The fiery beauty of autumn had long since faded away. No longer was the rolling hilltop campus of Christiania College crowned by the dazzling scarlet of symmetrical maples or the more regal purple of twisted oaks. The piles and ridges of wind-driven leaves were gone too, buried under the accumulation of two late-fall snowstorms. The temperature was already taking those deep plunges so characteristic of Minnesota winters, and the wind was sweeping as usual across the barren fields and whipping over the crest of the hill on which Christiania stood. Fine particles of icy snow cut like shredded glass into the face of anyone brave enough to venture out across the naked campus. The challenge of a long hard winter had arrived with its clean fair-handed fury. The hardy country folks accepted it head-on, leaning into the wind in their thick fur-lined coats or huddled around their fires indoors. The cold on the outside served to concentrate the warmth on the inside, and the forbidding brutality of nature tended to intensify the intimacy shared among friends and family members.
But for one young man on the campus of Christiania College, this was a period of creeping disintegration. To all outward appearances, Stephan Pearson was very little changed from his high school days. He was still the quiet one wherever he went, still an enigma to his professors. They did not know quite how to interpret the nervous detachment that often descended on him during their lectures: Was he daydreaming, bored, or pursuing some line of thought suggested by the lecture? He was still attracted to the ranks of those fellow students who made a practice of severing their ties to the college every weekend and just letting themselves go. But he was not always comfortable in their company either.
Among his friends in those days was Tom Mahler, a tall, sturdy, handsome veteran of the First World War who was taking premedicine in the hope of following in his father’s footsteps. He roomed across the corridor from Steve and seemed to enjoy Steve’s company on his weekend excursions into the countryside around St. Mark. Since St. Mark was his hometown, he was acquainted with several farmers in the area who made a decent home brew. More often than not, they were joined by such lads as Lute Odegaard, a quick-witted farmer’s son from Western Minnesota, and by Steve’s roommate, Ted Bjornson, the tall lanky son of a South Dakota Ford dealer. The recent passage of the Prohibition Amendment and the firm stand Christiania College took against intoxicating beverages added measurably to the attractiveness of these weekend excursions.
But the normal course of the average day provided Steve with numberless irritations. Each morning the entire student body was required to gather in the chapel for a full half hour devoted to worship and instruction. In one form or another, the students were regularly reminded of their Christian duty to be good stewards of the God-given talents entrusted to them, which was synonymous with their duty to study diligently and get a solid liberal arts education. Was not the Parable of the Talents ample evidence that squandering our gifts will earn us the wrath of God? Steve sat through such counsel impassively. He could barely stomach harangues of this sort. They ran so counter to the observable facts of life. His dad would admirably have filled their bill, and yet he was just about the least happy man Steve knew. People who toiled and ground their lives away had to die in the end just like anyone else, and most of them never experienced a day of true enjoyment all the while. This kind of talk was so annoying to him that he wrote off whatever good there might have been in other aspects of chapel and came to look on it as a choice time to catch up on his sleep in a rear pew.
And then there was that cursed obligation to sit through sixteen hours of didactic droning each week. And they took attendance in those days! So he would sleep until the last moment every morning, skip breakfast, and saunter off to his first class. Between classes he would meet some buddies in the Tiger’s Haunt and play checkers or eat ice cream. Every chance he got he would abandon the campus altogether, taking long hikes through the fields, even in bad weather. Occasionally he would skim through a textbook, but ordinarily he spent his time doodling away on a blank sheet of paper, drawing cars, horses, math formulas, war scenes, and intricate designs of all sorts. Sometimes he merely sulked around his room in seething agitation, as though he were about to burst.
The only courses that interested him in the slightest degree were his mathematics and science courses. He frankly despised his required religion course taught by a young Th.D. who enjoyed displaying the shock value of his newly acquired skills in what he “modestly” called higher criticism.
In a word, Steve’s life was torn between a myriad of things that disgusted him and a mere handful of things that he enjoyed. If he had had his way, he would have turned his back on the former and spent all his time on the latter. But that was impossible. Wherever he turned he was ensnared by distasteful obligations: his textbooks were always staring at him, his schedule was always glowering at him, his professors were always nagging him, his mother’s letters were always admonishing him. At times his disgust would turn to rage and he would seize the nearest book and hurl it to the floor or storm out of his room and charge blindly down the hill out into the open fields.
