Brinker and three cohorts came with much commotion into our room at 10:05 p.m. that night.
“We’re taking you out,” he said flatly.
“It’s after hours,” I said; “Where?” said Finny with interest at the same time.
“You’ll see. Get them.” His friends half-lifted us half-roughly, and we were hustled down the
stairs. I thought it must be some kind of culminating prank, the senior class leaving Devon with a
flourish. Were we going to steal the clapper of the school bell, or would we tether a cow in
chapel?
They steered us toward the First Building—burned down and rebuilt several times but still
known as the First Building of the Devon School. It contained only classrooms and so at this
hour was perfectly empty, which made us stealthier than ever. Brinker’s many keys, surviving
from his class-officer period, jingled softly as we reached the main door. Above us in Latin
flowed the inscription, Here Boys Come to Be Made Men.
The lock turned; we went in, entering the doubtful reality of a hallway familiar only in daylight
and bustle. Our footsteps fell guiltily on the marble floor. We continued across the foyer to a
dreamlike bank of windows, turned left up a pale flight of marble steps, left again, through two
doorways, and into the Assembly Room. From the high ceiling one of the celebrated Devon
chandeliers, all glittering tears, scattered thin illumination. Row after row of black Early
American benches spread emptily back through the shadows to long, vague windows. At the
front of the room there was a raised platform with a balustrade in front of it. About ten members
of the senior class sat on the platform; all of them were wearing their black graduation robes.
This is going to be some kind of schoolboy masquerade, I thought, some masquerade with masks
and candles.
“You see how Phineas limps,” said Blinker loudly as we walked in. It was too coarse and too
loud; I wanted to hit him for shocking me like that. Phineas looked perplexed. “Sit down,” he
went on, “take a load off your feet.” We sat in the front row of the benches where eight or ten
others were sitting, smirking uneasily at the students on the platform.
Whatever Brinker had in his mind to do, I thought he had chosen a terrible place for it. There
was nothing funny about the Assembly Room. I could remember staring torpidly through these
windows a hundred times out at the elms of the Center Common. The windows now had the
closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf. The great
expanses of wall space were opaque with canvas, portraits in oil of deceased headmasters, a
founder or two, forgotten leaders of the faculty, a beloved athletic coach none of us had ever
heard of, a lady we could not identify—her fortune had largely rebuilt the school; a nameless
poet who was thought when under the school’s protection to be destined primarily for future
generations; a young hero now anonymous who looked theatrical in the First World War uniform
in which he had died.
I thought any prank was bound to fall flat here.