The Night School

by James Hopper

THE NIGHT SCHOOL

BY JAMES HOPPER
Author of "The Trimming of Goosie" and "Caybigan"

HAVING laid my last hope beneath heavy flowers, I had drifted back to the village of my youth. The little village was now a large city, a clamorous city, and on the first day I met Dorman. It was on a stone sidewalk, beneath a pale, faint sun. How he recognized me, God only knows; we both had grown very old, and at first I could see nothing in him of the boy with whom I had gone to school. He stopped and fixed me silently, then from the folds of his cloak his arm stretched out and gripped me as with a claw.

"You are Halton," he said—"Jack Halton, whose desk was next to mine at school."

"I am," I said. "I am Jack Halton."

He stood there, looking at me with eyes gray and round beneath the bristle of his heavy brows.

"I am Dorman," he said—"Nat Dorman, who sat next to you at school."

Of late age has been enwrapping me with its frigid haze, and I have taken to the resource of the old. I stare persistently at the golden days that are gone.

And so I remembered.

"I remember," I said.

His hand was still on my arm, his eyes were on my eyes.

"You have a wife, children?" he asked.

"I have had a wife; I have no wife," I answered. "I have had children; I have no children."

"I have never had either wife or children," he said. We stood there on the stone sidewalk, beneath the cheerless sun. "Wife nor children," he nodded; "wife nor children." But it was on my answer he pondered, for finally he said, "Come with me to my house for to-night."

A vast indifference held me. I said:

"Very well, I will go with you to your house for to-night."

He raised his stick, and a carriage which had been wheeling slowly back and forth rushed in sudden animation to the curb. We sank upon the dark cushions within; the door shut upon us. As we rolled along the streets I had known, now unknown to me, I noticed that his hands, folded beneath his chin on the top of his cane, trembled incessantly.

"How old he is!" I thought.

 

It was a palace, his house, of stone, thick-walled, the interior full of fine, somber things, and muffled with elastic carpets. We dined in a high-ceiled oaken hall, before a blazing grate. We held up our glasses to the flame, and looked at the golden sun of our youth, the ruby blood of our youth. We drank the sun, we drank the blood, but our veins remained cold.

We went up-stairs to his room. Two beds, heavily curtained, were in it, against opposite walls.

"There are two beds," he said. "You will sleep here with me in my room."

I did not care; I answered:

"Yes, I will sleep here in your room with you."

I slept badly. The bed was heaped with blankets, but they were as heavy as a lid, and between the sheets I was as cold as in the tomb. I dreamed.

A bell was ringing somewhere in some one's hand; it had a brazen, persistent sound. When it had ceased with a last rattle of clapper, a drum began to beat. Feet marched to the beat, many of them, light feet, marching a little shufflingly. I could hear their passing from crunched gravel to a resonance of hollow wood; they united in a rhythmic murmur, above which, like gulls eddying over the sea, sharp cries of command hovered, female cries, of women. A door slammed to with a clack as of a whip, the drum died abruptly, there was a silence, then a chorus of fresh young voices rose in song—a song which my bearded, critical self judged harshly, but which was soft to the heart of my youth. Though I thought that I must be asleep, thought that my eyes must be closed, I was aware of my host, in white, standing at one of the three southern windows. He too seemed to listen to the song. I heard him sigh a long, dolorous sigh. Then he must have returned to his bed. The song trailed away in a last, long, gentle note, and now I slept undisturbed, a tenderness tugging at my soul.

When I awoke after the long night, the room was still dark; but when to my gesture a curtain whirred open with a noise as of wings, the day came in warm with sun. I stood at the window and looked out.

I was looking deep into a large, bare yard. Children were playing there, many children, brown-headed and yellow-haired, boys and girls. Above them the layers of air, striated with sun, seemed liquid; they were like goldfish in an aquarium. They zigzagged like butterflies in their bright garments; their cries, muffled to me, came as the little cries of birds.

The front of the yard, to my right, was a big brick building pierced with many windows.

"Do you recognize the place?" Dorman asked.

I turned, and saw him standing at the casement next to mine. He seemed speaking to the glass, not to me.

"It is a school, is it not?" I fenced.

"It is our school," he said.

