A Grain of Wheat Read online

  But in Stephan Pearson different forces were at work. For him, reality whether outdoors or indoors seemed to hang intangible in the air during this month so cruelly calculated by nature and man to be conducive to nothing but studying. By itself, the fact that the outdoor world was an untouchable chimera and the indoor world an imminent day of reckoning no more drove him to his books than an impending squall drives a ship’s captain into his lifeboat. While everyone else was sitting hypnotized before a stack of books, Steve was pacing to and fro, tugging as it were on the bars of his cage.

  The better part of a month had passed since Steve had caught his hacking cold on the rear platform of the Great Northern passenger train. This evening he was in his room all alone, slouched down in an overstuffed chair with his feet up on the windowsill. It was almost pitch dark, but dim rays from a streetlight across the lane were filtering in through the windowpane and casting a dull luminescence over the area where he was sitting. He gazed absently out into the scene before him that was being formed and re-formed by the compelling hand of a driving snowstorm. It was nine thirty at night. Across the ravine through the slanted streaks of flying snow, he could just make out the windows of the library, all ablaze with light. From each tiny window marking a carrel cell in the “stacks” a beam pierced the night, and under each beam was a student laboring away.

  For many nights recently Steve had been left alone in his nearly deserted corridor. His roommate, Ted Bjornson, had been caught up in the general panic that swept over every class of freshmen about two weeks before finals when he discovered to his serious alarm that he had most of a semester’s work to cram into fourteen days. At first he had sat chained to his desk day and night, putting up with Steve’s thoughtless agitation. But when he started coming down with Steve’s cold, he took refuge in the library on the pretext that he had some reference work to do there.

  Tom Mahler, the veteran across the hall, always had been a diligent student except on weekends. Although, as we have noted, he aspired to follow his father’s footsteps into the medical profession, his modest intellectual gifts required him to work hard to qualify for medical school. Steve thought of him as almost schizophrenic: unapproachable during the week because he was so caught up in his studies, and the life of the party on weekends. He could shed academia like a cloak for a day or two and pour himself into whatever form of amusement was on offer. Women were the only topic on which he could almost always be approached, a field of interest which he seemed to have developed to a fine art in Europe during the war. But now, with finals right around the corner, even that topic took a backseat. He plodded along day and night in a stupor, spending even the weekends in the library and returning to his room each night all played out but without a word of complaint. To Steve he was a total self-contradiction. What drove him on? Didn’t he have a brain in his head? Couldn’t he see that he was slaving away to prepare for a future that was bound to be as dull as his present?

  A funereal pall had descended over the dormitory that night: it was as silent as death. Only the whining of the wind around the sharp corners of the building and the rattling of the windowpanes broke the silence. Steve sunk lower and lower into his chair, sucking on his pipe that had long since gone cold. The immense emptiness around him played with the tangle of emotions within him. His lips were tense and dry, a persistent scowl deformed his features, his watery eyes were compressed into a squint. He sat there, a knot of dull sensations, staring into the blackness. His mind sluggishly stirred around in the brew of bitterness within him whose individual components had long since blended into one acrid pottage.

  Then, as though in response to a new turn of thought, he sat up a little straighter and relit his pipe. His eyes opened wider as the new thought took root. He spent only a moment or two rolling it around in his mind. Then he got to his feet, walked over to his desk, thumbed through a small pile of papers in the semidarkness, and pulled out a couple of sheets. Before he could change his mind, he was tapping on the half-open door of the room next to his.

  “Come on in,” I called, surprised that anyone would knock.

  Yes, I was Steve’s neighbor during his freshman year, but up to this point I hardly knew him. This is a strange fact, I must admit. But it can be explained by his reserved personality and my natural reticence. If it had not been for one happy fact, I might never have become well acquainted with anyone in the dorm. But this one fact brought many of the guys to my room and provided the incentive for Steve’s nocturnal visit as well. As it happened, my high school education included Latin, German, and French which put me in a position to help a number of friends struggling with one of these languages.

  But even more than that, my study of other languages gave me a good grasp of English, and so I was able to help even more friends by checking over their essays assigned in any subject for grammar and syntax. I learned a lot from this, both about the subjects of the essays and about their authors. At term-paper time the task became almost unmanageable, but I never had to turn anyone down.

  “Come on in,” I repeated before turning around in my chair to see who it was. Throwing a period on the end of a sentence, I looked about to see Steve walk through the door, papers in hand. “Why, good evening, Steve,” I exclaimed in mild surprise. “Have a seat.”

  He walked over to the soft chair next to my desk and sat down. It was a congenial place for friends to sit while I went over their work. Steve perched himself on the edge of the chair holding the sheets of paper on his knees.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a few minutes to look this over, would you?” he asked hesitantly. “Doc Rasmussen assigned us this paper and said he expects it to be perfect.”

  “Sure. Let’s have a look at it.”

  Steve leaned back in the chair and pulled out a cigarette. “Do you mind?”

