Eagerly they walked over to the women’s dorm. Steve’s headache seemed to disappear while he was waiting for Cecilia. What wonders that girl could effect! She had chased away his pain as easily as dawn scatters darkness. He felt game for anything. And that was a good thing, because here she was, coming towards him all dressed up for riding and holding a small bundle in front of her.
“There’s a picnic lunch in here for us,” she said with a smile, handing it to him.
Next they walked over to the men’s dorm. Steve could feel her hand trembling just slightly in his. There was something a bit light-headed about her today which made her all the more attractive to him. Probably she was not entirely herself yet. Was it wise for him to yield to her impulsive request and take her out into the country today? She might regret it tomorrow.
Ah well, he concluded to himself. Once we get there both of us can relax and rest. That’s as good a place to do it as anywhere, I suppose.
His few moments of worrying about Cecilia’s condition had just refanned the smoldering embers in his own head. He would need that rest!
It took him no time at all to get into some thick warm clothes and put on his cycle jacket. He, like Cecilia, brought along an extra pair of dry socks. Soon they were sputtering down the hill toward the wooded bluff in the distance.
The roads in town were, of course, in fairly good condition. The current of springlike air rushing past Cecilia’s bared face and through her blond hair lifted her heart right out of her up towards the sky. She clung to Steve, inhaling deeply and soaking in the vernal delights all around her. She marveled at the gleaming purity of the snow shimmering under the noonday sun.
Steve too was marveling at the snow. He had not expected it to be so dazzling. The shafts of sunlight glancing off the glossy surface of the snow drove themselves like daggers through his squinting eyes into the most sensitive part of his headache. The ointment of Cecilia’s delight in the ride had no effect on this acidic onslaught. Things had better improve once they got onto the country roads. He didn’t know why they should, but they had better!
In point of fact, the situation deteriorated even further when they left town and turned onto the road leading to the bluff. Steve now had to cope not only with glaring snow but also with demanding road conditions. Normally it would have been great fun for him. But today it was pure torture. On all sides the blinding sea of fire stretched out all the way to the horizon, implacable and inescapable, daring him to slice his way through it over the lacerated and sloppy roadbed. Under the slop, the ground was still frozen solid, forming a hard surface slickened by the slush and half-melted mire. Defiantly Steve propped open his protesting eyelids and clung to the handlebars to keep the machine on the road and prevent it from spinning out of control. On and on it went. It took everything he had to break through the red wall of pain in his eyes and force himself to react nimbly to the challenges of the road—here a deep rut, there a treacherous mudhole, here a large rock, there a fallen branch. On and on and on.
Poor Cecilia, enjoying every frolicking moment of it and assuming that Steve was enjoying it too! He was in his element, after all. How could she know that the tenseness in his body was different today from every other day? How could she know that this was proving to be pure torture for him, not the thrill he usually experienced in overcoming challenging road conditions?
Steve made a firm decision to resign himself to the struggle. That helped. No point in fighting the pain. There was enough to fight on the road.
Just open your eyes wide and let it come, he lectured to himself. You’ve got mighty precious baggage here to be worrying about your eyes. Just get her there safely, he told himself over and over again. He had to remind himself constantly that his baggage was precious because even with her arms around his waist, she didn’t feel precious. His feelings were consumed by the massive ball of fire stabbing him in both eyes and sending explosive throbs into his head. By sheer force of reason he flung his feelings aside and focused on Cecilia and the challenges of the road.
At last, the struggle ground to a jerking halt. Steve turned up a little pathway leading to the place where they had come earlier in the fall and pulled up beside a great oak tree. Cecilia jumped off the cycle and danced around to the front, but Steve remained anchored to the seat gunning the engine, his eyes pressed tightly shut. He could hardly believe it was all over. Slowly he let the roar of the engine which had become synonymous with life die away.
Here they come, he shuddered to himself, anticipating the stabbing pains in his head which he had been holding at bay. She was standing in front of him grinning spritely. He looked up.
“That was quite something, wasn’t it,” he heard himself remark.
She nodded abruptly.
“Let’s go take a rest under that tree. A drive like that sort of takes it out of a fellow for a while.”
