The American Child Part 5

No matter how joyously American children may play with their elders, or with their contemporaries, whatever enhancement their satisfaction in play with one another may gain from the presence of grown-up spectators, they are not likely to become so dependent upon the one, nor so self- conscious by reason of the other, that they will relinquish--or, worse still, never know--the dear delights of "playing alone." Games played in company may be the finest prose--they are yet prose; games played alone are pure poetry. The children of our Nation are not without that imagination which, on one day or another, impels a child to wander, "lonely as a cloud," along the path of dreamful, solitary play.

How often a child who, to our eyes, appears to be doing nothing whatever, is "playing alone" a delectable game! Probably, only once in a hundred times, and then, by the merest accident, do we discover what that game is.

Among my child friends there is a little boy who takes great pleasure in seeing dramas acted. One spring day I took him to an open-air presentation of "As You Like It."

The comedy was charmingly given in a clearing in a beautiful private park. Orlando had "real" trees and hawthorns and brambles upon which to hang his verses; and he made lavish use of them.

The fancy of my small friend was quite captivated by what he called "playing hide-and-go-seek with poems." "What fun he has, watching her find them and not letting her know he hid them!" he exclaimed.

Later in the season I went to spend a few days at the country home of his parents. Early one morning, from my window, I espied the little boy, stealthily moving about under the trees in the adjacent apple orchard.

At breakfast he remarked to me, casually, "It's nice in the orchard--all apple blossoms."

"Will you go out there with me?" I asked.

"P'aps not to-day," he made reply. "But," he hazarded, "you could go by yourself. It's nice," he repeated; "all apple blossoms. Get close to the trees, and smell them."

It was a pleasant plan for a May morning.

I lost no time in putting it into practice. Involuntarily I sought that corner of the orchard in which I had seen my small friend. Mindful of his counsel, I got close to the apple blossoms and smelled them. As I did so I noticed a crumpled sheet of paper in a crotch of one of the trees. I no sooner saw it than I seized it, and, smoothing it out, read, written in a primary-school hand:--

"The rose is red, The violet blue, Sugar is sweet, And so are you."

Need I say that I had scarcely read this before I entered upon an exhaustive search among the other trees? My amused efforts were well rewarded. Between two flower-laden branches I descried another "poem,"

in identical handwriting:--

"A birdie with a yellow bill Hopped upon the window-sill, c.o.c.ked his shining eye and said 'Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!'"

In a tiny hollow I found still another, by the same hand:--

"'T was brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe."

As I went back to the house, bearing my findings, I met my little boy friend. He tried not to see what I carried.

"I gathered these from the apple trees," I said, holding out the verses.

"They are poems."

He made no motion to take the "poems." His eyes danced. But neither then did he say nor since has he said that the verses were his; that he was the Orlando who had caused them to grow upon the trees.

Another child of my acquaintance, a little girl, I discovered in an even sweeter game for "playing alone." She chanced to call upon me one afternoon just as I was taking from its wrappings an _edition de luxe_ of "Pippa Pa.s.ses." Her joy in the exquisite ill.u.s.trations with which the book was embellished even exceeded mine.

"Is the story in the book as lovely as the pictures?" she queried.

"Yes," I a.s.sured her.

Then, at her urgent request, I told her the tale of the "little black- eyed pretty singing Felippa"; of her "single day," and of her singing that "righted all again" on that holiday in Asolo.

The child was silent for a moment after I had finished the story. "Do you like it?" I inquired.

"Um--yes," she mused. "Let me look at the pictures some more," she asked, with sudden eagerness.

I handed her the book, and she pored over it for a long time. "The houses then were not like the houses now--were they?" she said; "and the people dressed in funny clothes."

The next Sat.u.r.day, at an early hour, I heard beneath my window a childish voice singing a kindergarten song. I peeped out. There stood my little friend. I was careful to make no sound and to keep well in the shadow. The small girl finished her song, and softly ran away.

