With all of this going on in his head, he hadn’t noticed her silently descend the staircase. Now all at once he looked up and there she was, standing across the lobby from him waiting in line to sign out. She was smiling at him. She was the only girl whose escort had not leapt to her side the moment she appeared in line. Unattended as she was, Steve noticed several of the men eying her over, probably wishing they could work out an exchange of dates for the evening, he thought.
Even at that, Steve could not move. He felt transfixed as by a light from heaven. He couldn’t get his eyes off her. Everything about her was so right. She stood there just as she had in his very first dream of her—so pure, so otherworldly, so very kind, and so indescribably beautiful. In his dream he hadn’t been able to get to her, but now she was quietly motioning him to come and join her.
And he did, drawn by her warmth. “Hello,” he said, looking into her eyes.
“Hello,” she said, looking into his.
XXX
In the course of that evening I am sure Steve committed many faux pas, but in a sense both he and Cecilia were oblivious to the stricter requirements of social convention. What mattered to each of them was the genuineness of the other. There was nothing fawning about the way they treated each other. Steve’s almost paralyzing awe of her became a different kind of awe in her disarming presence. There was nothing ill-at-ease about it from the very first moments of their being together.
As they walked down the arbored lane to the concert hall arm in arm, Steve felt very proud, very unworthy, and very happy. They said almost nothing until they came to a little clearing in the trees. There Cecilia stopped and pointed to a small bright constellation off to the northeast of them. Leaning close to Steve she said, “That’s my favorite formation. Folks call it Cassiopeia, but I call it Tiny Dipper. No matter what time of the year or what time of the night you look into the stars, you always see it.”
Steve caught the wonder in her voice.
“I’ve noticed that too. Isn’t it wonderful?”
They walked on.
In the gaily-lighted auditorium, one of Steve’s friends from his physics class ushered them into a couple of seats halfway down the center aisle. As he handed Steve their program, he winked at him and Steve winked back.
Soon the lights dimmed and the curtain rose on the orchestra. A tingle of excitement rippled over Steve. This was going to bring joy to his Cecilia and that alone, with or without the music, would bring him joy. The conductor strode to the podium, greeted by a respectful ovation. On the downbeat the orchestra broke into Brahm’s “Symphony Number One.”
The first movement sustained Steve’s mood of anticipation. It was a good work on which to begin the program. He could see that Cecilia was really getting into it, and he dearly appreciated all the time it gave him to sit next to her. It felt so good being so close to her surrounded by this glorious music.
Somewhere in the middle of the second movement, Steve and Cecilia happened to shift around at the same time so that their shoulders and upper arms pressed against each other. Neither of them moved. Steve could now feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. He closed his eyes and let his head slump slightly forward. It was almost too much for him, this miracle. This was no phantom, no apparition. He was touching the real her, close and warm and alive.
During the third movement, an overpowering urge timidly lifted his hand to the armrest close to Cecilia’s. It lay there palm down for two or three minutes. Then, in a lull in the music, he felt her soft strong hand gliding smoothly towards his, also palm down. Lifting his hand ever so slightly, she slid hers under his. Their fingers interlocked. They almost stopped breathing. The mere touching of one another in this simple way mysteriously portended to each of them a hint of a wondrous future in which they could be forever connected, forever one. Neither of them had ever been even close to this place before. This was wholly new territory for them. They remained interlocked like this until the very end of the symphony and only released each other reluctantly when they stood up for the applause. They looked at each other during the applause, began to understand, and were totally dumbfounded.
During the next section of the program consisting of a number of smaller lyrical works by Brahms, their hands came together all by themselves.
The final section of the program was the magnificent “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” in whose soaring interwoven melodies and harmonies their quickened hearts took flight. In the resounding affirmation with which this work closes, all they could think of was where this new and untested love of theirs was leading them, to a climax that would fulfill their lives for time and for eternity.
