“What is it, Steve?” I asked gently.
He turned his head back toward me slowly, fixing his pleading eyes on mine. “You’ve got to protect her, that’s all. You’re her cousin.”
He would gladly have stopped there and left me to figure out the rest.
“Of course I will, Steve. But why does she need to be protected?”
Steve sat silent for several moments. He looked up into the trees, bit his lip, opened his mouth hesitantly, and spoke.
“Tom—Tom Mahler, that is—is a fine fellow in his own way and all that, but….” And he went on to recount in concise phrases all that had happened in the past week: the talk around the pinochle game, the wager after the play, the ploys Tom was using on Cecilia, the risk she was in, and more. In quoting the language the fellows had used in describing Cecilia, he took no pains to spare my sensibilities. The only factor he left out was the very one that was most obvious to me—that he had a huge personal stake in what might happen to Cecilia.
Cecilia was to me both a cousin and a woman. We loved each other very dearly. And so I was more than mildly alarmed to hear what Steve had just told me. But I had great confidence in Cecilia’s ability to sense danger and handle herself well. I was more moved by Steve’s impassioned concern for her welfare than I was about Cecilia’s alleged plight. He had obviously never before faced anything that had aroused such powerful emotions in him. I could tell from the way he referred to Cecilia throughout his account of her plight that for him she was “way up there” and he was “way down here,” that the most someone like him could hope for from someone like her was to get a glimpse of her from time to time and take some joy for himself in her happiness and her beauty.
I am not sure precisely what inspired the idea in me. Perhaps I saw something in each of them that could bless the other. I don’t know. But whatever it was, after pondering his words for a few moments, I looked straight at him and said, “Why don’t you take her out?”
“Me?” Steve looked flabbergasted. Looking down at his tendinous body and holding out his arms helplessly, he tried to tell me without words how absurd the very idea was. In point of fact, he was paralyzed by overawe and fear of failure.
“Steve,” I said firmly, taking hold of his shoulders. “I guarantee you that what you have is worth far more in Cecilia’s eyes than what Tom has.”
I paused and went on. “I’m not going to say anything for a while about what we just talked about, maybe never. But thank you for alerting me to the situation. I hope you can see your own potential for solving this problem.” With that I smiled at him, noting the stunned expression on his face. I got up, patted him on the shoulder, and left him in a daze with the words, “The key is in your hands, Steve.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever quite forgiven myself for saying that.
XXIII
The reader need not conjecture what was Steve’s next move. As Cecilia and I were leaving the music hall, I heard the roar of his motorcycle thundering out of the parking lot on the other side of the campus. It seems that Steve could untie the knots of his troubles only when the clean sweep of cool air was rushing through his hair and when the surging of the engine was drawing off his excess energy.
With him Steve took his warm bedroll and his .22 caliber rifle. He knew only that to the west of the college were densely forested hills. All that mattered was to get to those hills where he could find a little peace and quiet. He ached all over as he bucked his way toward the Mississippi River Valley. His cycle could not fly fast enough through the darkness. But his spirit was hurtling forward even faster.
Deep into the night the road took a plunge down into the hill country. Trees closed in on it from both sides. Still Steve roared up and down the hills. Then, approaching the crest of a steep slope, he spotted a little-used path cutting off to the right. Following that, he skirted the top of a horseshoe ridge until he observed in the moonlight a small glade not far below the path. There the hillside leveled off a bit before dropping sharply into a boxed-in valley. He stopped, grabbed his bedroll and rifle, and descended to the clearing. The dry grass and fallen leaves made a superb mattress.
As he sank to sleep, a rosy tint on the eastern horizon was already beginning to cast a flush over the forest.
XXIV
Real sleep lasted only a couple of hours for Steve. Broad daylight brought with it the climbing sun in a cloudless sky that beat down through his thin eyelids and stirred up a host of grotesque dreams from which he awoke in fits and starts, and back into which he limply slipped time and again. From different directions the dreams all converged on a most distressing single motif as Steve went in and out of semiconsciousness. At last he’d had enough. He threw back his bedroll. “Can’t a fellow have a little peace even in his sleep?” he demanded.
Dragging himself into the shade of an ash tree, he leaned back against its trunk. A dull headache befuddled his mind. His eyes were aching and bloodshot. The hollow pain that had been pressing on his chest for days now was eating at him worse than ever. It seemed to be this pain that had spawned his dreams, each of which, having staged its particular drama, receded back into the pain from which it had come and magnified the pressure on his chest.
Fragments alone were left now. Whatever larger context they may have once fit into was lost forever. But, oh how they cut him, these fragments. This one, for example. How it hurt!
