On the way up the staircase, Steve was doing a little calculating. Being the son of Julia whose menstrual periods were severe and inescapably noticeable, Steve was well aware of how fragile a woman’s emotions can become once a month. “It has to be her time now,” he told himself. “It’s just the way of women.”
When they reached the organ chamber, they sat down next to each other on the bench. Steve had not felt so desolate for over a month. Leaning into his shivering treasure, he lightly caressed her cheek and said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Without looking up, she moved in closer to him and began haltingly.
“It’s nothing, really…. But then again…. No, it really is silly…. Still, I’ll tell you about it because … because you’re my Steve and you won’t think I’m crazy.”
Steve nodded.
Reaching into the pocket of her coat, she pulled out a sheet of paper and opened it deliberately.
“This afternoon in the library, Paul gave me the German part of what’s on this paper. He was feeling kind of down in the dumps and just wanted someone to share it with, I guess. It’s a little poem by Goethe called Wanderers Nachtlied II. He wrote it on a mountaintop in the evening when he was an old man. Something in it spoke to Paul’s sadness, I guess. After he gave it to me, I think he felt better…. Well, then for some reason I began to get silly over it, too. It’s been going through my head all afternoon, as if I were the old man! I even made a translation of it for you so you could see it too. I knew you wouldn’t get silly…. Then I came across that poor little cardinal lying in the snow and oh, I don’t what came over me….”
She handed him the paper and repeated the poem softly in German as he read it silently in English.
“Ueber allen Gipfeln
“Over every mountain crest
Ist Ruh’;
Is peace;
In allen Wipfeln
In all the crowns of trees at rest
Spuerest du
Thou seest
Kaum einen Hauch;
Scarcely a sigh;
Die Voegelein schweigen in Walde;
The little birds are hushed now;
Warte nur, balde
Only wait, soon thou,
Ruhest du auch.”
Thou too shalt die.”
“Only he doesn’t say ‘die’ in the last line. He just says ‘rest,’ but you know he means ‘die.’ It isn’t supposed to be sad, just accepting of the inevitable, almost embracing it. Still, when I saw that beautiful cardinal lying dead in the snow and thought of the words ‘Die Voegelein schweigen im Walde,’ something just snapped inside me. I can’t even tell you what it was! I broke out in tears and sat down next to the bird and ran my fingers over its soft feathers and just cried and cried and cried. I lost all track of time. It felt like I was crying for the whole world, Steve—all because of that little cardinal and that poem…. Now you know what I mean by ‘silly.’”
Far from being put off by this bizarre account, Steve’s heart nearly burst for love of his precious Cecilia. He laid his hand on hers. It was warmer now and she was shivering less. He kissed her on the temple and slid off the bench and onto a chair.
“Won’t you play something soft and peaceful, my angel?” he whispered.
She nodded. Selecting just the right stops, she began playing from memory.
The serene harmonies and poignant melody of Bach’s “Komm, suesser Tod” settled over the chamber and tenderly enfolded the two young lovers. Steve leaned back in his chair and inhaled deeply. His lungs felt sore and heavy. Gazing into his angel’s tear-stained face now absorbed into the remote world of her music, he knew he was bound in love to this amazing woman forever, not to cramp her or in any way to tame her spirit, but to treasure her and to keep an eternal vigil over her.
Getting out of his chair, he approached Cecilia from behind without interrupting her playing. Placing his hands lightly around her waist, he whispered into her ear, “What would life be worth to me without you, my treasure?”
Later that night I passed Steve in the corridor. He scowled almost fiercely at me, but did not say a word. I knew why.
XXXVIII
The following day Steve noticed that Cecilia was behaving very strangely. She cut all her classes and spent the morning alone in her room. The afternoon she passed in the solitude of her organ chamber. Whenever they were together she was especially loving towards him, but she seemed preoccupied and a little dizzy. Her thoughts wandered, her sentences trailed off, her words got all mixed up. He caught her humming to herself several times. But he was not perturbed by these eccentricities—after all it was her time, and this was Cecilia. Nevertheless he shadowed her throughout the day whenever he could with the dedication of a practiced sleuth. He was not about to permit her to fall into a repeat of yesterday’s heart-wrenching episode.