I looked back far into my memory, and saw that it indeed must be the school to which we had gone when young. But it had changed. The yard had been much wider then, without bonds to the south, where now rose a forest of chimneys and roofs. Then it had stretched away to the south in a grassy meadow that sloped away gently to a brook. And the school-house had not been the big brick pile it now stood. I shut my eyes, and saw again the school-house that' had been. I saw clearly the little wooden house, its overlapping boards, softly gray, its peaked roof, as green as moss, the red veins of the carpeting vine, and the long outside stairway, slanting upward to the gallery, along which we marched up to our classroom under the twittering eaves.

"They have changed it, our school!" I exclaimed, absurdly resentful.

"When I returned to this city," he said, "I built here next to the school. I don't know why I built here next to the school."

A bell began to ring in the yard beneath me. The children's crisscrossing play halted abruptly and petrified in long, decorous lines. A drum began to beat, and the little ones marched into school. The many little feet stamped the ground together; the lines flowed forward. They coiled, straightened, rose, and slid like ribbons into the yawning portals. The drum, beat; the little feet tramped, tramped, tramped, along halls, up flights of stairs; the whole building trembled to the tremendous unison of their light, firm tread; and above this basic rumor the commands of the women teachers eddied like the gull's nostalgic cry.

The drum stopped, the outer doors clanged shut, a silence followed, then fresh young voices rose in choral song.

"Why, it must be what I heard last night!" I cried.

But Dorman said:

"It was not they. You heard the others."

I did not understand him.

 

I stayed again at Dorman's house, for he insisted, and I did not care. My sleep was troubled again that night. The covers lay upon me like a stone, and I was tomb-cold. A bell began to ring. It rang persistently. Its clangs winged off in brazen waves, struck, and rebounded, to mingle with new clangs till my brain pained.

I rose at length to its continued attack, and, groping through the velvet darkness, reached one of the windows. I parted the ponderous curtains, looked, and saw nothing. I was looking into the night, and saw only night. Little by little, though, to the fixity of my stare the blackness seemed to recede, and at last I saw in a brown obscurity. I saw a yard and a school-house. It was a small school-house, of wood. The roof was peaked. Vines veined one wall. Stairs along another wall slanted upward to a gallery beneath the eaves.

Below me, the indistinct floor of the yard was dimly striated with lines. These were animated with a fluid pulsation. After a time I understood them. Children were lined there, grave little children, many of them, with books under their arms or swinging at the end of straps.

I tried to count the children, but they were too many. I tried to count the lines, but they fluctuated like tide-water. There were many. They ran east and west from the little school-house to the fence at the back, then turned flexibly and streamed off to the south, where in my youth the land lay open. I could not see them end over there. My eyes followed them till they merged in the darkness; but even there, and beyond, the void held an undulation of fluid multitudes. Multitudes of children waited in line over there in the vague region beyond the reading of my sight.

The bell came to a stop with a last wicked rattle, and a drum began to beat. A shiver passed along the lines like a breeze; all the small forms bent slightly forward; the lines began to flow; and the night became filled with a measured, soft, and tender tramping sound which was as the muffled heart-beat of the night. The lines passed by; they came glidingly from the void in the south, swung into the yard with a lithe torsion of a fish that turns, crushed across the gravel, stamped up the planking of the stairs, flowed into the yawn of the doors. They passed, the children, by hundreds, by thousands. The stairs shook, the frail building trembled, the night was rhythmic with the soft beat of their feet. The drum beat, they passed, and still the vastness to the south palpitated obscurely with unnumbered reserves. Above the basic rumor the cries of the women were sharp.

"It is our class coming now—our own class," said a voice within the room.

I turned toward it. Dorman was at the window next to mine. Seated in his rich, red arm-chair, he was looking as I looked, his brow against the pane.

"How our class? How our class?" I said peevishly.

"It is our class; you see if it is not our class."

And then it was truly our class that passed, the little companions of our childhood. They came in line from the dim reservoir to the south, turned into the yard, crunched upon its gravel, and rose along the stairway to the small room beneath the eaves. Their familiar little feet hissed gently against the wooden steps, and we stood there, the two old men, each at his window, watching with cold brows upon the panes.

