The words shocked Phineas into awareness. He whirled as though being attacked from behind.
“You get the rest of the facts, Brinker!” he cried. “You get all your facts!” I had never seen
Finny crying, “You collect every f—ing fact there is in the world!” He plunged out the doors.

The excellent exterior acoustics recorded his rushing steps and the quick rapping of his cane
along the corridor and on the first steps of the marble stairway. Then these separate sounds
collided into the general tumult of his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs.

Chapter 12

Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind. Brinker shouted that Phineas must not be
moved; someone else, realizing that only a night nurse would be at the Infirmary, did not waste
time going there but rushed to bring Dr. Stanpole from his house. Others remembered that Phil
Latham, the wrestling coach, lived just across the Common and that he was an expert in first aid.
It was Phil who made Finny stretch out on one of the wide shallow steps of the staircase, and
kept him still until Dr. Stanpole arrived.

The foyer and the staircase of the First Building were soon as crowded as at midday. Phil Latham
found the main light switch, and all the marble blazed up under full illumination. But
surrounding it was the stillness of near-midnight in a country town, so that the hurrying feet and
the repressed voices had a hollow reverberance. The windows, blind and black, retained their
look of dull emptiness.

Once Brinker turned to me and said, “Go back to the Assembly Room and see if there’s any kind
of blanket on the platform.” I dashed back up the stairs, found a blanket and gave it to Phil
Latham. He carefully wrapped it around Phineas.

I would have liked very much to have done that myself; it would have meant a lot to me. But
Phineas might begin to curse me with every word he knew, he might lose his head completely,
he would certainly be worse off for it. So I kept out of the way.

He was entirely conscious and from the glimpses I caught of his face seemed to be fairly calm.
Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind, and that included Phineas.

When Dr. Stanpole arrived there was silence on the stairs. Wrapped tightly in his blanket, with
light flooding down on him from the chandelier, Finny lay isolated at the center of a tight circle
of faces. The rest of the crowd looked on from above or below on the stairs, and I stood on the
lower edge. Behind me the foyer was now empty.

After a short, silent examination Dr. Stanpole had a chair brought from the Assembly Room, and
Finny was lifted cautiously into it. People aren’t ordinarily carried in chairs in New Hampshire,
and as they raised him up he looked very strange to me, like some tragic and exalted personage, a
stricken pontiff. Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was
finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was
by nature someone who carried others. I didn’t think he knew how to act or even how to feel as
the object of help. He went past with his eyes closed and his mouth tense. I knew that normally I