other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked
since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the
beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he
wanted for himself. I didn’t want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his
trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out
now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider
inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn’t the words he said which
angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer,
nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes,
he had not seen Leper’s snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing,
knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.
“You, Quackenbush, don’t know anything about who I am.” That launched me, and I had to go
on and say, “or anything else.”
“Listen you maimed son-of-a-bitch ...”
I hit him hard across the face. I didn’t know why for an instant; it was almost as though I were
maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me.
Quackenbush had clamped his arm in some kind of tight wrestling grip around my neck, and I
was glad in this moment not to be a cripple. I reached over, grasped the back of his sweat shirt,
wrenched, and it came away in my hand. I tried to throw him off, he lunged at the same time, and
we catapulted into the water.
The dousing extinguished Quackenbush’s rage, and he let go of me. I scrambled back onto the
float, still seared by what he had said. “The next time you call anybody maimed,” I bit off the
words harshly so he would understand all of them, “you better make sure they are first.”
“Get out of here, Forrester,” he said bitterly from the water, “you’re not wanted around here,
Forrester. Get out of here.”
I fought that battle, that first skirmish of a long campaign, for Finny. Until the back of my hand
cracked against Quackenbush’s face I had never pictured myself in the role of Finny’s defender,
and I didn’t suppose that he would have thanked me for it now. He was too loyal to anything
connected with himself—his roommate, his dormitory, his class, his school, outward in vastly
expanded circles of loyalty until I couldn’t imagine who would be excluded. But it didn’t feel
exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself.
If so I had little profit to show as I straggled back toward the dormitory dripping wet, with the
job I had wanted gone, temper gone, mind circling over and over through the whole soured
afternoon. I knew now that it was fall all right; I could feel it pressing clammily against my wet
clothes, an unfriendly, discomforting breath in the air, an edge of wintery chill, air that shriveled,
soon to put out the lights on the countryside. One of my legs wouldn’t stop trembling, whether
from cold or anger I couldn’t tell. I wished I had hit him harder.