''The Night School'' Short Story by James Hopper

• Story Name : The Night School
• Author Name : James Hopper (1876–1956)
• Author Country : United States
• Published Year : 1914
• Story Type : Short Story

Having laid my last hope beneath heavy flowers, I had drifted back to the village of my youth. The small village had grown into a bustling metropolis, and on the first day, I met Dorman.It was on a stone sidewalk, beneath a pale, faint sun. God only knows how he recognised me; we both had grown very old, and at first I could see nothing in him like 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 grey and round beneath the bristles 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 in its frigid haze, and I have taken to the resources 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, and his eyes were on my eyes.

"You have a wife and 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 a wife or children," he said. We stood there on the stone sidewalk, beneath the cheerless sun. "Neither wife nor children," he nodded; "neither wife nor children." But it was my answer that he pondered, for finally he said, "Come with me to my house for the night."

I was gripped by a profound apathy.I said:

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

He raised his stick, and a carriage that had been wheeling slowly back and forth rushed in sudden animation to the curb. We sank into the dark cushions inside as the door closed behind 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 stone palace with thick walls; the interior was full of fine, solemn things and muffled with elastic carpets.We dined in a high-ceilinged oaken hall before a blazing fireplace. We held our glasses up to the flame and gazed at the golden sun and ruby blood of our youth.We drank blood and sun, but our veins remained frozen.

We went upstairs to his room. Two heavily curtained beds 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 someone's hand; it had a brazen, persistent sound. When it had ceased with a last rattle of the clapper, a drum began to beat. Feet marched to the beat, many of them with 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 with a clack like a whip, the drum died abruptly, there was a silence, then a chorus of fresh young voices rose in song—a song that my bearded, critical self judged harshly but that was soft to the heart of my youth. Though I thought that I must be asleep and 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 off on a 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 like wings, the day came in warm with the 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, and their cries, muffled to me, came as the little cries of birds.

To my right, at the front of the yard, was a large brick building with many windows.

"Do you recognise the place?" Dorman asked.

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

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

"It is our school," he said.

I looked far back in my memory and realised that it had to be the school where we had gone when we were kids.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 schoolhouse had not always been the massive brick structure that it is now.I closed my eyes and saw the former schoolhouse again.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.

"Our school has been altered!"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 kids' crisscrossing play came to an abrupt halt and petrified into long, decorous lines.A drum began to beat, and the little ones marched into school. The many little feet stamped the ground together, and 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 and 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, and then fresh young voices rose in choral song.

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

But Dorman said:

"It wasn't them."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 flew off in bold waves, struck, and rebounded to mingle with new clangs until my head hurt.

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. To the fixity of my gaze, the blackness seemed to recede gradually, and eventually I saw in a brown obscurity.I saw a yard and a schoolhouse. It was a small schoolhouse made 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 fluid pulsations. After a time, I understood them. Children were lined up there, grave little children, many of them, with books under their arms or swinging at the ends of straps.

I tried to count the children, but they were too many. I tried to count the lines, but they fluctuated like tidewater. There were many. They ran east and west from the little schoolhouse 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. Hundreds of children stood in line over there, in the hazy area beyond 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 that was like the muffled heartbeat of the night. The lines passed by; they came glidingly from the void in the south, swung into the yard with the lithe torsion of a fish that turns, crushed across the gravel, stamped up the planking of the stairs, and flowed into the yawn of the doors. The children outnumbered the adults by hundreds, if not thousands.The stairs shook, the frail building trembled, and 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. He was seated in his rich, red armchair, his brow against the pane, looking at me.

How is our class? "How our class?" I said it 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 told me, one by one, their names and their fate as they passed.I saw Jack Bennett, the butcher's son, and remembered that I still owed him a marble; I saw red-headed Jack Stearns, with his pale, up-tilted nose and the glass eye that had been our marvel and pride; I saw Roscoe Miller, who had become a banker; I saw Starr, who had ended up in the gutter; and I saw Perry, who had wrecked himself against the things that will not move.On 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 friend at school. "Ralph! Ralph!" I yelled, but I didn't make a sound, and he didn't 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 me.

"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 didn't realise it because his eyes were ahead, far, amid vaporous visions; beneath his cap, his hair was like a gold wreath.

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

The poet's son toiled in vain.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 away.

The boy behind him mischievously wiped his feet on his stockings, but he was unaware of it. The same boy reached into his pocket and took out his pencil and knife, but he didn't notice.He let a book slip from beneath his elbow, and the boy behind him trampled on it. Finally, the boy behind him gave him a push. The poet boy fell; his cap jerked off his head, and his books scattered down the steps. A woman teacher picked him up and shook him ragefully, while the boy behind him 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 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 it 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."

"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 it very fast. He seemed to pant for his school. Despite his quick pace, his hair was neat and a little damp from late combing, as if, in response to the ring of the bell, he had broken free from a mother's lingering touch.

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

The boy was near, and something about his square shoulders, his sturdy legs, and 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 appears to me that I am aware."It appears to me, I know," I said, my memory becoming agitated.

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

And then I realized.

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

He vanished within; the boys behind him, one after the other, vanished within; the poet boy, last in line, vanished within; the door slammed shut.

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

I think I'll stay here and stand at the window at night until I see a boy come running out of the hazy region to the south—a last late boy come running to join his dear comrades.