THE FINE ART OF PLAY
It was her earliest recollection, and parts of it were not clear.
There were those big men carrying in her father, and her mother's face
looking so strange, and her father looking so strange with the white
cloths about his head, and the strange faces of doctors and neighbors
she had not seen before. Then the strange stillness and the strange
new fear when her father did not move and they all were so quiet.
These memories were rather blurred; she was not always sure which were
memories of the events or which had grown from what she had afterwards
heard. But of the funeral she was very sure, for she could never
forget those beautiful silvered handles on the shining wooden coffin,
or her resentment toward the women dressed in black who would not let
her touch these--the prettiest things she had ever seen. The colts had
run away, frightened, when an empty sap-barrel fell off the sled, and
her father had been thrown against a tree and brought home with a
fractured skull, to live unconscious two days, and to be buried in the
shiny coffin with the silver handles.
There had been an older child who died as a baby of eight months, and
so Widow Gilmore was left at thirty-five with her only child, Hattie,
and a hundred-and-forty-acre farm, with the house in town. Mrs.
Gilmore had good business sense. She lived alone with Hattie, ran the
farm, and soon her interests degenerated into a slavery to household
and farm details.
The widow had taught school until she was nearly thirty. She was not
handsome, and the meager sentiment of her soul easily disintegrated
into morbidness. She wore black the rest of her days, and for the rest
of her days church services were hours of public mourning. The Gilmore
"parlor" was closed after the funeral, and Hattie never got a glimpse
within its almost gruesomely sacred walls, save as she timidly peeped
in during cleaning days or, rarely, when her mother tearfully led her
in and they stood before the life-size crayon portrait of the
departed. Even in her quiet play, Hattie must keep on the other side
of the house.
Hattie Gilmore was a sober child and lived a sober childhood. She was
not strong; nothing had ever been done to make her so. Play and
playmates were always limited. She and her mother belonged to
Coopersville's "better class," most of the town children living below
the bridge where the homes of the factory people crowded. Boys were
"too rough," and the other girls were "not nice enough"; so she played
much alone--such play as it was, with her two china dolls and the tin
stove and tin dishes, which made up her toys. There was little to
stimulate her imagination and nothing to develop comradeships and
friendships. For hours of her play-time she sat inertly on the front
stoop and watched the passersby, for there had never been any thought
of training her in the art of play. Instead, she was warned to keep
her dress clean and rather sharply reprimanded if, perchance, dress or
apron was torn. So she stood and watched the school-play of the other
children, never knowing the thrills of a game of "tag," nor the
reckless adventures of "black man"; even "Pussy wants a corner"
disarranged her painfully curled curls and was rarely risked. "Hop-
scotch," when the figure was small and lady-like, was practically the
limit of Hattie's "violent exercise." So she did not develop-how could
she! She remained undersized. Moreover, her play-days were sadly
shortened, for they early merged into work-days. Housekeeping cares
were many, as her mother planned her household. According to York
State traditions Hattie was early taught domestic details, and for
over a generation seriously, slavishly followed the routine
established by her mother who doggedly, to the last, knew no shadow of
turning, and went to her honestly earned long rest within a week after
she took to her bed. Hattie finished the town high school, and had
taken her school-work so seriously that she was valedictorian--being
too good to soil your dress ought to bring some reward. Her teacher
proudly referred to her as an example of the fine work a student could
do who was not disturbed by outside influences. Commencement night,
the same summer she was seventeen, she was almost pretty. The natural
flush of success and of public recognition was heightened by the
reflected flush from the red roses she wore; and Ben Stimson, the old
doctor's son, carried the image of this, her most beautiful self, in
his big heart for many years. He was then twenty, a sophomore at
college, and a wholesome fellow to look upon. He took Hattie home that
night. It was early June, and they dallied on the way. She was so
nearly happy that her conscience became suspicious. She felt something
awful was going to happen!--and she almost did not care. They had
reached the front steps of her home. Ominously, silence fell. Suddenly
impulsive Ben crushed her to him and--must it be told?--kissed her,
kissed Hattie Gilmore's unsullied lips. For a moment her heart leaped
almost into wanton expression. A moment more--another kiss, and she
might have been compromised, she might have responded to the thrilling
love which was calling to her heart, but the goddess of her destiny
willed otherwise. The front door opened; an angular form appeared; an
acrid voice fairly curdled love-thoughts as it assailed the impetuous
lover. Within a minute he was slinking away and the rescued maiden was
safe in the indignant, resenting arms of her mother--safe, but for
years to be tempted and troubled by remorse and wishes, to be haunted
by unaccepted hopes. "Ben Stimson is a free lance. He can't help
being, for his father's a free thinker and the boy never went to
Sunday-school a dozen times in his life. Let him join the church and
show folks he wants to live right; then, if he courts you regular, I
won't mind, but he is too free and easy. I call that kind dangerous,"
her mother said.
Ben Stimson wrote Hattie a note the next day, which she did not
answer, but kept for years. Two summers later he drove up to the
house, looking mighty fine in the doctor's new runabout, driving the
high-stepping bay, natty in a "brand-new" tan harness--the first
Hattie had ever seen. He asked her to come with him for a drive, and
again her mother's nipping negative influenced her decision against
the pleadings of a yearning, lonely heart.