There was not much time to loiter after the long concert. The girls had to report into the dormitory within fifteen minutes of its conclusion. Steve and Cecilia spent fourteen and a half minutes strolling hand in hand under the stars. They said almost nothing. The current flowing through their fingers said it all. Accompanying her all the way up to the front door, Steve faced Cecilia and took both of her hands in his.
“Good night, Cecilia,” he choked out.
“Good night, Steve,” she whispered.
They squeezed their hands very tightly and Cecilia ducked into the door at the last second.
And each of them went their separate ways that night with their heads spinning.
XXXI
The next evening Steve was at his bench earlier than usual, gazing up into the sky. The day had vanished behind him in two bright flashes of lightning, the first when he passed her on the staircase and looked into her bedazzled eyes, and the second during chapel when she looked up at him sitting in the balcony and their hearts touched for the briefest instant. The rest of the day had been a blur.
When Steve lowered his eyes from the sky, there she was walking towards him down the lane, her arms burdened with a stack of music. Approaching him, a solitary figure in the twilight, she was for a moment indistinguishable from the angelic woman of his dreams. He got up and walked towards her, beaming shyly, to greet her. She too had a sort of sheepish look on her face that easily betrayed the stirrings deep within her. They strolled to the bench and sat down.
The air was nippy, but it served to sharpen their sensitivities. They looked at each other, groping for words they didn’t find and couldn’t express. That’s the way they were, those two, often smiling at each other and not saying a word.
Cecilia broke the silence.
“At nine o’clock we could go for a walk, if you want to.”
“Where should we meet? Right here?”
“Yes. Right here.”
She rose to go.
“See you at nine o’clock.”
“At nine o’clock, right here.”
Cecilia proceeded on to the music hall and up the steps towards her big organ on the fifth floor.
As she was mounting the stairs, she heard a familiar sound and stopped. The noise was coming from a nearby cell and was a rough simulation of the “Grieg Piano Sonata” I was struggling to master at the time. For a few moments she stood on the landing indecisively. Then recognizing beyond doubt my own peculiar musical blunders, she came over to the door of my cell and knocked on it. I stopped playing and answered the door, surprised but pleased to see her.
“May I come in for a few minutes, Paul?”
“Of course,” I replied, pulling the piano bench out a little so that we could both sit down on it. She opened her mouth several times, but nothing came out.
I knew she wanted to tell me something, and I had a pretty good idea what it might be. She sat there staring at her lap and rubbing her hands together slowly. Then without looking up she said in a low tone, “Paul, I don’t know what’s the matter with me…. I’ve been feeling so funny the past few days.” She looked up at me pleadingly.
The poor girl was in dead earnest. Confusion was written all over her face. I had to bite my lip to keep from chuckling. With an air of deep concern, I said, “Oh? Do you think you’re sick?
Do you hurt anywhere?”
“Not really,” she answered, shaking her head in perplexity. “Just kind of all over. Just a funny feeling as though I’m not myself. I’m not really sick. And sometimes I feel very well, even better than usual…. I don’t know….”
She shook her head, thoroughly puzzled.
“Do you feel feverish ever?”
“Yes. Now and then I feel very feverish and get chills and run short of breath.” She stopped and looked up at me. “Paul, what’s wrong with me?” she pleaded.
“Well,” probed I, “do you feel these symptoms in connection with any traceable pattern in your life? Do they come and go, say, with something special you eat or some special time of day or after something especially strains your eyes or … or whenever you think of someone special, or come near someone special?”
Her head popped up like a cork. She shot back, “Paul! Whatever do you mean by that?”
Grinning mischievously, I looked her straight in the eyes, which were as big as saucers, and said, “I mean are you in love, you silly thing?”
I’ll never forget the expression on her face when the light dawned. She just sat there rocking back and forth, speechless, her mouth wide open. Slowly she raised her hands to her mouth to cover its gaping hole. Then she nodded her head slowly up and down.
