The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles round them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and stupefied with heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than refreshing. There was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality about these haggard faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn of all the poetical illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even these fearless champions, accustomed to measure themselves with excess, were struck with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of its disguises, at being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in rags, lifeless and hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect and the enchantments of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in silence and with haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms where everything had been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated passions.
Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the image of a crime that knows no remorse (see L’Auberge rouge). The picture was complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury, a hideous mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening after the frenzy of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of life in her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to her, and lies in which she believes no longer. You might have thought of Death gloating over a family stricken with the plague.
The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere, heavy with the fumes of the previous night of revelry.
Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls thought of other days and other wakings; pure and innocent days when they looked out and saw the roses and honeysuckle about the casement, and the fresh countryside without enraptured by the glad music of the skylark; while earth lay in mists, lighted by the dawn, and in all the glittering radiance of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the father and children round the table, the innocent laughter, the unspeakable charm that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and their meal as simple.
An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an important transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted his study and that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just then as smiling, blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a fashionable shop.
“You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won’t be fit for anything to-day, so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast.”
At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went languidly up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one shook herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The courtesans made fun of those who looked unable to continue the boisterous festivity; but these wan forms revived all at once, stood in groups, and talked and smiled. Some servants quickly and adroitly set the furniture and everything else in its place, and a magnificent breakfast was got ready.
The guests hurried into the dining-room. Everything there bore indelible marks of yesterday’s excess, it is true, but there were at any rate some traces of ordinary, rational existence, such traces as may be found in a sick man’s dying struggles. And so the revelry was laid away and buried, like carnival of a Shrove Tuesday, by masks wearied out with dancing, drunk with drunkenness, and quite ready to be persuaded of the pleasures of lassitude, lest they should be forced to admit their exhaustion.
As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist’s breakfast-table, Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to make a night of it after the dinner, and finished the evening after his own fashion in the retirement of domestic life. Just now a sweet smile wandered over his features. He seemed to have a presentiment that there would be some inheritance to sample and divide, involving inventories and engrossing; an inheritance rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and something as juicy as the trembling fillet of beef in which their host had just plunged his knife.
“Oh, ho! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a notary,” cried Cursy.
“You have come here just at the right time,” said the banker, indicating the breakfast; “you can jot down the numbers, and initial off all the dishes.”
“There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage there may be, perhaps,” said the scholar, who had made a satisfactory arrangement for the first time in twelve months.
“Oh! Oh!”
“Ah! Ah!”
“One moment,” cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus of wretched jokes. “I came here on serious business. I am bringing six millions for one of you.” (Dead silence.) “Monsieur,” he went on, turning to Raphael, who at the moment was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a corner of the table-napkin, “was not your mother a Mlle. O’Flaharty?”
“Yes,” said Raphael mechanically enough; “Barbara Marie.”
“Have you your certificate of birth about you,” Cardot went on, “and Mme. de Valentin’s as well?”
“I believe so.”
“Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O’Flaharty, who died in August 1828 at Calcutta.”
“An incalcuttable fortune,” said the critic.
“The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public institutions in his will, the French Government sent in a claim for the remainder to the East India Company,” the notary continued. “The estate is clear and ready to be transferred at this moment. I have been looking in vain for the heirs and assigns of Mlle. Barbara Marie O’Flaharty for a fortnight past, when yesterday at dinner – ”
Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man who has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence, for stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all eyes devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the voice of a discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot, as everybody made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by the notary.
This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thoroughly to his senses. He immediately spread out the table-napkin with which he had lately taken the measure of the piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing as he laid the talisman upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the sight of a slight difference between the present size of the skin and the outline traced upon the linen.
“Why, what is the matter with him?” Taillefer cried. “He comes by his fortune very cheaply.”
“Soutiens-le Chatillon!” said Bixiou to Emile. “The joy will kill him.”
A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the hollows in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed and staring. He was facing Death.
The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony, was a living illustration of his own life.
Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it, but his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but the will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the midst of the desert, with but a little water left to quench his thirst, he must measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw what every desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He believed in the powers of the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every breath he drew; he felt ill already; he asked himself:
“Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a lung complaint?”
“Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?” asked Aquilina.
“Here’s to the death of his uncle, Major O’Flaharty! There is a man for you.”
“He will be a peer of France.”
“Pooh! what is a peer of France since July?” said the amateur critic.
“Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons?”
“You are going to treat us all, I hope?” put in Bixiou.
“A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style,” said Emile.
The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin’s ears, but he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him of the Breton peasant’s life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of a Sunday on the green sward, and understanding never a word of the rector’s sermon. The actual scene that lay before him, the gilded furniture, the courtesans, the feast itself, and the surrounding splendors, seemed to catch him by the throat and made him cough.
