Chapter 11

I wanted to see Phineas, and Phineas only. With him there was no conflict except between athletes, something Greek-inspired and Olympian in which victory would go to whoever was the strongest in body and heart. This was the only conflict he had ever believed in.

When I got back I found him in the middle of a snowball fight in a place called the Fields Beyond. At Devon the open ground among the buildings had been given carefully English names—the Center Common, the Far Common, the Fields, and the Fields Beyond. These last were past the gym, the tennis courts, the river and the stadium, on the edge of the woods which, however English in name, were in my mind primevally American, reaching in unbroken forests far to the north, into the great northern wilderness. I found Finny beside the woods playing and fighting—the two were approximately the same thing to him—and I stood there wondering whether things weren’t simpler and better at the northern terminus of these woods, a thousand miles due north into the wilderness, somewhere deep in the Arctic, where the peninsula of trees which began at Devon would end at last in an untouched grove of pine, austere and beautiful.

There is no such grove, I know now, but the morning of my return to Devon I imagined that it might be just over the visible horizon, or the horizon after that.

A few of the fighters paused to yell a greeting at me, but no one broke off to ask about Leper. But I knew it was a mistake for me to stay there; at any moment someone might.

This gathering had obviously been Finny’s work. Who else could have inveigled twenty people to the farthest extremity of the school to throw snowballs at each other? I could just picture him, at the end of his ten o’clock class, organizing it with the easy authority which always came into his manner when he had an idea which was particularly preposterous. There they all were now, the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with their high I. Q. ’s and expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs.

I hesitated on the edge of the fight and the edge of the woods, too tangled in my mind to enter either one or the other. So I glanced at my wrist watch, brought my hand dramatically to my mouth as though remembering something urgent and important, repeated the pantomime in case anybody had missed it, and with this tacit explanation started briskly back toward the center of the school. A snowball caught me on the back of the head. Finny’s voice followed it. “You’re on our side, even if you do have a lousy aim. We need somebody else. Even you. ” He came toward me, without his cane at the moment, his new walking cast so much smaller and lighter that an ordinary person could have managed it with hardly a limp noticeable. Finny’s coordination, however, was such that any slight flaw became obvious; there was an interruption, brief as a drum beat, in the continuous flow of his walk, as though with each step he forgot for a split-second where he was going.

“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.

Finny got up from the cot, picking up his cane as an afterthought. He looked oddly at me, his face set to burst out laughing I thought. “Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers, ” he came across a few paces, “but I do believe—it’s important after all for me to believe you. Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody. ” I waited without saying anything. “And you told me about Leper, that he’s gone crazy. That’s the word, we might as well admit it. Leper’s gone crazy. When I heard that about Leper, then I knew that the war was real, this war and all the wars. If a war can drive somebody crazy, then it’s real all right. Oh I guess I always knew, but I didn’t have to admit it. ” He perched his foot, small cast with metal bar across the bottom to walk on, next to where I was sitting on the cot. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too completely sure about you, when you told me how Leper was. Of course I believed you, ” he added hurriedly, “but you’re the nervous type, you know, and I thought maybe your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont. I thought he might not be quite as mixed up as you made out. ” Finny’s face tried to prepare me for what came next. “Then I saw him myself. ”

I turned incredulously. “You saw Leper? ”

“I saw him here this morning, after chapel. He was—well, there’s nothing inflamed about my imagination and I saw Leper hiding in the shrubbery next to the chapel. I slipped out the side door the way I always do—to miss the rush—and I saw Leper and he must have seen me. He didn’t say a damn word. He looked at me like I was a gorilla or something and then he ducked into Mr. Carhart’s office. ”

“He must be crazy, ” I said automatically, and then my eyes involuntarily met Finny’s. We both broke into sudden laughter.

“We can’t do a damn thing about it, ” he said ruefully.

“I don’t want to see him, ” I muttered. Then, trying to be more responsible, “Who else knows he’s here. ”

“No one, I would think. ”

“There’s nothing for us to do, maybe Carhart or Dr. Stanpole can do something. We won’t tell anybody about it because … because they would just scare Leper, and he would scare them. ”

“Anyway, ” said Finny, “then I knew there was a real war on. ”

“Yes, I guess it’s a real war all right. But I liked yours a lot better. ”

“So did I. ”

“I wish you hadn’t found out. What did you have to find out for! ” We started to laugh again, with a half-guilty exchange of glances, in the way that two people who had gone on a gigantic binge when they were last together would laugh when they met again at the parson’s tea. “Well, ” he said, “you did a beautiful job in the Olympics. ”

“And you were the greatest news analyst who ever lived. ”

“Do you realize you won every gold medal in every Olympic event? No one’s ever done anything like that in history. ”

“And you scooped every newspaper in the world on every story. ” The sun was doing antics among the million specks of dust hanging between us and casting a brilliant, unstable pool of light on the floor. “No one’s ever done anything like that before. ”

Brinker and three cohorts came with much commotion into our room at 10: 05 p. m. that night. “We’re taking you out, ” he said flatly.

