A Separate Peace

I tore myself from the bench toward him. “Phineas—!”

He shook his head sharply, closing his eyes, and then he turned to regard me with a handsome mask of face. “I just don’t care. Never mind,” and he started across the marble floor toward the doors.

“Wait a minute!” cried Brinker. “We haven’t heard everything yet. We haven’t got all the facts!”

The words shocked Phineas into awareness. He whirled as though being attacked from behind. “You get the rest of the facts, Brinker!” he cried. “You get all your facts!” I had never seen Fi

The excellent exterior acoustics recorded his rushing steps and the quick rapping of his cane along the corridor and on the first steps of the marble stairway. Then these separate sounds collided into the general tumult of his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs.

Chapter 12

Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind. Brinker shouted that Phineas must not be moved; someone else, realizing that only a night nurse would be at the Infirmary, did not waste time going there but rushed to bring Dr. Stanpole from his house. Others remembered that Phil Latham, the wrestling coach, lived just across the Common and that he was an expert in first aid. It was Phil who made Fi

The foyer and the staircase of the First Building were soon as crowded as at midday. Phil Latham found the main light switch, and all the marble blazed up under full illumination. But surrounding it was the stillness of near-midnight in a country town, so that the hurrying feet and the repressed voices had a hollow reverberance. The windows, blind and black, retained their look of dull emptiness.

Once Brinker turned to me and said, “Go back to the Assembly Room and see if there’s any kind of blanket on the platform.” I dashed back up the stairs, found a blanket and gave it to Phil Latham. He carefully wrapped it around Phineas.

I would have liked very much to have done that myself; it would have meant a lot to me. But Phineas might begin to curse me with every word he knew, he might lose his head completely, he would certainly be worse off for it. So I kept out of the way.

He was entirely conscious and from the glimpses I caught of his face seemed to be fairly calm. Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind, and that included Phineas.

When Dr. Stanpole arrived there was silence on the stairs. Wrapped tightly in his blanket, with light flooding down on him from the chandelier, Fi

After a short, silent examination Dr. Stanpole had a chair brought from the Assembly Room, and Fi

Dr. Stanpole stopped near the doors, looking for the light switch. There was an interval of a few seconds when no one was near him. I came up to him and tried to phrase my question but nothing came out, I couldn’t find the word to begin. I was being torn irreconcilably between “Is he” and “What is” when Dr. Stanpole, without appearing to notice my tangle, said conversationally, “It’s the leg again. Broken again. But a much cleaner break I think, much cleaner. A simple fracture.” He found the light switch and the foyer was plunged into darkness.

Outside, the doctor’s car was surrounded by boys while Fi

Mr. Ludsbury loomed abruptly out of a. background of shrubbery. “Get along to the dormitory, Forrester,” he said with a dry certainty in my obedience which suddenly struck me as fu

Dr. Stanpole’s car was at the top of it, headlights on and motor ru

The ground was too damp to sit on, so I crouched down and waited. I could hear their blurred voices droning monotonously through the window. If they do nothing worse, they’re going to bore Fi

What could they be talking about? The night nurse had always been the biggest windbag in the school. Miss Windbag, R.N. Phil Latham, on the other hand, hardly ever spoke. One of the few things he said was “Give it the old college try”—he thought of everything in terms of the old college try, and he had told students to attack their studies, their sports, religious waverings, sexual maladjustments, physical handicaps and a constellation of other problems with the old college try. I listened tensely for his voice. I listened so hard that I nearly differentiated it from the others, and it seemed to be saying, “Fi