During supper she scarcely uttered a word, but the furtive glances she tossed at him were like little jetting leaks of something big and powerful stored up inside her.
After supper she took him by the hand and led him to her organ chamber in the music hall. “I want to show you something,” she said. She seated him in the chair and climbed onto the organ bench, spreading out on the music stand before her several sheets of staff paper covered with handwritten words and notes. Steve was mesmerized by what she was doing.
Her hands came down on the keyboard in a powerful opening declaration. Then the music receded into overlapping waves of a simple fugue which gathered momentum to an intense climax before melting away into a lovely choral figure. This turned into another fugue, more subdued than the first one but just as intense. It too faded off into a quiet denouement that lingered just long enough to bring the music to a perfect end.
When she was finished she closed her eyes tightly, tears squirting out from under her eyelids, and let her fingers float over the keyboard in a soft reprise of the main themes, finally allowing her hands to drop to her lap. Then she raised her head, swung around on the bench, and looked straight into Steve’s gaping eyes.
“My love,” she said. “This is part of yesterday. It is for us. I want it to surprise you. You won’t forget the name ‘Susan Dahl,’ will you?”
“Susan Dahl,” he repeated. “No, I won’t forget it. Ever.”
A smile toyed with the corners of his lips at the thought that she had written this wonderful music for them. But in Cecilia’s eyes there was only pleading. After staring into her eyes for a long moment, he stepped up to the bench and kissed her on the forehead. Then he turned to go.
“You won’t forget?” she asked again, the pleading still in her eyes.
“Susan Dahl. I won’t forget, my dear angel. I’ll come back later as usual.”
Steve felt much better as he descended the staircase. So, she wanted to surprise him! He was still humming the melody of the second fugue, experiencing once again its intensity and beauty. So, this was a part of yesterday, was it? What might that mean? He would have to wait until his Cecilia decided it was the right time to unveil her surprise for him. But it would be worth the wait!
She was something else, his Cecilia!
XXXIX
The weekend was soon upon them again. The temperatures had steadily fallen all week long. Friday night the wind blew with slicing sharpness as soon as the sun fell below the horizon. Except in the small patches where the sun had melted it a little, the fine powdery snow shifted and drifted back and forth. Steve and Cecilia decided to spend the evening in the lounge of the women’s dormitory with a few other people listening to phonograph records on the new Gramophone which had recently been donated by someone.
More amusing than any vaudeville act, especially for Cecilia, the odd-looking machine ground out in squealing bursts of noise something that vaguely resembled Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Bach. The foibles and distortions produced by those early attempts at recording tickled Cecilia’s funny bone all evening long. Steve was just as amused by her reaction to these puny sounds as he was by
the sounds themselves. When the anemic strings in Cesar Franck’s “Symphony in D Minor” struggled and surged upwards toward a thin climax, with the great brass choir making its pompous entry sounding more like a collection of Cracker Jack whistles than the trumpets of doom, she nearly broke up.
By 9:30, however, she was looking all tired out. Noting this, Steve, to ensure that their time together was always a blessing for her and not a burden, took her hands in his, raised her up off the davenport where they had been seated, and suggested that she go right to bed and sleep in as late in the morning as she wanted to, since he knew she had no classes on Saturday. She lay her head on his shoulder (you couldn’t really kiss romantically in public in those days), squeezed his hands, and said she would.
Steve, for his part, on leaving the dorm, did not feel at all like going to bed. The biting antiseptic air cleared out his head and aroused within him the desire to tackle something really challenging. The library was still open, he noted. He might just find something suitable to his mood in there. So he detoured into the library and headed for the “stacks” which, though formerly so repellant to him, he was now often finding strangely attractive. The only nook in the whole entanglement that was familiar to him was Stack Five, northeast corner. Here was deposited a collection of treatises on mathematics and physics to which he had infrequent recourse. Surveying the offerings on the shelves, his eyes were arrested by one that read The Collected Mathematical and Scientific Dissertations and Treatises of Blaise Pascal. He pulled it out, blew the dust off, opened it, and observed on the checkout card that no one had ever taken it out. An inscription informed him that it had been a part of the private library of one “Hjertaas Jensen” which had been bequeathed to the college in 1897.