He was alone in a corner somewhere—was it in a bar? Straight across the large room from him was a noisy crowd of eight or ten rowdies about his age, gathered around one small table and lustily singing “Gaudeamus igitur juvenes cum sumus!” They were laughing boisterously in the heady afterglow of many beers. A gayer picture of unbridled youthful lustiness was never seen. Steve was staring at them from a distance, almost contemptuously, until he saw something else in the picture. God knows he saw something else in that picture! Sitting in the very center of this half-drunk mob, her head bowed slightly and cocked to one side, was his Cecilia! In her misty eyes Steve could see a deep well of infinite pity for the men around her and what they were doing to themselves, a pity that lay her wide open to the filth they were obviously planning for her. From his dark corner Steve’s heart strained to reach her, but he was rooted to the spot, doomed to watch them take whatever liberties they wanted with her…. Next thing Steve saw, they were walking past him, leading her away. She was not resisting, oblivious to their intentions, still pitying them, even loving them with those soft misty eyes. He had the impression that she had often been violated by them already, but had never lost her compassion for them. Guileless, chaste, spotless, though defiled over and over again, and likely ridden with disease. Cecilia, Cecilia! And Steve powerless to move.
Recalling this scene as he sat under the ash tree, tears streamed down his cheeks.
And then there was this fragment
He was at a church meeting, but all over the floor around him a regular orgy was going on. Across the sea of milling heads, caressing limbs, and squirming bodies he could see into the far corner of the room. And there she was again, standing apart from and above the slime going on around her while yet in its very midst. The same back-slapping rowdies were saucily poking at her and coaxing her to follow them to the door. In her eyes again Steve could see only pity for her abusers. Her pure heart raised her soul above her abusers’ ravages, but left her body helpless. Steve had to get to her! He scrambled through the sea of bodies, pushing and shoving against the twisting mass. As often as he cleaved a passage forward, he was forced back. Desperately he struggled against the tide until he finally broke out into the open area where he had last seen Cecilia and her tormenters. But now they were not there! Panicking, he searched the room for any sign of her. Where was she? What had they done with her? Frantically he asked someone what had happened to them. The informant simply pointed to a door across the room in the direction from which he had just come. And there Steve caught a glimpse of her being led away into the night.
Steve’s head s
lumped to his breast. He shuddered. Only one more fragment occurred to him as he sat there. It was very short and very sharp.
It seemed he was walking down a narrow cobblestone street in an Old World town. He stopped before a mossy set of stone steps leading directly down to a heavy oaken door in the foundation of a large mansion dating from the Middle Ages. Somehow he was aware that his Cecilia was inside. Just as he was about to descend the steps, a crooked old woman with a cackling voice shuffled in front of him and rasped, “No! You can’t go in there!” He looked up and realized he was on the threshold of a brothel. Its windows were closed and barred, and Cecilia was behind them.
“Am I sane?” Steve whimpered. “How can I even dream such a thing?”
His dreams weighed on him like blocks of concrete. Awake or asleep, there was no doubt about it: he was obsessed by the thought of Cecilia’s impotence in the face of dangers which she was too naive and too innocent to recognize in time. This was exactly what Tom was counting on! On top of that, Steve was clearly also obsessed by the thought of his own powerlessness to help her despite his knowing what she didn’t know! Whenever he closed his eyes and thought of Cecilia, the real Cecilia, he could not escape the truth that she was in clear and present danger, or the truth that he, Stephan Pearson, had been told that he was the person in the best position to do something about it.
It was the tightness in Steve’s throat that eventually drew him out from under the tree and sent him off toward the cradle of the ravine in search of a spring of water. He had to follow the spring bed down the hillside several hundred feet before coming upon a little trickle of water in a recess where a mass of roots supported the top of a small ledge of rock. Here, under the lip, icy water dripped and oozed into a clear pool about two feet across. He grimaced before lapping up the icy water, knowing it would drive nails into his throbbed temples.
He closed his smarting eyes until the pain subsided. Then slowly lifting his head, he watched the tiny stream trickle down the lush gully. About a hundred and fifty feet below him, his attention was arrested by a giant fallen white pine. Many years before, it had been rooted up by high winds and stretched out across the gully, forming above the streambed a sturdy bridge about five feet in diameter. Trudging down to it, Steve examined it all the way around and discovered it was still as solid as the day it had fallen. He scrambled up the side of the ravine to the base of the trunk and walked out to the center above the creek bed.
A muted happiness ran through him for having found so suitable a place to be so sad. The situation had about it something of the precariousness of life itself as well as its solid reality. Steve pondered the paradox of his own position on the trunk. If he took a long leap upcreek, he would land safely. But let him just slide effortlessly off the log downcreek and it would mean certain disaster. He sat down facing downcreek.
At the bottom of the ravine in the distance was an isolated farm. The thought crossed his mind that if a man had to farm at all, this was the ideal place for it, in contrast to the featureless prairie where he had been raised. But such thoughts didn’t occupy him for long. Sitting still, his head automatically dropped to his chest under the burden of the night’s dreams. The hollowness in his heart was hurting again. Involuntarily he reached out for a hand that wasn’t there. He groped for it a bit and then sank back into his pain.
