CHAPTER X
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.