“So all those corny songs aren’t corny after all,” she concluded in awe.
Next thing I knew she had jumped to her feet, planted a big kiss on my forehead, and flown out of my cell like a bird from a cage. A little later when I opened the window for some fresh air, I heard the most ecstatic organ music rolling out of the wide-open window above mine. One enraptured young lady was lifting that old organ to new heights of rhapsody.
She was, after all, a very simple ingenuous girl at heart, beautiful and innocent beyond words, and as thoroughly shaped by the love of Jesus as anyone I have ever known. And I knew from this point on that she was no longer “my” Cecilia.
XXXII
Steve did not move from the old bench between 6:45 when he got there and 8:45 when Cecilia unexpectedly appeared next to him. She had been unable to finish her allotted time on the organ in spite of the fact that the good people of Meadowville were paying for it. So, feeling uncommonly spritely, she had sneaked out the back door of the music hall and crept up behind the old bench fifteen minutes early to surprise Steve. But when she took stock of his unwary innocence she couldn’t bring herself to startle him too brutally, so she simply stepped out of nowhere beside him. That was startling enough! Poor Steve jerked around like a released slingshot and looked up into her teasing eyes in pure astonishment. She just stood there twinkling back at him, unencumbered by music books and luscious enough to eat. He bounced off the bench and, catching her capricious spirit, declared, “No fair! That’s guerrilla warfare!”
“All’s fair…,” she began, grinning back at him. Then she sucked in her cheeks a little and wavered back and forth with her hands behind her back, looking very elfin.
“As you say,” declared Steve with conviction, catching one of her hands in his and holding it lightly. Then he gently but firmly turned her around and started her walking down the lane. She responded happily to this good-natured display of pseudo-authoritarianism: it exactly suited her mood. They looked at each other and melted together under their little joke.
As they strolled down the path in the quiet of the cool night, an impregnable assurance of the rightness of it all bound them together. It was so much what should be, so divinely appointed, so very good. Although it was totally new to them both, totally unlike anything they had tumbled into until now, it felt to them as if they had been created for this from the beginning, as if they had never been strangers. It felt as if they had known each other for always and needed only the right occasion to solemnify what already was. Up and down the campus outskirts they strolled like partners in a dance, paying no attention to where they were going. Steve led, without realizing it, and she followed, trusting Steve to lead her well.
After some time they stopped on a seldom-used set of stairs leading down the hill toward a building that had burned down some years before. Around and beneath them spread the rolling countryside, just bright enough under the first quarter of the moon to resemble a vast snapshot negative and just dark enough to preserve the mystic envelopment of night. Their eyes wandered over the panorama. A light breeze fanned their cheeks. Their thoughts zeroed in on the same target, and they knew it without saying a word.
The minutes passed and strangely enough Cecilia began to sense in Steve a kind of withdrawal from the warm circumference of their little circle. She was just beginning to worry about this when Steve haltingly opened his mouth and said:
“I will never understand why you … you…,”—Steve hesitated—” I will never understand why you would take a second look at a frog like me.”
Her hand squeezed his. The silence of the next few moments cut off his breath entirely. Her hand held onto his so tightly that it almost hurt. Poor Cecilia had no idea what to say. How could Steve even think such a thing? Her heart was pounding, her breast rose and fell. There was only one answer that came to her at that most tender moment. Turning squarely towards him, the dim moonlight revealing the plea in her eyes, she raised her arms and entwined them behind his neck. He clasped her around the waist and drew her bosom into his chest. There was a moment of stillness, and then their lips met in a long and warm and moist kiss that effectively sealed their destiny. They would be together forever.
After the kiss she rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He entwined his head and neck around hers and held her there while love washed over them both in its purest and rarest form.
From that moment on, it was evident to all that Stephan Pearson and Cecilia Endsrud were destined to become husband and wife.
