A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

72Giraud but Lepellier; we knew, better than the newspapers, that it was not the Big Three but theBig Four who were running the war.In the silences between jokes about Leper's glories we wondered whether we ourselveswould measure up to the humblest minimum standard of the army. I did not know everythingthere was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know ft; I wondered in the silencesbetween jokes about Leper whether the still hidden parts of myself might contain the Sad Sack,the outcast, or the coward. We were all at our funniest about Leper, and we all secretly hopedthat Leper, that incompetent, was as heroic as we said.Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt onHitler's life, Finny had said, "If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler's temple,he'd miss." There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building ofLeper's triumphal arch around Brinker's keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since littleelse was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me fromgoing as well—"How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?" He drewme increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all otherfriends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, justPhineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944.Saturday afternoons are terrible in a boys' school, especially in the winter. There is nofootball game; it is not possible, as it is in the spring, to take bicycle trips into the surroundingcountry. Not even the most grinding student can feel required to lose himself in his books,since there is Sunday ahead, long, lazy, quiet Sunday, to do any homework.And these Saturdays are worst in the late winter when the snow has lost its novelty and itsshine, and the school seems to have been reduced to only a network of drains. During the briefthaw in the early afternoon there is a dismal gurgling of dirty water seeping down pipes andalong gutters, a gray seamy shifting beneath the crust of snow, which cracks to show patches offrozen mud beneath. Shrubbery loses its bright snow headgear and stands bare and frail, tooundernourished to hide the drains it was intended to hide. These are the days when going intoany building you cross a mat of dirt and cinders led in by others before you, thinning andfinally trailing off in the corridors. The sky is an empty hopeless gray and gives the impressionthat this is its eternal shade. Winter's occupation seems to have conquered, overrun anddestroyed everything, so that now there is no longer any resistance movement left in nature; allthe juices are dead, every sprig of vitality snapped, and now winter itself, an old, corrupt, tiredconqueror, loosens its grip on the desolation, recedes a little, grows careless in its watch; sickof victory and enfeebled by the absence of challenge, it begins itself to withdraw from theruined countryside. The drains alone are active, and on these Saturdays their noises sound adull recessional to winter.Only Phineas failed to see what was so depressing. Just as there was no war in hisphilosophy, there was also no dreary weather. As I have said, all weathers delighted Phineas."You know what we'd better do next Saturday?" he began in one of his voices, the low-pitched