"Your little girl serenaded me the other morning," I said to her mother when I saw her a few days afterward. The child had shown so slight an interest in anything in my book except the pictures that I did not yet connect her singing with it.

"You, too!" exclaimed the little girl's mother. "She evidently serenaded the entire neighborhood! All day Sat.u.r.day, her only holiday, she went around, singing under various windows! I wonder what put the idea into her head."

"Did you ask her?" I questioned, with much curiosity.

"Yes," answered the child's mother; "but she only smiled, and looked embarra.s.sed, so I said nothing further. She seemed to want to keep her secret, the dear baby! So I thought I'd let her!"

And I--I, too, kept it. "Yes, do let her," was all I said.

American children, when "playing alone," impersonate the heroes and heroines of the dramas they see, or the stories they are told, or the books they read (how much more often they must do it than we suspect our memories of our own childish days will teach us), but when they play together, even when they "play at books that they have read," they seldom "pretend." A group of small boys who have just read "Robin Hood"

do not say: "Wouldn't it be fun to play that _we_ are Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and that our grove is Sherwood Forest?" They are more apt to say: "It would be good sport for _us_--shooting with bows and arrows. We might get some, and fix up a target somewhere and practise." The circle of little girls who have read "Mary's Meadow" do not propose that they play at being Mary. They decide instead upon doing, in their own proper persons, what Mary did in hers. They can play together, the children of our Nation, but they seem unable to "pretend" together. They are perhaps too self-conscious.

It is a significant circ.u.mstance that yearly there are published in America a large number of books for children telling them "how to make"

various things. A great part of their play consists in making something --from a sunken garden to an air-ship.

I recently had a letter from a boy in which he said: "The boys here are getting wireless sets. We have to buy part of the things; but we make as many of them as we can."

And how a.s.siduously they attempt to make as many as they can of the other things we grown-ups make! They imitate our play; and, in a spirit of play, they contrive to copy to its last and least detail our work. If we play golf or tennis, they also play these games. Are we painters of pictures or writers of books, they too aspire to paint or to write!

It cannot be denied that we encourage the children in this "endless imitation." We not only have diminutive golf sticks and tennis rackets manufactured for their use as soon as they would play our games; when they show signs of toying with our work, we promptly set about providing them with the proper means to that end.

One of our best-known magazines for children devotes every month a considerable number of its pages to stories and poems and drawings contributed by children. Furthermore, it offers even such rewards as we grown-up writers and painters are offered for "available" products.

Moreover, the young contributors are instructed in the intricacies of literary and artistic etiquette. They are taught how to prepare ma.n.u.scripts and drawings for the editorial eye. The "rules" given these children are identical with the regulations governing well-conducted grown-up writers and artists--excepting that the children are commanded to "state age," and "have the contribution submitted indorsed as wholly original!"

It is a noteworthy fact that hundreds of children in America send in contributions, month after month, year after year, to this magazine.

Even more significant is it that they prepare these contributions with all the conscientious care of grown-up writers or painters to whom writing or painting is the chiefest reality of life. So whole-heartedly do the children play at being what their elders are!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEAR DELIGHTS OF PLAYING ALONE]

An Italian woman once asked me, "The American children--what do they employ as toys?"

I could only reply, "Almost anything; almost everything!"

When we are furthest from seeing the toy possibilities of a thing, they see it. I have among my treasures a libation cup and a _ushabti_ figurine--votive offerings from the Temple of Osiris, at Abydos.

A short time ago a little boy friend of mine lighted upon them in their safe retreat. "What are these?" he inquired.

"They came from Egypt--" I began.

"Oh, _really_ and _truly_?" he cried. "_Did_ they come from the Egypt in the poem--

"'Where among the desert sands Some deserted city stands, There I'll come when I'm a man With a camel caravan; And in a corner find the toys Of the old Egyptian boys'?"