A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

8711I wanted to see Phineas, and Phineas only. With him there was no conflict except betweenathletes, something Greek-inspired and Olympian in which victory would go to whoever wasthe strongest in body and heart. This was the only conflict he had ever believed in.When I got back I found him in the middle of a snowball fight in a place called the FieldsBeyond. At Devon the open ground among the buildings had been given carefully Englishnames—the Center Common, the Far Common, the Fields, and the Fields Beyond. These lastwere past the gym, the tennis courts, the river and the stadium, on the edge of the woodswhich, however English in name, were in my mind primevally American, reaching in unbrokenforests far to the north, into the great northern wilderness. I found Finny beside the woodsplaying and fighting—the two were approximately the same thing to him—and I stood therewondering whether things weren't simpler and better at the northern terminus of these woods, athousand miles due north into the wilderness, somewhere deep in the Arctic, where thepeninsula of trees which began at Devon would end at last in an untouched grove of pine,austere and beautiful.There is no such grove, I know now, but the morning of my return to Devon I imagined thatit might be just over the visible horizon, or the horizon after that.A few of the fighters paused to yell a greeting at me, but no one broke off to ask aboutLeper. But I knew it was a mistake for me to stay there; at any moment someone might.This gathering had obviously been Finny's work. Who else could have inveigled twentypeople to the farthest extremity of the school to throw snowballs at each other? I could justpicture him, at the end of his ten o'clock class, organizing it with the easy authority whichalways came into his manner when he had an idea which was particularly preposterous. Therethey all were now, the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with theirhigh I.Q.'s and expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs.I hesitated on the edge of the fight and the edge of the woods, too tangled in my mind toenter either one or the other. So I glanced at my wrist watch, brought my hand dramatically tomy mouth as though remembering something urgent and important, repeated the pantomime incase anybody had missed it, and with this tacit explanation started briskly back toward thecenter of the school. A snowball caught me on the back of the head. Finny's voice followed it."You're on our side, even if you do have a lousy aim. We need somebody else. Even you." Hecame toward me, without his cane at the moment, his new walking cast so much smaller andlighter that an ordinary person could have managed it with hardly a limp noticeable. Finny'scoordination, however, was such that any slight flaw became obvious; there was aninterruption, brief as a drum beat, in the continuous flow of his walk, as though with each stephe forgot for a split-second where he was going.