“I know, I know. I’m going to work. I really am going to work. You’re going to pull me through
mostly, but I am going to work as hard as I can. Only not today, not the first thing. Not now, not
conjugating verbs when I haven’t even looked at the school yet. I want to see this place, I haven’t
seen anything except the inside of our room, and the inside of chapel. I don’t feel like seeing the
inside of a classroom. Not now. Not yet.”
“What do you want to see?”
He had started to turn around so that his back was to me. “Let’s go to the gym,” he said shortly.
The gym was at the other end of the school, a quarter of a mile away at least, separated from us
by a field of ice. We set off without saying anything else.
By the time we had reached it sweat was running like oil from Finny’s face, and when he paused
involuntary tremors shook his hands and arms. The leg in its cast was like a sea anchor dragged
behind. The illusion of strength I had seen in our room that morning must have been the same
illusion he had used at home to deceive his doctor and his family into sending him back to
Devon.
We stood on the ice-coated lawn in front of the gym while he got ready to enter it, resting
himself so that he could go in with a show of energy. Later this became his habit; I often caught
up with him standing in front of a building pretending to be thinking or examining the sky or
taking off gloves, but it was never a convincing show. Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had
no practice.
We went into the gym, along a marble hallway, and to my surprise we went on past the Trophy
Room, where his name was already inscribed on one cup, one banner, and one embalmed
football. I was sure that this was his goal, to mull over these lost glories. I had prepared myself
for that, and even thought of several positive, uplifting aphorisms to cheer him up. But he went
by it without a thought, down a stairway, steep and marble, and into the locker room. I went
along mystified beside him. There was a pile of dirty towels in a corner. Finny shoved them with
a crutch. “What is all this crap,” he muttered with a little smile, “about no maids?”
The locker room was empty at this hour, row after row of dull green lockers separated by wide
wooden benches. The ceiling was hung with pipes. It was a drab room for Devon, dull green and
brown and gray, but at the far end there was a big marble archway, glisteningly white, which led
to the pool.
Finny sat down on a bench, struggled out of his sheep-lined winter coat, and took a deep breath
of gymnasium air. No locker room could have more pungent air than Devon’s; sweat
predominated, but it was richly mingled with smells of paraffin and singed rubber, of soaked
wool and liniment, and for those who could interpret it, of exhaustion, lost hope and triumph and
bodies battling against each other. I thought it anything but a bad smell. It was preeminently the
smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and
poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.