  “Not a bit.” I noticed he had thought to close the door. In those days, smoking infractions were rather severely dealt with at Christiania. Glancing at the pages I asked, “What topic did he assign you?”

  “Oh, anything. Anything at all. Just so it contains between three and five hundred perfect words. I’ve never been strong in grammar. That’s where I may need some help.”

  “One thing I learned from studying all those languages, especially Latin, was English grammar.”

  He laughed politely and a little cynically. “You really enjoy that stuff, don’t you?”

  “Well, not exactly. Let’s just say that since a fellow’s got to take something in all this schooling folks seem to think we need, you might as well take what you least dislike, especially if you figure you can get some use out of it in the future.” I was touching only the fringe of my real sentiments.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Steve said slowly. My reply seemed to have caught him a bit sidewise. It wasn’t what he had expected.

  For the next few minutes I was engaged in reading the following essay which I happened to recover after Steve’s death in a trunk filled with memorabilia:

  One drab day not long ago when low heavy clouds were hanging motionless in the sky, I was sitting at my desk trying to study our religion assignment. Even before opening the textbook my head was as muddled and thick as the air outside, but after I started reading it got even worse. Page after page was consumed by the author in dissecting the hair-splitting reasons why Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians could not have been written by Paul himself, but had to have been composed by a loyal disciple a generation later. As he built his case, he became increasingly sure of himself and impressed with his own brilliance.

  He went from one scrap of evidence to the next, wringing every drop of proof he could out of each one. He reveled in his confident assertions and in everything they implied. Not only did the poor man actually expect his fellowmen to plow through all this stuff, but he took it for granted that they would swallow it all. The crowning insult came when he made a big issue of Paul’s personal references to himself in 3:1–13, claiming that these were totally out of character for the apo
stle. Even I knew that he had said the same things about himself in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, but our author never even alluded to this fact in his three-page effort to prove his point.

  That’s when I slammed the book shut and stalked out of the room into the lavatory. “Who the devil cares who wrote Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians?” I spit out bitterly.

  I returned to my room fuming and headed over to the desk. But something stopped me in my tracks. Lying there on my bed looking up at me with lazy drop-shaped eyes was a little grey kitten. How she had got there I couldn’t even guess.

  “Well, well, well,” I said to her. “Look what happens when I leave my door open a crack. Here you are all curled up on my bed. What do you care whose bed it is?”

  The kitten yawned and stretched.

  I sat down beside her. I stroked her under the chin and ruffled her behind the ears. Instantly she started purring. Then she closed her eyes and stretched out her neck, her little head swaying from side to side. Moments later she drifted off into a catnap.

  “Nothing ever bothers you, does it?” I confided to her. “You always have more than enough food, you’re never bored, you fear neither life nor death, you don’t study for exams, you’re contented wherever you are…….

  “Why didn’t God make us all like you?”

  Long after I was done reading the essay and correcting its few errors, I sat there staring a hole through it. One by one its implications dawned on me. I was dumbfounded by what it was suggesting and bewildered by its climax in the last line. A passionate prayerful desire welled up within me to find out who this Stephan Pearson really was and to get to know him.

  At length I made a weak attempt to say something. “This ought to satisfy Doc Rasmussen.” I meant it from a grammatical point of view, but it sounded like I meant more than that. I felt awkward and foolish.

  “No problem with the grammar and sentence structure.”

  That was worse yet. I prayed in my heart for the grace to say something helpful.

  “I suppose it would be rather serene to be a little kitten,” I offered cautiously. “But I wonder whether a kitten is capable of the joy we can experience as human beings…. Yes, I suppose life must pose fewer problems for a cat than for us, but wouldn’t that limit a cat’s capacity for achieving something really good?” I was speaking suggestively, more ruminating than preaching.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to find any good things in life,” mumbled Steve. “And when you do find some, all people want to do is take them away from you.”

  “That’s true often enough…. Could that mean that the only reliable source of happiness for us is to enjoy giving good things, including ourselves, to other people, rather than letting them take them from us?”

  “Like homework?”

  “O sorry. I guess I’m thinking about different things than homework. Homework falls into the category of stuff demanded of us whether we think it’s worth the effort or not. No, I’m thinking of life in general. It seems to me that a person’s life can’t be worth much if you haven’t found something bigger than yourself to give it to, right? For me, that means giving it to God. If we get all wrapped up in ourselves, we make a pretty small package. But if we unite our destiny to something much bigger than we are, we grow with it. I’m not sure kittens were created for something as big as this.”

  Steve looked at me quizzically. The expression on his face told me that I had said more than he was capable of absorbing. An awkward silence ensued. I returned his essay to him, repeating that I thought Doc Rasmussen would be very satisfied with it. He got up and with a word of thanks, he left the room.

  VI

  Within a week-and-a-half after Steve’s night visit, finals were over for another four months. Tensely he endured this artificial period of time. It took a great effort of self-constraint and apathetic resignation for him to subdue the throbbing forces in his soul, but he had had a lot of practice at subduing them during his upbringing. He was like the protagonist in one of those Greek tragedies whose dynamism the Fates have so succeeded in thwarting at every turn that he is finally reduced to impotence and remorseful prostration before them. Steve certainly did not embrace the course of events which necessity thrust upon him, but neither did he fight it. He simply submitted to the unavoidable.

