Part 2 (2/2)
”I was real proud of you, the way you s.p.u.n.ked 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 cla.s.s 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 subst.i.tute princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.ses 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.”
CHAPTER IV.
RULES AND RESULTS.
The strangest thing about Miss Plympton was that she never was able to tell the Tucker Twins apart. This was an unforgivable offense in their eyes and in the eyes of their friends. They were as alike as two peas in some ways and the antipodes in others. They might mystify you from the back but once you got a good look in their eyes, the mirrors of their souls, you were pretty apt to get them straight and keep them straight.
Then their colouring was so different. Dee's hair was black with blue lights and Dum's was black with red lights; Dee's eyes were grey and Dum's hazel; Dee had a dimple in her chin, while Dum's chin had an uncompromising squareness to it that gave you to understand that her character was quite as fixed as Gibraltar, and she had no more idea of changing her mind than Miss Plympton had of toying with unalterable facts, such as 1066 or 1492.
From the very beginning I scented trouble between the new princ.i.p.al and the Tuckers. Miss Plympton called them Miss Tucker indiscriminately, and sometimes both of them answered and sometimes neither of them. Either way irritated Miss Plympton. She seemed to think they should know by instinct which one she meant. She finally grasped the fact that they had separate names but was more than apt to call Dee, Virginia, and Dum, Caroline, which was quite as unpardonable as saying Columbus discovered America in 1066 would have been to her.
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