During the month of November, Steve and Cecilia were, as I saw it, the two happiest people on campus. Day by day as they continued to grow into each other, they fell more and more in love. Those two had a knack for being completely themselves as individuals and at the same time completely united in their love, which only served to enhance their mutual enchantment with one another. Their oneness came from the way they gloried in their differences as well as in their similarities which bonded them all the more. To describe for me what their love felt like to him Steve once used the analogy of a colloidal suspension in which the parts remain distinct but are fully integrated, as opposed to a compound in which the parts dissolve into one another and lose their identity. Steve was in a state of awe at the fact that such a love was even possible, and when he tried to explain it to Cecilia in these terms as they sat together on their bench one evening, she simply responded by looking him straight in the eyes, nodding her head and planting a big kiss on his forehead. They never forfeited the awe in which they held each other. Nothing about Cecilia disenchanted Steve. Whether he was calling for her at the women’s dorm or waiting for her on the old bench, his heart skipped a beat every time he caught sight of her coming towards him. But Cecilia was no less in awe of Steve, as her frequent little stopovers at my practice room made clear to me. She marveled at his intellect, especially at the way things came together so smoothly in his swift mathematical mind, as well as at his ability to respond instantly and deeply to anything, large or small, that was truly beautiful.
In spite of their surface differences, they shared some powerful cohesives. One of them was their response to “little things” unnoticed by most of us, things like Cassiopeia, or the rhapsodic singing of the birds, or the silvery magic of the moonlit countryside. Cecilia’s love for the passion of the music of Bach matched Steve’s admiration for its mathematical purity, and each enhanced the other, sending down ever deeper roots of appreciation in both of them for his music.
During those few all-too-short weeks in November of 1919, to meet either of them alone was to encounter the very definition of “happiness.” To meet both of them together was to discover everything that is meant by “bliss.”
Every morning they met in front of the church to attend chapel together. It felt so good to stroll down the aisle to “their” pew, to sit side by side before God and the whole world, to share the same hymnal and to sing the same hymn. Steve especially enjoyed the praise hymns. Praise was in his bones. God was so close to him when Cecilia was sitting beside him holding his hand.
But it was the evenings, the cool still November evenings, towards which their whole days tended. Then it was that they soaked each other up, mostly in silence as the well-matched pieces of their souls interlocked, almost physically, through their entwined fingers. A little ritual developed. They’d meet at the bench, give each other a hug, and sit down side by side. Then with Cecilia holding onto his hand, torn between her love for him and her duty to use her practice time well, Steve would rise from the bench without releasing her hand and walk her to the door of the music hall. Giving her a light kiss on the forehead, he’d gently nudge her through the door. Then he’d return to the bench and sit there listening to her organ music roll out through the open window until he couldn’t stand it anymore. It was usually around 8:30 when he could no longer resist the urge to join her. Into the music hall he’d go and up the staircase to her chamber on the fifth floor. Quietly he’d slip through the door and there she was, his beautiful Cecilia, making beautiful music. As the days grew shorter and the air grew nippier, he found himself worrying about how cold it was getting in her room, so he’d quietly move over to the window and shut it. The first time he did that, she looked around at him without stopping the music and said very softly, very coyly, “Thank you, my love. Now that you are right here, I don’t need to have the window open anymore.”
Poor Steve! It was a good thing she looked back at her music or she would have seen his eyes fill with tears.
As for Cecilia, these silent visits from Steve towards the end of her practice period became a “minimum daily requirement” for her happiness. On the one occasion on which he was detained (by me!) until a few minutes after nine o’clock, he found her kneeling in fervent prayer next to her organ bench. She couldn’t disguise her relief when he appeared in the doorway, almost flinging herself into his arms.
But normally their evening rendezvous were examples of exhilarating simplicity. Steve would stealthily step through the door “so as not to bother you” and stand behind her admiringly for several minutes. She would pretend she hadn’t noticed him and continue playing until the end of the piece. Then she would pivot on the bench and look him straight in the eye as if to say, You can’t fool me! He would kiss her on the forehead and either stand back to watch and listen or else head over to the pipe chamber to nose around in there while she was playing. The cubbyhole that housed all the ranks of pipes fascinated him. Each rank from the great sixteen-foot Bourdons to the tiny pencil-size flutes was arranged in the same slightly lopsided symmetry. Steve wondered what the purpose was of hiding such beauty in a dingy closet. At 9:00 they would leave the musty chamber and descend the stairs out into the starlit night.
