CHAPTER III.
GRESHAM AGAIN.
How strange it was to be back at school and to belong there, greetingold 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 shouldbe there saving seats for us but dear old Mary Flannagan, her headredder than ever and her good, fine face beaming with joy at ourappearance. Our bus filled up with Juniors, all of us happy and gay andglad to see one another. Miss Sayre, a pupil teacher of last year and afull teacher for the present, got in with us. She was very popular withour class and not very much older than we were, so we talked before herwithout the least restraint.
"I'm glad to see you, Page," she said, finding a place between Mary andme 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 atWilloughby, and there was a boys' camp near us, and the fun we had withthem! 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 bigbox 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 hadcome through Richmond. Before she could tell us what he said, which shewas clamoring to do, Annie Pore spoke up to say that Harvie Price wasgoing to the University to-morrow. What he said about going was cutshort by Mary Flannagan who blurted out:
"Shorty says that he hears that George Massie is so stuck on Annie thathe 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, sothis set us off into peals of laughter.
"Rags wrote me that Sleepy was drinking no water with his meals andeating no potatoes, trying to fall off," I ventured when I could get aword in edgewise. "I can't fancy Sleepy thin, but I think he is just assweet as he can be, fat or thin." I caught a very amused look onMargaret Sayre's face. "What is it?" I asked.
"Oh, nothing! I can't help wondering where the Sophomores go and theJuniors come from. You are the same girls who a year ago said you wouldbite out your tongues before you would spend your time talking aboutboys all the time, and since we got in the bus there has not been oneword 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 girlsusually go through and I knew it would hit you and your friends thisyear. If it doesn't hit you too hard it does not hurt you at all, justso none of you gets beau-crazy."
"Well, I hope to gracious we will have too much sense for that," and Iquietly determined to put a bridle on my tongue when boys were thesubject of conversation. Here I was acting like a crazy Junior, thatfrom the Sophomore standpoint of the year before I had so heartilycondemned. I remembered the pranks of the class ahead of us and wasamazed when a bus filled with rather sober girls came abreast of us andI recognized in them last year's Juniors, this year's Seniors. They wereso much quieter and more dignified than the rollicking busload of whichI made one.
"Do you know Miss Peyton is ill and may have to take the whole year toget 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 thepupils. She was a person of infinite tact and charm and herunderstanding of the genus, girl, was little short of uncanny.
"Who on earth is to take her place at Gresham?" I asked. "One of theteachers?"
"There was no teacher to call on to fill the place, now that Miss Cox ismarried, so a principal from North Carolina has been engaged. She is aB.A., an M.A., a Ph. D., and every other combination of letters in thealphabet, from big Eastern colleges. I hope we will all pull together aswe have under Miss Peyton's kindly hand. Her name is Miss Plympton. Ihave not met her yet," and Margaret Sayre looked very sad. She had beenunder Miss Peyton for many years, as a pupil first, then a pupil teacherand now she had hoped to have her first year of real teaching under thecareful and understanding guidance of her beloved friend.
All of us felt depressed, but it takes nothing short of an overwhelmingcalamity to keep down the spirits of girls of sixteen for any length oftime. By the time our straining horses had pulled their load up to thetop of Gresham hill we were bubbling over again, and I must say that nowmy 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 lookat the mountains. They were out in full force to greet us. Sometimesmountains behave so badly; just when you need them most they disappearand will not show their countenances for days and days. Gresham waslooking very lovely, and in spite of the little empty feeling I alwayshad about being away from Father and my beloved home, Bracken, I wasglad to be there. It meant seeing my old friends and, no doubt, makingmany more new ones, and making friends was still the uppermost desire ofmy heart.
"117 Carter Hall is still ours, so let's go up and shed our wraps andleave our grips and come down later to see the new principal," and Dumhooked 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 isgetting 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, asall of our doo-dads had to come down when we left in June. One of therules of the institution was that no furnishings could be left from yearto year.