He fumbled his way over to the tree and sank into a bed of warm dry leaves trapped in a hollow between two big roots and bathed in the afternoon sun. The old oak clung to the hillside near the top of the windward flank of the bluff. The prevailing wind had sent most of the snow skittering over the top of the bluff to the leeward flank.
Steve shut his eyes, his head propped solidly between the two large roots.
“Cecilia,” he said absently. “I think I’m just going to take a little nap for a few minutes.”
“Sure,” she said. “You’ve earned it.”
In a moment he was unconscious.
Meanwhile Cecilia gathered some dry wood, cleaned out an open area in the leaves not far from Steve, and lit a crackling fire to help keep him warm. Then she poked around in his bag until she found his dry socks. Unlacing his left shoe, she eased it off without disturbing him and peeled off the wet sock. She touched his toes. They felt numb. So she massaged them and the rest of his foot briskly until his whole foot was pink again. She put on the dry stocking and, turning to the other foot, gave it the same treatment. The shoes she set closer to the fire to dry out. Then for an hour or so she sat below Steve, massaging his stocking feet and tending the fire.
Sitting there she gazed at the trees. A squirrel scampered back and forth between two nearby oaks, apparently just for the fun of it. A blue jay stirred up a racket high overhead.
They always sound like they’re scolding someone, but I think it’s just their way of laughing, she told herself.
For a long time she mused on these things. Then quietly, imperceptibly, an awesome sense of the vastness and providential goodness of Creation began to stir within her. It was the spotless fathomless blue of the sky and the endless whiteness of the earth. It was the time-warped gnarls of the ancient oaks in contrast to the fleeting nowness of the little woodland creatures scampering around in them. It was the fragrance-laden breezes and the cozy cushion of leaves. It was the sun’s benediction and the earth’s adoration. It was all of this and more, distilled in the all-embracing love of God and in Steve and Cecilia’s blossoming love for each other. Her heart was bursting with joy. God had been so good to them!
At that moment Steve stirred. She looked up at him from where she was sitting at his feet. His eyes blinked and opened and then pressed shut.
“O Steve,” she purred with quiet ardor. “Isn’t God wonderful? I’ve just been soaking in this tiny corner of His vast creation and thinking of how great He is, and of all He’s done for us.”
Steve blinked again and pinched his eyes back shut, reeling from the brightness as from the door of a blast furnace.
“Mmmmm,” he mumbled. “We are pretty lucky, aren’t we?”
She looked at him a little crestfallen.
“Lucky?” she asked softly. “Wouldn’t you rather say ‘blessed’? God has blessed us, don’t you think?”
“You sound just like my mother.”
“Like your mother?”
She was still rubbing his feet. He didn’t talk much about his parents.
“You must love her very much,” she suggested.
“There is only one person in the world that I love very much,” he muttered between his teeth. “Only one person I’d drive through a wall of fire with a splitting headache for, just because she wants to come out here.”
Cecilia fell back in alarm.
“O my love! Why didn’t you tell me you had a headache? We would never have come out here if I had only known! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” he replied slowly, opening his eyes a slit and wobbling his head drunkenly with each word, “because you’re the one person in the whole world I’d walk through burning coals to reach if you were on the other side. That’s why.”
His head fell back, his eyes pressed shut again.
Cecilia turned her pleading eyes away and peered into the fire. All at once she felt like crying. She swallowed hard. Then she looked back at him. Her throat was tight. Her tongue felt swollen. She got up and sat down next to his head. Gently she rested her hand on his forehead.
“But … can you love me and not love everyone else too?” Tears were blurring her eyes now. She blinked and one big tear fell onto his cheek.
Steve was simply going to answer, “Of course I can.” But something in her voice checked him before he spoke.
“Actually,” he said very softly instead, “when I’m feeling more like myself and when my heart is full of you, I guess you could say that my love for you spills over to everyone else, too, in some sense. Yes, you could say that.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.
Now she was lightly caressing his eyeballs through his eyelids. It felt good.
In the silence that followed, Steve mulled over what he had just said, moving from confusion to greater clarity.
