A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

  There was no one to stop me but myself. Putting aside soft reservations about What I Owed Devon and my duty to my parents and so on, I reckoned my responsibilities by the light of the unsentimental night sky and knew that I owed no one anything. I owed it to myself to meet this crisis in my life when I chose, and I chose now.

  I bounced zestfully up the dormitory stairs. Perhaps because my mind still retained the image of the sharp night stars, those few fixed points of light in the darkness, perhaps because of that the warm yellow light streaming from under my own door came as such a shock. It was a simple case of a change of expectation. The light should have been off. Instead, as though alive itself, it poured in a thin yellow slab of brightness from under the door, illuminating the dust and splinters of the hall floor.

  I grabbed the knob and swung open the door. He was seated in my chair at the desk, bending down to adjust the gross encumbrance of his leg, so that only the familiar ears set close against his head were visible, and his short-cut brown hair. He looked up with a provocative grin, “Hi pal, where’s the brass band?”

  Everything that had happened throughout the day faded like that first false snowfall of the winter. Phineas was back.

  8

  “Ican see I never should have left you alone,” Phineas went on before I could recover from the impact of finding him there, “Where did you get those clothes!” His bright, indignant eyes swept from my battered gray cap, down the frayed sweater and paint-stained pants to a pair of clodhoppers. “You don’t have to advertise like that, we all know you’re the worst dressed man in the class.”

  “I’ve been working, that’s all. These are just work clothes.”

  “In the boiler room?”

  “On the railroad. Shoveling snow.”

  He sat back in the chair. “Shoveling railroad snow. Well that makes sense, we always did that the first term.”

  I pulled off the sweater, under which I was wearing a rain slicker I used to go sailing in, a kind of canvas sack. Phineas just studied it in wordless absorption. “I like the cut of it,” he finally murmured. I pulled that off revealing an Army fatigue shirt my brother had given me. “Very topical,” said Phineas through his teeth. After that came off there was just my undershirt, stained with sweat. He smiled at it for a while and then said as he heaved himself out of the chair, “There. You should have worn that all day, just that. That has real taste. The rest of your outfit was just gilding that lily of a sweat shirt.”

  “Glad to hear you like it.”

  “Not at all,” he replied ambiguously, reaching for a pair of crutches which leaned against the desk.

  I took the sight of this all right, I had seen him on crutches the year before when he broke his ankle playing football. At Devon crutches had almost as many athletic associations as shoulder pads. And I had never seen an invalid whose skin glowed with such health, accenting the sharp clarity of his eyes, or one who used his arms and shoulders on crutches as though on parallel bars, as though he would do a somersault on them if he felt like it. Phineas vaulted across the room to his cot, yanked back the spread and then groaned. “Oh Christ, it’s not made up. What is all this crap about no maids?”

  “No maids,” I said. “After all, there’s a war on. It’s not much of a sacrifice, when you think of people starving and being bombed and all the other things.” My unselfishness was responding properly to the influences of 1942. In these past months Phineas and I had grown apart on this; I felt a certain disapproval of him for grumbling about a lost luxury, with a war on. “After all,” I repeated, “there is a war on.”

  “Is there?” he murmured absently. I didn’t pay any attention; he was always speaking when his thoughts were somewhere else, asking rhetorical questions and echoing other people’s words.

  I found some sheets and made up his bed for him. He wasn’t a bit sensitive about being helped, not a bit like an invalid striving to seem independent. I put this on the list of things to include when I said some prayers, the first in a long time, that night in bed. Now that Phineas was back it seemed time to start saying prayers again.

  After the lights went out the special quality of my silence let him know that I was saying them, and he kept quiet for approximately three minutes. Then he began to talk; he never went to sleep without talking first and he seemed to feel that prayers lasting more than three minutes were showing off. God was always unoccupied in Finny’s universe, ready to lend an ear any time at all. Anyone who failed to get his message through in three minutes, as I sometimes failed to do when trying to impress him, Phineas, with my sanctity, wasn’t trying.

  He was still talking when I fell asleep, and the next morning, through the icy atmosphere which one window raised an inch had admitted to our room, he woke me with the overindignant shout, “What is all this crap about no maids!” He was sitting up in bed, as though ready to spring out of it, totally and energetically awake. I had to laugh at this indignant athlete, with the strength of five people, complaining about the service. He threw back his bedclothes and said, “Hand me my crutches, will you?”

  Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter of snow and crutches with Phineas, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk. Phineas however did not believe this. I’m sure that he looked down at his leg every morning first thing, as soon as he remembered it, to see if it had not been totally restored while he slept. When he found on this first morning back at Devon that it happened still to be crippled and in a cast, he said in his usual self-contained way, “Hand me my crutches, will you?”

  Brinker Hadley, next door, always awoke like an express train. There was a gathering rumble through the wall, as Brinker reared up in bed, coughed hoarsely, slammed his feet on the floor, pounded through the freezing air to the closet for something in the way of clothes, and thundered down the hall to the bathroom. Today, however, he veered and broke into our room instead.

  “Ready to sign up?” he shouted before he was through the door. “You ready to en—Finny!”

  “You ready to en—what?” pursued Finny from his bed. “Who’s ready to sign and en what?”

  “Finny. By God you’re back!”

  “Sure,” confirmed Finny with a slight, pleased grin.

  “So,” Brinker curled his lip at me, “your little plot didn’t work so well after all.”

  “What’s he talking about?” said Finny as I thrust his crutches beneath his shoulders.

  “Just talking,” I said shortly. “What does Brinker ever talk about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about well enough.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Oh yes you do.”

  “Are you telling me what I know?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  “What’s he talking about,” said Finny.

  The room was bitterly cold. I stood trembling in front of Phineas, still holding his crutches in place, unable to turn and face Brinker and this joke he had gotten into his head, this catastrophic joke.

  “He wants to know if I’ll sign up with him,” I said, “enlist.” It was the ultimate question for all seventeen-year-olds that year, and it drove Brinker’s insinuations from every mind but mine.

  “Yeah,” said Brinker.

  “Enlist!” cried Finny at the same time. His large and clear eyes turned with an odd expression on me. I had never seen such a look in them before. After looking at me closely he said, “You’re going to enlist?”

  “Well I just thought—last night after the railroad work—”

  “You thought you might sign up?” he went on, looking carefully away.

  Brinker drew one of his deep senatorial breaths, but he found nothing to say. We
three stood shivering in the thin New Hampshire morning light, Finny and I in pajamas, Brinker in a blue flannel bathrobe and ripped moccasins. “When will you?” Finny went on.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It was just something Brinker happened to say last night, that’s all.”

  “I said,” Brinker began in an unusually guarded voice, glancing quickly at Phineas, “I said something about enlisting today.”

  Finny hobbled over to the dresser and took up his soap dish. “I’m first in the shower,” he said.

  “You can’t get that cast wet, can you?” asked Brinker.

  “No, I’ll keep it outside the curtain.”

  “I’ll help,” said Brinker.

  “No,” said Finny without looking at him, “I can manage all right.”

  “How can you manage all right?” Brinker persisted aggressively.

  “I can manage all right,” Finny repeated with a set face.

  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. In some way he needed me. He needed me. I was the least trustworthy person he had ever met. I knew that; he knew or should know that too. I had even told him. I had told him. But there was no mistaking the shield of remoteness in his face and voice. He wanted me around. The war then passed away from me, and dreams of enlistment and escape and a clean start lost their meaning for me.

  “Sure you can manage the shower all right,” I said, “but what difference does it make? Come on. Brinker’s always . . . Brinker’s always getting there first. Enlist! What a nutty idea. It’s just Brinker wanting to get there first again. I wouldn’t enlist with you if you were General MacArthur’s eldest son.”

  Brinker reared back arrogantly. “And who do you think I am!” But Finny hadn’t heard that. His face had broken into a wide and dazzled smile at what I had said, lighting up his whole face. “Enlist!” I drove on, “I wouldn’t enlist with you if you were Elliott Roosevelt.”

  “First cousin,” said Brinker over his chin, “once removed.”

  “He wouldn’t enlist with you,” Finny plunged in, “if you were Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”

  “Well,” I qualified in an undertone, “he really is Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”

  “Well fan my brow,” cried Finny, giving us his stunned look of total appalled horrified amazement, “who would have thought that! Chinese. The Yellow Peril, right here at Devon.”

  And as far as the history of the Class of 1943 at the Devon School is concerned, this was the only part of our conversation worth preserving. Brinker Hadley had been tagged with a nickname at last, after four years of creating them for others and eluding one himself. “Yellow Peril” Hadley swept through the school with the speed of a flu epidemic, and it must be said to his credit that Brinker took it well enough except when, in its inevitable abbreviation, people sometimes called him “Yellow” instead of “Peril.”

