Evening Star Newspaper, September 29, 1929, Page 106

6 < R THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C. SEPTEMBER 29, 1929, THE POSITION OF AGNES WINTERS.- - . . By Fannic Hursi A First-Run Story, Complete. "T'hese Storis, by the 1} orld’s Highest Paid Writer of Short Fiction, Are Exclusive Features ()f I'he Star’s Sunday Magazine. CHILD named Ellen, 16 years of age, with hair in a yellow braid cver each shoulder and a faded blue frock that bespoke poverty, cegarded her mother with eyes dilated in #ppalled amaze- ment as her parent, quivering with rage, stood beside a small mean table in a small mean room and boomed “No!" That “no” had deeply rooted beginnings. It was a “no” that went back and back into the gecesses of memory. It was a “no” addressed to Mrs. James McRae. The mother of the girl in the torn blue frock, Agnes Winters, had worked in the McRae household as a domestic servant for a period of 30 years. There were dark blue glasses across the eyes of Agnes Winters, but they did not prevent her from looking inward down those nisles of time, The McRaes' was a big household. A forty- roem affair with five acres of rose gardens. Garage for 10 cars. Gardeners' cottages and a house staff of some 15 servants. The position of Agnes Winters in that house- hold was a dual one of chambermaid and per- sonal maid to Mrs. McRae. There was a French girl who officially occupied the latter capacity, but Agnes did the mending and the fine handi- 'werk and the embroidering of initials on Mrs. MeRae’s sheer lingerie and handkerchiefs. *HE mother of Agnes Winters had worked for the mother of Alice McRae in almost the same capacity. It was sort of a dynasty. ‘The Winters serving the McRaes. Alice McRae conducted her household with 8 high, efiiclent hand. She was accustomed to meney, always had been, and with the manner born of one wealthy enough to dare to scrimp, she ceonducted the great establishment along lavish but strictly business-like lines. The servants were given good and sufficient foed, but feod of a different grade than that of the household. Their quarters were warmed in Winter, but to a lower temperature than the house proper. Many a night Agnes Winters had sat in her small room, with its slanting roof, her feet wrapped in her coat and a candle lighted on the table for the warmth it gave off. The servants on the McRae estate remained for two reasons. Wages were Ligh, compara- tively speaking, and their children were per- mitted to attend, free of chesge, the great McRae schools which were conducted on an endewment fund contributed by an ancestral McRae. Agnes' mother had remained in the McRae service until her death for that reason. After her death Agnes in a sort of dull apathy also continued on. She was valuable to Mrs. McRae, who had discovered in her a talent for the meit minute and lovely hand-embroidery. For yean;, ever since Agnes had been 15 and out of the McRae schools, Alice McRae had worn lingerie that was the delight and admiration of her woman friends. Even the McRae table linen, napkins, tea cloths, doilies were the subject of comment “Museum pieces!” exclaimed the guests, eya= ing through lorgnettes the indescribably minute handiwork of Agnes. It she had had the initiative or aggressive- ¥ Agnes Winters. Quivering with rage, she stood beside a small, mea n table in a small, mean room and boomed, “No!” ness Agnes, as she had so often been told by her associates, could have made large sums of money at her art embroidery. BUT Agnes detested the work. The process of picking with a splinter of needle through the meshes of linen or silk was maddening to her nerves. Needlework tortured her body and more than that it tortured her eyes, sending her to bed night after night with blazing, tor- turous headaches. Against these headaches Mrs. McRae supplied spectacles ground out from a prescription written by a local dealer in opera glasses and binoculars. They relieved, but did not cure. And so, on and on through the years, Agnes Winters, protesting occasionally, but in the main resigned, eontinued to create for Mrs. McRae the beautiful and the sheer in handwork. When she was 20 she married one of the gardeners. Morris Murphy was an architectural gardener and had learned his trade from an Ameriean who had taken him to Italy. He was a bluff, good humored fellow and as if by con- trast, seemed to admire in Agnes Winters the demure qualities that were so removed from his ewn. They were married and continued as man and wife to live on, in service, at the McRaes. It became after a while terrible to Morris Murphy to see the kind of flagellation to which Agnes was subjected