And now when we were served chicken livers for dinner I couldn’t help conceiving a mental
picture of President Roosevelt and my father and Finny’s father and numbers of other large old
men sitting down to porterhouse steak in some elaborate but secluded men’s secret society room.
When a letter from home told me that a trip to visit relatives had been canceled because of gas
rationing it was easy to visualize my father smiling silently with knowing eyes—at least as easy
as it was to imagine an American force crawling through the jungles of a place called
Guadalcanal—”Wherever that is,” as Phineas said.
And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation and hard
work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty were using
this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to drive us, regardless of any war or peace.
What a joke if Finny was right after all!
But of course I didn’t believe him. I was too well protected against the great fear of boys’ school
life, which is to be “taken in.” Along with everyone else except a few professional gulls such as
Leper, I rejected anything which had the smallest possibility of doubt about it. So of course I
didn’t believe him. But one day after our chaplain, Mr. Carhart, had become very moved by his
own sermon in chapel about God in the Foxholes, I came away thinking that if Finny’s opinion
of the war was unreal, Mr. Carhart’s was at least as unreal. But of course I didn’t believe him.
And anyway I was too occupied to think about it all. In addition to my own work, I was dividing
my time between tutoring Finny in studies and being tutored by him in sports. Since so much of
learning anything depends on the atmosphere in which it is taught Finny and I, to our joint
double amazement, began to make flashing progress where we had been bumblers before.
Mornings we got up at six to run. I dressed in a gym sweat suit with a towel tucked around my
throat, and Finny in pajamas, ski boots and his sheep-lined coat.
A morning shortly before Christmas vacation brought my reward. I was to run the course Finny
had laid out, four times around an oval walk which circled the Headmaster’s home, a large
rambling, doubtfully Colonial white mansion. Next to the house there was a patriarchal elm tree,
against the trunk of which Finny leaned and shouted at me as I ran a large circle around him.
This plain of snow shone a powdery white that morning; the sun blazed icily somewhere too low
on the horizon to be seen directly, but its clean rays shed a blue-white glimmer all around us. The
northern sunshine seemed to pick up faint particles of whiteness floating in the air and
powdering the sleek blue sky. Nothing stirred. The bare arching branches of the elm seemed laid
into this motionless sky. As I ran the sound of my footfalls was pitched off short in the vast
immobile dawn, as though there was no room amid so many glittering sights for any sound to
intrude. The figure of Phineas was set against the bulk of the tree; he shouted now and then, but
these sounds too were quickly absorbed and dispelled.
And he needed to give no advice that morning. After making two circuits of the walk every trace
of energy was as usual completely used up, and as I drove myself on all my scattered aches
found their usual way to a profound seat of pain in my side. My lungs as usual were fed up with