Not in this conversation, not in this room. I wished I had met him in a railroad station, or at some highway intersection. Not here. Here the small window panes shone from much polishing and the walls were hung with miniatures and old portraits. The chairs were either heavily upholstered and too comfortable to stay awake in or Early American and never used. There were several square, solid tables covered with family pictures and random books and magazines, and also three small, elegant tables not used for anything. It was a compromise of a room, with a few good “pieces’” for guests to look at, and the rest of it for people to use.

But I had known Finny in an impersonal dormitory, a gym, a playing field. In the room we shared at Devon many strangers had lived before us, and many would afterward. It was there that I had done it, but it was here that I would have to tell it I felt like a wild man who had stumbled in from the jungle to tear the place apart.

I moved back in the Early American chair. Its rigid back and high armrests immediately forced me into a righteous posture. My blood could start to pound if it wanted to; let it. I was going ahead. “I was dunking about you most of the trip up.”

“Oh yeah?” He glanced briefly into my eyes.

“I was thinking about you … and the accident.”

“There’s loyalty for you. To think about me when you were on a vacation.”

“I was thinking about it … about you because—I was thinking about you and the accident because I caused it.”

Finny looked steadily at me, his face very handsome and expressionless. “What do you mean, you caused it?” his voice was as steady as his eyes.

My own voice sounded quiet and foreign. “I jounced the limb. I caused it.” One more sentence. “I deliberately jounced the limb so you would fall off.”

He looked older than I had ever seen him. “Of course you didn’t.”

“Yes I did. I did!”

“Of course you didn’t do it. You damn fool. Sit down, you damn fool.”

“Of course I did!”

I’m going to hit you if you don’t sit down.”

“Hit me!” I looked at him. “Hit me! You can’t even get up! You can’t even come near me!”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t shut up.”

“You see! Kill me! Now you know what it is! I did it because I felt like that! Now you know yourself!”

“I don’t know anything. Go away. I’m tired and you make me sick. Go away.” He held his forehead wearily, an unlikely way.

It struck me then that I was injuring him again. It occurred to me that this could be an even deeper injury than what I had done before. I would have to back out of it, I would have to disown it. Could it be that he might even be right? Had I really and definitely and knowingly done it to him after all? I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t think. However it was, it was worse for him to know it. I had to take it back.

But not here. “You’ll be back at Devon in a few weeks, won’t you?” I muttered after both of us had sat in silence for a while.

“Sure, I’ll be there by Thanksgiving anyway.”

At Devon, where every stick of furniture didn’t assert that Finny was a part of it, I could make it up to him.

Now I had to get out of there. There was only one way to do it; I would have to make every move false. “I’ve had an awfully long trip,” I said, “I never sleep much on trains. I guess I’m not making too much sense today.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I think I’d better get to the station. I’m already a day late at Devon.”

“You aren’t going to start living by the rules, are you?”

I grinned at him. “Oh no, I wouldn’t do that,” and that was the most false thing, the biggest lie of all.

Peace had deserted Devon. Although not in the look of the campus and village; they retained much of their dreaming summer calm. Fall had barely touched the full splendor of the trees, and during the height of the day the sun briefly regained its summertime power. In the air there was only an edge of coolness to imply the coming winter.

But all had been caught up, like the first fallen leaves, by a new and energetic wind. The Summer Session—a few dozen boys being force-fed education, a stopgap while most of the masters were away and most of the traditions stored against sultriness—the Summer Session was over. It had been the school’s first,’ but this was its one hundred and sixty-third Winter Session, and the forces reassembled for it scattered the easygoing summer spirit like so many fallen leaves.

The masters were in their places for the first Chapel, seated in stalls in front of and at right angles to us, suggesting by their worn expressions and careless postures that they had never been away at all.

In an apse of the church sat their wives and children, the objects during the tedious winter months of our ceaseless, ritual speculation (Why did he ever marry her? What in the world ever made her marry him? How could the two of them ever have produced those little monsters?). The masters favored seersucker on this mild first day the wives broke out their hats. Five of the younger teachers were missing gone into the war. Mr Pike had come in his Naval ensigns uniform; some reflex must have survived Midshipman’s School and brought him back to Devon for the day His face was as mild and hopeless as ever; mooning above the snappy, rigid blouse, it gave him the air of an impostor.

Continuity was the keynote. The same hymns were played the same sermon given, the same announcements made. There was one surprise; maids had disappeared “for the Duration,” a new phase then. But continuity was stressed, not beginning again but continuing the education of young men according to the unbroken traditions of Devon.

I knew, perhaps I alone knew, that this was false. Devon had slipper’ through their fingers during the warm overlooked months. The tradition’s had been broken, the standards let down, all rules forgotten. In those bright days of truancy we had never thought of What We Owed Devon, as the sermon this opening day exhorted us to do. We had thought of ourselves, of what Devon owed us, and we had taken all of that and much more Today’s hymn was Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive Our Foolish Ways; we had never heard that during the summer either. Ours had been a wayward gypsy music, leading us down all kinds of foolish gypsy ways, unforgiven. I was glad of it, I had almost caught the rhythm of it, the dancing, clicking jangle of it during the summer.

Still it had come to an end, in the last long rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas fell. It was forced on me as I sat chilled through the Chapel service, that this probably vindicated the rules of Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning.

After the service ended we set out seven hundred strong, the regular winter throng of the Devon School, to hustle through our lists of appointments. All classrooms were crowded, swarms were on the crosswalks, the dormitories were as noisy as factories, every bulletin board was a forest of notices.

We had been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking charge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had belonged only to us. I had the same room which Finny and I had shared during the summer, but across the hall, in the large suite where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping in to confer with him. Leper, luckless in his last year as all the others, had been moved to a room lost in an old building off somewhere in the trees toward the gym.