Chapter 6

Peace had deserted Devon. Although not in the look of the campus and village; they retained much of their dreaming summer calm. Fall had barely touched the full splendor of the trees, and during the height of the day the sun briefly regained its summertime power. In the air there was only an edge of coolness to imply the coming winter.

But all had been caught up, like the first fallen leaves, by a new and energetic wind. The Summer Session—a few dozen boys being force-fed education, a stopgap while most of the masters were away and most of the traditions stored against sultriness—the Summer Session was over. It had been the school’s first, ’ but this was its one hundred and sixty-third Winter Session, and the forces reassembled for it scattered the easygoing summer spirit like so many fallen leaves.

The masters were in their places for the first Chapel, seated in stalls in front of and at right angles to us, suggesting by their worn expressions and careless postures that they had never been away at all.

In an apse of the church sat their wives and children, the objects during the tedious winter months of our ceaseless, ritual speculation (Why did he ever marry her? What in the world ever made her marry him? How could the two of them ever have produced those little monsters? ). The masters favored seersucker on this mild first day the wives broke out their hats. Five of the younger teachers were missing gone into the war. Mr Pike had come in his Naval ensigns uniform; some reflex must have survived Midshipman’s School and brought him back to Devon for the day His face was as mild and hopeless as ever; mooning above the snappy, rigid blouse, it gave him the air of an impostor.

Continuity was the keynote. The same hymns were played the same sermon given, the same announcements made. There was one surprise; maids had disappeared “for the Duration, ” a new phase then. But continuity was stressed, not beginning again but continuing the education of young men according to the unbroken traditions of Devon.

I knew, perhaps I alone knew, that this was false. Devon had slipper’ through their fingers during the warm overlooked months. The tradition’s had been broken, the standards let down, all rules forgotten. In those bright days of truancy we had never thought of What We Owed Devon, as the sermon this opening day exhorted us to do. We had thought of ourselves, of what Devon owed us, and we had taken all of that and much more Today’s hymn was Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive Our Foolish Ways; we had never heard that during the summer either. Ours had been a wayward gypsy music, leading us down all kinds of foolish gypsy ways, unforgiven. I was glad of it, I had almost caught the rhythm of it, the dancing, clicking jangle of it during the summer.

Still it had come to an end, in the last long rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas fell. It was forced on me as I sat chilled through the Chapel service, that this probably vindicated the rules of Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning.

After the service ended we set out seven hundred strong, the regular winter throng of the Devon School, to hustle through our lists of appointments. All classrooms were crowded, swarms were on the crosswalks, the dormitories were as noisy as factories, every bulletin board was a forest of notices.

We had been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking charge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had belonged only to us. I had the same room which Finny and I had shared during the summer, but across the hall, in the large suite where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping in to confer with him. Leper, luckless in his last year as all the others, had been moved to a room lost in an old building off somewhere in the trees toward the gym.

After morning classes and lunch I went across to see Brinker, started into the room and then stopped. Suddenly I did not want to see the trays of snails which Leper had passed the summer collecting replaced by Brinker’s files. Not yet. Although it was something to have this year’s dominant student across the way. Ordinarily he should have been a magnet for me, the center of all the excitement and influences in the class. Ordinarily this would have been so—if the summer, the gypsy days, had not intervened. Now Brinker, with his steady wit and ceaseless plans, Brinker had nothing to offer in place of Leper’s dust motes and creeping ivy and snails.

I didn’t go in. In any case I was late for my afternoon appointment. I never used to be late. But today I was, later even than I had to be. I was supposed to report to the Crew House, down on the banks of the lower river. There are two rivers at Devon, divided by a small dam. On my way I stopped on the footbridge which crosses the top of the dam separating them and looked upstream, at the narrow little Devon River sliding toward me between its thick fringe of pine and birch.

As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky.

Then, an infinitesimal veering of the canoe, and the line of his body would break, the soaring arms collapse, up shoot an uncontrollable leg, and Phineas would tumble into the water, roaring with rage.

I stopped in the middle of this hurrying day to remember him like that, and then, feeling refreshed, I went on to the Crew House beside the tidewater river below the dam.

We had never used this lower river, the Naguamsett, during the summer. It was ugly, saline, fringed with marsh, mud and seaweed. A few miles away it was joined to the ocean, so that its movements were governed by unimaginable factors like the Gulf Stream the Polar Ice Cap, and the moon. It was nothing like the fresh-water Devon above the dam where we’d had so much fun, all the summer. The Devon’s course was determined by some familiar hills a little inland; it rose among highland farms and forests which we knew, passed at the end of its course through the school grounds, and then threw itself with little spectacle over a small waterfall beside the diving dam, and into the turbid Naguamsett.

The Devon School was astride these two rivers.

At the Crew House, Quackenbush, in the midst of some milling oarsmen in the damp main room, spotted me the instant I came in, with his dark expressionless eyes. Quackenbush was the crew manager, and there was something wrong about him. I didn’t know exactly what it was. In the throng of the winter terms at Devon we were at opposite extremities of the class, and to me there only came the disliked edge of Quackenbush’s reputation. A clue to it was that his first name was never used—I didn’t even know what it was—and he had no nickname, not even an unfriendly one.

