Read Online A Separate Peace by John Knowles - Free Book Online Page B

fall?”
    His eyes continued their roaming across my face. “I don’t know, I must have just lost my balance. It must have been that. I did have this idea, this feeling that when you were standing there beside me, y—I don’t know, I had a kind of feeling. But you can’t say anything for sure from just feelings. And this feeling doesn’t make any sense. It was a crazy idea, I must have been delirious. So I just have to forget it. I just fell,” he turned away to grope for something among the pillows, “that’s all.” Then he glanced back at me, “I’m sorry about that feeling I had.”
    I couldn’t say anything to this sincere, drugged apology for having suspected the truth. He was never going to accuse me. It was only a feeling he had, and at this moment he must have been formulating a new commandment in his personal decalogue: Never accuse a friend of a crime if you only have a feeling he did it.
    And I thought we were competitors! It was so ludicrous I wanted to cry.
    If Phineas had been sitting here in this pool of guilt, how would he have felt, what would he have done?
    He would have told me the truth.
    I got up so suddenly that the chair overturned. I stared at him in amazement, and he stared back, his mouth breaking into a grin as the moments passed. “Well,” he said at last in his friendly, knowing voice, “what are you going to do, hypnotize me?”
    â€œFinny, I’ve got something to tell you. You’re going to hate it, but there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
    â€œMy God, what energy,” he said, falling back against the pillows. “You sound like General MacArthur.”
    â€œI don’t care who I sound like, and you won’t think sowhen I tell you. This is the worst thing in the world, and I’m sorry and I hate to tell you but I’ve got to tell you.”
    But I didn’t tell him. Dr. Stanpole came in before I was able to, and then a nurse came in, and I was sent away. The next day the doctor decided that Finny was not yet well enough to see visitors, even old pals like me. Soon after he was taken in an ambulance to his home outside Boston.
    The Summer Session closed, officially came to an end. But to me it seemed irresolutely suspended, halted strangely before its time. I went south for a month’s vacation in my home town and spent it in an atmosphere of reverie and unreality, as though I had lived that month once already and had not been interested by it the first time either.
    At the end of September I started back toward Devon on the jammed, erratic trains of September, 1942. I reached Boston seventeen hours behind schedule; there would be prestige in that at Devon, where those of us from long distances with travel adventures to report or invent held the floor for several days after a vacation.
    By luck I got a taxi at South Station, and instead of saying “North Station” to the driver, instead of just crossing Boston and catching the final train for the short last leg of the trip to Devon, instead of that I sat back in the seat and heard myself give the address of Finny’s house on the outskirts.
    We found it fairly easily, on a street with a nave of ancient elms branching over it. The house itself was high, white, and oddly proper to be the home of Phineas. It presented a face of definite elegance to the street, although behind that wings and ells dwindled quickly in formality until the house ended in a big plain barn.
    Nothing surprised Phineas. A cleaning woman answeredthe door and when I came into the room where he was sitting, he looked very pleased and not at all surprised.
    â€œSo you are going to show up!” his voice took off in one of its flights, “and you brought me something to eat from down South, didn’t you? Honeysuckle and molasses or something like that?” I tried to think of something funny. “Corn bread? You did bring something.