Heart/The First Day of School
An Italian School Boy's Journal
OCTOBER
THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
To-day, is the first day of school.
The three months of vacation in the country have passed like a dream. This morning my mother took me to the Baretti schoolhouse to have me enter for the third elementary grade: I was thinking of the country, and went unwillingly. The streets were swarming with boys: the two book-shops were thronged with fathers and mothers who were purchasing bags, portfolios, and copy-books, and in front of the school so many people had collected, that the beadle and the policeman found it hard to keep the entrance clear. Near the door, I felt myself touched on the shoulder: it was my master of the second grade, cheerful, as usual, and with his red hair ruffled. He said to me:—
"So we are to part forever, Enrico?"
I knew it well, yet the words pained me.
We made our way in with difficulty. Ladies, gentlemen, women of the people, workmen, officials, nuns, and servants, all leading boys with one hand, and holding the promotion books in the other, filled the anteroom and the stairs, making such a buzzing, that it seemed like entering a theatre. I was glad to see once more that large room on the ground floor, with the doors leading to the seven classes, where I had passed nearly every day for three years. There was a throng of teachers going and coming. My schoolmistress of the first upper class greeted me from the door of the class-room, and said:—
"Enrico, you are going to the floor above, this year. I shall not even see you pass by any more!" And she gazed sadly at me.
The principal was surrounded by women who were much worried because there was no room for their sons; and it struck me that his beard was a little whiter than it had been last year. I found the boys had grown taller and stouter. On the ground floor, where the divisions had already been made, there were little children of the first and lowest sections, who did not want to enter the class-rooms, and who pulled back like donkeys: they had to be dragged in by force, and some ran away from the benches; others, when they saw their parents leave, began to cry, and the parents had to go back and comfort them, or take them away; while the teachers were in despair.
My little brother was placed in the class of Mistress Delcati: I was put with Master Perboni, upstairs on the first floor.
At ten o'clock we were all in our classes: fifty-four of us; only fifteen or sixteen of my companions of the second class, among them, Derossi, the one who always gets the first prize.
The school seemed so small and gloomy to me when I thought of the woods and the mountains where I had passed the summer! I thought again, too, of my master in the second class, who was so good, and who always smiled at us, and was so small that he seemed to be one of us; and I grieved that I should no longer see him, with his tumbled red hair. Our present teacher is tall; he has no beard; his hair is gray and long; and he has a straight line running crosswise on his forehead. He has a big voice, and he looks at us fixedly, one after the other, as though he were reading our very thoughts; and he never smiles. I said to myself: "This is my first day. There are nine months more. What work, what monthly examinations, what weariness!" I wanted to see my mother when I came out, and I ran to kiss her hand! She said to me:—
"Courage, Enrico! we will study together." And I returned home content. But I no longer have my master, with his kind, merry smile, and school does not seem so nice to me as it did before.