A Separate Peace (10 page)

So to Phineas I said, “I'm too busy for sports,” and he went into his incoherent groans and jumbles of words, and
I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, “Listen, pal, if
I
can't play sports,
you're
going to play them for me,” and I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

B
rinker Hadley came across to see me late that afternoon. I had taken a shower to wash off the sticky salt of the Naguamsett River—going into the Devon was like taking a refreshing shower itself, you never had to clean up after it, but the Naguamsett was something else entirely. I had never been in it before; it seemed appropriate that my baptism there had taken place on the first day of this winter session, and that I had been thrown into it, in the middle of a fight.

I washed the traces off me and then put on a pair of chocolate brown slacks, a pair which Phineas had been particularly critical of when he wasn't wearing them, and a blue flannel shirt. Then, with nothing to do until my French class at five o'clock, I began turning over in my mind this question of sports.

But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day. “Well, Gene,” his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines—eyebrows, mouth, nose, every-thing—and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices. There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker's salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks.

“Here you are in your solitary splendor,” he went on genially. “I can see you have real influence around here. This big room all to yourself. I wish I knew how to manage things like you.” He grinned confidingly and sank down on my cot, leaning on his elbow in a relaxed, at-home way.

It didn't seem fitting for Brinker Hadley, the hub of the class, to be congratulating me on influence. I was going to say that while he had a roommate it was frightened Brownie Perkins, who would never impinge on Brinker's comfort in any way, and that they had two rooms, the front one with a fireplace. Not that I grudged him any of this. I liked Brinker in spite of his Winter Session efficiency; almost everyone liked Brinker.

But in the pause I took before replying he started talking in his lighthearted way again. He never let a dull spot appear in conversation if he could help it.

“I'll bet you knew all the time Finny wouldn't be back this fall. That's why you picked him for a roommate, right?”

“What?” I pulled quickly around in my chair, away from the desk, and faced him. “No, of course not. How could I know a thing like that in advance?”

Brinker glanced swiftly at me. “You fixed it,” he smiled widely. “You knew all the time. I'll bet it was
all
your doing.”

“Don't be nutty, Brinker,” I turned back toward the desk and began moving books with rapid pointlessness, “what a crazy thing to say.” My voice sounded too strained even to my own blood-pounded ears.

“Ah-h-h. The truth hurts, eh?”

I looked at him as sharply as eyes can look. He had struck an accusing pose.

“Sure,” I gave a short laugh, “sure.” Then these words came out of me by themselves, “But the truth will out.”

His hand fell leadenly on my shoulder. “Rest assured of that, my son. In our free democracy, even fighting for its life, the truth will out.”

I got up. “I feel like a smoke, don't you? Let's go down to the Butt Room.”

“Yes, yes. To the dungeon with you.”

The Butt Room was something like a dungeon. It was in the basement, or the bowels, of the dormitory. There were about ten smokers already there. Everyone at Devon had many public faces; in class we looked, if not exactly scholarly, at least respectably alert; on the playing fields we looked like innocent extroverts; and in the Butt Room we looked, very strongly, like criminals. The school's policy, in order to discourage smoking, was to make these rooms as depressing as possible. The windows near the ceiling
were small and dirty, the old leather furniture spilled its innards, the tables were mutilated, the walls ash-colored, the floor concrete. A radio with a faulty connection played loud and rasping for a while, then suddenly quiet and insinuating.

“Here's your prisoner, gentlemen,” announced Brinker, seizing my neck and pushing me into the Butt Room ahead of him, “I'm turning him over to the proper authorities.”

High spirits came hard in the haze of the Butt Room. A slumped figure near the radio, which happened to be playing loud at the moment, finally roused himself to say, “What's the charge?”

“Doing away with his roommate so he could have a whole room to himself. Rankest treachery.” He paused impressively. “Practically fratricide.”

With a snap of the neck I shook his hand off me, my teeth set, “Brinker . . .”

He raised an arresting hand. “Not a word. Not a sound. You'll have your day in court.”

“God damn it! Shut up! I swear to God you ride a joke longer than anybody I know.”

It was a mistake; the radio had suddenly gone quiet, and my voice ringing in the abrupt, releasing hush galvanized them all.

“So, you killed him, did you?” A boy uncoiled tensely from the couch.

“Well,” Brinker qualified judiciously, “not actually killed. Finny's hanging between life and death at home, in the arms of his grief-stricken old mother.”

I had to take part in this, or risk losing control completely. “I didn't do hardly a thing,” I began as easily as it was possible for me to do, “I—all I did was drop a little bit . . . a little pinch of arsenic in his morning coffee.”

“Liar!” Brinker glowered at me. “Trying to weasel out of it with a false confession, eh?”

I laughed at that, laughed uncontrollably for a moment at that.

“We know the scene of the crime,” Brinker went on, “high in that . . . that
funereal
tree by the river. There wasn't any poison, nothing as subtle as that.”

“Oh, you know about the tree,” I tried to let my face fall guiltily, but it felt instead as though it were being dragged downward. “Yes, huh, yes there was a small, a little
contretemps
at the tree.”