“It’s after hours, ” I said; “Where? ” said Finny with interest at the same time.

“You’ll see. Get them. ” His friends half-lifted us half-roughly, and we were hustled down the stairs. I thought it must be some kind of culminating prank, the senior class leaving Devon with a flourish. Were we going to steal the clapper of the school bell, or would we tether a cow in chapel?

They steered us toward the First Building—burned down and rebuilt several times but still known as the First Building of the Devon School. It contained only classrooms and so at this hour was perfectly empty, which made us stealthier than ever. Brinker’s many keys, surviving from his class-officer period, jingled softly as we reached the main door. Above us in Latin flowed the inscription, Here Boys Come to Be Made Men.

The lock turned; we went in, entering the doubtful reality of a hallway familiar only in daylight and bustle. Our footsteps fell guiltily on the marble floor. We continued across the foyer to a dreamlike bank of windows, turned left up a pale flight of marble steps, left again, through two doorways, and into the Assembly Room. From the high ceiling one of the celebrated Devon chandeliers, all glittering tears, scattered thin illumination. Row after row of black Early American benches spread emptily back through the shadows to long, vague windows. At the front of the room there was a raised platform with a balustrade in front of it. About ten members of the senior class sat on the platform; all of them were wearing their black graduation robes. This is going to be some kind of schoolboy masquerade, I thought, some masquerade with masks and candles.

“You see how Phineas limps, ” said Blinker loudly as we walked in. It was too coarse and too loud; I wanted to hit him for shocking me like that. Phineas looked perplexed. “Sit down, ” he went on, “take a load off your feet. ” We sat in the front row of the benches where eight or ten others were sitting, smirking uneasily at the students on the platform.

Whatever Brinker had in his mind to do, I thought he had chosen a terrible place for it. There was nothing funny about the Assembly Room. I could remember staring torpidly through these windows a hundred times out at the elms of the Center Common. The windows now had the closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf. The great expanses of wall space were opaque with canvas, portraits in oil of deceased headmasters, a founder or two, forgotten leaders of the faculty, a beloved athletic coach none of us had ever heard of, a lady we could not identify—her fortune had largely rebuilt the school; a nameless poet who was thought when under the school’s protection to be destined primarily for future generations; a young hero now anonymous who looked theatrical in the First World War uniform in which he had died.

I thought any prank was bound to fall flat here.

The Assembly Hall was used for large lectures, debates, plays, and concerts; it had the worst acoustics in the school. I couldn’t make out what Brinker was saying. He stood on the polished marble floor in front of us, but facing the platform, talking to the boys behind the balustrade. I heard him say the word “inquiry” to them, and something about “the country demands…. ”

“What is all this hot air? ” I said into the blur.

“I don’t know, ” Phineas answered shortly.

As he turned toward us Brinker was saying “… blame on the responsible party. We will begin with a brief prayer. ” He paused, surveying us with the kind of wide-eyed surmise Mr. Carhart always used at this point, and then added in Mr. Carhart’s urbane murmur, “Let us pray. ”

We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly into the awkward crouch in which God was addressed at Devon, leaning forward with elbows on knees. Brinker had caught us, and in a moment it was too late to escape, for he had moved swiftly into the Lord’s Prayer. If when Brinker had said “Let us pray” I had said “Go to hell” everything might have been saved.

At the end there was an indecisive, semiserious silence and then Brinker said, “Phineas, if you please. ” Finny got up with a shrug and walked to the center of the floor, between us and the platform. Brinker got an armchair from behind the balustrade, and seated Finny on it with courtly politeness. “Now just in your own words, ” he said.

“What own words? ” said Phineas, grimacing up at him with his best you-are-an-idiot expression.

“I know you haven’t got many of your own, ” said Brinker with a charitable smile. “Use some of Gene’s then. ”

“What shall I talk about? You? I’ve got plenty of words of my own for that. ”

“I’m all right, ” Brinker glanced gravely around the room for confirmation, “you’re the casualty. ”

“Brinker, ” began Finny in a constricted voice I did not recognize, “are you off your head or what? ”

“No, ” said Brinker evenly, “that’s Leper, our other casualty. Tonight we’re investigating you. ”

“What the hell are you talking about! ” I cut in suddenly.

