and the novelty and money of these days excited us. Life at Devon was revealed as still very
close to the ways of peace; the war was at worst only a bore, as Brinker said, no more taxing to
us than a day spent at harvesting in an apple orchard.
Not long afterward, early even for New Hampshire, snow came. It came theatrically, late one
afternoon; I looked up from my desk and saw that suddenly there were big flakes twirling down
into the quadrangle, settling on the carefully pruned shrubbery bordering the crosswalks, the
three elms still holding many of their leaves, the still-green lawns. They gathered there thicker by
the minute, like noiseless invaders conquering because they took possession so gently. I watched
them whirl past my window—don’t take this seriously, the playful way they fell seemed to
imply, this little show, this harmless trick.
It seemed to be true. The school was thinly blanketed that night, but the next morning, a bright,
almost balmy day, every flake disappeared. The following weekend, however, it snowed again,
then two days later much harder, and by the end of that week the ground had been clamped under
snow for the winter.
In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about maids and
days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow was
commandeered as its advance guard.
Leper Lepellier didn’t suspect this. It was not in fact evident to anyone at first. But Leper stands
out for me as the person who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise, by this
and every other shift in our life at Devon.
The heavy snow paralyzed the railroad yards of one of the large towns south of us on the Boston
and Maine line. At chapel the day following the heaviest snowfall, two hundred volunteers were
solicited to spend the day shoveling them out, as part of the Emergency Usefulness policy
adopted by the faculty that fall. Again we would be paid. So we all volunteered, Brinker and I
and Chet Douglass and even I noticed, Quackenbush.
But not Leper. He generally made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook
during chapel, so that he had probably not heard the announcement. The train to take us south to
the work did not arrive until after lunch, and on my way to the station, taking a short cut through
a meadow not far from the river, I met Leper. I had hardly seen him all fall, and I hardly
recognized him now. He was standing motionless on the top of a small ridge, and he seemed
from a distance to be a scarecrow left over from the growing season. As I plodded toward him
through the snow I began to differentiate items of clothing—a dull green deer-stalker’s cap,
brown ear muffs, a thick gray woolen scarf—then at last I recognified the face in the midst of
them, Leper’s, pinched and pink, his eyes peering curiously toward some distant woods through
steel-rimmed glasses. As I got nearer I noticed that below his long tan canvas coat with sagging
pockets, below the red and black plaid woolen knickers and green puttees, he was wearing skis.
They were very long, wooden and battered, and had two decorative, old-fashioned knobs on their
tips.