A Separate Peace

We were walking up the steps of the infirmary everything was very swift, and next I was in a corridor being nudged by Dr. Stanpole toward a door. “He’s in there. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

The door was slightly ajar, and I pushed it back and stood transfixed on the threshold. Phineas lay among pillows and sheets, his left leg, enormous in its white bindings, suspended a little above the bed. A tube led from a glass bottle into his right arm. Some cha

“Come on in,” I heard him say. “You look worse than I do.” The fact that he could still make a light remark pulled me back a little, and I went to a chair beside his bed. He seemed to have diminished physically in the few days which had passed, and to have lost his tan. His eyes studied me as though I were the patient. They no longer had their sharp good humor but had become clouded and visionary. After a while I realized he had been given a drug. “What are you looking so sick about?” he went on.

“Fi

“I just fell,” his eyes were vaguely on my face, “something jiggled and I fell over. I remember I turned around and looked at you, it was like I had all the time in the world. I thought I could reach out and get hold of you.”

I flinched violently away from him. “To drag me down too!”

He kept looking vaguely over my face. “To get hold of you, so I wouldn’t fall off.”

“Yes, naturally.” I was fighting for air in this close room. “I tried, you remember? I reached out but you were gone, you went down through those little branches underneath, and when I reached out there was only air.”

“I just remember looking at your face for a second. Awfully fu

“Right now? Well, of course, I am shocked. Who wouldn’t be shocked, for God sakes. It’s terrible, everything’s terrible.”

“But I don’t see why you should look so personally shocked. You look like it happened to you or something.”

“It’s almost like it did! I was right there, right on the limb beside you.”

“Yes, I know. I remember it all.”

There was a hard block of silence, and then I said quietly, as though my words might detonate the room, “Do you remember what made you fall?”

His eyes continued their roaming across my face. “I don’t know, I must have just lost my balance. It must have been that I did have this idea, this feeling that when you were standing there beside me, y—I don’t know, I had a kind of feeling. But you can’t say anything for sure from just feelings. And this feeling doesn’t make any sense. It was a crazy idea, I must have been delirious. So I just have to forget it. I just fell,” he turned away to grope for something among the pillows, “that’s all.” Then he glanced back at me, Tm sorry about that feeling I had.”

I couldn’t say anything to this sincere, drugged apology for having suspected the truth. He was never going to accuse me. It was only a feeling he had, and at this moment he must have been formulating a new commandment in his personal decalogue. Never accuse a friend of a crime if you only have a feeling he did it.

And I thought we were competitors! It was so ludicrous I wanted to cry.

If Phineas had been sitting here in this pool of guilt, how would he have felt, what would he have done?

He would have told me the truth.

I got up so suddenly that the chair overturned. I stared at him in amazement, and he stared back, his mouth breaking into a grin as the moments passed. “Well,” he said at last in his friendly knowing voice, “what are you going to do, hypnotize me?”

“Fi

“My God, what energy,” he said, falling back against the pillows. “You sound like General MacArthur.”

“I don’t care who I sound like, and you won’t think so when I tell you. This is the worst thing in the world, and I’m sorry and I hate to tell you but I’ve got to tell you.”

But I didn’t tell him. Dr. Stanpole came in before I was able to, and then a nurse came in, and I was sent away. The next day the doctor decided that Fi

The Summer Session closed, officially came to an end. But to me it seemed irresolutely suspended, halted strangely before its time. I went south for a month’s vacation in my home town and spent it in an atmosphere of reverie and unreality, as though I had lived that month once already and had not been interested by it the first time either.

At the end of September I started back toward Devon on the jammed, erratic trains of September, 1942. I reached Boston seventeen hours behind schedule; there would be prestige in that at Devon, where those of us from long distances with travel adventures to report or invent held the floor for several days after a vacation.

By luck I got a taxi at South Station, and instead of saying “North Station” to the driver, instead of just crossing Boston and catching the final train for the short last leg of the trip to Devon, instead of that I sat back in the seat and heard myself give the address of Fi

We found it fairly easily, on a street with a nave of ancient elms branching over it. The house itself was high, white, and oddly proper to be the home of Phineas. It presented a face of definite elegance to the street, although behind that wings and ells dwindled quickly in formality until the house ended in a big plain barn.

Nothing surprised Phineas. A cleaning woman answered the door and when I came into the room where he was sitting, he looked very pleased and not at all surprised.

“So you are going to show up!” his voice took off in one of its flights, “and you brought me something to eat from down South, didn’t you? Honeysuckle and molasses or something like that?” I tried to think of something fu

“I brought … Well I never remember to bring anyone anything.” I struggled to get my voice above this self-accusing murmur. “I’ll send you something. Flowers or something.”

“Flowers! What happened to you in Dixie anyway?”

“Well then,” there was no light remark anywhere in my head, “I’ll get you some books.”

“Never mind about books. I’d rather have some talk. What happened down South?”

“As a matter of fact,” I brought out all the cheerfulness I could find for this, “there was a fire. It was just a grass fire out behind our house. We … took some brooms and beat it. I guess what we really did was fan it because it just kept getting bigger until the Fire Department finally came. They could tell where it was because of all the flaming brooms we were waving around in the air, trying to put them out.”

Fi