GRESHAM AGAIN.
How strange it was to be back at school and to belong there, greeting
old girls and being greeted as an old girl! We piled into the same bus,
this time not getting separated as we had the first year, and who should
be there saving seats for us but dear old Mary Flannagan, her head
redder than ever and her good, fine face beaming with joy at our
appearance. Our bus filled up with Juniors, all of us happy and gay and
glad to see one another. Miss Sayre, a pupil teacher of last year and a
full teacher for the present, got in with us. She was very popular with
our class and not very much older than we were, so we talked before her
without the least restraint.
"I'm glad to see you, Page," she said, finding a place between Mary and
me that Mary's bunchy skirt had successfully filled before.
"You girls look so well and rosy I know you have had a good summer."
"Splendid!" I exclaimed. "You know Tweedles had a house party down at
Willoughby, and there was a boys' camp near us, and the fun we had with
them! I never had such a good time in my life!"
"Guess who came on the train with me!" broke in Mary. "Shorty Hawkins!
He said----"
"Well, who do you think came down to see us off and brought Annie a big
box of candy and rode as far as the Junction and went back with Zebedee?
Harvie Price, and he said----"
But Dum interrupted Dee to inform the crowd that Stephen White, Wink,
had taken them to the Lyric on his way to the University when he had
come through Richmond. Before she could tell us what he said, which she
was clamoring to do, Annie Pore spoke up to say that Harvie Price was
going to the University to-morrow. What he said about going was cut
short by Mary Flannagan who blurted out:
"Shorty says that he hears that George Massie is so stuck on Annie that
he is getting thin--He has waked up and has fallen off a whole pound."
George Massie's nickname was Sleepy and he weighed about two hundred, so
this set us off into peals of laughter.
"Rags wrote me that Sleepy was drinking no water with his meals and
eating no potatoes, trying to fall off," I ventured when I could get a
word in edgewise. "I can't fancy Sleepy thin, but I think he is just as
sweet as he can be, fat or thin." I caught a very amused look on
Margaret Sayre's face. "What is it?" I asked.
"Oh, nothing! I can't help wondering where the Sophomores go and the
Juniors come from. You are the same girls who a year ago said you would
bite out your tongues before you would spend your time talking about
boys all the time, and since we got in the bus there has not been one
word about anything but boys, boys, boys."
"Oh, Miss Sayre, how silly you must think we are!" I whispered.
"Not a bit of it! I just had to tease you a little. It is a phase girls
usually go through and I knew it would hit you and your friends this
year. If it doesn't hit you too hard it does not hurt you at all, just
so none of you gets beau-crazy."
"Well, I hope to gracious we will have too much sense for that," and I
quietly determined to put a bridle on my tongue when boys were the
subject of conversation. Here I was acting like a crazy Junior, that
from the Sophomore standpoint of the year before I had so heartily
condemned. I remembered the pranks of the class ahead of us and was
amazed when a bus filled with rather sober girls came abreast of us and
I recognized in them last year's Juniors, this year's Seniors. They were
so much quieter and more dignified than the rollicking busload of which
I made one.
"Do you know Miss Peyton is ill and may have to take the whole year to
get well?" asked Miss Sayre.
"Oh, oh! How sorry we are!" came from the whole load of girls.
Miss Peyton, the principal of Gresham, was much beloved by all the
pupils. She was a person of infinite tact and charm and her
understanding of the genus, girl, was little short of uncanny.
"Who on earth is to take her place at Gresham?" I asked. "One of the
teachers?"
"There was no teacher to call on to fill the place, now that Miss Cox is
married, so a principal from North Carolina has been engaged. She is a
B.A., an M.A., a Ph. D., and every other combination of letters in the
alphabet, from big Eastern colleges. I hope we will all pull together as
we have under Miss Peyton's kindly hand. Her name is Miss Plympton. I
have not met her yet," and Margaret Sayre looked very sad. She had been
under Miss Peyton for many years, as a pupil first, then a pupil teacher
and now she had hoped to have her first year of real teaching under the
careful and understanding guidance of her beloved friend.
All of us felt depressed, but it takes nothing short of an overwhelming
calamity to keep down the spirits of girls of sixteen for any length of
time. By the time our straining horses had pulled their load up to the
top of Gresham hill we were bubbling over again, and I must say that now
my attention had been called to it, there were certainly a great many
"he saids" and "I told hims" to be distinguished in the hubbub.
Miss Sayre and I stopped a minute before going into the building to look
at the mountains. They were out in full force to greet us. Sometimes
mountains behave so badly; just when you need them most they disappear
and will not show their countenances for days and days. Gresham was
looking very lovely, and in spite of the little empty feeling I always
had about being away from Father and my beloved home, Bracken, I was
glad to be there. It meant seeing my old friends and, no doubt, making
many more new ones, and making friends was still the uppermost desire of
my heart.
"117 Carter Hall is still ours, so let's go up and shed our wraps and
leave our grips and come down later to see the new principal," and Dum
hooked her arm in one of mine and Dee took possession of my other side.
"Annie and Mary Flannagan are to be right next to us. Isn't that great?
I feel terribly larky, somehow. I reckon it's being a Junior that is
getting in on me," and Dum let out a "Junior! Junior! Rah! Rah! Rah!"
117 was as bare as it had been when first we took possession of it, as
all of our doo-dads had to come down when we left in June. One of the
rules of the institution was that no furnishings could be left from year
to year.