by the insistent demands of Mrs. McRae for more and more fine needle- work. He had never realized up to then the cruel kind of pressure under which this quiet young girl had spent her youth. Her eyes were so tired. When she lifted her face to kiss him it was as if they were filled with little dagger points. Crucified with little steel splinters. It was at the end of the third vear of their marrijage. six months before their child, Ellen, was born, that one night, seated in their small room, Morris drawing plans for a new garden- pergola for Mrs. McRae, and Agnes seated as usual over a complicated embroidery frame, that she cried out sharply and clutched with her hands across her eyes. The horrible had happened. Agnes had prac- tically lost her sight. And so it happened that a child, Ellen, was to come into & world and never know her mother as except a two-thirds blind woman, who groped her way about the little household and had the pathetic habit of forever rubbing her hand across her eyes as if to tear away a film. ANOTHER strange thing in the life of the little Ellen was the fact that the quiet little body given to simple indoor pleasures could arouse within her parent an unreasonable amount of anger if she so much as attempted to pick up a needle to make doll clothes, which delighted her as a pastime. The gentle mother of little Ellen became a virago then. It was one of the things she early learned she dared not do. When Ellen was 15 years old Morris Murphy, genial, good humored, good natured, good hus- band, good parent, fell off the top of a high and elaborate pergola he was building for Mrs. McRae and was instantly killed. Overnight, as it were, the kindest light in the meager life of Agnes and Ellen went out. And into the midst of this darkness there strode one day, commiserating, kindly in her efficient manner, the figure of Mrs. McRae, for whom Agnes had gone two-thirds blind and for whom Morris had hurtled to his death. It was then that Ellen, as Mrs. McRae came on her benign mission of offering to take the little Ellen into her household as maid, beheld her mother draw herself up to the height of fury and order the cowed figure of Mrs. McRae out of the gardener's cottage. (Copyright. 1929.) Only the Ph y.s‘/'dl!{ y Fat Can Play Foot Ball Continued from Third Page but he was a regular ball of fire, with as much nerve as I've ever seen in my life. Once I saw him almost wreck a heavyweight wrestler who outweighted him by 70 pounds. Against a great Minnesota team years ago, which averaged 195 pcunds, this little runt turned loose on those giants and stopped them dead. He never thought foot ball was rough enough! “It is not necessary for a player to have the physical proportions of a giant, but just the possession of a healthy body and an alert mind unweakened by the softness that civilizaticn often brings,” he concluded. When Johnny Poe was coaching at Princeton many years ago he was the smallest man on the field. It was the day of push-and-pull foot ball, with emphasis on brute strength and size. Yet Poe, the tiny coach, would stand without pad- ding and force the heaviest man on the squad to tackle him at full speed. Smacked to earth by young giants twice his weight, Jchnny would rise with a “Come on, men, hit me harder.” Johnny Poe was a sort of Richard Harding Davis hero in real life. A surpassing foct ball player, he followed a hard, rough trail by be- coming a soldier of fortune after leaving Prince- ton and died gallantly in action with the Black Watch at Loos in 1915. Like many another hero of the war, he was drilled on a field that attracted the same type of man. Foot ball has been termed the sublimation of war. It takes a lot out of the players, but those with a sense of humor seem to enjoy it. Last Fall, after one of Red Cagle's brilliant end runs against Notre Dame, Wilson remarked to one of the Fighting Irish, “Where were you on that play?” “I was taking out interference for the Army,” tetorted the witty Irishman. Stankard of Holy Cross was another such player. He enjoyed every minute of scrimmage, never felt his bruises. The hotter the battle the more his body glowed with physical exaltaticn of the impact of flesh against flesh. In a game against Yale some years ago Stankard played rings around his opponent, smashing inter- ference and tackling with deadly precision. Finally he crashed through the Yale inter- ference and brought down a blue-jerseyed back with terrific force. The Yale man, badly Jjarred, snapped angrily: “You think you're quite a player, don't you?” “Well,” said Stankard quietly, “I usually do pretty well against these small freshwater col- leges.” Instances