“Hmmm,” he muttered, fondling the heavy relic. “You ought to do the trick.”
He sat down in an unoccupied carrel and was soon absorbed in the first chapter: “Dissertation on Conic Sections Presented to les mathematiciens parisiens at Sixteen Years of Age.” He followed the youthful Pascal around in this admirable essay until he picked up on the direction of his thought and then sailed on ahead of his words to stand back and watch Pascal drift by just as he knew he would. He enjoyed playing this game with essays like this one. First, you had to bend your mind to follow the hand that wrote the work and the eyes that were now reading it; but once your mind caught the scent, so to speak, it could race on ahead and claim the quarry before the author got there. It was real fun.
About that time the lights in the “stacks” blinked on and off. Just as the thing was getting really interesting! So creeping down the narrow circular stairwell to the desk, he checked out the volume and trotted off to the dorm with it tucked safely under his arm. The wind, he observed, had grown milder now, almost balmy, in the short time he had been in the library.
The corridor was deserted and Ted was in bed. So Steve sat down at a table in the lounge and opened the book. Glancing at his watch, it was 10:15 p.m.
The next time he looked at his watch it said 3:35 a.m. Ridiculous! The thing must be on the blink! It couldn’t be more than midnight. Well, he’d just finish the chapter he was on and call it a night.
When he finally rolled into bed, his eyes were starting to ache. That fool watch said 4:20. He’d have to get it fixed.
Two hours later the washed-out grays of dawn seeped through the window, unnoticed by Steve.
An hour after that, Steve was faintly conscious of Ted stirring around. He groggily replied to his roommate’s libelous conjecture as to why he had got in so late the night before.
An hour and a half later he bounced to life when Ted strode into the room and slammed the door.
“What’s the matter?” he almost shouted in alarm.
“The matter? Nothing, Casanova. Nothing except the snow is melting, that’s all! Another two or three days of weather like this and we’ll have the robins back!”
“Dang! What time have you got? I can’t trust my watch.”
“It’s 9:00 Saturday morning, in the year 1920. Don’t ask me the date. All I know is that spring is early and you’re still in bed.”
Steve gazed glassy-eyed into the quilt on his lap.
“O rats,” he muttered, seeing that his watch had been correct all the time. Good thing he’d told Cecilia to sleep in late. Otherwise she’d have expected him to meet her for breakfast and be worried about him by now.
He touched his eyes. They were tender to the touch.
“But it was worth it,” he told himself.
XL
In his 10:20 physics class, Steve nearly dozed off several times. He would like to have called the whole thing off and gone back to bed. The soreness in his eyes had reached the point that when he closed his eyes it would creep forward and escape through his eyelids, but when he opened them it screwed itself slowly further back into his head. He knew from experience that the more deeply it entrenched itself in his head, the more difficult it would be to rout. If only he could come by a couple of hours of sleep right now, he would have a normal day.
Somehow he managed to stay awake through Dr. Brockhaus’ class. Fragments of the formulae and segments of the lines of reasoning which had absorbed him the previous night kept floating through his mind, drifting round and round in lazy spirals. They kept swarming around him like yellow jackets at a garbage pit—which was a pretty good description of what he was feeling like. Their monotonous buzzing drilled itself into his brain. Normally he enjoyed this kind of stuff, but when your eyes and head feel like they are about to pop, a fellow can’t even enjoy what he usually enjoys the most.
Now hold it a minute! It was Cecilia that he “enjoyed” the most, and he could enjoy her anytime.
I wonder, though, if my angel Cecilia were sitting beside me right now, he asked himself, how much would I be able to actually enjoy her through this lousy headache and these aching eyes? They say England lost America because of someone’s gout.
