THE GREEN CHEST
Jimmy Toppan was worth knowing for the sake of his grandmothers, if for
no other reason. He had two of them. With one, and a great-aunt, he
lived on Elm Street.
The other grandmother was mistress of a farm in the country, to which
we often went. There were uncles and aunts there, too, but it was
Grandmother Toppan who seemed best to understand our needs. When we
were at the farm she knew the exact hours (about eleven in the morning,
and again about half-past four in the afternoon) when a large slice of
apple pie is most useful.
Tactfully and unfailingly she administered it at those times.
Grandmother Bradley, with whom Jimmy lived, ran Grandmother Toppan a
very close race. Her favorite remedy for our troubles (certain hollow
feelings which often afflicted us) was sugar-gingerbread. I will leave
it to any one if it is possible to choose between two such excellent
women.
The farm was, of course, a centre of attractions. Grandmother Bradley's
domain, on a principal street of the town, was naturally circumscribed.
Yet it contained one object of overwhelming interest.
In the basement stood a green chest. It was bumped and scarred, and,
worse than all, it was locked.
Lovely things dwelt within it, so Jimmy said.
It had come across the seas with some far-off great-uncle, and it was
never opened. But if the cover should ever be raised, he who stood by
should be envied of all boys. For inside was a large tank, filled with
some liquid, the exact nature of which Jimmy never explained. In this
silvery fluid swam or floated all manner of fairy shapes. There were
mermaids, tiny golden fishes, and other strange inhabitants of the
ocean. Enormous turtles reposed on the sands at the bottom, and gay
little ships with bright rigging sailed overhead.
All of these delectable objects were made, by the cunning of some
foreign workman, out of glass. The golden hair of the mermaids, the
scales of the fish, the sand, the sea-shells, the monstrous whales,
the sword of the swordfish, the flippers of the turtles, the little
lighthouse that stood on the shore, the beautifully colored seaweeds
that clustered about the rocks, all of these--even the thread-like
ropes and shrouds of the bobbing vessels--all were fashioned from
brittle glass.
Did a boy ever have a more tantalizing vision dancing before his eyes?
I stood and gazed at that green chest. A more stolid, unyielding affair
cannot be imagined. It was dusty, and the corners of it were worn and
rounded. The green paint which had covered it was faded, and in many
spots knocked off altogether. Sailors' boots had kicked it, perhaps, or
it had rocked about some cabin or hold when the waves of the real ocean
had started a miniature tempest on the little sea within. What, then,
had prevented collisions between the glass ships, or kept the mermaids
from being shivered to bits on the reef?
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.
In this one much importance was attached to a plate of sand set on
a table. This, so Jimmy solemnly averred, was for the purpose of
discovering the presence of mice in the basement. If they ran over the
sand, their footprints would betray them, and traps might be set. It
did not occur to me to marvel at the obliging nature of mice who should
be at such great pains to record their arrival. Observing that Jimmy's
great-aunt often inspected the plate of sand and smoothed its surface
over after each inspection, we looked to it that she should never be
disappointed.
It is not hard to counterfeit small footprints, such as might be made
by a scurrying mouse.
In an adjoining room there was a steam-boiler--part of the heating
apparatus of the house. The existence of this boiler, the discovery
of clay in Davenport's field, and the always present need of marbles,
these conditions led to the foundation of an enterprise that occupied a
number of days.
The clay was brought from "Davenport's," and rolled into balls of the
proper size. These were placed on shingles and set to bake beneath the
boiler.
Visions of revolutionizing the marble industry spurred us on. We
calculated that we could undersell the regular dealers and that profits
would accrue. But although the clay balls were duly left beneath the
boiler all night, there were defects in the finished product. The part
that had rested on the shingle obstinately remained flat. We found no
way of giving our marbles the glaze necessary to the real thing; so the
dealers continued to ask the exorbitant sum of a cent for ten, and did
not have to break prices to meet our competition.
It is possible that the fact that there was no heat in the boiler had
something to do with this fiasco.
After this, to keep our minds from wandering toward the green chest,
we started the manufacture of gunpowder on a large scale. The raw
material, rotting stone, could be procured from the sand heap and dump,
which at that date (before the rise of city improvement associations)
adorned the banking at the end of the frog pond. This dump had many
attractions, not the least of which were the squash vines which trailed
over it. They never got beyond the blossoming stage, but that did
not trouble us. The possession of raw squashes would have availed us
little. The flowers were interesting, and I scarcely need to point out
the value of the stems. We cut a slit near one end, and they became in
our hands trumpets with which to blow soul-animating strains. It is, of
course, necessary to scrape off the prickles with a jack-knife, or the
lips of the performer are apt to suffer.
But these were by the way. The rotting stone, red, gray, brown, and
black, was the most valuable product of the dump. We carried it to
a broad, flat piece of slate which covered a cistern just outside
the basement windows. Here, with hard rocks, we ground it fine. It
then became, by the chemistry which worked so quickly in those days,
gunpowder. The black dust was the ordinary article. Mixed with red or
other colors, it was transformed into various high explosives. Then we
stored it in packets in the basement, where it might be drawn upon in
case of need--any sudden attacks by Indians or pirates, for instance.
The day on which we stored the powder was not long after the Fourth of
July. Our operations in the basement had to come to an end on that day,
for Grandmother Bradley and Aunt Josephine were going away for a week.
The house was to be closed, and Jimmy would stay with his Grandmother
Toppan in the country.
The last time we entered the basement our eyes wandered toward the
green chest. But neither of us spoke about it. I wondered if the chest
would be stolen, or be burned up, or should I die and never look inside
it? Already the little glass ships and fishes had become less real,
though more beautiful, than the folks of elf-land. What small hope I
had ever entertained of seeing them was dwindling to a pin-point.
I was never troubled by any suspicion that the tank, the ocean, and
the glass creatures existed only in Jimmy's imagination. Such doubts
did not fret me then, nor afterwards. The green chest remained one of
the mysteries of the believing years.