A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

10312Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind. Brinker shouted that Phineas must not bemoved; someone else, realizing that only a night nurse would be at the Infirmary, did not wastetime going there but rushed to bring Dr. Stanpole from his house. Others remembered that PhilLatham, the wrestling coach, lived just across the Common and that he was an expert in firstaid. 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. PhilLatham found the main light switch, and all the marble blazed up under full illumination. Butsurrounding it was the stillness of near-midnight in a country town, so that the hurrying feetand the repressed voices had a hollow reverberance. The windows, blind and black, retainedtheir look of dull emptiness.Once Brinker turned to me and said, "Go back to the Assembly Room and see if there's anykind of blanket on the platform." I dashed back up the stairs, found a blanket and gave it to PhilLatham. 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 headcompletely, 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 fairlycalm. 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 tightcircle of faces. The rest of the crowd looked on from above or below on the stairs, and I stoodon 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 NewHampshire, and as they raised him up he looked very strange to me, like some tragic andexalted personage, a stricken pontiff. Once again I had the desolating sense of having all alongignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft andstricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to actor even how to feel as the object of help. He went past with his eyes closed and his mouthtense. I knew that normally I would have been one of those carrying the chair, sayingsomething into his ear as we went along. My aid alone had never seemed to him in the categoryof help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliantfoyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.