But the disappearing tail of Leper’s cap inspired none of this. For a few days the war was more unimaginable than ever. We didn’t mention it and we didn’t mention Leper, until at last Brinker found a workable point of view. One day in the Butt Room he read aloud a rumor in a newspaper about an attempt on Hitler’s life. He lowered the paper, gazed in a visionary way in front of him, and then remarked, “That was Leper, of course.”

This established our liaison with World War II. The Tunisian campaign became “Leper’s liberation”; the bombing of the Ruhr was greeted by Brinker with hurt surprise: “He didn’t tell us he’d left the ski troops”; the torpedoing of the Scharnhorst: “At it again.” Leper sprang up all over the world at the core of every Allied success. We talked about Leper’s stand at Stalingrad, Leper on the Burma Road, Leper’s convoy to Archangel; we surmised that the crisis over the leadership of the Free French would be resolved by the appointment of neither de Gaulle nor Giraud but Lepellier; we knew, better than the newspapers, that it was not the Big Three but the Big Four who were running the war.

In the silences between jokes about Leper’s glories we wondered whether we ourselves would measure up to the humblest minimum standard of the army. I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know ft; I wondered in the silences between jokes about Leper whether the still hidden parts of myself might contain the Sad Sack, the outcast, or the coward. We were all at our funniest about Leper, and we all secretly hoped that Leper, that incompetent, was as heroic as we said.

Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler’s life, Finny had said, “If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler’s temple, he’d miss.” There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper’s triumphal arch around Brinker’s keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well—”How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?” He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944.

Saturday afternoons are terrible in a boys’ school, especially in the winter. There is no football game; it is not possible, as it is in the spring, to take bicycle trips into the surrounding country. Not even the most grinding student can feel required to lose himself in his books, since there is Sunday ahead, long, lazy, quiet Sunday, to do any homework.

And these Saturdays are worst in the late winter when the snow has lost its novelty and its shine, and the school seems to have been reduced to only a network of drains. During the brief thaw in the early afternoon there is a dismal gurgling of dirty water seeping down pipes and along gutters, a gray seamy shifting beneath the crust of snow, which cracks to show patches of frozen mud beneath. Shrubbery loses its bright snow headgear and stands bare and frail, too undernourished to hide the drains it was intended to hide. These are the days when going into any building you cross a mat of dirt and cinders led in by others before you, thinning and finally trailing off in the corridors. The sky is an empty hopeless gray and gives the impression that this is its eternal shade. Winter’s occupation seems to have conquered, overrun and destroyed everything, so that now there is no longer any resistance movement left in nature; all the juices are dead, every sprig of vitality snapped, and now winter itself, an old, corrupt, tired conqueror, loosens its grip on the desolation, recedes a little, grows careless in its watch; sick of victory and enfeebled by the absence of challenge, it begins itself to withdraw from the ruined countryside. The drains alone are active, and on these Saturdays their noises sound a dull recessional to winter.

Only Phineas failed to see what was so depressing. Just as there was no war in his philosophy, there was also no dreary weather. As I have said, all weathers delighted Phineas. “You know what we’d better do next Saturday?” he began in one of his voices, the low-pitched and evenly melodic one which for some reason always reminded me of a Rolls-Royce moving along a highway. “We’d better organize the Winter Carnival.”

We were sitting in our room, on either side of the single large window framing a square of featureless gray sky. Phineas was resting his cast, which was a considerably smaller one now, on the desk and thoughtfully pressing designs into it with a pocket knife. “What Winter Carnival?” I asked.

“The Winter Carnival. The Devon Winter Carnival.”

“There isn’t any Devon Winter Carnival and never has been.”

“There is now. We’ll have it in that park next to the Naguamsett. The main attraction will be sports, naturally, featuring I expect a ski jump—”

“A ski jump! That park’s as flat as a pancake.”

“—and some slalom races, and I think a little track. But we’ve got to have some snow statues too, and a little music, and something to eat. Now, which committee do you want to head?”

I gave him a wintry smile. The snow statues committee.”

“I knew you would. You always were secretly arty, weren’t you? I’ll organize the sports, Brinker can handle the music and food, and then we need somebody to kind of beautify the place, a few holly wreaths and things like that. Someone good with plants and shrubbery. I know. Leper.”

From looking at the star he was imprinting in his cast I looked quickly up at his face. “Leper’s gone.”

“Oh yeah, so he is. Leper would be gone. Well, somebody else then.”

And because it was Finny’s idea, it happened as he said, although not as easily as some of his earlier inspirations. For our dormitory was less enthusiastic about almost everything with each succeeding week. Brinker for example had begun a long, decisive sequence of withdrawals from school activity ever since the morning I deserted his enlistment plan. He had not resented my change of heart, and in fact had immediately undergone one himself. If he could not enlist—and for all his self-sufficiency Brinker could not do much without company—he could at least cease to be so multifariously civilian. So he resigned the presidency of the Golden Fleece Debating Society, stopped writing his school spirit column for the newspaper, dropped the chairmanship of the Underprivileged Local Children subcommittee of the Good Samaritan Confraternity, stilled his baritone in the chapel choir, and even, in his most impressive burst of irresponsibility, resigned from the Student Advisory Committee to the Headmaster’s Discretionary Benevolent Fund. His well-bred clothes had disappeared; these days he wore khaki pants supported by a garrison belt, and boots which rattled when he walked.

“Who wants a Winter Carnival?” he said in the disillusioned way he had lately developed when I brought it up. “What are we supposed to be celebrating?”

“Winter, I guess.”

“Winter!” He gazed out of his window at the vacant sky and seeping ground. “Frankly, I just don’t see anything to celebrate, winter or spring or anything else.”

“This is the first time Finny’s gotten going on anything since … he came back.”

“He has been kind of nonfunctional, hasn’t he? He isn’t brooding, is he?”

“No, he wouldn’t brood.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would. Well, if you think it’s something Finny really wants. Still, there’s never been a Winter Carnival here. I think there’s probably a rule against it.”

“I see,” I said in a tone which made Brinker raise his eyes and lock them with mine. In that plotters’ glance all his doubts vanished, for Brinker the Lawgiver had turned rebel for the Duration.