A Separate Peace: Chapters 8-10

I could hardly believe it, but it was too plainly printed in the closed expression of his face to mistake, too discernible beneath the even tone of his voice: Phineas was shocked at the idea of my leaving.

This opulent sobriety betrayed the divided nature of the school, just as in a different way the two rivers that it straddled did.

From the outside the buildings were reticent, severe straight lines of red brick or white clapboard, with shutters standing sentinel beside each window, and a few unassuming white cupolas placed here and there on the roofs because they were expected and not pretty, like Pilgrim bonnets.

We went into the gym, along a marble hallway, and to my surprise we went on past the Trophy Room, where his name was already inscribed on one cup, one banner, and one embalmed football.

I had prepared myself for that, and even thought of several positive, uplifting aphorisms to cheer him up.

No locker room could have more pungent air than Devon’s; sweat predominated, but it was richly mingled with smells of paraffin and singed rubber, of soaked wool and liniment, and for those who could interpret it, of exhaustion, lost hope and triumph and bodies battling against each other.

To do otherwise, to begin joking, would have been a hypocritical denial of what had happened, and Phineas was not capable of that.

And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation and hard work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty were using this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to drive us, regardless of any war or peace.

I stood there pitying Mr. Ludsbury for his fatal thinness and reflecting that after all he had always had a gullible side.

His enlistment seemed just another of Leper’s vagaries, such as the time he slept on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine where each morning the sun first strikes United States territory.

It was the cleanest image of war I had ever seen; even the Air Force, reputedly so high above the infantry’s mud, was stained with axle grease by comparison, and the Navy was vulnerable to scurvy.

We talked about Leper’s stand at Stalingrad, Leper on the Burma Road, Leper’s convoy to Archangel; we surmised that the crisis over the leadership of the Free French would be resolved by the appointment of neither de Gaulle nor Giraud but Lepellier; we knew, better than the newspapers, that it was not the Big Three but the Big Four who were running the war.

You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with “personality,” and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone.

I jerked the jug to my mouth and took a huge gulp of cider in relief, and the violence latent in the day drifted away; perhaps the Naguamsett carried it out on the receding tide.

Leper didn’t bother to make a rejoinder.