down and watched him some more. He breezed through the files very rapidly, not seeming to find anything worth taking, thanked me, and stalked out.
After the five-thirty deadline no more blankets were accepted, though a few more people showed up with them. Maud Dollfus organized teams of seventh and eighth-grade boys to carry supper trays to the classrooms. (She was about to use the girls from her home ec classes, till I told her I wasn’t going to have girls running around with the halls full of soldiers.) It was a slow way to feed three hundred children, but keeping them out of the way was worth a little inefficiency.
Six o’clock came and went, and I felt my stomach tighten as the hand of the clock moved past that curfew mark. What I wanted most of all right then was to sit down somewhere and pray, but I wasn’t about to do it with all those grinning Turkistanis (assuming that was what they were) bustling around. Besides, the supper business was keeping me busy. We finished a little before seven-thirty. I was eating my own meal at last when a certain stir among the soldiers told me Arslan was coming back. He carried a sphere of motion and excitement around him. I knew the phenomenon very well. We didn’t see it so often in grade school, but it happened every few years in high school, whenever the basketball team had a star player who inspired the rest of the kids with pride instead of envy. There was exactly that feeling obvious in the looks of the Turkistanis; wherever Arslan went was where the action was.
He certainly moved with the style of an athlete riding a wave of popularity. He came in swinging along as if he heard cheers on every side. “Now.” He faced me, about a foot too close, considering the liquor on his breath. “You should see that your children are disposed for the night. Very soon they will be locked in their classrooms.”
“Quite a few of them are going to need to go to the bathroom in the night.”
“There will be a man on duty here.” He tapped the intercom on my desk. “The door will be opened for any adequate cause.” He grinned arrogantly. “You see, I am not unreasonable. You will return to this office with those members of your staff who are not required in the classrooms or in preparing food.” The corner of his mouth drew itself into a deep dimple of amusement, and he paused for just a second before he added, “Including Miss Hanson,” and it was only then that I began to understand what we were really in for.
“Miss Hanson is required in her classroom.”
“This is not true,” he told me reprovingly. “Mrs. Runciman is competent to replace her there. You yourself have arranged this.”
“By what authority are you acting, General?” It was a question I’d forgotten to ask before. He carried his credentials in his eyes.
He pursed his lips. “By authority of the President of the United States of America.”
I made sure that things were squared away in all of the rooms, and the intercom working. I said a few words to each class, and a few more to each teacher privately. Last of all, I brought Betty Hanson out. There was a lone soldier in my office now. We stood in the empty corridor. She hadn’t been crying for a while, from the looks of her, but she was shaking. I squeezed her arm, and she took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “How old are you, Betty?”
“Twenty-three.”
“That makes you our youngest faculty member. But remember, Betty, there are about three hundred people in this building who are younger than you. A lot is going to be demanded of you, but a lot is being demanded of them, too. They’re my responsibility, and they’re your responsibility, and every teacher’s here. You understand that, don’t you?” She nodded. She’d stopped trembling, and a little color was coming back into her fragile face. “Nobody’s asking us to do anything heroic, Betty. I’m just asking you to remember you’re a teacher. I expect you to behave accordingly. Will you promise me that?”
She took another shuddering breath. “Yes, Mr. Bond.”
“Good girl. I know you will.” I put an arm around her and shepherded her into the office, which comforted her and saved me from having to look at her directly. She was too young and too scared—too pretty, aside from the temporary effects of the tears. Arslan’s hands had looked very hard.
It was mainly to provide cover and comfort for Betty that I pried loose Maud Dollfus and Jean Morgan from the cooking. Perry Carpenter had been helping the janitor bank down the old furnace. As shop teacher and coach Perry hadn’t had much to do all day, and he was pretty nervous. The six of us waited in the office, and at first nobody spoke.
