A Separate Peace (18 page)

“How's Leper?” he asked in an offhand way.

“Oh Leper's—how would he be? You know Leper—” The fight was moving toward us; I stalled a little more, a stray snowball caught Finny on the side of the face, he shot one back, I seized some ammunition from the ground and we were engulfed.

Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases. I had forgotten that this existed, this smell which instead of the first robin, or the first bud or leaf, means to me that spring has come. I had always welcomed vitality and energy and warmth radiating from thick and sturdy winter clothes. It made me happy, but I kept wondering about next spring, about whether khaki, or suntans or whatever the uniform of the season was, had this aura of promise in it. I felt fairly sure it didn't.

The fight veered. Finny had recruited me and others as allies, so that two sides fighting it out had been taking form. Suddenly he turned his fire against me, he betrayed several of his other friends; he went over to the other, to Brinker's side for a short time, enough to ensure that his betrayal of them would heighten the disorder. Loyalties became hopelessly entangled. No one was going to win or lose after all. Somewhere in the maze Brinker's sense of generalship disappeared, and he too became as slippery as
an Arab, as intriguing as a eunuch. We ended the fight in the only way possible; all of us turned on Phineas. Slowly, with a steadily widening grin, he was driven down beneath a blizzard of snowballs.

When he had surrendered I bent cheerfully over to help him up, seizing his wrist to stop the final treacherous snowball he had ready, and he remarked, “Well I guess that takes care of the Hitler Youth outing for one day.” All of us laughed. On the way back to the gym he said, “That was a good fight. I thought it was pretty funny, didn't you?”

•  •  •

Hours later it occurred to me to ask him, “Do you think you ought to get into fights like that? After all, there's your leg—”

“Stanpole said something about not falling again, but I'm very careful.”

“Christ, don't break it again!”

“No, of course I won't break it again. Isn't the bone supposed to be stronger when it grows together over a place where it's been broken once?”

“Yes, I think it is.”

“I think so too. In fact I think I can feel it getting stronger.”

“You think you can? Can you feel it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thank God.”

“What?”

“I said that's good.”

“Yes, I guess it is. I guess that's good, all right.”

• • •

After dinner that night Brinker came to our room to pay us one of his formal calls. Our room had by this time of year the exhausted look of a place where two people had lived too long without taking any interest in their surroundings. Our cots at either end of the room were sway-backed beneath their pink and brown cotton spreads. The walls, which were much farther off white than normal, expressed two forgotten interests: Finny had scotch-taped newspaper pictures of the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting above his cot (“They're the two most important of the old men,” he had explained, “getting together to make up what to tell us next about the war”). Over my cot I had long ago taped pictures which together amounted to a barefaced lie about my background—weepingly romantic views of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads winding dustily past the cabins of the Negroes. When asked about them I had acquired an accent appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I had transmitted the impression, without actually stating it, that this was the old family place. But by now I no longer needed this vivid false identity; now I was acquiring, I felt, a sense of my own real authority and worth, I had had many new experiences and I was growing up.

“How's Leper?” said Brinker as he came in.

“Yeah,” said Phineas, “I meant to ask you before.”

“Leper? Why he's—he's on leave.” But my resentment against having to mislead people seemed to be growing stronger every day. “As a matter of fact Leper is ‘Absent Without Leave,' he just took off by himself.”

“Leper?” both of them exclaimed together.

“Yes,” I shrugged, “Leper. Leper's not the little rabbit we used to know any more.”

“Nobody can change
that
much,” said Brinker in his new tough-minded way.

Finny said, “He just didn't like the army, I bet. Why should he? What's the point of it anyway?”

“Phineas,” Brinker said with dignity, “please don't give us your infantile lecture on world affairs at this time.” And to me, “He was too scared to stay, wasn't he?”

I narrowed my eyes as though thinking hard about that. Finally I said, “Yes, I think you could put it that way.”

“He panicked.”