Dorman, as they passed, told them off to me one by one, their names and their fate. I saw Jack Bennett, the butcher's son, and I remembered that I still owed him a marble; I saw red-headed Jack Stearns, with his pale, up-tilted nose, and the glass eye which had been our marvel and our pride; and Roscoe Miller, who had become a banker; and Starr, who had ended in the gutter; and Perry, who had wrecked himself against the things that will not move. Up the other stairs, which we could not see, I guessed that the girls were passing, and I knew that among them was a frail, blue-eyed girl—ah, how well I remembered her!

"But," I said, "all those you tell me of have died."

From his window Dorman said:

"I have noticed that. All those that pass here have died." He added after a moment: "And all those with whom we went to school pass here. The class is almost complete."

And still they passed, and still Dorman told them off. Some had been poor, some had been rich; some had been comic, and some tragic; but all had died.

Ralph Dorn passed by. He had been my best chum at school. "Ralph! Ralph!" went my lips, but made no noise, and he did not hear. But I knew now that all my life I had missed him—him and the frail, blue-eyed girl. I knew now what had been ailing my life.

"Here is Keating," said Dorman. "Watch him; he is always funny."

To the stairs came a hunchback boy. He toiled up with much labor, but did not know that he toiled, for his eyes were ahead, far, amid vapory visions; beneath his cap his hair was like a wreath of gold.

"He wrote verse, and he starved," said Dorman. "I have his book in the library; it is funny."

The poet boy toiled up uncertainly. He zigzagged a bit from side to side; the cries of the women teachers eddied over him; he slowed up the line and disordered the march; his eyes were far.

The boy behind him mischievously wiped his feet upon his stockings, but he was unaware of it. The same boy reached within his pocket and took his pencil and his knife, but still he did not notice. He let a book slip from beneath his elbow, and the boy behind trampled upon it. Finally the boy behind gave him a push. The poet boy fell; his cap jerked off his head, his books scattered down the steps. A woman teacher picked him up and shook him ragefully, while the boy behind looked grave and reproachful.

"If I were there, I would protect him," I thought. "If I were there, I would understand him."

"Who is the boy behind?" I asked of Dorman.

"It is 'Spike' Martin," he answered. "He has been the most successful of us all. His sons are multimillionaires."

I noticed now that this was the end of all the marching. This was the last line. A length of it was still on the stairs, but the yard behind was already empty.

"It is the end," I said.

"Yes," he answered. "They have all passed now; our class is always the last."

"But wait," I said, "here comes another boy, I think."

"Are you sure?" said Dorman. "I have not missed any one."

"Yes, yes, I am sure."

From the vague somberness to the south a dim form was flitting toward us. It neared. It was a boy, running very fast, his books under his arm, his cap in hand.

"But who is that boy? Who is that boy?" Dorman murmured.

The boy was still in the twilight, not quite distinct, but he was nearing very fast. He seemed to pant for his school. Despite his fast running, his hair was orderly and a little damp with late combing, as though to the ring of the bell he had broken away from a mother's lingering touch.

"Who is that boy? Who is that boy?" mumbled Dorman.

The boy was near, and something about his square shoulders, his sturdy legs, the way he swayed slightly from right to left as he ran, gave my memory unrest.

"Who is that boy? Who is that boy?" Dorman cried.

"It seems to me I know. It seems to me I know," I said, my memory more and more restless.

"Who is that boy, Halton? Who is that boy?"

And suddenly I knew.

"It is you, Dorman, it is you!" I cried.

"No, no, Halton, don't say that. Who is that boy?"

"It is you, it is you!" I cried.

The boy came swiftly across the yard, leaped up the steps. He came to the poet boy, drew him aside eagerly, took his place, then with incredible quickness he pulled aside boy after boy till he was first and at the door.

He vanished within; the boys behind, one after the other, vanished within; the poet boy, last of the line, vanished within; the door slapped shut.

The drum stopped beating; there was a silence. I left my window and, going up to Dorman, placed a friendly hand upon his shoulder. And he was dead—dead there in his rich, red arm-chair, his brow still upon the cold pane.

I think I shall stay here always, and stand at the window at night, till out of the vague region to the south I see a boy come running—a last late boy come running to join his dear comrades.