Within a week-and-a-half after Steve’s night visit, finals were over for another four months. Tensely he endured this artificial period of time. It took a great effort of self-constraint and apathetic resignation for him to subdue the throbbing forces in his soul, but he had had a lot of practice at subduing them during his upbringing. He was like the protagonist in one of those Greek tragedies whose dynamism the Fates have so succeeded in thwarting at every turn that he is finally reduced to impotence and remorseful prostration before them. Steve certainly did not embrace the course of events which necessity thrust upon him, but neither did he fight it. He simply submitted to the unavoidable.
The semester break was spent at Joe Brennan’s farm with a number of the fellows. They filled their days with eating, sleeping, drinking, card-playing, and the like. Several times a day Steve yielded to the impulse to strike out on his own across the snowy fields to the woods on the far end of the farm, there to stamp about concealed by the trees and out of earshot of his friends who would have been baffled by the stuff that came out of his mouth.
It was from an entirely unexpected source that trouble suddenly broke in on him two days after the second semester began. He stumbled onto it early one morning well camouflaged in an innocent-looking white envelope in his post office box. Taking the envelope into the Tiger’s Haunt, he sat down at a table in the corner and opened it. It contained a note typewritten by a student secretary:
“Dr. C. B. Larson respectfully requests the presence of Mr. Stephan Pearson in his office this afternoon between the hours of three and five o’clock. Thank you.”
Steve, confused by it, reread the note several times before remarking out loud, “What in the world does he want with me?” For the rest of the day he was plagued by this question until at four-thirty he decided to bite the bullet and get it over with. He trudged haltingly across the campus to Old Main and climbed up to the third story where the Mathematics Department was housed.
The door to Doc Larson’s office was ajar, as though he was expecting someone. Through the crack in the door, Steve spied the middle-aged professor bending over a desk and engrossed in a stack of papers. He had almost decided that this was not a good time to disturb him when the gray-haired man sensed his presence and looked up.
“Ah yes, Mr. Pearson. I was expecting you. Come in and sit down,” he said with a sharp precision. Running his fingers quickly through his tousled hair, he lost no time in getting down to business.
“Mr. Pearson,” he began. “My colleague, Dr. Brockhaus, and I have been surprised and, well, quite impressed by your showing on our final examinations.” He was now measuring his words one by one. “As a matter of fact, you would have written a perfect examination for me if in your haste you had not misread the fifth problem on spherical trigonometry and made it much harder for yourself. Still, if I had stated it the way you construed it, your answer would not only have been correct but—and I do not say this lightly—a stroke of genius. And Dr. Brockhaus tells me your only errors in the physics final occurred where solving a problem required memorizing tables of specific gravities and that sort of thing. He was forced to conclude that you had never even opened the textbook.”
The professor paused. Steve sat impassive before him. He pressed on to make his point.
“Now, Mr. Pearson, if you had bothered to submit your daily assignments or had shown any interest in your work during the semester, I would have been compelled to give you an A. But, young man, in view of your record, what do you expect me to do?”
It was a question demanding an answer. Steve, of course, had not wasted a moment of thought on it up to this point. The question hung in the air. The silence was getting embarrassing.
“I don’t know, sir,” Stephan said weakly.
“Well, I don’t know either. But that’s not actually the reason I asked to see you today. Mr. Pearson, tell me this: What are you really interested in? What stirs your juices?”
Another unanswerable question for someone whose spurts of eloquence were confined to paper and whose honest response was, in any case, unthinkable at the moment. Steve had a feeling that the longer it took for him to find some kind of an answer, the more likely he was to get a drawn-out lecture from Dr. Larson. But nothing came to him. He squirmed nervously in the chair, his eyes glued to the floor. Finally he stated with as much conviction as he could muster, “I like nature and the out-of-doors, and animals, especially horses.”
“That’s just fine,” retorted the educator. “So do I. Everyone needs an avocation. But what are you planning to do with your life? What is your vocation? Let me be frank with you. It would be criminal of you to squander your God-given ability. That’s true of everyone, of course. But when we are talking about an extraordinarily rare and priceless treasure such as you have been given, young man, it becomes doubly criminal to squander it. What you have been given is not just yours. It is the common property of all mankind. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student whose natural gifts in mathematics approach yours. You’ve got to harness those gifts and put them to work in a productive way. It’s time for you to start digging in, my boy. Life is too short to throw away on frivolities. Sure enjoy them from time to time, but don’t make a career out of them. If it sounds like I’m pleading with you, I am! What will it take for you to discover your true calling in life?”
Dr. Larson had said his piece. The blank expression on Steve’s face said it all. He was wasting his breath.
“You may leave now. But at least give some serious thought to what I have just told you. We are here to help and encourage you. I’m telling you point blank, Mr. Pearson, I would be only too grateful for the chance to do that.”
Steve got up, thanked him perfunctorily, and walked out of the frustrated professor’s office, but not out of his mind.
And indeed it would be true to say that he stalked about in Dr. Larson’s mind for the rest of the year. The devoted professor joined hands with Dr. Brockhaus in a relentless effort to arouse in Steve some sense of his “obligations to God, to society, and to himself.” The peace of anonymous obscurity was no longer a luxury available to the taciturn young man who, in the classroom, always chose to sit as far away from the action as he could get.