It was 8:00 the following Wednesday evening. A half-moon lay low on the western horizon in the receding aura of the long-set sun. Dry leaves were scraping lifelessly along the sidewalks and lanes and were piling up in the eddies of trees, gutters, and even the old oak bench on which Stephan Pearson was nervously fidgeting.
Where on earth could she be? he asked himself anxiously. She’s looked so unbearably pretty these last few days. Makes you fall all apart on the inside.
This led him into a series of vague and inconclusive musings about his weird life these past weeks. But as the darkness deepened around him, it also deepened within him. This was the one time each day when he could count on seeing her. She never failed to emerge from the women’s dorm, stroll past him to the music hall, and mount the stairs to her organ perch high above him. It hadn’t taken him long to distinguish the sound of her organ from all the other sounds coming from the building. He had grown to depend on this evening routine for his inner sustenance, and now that for the first time it hadn’t happened, he felt more ravenous than if he had skipped a meal.
Where are you? he moaned inwardly.
As time wore on and she didn’t appear, his worry over her also became disgust with himself. Self-doubt began tormenting him again. This is so stupid, he chided. Whether she comes or doesn’t come, just look at yourself. You’re behaving like a fool. Get up and get out of here!
With that he grabbed his book and fled the bench. Soon, however, he had slowed to a normal walk. He was aching all over and about as crestfallen as he could get. Maybe there was something wrong with her? Maybe she was sick?… No, not likely. He had seen her at supper. But then, he had noticed that she’d eaten only a few mouthfuls before getting up and taking her tray to the rack. She had seemed a bit flustered at that…. Those music students were an odd lot. Perhaps there was a special concert or recital in Minneapolis. He knew the train left shortly after supper. Yes, that was probably it! He felt relieved to hit upon such a logical explanation for her absence.
I hope she’s having a good time up there, he said to himself with resignation.
At that moment he stepped out from under the trees into a flood of light coming from the auditorium. What’s this all about? he wondered, recalling as quickly the announcement in chapel that morning that the Drama Department was staging an English production of Schiller’s Cabale und Liebe that evening.
Sounds like a real thriller, Steve told himself.
Students were now pouring in toward the auditorium from every direction. But the main flow was on the broad sidewalk from the women’s dorm that ran roughly parallel to the little used trail Steve was on. He was glad to be out of the traffic. Near the entrance of the auditorium, however, the trail and the sidewalk converged. Steve was tempted to turn off the trail and walk around the auditorium through the trees to avoid the crowd, but something prevented him. So he continued straight ahead towards the crowd.
He was nearly at the intersection of his trail with the sidewalk when his blood froze. Coming down the walk and destined to converge with him were Tom Mahler and Cecilia Endsrud! The handsome young ex-soldier was walking straight and tall with a broad grin on his face. And at his side, her arm through his arm, radiant and glowing as usual, was Steve’s angel.
Steve’s legs turned to lead weights. He wanted to run away, but his feet kept plodding forward on their collision course. Robotlike he lurched forward. Closer and closer and closer.
“Evening, buddy!” Tom sang out across the well-lit ten feet that separated them. “Heading for the play, too? Cecilia here tells me it’s a real tearjerker. Poisoned lemonade and everything.”
“No, no. Just out for a walk,” Steve squeezed out.
Cecilia was looking at Steve full in his mournful face. A gentle smile played on her lips but it looked to him as though there was a question mark in her soft eyes. There was nothing condescending about it, just the merest hint that Steve’s sorrow was touching her now as it had touched his Spectre Maiden on that night in his dream. It was almost a look of understanding. It was too much for Steve. It lasted for the briefest instant, and then they were past him.
He dropped his head, turned away, and stepped off into the obscurity of the trees. There’s your quota for life, he moaned. She’s just too much for you.
He couldn’t go back to the dorm. Instead he wandered down into the town and out into the countryside. He paced around in the blackness of the now moonless night. Finally, wearied in body and soul, he returned to the dormitory by another route.
The play lasted rather late into the evening. The women had been issued special passes at the door so that they could get back into the dorm “not later than 11:30 p.m. on pain of forfeiting similar privileges in the future.” By 11:45 half the fellows in the men’s dorm were congregated in their respective lounges discussing, surprisingly enough, the relative merits both of their dates and of the play. Apparently, those men who really cared about their dates had been really shaken up by Schiller’s tearful tale, while most of the girls had sobbed quietly into their handkerchiefs for the better part of the last two acts.
Lute and Ted had decided to forego the play and stay in the dorm. When Steve came absently trudging up the staircase, they were both sitting in the lounge listening intently to Tom’s play-by-play account of his date. Steve slipped past them into his room without greeting them, but he left his door ajar.