"I wish our trunks would come so we could cover up this bareness. The
nakedness of these walls is positively indecent," sighed Dee. "Wink is
going to send me some pennants from the University. I just adore
pennants."
I could see the finish of our room. Last year there had been very little
wall space showing and this year there was to be none. It was against
the rules to tack things on the wall and everything had to hang from the
picture railing, so the consequence was most of the rooms looked like
some kind of telephone system gone crazy, wires long and short crossing
and recrossing. Sometimes a tiny little kodak picture that some girl
wanted to hang by her dresser would have to suspend from yards of wire.
Sometimes an ingenious one would bunch many small pictures from one wire
and that would remind me of country telephones and a party line where
your bell rang at every one's house and every one's bell rang at yours.
We stopped in 115, where Annie and Mary were to live, and found them
very much pleased with their room, happy to be together and to be next
to us.
"Won't we have larks, though?" exclaimed Mary. "I feel terribly like I'm
going to be one big demerit. I hear the new principal is awfully strict.
A girl who knew a girl whose brother married a girl who went to the
school Miss Plympton used to boss in North Carolina told me she heard
she was a real Tartar. They say she makes you toe the mark."
When I saw Miss Plympton I could well believe the girl that Mary knew,
who knew a girl, whose brother married a girl who knew Miss Plympton,
was quite truthful in her statement that Miss Plympton was something of
a disciplinarian. She was mannish in her attire and quite soldierly in
her bearing. Her tight tailored clothes fitted like the paper on the
wall. She gave one the impression of having been poured into them,
melted first. But above her high linen collar, her chin and neck seemed
to have retained the fluid state that the rest of her must have been
reduced to to get her so smoothly into her clothes. Her neck fell over
her collar in soft folds and her chin--I should say chins--were as
changing in form as a bank of clouds on a summer day. We never could
agree how many she had, and Dum and Dee Tucker actually had to resort to
their boxing gloves, something they seldom did in those days, to settle
the matter. Dee declared she had never been able to count but four but
Dum asserted that she had distinctly seen five, in fact that she usually
had five. Be that as it may, she certainly had more than her share, and
what interested me in her chins was whether or not the changing was
voluntary or involuntary. I never could decide, although I made a close
study of the matter. Her face was intelligent but very stern, and I had
a feeling from the beginning that it was going to be difficult, perhaps
impossible, to make a friend of her.
"She is as hard as a bag of nails!" exclaimed Dee, when we compared
impressions later on.
"I'd just as soon weep on her back as her bosom," wailed Dum. "I don't
believe there is one bit of difference. She's got about as much heart as
Mrs. Shem, Ham, and Japheth in a Noah's ark."
"She almost scared me to death," shivered poor Annie Pore. "Just think
of the contrast between her and Miss Peyton."
"I was real proud of you, the way you spunked up to her, Annie," broke
in Mary Flannagan. "Wasn't she terrifying when she decided I was too
young to be a Junior? I don't know what I should have done if you had
not told her I led my class in at least one subject. I hope it is not
the one she teaches or it will be up to me to hustle."
"Well, girls," I said, "I see breakers ahead for all of us unless we can
find a soft side to Miss Plumpton, I mean Plympton, and keep on it." A
roar from the girls stopped me.
"What a good name for her--Plumpton--" tweedled the twins. "Plumpton!
Plumpton! Rah, rah, rah!"
No great dignity was possible after that. No matter how stiff and
military Miss Plympton could be, and she could out-stiffen a poker, we
knew her name was Plumpton and were ahead of her. I had a feeling during
our whole interview with her that she did not approve of us for some
reason. I don't know what it was. It almost looked as though some one
had got us in bad before we ever met her; but some of the other girls
told me they had the same feeling, so no doubt it was just her
unfortunate manner that made you think she looked upon you as a
suspicious character.
Looking back soberly and sanely on that year at school, I can understand
now that the substitute principal was not quite as impossible as we
thought she was, but the keynote of her character was that she lacked
all sense of humour. A joke book meant no more to her than a grocery
book. She was nothing but a bundle of facts. She thought in dates and
eras (History being her subject) and if you could not begin at the
creation and divide time up into infinitesimal bits and pigeon hole
every incident, you were nothing but a numskull. Any one who had to
learn a verse of poetry to remember the kings of England had softening
of the brain in her eyes. She did not even think it permissible to say:
"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November."
"Facts are much simpler to master than fancies," she would lecture, and
my private opinion was that she could not learn poetry any more than
some of us could learn dates. The calendar to her was just another month
marked with black figures to be torn off. I usually resorted to some
form of poetry to take the taste of her classes out of my mouth. I
remember once when the lesson had been the making and remaking of the
calendar by the arbitrary parties who took upon themselves that task, I
got so bored and sleepy that all I could do was to keep on saying to
myself:
"January brings the snow,
Makes our feet and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen lake again.
March brings breezes, loud and shrill,
To stir the dancing daffodil.
April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daisies at our feet.
May brings flocks of pretty lambs
Skipping by their fleecy dams.
June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children's hands with posies.
Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers.
August brings the sheaves of corn;
Then the harvest home is borne.
Fresh October brings the pheasant;
Then to gather nuts is pleasant.
Dull November brings the blast;
Then the leaves are whirling fast.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire and Christmas treat."