A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

40Still it had come to an end, in the last long rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas fell. Itwas forced on me as I sat chilled through the Chapel service, that this probably vindicated therules of Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, Ithink, 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 theDevon 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 boardwas a forest of notices.We had been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by theeccentric notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen takingcharge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which hadbelonged only to us. I had the same room which Finny and I had shared during the summer, butacross the hall, in the large suite where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July andAugust amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reachedtentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissarieswere 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 thenstopped. Suddenly I did not want to see the trays of snails which Leper had passed the summercollecting replaced by Brinker's files. Not yet. Although it was something to have this year'sdominant student across the way. Ordinarily he should have been a magnet for me, the centerof all the excitement and influences in the class. Ordinarily this would have been so—if thesummer, the gypsy days, had not intervened. Now Brinker, with his steady wit and ceaselessplans, 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, downon the banks of the lower river. There are two rivers at Devon, divided by a small dam. On myway I stopped on the footbridge which crosses the top of the dam separating them and lookedupstream, at the narrow little Devon River sliding toward me between its thick fringe of pineand 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 acanoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, bodya complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all theothers to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, hiswhole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might bygently 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, thesoaring arms collapse, up shoot an uncontrollable leg, and Phineas would tumble into the