Chapter II

       Table of Contents

       (Extracts from various letters from the same to the same.)

      “September 26th.

      “Do you know where I go to read your letters? Across the road into the grove. There is a little dell there where the sun dapples the ferns. A brook meanders through it; there is a twisted mossy tree-trunk on which I sit, and the most delightful row of young sister birches. After this, when I have a dream of a certain kind … a golden-green, crimson-veined dream … a very dream of dreams … I shall please my fancy with the belief that it came from my secret dell of birches and was born of some mystic union between the slenderest, airiest of the sisters and the crooning brook. I love to sit there and listen to the silence of the grove. Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods … of the shore … of the meadows … of the night … of the summer afternoon. All different because all the undertones that thread them are different. I’m sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.

      “School has been ‘keeping’ for two weeks now and I’ve got things pretty well organized. But Mrs. Braddock was right … the Pringles are my problem. And as yet I don’t see exactly how I’m going to solve it in spite of my lucky clovers. As Mrs. Braddock says, they are as smooth as cream … and as slippery.

      “The Pringles are a kind of clan who keeps tabs on each other and fight a good bit among themselves but stand shoulder to shoulder in regard to any outsider. I have come to the conclusion that there are just two kinds of people in Summerside … those who are Pringles and those who aren’t.

      “My room is full of Pringles and a good many students who bear another name have Pringle blood in them. The ring-leader of them seems to be Jen Pringle, a green-eyed bantling who looks as Becky Sharp must have looked at fourteen. I believe she is deliberately organizing a subtle campaign of insubordination and disrespect, with which I am going to find it hard to cope. She has a knack of making irresistibly comic faces and when I hear a smothered ripple of laughter running over the room behind my back I know perfectly well what has caused it, but so far I haven’t been able to catch her out in it. She has brains, too … the little wretch! … can write compositions that are fourth cousins to literature and is quite brilliant in mathematics … woe is me! There is a certain sparkle in everything she says or does and she has a sense of humorous situations which would be a bond of kinship between us if she hadn’t started out by hating me. As it is, I fear it will be a long time before Jen and I can laugh together over anything.

      “Myra Pringle, Jen’s cousin, is the beauty of the school … and apparently stupid. She does perpetrate some amusing howlers … as, for instance, when she said today in history class that the Indians thought Champlain and his men were gods or ‘something inhuman.’

      “Socially the Pringles are what Rebecca Dew calls ‘the e-light’ of Summerside. Already I have been invited to two Pringle homes for supper … because it is the proper thing to invite a new teacher to supper and the Pringles are not going to omit the required gestures. Last night I was at James Pringle’s … the father of the aforesaid Jen. He looks like a college professor but is in reality stupid and ignorant. He talked a great deal about ‘discipline,’ tapping the tablecloth with a finger the nail of which was not impeccable and occasionally doing dreadful things to grammar. The Summerside High had always required a firm hand … an experienced teacher, male preferred. He was afraid I was a leetle too young … ‘a fault which time will cure all too soon,’ he said sorrowfully. I didn’t say anything because if I had said anything I might have said too much. So I was as smooth and creamy as any Pringle of them all could have been and contented myself with looking limpidly at him and saying inside of myself, ‘You cantankerous, prejudiced old creature!’

      “Jen must have got her brains from her mother … whom I found myself liking. Jen, in her parents’ presence, was a model of decorum. But though her words were polite her tone was insolent. Every time she said ‘Miss Shirley’ she contrived to make it sound like an insult. And every time she looked at my hair I felt that it was just plain carroty red. No Pringle, I am certain, would ever admit it was auburn.

      “I liked the Morton Pringles much better … though Morton Pringle never really listens to anything you say. He says something to you and then, while you’re replying, he is busy thinking out his next remark.

      “Mrs. Stephen Pringle … the Widow Pringle … Summerside abounds in widows … wrote me a letter yesterday … a nice, polite, poisonous letter. Millie has too much home work … Millie is a delicate child and must not be overworked. Mr. Bell never gave her home work. She is a sensitive child that must be understood. Mr. Bell understood her so well! Mrs. Stephen is sure I will, too, if I try!

      “I do not doubt Mrs. Stephen thinks I made Adam Pringle’s nose bleed in class today by reason of which he had to go home. And I woke up last night and couldn’t go to sleep again because I remembered an i I hadn’t dotted in a question I wrote on the board. I’m certain Jen Pringle would notice it and a whisper will go around the clan about it.

      “Rebecca Dew says that all the Pringles will invite me to supper, except the old ladies at Maplehurst, and then ignore me forever afterwards. As they are the ‘e-light,’ this may mean that socially I may be banned in Summerside. Well, we’ll see. The battle is on but is not yet either won or lost. Still, I feel rather unhappy over it all. You can’t reason with prejudice. I’m still just as I used to be in my childhood … I can’t bear to have people not liking me. It isn’t pleasant to think that the families of half my pupils hate me. And for no fault of my own. It is the injustice that stings me. There go more italics! But a few italics really do relieve your feelings.

      “Apart from the Pringles I like my pupils very much. There are some clever, ambitious, hardworking ones who are really interested in getting an education. Lewis Allen is paying for his board by doing housework at his boardinghouse and isn’t a bit ashamed of it. And Sophy Sinclair rides bareback on her father’s old gray mare six miles in and six miles out every day. There’s pluck for you! If I can help a girl like that, am I to mind the Pringles?

      “The trouble is … if I can’t win the Pringles I won’t have much chance of helping anybody.

      “But I love Windy Poplars. It isn’t a boardinghouse … it’s a home! And they like me … even Dusty Miller likes me, though he sometimes disapproves of me and shows it by deliberately sitting with his back turned towards me, occasionally cocking a golden eye over his shoulder at me to see how I’m taking it. I don’t pet him much when Rebecca Dew is around because it really does irritate her. By day he is a homely, comfortable, meditative animal … but he is decidedly a weird creature at night. Rebecca says it is because he is never allowed to stay out after dark. She hates to stand in the back yard and call him. She says the neighbors will all be laughing at her. She calls in such fierce, stentorian tones that she really can be heard all over the town on a still night shouting for ‘Puss … puss … PUSS!’ The widows would have a conniption if Dusty Miller wasn’t in when they went to bed. ‘Nobody knows what I’ve gone through on account of That Cat… nobody,’ Rebecca has assured me.