A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

66you at the Funny Farm.""In a way," deep in argument, his eyes never wavered from mine, "the whole world is on aFunny Farm now. But it's only the fat old men who get the joke.""And you.""Yes, and me.""What makes you so special? Why should you get it and all the rest of us be in the dark?"The momentum of the argument abruptly broke from his control. His face froze. "BecauseI've suffered," he burst out.We drew back in amazement from this. In the silence all the flighty spirits of the morningended between us. He sat down and turned his flushed face away from me. I sat next to himwithout moving for as long as my beating nerves would permit, and then I stood up and walkedslowly toward anything which presented itself. It turned out to be the exercise bar. I sprang up,grabbed it, and then, in a fumbling and perhaps grotesque offering to Phineas, I chinnedmyself. I couldn't think of anything else, not the right words, not the right gesture. I did what Icould think of."Do thirty of them," he mumbled in a bored voice.I had never done ten of them. At the twelfth I discovered that he had been counting tohimself because he began to count aloud in a noncommittal, half-heard voice. At eighteen therewas a certain enlargement in his tone, and at twenty-three the last edges of boredom left it; hestood up, and the urgency with which he brought out the next numbers was like an invisibleboost lifting me the distance of my arms, until he sang out "thirty!" with a flare of pleasure.The moment was past. Phineas I know had been even more startled than I to discover thisbitterness in himself. Neither of us ever mentioned it again, and neither of us ever forgot that itwas there.He sat down and studied his clenched hands. "Did I ever tell you," he began in a husky tone,"that I used to be aiming for the Olympics?" He wouldn't have mentioned it except that afterwhat he had said he had to say something very personal, something deeply held. To dootherwise, to begin joking, would have been a hypocritical denial of what had happened, andPhineas was not capable of that.I was still hanging from the bar; my hands felt as though they had sunk into it. "No, younever told me that," I mumbled into my arm."Well I was. And now I'm not sure, not a hundred per cent sure I'll be completely, you know,in shape by 1944. So I'm going to coach you for them instead.""But there isn't going to be any Olympics in '44. That's only a couple of years away. The war—"