Back at School with the Tucker Twins

"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."

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 principal 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.

"The very next time she calls me Caroline, I'm going to call her Plumpton," declared Dum. "I don't mean that Dee ain't as good as I am and a heap better, but I'm me – "

"Yes, and in the same vernacular Dee's her," I teased. We had a compact to correct the grammar of our roommates.

"I stand corrected about ain't but I still stick to 'I'm me.' It is more forceful and means more than 'I'm I.' Of course I'm I, but in Miss Plumpton's mind there seems to be strong doubt whether I'm me. I is a kind of ladylike, sissy outside of a person, but me is the inmost, inward, soul self – I'm me – me – me!"

"Well, you certainly are and there is no one quite like you. I don't see why Miss Plympton can't see it, too."

"I know why! It's because she doesn't understand people. She thinks of us as being human beings of the female sex, who weigh a certain amount, are just so tall and so wide, have lived a certain time and come from such and such a city. Why, the only difference she sees between you and Mary Flannagan is that you are in 117 and Mary is in 115, and you have brown hair and Mary has red, and Mary is better on dates than you are. The real true Page Allison is a closed book to that fat head. I believe Miss Peyton knew our souls as well as she did our bodies."

We missed Miss Peyton every hour of the day. Her reign had been wise and gentle and always just. We never forgot her kindness to us the time Dee kept the kitten in her room all night. She won us over for life then and there. Miss Plympton had retained all of Miss Peyton's rules and added to them. She fenced us around with so many rules that the honour system was abolished.

Study hall was a very different place from what it had been in Miss Peyton's time. Then order had ruled because we were on our honour not to communicate with one another by word or sign. Of course some girls do not regard honour as a very precious thing and they broke their word, but most girls, I am glad to say, have as keen a sense of honour as the best of men. Miss Plympton's attitude toward us was one of doubt and suspicion and, the honour system being abolished, we naturally felt that the most serious fault we could commit would be breaking the eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not be found out." We developed astonishing agility in evading the authorities and getting out of scrapes. From having been five law-abiding citizens, we turned into extremely slick outlaws. Even Annie Pore would sometimes suggest escapades that no one would dream could find harbour behind that calm, sweet brow.

The same unrest pervaded the whole school. A day never passed that some group of girls was not called to the office to have a serious reprimand. We got so hardened that it meant no more to us than the ordinary routine of the day, while the year before to be called to the office to have Miss Peyton censure you about something was a calamity that every one earnestly prayed to avoid. Miss Peyton never talked to you like a Dutch Uncle unless you needed it, while Miss Plympton never talked to you any other way.