The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
Kol drew back and dropped his hands so that they almost dragged along the museum floor. “Anyone can be a mathematician,” he said. “But look at the Rembrandt! See with what wonderful invention he twists his paint to make it appear like suet. If you can possibly get even a foothold in art, you should never be a mathematician.” Then he lifted his right hand to point at the Rembrandt, and the hand was powerful, like a blacksmith’s, and David thought: “There’s nothing wrong with him! Why, he could play tackle with those mitts.”
Kol knew he had said enough, so now he clapped his hands and said, “After the lecture, good news! Mary is arriving on the afternoon train from Clevelandl And we’re going to have dinner tonight!”
“I’ve got to get back to college,” David protested. “The observatory.”
“That can wait!” Kol insisted, and he led David to the dirty station where Mary was to arrive. The train was late, of course, and Kol said, “I’m glad. I forgot to tell you something, David. Mary has changed her name. For professional reasons.” He pressed the side of his nose and tried not to smile. “Now you should learn that whenever a girl changes her hat, or her hairdo, or her name, it’s very important. Won’t you please remember to call her Mona?”
“Mona!” David repeated. “That’s an interesting name.”
The train puffed in and David’s heart pounded like the thundering wheels. Finally Mona appeared, a rich coat thrown over her shoulders and a porter carrying five or six boxes. “Klim!” she cried, rushing up to the tall musician and kissing him. Across Kol’s shoulder she saw David and slowly drew her lips away from Klim’s cheek.
“Hello!” she said, extending her hand.
“Hello, Mona,” David replied. A slight twinkle flashed in her eyes and she pressed his hand. “See!” she cried to Kol. “He knows my name already!”
They ate, very formally, at a German restaurant and then went by taxi to Kol’s apartment. David was tremendously excited. Mona was much prettier than even his accurate mind remembered. He noticed that she was not wearing much make-up and that her pale cheeks were not rouged. At the apartment a message was waiting and Klim said, “Stokowski called. He’s furious about the recording. The brasses, rumbling like beer wagons! I’ll run along now. I won’t be long. You wait here.”
But he was gone a long time, and as the minutes passed David could do nothing but stare at the actress, and she sat still and tired in a large chair. Finally she asked, “What are you thinking, Dave?” And he replied, “I was comparing you with that portrait. You seem to get younger.” And she said, “I’m one of the lucky ones, Dave. I don’t put on weight. I’ve got good teeth. I’ll be young for a long time.” Then David sucked in his breath and said, “You talk of yourself the way farmers talk about horses.” And she laughed and said, “Most people are like horses, but they don’t admit it. I’m one of the lucky ones. I keep my looks a long time.”
They lapsed into silence and David finally said, “Klim’s gone a long time.” And Mona replied, “When he and Stokey get together they talk forever.” She dropped her head as she said this so that she looked at David out of only part of her eyes, and he had to restrain himself from leaping at her again. He said, “I’m ashamed of how I acted last time, Mona.” And she held out her hands and said, “Don’t be silly! Never be ashamed of anything! If you’ve made a fool of yourself, just don’t do it again. But being ashamed is only being a fool twice for the same reason.” He rose slowly, almost indifferently, and thought: “How do you start to kiss a girl who’s sitting in a chair?” He walked stiffly to the chair and bent awkwardly down. As he did so he realized he couldn’t possibly kiss the actress unless he knelt on the floor, but quietly she raised her lips, and he did not feel awkward any longer. “Let’s sit over here,” he said, pulling her gently to the davenport.
Together they looked at the door, thinking that Klim might appear at any moment. “Wouldn’t it be better …” David began. “Why don’t you lock the door?” Mona asked. David jumped to the task and laughed nervously as he returned to the davenport. Again he wondered: “What am I supposed to do now?” Tentatively, he sat close to her and kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips. Mona closed her eyes and leaned back against the cushions.
“It was a long trip from Cleveland,” she said. “What a smelly theatre!”
Even more tentatively David began to loosen the buttons at the throat of her dress. Instinctively, as if she were again a girl of fifteen on her first date, she pressed her hand against his to stop him. Then, as if she remembered who she was and what she needed, she rose calmly and undressed.
With his mouth open, David watched the expensive traveling clothes slip away from her perfect body. When she at last stood free and naked before him, he was breathless in wonder, but his mind—that impartial machine that must work and compare to live—said: “She’s so much whiter than Nora! Her breasts are smaller and harder, too. But it’s strange how much alike girls look when they’re undressed.” Then he himself, David, rushed back to his mind and cried, “What if Klim should come in?”