"I wish our trunks would come so we could cover up this bareness. Thenakedness of these walls is positively indecent," sighed Dee. "Wink isgoing to send me some pennants from the University. I just adorepennants."
I could see the finish of our room. Last year there had been very littlewall space showing and this year there was to be none. It was againstthe rules to tack things on the wall and everything had to hang from thepicture railing, so the consequence was most of the rooms looked likesome kind of telephone system gone crazy, wires long and short crossingand recrossing. Sometimes a tiny little kodak picture that some girlwanted to hang by her dresser would have to suspend from yards of wire.Sometimes an ingenious one would bunch many small pictures from one wireand that would remind me of country telephones and a party line whereyour 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 themvery much pleased with their room, happy to be together and to be nextto us.
"Won't we have larks, though?" exclaimed Mary. "I feel terribly like I'mgoing 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 theschool Miss Plympton used to boss in North Carolina told me she heardshe 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 ofa disciplinarian. She was mannish in her attire and quite soldierly inher bearing. Her tight tailored clothes fitted like the paper on thewall. She gave one the impression of having been poured into them,melted first. But above her high linen collar, her chin and neck seemedto have retained the fluid state that the rest of her must have beenreduced to to get her so smoothly into her clothes. Her neck fell overher collar in soft folds and her chin--I should say chins--were aschanging in form as a bank of clouds on a summer day. We never couldagree how many she had, and Dum and Dee Tucker actually had to resort totheir boxing gloves, something they seldom di
d in those days, to settlethe matter. Dee declared she had never been able to count but four butDum asserted that she had distinctly seen five, in fact that she usuallyhad five. Be that as it may, she certainly had more than her share, andwhat interested me in her chins was whether or not the changing wasvoluntary or involuntary. I never could decide, although I made a closestudy of the matter. Her face was intelligent but very stern, and I hada feeling from the beginning that it was going to be difficult, perhapsimpossible, to make a friend of her.
"She is as hard as a bag of nails!" exclaimed Dee, when we comparedimpressions later on.
"I'd just as soon weep on her back as her bosom," wailed Dum. "I don'tbelieve there is one bit of difference. She's got about as much heart asMrs. Shem, Ham, and Japheth in a Noah's ark."
"She almost scared me to death," shivered poor Annie Pore. "Just thinkof the contrast between her and Miss Peyton."
"I was real proud of you, the way you spunked up to her, Annie," brokein Mary Flannagan. "Wasn't she terrifying when she decided I was tooyoung to be a Junior? I don't know what I should have done if you hadnot told her I led my class in at least one subject. I hope it is notthe 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 canfind a soft side to Miss Plumpton, I mean Plympton, and keep on it." Aroar 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 andmilitary Miss Plympton could be, and she could out-stiffen a poker, weknew her name was Plumpton and were ahead of her. I had a feeling duringour whole interview with her that she did not approve of us for somereason. I don't know what it was. It almost looked as though some onehad got us in bad before we ever met her; but some of the other girlstold me they had the same feeling, so no doubt it was just herunfortunate manner that made you think she looked upon you as asuspicious character.
Looking back soberly and sanely on that year at school, I can understandnow that the substitute principal was not quite as impossible as wethought she was, but the keynote of her character was that she lackedall sense of humour. A joke book meant no more to her than a grocerybook. She was nothing but a bundle of facts. She thought in dates anderas (History being her subject) and if you could not begin at thecreation and divide time up into infinitesimal bits and pigeon holeevery incident, you were nothing but a numskull. Any one who had tolearn a verse of poetry to remember the kings of England had softeningof 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, andmy private opinion was that she could not learn poetry any more thansome of us could learn dates. The calendar to her was just another monthmarked with black figures to be torn off. I usually resorted to someform of poetry to take the taste of her classes out of my mouth. Iremember once when the lesson had been the making and remaking of thecalendar by the arbitrary parties who took upon themselves that task, Igot so bored and sleepy that all I could do was to keep on saying tomyself:
"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."