A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

51Not long afterward, early even for New Hampshire, snow came. It came theatrically, lateone afternoon; I looked up from my desk and saw that suddenly there were big flakes twirlingdown into the quadrangle, settling on the carefully pruned shrubbery bordering the crosswalks,the three elms still holding many of their leaves, the still-green lawns. They gathered therethicker by the minute, like noiseless invaders conquering because they took possession sogently. I watched them whirl past my window—don't take this seriously, the playful way theyfell seemed to imply, this little show, this harmless trick.It seemed to be true. The school was thinly blanketed that night, but the next morning, abright, almost balmy day, every flake disappeared. The following weekend, however, it snowedagain, then two days later much harder, and by the end of that week the ground had beenclamped under snow for the winter.In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about maidsand days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow wascommandeered as its advance guard.Leper Lepellier didn't suspect this. It was not in fact evident to anyone at first. But Leperstands out for me as the person who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise,by this and every other shift in our life at Devon.The heavy snow paralyzed the railroad yards of one of the large towns south of us on theBoston and Maine line. At chapel the day following the heaviest snowfall, two hundredvolunteers were solicited to spend the day shoveling them out, as part of the EmergencyUsefulness policy adopted by the faculty that fall. Again we would be paid. So we allvolunteered, Brinker and I and Chet Douglass and even I noticed, Quackenbush.But not Leper. He generally made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of hisnotebook during chapel, so that he had probably not heard the announcement. The train to takeus south to the work did not arrive until after lunch, and on my way to the station, taking ashort cut through a meadow not far from the river, I met Leper. I had hardly seen him all fall,and I hardly recognized him now. He was standing motionless on the top of a small ridge, andhe seemed from a distance to be a scarecrow left over from the growing season. As I ploddedtoward him through the snow I began to differentiate items of clothing—a dull green deerstalker'scap, brown ear muffs, a thick gray woolen scarf—then at last I recognified the face inthe midst of them, Leper's, pinched and pink, his eyes peering curiously toward some distantwoods through steel-rimmed glasses. As I got nearer I noticed that below his long tan canvascoat with sagging pockets, below the red and black plaid woolen knickers and green puttees, hewas wearing skis. They were very long, wooden and battered, and had two decorative, oldfashionedknobs on their tips."You think there's a path through those woods?" he asked in his mild tentative voice when Igot near. Leper did not switch easily from one train of thought to another, and even though Iwas an old friend whom he had not talked to in months I didn't mind his taking me for grantednow, even at this improbable meeting in a wide, empty field of snow.