Angrily Mona clenched her fists and muttered, “Klim’s no part of this. If he comes back, that’s our risk. And his.” With a quick jump she landed on the davenport beside David and allowed him to clutch her lips to his. But instinctively she knew that he was afraid of Klim, and his fear gave her added courage. Deftly she slipped away from him and danced from light to light, snapping switches and kicking her small pink-and-gray heels as she did so. She circled the room like the goddess of night, leaving behind a trail of lovers’ darkness. Then she crept beside David and whispered, “Don’t you understand? Whenever a grown man rants about his honor it means he’s no good in bed.”
She was a wild and violent woman, a human, twisting spring, tortured and yet deeply alive. Her breasts were firm like muscles and her neck was never relaxed. There was a passion in her love-making and a gurgling, triumphant conclusion. For a moment, she was set free of her tireless ambition and was merely an exhausted, breathless woman.
But it was only for a moment. Suddenly she cried, “Now for God’s sake get dressed, Dave. Turn on the lights and unlock the door. Oh, my God! If Klim had come home!” She fluffed up the pillows and made David turn around in a circle to be sure he looked all right. Then she said, “I know! Why don’t you leave right now? I’ll say you couldn’t wait. Had to get back to take your pictures.” She rushed him from the apartment and into the warm night air.
Hours later he sleepily set two photographs into the oscillograph and even his exhausted eyes could catch the fluttering star, the star among all the others that rose and fell in brilliance, throbbing millions of miles away, exploding in fiery wonder like a woman in love.
The light in which David saw himself next morning was not pleasant. He had betrayed a friend. In Klim’s own house he had seduced the musician’s mistress. But he knew the word seduce was meaningless when applied to Mona. She had merely used him as her automatic fool, and that fact, added to David’s memory of kind, friendly Klim, produced a vague nausea.
David said to himself: “No more of that!” Then he added a current college tag line: “That’s how guys get shot.” He immersed himself in his studies and for several days succeeded in expelling Mona from his thoughts.
But her banishment was soon revoked, for whether he willed it or not, he was forced to submit to his vision of her. She was completely unlike anyone he had previously imagined, for she was one of those women whom a few fortunate men meet: she filled the hazy confines of the dream of love and made imaginings real. Let her once be glimpsed, running naked to extinguish the lights, and she was perpetually in the mind. Five days after David had denounced himself for having betrayed Klim, he was subconsciously plotting how he might again get into bed with her.
His connivings were subconscious because openly he reassured himself: “Like I said! No more of that dame. Not for me!” Then he added: “I’ll study like mad.” He began by reading a life of Castiglione, which led naturally t
“Look at those rascals!” he laughed, not admitting that he envied their conscienceless revels. He cocked his head and studied the delicate brown shading of the picture, and one of the rubaiyat of Omar came to his mind from those rainy days at Paradise when he had memorized the indolent poem.
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.
Goaded by the words, he prevailed upon the caretaker to let him use the phone. When he called Klim’s number, Mona answered and David asked breathlessly, “Is Klim there?”
“No,” she cautiously replied.
“I’ll be right up,” he whispered.
“Take a cab,” Mona said in a noncommittal voice.
Twelve minutes later he burst into Klim’s apartment and cried, “I’ve been dying to see you.”
“Hey!” she protested. “Take it easy!” She pushed him into a chair and started laughing. He joined in and for some minutes they made fun of each other, laughing ever more boisterously. Finally Mona cried, “You came busting in here like Tarzan.”
“That’s how I felt,” David admitted, and then they chuckled over David’s ever becoming an uncontrolled ape-man.
“Don’t you think it’s fun when people aren’t too serious?” Mona teased.
David grabbed at her and said, “You can’t talk me out of being serious over you. Don’t try!” He pulled her onto the couch beside him, and she pressed her clean, cool face against his.
“Klim’s always so dull,” she whispered, and that was when David learned how utterly delightful can be the revels of love, how winged and how joyous.
The experience affected him deeply. Instinctively he knew—because of his Bucks County upbringing—that it was reprehensible to enjoy with abandon any act of life; but to enjoy sleeping with a woman must be inescapably sinful, and it was irrelevant that an old Persian had advised tossing the ashcloths of repentance into the fires of spring. That might be all right for a Persian, but it simply didn’t apply to a Pennsylvania Quaker.
So, as most young men would have done, David stayed away from Mona for more than a week. Then suddenly he dropped all pretense and hurried shamelessly to the actress. “I’ll bet you’ve been having a great argument with yourself,” she teased.