“Franklin,” Jean said sharply, when she saw me watching her, “if you’re wondering whether to tell me that they took Hunt, I already know about it. But that’s all I know, so if there’s anything else, for Pete’s sake tell me.” Her chin was up and her voice firm. I didn’t need to worry about Jean Morgan.
“You know as much as I do, then, Jean. Hunt’s a levelheaded boy.”
“That’s what I’m telling myself,” she said doggedly.
The soldier lounging at the door came to eager attention. “Here it is,” I said. But Arslan didn’t bother to enter the office; he just returned the soldier’s salute and gestured us towards the cafeteria. Two of his followers dropped off to herd us down the hall after him.
The tables bristled with liquor bottles. The folding doors stood wide open, and we threaded our way through into the gym. It was filling up fast with soldiers. The moment Arslan appeared, they raised a shout of joy. There was no doubting the spontaneity of that cheer. He waved his arms and shouted back at them. He loved it; and to all appearances they loved him.
They were streaming in from the back door, filling the gym and starting now to flow on into the cafeteria, so that Arslan, in his progress toward the stage, breasted the full stream of them. They opened a path for him, closing in again in little eddies around us, and as he passed they laughed, shouted, shook their fists triumphantly. It was an impressive thing to walk through.
They were fresh and spruce. They didn’t look as though they’d been in any battles very recently, but it was a dead certainty they’d been in battles. Not a man of them but looked older and grimmer than their general, though there was nothing grim about their mood at the moment. In one word, they looked tough—not the desperate boy- toughness I’d seen in so many American veterans, but the unpretentious toughness of professionals.
Near the back door we were halted by the pressure of the stream. Arslan stood flushed and laughing— shaking hands, slapping backs, waving over shoulders at faces beyond. In half a minute we were cut off from him by the swarm, and gradually forced backwards. I steered us up against the wall, and we stuck there stubbornly.
No matter how well you knew your teachers, you could never predict for sure how they would act in a completely new situation. But you could make a pretty darned good guess—especially if one of them had been your next-door neighbor for four years. Perry Carpenter worried me. Perry with his breezy ways and red hair and long- handled basketball reach had been the most convenient hero for the boys of his teams and classes, but not a man I’d ask for anything out of the ordinary. Now, scared rotten, he was ready to sell the school or the whole country, whichever was in demand, to whoever held the gun. I couldn’t blame him, any more or less than I blamed myself for having a bad stomach. It was just another aggravating factor that had to be taken into account.
At last the stream stopped flowing. The tiers of seats were packed; the tables were crowded. Whoever had decided how many troops were to be squeezed into the gym and cafeteria tonight had figured it pretty close. But they were all in; I could see that only a couple of sentries were left outside when the door finally closed. Arslan waved his arms, and the soldiers jostled down into their seats. Now only he, and we, and the little pack that must be his bodyguard, were left standing. He turned to us, and the look that lit up his face made me stiffen. It was a devil’s look, a look of white-hot pleasure.
“You are my guests,” he said. Without turning his eyes away from us he gave an order, and suddenly his guards were at us, pinioning our arms, wheeling us face-forward against the wall, and in what seemed seconds we were helpless as papooses, our arms roped tight (they had had those ropes mighty handy) and our mouths choked with cloth gags. All except Betty Hanson.
They turned us again to face Arslan. He let his eyes drift relishingly over us all and settle on Betty. She was leaning against the wall beside me, trembling so hard that I felt it through the plaster. Slowly and thoughtfully he stretched out his left hand and closed it on her right breast. Slowly and thoughtfully he caressed it. “You,” he said tenderly, “will wait.” He nodded to one of the bodyguards, and instantly she was grabbed by the arm and hustled out the back door. The troops shouted applause and groaned disappointment. He threw them an acknowledging grin. Then he took two easy steps to stand in front of Perry Carpenter at my other side. The gleam of his eyes was intensely mocking. “You are not worth keeping alive,” he said. And he turned to another one of his men and gave a
