seemingly near no town whatever, a bus station in which none of the people were fully awake, or
seemed clean, or looked as though they had homes anywhere; a bus which passengers entered
and left at desolate stopping places in the blackness; a chilled nighttime wandering in which I
tried to decipher between lapses into stale sleep, the meaning of Leper’s telegram.
I reached the town at dawn, and encouraged by the returning light, and coffee in a thick white
cup, I accepted a hopeful interpretation. Leper had “escaped.” You didn’t “escape” from the
army, so he must have escaped from something else. The most logical thing a soldier escapes
from is danger, death, the enemy. Since Leper hadn’t been overseas the enemy must have been in
this country. And the only enemies in this country would be spies. Leper had escaped from spies.
I seized this conclusion and didn’t try to go beyond it. I suppose all our Butt Room stories about
him intriguing around the world had made me half-ready to half-believe something like this. I
felt a measureless relief when it occurred to me. There was some color, some hope, some life in
this war after all. The first friend of mine who ever went into it tangled almost immediately with
spies. I began to hope that after all this wasn’t going to be such a bad war.
The Lepellier house was not far out of town, I was told. There was no taxi, I was also told, and
there was no one, I did not need to be told, who would offer to drive me out there. This was
Vermont. But if that meant austerity toward strangers it also meant mornings of glory such as
this one, in which the snow, white almost to blueness, lay like a soft comforter over the hills, and
birches and pines indestructibly held their ground, rigid lines against the snow and sky, very thin
and very strong like Vermonters.
The sun was the blessing of the morning, the one celebrating element, an aesthete with no
purpose except to shed radiance. Everything else was sharp and hard, but this Grecian sun
evoked joy from every angularity and blurred with brightness the stiff face of the countryside. As
I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my
neck.
The road led out along the side of a ridge, and after a mile or so I saw the house that must be
Leper’s, riding the top of the slope. It was another brittle-looking Vermont house, white of
course, with long and narrow windows like New England faces. Behind one of them hung a gold
star which announced that a son of the house was serving the country, and behind another stood
Leper.
Although I was walking straight toward his front door he beckoned me on several times, and he
never took his eyes from me, as though it was they which held me to my course. He was still at
this ground-floor window when I reached the door and so I opened it myself and stepped into the
hallway. Leper had come to the entrance of the room on the right, the dining room.
“Come in here,” he said, “I spend most of my time in here.”
As usual there were no preliminaries. “What do you do that for, Leper? It’s not very comfortable,
is it?”