Thursday, 2d.
LAST night my father took me to see the evening schools in our Baretti
schoolhouse, which were all lighted up already, and where the workingmen
were already beginning to enter. On our arrival we found the head-master
and the other masters in a great rage, because a little while before the
glass in one window had been broken by a stone. The beadle had darted
forth and seized a boy by the hair, who was passing; but thereupon,
Stardi, who lives in the house opposite, had presented himself, and
said:--
"This is not the right one; I saw it with my own eyes; it was Franti who
threw it; and he said to me, 'Woe to you if you tell of me!' but I am
not afraid."
Then the head-master declared that Franti should be expelled for good.
In the meantime I was watching the workingmen enter by twos and threes;
and more than two hundred had already entered. I have never seen
anything so fine as the evening school. There were boys of twelve and
upwards; bearded men who were on their way from their work, carrying
their books and copy-books; there were carpenters, engineers with black
faces, masons with hands white with plaster, bakers' boys with their
hair full of flour; and there was perceptible the odor of varnish,
hides, fish, oil,--odors of all the various trades. There also 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 that young and well-dressed
master "the little lawyer," who had three or four workingmen clustered
round his table, and 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 master, who had recovered, and
who will return to school to-morrow, 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 head-master 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; one even went fast asleep with his head on the
bench, and the master waked him up by poking his ear with a pen. But the
grown-up men did nothing of the sort; they kept awake, and listened,
with their mouths wide open, to the lesson, without even winking; and it
made a deep impression on me to see all those bearded men on our
benches. We also ascended to the story floor above, and I ran to the
door of my schoolroom and saw in my seat a man with a big mustache 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.
But 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 giant, 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 head-master the first evening he came to the
school:--
"Signor 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; and at
the entrance a change was effected: the husbands took the children in
their arms, and the women made them surrender 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 all grew
silent, and all we could see was the tall and weary form of the
head-master disappearing in the distance.