  The semester break was spent at Joe Brennan’s farm with a number of the fellows. They filled their days with eating, sleeping, drinking, card-playing, and the like. Several times a day Steve yielded to the impulse to strike out on his own across the snowy fields to the woods on the far end of the farm, there to stamp about concealed by the trees and out of earshot of his friends who would have been baffled by the stuff that came out of his mouth.

  It was from an entirely unexpected source that trouble suddenly broke in on him two days after the second semester began. He stumbled onto it early one morning well camouflaged in an innocent-looking white envelope in his post office box. Taking the envelope into the Tiger’s Haunt, he sat down at a table in the corner and opened it. It contained a note typewritten by a student secretary:

  “Dr. C. B. Larson respectfully requests the presence of Mr. Stephan Pearson in his office this afternoon between the hours of three and five o’clock. Thank you.”

  Steve, confused by it, reread the note several times before remarking out loud, “What in the world does he want with me?” For the rest of the day he was plagued by this question until at four-thirty he decided to bite the bullet and get it over with. He trudged haltingly across the campus to Old Main and climbed up to the third story where the Mathematics Department was housed.

  The door to Doc Larson’s office was ajar, as though he was expecting someone. Through the crack in the door, Steve spied the middle-aged professor bending over a desk and engrossed in a stack of papers. He had almost decided that this was not a good time to disturb him when the gray-haired man sensed his presence and looked up.

  “Ah yes, Mr. Pearson. I was expecting you. Come in and sit down,” he said with a sharp precision. Running his fingers quickly through his tousled hair, he lost no time in getting down to business.

  “Mr. Pearson,” he began. “My colleague, Dr. Brockhaus, and I have been surprised and, well, quite impressed by your showing on our final examinations.” He was now measuring his words one by one. “As a matter of fact, you would have written a perfect examination for me if in your haste you had not misread the fifth problem on spherical trigonometry and made it much harder for yourself. Still, if I had stated it the way you construed it, your answer would not only have been correct but—and I do not say this lightly—a stroke of genius. And Dr. Brockhaus tells me your only errors in the physics final occurred where solving a problem required memorizing tables of specific gravities and that sort of thing. He was forced to conclude that you had never even opened the textbook.”

  The professor paused. Steve sat impassive before him. He pressed on to make his point.

  “Now, Mr. Pearson, if you had bothered to submit your daily assignments or had shown any interest in your work during the semester, I would have been compelled to give you an A. But, young man, in view of your record, what do you expect me to do?”

  It was a question demanding an answer. Steve, of course, had not wasted a moment of thought on it up to this point. The question hung in the air. The silence was getting embarrassing.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Stephan said weakly.

  “Well, I don’t know either. But that’s not actually the reason I asked to see you today. Mr. Pearson, tell me this: What are you really interested in? What stirs your juices?”

  Another unanswerable question for someone whose spurts of eloquence were confined to paper and whose honest response was, in any case, unthinkable at the moment. Steve had a feeling that the longer it took for him to find some kind of an answer, the more likely he was to get a drawn-out lecture from Dr. Larson. But nothing came to him. He squirmed nervously in the chair, his eyes glued to the floor. Finally he stated with as m
uch conviction as he could muster, “I like nature and the out-of-doors, and animals, especially horses.”

  “That’s just fine,” retorted the educator. “So do I. Everyone needs an avocation. But what are you planning to do with your life? What is your vocation? Let me be frank with you. It would be criminal of you to squander your God-given ability. That’s true of everyone, of course. But when we are talking about an extraordinarily rare and priceless treasure such as you have been given, young man, it becomes doubly criminal to squander it. What you have been given is not just yours. It is the common property of all mankind. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student whose natural gifts in mathematics approach yours. You’ve got to harness those gifts and put them to work in a productive way. It’s time for you to start digging in, my boy. Life is too short to throw away on frivolities. Sure enjoy them from time to time, but don’t make a career out of them. If it sounds like I’m pleading with you, I am! What will it take for you to discover your true calling in life?”

  Dr. Larson had said his piece. The blank expression on Steve’s face said it all. He was wasting his breath.

  “You may leave now. But at least give some serious thought to what I have just told you. We are here to help and encourage you. I’m telling you point blank, Mr. Pearson, I would be only too grateful for the chance to do that.”

  Steve got up, thanked him perfunctorily, and walked out of the frustrated professor’s office, but not out of his mind.

  And indeed it would be true to say that he stalked about in Dr. Larson’s mind for the rest of the year. The devoted professor joined hands with Dr. Brockhaus in a relentless effort to arouse in Steve some sense of his “obligations to God, to society, and to himself.” The peace of anonymous obscurity was no longer a luxury available to the taciturn young man who, in the classroom, always chose to sit as far away from the action as he could get.

  VII