Roses Are Red

Miss Stanbury sat at her desk in the back of the primary room of Junction City school almost as she had sat at this time of the morning for the last twenty years. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, arranged from her left to right, had been set to reading; that no class was reciting or writing on the blackboards would have been a difference if the next day had not been the end of the school year, the end of Miss Stanbury’s twentieth year of teaching at Junction City. Her pupils were all looking at textbooks, they had no others; they were all sitting erect holding their books tightly in both hands, and occasionally pages were turned slowly and quietly; they moved their feet slowly without scuffling; there were subdued sniffles and choked coughs from one or two pupils who had colds. It was an unnatural silence which would last an exact number of minutes. This period of time Miss Stanbury knew precisely, and she knew that it gave her space for appraisal before the straining silence would begin to disintegrate into the normal undertone of an idle classroom. Once the tension began to relax, she would not be able to restore the lost tone without a diversion of generally-accepted activity or an outbreak of forced hysterics, and either alternative was, she felt, too much for her throbbing head.

To test her headache she swept the room from left to right with her eyes, taking them to the limits of their side vision. For a more careful look she began by catching only the door frame of the boys’ cloak room, which was behind her desk to the left. No one was in the cloak room, so the real watching began at the mirror and washbasin next to the door. On the wall beneath the mirror hung two charts which had been left three weeks ago by a Lifebuoy soap salesman. The charts, one for boys and one for girls, were designed to encourage the habit of daily baths, or at least sponge baths. The salesman had given a cheery talk first to Miss Stanbury and later to the assembled four grades on the benefits of daily bathing, and he had left each of his audience a hotel-sized cake of Lifebuoy soap. The charts, with red stars for sponge baths and gold stars for tub baths, had been posted, and the contest had waxed for a week. The students had posted their stars each morning, but after the first week end almost everyone stopped. Both the pupils and Miss Stanbury let the contest drop without trying to justify the waning nor attempting to revive interest. Almost all her students lived on farms; she knew of but one and could predict but three more homes where there were bathtubs which did not have to be carried from the laundry room into the kitchen. On the boys’ chart there was one name with a solid row of gold stars, the last having been posted this morning to establish an even wider margin of victory in the “contest” for Paul Tuttle, Jr. Miss Stanbury had visited the Tuttle home for dinner, and she knew that there was a bathtub in the upstairs bathroom. Could she doubt the testimony of his daily baths?