“And she sat there next to me, her shoulders quivering and the tears streaming down her cheeks just as unashamed as can be. I was too embarrassed to look at her, but I sure wanted to. I did get a chance to steal a look at her once. She looked at me and I could see she had taken the whole thing into her heart. It was awfully sad, all right…. You can’t imagine how gosh awful pretty some girls are when they have tears in their eyes. I had the strongest urge right there to take her in my arms and tell her that everything would be all right.”
“That’s what I’d have done,” boasted Lute.
“Not with her you wouldn’t have! This little chick has got a built-in something-or-other that draws you in and then holds you at arm’s length even though you want to grab her and squeeze the living daylights out of her.”
“Oh, I see. One of the magic kind, eh? Well, you held her hand at least, didn’t you?”
“Well, ah, as a matter of fact, you fellows just don’t get it. She’s a good girl, a really good girl. But you just wait until Christmas. By then I’ll have her doing cartwheels around my little finger!” Tom swelled up with confidence.
“Listen to him talk!”
“Don’t be too hard on him, Lute. A great big handsome brute like him will just bowl that innocent little farm girl over in no time flat.” Ted enjoyed poking fun at Tom whose muscular frame and classical Nordic features would have impressed even Miss America.
“Now don’t you be too sure about that. He’s not dealing with one of those man-hungry French broads that were running around on the loose after the war. A Minnesota preacher’s daughter is nothing like them.”
“Lute, would you shut up. It might just be that I wouldn’t want to treat Cecilia like one of them.”
“Yeah. And it might just be that you couldn’t.”
“You just listen to me now!” Tom’s wrath was aroused. “It isn’t a matter of ‘can or can’t.’ Some things are a matter of ‘want to or not’!”
“Well, I’ll bet you anything that you can’t take her by Christmas.” Lute was needling Tom along solely for the satisfaction of seeing his friend’s fair face turn scarlet. Nor was he disappointed. He knew exactly which of the ex-soldier’s buttons to push.
“Listen here! I’ll do whatever I decide to do! If I want to, I will. If I don’t, nobody can make me.”
“All right. Fair enough,” Lute said coldly. “If you’re still going with her two weeks from now, guaranteed that you’ll want to. And if you are, I’ll bet you can’t take her by January second. See, I’ll even throw New Year’s Eve into the bargain. If you quit going with her before the two weeks are up, the bet’s off.”
“Well, screw you both. I suppose I’ll have to show you.” At midnight there must have been something about the voluptuous prospects of this bet that seemed especially attractive to Tom who had had a generous foretaste of such things in France. “What do you want to make of it?”
“Two to one,” said Lute, feigning the cool detachment of a businessman. You win, I pay you fifty dollars. You lose, you pay me twenty-five.”
“It’s a deal, by golly!”
“Shake.”
“Shake.”
“Well, I’ll be the son of a three-legged centipede,” drawled Ted, marveling at the rapidity of the transaction.
That’s all Steve heard. He wanted to slam the door shut so hard that the dorm would rock. Instead he eased it shut until it clicked. He could not stand still. He paced up and down the room, bumping into his chair and kicking the bunk. He was seeing red. It was all he could handle to hear them kicking his precious Cecilia around like a piece of garbage. Sure! That’s how those guys always talked. They were always needling each other, and bets had come and gone and been forgotten about more times than you could name. But this was about Cecilia and they sounded dead serious! Couldn’t you just see a handsome chunk of a man like Tom following gullible, trusting Cecilia around day and night like an innocent little puppy dog? Those “guileless” features on that sculpted face of his that could look so wounded, so hurt, so maltreated? It would be so easy for her to fall for that. She was so trusting she’d have to be tottering on the brink of disaster before she’d realize she was in danger. It was unthinkable! They were treating his angel as if she were their plaything! Her! Their plaything! And she’d be the last one to catch on.
Steve flung himself down on his bed in a heavy sweat.
But what could a little runt like him do against the bold honest face of a hunk like Tom Mahler? Not a thing came to mind. Steve felt utterly helpless. It is not too hard for us to understand that in his state of mind, the most obvious solution to his dilemma seemed the most remote to him.
He lay there fuming long after Ted had come to bed and long after the lights had been turned off. Everything was tumbling around in his head—his miserable lot, the whole institution of womanhood, the unspeakable gall of anyone conniving to harm his Cecilia, and the overwhelming need he felt to plant himself somehow smack dab in front of her to defend her at any cost. The only thought that didn’t occur to him that night was the startling truth that until a few weeks ago, he would have been utterly incapable of entertaining any such need to defend anybody.