When Steve awoke the next morning, the brightness of the day immediately cheered him and reminded him of the previous day. The air was every bit as fragrant and the sun every bit as glorious as on the morning before. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the dingy atmosphere of the classrooms he so despised. As a matter of fact, he was among the first in line for breakfast. There was something about the whole appeal of things that gave him an appetite. A hearty breakfast seemed the order of the day.
Who knows what prevented him from taking off across the countryside once again? When he stepped out of the cafeteria and inhaled the clean air, his spirit soared. In his mind’s eye he was back in the woodland where life went on in a harmony of desire and duty because its creatures were all doing by instinct exactly what they wanted to do. Watching a couple of early spring robins peck around in the damp lawn in front of him, he imagined their joy in possessing the bright wide freedom of the whole world. And then he looked around and thought of man.
Why did man alone have to build walls, make unnatural laws, deprive animals of their freedom, and make a slave of himself? It might be understandable if some greater animal had robbed him of his liberty just as he had robbed the horse. But man had made a slave of himself! He had made his own bit and bridle. And if he was slave only to himself, then what’s to prevent him from setting himself free?
“Nothing!” Steve exclaimed out loud.
The rest of the morning he found it easy to live out his newfound conviction. It’s not that he rebelled against what was going on around him, nor did he openly oppose his teachers. Rather, it was the woodland itself, with its carefree spirit and elemental satisfactions still burning like a fire within him, which held the classroom, the professor, and subject matter at bay and made them simply irrelevant.
At 10:20 he went to his physics class. Right off the mark, Dr. Brockhaus was visibly irritated by Steve’s unexcused absence the day before. He opened the class by letting fly a well-aimed dart in Steve’s direction which missed its mark because its mark was elsewhere in spirit. In the course of the lecture, Dr. Brockhaus asked Steve two easy questions to which he received no answer because Steve never even heard them. The student next to him had to jab him in the ribs and the question had to be repeated. The second time this happened, the professor took a deep breath and said in a cold tone of voice, “Mr. Pearson, you will remain here after class is dismissed.”
This jolted Steve abruptly out of his reveries and back into the classroom. “What a way to die!” he flustered to himself.
And it was as though he had just died. A moment ago he had been living his dream, and now it was gone. In its place there remained the cold propositions he had formulated in his well-ordered mind to make sense of his dream. The scenes and smells that had been dancing around in his head now suddenly were reduced to tableaux, lifeless murals, mounted laboratory slides, information you could put into a dusty textbook. The old shroud dropped on him like a curtain and smothered him in darkness again.
Class was over. Dr. Brockhaus was shuffling some papers around on his desk as the students filed out. Steve approached him slowly. When the other students were gone, the professor looked up and said, “Mr. Pearson, what is the matter with you?”
A long pause ensued.
“I was just beginning to think we were making some progress with you. Am I wrong? Do you have no sense of obligation to those who fought and died to make our world a better place? Doesn’t it matter to you at all that a lasting peace is within reach, that democracy is giving the whole human race a chance to move up, that men with your ability are more needed now than ever?”
Silence.
“Young man, I know what you did yesterday,” the professor went on more gently. “I know how difficult it can be to concentrate on your studies in the springtime. I was young once too, you know. But you can’t just spend your life yielding to your whims. It’s fine to indulge them in the right time and place, and in the right amount. But it is just plain foolish to choose them over the effort it takes to stick with things that are much more necessary but not as much fun. You don’t want to spend your whole life darting around after butterflies. You may not realize it now, but most of the good things you take for granted on every level, others have worked hard to place at your disposal. It’s the duty of every one of us to do the same thing for those who come after us. Remember, there’s a big difference between being truly happy and just having fun. Working to add something good to the rich cultural store that supports us all is the only path to happiness.”
Steve was seething within. Here was a man so obsessed with “culture” that he failed utterly to see that “culture” was the very wall that penned man in, the very bridle that made him a slave. What did he know about life on the other side of the wall? All that mattered to him was adding to the wall, making it harder for people to escape. The job of the superintelligent is to shore up the wall and pen everybody else in, like cattle in the stockyards, is that it?
Steve was too furious to talk. Dr. Brockhaus turned back to his papers. Stephan Pearson stormed out of the room, his beautiful world in a shambles and his orderly mind deeply offended.
Back in his room he sulked and fumed. So great was his agitation that he finally had to turn to paper and pencil to get it out of his system. He wrote feverishly in a large scrawl all the convictions that had distilled in his mind that morning. He saved the paper and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk. For the next several months it remained there, a symbol of the lucidity of his reasoning based on real experiences and a silent justifier of nearly everything he did.
He had scarcely finished writing and had just started to pace up and down the room when he heard a familiar roar coming from beneath the window. Down below he saw Craig winding up the engine of his motorcycle to go somewhere. A ripple of excitement passed over Steve.
“If only every day could be like yesterday,” he heard himself saying out loud. “Then life would be life.”
The memory of his thrilling ride through the dusk over the muddy roadway drew a pained smile across his face. It was a crooked smile that incorporated both what life could be and what life actually was.
“If only…,” he mused. “If only….”
He settled back in his overstuffed chair and listened to the sound of the cycle fade away in the distance. Shutting his eyes he tried to envision the day before, but succeeded only in evoking bits and pieces of it. Then all at once this bit came to the surface: “Well, baby. It’s a shame that I’ve got to sell you. But a fellow’s got to live somehow.”
Steve sat up, startled. What was that all about? Did Craig actually say he had to sell the cycle? A shaft of light broke into the gloom and all but drove it away in an instant.
“Why can’t I buy it?”
It seemed forever until Craig got back. Was he out there right now selling it to someone else? What if he came back without it? An hour passed. Two hours. And then, through the opened window, he heard the sound he was longing for. He ran down the steps to meet Craig just as he pulled into the parking stall. Trying to appear relaxed, he sauntered over to him as he was shutting off the engine.
“How’s she purring today?”
“Smooth as ever. Polished her up this morning. It took a good hour to get all the mud off.”
“That’s not hard to believe. I’ll bet you’re not too happy about having to … did I hear you say sell her?”
“O yeah.” Disappointment was written all over Craig’s face. “I owe the school over a hundred dollars before the end of the semester. That’s what I get for buying a motorcycle with my college money, I suppose. But it was worth it even for just half a year.”
“Do you have any prospects—for buying it, I mean?”
“Well, there’s a couple of fellows in Minneapolis, but I don’t know….”
“How much are you asking for it?”
Craig’s interest perked up. “Well, I paid over two hundred dollars for it, but I’d be willing to part with it for a hundred and fifty.”
“Would you be willing to take fifty now and a hundred within a couple of weeks?” Steve was not even trying to hide his excitement.
And that’s how Stephan Pearson acquired the motorcycle that ultimately altered the course of so many lives.