Monday, 17th.
TO-DAY is the first day of school. These three months of vacation in the
country have passed like a dream. This morning my mother conducted me to
the Baretti schoolhouse to have me enter for the third elementary
course: I was thinking of the country and went unwillingly. All 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 difficult to keep the
entrance disencumbered. Near the door, I felt myself touched on the
shoulder: it was my master of the second class, cheerful, as usual, and
with his red hair ruffled, and he said to me:--
"So we are separated forever, Enrico?"
I knew it perfectly well, yet these words pained me. We made our way in
with difficulty. Ladies, gentlemen, women of the people, workmen,
officials, nuns, 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 as though one were entering a
theatre. I beheld again with pleasure 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; the teachers were
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 never see
you pass by any more!" and she gazed sadly at me. The director was
surrounded by women in distress 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 section, who did not want to
enter the class-rooms, and who resisted like donkeys: it was necessary
to drag them in by force, and some escaped from the benches; others,
when they saw their parents depart, began to cry, and the parents had to
go back and comfort and reprimand them, and the teachers were in
despair.
My little brother was placed in the class of Mistress Delcati: I was put
with Master Perboni, up stairs 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 to me so small and gloomy 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 there, with his
tumbled red hair. Our teacher is tall; he has no beard; his hair is gray
and long; and he has a perpendicular wrinkle on his forehead: he has a
big voice, and he looks at us fixedly, one after the other, as though he
were reading our inmost thoughts; and he never smiles. I said to myself:
"This is my first day. There are nine months more. What toil, what
monthly examinations, what fatigue!" I really needed 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 pleasant to me as it did before.