Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was
the real point of the sermon on this first morning.
After the service ended we set out seven hundred strong, the regular winter throng of the Devon
School, to hustle through our lists of appointments. All classrooms were crowded, swarms were
on the crosswalks, the dormitories were as noisy as factories, every bulletin board was a forest of
notices.
We had been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric
notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking charge,
assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had belonged only to
us. I had the same room which Finny and I had shared during the summer, but across the hall, in
the large suite where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid
sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the
room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping
in to confer with him. Leper, luckless in his last year as all the others, had been moved to a room
lost in an old building off somewhere in the trees toward the gym.
After morning classes and lunch I went across to see Brinker, started into the room and then
stopped. Suddenly I did not want to see the trays of snails which Leper had passed the summer
collecting replaced by Brinker’s files. Not yet. Although it was something to have this year’s
dominant student across the way. Ordinarily he should have been a magnet for me, the center of
all the excitement and influences in the class. Ordinarily this would have been so—if the
summer, the gypsy days, had not intervened. Now Brinker, with his steady wit and ceaseless
plans, Brinker had nothing to offer in place of Leper’s dust motes and creeping ivy and snails.
I didn’t go in. In any case I was late for my afternoon appointment. I never used to be late. But
today I was, later even than I had to be. I was supposed to report to the Crew House, down on the
banks of the lower river. There are two rivers at Devon, divided by a small dam. On my way I
stopped on the footbridge which crosses the top of the dam separating them and looked
upstream, at the narrow little Devon River sliding toward me between its thick fringe of pine and
birch.
As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but
of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe
like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a
complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others
to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole
body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently
pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space,
encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky.
Then, an infinitesimal veering of the canoe, and the line of his body would break, the soaring
arms collapse, up shoot an uncontrollable leg, and Phineas would tumble into the water, roaring
with rage.