Mrs. Gilmore finally died an exclusive, matter-of-fact, joyless death,
even as she had lived. Ben came to the funeral. He called on Hattie
the next day. Inconstancy was not one of his weaknesses, and the veil
of her Commencement beauty had clung to her through these many years,
in her old lover's eyes. He was again impetuous and offended every
conservative propriety of Hattie's dutiful melancholy by asking her to
marry him--and this actually in the room where her mother's funeral
was held the day before! What could Hattie do but burst into tears and
leave the room--and Ben, and the secretly cherished hopes of many
years, and a real home with a cheerily happy husband and those
children which might have been hers--to leave all these and more in
homage to the sacredness of her mother's memory.
Ten gray years dragged by. Hattie kept a few boarders so as not to be
alone in the house. She would take no children. They were too noisy
and kept the place in disorder. Ben's patience had finally exhausted,
though he finished his medical course and had been practicing nearly
ten years before he married. No other one for whom she could care even
called.
The farm did well. The lone woman had over $20,000 in the bank and the
property was worth as much more. But the brightest days were gray. At
forty-five she weighed ninety-four. She ate barely enough to keep
going. Her digestion was wretched. Her pride and her will alone made
her able to sit through meals or through the occasional neighbors'
calls. She spent hours alone in her room, dumb, dark-minded, with an
unrelenting heartache and pains which racked every organ. Her sleep
was fitful and she dreamed of Ben downstairs in a casket, again and
again, until she fairly feared the night. When she took her nerve
medicine, she seemed tied, bound hand and foot in that parlor of
death, held by a sleep of terror. Then Ben would move about in the
casket and make tortured faces at her, and some horrible times he
accused, even berated her. Finally an awful dream, two caskets, her
mother in one, Ben in the other, each railing and both showering abuse
upon her. She was in bed for weeks. Another doctor came and then-
praise be! her deliverer.
Jane Andrews was the old Presbyterian minister's daughter. She had
lived in Coopersville until she was twenty-four, giving her father an
efficient, devoted daughter's care through his long, last illness. The
family means had always been limited, and when the earner was laid
away, she at once responded to the practical call. There were no
hospitals near; so she left home and went into training in a small
institution on the Hudson. This is a hospital where sickness is
recognized as more than infections and broken, mangled members. Here
she learned well the saving balm of joy in making whole wretched
bodies with their more wretched souls. For five years she had lived in
the midst of benefits brought by the inspiration of right-feeling
attitudes. She knew full well the healing potency of the play-spirit.
Her insight into life was already deep, her outlook upon life high and
heartful. Then her mother failed; she came home and for three months
had been beautifying the final weeks, This more than wise woman now
came to nurse poor Hattie, came to companion her back to health, came
as a revelation to this mistaken and wearied one, of a better way.
After forty-five years of the playless life of a serf to blighting
seriousness, the wonder is that sourness had not entered to hopelessly
curdle all chances for joyous living.
Hattie Gilmore had to be taught to play. During the weeks of her rest-
treatment the stronger woman took the weaker back to girlhood. She
brought some dolls. They made clothes for them. They dressed and
undressed them and put them to bed. They taught them to say their
prayers and prepared their little meals, teaching them "table
manners," and they made them play as children should play. A sunshine
scrapbook was made. It was a gorgeous conglomeration of colors, of
fairies and children, of birds and flowers, and of awkward, but
telling, hand-illustrations of the joys of being nursed and,
prophetically, of the greater joys of being well. They played
"Authors," "Flinch," and even "Old Maid." Splendid half-hours were
spent in reading gloriously happy lives. Stories were told--happiness
stories, and jokes and conundrums invented. One day Hattie laughed
aloud, for which heartlessness her morbid conscience at once wrung
forth a stream of tears; but that wondrously artful nurse held a
mirror before a woefully twisting face, and her tactful comments
brought back the smiles. That laugh was the first warming beam of a
summer of happiness which was to golden the autumn of a bleak life
made blest. Then Hattie Gilmore learned to play a score of out-of-door
games and to understand sports. She learned to see the beauties in the
roadside flowers-"weeds" her mother had called most of them. She
learned to read glorious stories in the ever-transforming clouds. The
neighbors' children were invited, timidly they came at first, later
they were eager to come and play at "Aunt Hattie's." Three fine,
determining events happened that fall to complete the salvation of
this woman who was so fast learning happiness-living.
They, Jane and Hattie, friends now rather than nurse and patient, made
the daintiest possible cap and cloak for Dr. Ben's last baby, and sent
it with a hearty, merry greeting. This was a peace-offering to the
past, more efficient probably than much blood which has been shed on
sacrificial altars. Then they made a trip which came near being a
solemn occasion, it was so portentously important. They went to the
church-orphanage, remained several days and brought home a lusty
three-year-old bunch of mischief, who was forever to wreck all the
gloom-sanctity of that old home. Hereafter even the parlor of mourning
was to be assailed with shouts of glee; some things planted in
Hattie's flower beds were foredoomed not to come up; no longer could
the front lawn look like a freshly swept carpet. Roy was legally
adopted by Hattie and became her proudest possession. Finally, her
eyes were opened to that rarely sighted, fair vista of the sacred
play-life, the play-life so long denied this good woman. Never again
were housekeeping worries to be mentioned. They were not recognized.
When things went wrong, they went merrily wrong. What could not be
cured was joked about. The whole business of home-making became a
gladsome game.
Life for Hattie Gilmore, for Roy, for the neighbors' children, and for
some of the mothers of dull old Coopersville came to be lived as the
Father intended His children to live, when one almost old woman found
the Fountain of Youth revealed by the fine art of play. A blessed
revelation it is to every life when the joy of play robs the working
hours of their tedium and weariness. He lives as master who makes play
of his work.