After a while he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He held it in his hands and stared at it without opening it. Then, fumbling, he unfolded it and began to read. It was the statement of the lucid convictions he had come to the previous spring after his day in “paradise.” He had stored it in the bottom drawer of his desk and had grabbed it on impulse on the way out of his room. It was his Declaration of Independence, his window to that one perfect day, his point of departure for all future hopes for happiness. It read:
It is to me a great insoluble mystery that all men in this world without exception choose to harness themselves to a daily routine of drudgery and endless misery. I can understand the horse’s plight, brute victim of the whims of a higher intelligence. But who has enslaved man if not man himself?
I am not very wise and I have no desire to be. But one thing appears to me to be so obvious that I despise every man who fails to see it. It is this: all other creatures in the natural state do only what they instinctively want to do. Only man when left to himself hedges himself up, walls himself in, clamps himself down. What he calls “duty” is nothing but a fear inculcated in him by others who never cease to make demands upon him, a fear which he himself nurtures and reverences and which thus becomes his self-constructed prison.
You ask me about the duties of animals in nature? It is true that they are responsible for feeding and raising their young, but who lays this responsibility on them? No one! Are they tied down against their will? Certainly not! They fulfill their needful obligation because their instincts make them want to. And I set it forth as a fact that if man had not harnessed and bridled himself as he has, he too would by nature fulfill this, his one needful obligation and let the rest go hang.
Yes, birds feed and tend their young, but they also perch high in the treetops and sing their hearts out just because it feels good. And they soar through the clouds and flit about in the bushes just for the fun of it. Man has wrecked life for himself by adding to his one real obligation a host of imaginary obligations and has thereby robbed himself of the natural joy in life which all other creatures know.
Since this strange and scarcely curable disease has infected all humanity, the only sane course for any man who seeks the only sane goal in life—namely, happiness—is to sever himself from the diseased body and start all over on his own. Only thus can he rid himself of superfluous obligations and unnatural duties and follow the harmonious course of nature. To this I pledge myself: let no man stand in my way!
After he had finished reading it, he sat gazing off into the distance. Whatever world he had been in last spring, he was in a different world today. That world was way back then and way over there. This world was filling his heart to the breaking point right here and now. There may have been some truth to what he wrote back then, but the way back into that world for him was now forever blocked by one lone figure with the face of an angel, standing defenseless before him. In fact, the roads from Steve to about anywhere were all blocked by her. She was everywhere for him. Wherever he turned, there she was. And there he wanted her always to be.
What can one say about the rest of that day? It was one long soliloquy punctuated by periods of sheer silence. He found himself talking to her, about everything. And listening to her. And just looking at her in his mind while she smiled back at him. The hours passed like minutes until a rumbling growl from the pit of his stomach drew his attention to the fact that the sun was only half an hour above the horizon.
All at once he felt a surge of energy in his legs. They wanted to leap up and charge up the hill and leap onto the cycle and race back to Christiania and Cecilia!
He jumped to his feet, was off the log in a few long strides, and ran up the hill on the crest of the surge of power in his legs. Nothing could stop him. He skimmed over the creek bed, straining forward to get back to where he belonged. But, alas, his empty stomach had the last word. His legs suddenly turned to rubber. He tottered and sank to the ground, head throbbing and stomach growling. The taste of blood was in his throat from his overstrained lungs. He was definitely not going anywhere in that shape.
He needed to calm down, fetch his bedroll and rifle, shoot a squirrel or a rabbit or a grouse, eat and drink his fill, crawl in the sack, get up at the crack of dawn, and then drive back to the Hill.
Sleep came easily that night. It was a deep undisturbed sleep that lasted until just before dawn. Then, for the briefest moment they were sitting beside each other on the old oak bench. Their arms were touching, their fingers interlocked. She felt so warm. “Look,” she said softly. “I want to show you this.” He woke up without finding out what “
this” was. But he was curious to know.
His head was clear, his eyes felt soothed. He lay there in his bedroll for a few moments savoring the joy of feeling himself so near to Cecilia. Then he got up, impelled by a surge of excitement, and prepared to leave. Soon the motorcycle was speeding back to Christiania. Steve knew now both what he had to do and what he wanted to do, and for a change they were beautifully merged into one. His heart was light and eager, in spite of the hint of fear that remained embedded within him. But its slow burn was no match for the fire in his heart.
XXV
It was already past noon when Steve chugged up the hill and pulled into the parking lot behind the dorm. He jumped off the cycle and charged into the dorm. He had work to do!
First of all, he had to find out what was available on campus that he could ask her out to. And then he’d better get right at it before Tom did. Let’s see…. Where can a fellow find out what he needs to know? Of course! The bulletin board outside the post office! That should tell him! So off he trotted, his head in the clouds.
The bulletin board was a big arrangement that looked like an outhouse with only a back wall and a large overhanging roof. A fellow could scrutinize its various notices quite inconspicuously. At first he felt good about that, being the private guy that he was. But then it dawned on him: So what? Who cares if the whole world knows?
Let’s see….
Monday night—Canadian legislator to speak. Topic: “Four Reasons Why Russia Will Remain Depressed for at Least a Century”
Lovely. What’s on Tuesday?
Tuesday night—Estonian cosmetics demonstrated by two native Estonians. Recommended for home economics majors
We’re getting better….
A Grain of Wheat Page 11