Could a headache subvert his love for her? No, not really. But it could sure subvert his love for others beyond her. His love for her, based on a clear rational decision of his in response to everything that had led up to it, was an openly acknowledged factor in his life. It was his life! It was lodged just as firmly in his mind as it was in his heart. If pain drove her out of the feelings of his heart, she was still very much in his mind. His feelings for her could be, and almost always were, quite overwhelming, but his love for her was sustained by more than his feelings. It was sustained by his decision to love her and to believe in her love for him.
But what of his love for others beyond her? Had he ever openly acknowledged its existence or defined it as an important factor in his life? Let’s face it: it was a by-product of his love for her, and entirely on the feeling level. He didn’t even know he was doing it when he was doing it! No wonder it simply disappeared when something like a headache destroyed the feeling side of love. Now he had his finger on it….
Listen, old boy, he warned himself severely. That’s the way it’s got to stay. If you experience this “love for others” as a spontaneous offshoot of your love for Cecilia, well and good. When it springs from your heart all by itself, no problem. But why would you ever let it get entrenched in your mind? It could make a real sucker of you if you thought you had to love others no matter how you felt about it. Loving Cecilia is so rewarding. It’s worth any personal sacrifice on your part because of the returns it brings. If loving her flows over into loving even people you have every good reason to despise, then at least recognize the fact that you are under no obligation to love them when you don’t feel like it, when it doesn’t come naturally. What did you learn last summer? Two things at least: the joy of authentic companionship and the stupidity of clinging to an ideal, like wilderness living, when you have stopped desiring it. So, you can love others as long as loving Cecilia makes you want to. But careful about taking it further than that.
At this moment he knew he was living on his decision to love her. His heart could feel almost nothing. It was as though reading the wedding notice of a couple of strangers in the newspaper, he could neither doubt their happiness nor share in it. Sheer reason would have to carry him through today. Here she was, loving him with all her heart and tearfully stroking his brow, while all he could do through his blinding headache was to calculate that he loved her.
Such pretty bits of insight, arranged so neatly and encased in my poor aching head. Why can you think love when your head aches, but you can’t feel it? You have to think yourself through the motions of love. Here is an angel sitting by my head, running her fingers across my brow, caressing my throbbing eyeballs, and letting her tears fall on my face. And here I lie, almost as unmoved as a stone. All on account of the fact that I am suffering from the worst headache of my life, which is all on account of one Blaise Pascal, which is all on account of my curiosity getting the better of me, which is all on account of my feeling so good last night, which is all on account of how high I was riding after being with her, which is all on account of how much I love her! How crazy is life! You can start out in heaven and wind up in hell! Well, thank God that with her I will be out of this hell and back up to heaven again tomorrow. So stick it out, man, and don’t do anything stupid.
He opened his eyes. She was looking down at him, questions written all over her face. He reached for her hand and pulled her down to his side. The effort itself pumped poison into his head, but he bore it without wincing. Taking her into his arms, he said, “All I know is that I love you more than life itself. Please believe me. I can’t love anybody without loving you.”
She rested her head on his chest. His heart was thumping beneath his shirt. What a strange thing to say, she thought. Not that loving me makes him love everyone, but that he can’t love anyone without loving me…. My poor Steve must be bearing a terrible wound in his heart.
Lying there with her head on his chest, she felt his breathing become more regular, as though he were dozing off. She put her right arm around his rib cage and very gently drew him in more tightly against her.
“O Jesus!” she prayed softly under her breath. “How can I help You heal that terrible wound in his heart! I’ll do anything You ask of me for him, dear Savior. Anything! Whatever it takes. I love him so much.”
They lay there for some time without stirring. At length Steve took a deep breath and shifted his position.
“Cecilia, would you please get me the first-aid kit under the seat of the cycle? It’s just a tiny box. There are two aspirins in it. I’m going to take them now.”
She fetched it for him.
“Now a handful of clean snow.”
She brought it. He placed the two aspirins in his mouth and swallowed them without water. Then he took some of the snow, melted it in his mouth, and swallowed it, too.