I didn't say anything.

“He must be out of his mind,” said Brinker energetically, “to do a thing like that. I'll bet he cracked up, didn't he? That's what happened. Leper found out that the army was just too much for him. I've heard about guys like that. Some morning they don't get out of bed with everybody else. They just lie there crying. I'll bet something like that happened to Leper.” He looked at me. “Didn't it?”

“Yes. It did.”

Brinker had closed with such energy, almost enthusiasm, on the truth that I gave it to him without many misgivings. The moment he had it he crumbled. “Well I'll be damned. I'll be damned. Old Leper. Quiet old Leper. Quiet old Leper from Vermont. He never could fight worth a damn. You'd think somebody would have realized that when he tried to enlist. Poor old Leper. What's he act like?”

“He cries a lot of the time.”

“Oh God. What's the matter with our class anyway? It isn't even June yet and we've already got two men sidelined for the Duration.”

“Two?”

Brinker hesitated briefly. “Well there's Finny here.”

“Yes,” agreed Phineas in his deepest and most musical tone, “there's me.”

“Finny isn't out of it,” I said.

“Of course he is.”

“Yes, I'm out of it.”

“Not that there's anything to be out of!” I wondered if my face matched the heartiness of my voice. “Just this dizzy war, this fake, this thing with the old men making . . .” I couldn't help watching Finny as I spoke, and so I ran out of momentum. I waited for him to take it up, to unravel once again his tale of plotting statesmen and deluded public, his great joke, his private toe hold on the world. He was sitting on his cot, elbows on knees, looking down. He brought his wide-set eyes up, his grin flashed and faded, and then he murmured, “Sure. There isn't any war.”

It was one of the few ironic remarks Phineas ever made, and with it he quietly brought to a close all his special inventions which had carried us through the winter. Now the facts were re-established, and gone were all the fantasies, such as the Olympic Games for a.d. 1944, closed before they had ever been opened.

•  •  •

There was little left at Devon any more which had not been recruited for the war. The few stray activities and dreamy people not caught up in it were being systematically corralled by Brinker. And every day in chapel there was some announcement about qualifying for “V-12,” an officer-training program the Navy had set up in many colleges and universities. It sounded very safe, almost like peacetime, almost like just going normally on to college. It was also very popular; groups the size of LST crews joined it, almost everyone who could qualify, except for a few who “wanted to fly” and so chose the Army Air Force, or something called V-5 instead. There were also a special few with energetic fathers who were expecting appointments
to Annapolis or West Point or the Coast Guard Academy or even—this alternative had been unexpectedly stumbled on—the Merchant Marine Academy. Devon was by tradition and choice the most civilian of schools, and there was a certain strained hospitality in the way both the faculty and students worked to get along with the leathery recruiting officers who kept appearing on the campus. There was no latent snobbery in us; we didn't find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them, a difference which everyone struggled with awkward fortitude to bridge. It was as though Athens and Sparta were trying to establish not just a truce but an alliance—although we were not as civilized as Athens and they were not as brave as Sparta.

Neither were we. There was no rush to get into the fighting; no one seemed to feel the need to get into the infantry, and only a few were talking about the Marines. The thing to be was careful and self-preserving. It was going to be a long war. Quackenbush, I heard, had two possible appointments to the Military Academy, with carefully prepared positions in V-12 and dentistry school to fall back on if necessary.

I myself took no action. I didn't feel free to, and I didn't know why this was so. Brinker, in his accelerating change from absolute to relative virtue, came up with plan after plan, each more insulated from the fighting than the last. But I did nothing.

•  •  •

One morning, after a Naval officer had turned many heads in chapel with an address on convoy duty, Brinker put his hand on the back of my neck in the vestibule outside and steered me into a room used for piano practice near the
entrance. It was soundproofed, and he swung the vaultlike door closed behind us.

“You've been putting off enlisting in something for only one reason,” he said at once. “You know that, don't you?”

