A_Separate_Peace_-_Full_Text

8
a kitchen rattle from the wing of one of the buildings accompanied their talk. The sky was
darkening steadily, which brought up the lights in the dormitories and the old houses; a loud
phonograph a long way off played Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree, rejected that and played
They're Either Too Young or Too Old, grew more ambitious with The Warsaw Concerto,
mellower with The Nutcracker Suite, and then stopped.
Finny and I went to our room. Under the yellow study lights we read our Hardy
assignments; I was halfway through Tess of the D'Urbervilles, he carried on his baffled struggle
with Far from the Madding Crowd, amused that there should be people named Gabriel Oak
and Bathsheba Everdene. Our illegal radio, turned too low to be intelligible, was broadcasting
the news. Outside there was a rustling early summer movement of the wind; the seniors,
allowed out later than we were, came fairly quietly back as the bell sounded ten stately times.
Boys ambled past our door toward the bathroom, and there was a period of steadily pouring
shower water. Then lights began to snap out all over the school. We undressed, and I put on
some pajamas, but Phineas, who had heard they were unmilitary, didn't; there was the silence
in which it was understood we were saying some prayers, and then that summer school day
came to an end.