearson

Some glass sailor must have steered the ships to safety, while the mermaids had plunged beneath the waves to find calmer water below.

The solution seemed to fit the case, but how was I to prove it? How was I to look at any of these charming things? The chest was locked, and locked it was likely to remain. A sort of decree had issued from Jimmy Toppan's great-aunt: no one was to see the inside of the chest. Nay, more, one must not even ask about it. It was locked tight, and there was an end of it. I never heard Jimmy's great-aunt say this; I never mentioned the chest in her presence. Nor did Jimmy say that the unlocking of the chest was forbidden. He described its contents in a way to set my imagination aflame. He did not say definitely that he had ever looked in it. But he let it be known that it held such glories that a glimpse therein was a vision of fairyland. And he somehow cast an air of mystery and awe about it, till I would no more have asked to have the cover raised than I would have presented myself, snub-nosed and with holes in the knees of my stockings, at the gates of Paradise with a request to be enrolled in the cherubs' chorus.

I never knew why there was such a curse upon the chest. But I gathered, somehow, that the great-uncle, or grandfather, or whoever he was, who had brought it from foreign parts, had uttered, with his dying breath, a solemn injunction that it was to stay closed. The opening of Pandora's box was to be a holiday recreation compared to opening that green chest. It was no more to be disturbed than Shakespeare's bones. Why he should have transported it such a distance, with such infinite care, and then sealed it up forever, passed my understanding. Did the prohibition extend to grown-ups, or was it only for boys? That, also, I never could find out.

I used to fancy that Jimmy's great-aunt stole down to the basement in the dark hours of night to gloat over the silver sea and its delicate inhabitants. Once, in the late afternoon, I detected her going chestwards, and I followed with beating heart. I got behind an apple barrel and watched her movements. But she only went to an ice-box, from which she took out a plate of mutton chops.

The intolerable curiosity aroused in me by Jimmy's account of the chest was equalled only by the fear I had to make any inquiries about it. I was convinced that a painful family secret overhung that green chest.

Night after night I dreamed that I had been permitted to look within. Sometimes it was all I had imagined, and more. The ships, the mermaids, the turtles, and all the rest were there indeed. And others, new and indescribable forms, floated or swam in that enchanted ocean, glittering, fragile, wonderful. I could take them in my hand, play with them, and set them again in their element.

They did not merely act the lifeless part of china figures in an aquarium. They moved about with an intelligence of their own; the ships spread gauzy sails to catch a magic wind, and flew before it. The whales rose to the surface, disported themselves heavily, like true whales, and blew jets of spray into the air.

In the midst of my rapture I would wake; all the glass toys vanished, and I could have cried to find them gone. In the morning it would be impossible to recall these new figures. I remembered them dimly and more dimly as the hours of the day blurred my dream. The iridescent creatures turned to formless things of gray and drab, and then lost themselves, to be found again only in another dream.

But not all my sleeping experiences were so happy. Sometimes I would seem to approach the chest only to have Jimmy's great-aunt rise from behind it, shaking a broom. At other times I would lift the lid and find inside the chest the crouching figure of the long-departed great-uncle. He would jump out, gibbering frightfully, and I would scream and wake up. Thus the chest became surrounded by terrors even when viewed by daylight. Jimmy's great-aunt was like another dragon set over the golden apples. She kept watch by day, while at night the goblin uncle came on duty.

So we began to steer clear of the green chest and to confine our activities to other parts of the basement. Much has been written of the joy that dwells in old garrets. The basement is neglected. Yet, if dry and well lighted, it may have its points.