*****
I will admit that at the time I wondered how all of this could have happened so quickly. Of course, I knew nothing then of Steve’s odyssey which had left him so helplessly ready to respond to Cecilia and to love her. But Cecilia? I think we can thank Tom in part for setting her up for her rapid and wholehearted response to the new Steve, the Steve who had already begun to emerge from his wilderness encounters of the previous summer a changed man even before he laid eyes on her.
I cannot claim full accuracy in my account of the reasons why they bonded so quickly, but I can confidently claim it in reporting the fact that they did.
And I know, because she told me, that Cecilia was quick to recognize and strongly affirm Steve’s latent genius. She also found in him an exceptional sensitivity and kindness without realizing that she herself was the source of it.
XXXIII
During the month of November, Steve and Cecilia were, as I saw it, the two happiest people on campus. Day by day as they continued to grow into each other, they fell more and more in love. Those two had a knack for being completely themselves as individuals and at the same time completely united in their love, which only served to enhance their mutual enchantment with one another. Their oneness came from the way they gloried in their differences as well as in their similarities which bonded them all the more. To describe for me what their love felt like to him Steve once used the analogy of a colloidal suspension in which the parts remain distinct but are fully integrated, as opposed to a compound in which the parts dissolve into one another and lose their identity. Steve was in a state of awe at the fact that such a love was even possible, and when he tried to explain it to Cecilia in these terms as they sat together on their bench one evening, she simply responded by looking him straight in the eyes, nodding her head and planting a big kiss on his forehead. They never forfeited the awe in which they held each other. Nothing about Cecilia disenchanted Steve. Whether he was calling for her at the women’s dorm or waiting for her on the old bench, his heart skipped a beat every time he caught sight of her coming towards him. But Cecilia was no less in awe of Steve, as her frequent little stopovers at my practice r
oom made clear to me. She marveled at his intellect, especially at the way things came together so smoothly in his swift mathematical mind, as well as at his ability to respond instantly and deeply to anything, large or small, that was truly beautiful.
In spite of their surface differences, they shared some powerful cohesives. One of them was their response to “little things” unnoticed by most of us, things like Cassiopeia, or the rhapsodic singing of the birds, or the silvery magic of the moonlit countryside. Cecilia’s love for the passion of the music of Bach matched Steve’s admiration for its mathematical purity, and each enhanced the other, sending down ever deeper roots of appreciation in both of them for his music.
During those few all-too-short weeks in November of 1919, to meet either of them alone was to encounter the very definition of “happiness.” To meet both of them together was to discover everything that is meant by “bliss.”
Every morning they met in front of the church to attend chapel together. It felt so good to stroll down the aisle to “their” pew, to sit side by side before God and the whole world, to share the same hymnal and to sing the same hymn. Steve especially enjoyed the praise hymns. Praise was in his bones. God was so close to him when Cecilia was sitting beside him holding his hand.
But it was the evenings, the cool still November evenings, towards which their whole days tended. Then it was that they soaked each other up, mostly in silence as the well-matched pieces of their souls interlocked, almost physically, through their entwined fingers. A little ritual developed. They’d meet at the bench, give each other a hug, and sit down side by side. Then with Cecilia holding onto his hand, torn between her love for him and her duty to use her practice time well, Steve would rise from the bench without releasing her hand and walk her to the door of the music hall. Giving her a light kiss on the forehead, he’d gently nudge her through the door. Then he’d return to the bench and sit there listening to her organ music roll out through the open window until he couldn’t stand it anymore. It was usually around 8:30 when he could no longer resist the urge to join her. Into the music hall he’d go and up the staircase to her chamber on the fifth floor. Quietly he’d slip through the door and there she was, his beautiful Cecilia, making beautiful music. As the days grew shorter and the air grew nippier, he found himself worrying about how cold it was getting in her room, so he’d quietly move over to the window and shut it. The first time he did that, she looked around at him without stopping the music and said very softly, very coyly, “Thank you, my love. Now that you are right here, I don’t need to have the window open anymore.”
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