“That’s what I get for being an amateur scientist,” he said, laughing weakly. “Pills don’t do much good without something to dissolve them in. Now we’ll give them a few minutes to go to work. Then I have something to tell you that I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”
She sat down next to him.
“No, here,” he motioned, patting his chest with one hand and stretching out the other towards her. So she lay down again, her head beneath his chin and her slender body extended alongside his and enfolded in his arm.
They lay like that for several minutes, with their eyes closed. Then Steve opened his eyes. The headache had subsided to a mere annoyance. He inhaled deeply and felt her head rise with his chest. He gazed down at her golden hair. She went out of focus and in his mind’s eye he beheld the indistinct form of his Spectre Maiden in all its tantalizing beauty. Love surged into his heart, warm and real.
“Cecilia, I want to tell you about the Maiden from Heaven that I fell in love with this summer,” he breathed.
Her heart almost stopped.
“Mmmmmm,” she purred. Was this his great wound?
Several times he opened his mouth, but nothing came out. “I don’t know where to begin,” he admitted.
“I want to hear it all, my love. So why not go back to where it starts?”
“To where it starts,” he echoed. “That takes you all the way back to a big empty farmhouse in North Dakota and to a mother that was constantly nagging her husband and a father that paid no attention to his wife or his son. For each of them, life had become a self-inflicted drudgery, but for different reasons. It wasn’t until their kid got away to school that he discovered that you didn’t have to hate life every blessed moment of the day because there were some things you could do just for the fun of it.
“So what did the poor kid do? He got out of the house every chance he could. He raced horses, dreamed up ridiculous pranks, stormed the countryside in the Model T Ford his dad bought for him probably to make up for his neglect, wandered around outside all by himself, not joyfully like you used to do but restlessly, and spent his time figuring things out in his head that most people ignore, and generally raising Cain when he could.
“Everything he enjoyed, decent people looked down on. Everything he couldn’t stand, decent people spent their life pursuing. He knew lots of people who hated what they said they liked and liked what they said they hated, so he took any advice from them with a grain of salt. First thing you know, his mother was pushing him off to college and his father was trying to palm off the farm on him.
“So off he goes to college, hating every blessed minute of it except when he can get away on weekends with the fellows. But pretty soon this goes sour on him too. He gets a bellyful of that kind of stuff and about goes crazy trying to figure out what there is in the world that’s worth doing. Something inside him won’t give him any rest. Everyone is trying to get him to amount to something, as they define it. His professors, his mother, his father all have a clear idea of what he should be doing. He just wants to break free and fly away while he still can. Where? Who cares! Just so it’s away.
“Something about the wilderness attracts him, away from everybody and everything that could ensnare him and close to the creatures in nature who live by instinct and do only what they feel like doing. So he turns his back on all the rubbish people have dreamed up to turn their lives into pure drudgery in the name of duty, and takes off on his motorcycle for parts unknown, preferably in a forest somewhere.
“All right, fine and dandy. After nearly a month of disappointment and dead ends, he literally stumbles into a paradise in Upper Michigan…. A paradise, I tell you, Cecilia, a real paradise….”
His voice trailed off and his throat tightened up. Cecilia had been hanging onto each word. Her heart was bleeding for him.
“It was beautiful, my love, so beautiful. And perfect for my purposes. A lush basin in the silent hills just south of Lake Superior. Pines and cedars and great hardwoods. Dotted with sun-splattered glades. Bisected by a tumbling stream of pure cold water. Birds and animals. Everything I loved. Nothing I hated.”
“O Steve,” she interrupted. “Will you take me there sometime? I’d love to be in a place like that with you!… I’m sorry. Continue.”
“Well, at first I was overjoyed. I tinkered around building a camp. It was great fun. Before long I had finished the campsite, finished scouting the area, finished all my preparations for the good life there. So I settled back and waited for happiness. Well, Cecilia,… you’ll never believe it, but I had already had all the happiness I was going to get in that place. I’d already had it….