“Investigating Finny’s accident! ” He spoke as though this was the most natural and self-evident and inevitable thing we could be doing.

I felt the blood flooding into my head. “After all, ” Brinker continued, “there is a war on. Here’s one soldier our side has already lost. We’ve got to find out what happened. ”

“Just for the record, ” said someone from the platform. “You agree, don’t you, Gene? ”

“I told Brinker this morning, ” I began in a voice treacherously shaking, “that I thought this was the worst—”

“And I said, ” Brinker’s voice was full of authority and perfectly under control, “that for Finny’s good, ” and with an additional timbre of sincerity, “and for your own good too, by the way, Gene, that we should get all this out into the open. We don’t want any mysteries or any stray rumors and suspicions left, in the air at the end of the year, do we? ”

A collective assent to this rumbled through the blurring atmosphere of the Assembly Room.

“What are you talking about! ” Finny’s voice was full of contemptuous music. “What rumors and suspicions? ”

“Never mind about that, ” said Brinker with his face responsibly grave. He’s enjoying this, I thought bitterly, he’s imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He’s forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded. “Why don’t you just tell us in your words what happened? ” Brinker continued. “Just humor us, if you want to think of it that way. We aren’t trying to make you feel bad. Just tell us. You know we wouldn’t ask you if we didn’t have a good reason … good reasons. ”

“There’s nothing to tell. ”

“Nothing to tell? ” Brinker looked pointedly at the small cast around Finny’s lower leg and the cane he held between his knees.

“Well then, I fell out of a tree. ”

“Why? ” said someone on the platform. The acoustics were so bad and the light so dim that I could rarely tell who was speaking, except for Finny and Brinker who were isolated on the wide strip of marble floor between us in the seats and the others on the platform.

“Why? ” repeated Phineas. “Because I took a wrong step. ”

“Did you lose your balance? ” continued the voice.

“Yes, ” echoed Finny grimly, “I lost my balance. ”

“You had better balance than anyone in the school. ”

“Thanks a lot. ”

“I didn’t say it for a compliment. ”

“Well then, no thanks. ”

“Have you ever thought that you didn’t just fall out of that tree? ”

This touched an interesting point Phineas had been turning over in his mind for a long time. I could tell that because the obstinate, competitive look left his face as his mind became engaged for the first time. “It’s very funny, ” he said, “but ever since then I’ve had a feeling that the tree did it by itself. It’s an impression I’ve had. Almost as though the tree shook me out by itself. ”

The acoustics in the Assembly Room were so poor that silences there had a heavy hum of their own.

“Someone else was in the tree, isn’t that so? ”

“No, ” said Finny spontaneously, “I don’t think so. ” He looked at the ceiling. “Or was there? Maybe there was somebody climbing up the rungs of the trunk. I kind of forget. ”

This time the hum of silence was prolonged to a point where I would be forced to fill it with some kind of sound if it didn’t end. Then someone else on the platform spoke up. “I thought somebody told me that Gene Forrester was—”

“Finny was there, ” Brinker interrupted commandingly, “he knows better than anyone. ”

“You were there too, weren’t you, Gene? ” this new voice from the platform continued.

“Yes, ” I said with interest, “yes, I was there too. ”

“Were you—near the tree? ”

Finny turned toward me. “You were down at the bottom, weren’t you? ” he asked, not in the official courtroom tone he had used before, but in a friend’s voice.

I had been studying very carefully the way my hands wrinkled when tightly clenched, but I was able to bring my head up and return his inquiring look. “Down at the bottom, yes. ”

Finny went on. “Did you see the tree shake or anything? ” He flushed faintly at what seemed to him the absurdity of his own question. “I’ve always meant to ask you, just for the hell of it. ”

I took this under consideration. “I don’t recall anything like that …”

“Nutty question, ” he muttered.

“I thought you were in the tree, ” the platform voice cut in.

“Well of course, ” Finny said with an exasperated chuckle, “of course I was in the tree—oh you mean Gene? —he wasn’t in—is that what you mean, or—” Finny floundered with muddled honesty between me and my questioner.

“I meant Gene, ” the voice said.

“Of course Finny was in the tree, ” I said. But I couldn’t make the confusion last, “and I was down at the bottom, or climbing the rungs I think …”

“How do you expect him to remember? ” said Finny sharply. “There was a hell of a lot of confusion right then. ”

“A kid I used to play with was hit by a car once when I was about eleven years old, ” said Brinker seriously, “and I remember every single thing about it, exactly where I was standing, the color of the sky, the noise the brakes of the car made—I never will forget anything about it. ”

“You and I are two different people, ” I said.

“No one’s accusing you of anything, ” Brinker responded in an odd tone.

“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! ” Lepers 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 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.