I wanted to see Phineas, and Phineas only. With him there was no conflict except between
athletes, something Greek-inspired and Olympian in which victory would go to whoever was the
strongest in body and heart. This was the only conflict he had ever believed in.
When I got back I found him in the middle of a snowball fight in a place called the Fields
Beyond. At Devon the open ground among the buildings had been given carefully English
names-the Center Common, the Far Common, the Fields, and the Fields Beyond. These last
were past the gym, the tennis courts, the river and the stadium, on the edge of the woods which,
however English in name, were in my mind primevally American, reaching in unbroken forests
far to the north, into the great northern wilderness. I found Finny beside the woods playing and
fighting-the two were approximately the same thing to him-and I stood there wondering
whether things weren't simpler and better at the northern terminus of these woods, a thousand
miles due north into the wilderness, somewhere deep in the Arctic, where the peninsula of trees
which began at Devon would end at last in an untouched grove of pine, austere and beautiful.
There is no such grove, I know now, but the morning of my return to Devon I imagined that it
might be just over the visible horizon, or the horizon after that.
A few of the fighters paused to yell a greeting at me, but no one broke off to ask about Leper.
But I knew it was a mistake for me to stay there; at any moment someone might.
This gathering had obviously been Finny's work. Who else could have inveigled twenty people
to the farthest extremity of the school to throw snowballs at each other? I could just picture him,
at the end of his ten o'clock class, organizing it with the easy authority which always came into
his manner when he had an idea which was particularly preposterous. There they all were now,
the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with their high I.Q.'s and
expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs.
I hesitated on the edge of the fight and the edge of the woods, too tangled in my mind to enter
either one or the other. So I glanced at my wrist watch, brought my hand dramatically to my
mouth as though remembering something urgent and important, repeated the pantomime in case
anybody had missed it, and with this tacit explanation started briskly back toward the center of
the school. A snowball caught me on the back of the head. Finny's voice followed it. "You're on
our side, even if you do have a lousy aim. We need somebody else. Even you." He came toward
me, without his cane at the moment, his new walking cast so much smaller and lighter that an
ordinary person could have managed it with hardly a limp noticeable. Finny's coordination,
however, was such that any slight flaw became obvious; there was an interruption, brief as a drum beat, in the continuous flow of his walk, as though with each step he forgot for a split-
second where he was going.
"How's Leper?" he asked in an offhand way.
"Oh Leper's-how would he be? You know Leper-" The fight was moving toward us; I stalled
a little more, a stray snowball caught Finny on the side of the face, he shot one back, I seized
some ammunition from the ground and we were engulfed.
Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle
me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in
wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases. I had forgotten that this existed, this smell
which instead of the first robin, or the first bud or leaf, means to me that spring has come. I had
always welcomed vitality and energy and warmth radiating from thick and sturdy winter clothes.
It made me happy, but I kept wondering about next spring, about whether khaki, or suntans or