Lunchtime gave him a chance to move around a little. Distractions pulled his mind away from Pascal’s theorems and his own throbbing headache, especially the distraction of Cecilia. He thought she had never looked so lovely as she looked as she was coming down the walk in front of the dormitory to meet him for lunch. There was an almost unreal airiness about her.
“Good morning, my love!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
Squinting fiercely he scanned the bright sky, inhaled the fragrant air, and pressed her hand in his.
“Yes,” he said. “It sure is.”
And maybe it would be, after all.
After lunch they stepped out onto the veranda of the cafeteria. It was deserted. Beneath them lay a sweeping view of the countryside to the south.
Suddenly Cecilia lit up!
“Why don’t we go for a motorcycle ride this afternoon? It’s so warm and sunny. We could take a picnic and ride over to that hill way over there and have an early supper outdoors right under those trees and be back before dark.”
She was pointing to a wooded bluff just a few miles away where they had gone once before in the fall.
“This afternoon?”
“Why not?” There was that sparkle in her voice again that he hadn’t heard for a several days.
“Well, for one thing, we’d get plenty wet going and coming.”
“We could dress for it. We could take some spare socks and build a fire when we get there. Wouldn’t you love to do that? It’d be a real adventure.”
“That it would,” Steve agreed.
“And for another thing?” she teased.
“For another thing…,” he began hesitantly.
He looked into her eager eyes.
“You’re right. Let’s go!”
XLI
Eagerly they walked over to the women’s dorm. Steve’s headache seemed to disappear while he was waiting for Cecilia. What wonders that girl could effect! She had chased away his pain as easily as dawn scatters darkness. He felt game for anything. And that was a
good thing, because here she was, coming towards him all dressed up for riding and holding a small bundle in front of her.
“There’s a picnic lunch in here for us,” she said with a smile, handing it to him.
Next they walked over to the men’s dorm. Steve could feel her hand trembling just slightly in his. There was something a bit light-headed about her today which made her all the more attractive to him. Probably she was not entirely herself yet. Was it wise for him to yield to her impulsive request and take her out into the country today? She might regret it tomorrow.
Ah well, he concluded to himself. Once we get there both of us can relax and rest. That’s as good a place to do it as anywhere, I suppose.
His few moments of worrying about Cecilia’s condition had just refanned the smoldering embers in his own head. He would need that rest!
It took him no time at all to get into some thick warm clothes and put on his cycle jacket. He, like Cecilia, brought along an extra pair of dry socks. Soon they were sputtering down the hill toward the wooded bluff in the distance.
The roads in town were, of course, in fairly good condition. The current of springlike air rushing past Cecilia’s bared face and through her blond hair lifted her heart right out of her up towards the sky. She clung to Steve, inhaling deeply and soaking in the vernal delights all around her. She marveled at the gleaming purity of the snow shimmering under the noonday sun.
Steve too was marveling at the snow. He had not expected it to be so dazzling. The shafts of sunlight glancing off the glossy surface of the snow drove themselves like daggers through his squinting eyes into the most sensitive part of his headache. The ointment of Cecilia’s delight in the ride had no effect on this acidic onslaught. Things had better improve once they got onto the country roads. He didn’t know why they should, but they had better!
In point of fact, the situation deteriorated even further when they left town and turned onto the road leading to the bluff. Steve now had to cope not only with glaring snow but also with demanding road conditions. Normally it would have been great fun for him. But today it was pure torture. On all sides the blinding sea of fire stretched out all the way to the horizon, implacable and inescapable, daring him to slice his way through it over the lacerated and sloppy roadbed. Under the slop, the ground was still frozen solid, forming a hard surface slickened by the slush and half-melted mire. Defiantly Steve propped open his protesting eyelids and clung to the handlebars to keep the machine on the road and prevent it from spinning out of control. On and on it went. It took everything he had to break through the red wall of pain in his eyes and force himself to react nimbly to the challenges of the road—here a deep rut, there a treacherous mudhole, here a large rock, there a fallen branch. On and on and on.
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