“No, I don't know that.”

“Well, I know, and I'll tell you what it is. It's Finny. You pity him.”

“Pity him!”

“Yes, pity him. And if you don't watch out he's going to start pitying himself. Nobody ever mentions his leg to him except me. Keep that up and he'll be sloppy with self-pity any day now. What's everybody beating around the bush for? He's crippled and that's that. He's got to accept it and unless we start acting perfectly natural about it, even kid him about it once in a while, he never will.”

“You're so wrong I can't even—I can't even
hear
you, you're so wrong.”

“Well, I'm going to do it anyway.”

“No. You're not.”

“The hell I'm not. I don't have to have your approval, do I?”

“I'm his roommate, and I'm his best friend—”

“And you were there when it happened. I know. And I don't give a damn. And don't forget,” he looked at me sharply, “you've got a little personal stake in this. What I mean is it wouldn't do you any harm, you know, if everything about Finny's accident was cleared up and forgotten.”

I felt my face grimacing in the way Finny's did when he was really irritated. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don't know,” he shrugged and chuckled in his best manner, “nobody knows.” Then the charm disappeared and he added, “unless you know,” and his mouth closed in its straight expressionless line, and that was all that was said.

• • •

I had no idea what Brinker might say or do. Before he had always known and done whatever occurred to him because he was certain that whatever occurred to him was right. In the world of the Golden Fleece Debating Society and the Underprivileged Local Children subcommittee of the Good Samaritan Confraternity, this had created no problems. But I was afraid of that simple executive directness now.

I walked back from chapel and found Finny in our dormitory, blocking the staircase until the others who wanted to go up sang
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
under his direction. No one who was tone deaf ever loved music so much. I think his shortcoming increased his appreciation; he loved it all indiscriminately—Beethoven, the latest love ditty, jazz, a hymn—it was all profoundly musical to Phineas.

“. . . Our helper He a-mid the floods,” wafted out across the Common in the tempo of a football march, “Of mortal ills prevailing!”

“Everything was all right,” said Finny at the end, “phrasing, rhythm, all that. But I'm not sure about your pitch. Half a tone off, I would estimate offhand.”

We went on to our room. I sat down at the translation of Caesar I was doing for him, since he had to pass Latin at last this year or fail to graduate. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it.

“Is anything exciting happening now?”

“This part is pretty interesting,” I said, “if I understand it right. About a surprise attack.”

“Read me that.”

“Well let's see. It begins, ‘When Caesar noticed that the
enemy was remaining for several days at the camp fortified by a swamp and by the nature of the terrain, he sent a letter to Trebonius instructing him'—‘instructing him' isn't actually in the text but it's understood; you know about that.”

“Sure. Go on.”

“ ‘Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him'—this ‘him' refers to Caesar of course.”

Finny looked at me with glazed interest and said, “Of course.”

“ ‘Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him with three legions; he himself'—Caesar, that is—‘sent cavalry to withstand any sudden attacks of the enemy. Now when the Gauls learned what was going on, they scattered a selected band of foot soldiers in ambushes; who, overtaking our horsemen after the leader Vertiscus had been killed, followed our disorderly men up to our camp.' ”

“I have a feeling that's what Mr. Horn is going to call a ‘muddy translation.' What's it mean?”

“Caesar isn't doing so well.”

“But he won it in the end.”

“Sure. If you mean the whole campaign—” I broke off. “He won it, if you really think there was a Gallic War . . .” Caesar, from the first, had been the one historical figure Phineas refused absolutely to believe in. Lost two thousand years in the past, master of a dead language and a dead empire, the bane and bore of schoolboys, Caesar he believed to be more of a tyrant at Devon than he had ever been in Rome. Phineas felt a personal and sincere grudge against Caesar, and he was outraged most by his conviction that Caesar and Rome and Latin had never been alive
at all . . . “If you really think there ever was a Caesar,” I said.