“Late, Forrester, ” he said in his already-matured voice. He was a firmly masculine type; perhaps he was disliked only because he had matured before the rest of us.

“Yes, sorry, I got held up. ”

“The crew waits for no man. ” He didn’t seem to think this was a funny thing to say. I did, and had to chuckle.

“Well, if you think it’s all a joke …”

“I didn’t say it was a joke. ”

“I’ve got to have some real help around here. This crew is going to win the New England scholastics, or my name isn’t Cliff Quackenbush. ”

With that blank filled, I took up my duties as assistant senior crew manager. There is no such position officially, but it sometimes came into existence through necessity, and was the opposite of a sinecure. It was all work and no advantages. The official assistant to the crew manager was a member of the class below, and the following year he could come into the senior managership with its rights and status. An assistant who was already a senior ranked nowhere. Since I had applied for such a nonentity of a job, Quackenbush, who had known as little about me as I had about him, knew now.

“Get some towels, ” he said without looking at me, pointing at a door.

“How many? ”

“Who knows? Get some. As many as you can carry. That won’t be too many. ”

Jobs like mine were usually taken by boys with some physical disability, since everyone had to take part in sports and this was all disabled boys could do. As I walked toward the door I supposed that Quackenbush was studying me to see if he could detect a limp. But I knew that his flat black eyes would never detect my trouble.

Quackenbush felt mellower by the end of the afternoon as we stood on the float in front of the Crew House, gathering up towels.

“You never rowed did you. ” He opened the conversation like that, without pause or question mark. His voice sounded almost too mature, as though he were putting it on a little; he sounded as though he were speaking through a tube.

“No, I never did. ”

“I rowed on the lightweight crew for two years. ”

He had a tough bantam body, easily detectable under the tight sweat shirt he wore. “I wrestle in the winter, ” he went on. “What are you doing in the winter? ”

“I don’t know, manage something else. ”

“You’re a senior aren’t you? ”

He knew that I was a senior. “Yeah. ”

“Starting a little late to manage teams aren’t you? ”

“Am I? ”

“Damn right you are! ” He put indignant conviction into this, pouncing on the first sprig of assertiveness in me.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. ”

“Yes it matters. ”

“I don’t think it does. ”

“Go to hell Forrester. Who the hell are you anyway. ”

I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quackenbush wasn’t going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn’t want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn’t the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper’s snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.

“You, Quackenbush, don’t know anything about who I am. ” That launched me, and I had to go on and say, “or anything else. ”

“Listen you maimed son-of-a-bitch …”

I hit him hard across the face. I didn’t know why for an instant; it was almost as though I were maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me.

Quackenbush had clamped his arm in some kind of tight wrestling grip around my neck, and I was glad in this moment not to be a cripple. I reached over, grasped the back of his sweat shirt, wrenched, and it came away in my hand. I tried to throw him off, he lunged at the same time, and we catapulted into the water.

The dousing extinguished Quackenbush’s rage, and he let go of me. I scrambled back onto the float, still seared by what he had said. “The next time you call anybody maimed, ” I bit off the words harshly so he would understand all of them, “you better make sure they are first. ”

“Get out of here, Forrester, ” he said bitterly from the water, “you’re not wanted around here, Forrester. Get out of here. ”

I fought that battle, that first skirmish of a long campaign, for Finny. Until the back of my hand cracked against Quackenbush’s face I had never pictured myself in the role of Finny’s defender, and I didn’t suppose that he would have thanked me for it now. He was too loyal to anything connected with himself—his roommate, his dormitory, his class, his school, outward in vastly expanded circles of loyalty until I couldn’t imagine who would be excluded. But it didn’t feel exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself.

If so I had little profit to show as I straggled back toward the dormitory dripping wet, with the job I had wanted gone, temper gone, mind circling over and over through the whole soured afternoon. I knew now that it was fall all right; I could feel it pressing clammily against my wet clothes, an unfriendly, discomforting breath in the air, an edge of wintery chill, air that shriveled, soon to put out the lights on the countryside. One of my legs wouldn’t stop trembling, whether from cold or anger I couldn’t tell. I wished I had hit him harder.

Someone was coming toward me along the bent, broken lane which led to the dormitory, a lane out of old London, ancient houses on either side leaning as though soon to tumble into it, cobblestones heaving underfoot like a bricked-over ocean squall—a figure of great height advanced down them toward me. It could only be Mr. Ludsbury; no one else could pass over these stones with such contempt for the idea of tripping.

The houses on either side were inhabited by I didn’t know who; wispy, fragile old ladies seemed most likely. I couldn’t duck into one of them. There were angles and bumps and bends everywhere, but none big enough to conceal me. Mr. Ludsbury loomed on like a high-masted clipper ship in this rocking passage, and I tried to go stealthily by him on my watery, squeaking sneakers.