of this kind can be mentioned by the hundreds and are related merely to carry out the point that boys playing the reugh game of foot ball do not lose their sense of humor about it. “I'VE heard a lot about players who hate the game,” said Bill Roper, Princeton coach, “but to my knowledge I've never known that type. I shall make no attempt to deny that there are some parts of the training and prac- tice which are tedious and disagreeable, yet a healthy competitive spirit, the companionship of the boys and the thrill of the sport. itself transcend any unpleasant features of the game. I know boys who when the season is over feel badly about it.” Foot ball players have or acquire a sort of pluck which is admirable in itself, but not al- ways sensible or discreet. Instances of men play- ing with broken collarbones, bruised bodies and other injuries form a part of t}xe game's history. There is the immortal story of Phil Brett, the captain of Rutgers in 1891, which has come to be the catchword of foot ball heroics. Rut- gers was using the old wedge attack against Princeton. The Tigers broke it up, and, inci- dentally, broke Brett's leg. Brett was both heroic and mock heroic. Sitting on the ground waiting for the stretcher he asked for a cigar- ette, adding, “I could die for dear old Rutgers!"” Today every coach is as proud of limited injuries as he is of his record of games won, which are usually inversely related, for it is a stark impossibility to develop a winning team unless the men are in top shape. An injured player not only puts himself on the sidelines, but retards the general development of the team. Today a coach does not scrimmage his men for almost two weeks after the opening of the practice season, and sometimes only once or twice a week thereafter. As soon as a player shows signs of weakening the trainer yanks him out, for a player is much better under- trained than overtrained. “When a man {s overtrained,” said Keene Fitzpatrick, veteran trainer at Michigan, Yale and Princeton, “he won't eat well and he won't sleep. He is sluggish mentally and generally in poor spirits. A tired athlete loses a sense of rhythm and is more susceptible to injury. He is better on the sidelines.” YEARS ago a coach needed weight. A fast light man would have had to have extraor- dinary ability to get any consideration even if he survived the fierce clashes of scrimmage. Today players of giant stature are often dropped from a squad simply because they are not in prime condition to stand the wear and tear of the hard, fast, present-day game. Modern methods of training have reduced the number of injuries until the game today is compara- tively as safe as any other strenuous sport. Rockne, the coach of Notre Dame, believes the usual cry will be heard this Fall about the roughness of foot ball. “These outbursts will not occur until the sea- son is over,” he said. “At that time, having no other means of breaking into print, some persons will make their annual attack against the brutal, dehumanizing game of foot ball. As one of these chaps once said: ‘It's a terrible game, the way those boys bump into each other and everything.’ “In the next few weeks young men who are unknown today will become stars of the grid- iron, furnishing color and thrills galore to millicns of people. Our lives are drab enough these davs. I believe we have many reasons for foot ball, but the biggest one I can think of now is that it gives our lives a background of celor. “I attended a pevifist meeting this year at one of the great universities. I analyzed the crowd . as well and as fairly as I could. I found that, almost without exception, they were physically below normal. I questioned about a half dozen of the chaps regarding foot ball and I found that they were just as anti-foot ball as they were anti-military. The thought has occurred to me since that the resentment of these men against things military and against foot ball was a natural thing. These men were lacking in the qualities of courage, physique, loyalty and such that are a part of the make-up of the foot ball player and the soldier—hence their resentment against both.” (Copyright. 1929 Demand for Potatoes (G rows ]b‘ the general public eats potatoes at the usual rate, there will be some 65.000,000 bushels less on hand January 1 than at the cor- responding date this year. The Department of Agriculture forecasts that the supply at the first of the year will be around 80,000,000 bushels. This is probably heartening news to the grow= ers of Florida and Texas, who are planning to increase their planting of early potatoes by 20 per cent, or a total of 37,600 acres.