Heart/The Evening School
entered a squad of artillery workmen, dressed like soldiers and headed by a corporal. They all filed briskly to their benches, removed the board underneath, on which we put our feet, and immediately bent their heads over their work.
Some stepped up to the teachers to ask explanations, with their open copy-books in their hands. I caught sight of the young and well-dressed master, “the little lawyer,” who had three or four workingmen clustered around the table, and who was making corrections with his pen; and also the lame one, who was laughing with a dyer who had brought him a copy-book all adorned with red and blue dyes. My teacher, who had recovered, and who will return to school tomorrow, was there also. The doors of the schoolroom were open. I was amazed when the lessons began, to see how attentive they all were, and how they kept their eyes fixed on their work. Yet the greater part of them, so the principal said, for fear of being late, had not even been home to eat a mouthful of supper, and they were hungry.
But the younger ones, after half an hour of school, were falling off the benches with sleep; some even went fast asleep with their heads on the bench, and the teacher awakened them by tickling their ears with a pen. But the grown-up men did nothing of the sort; they kept awake, and listened, with their mouths wide open, and without even winking. It seemed strange to me to see all those bearded men on our benches.
We also went up to the floor above, and I ran to the door of my schoolroom where I saw in my seat a man with a big moustache and a bandaged hand, who might have injured himself while at work about some machine; but he was trying to write, though very, very slowly.
What pleased me most was to behold in the seat of the “little mason,” on the very same bench and in the very same corner, his father, the mason, as huge as a gaint, who sat there all coiled up into a narrow space, with his chin on his fists and his eyes on his book, so absorbed that he hardly breathed. And there was no chance about it, for it was he himself who said to the principal the first evening he came to the school:—
“Signer Director, do me the favor to place me in the seat of my ‘hare's face.’” For he always calls his son so.
My father kept me there until the end, and in the street we saw many women with children in their arms, waiting for their husbands. At the entrance a change was effected: the husbands took the children in their arms, and the women took their books and copy-books; and in this wise they proceeded to their homes. For several minutes the street was filled with people and with noise. Then it grew silent, and all we could see was the tall, weary form of the principal going away.
THE FIGHT
It was what might have been expected. Franti, on being expelled by the principal, wanted to revenge himself on Stardi, and after school he waited for Stardi at a corner, when he was passing with his sister, whom