and the Navy was vulnerable to scurvy. Nothing tainted these white warriors of winter as they
swooped down their spotless mountainsides, and this cool, clean response to war glided straight
into Leper’s Vermont heart.
“How do you like that!” he whispered to me in a wondering voice during these scenes. “How do
you like that!”
“You know, I think these are pictures of Finnish ski troops,” Phineas whispered on the other
side, “and I want to know when they start shooting our allies the Bolsheviks. Unless that war
between them was a fake too, which I’m pretty sure it was.”
After the movie ended and the lights came on to illuminate the murals of Tuscany and the
painted classical galleries around us, Leper still sat amazed in his folding chair. Ordinarily he
talked little, and the number of words which came from him now indicated that this was a
turning point in his life.
“You know what? Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It’s all right to miss seeing the trees
and the countryside and all the other things when you’ve got to be in a hurry. And when you’re
in a War you’ve got to be in a hurry. Don’t you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren’t ruining
the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has
to evolve or else it perishes.” Finny and I had stood up, and Leper looked earnestly from one to
the other of us from his chair. “Take the housefly. If it hadn’t developed all those split-second
reflexes it would have become extinct long ago.”
“You mean it adapted itself to the fly swatter?” queried Phineas.
“That’s right. And skiing had to learn to move just as fast or it would have been wiped out by
this war. Yes, sir. You know what? I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it,
and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive.”
You usually listened to Leper’s quiet talking with half a mind, but this theory of his brought me
to close attention. How did it apply to me, and to Phineas? How, most of all, did it apply to
Leper?
“I’m going to enlist in these ski troops,” he went on mildly, so unemphatically that my mind
went back to half-listening. Threats to enlist that winter were always declaimed like Blinker’s,
with a grinding of back teeth and a flashing of eyes; I had already heard plenty of them. But only
Leper’s was serious.
A week later he was gone. He had been within a few weeks of his eighteenth birthday, and with
it all chance of enlistment, of choosing a service rather than being drafted into one, would have
disappeared. The ski movie had decided him. “I always thought the war would come for me
when it wanted me,” he said when he came to say goodbye the last day. “I never thought I’d be
going to it. I’m really glad I saw that movie in time, you bet I am.” Then, as the Devon School’s
first recruit to World War II, he went out my doorway with his white stocking cap bobbing
behind.