  But in a week I had forgotten that, and I have never since forgotten the dazed look on Finny’s face when he thought that on the first day of his return to Devon I was going to desert him. I didn’t know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn’t care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful summertime stillness I had prized so much at Devon, and although the playing fields were crusted under a foot of congealed snow and the river was now a hard gray-white lane of ice between gaunt trees, peace had come back to Devon for me.

  So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on the beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.

  • • •

  “I like the winter,” Finny assured me for the fourth time, as we came back from chapel that morning.

  “Well, it doesn’t like you.” Wooden plank walks had been placed on many of the school paths for better footing, but there were icy patches everywhere on them. A crutch misplaced and he could be thrown down upon the frozen wooden planking, or into the ice-encrusted snow.

  Even indoors Devon was a nest of traps for him. The school had been largely rebuilt with a massive bequest from an oil family some years before in a peculiar style of Puritan grandeur, as though Versailles had been modified for the needs of a Sunday school. 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.

  But once you passed through the Colonial doorways, with only an occasional fan window or low relief pillar to suggest that a certain muted adornment was permissible, you entered an extravaganza of Pompadour splendor. Pink marble walls and white marble floors were enclosed by arched and vaulted ceilings; an assembly room had been done in the manner of the High Italian Renaissance, another was illuminated by chandeliers flashing with crystal teardrops; there was a wall of fragile French windows overlooking an Italian garden of marble bric-à-brac; the library was Provençal on the first floor, rococo on the second. And everywhere, except in the dormitories, the floors and stairs were of smooth, slick marble, more treacherous even than the icy walks.

  “The winter loves me,” he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, “I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.” I didn’t think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny’s: it should have been true. So I didn’t argue.

  The board walk ended and he moved a little ahead of me as we descended a sloping path toward our first class. He picked his way with surprising care, surprising in anyone who before had used the ground mainly as a point of departure, as the given element in a suspended world of leaps in space. And now I remembered what I had never taken any special note of before: how Phineas used to walk. Around Devon we had gaits of every description; gangling shuffles from boys who had suddenly grown a foot taller, swinging cowboy lopes from those thinking of how wide their shoulders had become, ambles, waddles, light trippings, gigantic Bunyan strides. But Phineas had moved in continuous flowing balance, so that he had seemed to drift along with no effort at all, relaxation on the move. He hobbled now among the patches of ice. There was the one certainty that Dr. Stanpole had given—Phineas would walk again. But the thought was there before me that he would never walk like that again.

  “Do you have a class?” he said as we reached the steps of the building.

  “Yes.”

  “So do I. Let’s not go.”

  “Not go? But what’ll we use for an excuse?”

  “We’ll say I fainted from exertion on the way from chapel,” he looked at me with a phantom’s smile, “and you had to tend me.”

  “This is your first day back, Finny. You’re no one to cut classes.”

  “I know, I know. I’m going to work. I really am going to work. You’re going to pull me through mostly, but I am going to work as hard as I can. Only not today, not the first thing. Not now, not conjugating verbs when I haven’t even looked at the school yet. I want to see this place, I haven’t seen anything except the inside of our room, and the inside of chapel. I don’t feel like seeing the inside of a classroom. Not now. Not yet.”

  “What do you
want to see?”

  He had started to turn around so that his back was to me. “Let’s go to the gym,” he said shortly.

  The gym was at the other end of the school, a quarter of a mile away at least, separated from us by a field of ice. We set off without saying anything else.

  By the time we had reached it sweat was running like oil from Finny’s face, and when he paused involuntary tremors shook his hands and arms. The leg in its cast was like a sea anchor dragged behind. The illusion of strength I had seen in our room that morning must have been the same illusion he had used at home to deceive his doctor and his family into sending him back to Devon.

  We stood on the ice-coated lawn in front of the gym while he got ready to enter it, resting himself so that he could go in with a show of energy. Later this became his habit; I often caught up with him standing in front of a building pretending to be thinking or examining the sky or taking off gloves, but it was never a convincing show. Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had no practice.

  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 was sure that this was his goal, to mull over these lost glories. I had prepared myself for that, and even thought of several positive, uplifting aphorisms to cheer him up. But he went by it without a thought, down a stairway, steep and marble, and into the locker room. I went along mystified beside him. There was a pile of dirty towels in a corner. Finny shoved them with a crutch. “What is all this crap,” he muttered with a little smile, “about no maids?”

  The locker room was empty at this hour, row after row of dull green lockers separated by wide wooden benches. The ceiling was hung with pipes. It was a drab room for Devon, dull green and brown and gray, but at the far end there was a big marble archway, glisteningly white, which led to the pool.