After the fourth circuit, like sitting in a chair, I pulled up in front of Phineas.

“You’re not even winded,” he said.

“I know.”

“You found your rhythm, didn’t you, that third time around. Just as you came into that straight part there.”

“Yes, right there.”

“You’ve been pretty lazy all along, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I guess I have been.”

“You didn’t even know anything about yourself.”

“I don’t guess I did, in a way.”

“Well,” he gathered the sheepskin collar around his throat, “now you know. And stop talking like a Georgia cracker—’don’t guess I did’!” Despite this gibe he was rather impersonal toward me. He seemed older that morning, and leaning quietly against that great tree wrapped in his heavy coat, he seemed smaller too. Or perhaps it was only that I, inside the same body, had felt myself all at once grown bigger.

We proceeded slowly back to the dormitory. On the steps going in we met Mr. Ludsbury coming out.

“I’ve been watching you from my window,” he said in his hooting voice with a rare trace of personal interest. “What are you up to, Forrester, training for the Commandos?” There was no rule explicitly forbidding exercise at such an hour, but it was not expected; ordinarily therefore Mr. Ludsbury would have disapproved. But the war had modified even his standards; all forms of physical exercise had become conventional for the Duration.

I mumbled some abashed answer, but it was Phineas who made the clear response.

“He’s developing into a real athlete,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re aiming for the ‘44 Olympics.”

Mr. Ludsbury emitted a single chuckle from deep in his throat, then his face turned brick red momentarily and he assumed his customary sententiousness. “Games are all right in their place,” he said, “and I won’t bore you with the Eton Playing Fields observation, but all exercise today is aimed of course at the approaching Waterloo. Keep that in your sights at all times, won’t you.”

Finny’s face set in determination, with the older look I had just detected in him. “No,” he said.

I don’t believe any student had ever said “No” flatly to Mr. Ludsbury before. It flustered him uncontrollably. His face turned brick red again, and for a moment I thought he was going to run away. Then he said something so rapid, throaty, and clipped that neither of us understood it, turned quickly and strode off across the quadrangle.

“He’s really sincere, he thinks there’s a war on,” said Finny in simple wonder. “Now why wouldn’t he know?” He pondered Mr. Ludsbury’s exclusion from the plot of the fat old men as we watched his figure, reedy even in his winter wraps, move away from us. Then the light broke. “Oh, of course!” he cried. “Too thin. Of course.”

I stood there pitying Mr. Ludsbury for his fatal thinness and reflecting that after all he had always had a gullible side.

This was my first but not my last lapse into Finny’s vision of peace. For hours, and sometimes for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world. Not that I ever believed that the whole production of World War II was a trick of the eye manipulated by a bunch of calculating fat old men, appealing though this idea was. What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it.

This was not shaken even by the enlistment of Leper Lepellier. In fact that made the war seem more unreal than ever. No real war could draw Leper voluntarily away from his snails and beaver dams. His enlistment seemed just another of Leper’s vagaries, such as the time he slept on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine where each morning the sun first strikes United States territory. On that morning, satisfying one of his urges to participate in nature, Leper Lepellier was the first thing the rising sun struck in the United States.

Early in January, when we had all just returned from the Christmas holidays, a recruiter from the United States ski troops showed a film to the senior class in the Renaissance Room. To Leper it revealed what all of us were seeking: a recognizable and friendly face to the war. Skiers in white shrouds winged down virgin slopes, silent as angels, and then, realistically, herring-boned up again, but herringboned in cheerful, sunburned bands, with clear eyes and white teeth and chests full of vigor-laden mountain air. It was the cleanest image of war I had ever seen; even the Air Force, reputedly so high above the infantry’s mud, was stained with axle grease by comparison, 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.

It probably would have been better for all of us if someone like Brinker had been the first to go. He could have been depended upon to take a loud dramatic departure, so that the school would have reverberated for weeks afterward with Brinker’s Last Words, Brinker’s Military Bearing, Brinker’s Sense of Duty. And all of us, influenced by the vacuum of his absence, would have felt the touch of war as a daily fact.