For the first two or three months, the weekends transformed him into a different person. In the company of his pals he felt free to set loose his wit and unleash his mischief. There was always plenty of beer and cigarettes to create a convivial mood on the farms where Tom Mahler took his buddies. Before winter set in, they rented horses and rode all over the place or hunted small game in the many nearby woodlots. But when Sunday night came, they had to be cautious not to betray the faintest whiff of beer on their breath when they returned to the college, and on Monday morning it was back to the same old grind. The Stephan Pearson of the school week and the Stephan Pearson of the weekend remained separate personalities until somewhere around Thanksgiving time. Then for some reason Steve began having a difficult time throwing off his sulkiness and wearying disgust when the weekend came. With the grim blanket of sloppy snow that set a limit to what you could do on weekends came a heavy feeling of the futility of it all. It smothered him wherever he was. He was constantly fidgeting, anxious about everything. His barricade was being breached on every hand. He was finding it more and more difficult to hide himself behind it, more and more difficult to keep his true feelings of disgust from showing.
Just before Christmas recess, the boys decided to have a free-wheeling party at the Brennan farm within walking distance of the hill. Joe Brennan was a middle-aged bachelor who welcomed the weekends the boys spent at his place every bit as much as the boys themselves did. He had no qualms about their proposal to invite some girls to this party.
Steve, however, didn’t know any girls well enough to feel comfortable about inviting one. The stringent moral code of his hometown made normal interaction of teens with the opposite sex almost impossible. In addition, there was his extreme reserve in dealing with other people in general, resulting in a lack of enthusiasm on his part for the party from the start.
His strapping roommate Ted Bjornson finally took a hand in the matter of getting him a date. Thus, on the evening of the party Steve found himself escorting a willowy blond Swede named Sue Olson who, Ted had assured him, could be trusted to keep their secret and to inject some wit into the occasion. Steve himself felt anything but witty that night, having undergone that same day a comprehensive English examination and a test covering the first two hundred fifty pages of his religion textbook. The whole pointless nonsense of it all was still gagging him as he trudged through the snow to call for Miss Olson. During the mile-long walk into the wind to the Brennan farm, Sue made several dead-end attempts to provoke a conversation. But Steve’s terse answers never offered more than a literal one- or two-word response to her questions. He seemed much more annoyed with himself than with her.
The spacious farmhouse was amply provided with all the attractions calculated to furnish an evening of pleasure at every level. The beer flowed from the kegs in a steady stream, as did the music from the fancy new Victrola. There was laughing and dancing—forbidden by the college—and general gaiety. Steve knew he should be having a good time, but for the life of him he just could not dive into the stream of the evening.
As the evening progressed, he discovered that what Ted had described as Sue’s wit was really the babbling of a scatterbrain. The lithe female, who towered over him by a good three inches, insisted on dragging him relentlessly around the dance floor while the Victrola spewed forth an unebbing tide of raucous sounds. Between dances she probably consumed more beer than she had ever seen in her life before, growing more obnoxious and, frankly, indecent by the mugful. Her prattling questions and her increasingly parasitic physical proximity became for Steve a major invasion of his privacy, an uninvited intrusion into the sanctuary behind his barricade. He was rapidly coming to despise her and even more to hate himself for his inability to have a good time when everyone else seemed to be having one.
A few hours and several beers into the evening, Lute noticed that Steve was far from his normal self. Sidling over to him during a pause in the music, he said with a facetiousness slightly tainted by reproof, “What’s the matter, old boy? You don’t seem to be having any fun.”
Steve looked him in the eye and smiled weakly, “Yeah. It’s a great party.”
Then the music started belting again and Lute returned to his date. Steve looked up and saw Sue wobbling towards him with another glass of beer in her hand and a foolish grin on her face. She winked at him and nodded in the direction of the bedroom from which a couple was at that very moment emerging, as if to say, It’s our turn. Sick, he wheeled about and made a rush for the door. Everyone was stamping on the floor in time to the blaring music. He pulled open the door and made his escape out onto the porch. The icy air met his flushed face. He stood there for a moment, glowering into the noiseless white night. Then, grabbing a handful of snow from the railing, he flung it out into the darkness.
“No!” he shouted. “No! No! No!”