No one was diverted from the issue by this try at a funny French pronunciation.

“Tell us everything,” a younger boy at the table said huskily. There was an unsettling current in his voice, a genuinely conspiratorial note, as though he believed literally everything that had been said. His attitude seemed to me almost obscene, the attitude of someone who discovers a sexual secret of yours and promises not to tell a soul if you will describe it in detail to him.

“Well,” I replied in a stronger voice, “first I stole all his money. Then I found that he cheated on his entrance tests to Devon and I blackmailed his parents about that, then I made love to his sister in Mr. Ludsbury's study, then I . . .” it was going well, faint grins were appearing around the room, even the younger boy seemed to suspect that he was being “sincere” about a joke, a bad mistake to make at Devon, “then I . . .” I only had to add, “pushed him out of the tree” and the chain of implausibility would be complete, “then I . . .” just those few words and perhaps this dungeon nightmare would end.

But I could feel my throat closing on them; I could never say them, never.

I swung on the younger boy. “What did I do then?” I demanded. “I'll bet you've got a lot of theories. Come on, reconstruct the crime. There we were at the tree. Then what happened, Sherlock Holmes?”

His eyes swung guiltily back and forth. “Then you just pushed him off, I'll bet.”

“Lousy bet,” I said offhandedly, falling into a chair as though losing interest in the game. “You lose. I guess you're Dr. Watson, after all.”

They laughed at him a little, and he squirmed and looked guiltier than ever. He had a very weak foothold among the Butt Room crowd, and I had pretty well pushed him off it. His glance flickered out at me from his defeat, and I saw to my surprise that I had, by making a little fun of him, brought upon myself his unmixed hatred. For my escape this was a price I was willing to pay.

“French, French,” I exclaimed. “Enough of this
contretemps.
I've got to study my French.” And I went out.

Going up the stairs I heard a voice from the Butt Room say, “Funny, he came all the way down here and didn't even have a smoke.”

•  •  •

But this was a clue they soon seemed to forget. I detected no Sherlock Holmes among them, nor even a Dr. Watson. No one showed any interest in tracking me, no one pried, no one insinuated. The daily lists of appointments lengthened with the rays of the receding autumn sun until the summer, the opening day, even yesterday became by the middle of October something gotten out of the way and forgotten, because tomorrow bristled with so much to do.

In addition to classes and sports and clubs, there was
the war. Brinker Hadley could compose his Shortest War Poem Ever Written

The War

Is a bore

if he wanted to, but all of us had to take stronger action than that. First there was the local apple crop, threatening to rot because the harvesters had all gone into the army or war factories. We spent several shining days picking them and were paid in cash for it. Brinker was inspired to write his Apple Ode

Our chore

Is the core

of the war

and the novelty and money of these days excited us. Life at Devon was revealed as still very close to the ways of peace; the war was at worst only a bore, as Brinker said, no more taxing to us than a day spent at harvesting in an apple orchard.

Not long afterward, early even for New Hampshire, snow came. It came theatrically, late one afternoon; I looked up from my desk and saw that suddenly there were big flakes twirling down into the quadrangle, settling on the carefully pruned shrubbery bordering the crosswalks, the three elms still holding many of their leaves, the still-green lawns. They gathered there thicker by the minute, like noiseless invaders conquering because they took possession so gently. I watched them whirl past my window—don't take this seriously, the playful way they fell seemed to imply, this little show, this harmless trick.

It seemed to be true. The school was thinly blanketed
that night, but the next morning, a bright, almost balmy day, every flake disappeared. The following weekend, however, it snowed again, then two days later much harder, and by the end of that week the ground had been clamped under snow for the winter.

In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about maids and days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow was commandeered as its advance guard.

Leper Lepellier didn't suspect this. It was not in fact evident to anyone at first. But Leper stands out for me as the person who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise, by this and every other shift in our life at Devon.

The heavy snow paralyzed the railroad yards of one of the large towns south of us on the Boston and Maine line. At chapel the day following the heaviest snowfall, two hundred volunteers were solicited to spend the day shoveling them out, as part of the Emergency Usefulness policy adopted by the faculty that fall. Again we would be paid. So we all volunteered, Brinker and I and Chet Douglass and even, I noticed, Quackenbush.

But not Leper. He generally made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook during chapel, so that he had probably not heard the announcement. The train to take us south to the work did not arrive until after lunch, and on my way to the station, taking a short cut through a meadow not far from the river, I met Leper. I had hardly seen him all fall, and I hardly recognized him now. He was standing motionless on the top of a small ridge, and he seemed from a distance to be a scarecrow left over from the growing season. As I plodded toward him through the snow I began to differentiate items of clothing—a dull green deer-stalker's cap, brown ear muffs, a
thick gray woolen scarf—then at last I recognized the face in the midst of them, Leper's, pinched and pink, his eyes peering curiously toward some distant woods through steel-rimmed glasses. As I got nearer I noticed that below his long tan canvas coat with sagging pockets, below the red and black plaid woolen knickers and green puttees, he was wearing skis. They were very long, wooden and battered, and had two decorative, old-fashioned knobs on their tips.