“… Our helper He a-mid the floods,” wafted out across the Common in the tempo of a football march, “Of mortal ills prevailing!”

“Everything was all right,” said Finny at the end, “phrasing, rhythm, all that. But I’m not sure about your pitch. Half a tone off, I would estimate offhand.”

We went on to our room. I sat down at the translation of Caesar I was doing for him, since he had to pass Latin at last this year or fail to graduate. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it.

“Is anything exciting happening now?”

“This part is pretty interesting,” I said, “if I understand it right. About a surprise attack.”

“Read me that.”

“Well let’s see. It begins, ‘When Caesar noticed that the enemy was remaining for several days at the camp fortified by a swamp and by the nature of the terrain, he sent a letter to Trebonius instructing him’—’instructing him’ isn’t actually in the text but it’s understood; you know about that.”

“Sure. Go on.”

“ ‘Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him’—this ‘him’ refers to Caesar of course.”

Finny looked at me with glazed interest and said, “Of course.”

“ ‘Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him with three legions; he himself—Caesar, that is—’sent cavalry to withstand any sudden attacks of the enemy. Now when the Gauls learned what was going on, they scattered a selected band of foot soldiers in ambushes; who, overtaking our horsemen after the leader Vertiscus had been killed, followed our disorderly men up to our camp.’”

“I have a feeling that’s what Mr. Horn is going to call a ‘muddy translation.’ What’s it mean?”

“Caesar isn’t doing so well.”

“But he won it in the end.”

“Sure. If you mean the whole campaign—” I broke off. “He won it, if you really think there was a Gallic War …” Caesar, from the first, had been the one historical figure Phineas refused absolutely to believe in. Lost two thousand years in the past, master of a dead language and a dead empire, the bane and bore of schoolboys, Caesar he believed to be more of a tyrant at Devon than he had ever been in Rome. Phineas felt a personal and sincere grudge against Caesar, and he was outraged most by his conviction that Caesar and Rome and Latin had never been alive at all … “If you really think there ever was a Caesar,” I said.

Finny got up from the cot, picking up his cane as an afterthought. He looked oddly at me, his face set to burst out laughing I thought. “Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers,” he came across a few paces, “but I do believe—it’s important after all for me to believe you. Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody.” I waited without saying anything. “And you told me about Leper, that he’s gone crazy. That’s the word, we might as well admit it. Leper’s gone crazy. When I heard that about Leper, then I knew that the war was real, this war and all the wars. If a war can drive somebody crazy, then it’s real all right. Oh I guess I always knew, but I didn’t have to admit it.” He perched his foot, small cast with metal bar across the bottom to walk on, next to where I was sitting on the cot. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too completely sure about you, when you told me how Leper was. Of course I believed you,” he added hurriedly, “but you’re the nervous type, you know, and I thought maybe your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont. I thought he might not be quite as mixed up as you made out.” Finny’s face tried to prepare me for what came next. “Then I saw him myself.”

I turned incredulously. “You saw Leper?”

“I saw him here this morning, after chapel. He was—well, there’s nothing inflamed about my imagination and I saw Leper hiding in the shrubbery next to the chapel. I slipped out the side door the way I always do—to miss the rush—and I saw Leper and he must have seen me. He didn’t say a damn word. He looked at me like I was a gorilla or something and then he ducked into Mr. Carhart’s office.”

“He must be crazy,” I said automatically, and then my eyes involuntarily met Finny’s. We both broke into sudden laughter.

“We can’t do a damn thing about it,” he said ruefully.

“I don’t want to see him,” I muttered. Then, trying to be more responsible, “Who else knows he’s here.”

“No one, I would think.”

“There’s nothing for us to do, maybe Carhart or Dr. Stanpole can do something. We won’t tell anybody about it because … because they would just scare Leper, and he would scare them.”

“Anyway,” said Finny, “then I knew there was a real war on.”

“Yes, I guess it’s a real war all right. But I liked yours a lot better.”

“So did I.”

“I wish you hadn’t found out. What did you have to find out for!” We started to laugh again, with a half-guilty exchange of glances, in the way that two people who had gone on a gigantic binge when they were last together would laugh when they met again at the parson’s tea. “Well,” he said, “you did a beautiful job in the Olympics.”

“And you were the greatest news analyst who ever lived.”

“Do you realize you won every gold medal in every Olympic event? No one’s ever done anything like that in history.”

“And you scooped every newspaper in the world on every story.” The sun was doing antics among the million specks of dust hanging between us and casting a brilliant, unstable pool of light on the floor. “No one’s ever done anything like that before.”

Brinker and three cohorts came with much commotion into our room at 10:05 p.m. that night. “We’re taking you out,” he said flatly.

“It’s after hours,” I said; “Where?” said Finny with interest at the same time.

“You’ll see. Get them.” His friends half-lifted us half-roughly, and we were hustled down the stairs. I thought it must be some kind of culminating prank, the senior class leaving Devon with a flourish. Were we going to steal the clapper of the school bell, or would we tether a cow in chapel?

They steered us toward the First Building—burned down and rebuilt several times but still known as the First Building of the Devon School. It contained only classrooms and so at this hour was perfectly empty, which made us stealthier than ever. Brinker’s many keys, surviving from his class-officer period, jingled softly as we reached the main door. Above us in Latin flowed the inscription, Here Boys Come to Be Made Men.

The lock turned; we went in, entering the doubtful reality of a hallway familiar only in daylight and bustle. Our footsteps fell guiltily on the marble floor. We continued across the foyer to a dreamlike bank of windows, turned left up a pale flight of marble steps, left again, through two doorways, and into the Assembly Room. From the high ceiling one of the celebrated Devon chandeliers, all glittering tears, scattered thin illumination. Row after row of black Early American benches spread emptily back through the shadows to long, vague windows. At the front of the room there was a raised platform with a balustrade in front of it. About ten members of the senior class sat on the platform; all of them were wearing their black graduation robes. This is going to be some kind of schoolboy masquerade, I thought, some masquerade with masks and candles.

“You see how Phineas limps,” said Blinker loudly as we walked in. It was too coarse and too loud; I wanted to hit him for shocking me like that. Phineas looked perplexed. “Sit down,” he went on, “take a load off your feet.” We sat in the front row of the benches where eight or ten others were sitting, smirking uneasily at the students on the platform.

Whatever Brinker had in his mind to do, I thought he had chosen a terrible place for it. There was nothing funny about the Assembly Room. I could remember staring torpidly through these windows a hundred times out at the elms of the Center Common. The windows now had the closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf. The great expanses of wall space were opaque with canvas, portraits in oil of deceased headmasters, a founder or two, forgotten leaders of the faculty, a beloved athletic coach none of us had ever heard of, a lady we could not identify—her fortune had largely rebuilt the school; a nameless poet who was thought when under the school’s protection to be destined primarily for future generations; a young hero now anonymous who looked theatrical in the First World War uniform in which he had died.