A Separate Peace (20 page)

“Well of course no one's
accusing
me—”

“Don't argue so much,” his voice tried for a hard compromise, full of warning and yet striving to pass unnoticed by the others.

“No, we're not accusing you,” a boy on the platform said evenly, and then I stood accused.

“I think I remember now!” Finny broke in, his eyes bright and relieved. “Yes, I remember seeing you standing on the bank. You were looking up and your hair was plastered down over your forehead so that you had that dumb look you always have when you've been in the water—what was it you said? ‘Stop posing up there' or one of those best-pal cracks you're always making.” He was very happy. “And I think I did start to pose just to make you madder, and I said, what did I say? something about the two of us . . . yes, I said ‘Let's make a double jump,' because I thought if we went together it would be something that had never been done before, holding hands in a jump—” Then it was as though someone suddenly slapped
him. “No, that was on the ground when I said that to you. I said that to you on the ground, and then the two of us started to climb . . .” he broke off.

“The two of you,” the boy on the platform went on harshly for him, “started to climb up the tree together, was that it? And he's just said he was on the ground!”

“Or on the rungs!” I burst out. “I said I might have been on the rungs!”

“Who else was there?” said Brinker quietly. “Leper Lepellier was there, wasn't he?”

“Yes,” someone said, “Leper was there.”

“Leper always was the exact type when it came to details,” continued Brinker. “He could have told us where everybody was standing, what everybody was wearing, the whole conversation that day, and what the temperature was. He could have cleared the whole thing up. Too bad.”

No one said anything. Phineas had been sitting motionless, leaning slightly forward, not far from the position in which we prayed at Devon. After a long time he turned and reluctantly looked at me. I did not return his look or move or speak. Then at last Finny straightened from this prayerful position slowly, as though it was painful for him. “Leper's here,” he said in a voice so quiet, and with such quiet unconscious dignity, that he was suddenly terrifyingly strange to me. “I saw him go into Dr. Carhart's office this morning.”

“Here! Go get him,” said Brinker immediately to the two boys who had come with us. “He must be in Carhart's rooms if he hasn't gone back home.”

I kept quiet. To myself, however, I made a number of swift, automatic calculations: that Leper was no threat, no one would ever believe Leper; Leper was deranged, he was
not of sound mind and if people couldn't make out their own wills when not in sound mind certainly they couldn't testify in something like this.

The two boys left and the atmosphere immediately cleared. Action had been taken, so the whole issue was dropped for now. Someone began making fun of “Captain Marvel,” the head of the football team, saying how girlish he looked in his graduation gown. Captain Marvel minced for us in his size 12 shoes, the sides of his gown swaying drunkenly back and forth from his big hips. Someone wound himself in the folds of the red velvet curtain and peered out from it like an exotic spy. Someone made a long speech listing every infraction of the rules we were committing that night. Someone else made a speech showing how by careful planning we could break all the others before dawn.

But although the acoustics in the Assembly Hall were poor, those outside the room were admirable. All the talk and horseplay ended within a few seconds of the instant when the first person, that is myself, heard the footsteps returning along the marble stairway and corridors toward us. I knew with absolute certainty moments before they came in that there were three sets of footsteps coming.

Leper entered ahead of the other two. He looked unusually well; his face was glowing, his eyes were bright, his manner was all energy. “Yes?” he said in a clear voice, resonant even in this room, “what can I do for you?” He made this confident remark almost but not quite to Phineas, who was still sitting alone in the middle of the room. Finny muttered something which was too indecisive for Leper, who turned with a cleanly energetic gesture toward Brinker. Brinker began talking to him in the elaborately casual manner of someone being watched. Gradually
the noise in the room, which had revived when the three of them came in, subsided again.

Brinker managed it. He never raised his voice, but instead he let the noise surrounding it gradually sink so that his voice emerged in the ensuing silence without any emphasis on his part—“so that you were standing next to the river bank, watching Phineas climb the tree?” he was saying, and had waited, I knew, until this silence to say.

“Sure. Right there by the trunk of the tree. I was looking up. It was almost sunset, and I remember the way the sun was shining in my eyes.”

“So you couldn't . . .” I began before I could stop myself.

There was a short pause during which every ear and no eyes were directed toward me, and then Brinker went on. “And what did you see? Could you see anything with the sun in your eyes?”

“Oh sure,” said Leper in his new, confident, false voice. “I just shaded my eyes a little, like this,” he demonstrated how a hand shades the eyes, “and then I could see. I could see both of them clearly enough because the sun was blazing all around them,” a certain singsong sincerity was developing in his voice, as though he were trying to hold the interest of young children, “and the rays of the sun were shooting past them, millions of rays shooting past them like—like golden machine-gun fire.” He paused to let us consider the profoundly revealing exactness of this phrase. “That's what it was like, if you want to know. The two of them looked as black as—as black as death standing up there with this fire burning all around them.”

Everyone could hear, couldn't they? the derangement in his voice. Everyone must be able to see how false his confidence was. Any fool could see that. But whatever I
said would be a self-indictment; others would have to fight for me.

“Up there where?” said Brinker brusquely. “Where were the two of them standing up there?”

“On the limb!” Leper's annoyed, this-is-obvious tone would discount what he said in their minds; they would know that he had never been like this before, that he had changed and was not responsible.

“Who was where on the limb? Was one of them ahead of the other?”

