Brinker reared back arrogantly. “And who do you think I am!” But Finny hadn’t heard that. His
face had broken into a wide and dazzled smile at what I had said, lighting up his whole face.
“Enlist!” I drove on, “I wouldn’t enlist with you if you were Elliott Roosevelt.”
“First cousin,” said Brinker over his chin, “once removed.”
“He wouldn’t enlist with you,” Finny plunged in, “if you were Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”
“Well,” I qualified in an undertone, “he really is Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”
“Well fan my brow,” cried Finny, giving us his stunned look of total appalled horrified
amazement, “who would have thought that! Chinese. The Yellow Peril, right here at Devon.”
And as far as the history of the Class of 1943 at the Devon School is concerned, this was the only
part of our conversation worth preserving. Brinker Hadley had been tagged with a nickname at
last, after four years of creating them for others and eluding one himself. “Yellow Peril” Hadley
swept through the school with the speed of a flu epidemic, and it must be said to his credit that
Brinker took it well enough except when, in its inevitable abbreviation, people sometimes called
him “Yellow” instead of “Peril.”
But in a week I had forgotten that, and I have never since forgotten the dazed look on Finny’s
face when he thought that on the first day of his return to Devon I was going to desert him. I
didn’t know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most
humbling sides of his handicap. I didn’t care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful
summertime stillness I had prized so much at Devon, and although the playing fields were
crusted under a foot of congealed snow and the river was now a hard gray-white lane of ice
between gaunt trees, peace had come back to Devon for me.
So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us,
overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word
from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled
harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on the beach, but leaving me
peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed
by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.
“I like the winter,” Finny assured me for the fourth time, as we came back from chapel that
morning.
“Well, it doesn’t like you.” Wooden plank walks had been placed on many of the school paths
for better footing, but there were icy patches everywhere on them. A crutch misplaced and he
could be thrown down upon the frozen wooden planking, or into the ice-encrusted snow.
Even indoors Devon was a nest of traps for him. The school had been largely rebuilt with a
massive bequest from an oil family some years before in a peculiar style of Puritan grandeur, as
though Versailles had been modified for the needs of a Sunday school. This opulent sobriety
betrayed the divided nature of the school, just as in a different way the two rivers that it straddled