“Do you wish for some asparagus?” the banker cried.
“I wish for nothing!” thundered Raphael.
“Bravo!” Taillefer exclaimed; “you understand your position; a fortune confers the privilege of being impertinent. You are one of us. Gentlemen, let us drink to the might of gold! M. Valentin here, six times a millionaire, has become a power. He is a king, like all the rich; everything is at his disposal, everything lies under his feet. From this time forth the axiom that ‘all Frenchmen are alike in the eyes of the law,’ is for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional Charter. He is not going to obey the law – the law is going to obey him. There are neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires.”
“Yes, there are,” said Raphael; “they are their own executioners.”
“Here is another victim of prejudices!” cried the banker.
“Let us drink!” Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” said Emile, checking his movement. “Gentlemen,” he added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by Raphael’s behavior, “you must know that our friend Valentin here – what am I saying? – I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin – is in the possession of a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon as he knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a flunkey, and devoid of all decent feeling.”
“Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments!” Euphrasia exclaimed.
“If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple of carriages with fast steppers,” said Aquilina.
“Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me!”
“Indian shawls!”
“Pay my debts!”
“Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!”
“Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I’ll cry quits with you, Raphael!”
“Deeds of gift and no mistake,” was the notary’s comment.
“He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout!”
“Lower the funds!” shouted the banker.
These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end of a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest than in jest.
“My good friend,” Emile said solemnly, “I shall be quite satisfied with an income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it at once.”
“Do you not know the cost, Emile?” asked Raphael.
“A nice excuse!” the poet cried; “ought we not to sacrifice ourselves for our friends?”
“I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead,” Valentin made answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
“Dying people are frightfully cruel,” said Emile, laughing. “You are rich now,” he went on gravely; “very well, I will give you two months at most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to believe in your Magic Skin.”
Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his fatal power.
III. THE AGONY
In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling rain. He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the address of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike fashion, and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His face plainly showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification and an authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder about a face like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a painter had come upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have transferred him to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure, clad in black, and have inscribed beneath it: “Classical poet in search of a rhyme.” When he had identified the number that had been given to him, this reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door of a splendid mansion.
“Is Monsieur Raphael in?” the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in livery.
“My Lord the Marquis sees nobody,” said the servant, swallowing a huge morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
“There is his carriage,” said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. “He is going out; I will wait for him.”
“Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy,” said the Swiss. “A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away. If I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I should lose an income of six hundred francs.”
A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the Civil Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the way down the steps, while he made a survey of the astonished elderly applicant for admission.
“What is more, here is M. Jonathan,” the Swiss remarked; “speak to him.”
Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two old men together in a central space in the great entrance-court. A few blades of grass were growing in the crevices of the pavement; a terrible silence reigned in that great house. The sight of Jonathan’s face would have made you long to understand the mystery that brooded over it, and that was announced by the smallest trifles about the melancholy place.
When Raphael inherited his uncle’s vast estate, his first care had been to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he knew that he was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight of his young master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell; and when the marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his happiness could not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an intermediary power between Raphael and the world at large. He was the absolute disposer of his master’s fortune, the blind instrument of an unknown will, and a sixth sense, as it were, by which the emotions of life were communicated to Raphael.
“I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir,” said the elderly person to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from the rain.
“To speak with my Lord the Marquis?” the steward cried. “He scarcely speaks even to me, his foster-father!”
“But I am likewise his foster-father,” said the old man. “If your wife was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He is my nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated his understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to my own honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of our epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in rhetoric. I am his professor.”
“Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet?”
“Exactly, sir, but – ”
“Hush! hush!” Jonathan called to two underlings, whose voices broke the monastic silence that shrouded the house.
“But is the Marquis ill, sir?” the professor continued.
“My dear sir,” Jonathan replied, “Heaven only knows what is the matter with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that there are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him; it formerly belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent three hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That’s a good deal, you know, three hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house is a perfect wonder. ‘Good,’ said I to myself when I saw this magnificence; ‘it is just like it used to be in the time of my lord, his late grandfather; and the young marquis is going to entertain all Paris and the Court!’ Nothing of the kind! My lord refused to see any one whatever. ‘Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, you understand. An inconciliable life. He rises every day at the same time. I am the only person, you see, that may enter his room. I open all the shutters at seven o’clock, summer or winter. It is all arranged very oddly. As I come in I say to him:
“‘You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.’
“Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his dressing-gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer, simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy! As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of him that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out the other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and yet I do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to, that I am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn’t he? Well, my instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don’t I tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that he is to come into after my lord’s death, if breakfast is not served inconciliably at ten o’clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has the earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed every morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he dresses himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen, that I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see that he always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his coat came to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it by another without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go in and say to my master:
“‘You ought to go out, sir.’