That gave them an hour before Cecilia had to report in to the women’s dorm. They thrilled at the prospect of having a whole unencumbered hour of strolling around together with nothing else to do but hold hands and talk. Steve felt no compulsion in these intimate moments to drag her through the world he had been living in before the past summer and her miraculous intervention in his life. Maybe someday, but not now. He was, on the other hand, intensely interested in knowing every detail about how she had become the angel she was. And since speaking about Jesus came to her so naturally, he learned from her bit by bit an entirely different way of experiencing and practicing the faith that he had grown up with. His walks with her in the evening were in some ways much like the walk of the two disciples with Jesus on the road to Emmaus on the day of His resurrection, in which “their hearts burned within them” as He opened the Scriptures to them (Luke 24). Steve, to his own amazement, soon found his heart burning not only for Cecilia but also for her God.
He was at first taken aback a little by her frequent stops in the middle of nowhere just to tell God how much she loved Him. Any little thing could trigger it—catching sight of the last fires of the sunset in the clouds, or marveling at the shimmering waves of the aurora borealis above their heads, or shivering at the distant hooting of a great-horned owl, or even just feeling Steve tenderly squeeze her hand. She’d close her eyes and ardently whisper, “O my dear dear God! I love You so much!”
Steve never really got used to this, but he loved it.
Cecilia was not excessively bothered by how new all this was to Steve. She sensed how receptive he was, how sincere in every way. She noted that his joy in attending chapel with her was growing into more than the joy of simply being with her. He was starting to enjoy God! It was only a matter of time before Jesus would do for him what He had done for her. And then he would grow! Oh, he would grow! There was so much in him, and soon he would give it all to Jesus.
One afternoon while Steve was in the physics lab, Cecilia and I bumped into each other on the library steps. She looked at me, smiled, and then looked up into the sky, with that distant dreamy gaze in her angel eyes. She spoke slowly, weighing each word.
“You know, Paul,” she began, looking very lovable to me, “great spiritual truths within people are like trees. They all begin as tiny seeds planted by Jesus in the right place at the right time. They grow slowly but surely. God is so patient with us. It would be cruel to whip a little sapling because it isn’t yet the giant pine it will become. It could even die from the whipping and never become great at all.”
She turned towards me, still focusing her eyes in the distance. “Crops have to have a chance to grow after being seeded. You can’t harvest them right away. We should be thankful to see the tiny sprouts and then believe in what they can become. If we are patient, we will wake up one morning and see a ripe harvest as far as the eye can see.”
I got the message. Her only job as she saw it now was to love Steve with all her heart and to enjoy being with him. God would do the rest.
I hardly knew the Steve I experienced that month. Gone was the Steve of the essay he had submitted to me for “correction,” the melancholic Steve groping for a way out of his incessant frustration with all of life. He did share with Cecilia indirectly something about the great disillusionment that had been his life until she came along, but only by way of helping her to understand why he loved her so much and treasured her and her love more than he could ever tell her.
It remains only to mention that in the course of this month, Steve’s motorcycle was transformed from a release valve for his frustrations into a release valve for their swelling love. Cecilia, so secure in herself, had always been one to try new things—to test the brink of a cliff, to climb a tree to the very top, to find out what was on the other side of a hill or a closed door. She seemed a bit of a paradox that way. If there was a view to be seen, a bug to be examined, a breeze to be caught, that was all the reason she needed to take a little risk. Once, in the days before she met Steve, I caught her sitting sidewise in the window of her organ chamber five stories above the ground, who knows why? And so it came as no surprise to me the first time I noticed them scoot down the hill together on Steve’s contraption.
The spice of the brisk wind in her face, the steady assurance with which Steve maneuvered the vehicle, the very notion of riding down a smooth road straight towards an invisible point off on God’s horizon, and of course the delightful obligation of holding onto her Steve very tightly endeared the black machine to her at once. She eagerly awaited each Saturday noon when they would set out with a picnic lunch for parts unknown.
In short, it is unimaginable that any two young people could have been more thrilled and awed by one another than Steve and Cecilia were. They were a rare combination. Everyone who knew them was deeply happy for them.
Even Tom Mahler got over his bitterness and reaffirmed his friendship with Steve when he saw the effect Cecilia was having on him. “I’m happy for you, Steve,” he told him one day. “Cecilia must be a miracle worker.”
“She is,” Steve replied, swallowing hard.
And of course old Drs. Brockhaus and Larsen were confident that at last their intransigent protégé was beginning to see the light.