“Just one moment, Forrester, if you please. ” Mr. Ludsbury’s voice was bass, British, and his Adam’s apple seemed to move as much as his mouth when he spoke. “Has there been a cloudburst in your part of town? ”

“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, I fell into the river. ” I apologized by instinct to him for this mishap which discomforted only me.

“And could you tell me how and why you fell into the river? ”

“I slipped. ”

“Yes. ” After a pause he went on. “I think you have slipped in any number of ways since last year. I understand for example that there was gaming in my dormitory this summer while you were living there. ” He was in charge of the dormitory; one of the dispensations of those days of deliverance, I realized now, had been his absence.

“Gaming? What kind of gaming, sir? ”

“Cards, dice, ” he shook his long hand dismissingly, “I didn’t inquire. It didn’t matter. There won’t be any more of it. ”

“I don’t know who that would have been. ” Nights of black-jack and poker and unpredictable games invented by Phineas rose up in my mind; the back room of Leper’s suite, a lamp hung with a blanket so that only a small blazing circle of light fell sharply amid the surrounding darkness; Phineas losing even in those games he invented, betting always for what should win, for what would have been the most brilliant successes of all, if only the cards hadn’t betrayed him. Finny finally betting his icebox and losing it, that contraption, to me.

I thought of it because Mr. Ludsbury was just then saying, “And while I’m putting the dormitory back together I’d better tell you to get rid of that leaking icebox. Nothing like that is ever permitted in the dormitory, of course. I notice that everything went straight to seed during the summer and that none of you old boys who knew our standards so much as lifted a finger to help Mr. Prud’homme maintain order. As a substitute for the summer he couldn’t have been expected to know everything there was to be known at once. You old boys simply took advantage of the situation. ”

I stood there shaking in my wet sneakers. If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.

I said nothing, on my face I registered the bleak look of a defendant who knows the court will never be swayed by all the favorable evidence he has. It was a schoolboy look; Mr. Ludsbury knew it well.

“There’s a long-distance call for you, ” he continued in the tone of the judge performing the disagreeable duty of telling the defendant his right. “I’ve written the operator’s number on the pad beside the telephone in my study. You may go in and call. ”

“Thank you very much, sir. ”

He sailed on down the lane without further reference to me, and I wondered who was sick at home.

But when I reached his study—low-ceilinged, gloomy with books, black leather chairs, a pipe rack, frayed brown rug, a room which students rarely entered except for a reprimand—I saw on the pad not an operator’s number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.

I called this operator, and listened in wonder while she went through her routine as though this were just any long-distance call, and then her voice left the line and it was pre-empted, and charged, by the voice of Phineas. “Happy first day of the new academic year! ”

“Thanks, thanks a lot, it’s a—you sound—I’m glad to hear your—”

“Stop stuttering, I’m paying for this. Who’re you rooming with? ”

“Nobody. They didn’t put anyone else in the room. ”

“Saving my place for me! Good old Devon. But anyway, you wouldn’t have let them put anyone else in there, would you? ” Friendliness, simple outgoing affection, that was all I could hear in his voice.

“No, of course not. ”

“I didn’t think you would. Roommates are roommates. Even if they do have an occasional fight. God you were crazy when you were here. ”

“I guess I was. I guess I must have been. ”

“Completely over the falls. I wanted to be sure you’d recovered. That’s why I called up. I knew that if you’d let them put anybody else in the room in my place then you really were crazy. But you didn’t, I knew you wouldn’t. Well, I did have just a trace of doubt that was because you talked so crazy here. I have to admit I had just a second when I wondered. I’m sorry about that, Gene. Naturally I was completely wrong. You didn’t let them put anyone else in my spot. ”

“No, I didn’t let them. ”

“I could shoot myself for thinking you might. I really knew you wouldn’t. ”

“No, I wouldn’t. ”

“And I spent my money on a long-distance call! All for nothing. Well, it’s spent, on you too. So start talking, pal. And it better be good. Start with sports. What are you going out for? ”

“Crew. Well, not exactly crew. Managing crew. Assistant crew manager. ”

“Assistant crew manager! ”

“I don’t think I’ve got the job—”

“Assistant crew manager! ”

“I got in a fight this after—”

“Assistant crew manager! ” No voice could course with dumfoundment like Finny’s “You are crazy! ”

“Listen, Finny, I don’t care about being a big man on the campus or anything. ”

“Whaaat? ” Much more clearly than anything in Mr. Ludsbury’s study I could see his face now, grimacing in wide, obsessed stupefaction. “Who said anything about whoever they are! ”

“Well then what are you so worked up for? ”

“What do you want to manage crew for? What do you want to manage for? What’s that got to do with sports? ”

The point was, the grace of it was, that it had nothing to do with sports. For I wanted no more of sports. They were barred from me, as though when Dr. Stanpole said, “Sports are finished” he had been speaking of me. I didn’t trust myself in them, and I didn’t trust anyone else. It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn’t seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming oil which would be on the surface.

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.