“How’s Leper?” said Brinker as he came in.

“Yeah,” said Phineas, “I meant to ask you before.”

“Leper? Why he’s—he’s on leave.” But my resentment against having to mislead people seemed to be growing stronger every day. “As a matter of fact Leper is ‘Absent Without Leave,’ he just took off by himself.”

“Leper?” both of them exclaimed together.

“Yes,” I shrugged, “Leper. Leper’s not the little rabbit we used to know any more.”

“Nobody can change that much,” said Brinker in his new tough-minded way.

Finny said, “He just didn’t like the army, I bet. Why should he? What’s the point of it anyway?”

“Phineas,” Brinker said with dignity, “please don’t give us your infantile lecture on world affairs at this time.” And to me, “He was too scared to stay, wasn’t he?”

I narrowed my eyes as though thinking hard about that. Finally I said, “Yes, I think you could put it that way.”

“He panicked.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He must be out of his mind,” said Brinker energetically, “to do a thing like that. I’ll bet he cracked up, didn’t he? That’s what happened. Leper found out that the army was just too much for him. I’ve heard about guys like that. Some morning they don’t get out of bed with everybody else. They just lie there crying. I’ll bet something like that happened to Leper.” He looked at me. “Didn’t it?”

“Yes. It did.”

Brinker had closed with such energy, almost enthusiasm, on the truth that I gave it to him without many misgivings. The moment he had it he crumbled. “Well I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned. Old Leper. Quiet old Leper. Quiet old Leper from Vermont. He never could fight worth a damn. You’d think somebody would have realized that when he tried to enlist. Poor old Leper. What’s he act like?”

“He cries a lot of the time.”

“Oh God. What’s the matter with our class anyway? It isn’t even June yet and we’ve already got two men sidelined for the Duration.”

Two?”

Brinker hesitated briefly. “Well there’s Finny here.”

“Yes,” agreed Phineas in his deepest and most musical tone, “there’s me.”

“Finny isn’t out of it,’ I said.

“Of course he is.”

“Yes, I’m out of it.”

“Not that there’s anything to be out of!” I wondered if my face matched the heartiness of my voice. “Just this dizzy war, this fake, this thing with the old men making …” I couldn’t help watching Finny as I spoke, and so I ran out of momentum. I waited for him to take it up, to unravel once again his tale of plotting statesmen and deluded public, his great joke, his private toe hold on the world. He was sitting on his cot, elbows on knees, looking down. He brought his wide-set eyes up, his grin flashed and faded, and then he murmured, “Sure. There isn’t any war.”

It was one of the few ironic remarks Phineas ever made, and with it he quietly brought to a close all his special inventions which had carried us through the winter. Now the facts were re-established, and gone were all the fantasies, such as the Olympic Games for a.d. 1944, closed before they had ever been opened.

There was little left at Devon any more which had not been recruited for the war. The few stray activities and dreamy people not caught up in it were being systematically corralled by Brinker. And every day in chapel there was some announcement about qualifying for “V-12,” an officer-training program the Navy had set up in many colleges and universities. It sounded very safe, almost like peacetime, almost like just going normally on to college. It was also very popular; groups the size of LST crews joined it, almost everyone who could qualify, except for a few who “wanted to fly” and so chose the Army Air Force, or something called V-5 instead. There were also a special few with energetic fathers who were expecting appointments to Annapolis or West Point or the Coast Guard Academy or even—this alternative had been unexpectedly stumbled on—the Merchant Marine Academy. Devon was by tradition and choice the most civilian of schools, and there was a certain strained hospitality in the way both the faculty and students worked to get along with the leathery recruiting officers who kept appearing on the campus. There was no latent snobbery in us; we didn’t find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them, a difference which everyone struggled with awkward fortitude to bridge. It was as though Athens and Sparta were trying to establish not just a truce but an alliance—although we were not as civilized as Athens and they were not as brave as Sparta.

Neither were we. There was no rush to get into the fighting; no one seemed to feel the need to get into the infantry, and only a few were talking about the Marines. The thing to be was careful and self-preserving. It was going to be a long war. Quackenbush, I heard, had two possible appointments to the Military Academy, with carefully prepared positions in V-12 and dentistry school to fall back on if necessary.

I myself took no action. I didn’t feel free to, and I didn’t know why this was so. Brinker, in his accelerating change from absolute to relative virtue, came up with plan after plan, each more insulated from the fighting than the last. But I did nothing.

One morning, after a Naval officer had turned many heads in chapel with an address on convoy duty, Brinker put his hand on the back of my neck in the vestibule outside and steered me into a room used for piano practice near the entrance. It was soundproofed, and he swung the vaultlike door closed behind us.

“You’ve been putting off enlisting in something for only one reason,” he said at once. “You know that, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“Well, I know, and I’ll tell you what it is. It’s Finny. You pity him.”

“Pity him!”

“Yes, pity him. And if you don’t watch out he’s going to start pitying himself. Nobody ever mentions his leg to him except me. Keep that up and he’ll be sloppy with self-pity any day now. What’s everybody beating around the bush for? He’s crippled and that’s that. He’s got to accept it and unless we start acting perfectly natural about it, even kid him about it once in a while, he never will.”

“You’re so wrong I can’t even—I can’t even hear you, you’re so wrong.”

“Well, I’m going to do it anyway.”

“No. You’re not.”

“The hell I’m not. I don’t have to have your approval, do I?”

“I’m his roommate, and I’m his best friend—”

“And you were there when it happened. I know. And I don’t give a damn. And don’t forget,” he looked at me sharply, “you’ve got a little personal stake in this. What I mean is it wouldn’t do you any harm, you know, if everything about Finny’s accident was cleared up and forgotten.”

I felt my face grimacing in the way Finny’s did when he was really irritated. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged and chuckled in his best manner, “nobody knows.” Then the charm disappeared and he added, “unless you know,” and his mouth closed in its straight expressionless line, and that was all that was said.

I had no idea what Brinker might say or do. Before he had always known and done whatever occurred to him because he was certain that whatever occurred to him was right. In the world of the Golden Fleece Debating Society and the Underprivileged Local Children subcommittee of the Good Samaritan Confraternity, this had created no problems. But I was afraid of that simple executive directness now.

I walked back from Chapel and found Finny in our dormitory, blocking the staircase until the others who wanted to go up sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God under his direction. No one who was tone deaf ever loved music so much. I think his shortcoming increased his appreciation; he loved it all indiscriminately—Beethoven, the latest love ditty, jazz, a hymn—it was all profoundly musical to Phineas.