“He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he doesn’t wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the coachman stops there inconciliably, whip in hand, just as you see him out there. In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the Opera, the other to the Ital – no, he hasn’t yet gone to the Italiens, though, for I could not find a box for him until yesterday. Then he comes in at eleven o’clock precisely, to go to bed. At any time in the day when he has nothing to do, he reads – he is always reading, you see – it is a notion he has. My instructions are to read the Journal de la Librairie before he sees it, and to buy new books, so that he finds them on his chimney-piece on the very day that they are published. I have orders to go into his room every hour or so, to look after the fire and everything else, and to see that he wants nothing. He gave me a little book, sir, to learn off by heart, with all my duties written in it – a regular catechism! In summer I have to keep a cool and even temperature with blocks of ice and at all seasons to put fresh flowers all about. He is rich! He has a thousand francs to spend every day; he can indulge his fancies! And he hadn’t even necessaries for so long, poor child! He doesn’t annoy anybody; he is as good as gold; he never opens his mouth, for instance; the house and garden are absolutely silent. In short, my master has not a single wish left; everything comes in the twinkling of an eye, if he raises his hand, and instanter. Quite right, too. If servants are not looked after, everything falls into confusion. You would never believe the lengths he goes about things. His rooms are all – what do you call it? – er – er —en suite. Very well; just suppose, now, that he opens his room door or the door of his study; presto! all the other doors fly open of themselves by a patent contrivance; and then he can go from one end of the house to the other and not find a single door shut; which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us great folk! But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money! And, after all, M. Porriquet, he said to me at last:
“‘Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long clothes,’ Yes, sir, ‘long clothes!’ those were his very words. ‘You will think of all my requirements for me.’ I am the master, so to speak, and he is the servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my word, that is just what nobody on earth knows but himself and God Almighty. It is quite inconciliable!”
“He is writing a poem!” exclaimed the old professor.
“You think he is writing a poem, sir? It’s a very absorbing affair, then! But, you know, I don’t think he is. He often tells me that he wants to live like a vergetation; he wants to vergetate. Only yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said to me:
“‘There is my own life – I am vergetating, my poor Jonathan.’ Now, some of them insist that that is monomania. It is inconciliable!”
“All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan,” the professor answered, with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old servant, “that your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in vast meditations, and has no wish to be distracted by the petty preoccupations of ordinary life. A man of genius forgets everything among his intellectual labors. One day the famous Newton – ”
“Newton? – oh, ah! I don’t know the name,” said Jonathan.
“Newton, a great geometrician,” Porriquet went on, “once sat for twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use to him.”
“Not for a moment!” Jonathan cried. “Not though you were King of France – I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced the doors open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, ‘Ought he to come up?’ And he will say Yes or No. I never say, ‘Do you wish?’ or ‘Will you?’ or ‘Do you want?’ Those words are scratched out of the dictionary. He let out at me once with a ‘Do you want to kill me?’ he was so very angry.”
Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every door stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance seated beside the fire.
Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy that preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and feeble frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked like some plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate grace about him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also noticeable. His hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman’s; he wore his fair hair, now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a refinement of vanity.
The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He had let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him, while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus, of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at the gaming-table only a few months ago.
He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish; and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed Origen’s example, and had maimed and chastened his imagination.
The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary’s house. A well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house, adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. “I will be like that man,” thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any price, and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the luxury around him.
The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe Harold.
“Good day, pere Porriquet,” said Raphael, pressing the old schoolmaster’s frozen fingers in his own damp ones; “how are you?”
“I am very well,” replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that feverish hand. “But how about you?”
“Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health.”
“You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?”
“No,” Raphael answered. “Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is.”
“The style is no doubt correct?” queried the schoolmaster. “You, I hope, would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new school, which fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering Ronsard!”
“My work treats of physiology pure and simple.”
“Oh, then, there is no more to be said,” the schoolmaster answered. “Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless, young man, a lucid and harmonious style – the diction of Massillon, of M. de Buffon, of the great Racine – a classical style, in short, can never spoil anything – But, my friend,” the schoolmaster interrupted himself, “I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own interests.”
Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin. It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material, surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with the old schoolmaster’s prolixity.
Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecutions directed against him ever since the Revolution of July. The worthy man, having a liking for strong governments, had expressed the patriotic wish that grocers should be left to their counters, statesmen to the management of public business, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and peers of France to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking ministers of the Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, on an accusation of Carlism, and the old man now found himself without pension or post, and with no bread to eat. As he played the part of guardian angel to a poor nephew, for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he came less on his own account than for his adopted child’s sake, to entreat his former pupil’s interest with the new minister. He did not ask to be reinstated, but only for a position at the head of some provincial school.