A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

  “You’ve been putting off enlisting in something for only one reason,” he said at once. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  “Well, I know, and I’ll tell you what it is. It’s Finny. You pity him.”

  “Pity him!”

  “Yes, pity him. And if you don’t watch out he’s going to start pitying himself. Nobody ever mentions his leg to him except me. Keep that up and he’ll be sloppy with self-pity any day now. What’s everybody beating around the bush for? He’s crippled and that’s that. He’s got to accept it and unless we start acting perfectly natural about it, even kid him about it once in a while, he never will.”

  “You’re so wrong I can’t even—I can’t even hear you, you’re so wrong.”

  “Well, I’m going to do it anyway.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “The hell I’m not. I don’t have to have your approval, do I?”

  “I’m his roommate, and I’m his best friend—”

  “And you were there when it happened. I know. And I don’t give a damn. And don’t forget,” he looked at me sharply, “you’ve got a little personal stake in this. What I mean is it wouldn’t do you any harm, you know, if everything about Finny’s accident was cleared up and forgotten.”

  I felt my face grimacing in the way Finny’s did when he was really irritated. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged and chuckled in his best manner, “nobody knows.” Then the charm disappeared and he added, “unless you know,” and his mouth closed in its straight expressionless line, and that was all that was said.

  • • •

  I had no idea what Brinker might say or do. Before he had always known and done whatever occurred to him because he was certain that whatever occurred to him was right. In the world of the Golden Fleece Debating Society and the Underprivileged Local Children subcommittee of the Good Samaritan Confraternity, this had created no problems. But I was afraid of that simple executive directness now.

  I walked back from chapel and found Finny in our dormitory, blocking the staircase until the others who wanted to go up sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God under his direction. No one who was tone deaf ever loved music so much. I think his shortcoming increased his appreciation; he loved it all indiscriminately—Beethoven, the latest love ditty, jazz, a hymn—it was all profoundly musical to Phineas.

  “. . . Our helper He a-mid the floods,” wafted out across the Common in the tempo of a football march, “Of mortal ills prevailing!”

  “Everything was all right,” said Finny at the end, “phrasing, rhythm, all that. But I’m not sure about your pitch. Half a tone off, I would estimate offhand.”

  We went on to our room. I sat down at the translation of Caesar I was doing for him, since he had to pass Latin at last this year or fail to graduate. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it.

  “Is anything exciting happening now?”

  “This part is pretty interesting,” I said, “if I understand it right. About a surprise attack.”

  “Read me that.”

  “Well let’s see. It begins, ‘When Caesar noticed that the enemy was remaining for several days at the camp fortified by a swamp and by the nature of the terrain, he sent a letter to Trebonius instructing him’—‘instructing him’ isn’t actually in the text but it’s understood; you know about that.”

  “Sure. Go on.”

  “ ‘Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him’—this ‘him’ refers to Caesar of course.”

  Finny looked at me with glazed interest and said, “Of course.”

  “ ‘Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him with three legions; he himself’—Caesar, that is—‘sent cavalry to withstand any sudden attacks of the enemy. Now when the Gauls learned what was going on, they scattered a selected band of foot soldiers in ambushes; who, overtaking our horsemen after the leader Vertiscus had been killed, followed our disorderly men up to our camp.’ ”

  “I have a feeling that’s what Mr. Horn is going to call a ‘muddy translation.’ What’s it mean?”

  “Caesar isn’t doing so well.”

  “But he won it in the end.”

  “Sure. If you mean the whole campaign—” I broke off. “He won it, if you really think there was a Gallic War . . .” Caesar, from the first, had been the one historical figure Phineas refused absolutely to believe in. Lost two thousand years in the past, master of a dead language and a dead empire, the bane and bore of schoolboys, Caesar he believed to be more of a tyrant at Devon than he had ever been in Rome. Phineas felt a personal and sincere grudge against Caesar, and he was outraged most by his conviction that Caesar and Rome and Latin had never been alive at all . . . “If you really think there ever was a Caesar,” I said.

  Finny got up from the cot, picking up his cane as an afterthought. He looked oddly at me, his face set to burst out laughing I thought. “Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers,” he came across a few paces, “but I do believe—it’s important after all for me to believe you. Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody.” I waited without saying anything. “And you told me about Leper, that he’s gone crazy. That’s the word, we might as well admit it. Leper’s gone crazy. When I heard that about Leper, then I knew that the war was real, this war and all the wars. If a war can drive somebody crazy, then it’s real all right. Oh I guess I always knew, but I didn’t have to admit it.” He perched his foot, small cast with metal bar across the bottom to walk on, next to where I was sitting on the cot. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too completely sure about you, when you told me how Leper was. Of course I believed you,” he added hurriedly, “but you’re the nervous type, you know, and I thought maybe your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont. I thought he might not be quite as mixed up as you made out.” Finny’s face tried to prepare me for what came next. “Then I saw him myself.”

  I turned incredulously. “You saw Leper?”

