The weekend was soon upon them again. The temperatures had steadily fallen all week long. Friday night the wind blew with slicing sharpness as soon as the sun fell below the horizon. Except in the small patches where the sun had melted it a little, the fine powdery snow shifted and drifted back and forth. Steve and Cecilia decided to spend the evening in the lounge of the women’s dormitory with a few other people listening to phonograph records on the new Gramophone which had recently been donated by someone.
More amusing than any vaudeville act, especially for Cecilia, the odd-looking machine ground out in squealing bursts of noise something that vaguely resembled Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Bach. The foibles and distortions produced by those early attempts at recording tickled Cecilia’s funny bone all evening long. Steve was just as amused by her reaction to these puny sounds as he was by the sounds themselves. When the anemic strings in Cesar Franck’s “Symphony in D Minor” struggled and surged upwards toward a thin climax, with the great brass choir making its pompous entry sounding more like a collection of Cracker Jack whistles than the trumpets of doom, she nearly broke up.
By 9:30, however, she was looking all tired out. Noting this, Steve, to ensure that their time together was always a blessing for her and not a burden, took her hands in his, raised her up off the davenport where they had been seated, and suggested that she go right to bed and sleep in as late in the morning as she wanted to, since he knew she had no classes on Saturday. She lay her head on his shoulder (you couldn’t really kiss romantically in public in those days), squeezed his hands, and said she would.
Steve, for his part, on leaving the dorm, did not feel at all like going to bed. The biting antiseptic air cleared out his head and aroused within him the desire to tackle something really challenging. The library was still open, he noted. He might just find something suitable to his mood in there. So he detoured into the library and headed for the “stacks” which, though formerly so repellant to him, he was now often finding strangely attractive. The only nook in the whole entanglement that was familiar to him was Stack Five, northeast corner. Here was deposited a collection of treatises on mathematics and physics to which he had infrequent recourse. Surveying the offerings on the shelves, his eyes were arrested by one that read The Collected Mathematical and Scientific Dissertations and Treatises of Blaise Pascal. He pulled it out, blew the dust off, opened it, and observed on the checkout card that no one had ever taken it out. An inscription informed him that it had been a part of the private library of one “Hjertaas Jensen” which had been bequeathed to the college in 1897.
“Hmmm,” he muttered, fondling the heavy relic. “You ought to do the trick.”
He sat down in an unoccupied carrel and was soon absorbed in the first chapter: “Dissertation on Conic Sections Presented to les mathematiciens parisiens at Sixteen Years of Age.” He followed the youthful Pascal around in this admirable essay until he picked up on the direction of his thought and then sailed on ahead of his words to stand back and watch Pascal drift by just as he knew he would. He enjoyed playing this game with essays like this one. First, you had to bend your mind to follow the hand that wrote the work and the eyes that were now reading it; but once your mind caught the scent, so to speak, it could race on ahead and claim the quarry before the author got there. It was real fun.
About that time the lights in the “stacks” blinked on and off. Just as the thing was getting really interesting! So creeping down the narrow circular stairwell to the desk, he checked out the volume and trotted off to the dorm with it tucked safely under his arm. The wind, he observed, had grown milder now, almost balmy, in the short time he had been in the library.
The corridor was deserted and Ted was in bed. So Steve sat down at a table in the lounge and opened the book. Glancing at his watch, it was 10:15 p.m.
The next time he looked at his watch it said 3:35 a.m. Ridiculous! The thing must be on the blink! It couldn’t be more than midnight. Well, he’d just finish the chapter he was on and call it a night.
When he finally rolled into bed, his eyes were starting to ache. That fool watch said 4:20. He’d have to get it fixed.
Two hours later the washed-out grays of dawn seeped through the window, unnoticed by Steve.
An hour after that, Steve was faintly conscious of Ted stirring around. He groggily replied to his roommate’s libelous conjecture as to why he had got in so late the night before.
An hour and a half later he bounced to life when Ted strode into the room and slammed the door.
“What’s the matter?” he almost shouted in alarm.
“The matter? Nothing, Casanova. Nothing except the snow is melting, that’s all! Another two or three days of weather like this and we’ll have the robins back!”
“Dang! What time have you got? I can’t trust my watch.”
“It’s 9:00 Saturday morning, in the year 1920. Don’t ask me the date. All I know is that spring is early and you’re still in bed.”
Steve gazed glassy-eyed into the quilt on his lap.
“O rats,” he muttered, seeing that his watch had been correct all the time. Good thing he’d told Cecilia to sleep in late. Otherwise she’d have expected him to meet her for breakfast and be worried about him by now.
He touched his eyes. They were tender to the touch.
“But it was worth it,” he told himself.