“Then one day as I was tramping around, I ran into a big silver dog that I named King. Or rather, he found me and decided I was his friend. He was very handsome, a husky, silver and white except for a patch of black under his neck. When he looked at you, you figured he understood you. His eyes were a little Oriental, made him look very wise. Well, he stayed with me all summer. And, Cecilia, that creature never got his fill of trying to please me, even when I was all wrapped up in myself and ignoring him. I tell you before God that he was the first living creature I knew who really loved me just as I was, and I guess I learned to love him in return.
“Early one morning I was awakened by his howling. It turned out that our camp was right in the path of a couple of huge warring ant colonies. A tree full of wood ants had fallen over a big mound of earth ants, and did they ever fight! All day long we watched them whittle each other down from two huge warring hoards to almost nothing, all over a misunderstanding. The only survivor I could see at the end of the battle was the queen of the wood ants, and she was maimed.
“Can you imagine what that left me feeling like? Why was I allowed to witness this? Would it all be to no purpose? What could I be expected to do about it, for crying out loud? I was all twisted up in a knot. From that point on, everything in the forest seemed to spell ‘futility’ to me. I was restless, closed off from the beautiful world around me, and terribly alone.
“Anyhow, an unbelievable thing happened to me that same night. I dreamed of the ants, of course, and of King and of my wilderness paradise. They were all tumbling around together in my dream, not making any sense. And then, all of a sudden….”
Steve paused. He choked up. He took a deep breath.
“This is the part you won’t believe, my love. All of a sudden, in the midst of all that chaos, you were there!”
Cecilia’s head jerked around. She looked up at him, her eyes as big as saucers.
“ME?”
“Yes, , Cecilia. All of a sudden there you were. And the moment you appeared in the distance, the world stood still. A hush fell over everything, and all I saw was you. But you were so far away. It was as if you had come to me, to us, from another realm because we needed you so badly. Your eyes were cast down and I can still see you in my mind’s eye sobbing quietly over us. Yes, I knew somehow that you were weeping for me, for us all, for the ants, for this poor old world. I wanted to come to you so badly, but I couldn’t move. You approached a little closer to me, your eyes still wet with tears, and then you disappeared. I woke up, all out of breath.
Steve tightened his grip on her. He was breathing heavily. She was speechless.
“I can’t explain how it was that you came to me,” he went on. “You seemed to just come down from Heaven. For me, everything came together in you, my love. I can’t explain it. It just did.
“From then on I had everything in that paradise except you, and so I had nothing. All it took was a whiff of your love to reduce all my other loves to ashes. In the following days my Spectre Maiden—that’s what I called you—would appear to me anytime, anywhere. She would tantalize me and then disappear into thin air. I became obsessed with her to the point where I despised myself for it. I knew no such person could really exist, much less for me; but in my heart and my sick imagination she was always hovering near me.
“To this day, my beloved Cecilia, I can only marvel at it, and I always will. You really do exist, and you exist for me. The only one of you in the whole wide world, in the whole universe! I love the real you, and—wonder of wonders—you love the real me. It’s too much, too much….”
He burrowed his face into her hair. Both of them were now sniffling softly.
“You can’t imagine what a shock it was to me when I first caught sight of you in the cafeteria. The Spectre Maiden I had fallen so crazily in love with was standing in front of me in flesh and blood, almost close enough for me to touch. I didn’t dare to hope for more than to get a glimpse of you on campus from time to time, you were so beautiful. So heart-meltingly beautiful. And now this. Now this….
“Without you, my angel, I am not even half a man. But with you….”
“Yes, yes, my dear Steve. Without you I’m not even half a woman. And both of us together, united with our dear Lord in love, will know pure joy. We’re awfully close to it already. It is a wonder.”
Steve was shifting around to feel her precious body against his in a new position. Drawing her tightly to him he whispered, “If you had been with me in the hollow this summer, everything would have been perfect. We would have soaked up the still moonlit nights together and taken great pleasure together in the events of each day. We would have been so happy. We would have figured out what to do about the ant war. We would have had a plan. You are close enough to God to make that happen, and I am close enough to you to let it happen. Our arms would not have been empty. I guess we’d have to be married to do that, wouldn’t we!”
She snuggled up to him. It was her way of saying, “I guess we would.”
She whispered back, “Jesus will give us everything we need for happiness on earth and in Heaven forever.”