  “I saw him here this morning, after chapel. He was—well, there’s nothing inflamed about my imagination and I saw Leper hiding in the shrubbery next to the chapel. I slipped out the side door the way I always do—to miss the rush—and I saw Leper and he must have seen me. He didn’t say a damn word. He looked at me like I was a gorilla or something and then he ducked into Mr. Carhart’s office.”

  “He must be crazy,” I said automatically, and then my eyes involuntarily met Finny’s. We both broke into sudden laughter.

  “We can’t do a damn thing about it,” he said ruefully.

  “I don’t want to see him,” I muttered. Then, trying to be more responsible, “Who else knows he’s here?”

  “No one, I would think.”

  “There’s nothing for us to do, maybe Carhart or Dr. Stanpole can do something. We won’t tell anybody about it because . . . because they would just scare Leper, and he would scare them.”

  “Anyway,” said Finny, “then I knew there was a real war on.”

  “Yes, I guess it’s a real war all right. But I liked yours a lot better.”

  “So did I.”

  “I wish you hadn’t found out. What did you have to find out for!” We started to laugh again, with a half-guilty exchange of glances, in the way that two people who had gone on a gigantic binge when they were last together would laugh when they met again at the parson’s tea. “Well,” he said, “you did a beautiful job in the Olympics.”

  “And you were the greatest news analyst who ever lived.”

  “Do you realize you won every gold medal in every Olympic event? No one’s ever done anything like that in history.”

  “And you scooped every newspaper in the world on every story.” The sun was doing antics among the million specks of dust hanging between us and casting a brilliant, unstable pool of light on the floor. “No one’s ever done anything like that before.�
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  • • •

  Brinker and three cohorts came with much commotion into our room at 10:05 p.m. that night. “We’re taking you out,” he said flatly.

  “It’s after hours,” I said; “Where?” said Finny with interest at the same time.

  “You’ll see. Get them.” His friends half-lifted us half-roughly, and we were hustled down the stairs. I thought it must be some kind of culminating prank, the senior class leaving Devon with a flourish. Were we going to steal the clapper of the school bell, or would we tether a cow in chapel?

  They steered us toward the First Building—burned down and rebuilt several times but still known as the First Building of the Devon School. It contained only classrooms and so at this hour was perfectly empty, which made us stealthier than ever. Brinker’s many keys, surviving from his class-officer period, jingled softly as we reached the main door. Above us in Latin flowed the inscription, Here Boys Come to Be Made Men.

  The lock turned; we went in, entering the doubtful reality of a hallway familiar only in daylight and bustle. Our footsteps fell guiltily on the marble floor. We continued across the foyer to a dreamlike bank of windows, turned left up a pale flight of marble steps, left again, through two doorways, and into the Assembly Room. From the high ceiling one of the celebrated Devon chandeliers, all glittering tears, scattered thin illumination. Row after row of black Early American benches spread emptily back through the shadows to long, vague windows. At the front of the room there was a raised platform with a balustrade in front of it. About ten members of the senior class sat on the platform; all of them were wearing their black graduation robes. This is going to be some kind of schoolboy masquerade, I thought, some masquerade with masks and candles.

  “You see how Phineas limps,” said Brinker loudly as we walked in. It was too coarse and too loud; I wanted to hit him for shocking me like that. Phineas looked perplexed. “Sit down,” he went on, “take a load off your feet.” We sat in the front row of the benches where eight or ten others were sitting, smirking uneasily at the students on the platform.

  Whatever Brinker had in his mind to do, I thought he had chosen a terrible place for it. There was nothing funny about the Assembly Room. I could remember staring torpidly through these windows a hundred times out at the elms of the Center Common. The windows now had the closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf. The great expanses of wall space were opaque with canvas, portraits in oil of deceased headmasters, a founder or two, forgotten leaders of the faculty, a beloved athletic coach none of us had ever heard of, a lady we could not identify—her fortune had largely rebuilt the school; a nameless poet who was thought when under the school’s protection to be destined primarily for future generations; a young hero now anonymous who looked theatrical in the First World War uniform in which he had died.

  I thought any prank was bound to fall flat here.

  The Assembly Hall was used for large lectures, debates, plays, and concerts; it had the worst acoustics in the school. I couldn’t make out what Brinker was saying. He stood on the polished marble floor in front of us, but facing the platform, talking to the boys behind the balustrade. I heard him say the word “inquiry” to them, and something about “the country demands. . . .”

  “What is all this hot air?” I said into the blur.

  “I don’t know,” Phineas answered shortly.

  As he turned toward us Brinker was saying “. . . blame on the responsible party. We will begin with a brief prayer.” He paused, surveying us with the kind of wide-eyed surmise Mr. Carhart always used at this point, and then added in Mr. Carhart’s urbane murmur, “Let us pray.”

  We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly into the awkward crouch in which God was addressed at Devon, leaning forward with elbows on knees. Brinker had caught us, and in a moment it was too late to escape, for he had moved swiftly into the Lord’s Prayer. If when Brinker had said “Let us pray” I had said “Go to hell” everything might have been saved.

