Shadowland

flat glass. 'See if you can help her, hey?' Whipple/New Hampshire padded off into the dark. 'We'll have those papers in a minute. Okay. Talk among yourselves.'

    Of course none of us did, but just jittered in the dark corridor until Mr. Ridpath thought of something else to say. 'Where are the two scholarship boys? Let's see some hands.'

    Chip Hogan and I raised our hands. Chip was already standing with Tom Flanagan and the others from the Junior School. Everybody looked curiously at the two of us. Compared to us, all the others, even Dave Brick, looked rich.

    'Good. Good. Call out your names.'

    We did.

    'You're the Hogan who ran seventy-five yards last year in the eighth-grade championship against St. Matthew's?'

    'Yeah,' Hogan said, but Mr. Ridpath did not seem to mind.

    'You two boys know the great opportunity you're getting?'

    We said 'Yes, sir' in unison.

    'All of you new boys?'

    There was a general sibilant mutter.

    'You'll have to work, you know. Work like you never have in your lives. We'll make you break your backs, and then we'll expect you to play harder than you ever have in your lives. And we'll make men out of you. Carson men. And that's something to be proud of.' He looked around scornfully. 'I don't think some of you are gonna cut the mustard. Wait till Mr. Thorpe gets his hands on you.'

    A large old woman in a brown cardigan shuffled out of the corridor, followed by Mr. Whipple, who carried a flashlight. She too wore rimless glasses, and toted a large bundle of papers sorted so that they were stacked crosswise, in different sections. 'Behind the duplicator, wouldn't you know? Frenchy never washes his cups, either. He couldn't put these on the counter like anyone else.' While she spoke, she dumped the stack of papers on the first desk. 'Help me distribute these — different piles on different desks.'

    The knot of teachers dissolved, each of the men picking up a separate stack of papers and moving to a different desk. Mr. Ridpath announced, 'Mrs. Olinger, school secretary,' in a parade-ground voice, and the old woman nodded, snatched her flashlight back from Mr. Whipple, and marched up the stairs into the light.

    'Single file,' Ridpath ordered, and we clumsily jostled into each line and went down the desks, picking up sheets from each.

    A boy behind me mumbled something, and Mr. Ridpath bellowed, 'No pencil? No pencil? First day of school and you don't have a pencil? What's your name again, boy?'

    'Nightingale, sir.'

    'Nightingale,' Ridpath said scornfully. 'Where are you from, anyway? What sort of school did you go to before you came here?'

    'This sort of school, sir,' came Nightingale's girlish voice.

    'What?'

'Andover, sir. I was at Andover last year.'

    'I'll loan him a pen, sir,' said Tom Flanagan, and we passed down the line of desks without any more bellow­ing. At the far end of the corridor, we stood and waited in the darkness to be told what to do.

    'Upstairs, single line, library,' Ridpath said wearily.

3

We went, like Mrs. Olinger, up the stairs into sunlight, which fell and sparkled through the mullioned glass set beside the high, thick scarred front door. The light was already dim and gray up here, but across the hall was the library, which had rows of big windows set between bookshelves on either side. If the library had not been so naturally dark, it would have shone. Cordovan-colored wood and unjacketed spines of books blotted up the available light, and on normal schooldays the big chan­deliers overhead burned whenever the library was in use. Without this light, the library was oddly tenebrous.

    Two rows of long flat desks, also of the cordovan-colored wood, filled the center of the front main section of the room, and we took our papers to them. Across the room ahead of us was a waist-high shelf of reference books behind which sat the librarian's desk and file cabinets in a kind of well with clear sight lines to all the tables. Mrs. Olinger watched us file into the library and take our seats, standing beside a thin woman with tightly penned white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She wore a black dress and a strand of pearls. The teachers came in last and sat all at one table behind us. They immediately began to mutter to each other.

    'Masters?' Mrs. Olinger queried, and the teachers quietened. One of them drummed a pencil in a triplet pattern, and continued to do so as long as we were in the library.

    'This is Mrs. Tute,' said Mrs. Olinger, and the thin woman wearing the pearls gave a nervous nod like a tremor of the head. 'Mrs. Tute is our librarian, and this is her domain. She will be present while you fill out the registration forms and digest some of the information on the other sheets, after which she will provide you with an orientation to the library. If you have any questions, raise your hand and one of the masters will help you.'

    The pencil continued to rattle against the master's table.

    When I had finished, I looked up and saw one or two other boys gazing idly around the murky room. Most of the others were still writing. Dave Brick's two curls had fallen over his forehead, and he looked red and sweaty and confused. He held up a hand, and Mr. Fitz-Hallan slowly lounged up toward his table.

    'He's cool,' Bob Sherman whispered to me, and both of us watched Fitz-Hallan idly lean over Brick's paper, hands thrust in his pockets holding out at an elegant angle the bottom of his well-cut jacket. Fitz-Hallan was a stylish figure whose elegance seemed so deeply ingrained as to be unconscious, but it was not merely that to which Sherman had referred. He was one of the younger teachers, perhaps not quite thirty, and even his languor was youthful: it seemed detached and kindly at the same time, and separated him from the other teachers as surely as we were separated from them. Fitz-Hallan straightened up, strolled to the librarian's desk, and returned with a ball­point pen. This he presented to Brick with an abrupt gesture which somehow conveyed both sympathy and amusement. The perfection of this little charade myste­riously contained in it the information that Fitz-Hallan had once been a student at the school, and that he was a kind of living exhibit, a model of what we should try to become.

    And that is the first of the three images I retain from the school, less remarkable than the two which followed but which in its way also led inexorably to all that happened. With hindsight I can see that here too was betrayal, delicately implied by the teacher's elegant clothing and manner, his amused sympathy: the way he thrust a cheap ball-point pen toward sweaty, doomed Dave Brick. We were so raw that we could be seduced by civility.

The half-dozen other sheets before the boys contained mimeographed data. The words to the school song (Arise and sing the praises/Of the school upon the hill) and the fight song (Green and gold, gold and green!), the school motto, Alis volat propriis. A translation thoughtfully followed: He flies by his own wings. 'He' may have been B. Thurman Banter, who had founded the school's first incarnation, the Lodestar Academy, in 1901; Carson began flying under its present name in 1914, under the headmastership of Thomas A. Rowan. 'Of Irish extrac­tion and English birth,' read the sheet. There followed a list of all headmasters from Rowan to the present, ending with Laker Broome; a list of present faculty, some thirty names, of which the last, Alexander Weatherbee, had been added in ink; the number of books in the library, twenty thousand; of pupils in the Upper School, one hundred and twelve; of football fields and baseball dia­monds, two. Another sheet gave the names of all the boys in the senior class, with stars by the names of the prefects. A commotion at the back of the library made me turn suddenly about. Mr. Ridpath was on his feet behind one of the tables, shouting, 'What? What?' His narrow face flamed. With his left hand he gripped Nightingale's collar; with his right he groped beneath the table, trying to capture something which panicked Nightingale was at­tempting to pass to his table-partner, Tom Flanagan. Both boys looked frightened, Flanagan slightly less so than Nightingale. Mr. Ridpath's question had deterio­rated into a series of animal grunts. When his right hand closed over the infuriating object, he withdrew it and held It up, giving his high- pitched snort. It was a pack of Bicycle playing cards. 'Cards? Cards?' The flap of the box was still open, suggesting that the cards within had been replaced only a moment before. The three other teachers seated behind Mr. Ridpath looked as startled as the boys, all of whom had by now turned around on their seats. Mr. Ridpath snorted down his nose again. His face was still very red. 'Who brought these here? Whose are they? Talk!'