Steve winced. He was too vulnerable at the moment to hear that, though at other moments it made perfect sense to him. She filled him. Why couldn’t he fill her? Why did she always have to have Jesus along?
And now his headache was recouping its strength. The dull smarting around his eyes was slowly spreading again and his eyes themselves were burning. The longer he lay there, the more spent he felt.
“Cecilia, would you mind if we waited until sundown to go back? It will be much easier for me to drive in the dark.”
“That’s just fine,” she replied. “I feel so sad for persuading you to come out here when you are not well. I pray that you and God will forgive me.”
“Supposing only I do?”
Cecilia started in surprise. Supposing only I do?’ Whatever could he mean by that? She looked up into his eyes, confusion written all over her face.
Steve did not really expect her to answer such a silly question.
“I don’t understand, Steve. What do you mean?”
“I mean, don’t you ever feel as if you and I are the only beings in the universe and that the only love and forgiveness that really counts is yours and mine? Don’t you ever feel that our love is just between us?”
Quite unexpectedly a lump formed in his throat and the dull throbbing in his head seemed to be sublimated into a real spiritual agony. Was he really questioning their love?
Immediately Cecilia caught on to his pathos. It was all related to what he had told her about his lonely childhood. As her heart went out to him, a light veil slipped down over it. She had suspected it before, but now she knew that to Steve, at the moment at least, for her to love God first was to love him less. She struggled to find the right words. She had never felt for one moment that God was any less close to her because she was in love with Steve, or that Steve was less close to her because she was in love with God. But obviously that was not how he felt, yet.
“Steve, my love. For me, it doesn’t work like that. I have more love for you when I love God first than I could ever have if I didn’t. His love for us, and ours for Him, kindles the fire of our love for each other. If I didn’t love Him most, I would love you less. It makes me so happy to have such a rich source of love in the Heart of God, a source that never goes dry. Please believe me. My love for God takes nothing away from my love for you. It makes it all the stronger. Do you see what I mean? It all fits together.”
Steve pinched his eyes shut. His dear little Cecilia! He would try to understand. But it felt to him as though everything about their love had to be censored by God before she could embrace it. That’s not what she meant, he knew, but it was what it felt like to him. Would she always be like that? Would there always be that Third Person intruding into their relationship, from her side? Steve was too worn out to pursue this any further, but it continued to unsettle him.
Cecilia sensed he couldn’t absorb what she had said in the shape he was in. She knew he was not feeling well and so she wrote it off to that. She lay by his side, saddened by their first little disagreement but confident that some good would come of it in time. A good night’s sleep would heal the little wounds opened this afternoon. They had too much going for them to let a day like today put their whole future in jeopardy.
“I think that love is the private property of two lovers and resents any intruders,” he muttered.
With that Cecilia patted him on the cheek and got up to fix a little lunch for them before sundown. But her heart was restless. She thought of all the things that had preoccupied her these past few days and silently she commended them all to God. She must try hard to help Steve to experience the love of God at first hand, and she must understand from what he had told her why it was not easy for him to enter into it.
As for Steve, he was still shaking his head. How could his splitting headache have wrecked a whole afternoon and left him feeling so unloved and so unloving? How could he have chosen to say things that obviously hurt his Cecilia so much? He must try to be decent to her now, try to be understanding. He needed her so badly. For God’s sake, however crumby he was feeling, he didn’t want to push her away!
I will be so glad to get back to the dorm, take a couple of aspirins, crawl in bed, and wake up to a new day and the prospect of a happy Sunday morning breakfast with my Cecilia, he told himself. She’ll look gorgeous in her Sunday clothes, and we’ll be sitting side by side in church holding hands. Hang in there!
He glanced at Cecilia preparing their simple supper. She seemed sad.
“My angel, I love you. Please forgive me.”
“No. You forgive me.”
She came over and knelt in front of him. Steve sat up. They threw their arms around each other and kissed and kissed.
“Let’s not let this happen again.”
“Never.”
“We can’t be afraid to be honest with each other.”
“Not ever again.”
They glanced at each other often as they downed their picnic supper mostly in silence. Love was in their eyes.