  At the end there was an indecisive, semiserious silence and then Brinker said, “Phineas, if you please.” Finny got up with a shrug and walked to the center of the floor, between us and the platform. Brinker got an armchair from behind the balustrade, and seated Finny on it with courtly politeness. “Now just in your own words,” he said.

  “What own words?” said Phineas, grimacing up at him with his best you-are-an-idiot expression.

  “I know you haven’t got many of your own,” said Brinker with a charitable smile. “Use some of Gene’s then.”

  “What shall I talk about? You? I’ve got plenty of words of my own for that.”

  “I’m all right,” Brinker glanced gravely around the room for confirmation, “you’re the casualty.”

  “Brinker,” began Finny in a constricted voice I did not recognize, “are you off your head or what?”

  “No,” said Brinker evenly, “that’s Leper, our other casualty. Tonight we’re investigating you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about!” I cut in suddenly.

  “Investigating Finny’s accident!” He spoke as though this was the most natural and self-evident and inevitable thing we could be doing.

  I felt the blood flooding into my head. “After all,” Brinker continued, “there is a war on. Here’s one soldier our side has already lost. We’ve got to find out what happened.”

  “Just for the record,” said someone from the platform. “You agree, don’t you, Gene?”

  “I told Brinker this morning,” I began in a voice treacherously shaking, “that I thought this was the worst—”

  “And I said,” Brinker’s voice was full of authority and perfectly under control, “that for Finny’s good,” and with an additional timbre of sincerity, “and for your own good too, by the way, Gene, that we should get all this out into the open. We don’t want any mysteries or any stray rumors and suspicions left in the air at the end of the year, do we?”

  A collective assent to this rumbled through the blurring atmosphere of the Assembly Room.

  “What are you talking about!” Finny’s voice was full of contemptuous music. “What rumors and suspicions?”

  “Never mind about that,” said Brinker with his face responsibly grave. He’s enjoying this, I thought bitterly, he’s imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He’s forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded. “Why don’t you just tell us in your words what happened?” Brinker continued. “Just humor us, if you want to think of it that way. We aren’t trying to make you feel bad. Just tell us. You know we wouldn’t ask you if we didn’t have a good reason . . . good reasons.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Nothing to tell?” Brinker looked pointedly at the small cast around Finny’s lower leg and the cane he held between his knees.

  “Well then, I fell out of a tree.”

  “Why?” said someone on the platform. The acoustics were so bad and the light so dim that I could rarely tell who was speaking, except for Finny and Brinker who were isolated on the wide strip of marble floor between us in the seats and the others on the platform.

  “Why?” repeated Phineas. “Because I took a wrong step.”

  “Did you lose your balance?” continued the voice.

  “Yes,” echoed Finny grimly, “I lost my balance.”

  “You had better balance than anyone in the school.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I didn’t say it for a compliment.”

  “Well then, no thanks.”

  “Have you ever thought that you didn’t just fall out of that tree?”

  This touched an interesting point Phineas had been turning over in his mind for a long time. I could tell that because the obstinate, competitive look left his face as his mind became engaged for the first time. “It’s very funny,” he said, “but ever since then I’ve had a feeling that the tree did it by itself. It’s an impression I’ve
had. Almost as though the tree shook me out by itself.”

  The acoustics in the Assembly Room were so poor that silences there had a heavy hum of their own.

  “Someone else was in the tree, isn’t that so?”

  “No,” said Finny spontaneously, “I don’t think so.” He looked at the ceiling. “Or was there? Maybe there was somebody climbing up the rungs of the trunk. I kind of forget.”

  This time the hum of silence was prolonged to a point where I would be forced to fill it with some kind of sound if it didn’t end. Then someone else on the platform spoke up. “I thought somebody told me that Gene Forrester was—”

  “Finny was there,” Brinker interrupted commandingly, “he knows better than anyone.”

  “You were there too, weren’t you, Gene?” this new voice from the platform continued.

  “Yes,” I said with interest, “yes, I was there too.”

  “Were you—near the tree?”

  Finny turned toward me. “You were down at the bottom, weren’t you?” he asked, not in the official courtroom tone he had used before, but in a friend’s voice.

  I had been studying very carefully the way my hands wrinkled when tightly clenched, but I was able to bring my head up and return his inquiring look. “Down at the bottom, yes.”

  Finny went on. “Did you see the tree shake or anything?” He flushed faintly at what seemed to him the absurdity of his own question. “I’ve always meant to ask you, just for the hell of it.”

  I took this under consideration. “I don’t recall anything like that . . .”

  “Nutty question,” he muttered.

  “I thought you were in the tree,” the platform voice cut in.

  “Well of course,” Finny said with an exasperated chuckle, “of course I was in the tree—oh you mean Gene?—he wasn’t in—is that what you mean, or—” Finny floundered with muddled honesty between me and my questioner.