“Well of course.”

“Who was ahead?”

Leper smiled waggishly. “I couldn't see
that.
There were just two shapes, and with that fire shooting past them they looked as black as—”

“You've already told us that. You couldn't see who was ahead?”

“No, naturally I couldn't.”

“But you could see how they were standing. Where were they exactly?”

“One of them was next to the trunk, holding the trunk of the tree. I'll never forget that because the tree was a huge black shape too, and his hand touching the black trunk anchored him, if you see what I mean, to something solid in all the bright fire they were standing in up there. And the other one was a little farther out on the limb.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then they both moved.”

“How did they move?”

“They moved,” now Leper was smiling, a charming and slightly arch smile, like a child who knows he is going to say something clever, “they moved like an engine.”

In the baffled silence I began to uncoil slowly.

“Like an engine!” Brinker's expression was a struggle between surprise and disgust.

“I can't think of the name of the engine. But it has two pistons. What is that engine? Well anyway, in this engine first one piston sinks, and then the next one sinks. The one holding on to the trunk sank for a second, up and down like a piston, and then the other one sank and fell.”

Someone on the platform exclaimed, “The one who moved first shook the other one's balance!”

“I suppose so.” Leper seemed to be rapidly losing interest.

“Was the one who fell,” Brinker said slowly, “was Phineas, in other words the one who moved first or second?”

Leper's face became guileful, his voice flat and impersonal. “I don't intend to implicate myself. I'm no fool, you know. I'm not going to tell you everything and then have it used against me later. You always did take me for a fool, didn't you? But I'm no fool any more. I know when I have information that might be dangerous.” He was working himself up to indignation. “Why should I tell you! Just because it happens to suit you!”

“Leper,” Brinker pleaded, “Leper, this is very important—”

“So am I,” he said thinly, “I'm important. You've never realized it, but I'm important too. You be the fool,” he gazed shrewdly at Brinker, “you do whatever anyone wants whenever they want it. You be the fool now. Bastard.”

Phineas had gotten up unnoticed from his chair. “I don't care,” he interrupted in an even voice, so full of richness that it overrode all the others. “I don't care.”

I tore myself from the bench toward him. “Phineas—!”

He shook his head sharply, closing his eyes, and then he turned to regard me with a handsome mask of a face. “I
just don't care. Never mind,” and he started across the marble floor toward the doors.

“Wait a minute!” cried Brinker. “We haven't heard everything yet. We haven't got all the facts!”

The words shocked Phineas into awareness. He whirled as though being attacked from behind. “You get the rest of the facts, Brinker!” he cried. “You get all your facts!” I had never seen Finny crying, “You collect every f——ing fact there is in the world!” He plunged out the doors.

The excellent exterior acoustics recorded his rushing steps and the quick rapping of his cane along the corridor and on the first steps of the marble stairway. Then these separate sounds collided into the general tumult of his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs.

E
veryone behaved with complete presence of mind. Brinker shouted that Phineas must not be moved; someone else, realizing that only a night nurse would be at the Infirmary, did not waste time going there but rushed to bring Dr. Stanpole from his house. Others remembered that Phil Latham, the wrestling coach, lived just across the Common and that he was an expert in first aid. It was Phil who made Finny stretch out on one of the wide shallow steps of the staircase, and kept him still until Dr. Stanpole arrived.

The foyer and the staircase of the First Building were soon as crowded as at midday. Phil Latham found the main light switch, and all the marble blazed up under full illumination. But surrounding it was the stillness of near-midnight in a country town, so that the hurrying feet and
the repressed voices had a hollow reverberance. The windows, blind and black, retained their look of dull emptiness.

Once Brinker turned to me and said, “Go back to the Assembly Room and see if there's any kind of blanket on the platform.” I dashed back up the stairs, found a blanket and gave it to Phil Latham. He carefully wrapped it around Phineas.

I would have liked very much to have done that myself; it would have meant a lot to me. But Phineas might begin to curse me with every word he knew, he might lose his head completely, he would certainly be worse off for it. So I kept out of the way.

He was entirely conscious and from the glimpses I caught of his face seemed to be fairly calm. Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind, and that included Phineas.

When Dr. Stanpole arrived there was silence on the stairs. Wrapped tightly in his blanket, with light flooding down on him from the chandelier, Finny lay isolated at the center of a tight circle of faces. The rest of the crowd looked on from above or below on the stairs, and I stood on the lower edge. Behind me the foyer was now empty.

After a short, silent examination Dr. Stanpole had a chair brought from the Assembly Room, and Finny was lifted cautiously into it. People aren't ordinarily carried in chairs in New Hampshire, and as they raised him up he looked very strange to me, like some tragic and exalted personage, a stricken pontiff. Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help. He went past with his eyes closed
and his mouth tense. I knew that normally I would have been one of those carrying the chair, saying something into his ear as we went along. My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

Dr. Stanpole stopped near the doors, looking for the light switch. There was an interval of a few seconds when no one was near him. I came up to him and tried to phrase my question but nothing came out, I couldn't find the word to begin. I was being torn irreconcilably between “Is he” and “What is” when Dr. Stanpole, without appearing to notice my tangle, said conversationally, “It's the leg again. Broken again. But a much cleaner break I think, much cleaner. A simple fracture.” He found the light switch and the foyer was plunged into darkness.