Around them spread a beautiful New England day. Peace lay on Devon like a blessing, the summer’s peace, the reprieve, New Hampshire’s response to all the cogitation and deadness of winter. There could be no urgency in work during such summers; any parachutes rigged would be no more effective than napkins.

Or perhaps that was only true for me and a few others, our gypsy band of the summer before. Or was it rarer even than that; had Chet and Bobby sensed it then, for instance? Had Leper, despite his trays of snails? I could be certain of only two people, Phineas and myself. So now it might be true only for me.

The company fell out and began scattering through the Far Common. Dormitory windows began to fly open and olive drab blankets were hung over the sills by the dozens to air. The sewing machines were carried with considerable exertion into Veazy Hall.

“Dad’s here,” said Brinker. “I told him to take his cigar down to the Butt Room. He wants to meet you.”

We went downstairs and found Mr. Hadley sitting in one of the lumpy chairs, trying not to look offended by the surroundings. But he stood up and shook my hand with genuine cordiality when we came in. He was a distinguished-looking man, taller than Brinker so that his portliness was not very noticeable. His hair was white, thick, and healthy-looking and his face was healthily pink.

“You boys look fine, fine,” he said in his full and cordial voice, “better I would say than those doughboys—G.I.’s—I saw marching in. And how about their artillery! Sewing machines!”

Brinker slid his fingers into the back pockets of his slacks. “This war’s so technical they’ve got to use all kinds of machines, even sewing machines, don’t you think so, Gene?”

“Well,” Mr. Hadley went on emphatically, “I can’t imagine any man in my time settling for duty on a sewing machine. I can’t picture that at all.” Then his temper switched tracks and he smiled cordially again. “But then times change, and wars change. But men don’t change, do they? You boys are the image of me and my gang in the old days. It does me good to see you. What are you enlisting in, son,” he said, meaning me, “the Marines, the Paratroops? There are doggone many exciting things to enlist in these days. There’s that bunch they call the Frogmen, underwater demolition stuff. I’d give something to be a kid again with all that to choose from.”

“I was going to wait and be drafted,” I replied, trying to be polite and answer his question honestly, “but if I did that they might put me straight in the infantry, and that’s not only the dirtiest but also the most dangerous branch of all, the worst branch of all. So I’ve joined the Navy and they’re sending me to Pensacola. I’ll probably have a lot of training, and I’ll never see a foxhole. I hope.”

“Foxhole” was still a fairly new term and I wasn’t sure Mr. Hadley knew what it meant. But I saw that he didn’t care for the sound of what I said. “And then Brinker,” I added, “is all set for the Coast Guard, which is good too.” Mr. Hadley’s scowl deepened, although his experienced face partially masked it.

“You know, Dad,” Brinker broke in, “the Coast Guard does some very rough stuff, putting the men on the beaches, all that dangerous amphibious stuff.”

His father nodded slightly, looking at the floor, and then said, “You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you’ll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that—partly from that, don’t get me wrong—but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come. I know you boys want to see plenty of action, but don’t go around talking too much about being comfortable, and which branch of the service has too much dirt and stuff like that. Now I know you—I feel I know you, Gene, as well as I know Brink here—but other people might misunderstand you. You want to serve, that’s all. It’s your greatest moment, greatest privilege, to serve your country. We’re all proud of you, and we’re all—old guys like me—we’re all darn jealous of you too.”

I could see that Brinker was more embarrassed by this than I was, but I felt it was his responsibility to answer it. “Well, Dad,” he mumbled, “we’ll do what we have to.”

“That’s not a very good answer, Brink,” he said in a tone struggling to remain reasonable.

“After all that’s all we can do.”

“You can do more! A lot more. If you want a military record you can be proud of, you’ll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to. Believe me.”

Brinker sighed under his breath, his father stiffened, paused, then relaxed with an effort. “Your mother’s out in the car. I’d better get back to her. You boys clean up—ah, those shoes,” he added reluctantly, in spite of himself, having to, “those shoes, Brink, a little polish?—and we’ll see you at the Inn at six.”

“Okay, Dad.”

His father, left, trailing the faint, unfamiliar, prosperous aroma of his cigar.

“Dad keeps making that speech about serving the country,” Brinker said apologetically, “I wish to hell he wouldn’t.”

“That’s all right.” I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.

“I’m enlisting,” he went on, Tm going to ‘serve’ as he puts it, I may even get killed. But I’ll be damned if I’ll have that Nathan Hale attitude of his about it. It’s all that World War I malarkey that gets me. They’re all children about that war, did you never notice?” He flopped comfortably into the chair which had been disconcerting his father. “It gives me a pain, personally. I’m not any kind of hero, and neither are you. And neither is the old man, and he never was, and I don’t care what he says he almost did at Château-Thierry.”

“He’s just trying to keep up with the times. He probably feels left out, being too old this time.”

“Left out!” Brinker s eyes lighted up. “Left out! He and his crowd are responsible for it! And we’re going to fight it!”

I had heard this generation-complaint from Brinker before, so often that I finally identified this as the source of his disillusionment during the winter, this generalized, faintly self-pitying resentment against millions of people he did not know. He did know his father, however, and so they were not getting along well now. In a way this was Finny’s view, except that naturally he saw it comically, as a huge and intensely practical joke, played by fat and foolish old men bungling away behind the scenes.

I could never agree with either of them. It would have been comfortable, but I could not believe it. Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

Brinker went upstairs to continue his packing, and I walked over to the gym to clean out my locker. As I crossed the Far Common I saw that it was rapidly becoming unrecognizable, with huge green barrels placed at many strategic points, the ground punctuated by white markers identifying offices and areas, and also certain less tangible things: a kind of snap in the atmosphere, a professional optimism, a conscious maintenance, of high morale. I myself had often been happy at Devon, but such times it seemed to me that afternoon were over now. Happiness had disappeared along with rubber, silk, and many other staples, to be replaced by the wartime synthetic, high morale, for the Duration.

At the gym a platoon was undressing in the locker room. The best that could be said for them physically was that they looked wiry in their startling sets of underwear, which were the color of moss.

I never talked about Phineas and neither did anyone else; he was, however, present in every moment of every day since Dr, Stanpole had told me. Finny had a vitality which could not be quenched so suddenly, even by the marrow of his bone. That was why I couldn’t say anything or listen to anything about him, because he endured so forcefully that what I had to say would have seemed crazy to anyone else—I could not use the past tense, for instance—and what they had to say would be incomprehensible to me. During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.