David stood back to study this remarkable girl. She had not bothered to finish high school, but she knew more about how people behaved than David would ever know. “How do you happen to guess right so often?” he asked.
“Books bore me,” she explained. “When you want to be an actress, you study how people do things. Want to see yourself?” With affectionate yet acid burlesques of David she portrayed an indecisive college student hastening to and hiding from a fatal charmer.
“I don’t look as silly as that!” David objected.
“Sure you do! You’re my silly Stage-door Johnny!” she teased, peering nervously around the edge of an imaginary door. Then she stopped teasing and allowed David to kiss her. “And like they say in plays,” she whispered, “you’re my lover. If you hadn’t of come today I’d’ve died.”
David wanted to ask, “What about Klim?” but he had reached the point at which Klim could be exorcized at will. In fact, on this day David himself went methodically from window to window, lowering the shades, but when he reached the darkened davenport, method ceased, and Mona crushed him to her. “You are my lover!” she said over and over, repeating the phrase even when they lay back exhausted; but David had the strange feeling that she was saying this only because she had heard it in some play. He didn’t believe for a moment that she meant the words. He even doubted that she understood what they were intended to convey.
In the late 1920’s most American colleges were little more than outposts of England, and as long as David lived he would bear a peculiar love for that tight little island. This was because his teachers had really loved only one thing: English culture. They extolled the grandeur of English common law and the sovereign accomplishment of English writers. Since Dedham was a Quaker college which considered art and music probably immoral, David did not discover until late how barren England was in those twin fields which illuminate so much of life.
For students of David’s generation the excellence of the world lay distilled in England, and those few of his professors who had chanced to study in that fortunate realm comprised the Dedham hierarchy. The accepted Dedham pronunciation was a bastard British; the style of clothes and the look of life were English; and the Nirvana to which even the lowliest student might properly aspire was “a summer in the Lake District.”
The result of this shameless sycophancy was snobbery on the one hand and ridicule of American culture on the other. Only three American writers were deemed worthy of study: Emerson, Howells, Henry James, and they were dealt with condescendingly. Most students graduated without ever having had a course in American history, and as for the concept of a rough and sometimes brutal American freedom, the idea would have been lashed from the halls of Dedham as vulgar and offensive. What civil freedoms America had attained were thought of as stolen from early English settlers.
In fact, anything American was slyly laughed at as unfortunate, or grotesque, or immature, or downright uncouth. And as David slowly built his moral and cultural judgments, he accepted blindly this evaluation of his own land. He was taught to be ashamed of it, for it was so deficient in quality. In the normal course of events he would have graduated with honors in German mathematics and English affectation. Then he would do graduate work in Chicago and Leipsic, after which he would find himself to be a pallid imitation of a pallid interpretation of an essentially pallid mock-European culture. Then he would be enshrined as a professor, and he would seduce other young Americans into the same folly. He would laugh snidely as he referred to “American Corinthian, the Bible Belt, Longfellow, and the great unwashed.” He would, in short, have become an American intellectual. Fortunately, a moonfaced Texan changed all that.
Doc Chisholm was a professor of English in one of the Texas colleges. He was built like a barrel, had very long apelike arms and a florid complexion. He massacred pronunciation and drawled in a voice that was sometimes so low as to be inaudible. He was becoming bald. And he had a gittar.
How a man like that ever got to Dedham, David never knew, but the roly-poly man appeared one Friday night and it was announced that he would teach three special classes. Purely because of a schedule mix-up, David took Doc Chisholm in the novel. And as long as he lived the results of that accident would haunt him.
For Doc Chisholm was a free man. He was the first completely free man David had ever known. Even cold Mr. Stone was tied to his glossy change board, but fat Doc Chisholm was free. His mind was a thing of placid, rare excellence, as beautiful as a lake in summer when the slightest feather from a passing bird establishes a ripple that ultimately finds shore.
In his third lecture—in which he reported on the first batch of papers: “My Three Favorite Novels”—Doc Chisholm spoke in a very low and soft voice. “Ah won’t tear up yore papers,” he said softly, “for Ah gotta admit that anithin’ once written has value to the guy that did the writin’. But these papers!” He waved them contemptuously. “Yawl tryin’ to impress me? Yew men are the hope of this nation. Yew mean to admit that the books yew tellin’ me about are what yore greatness feeds upon! Or yew jes’ tryin’ to impress me wid the fact yew read all the best books? Hmmmm?” He brushed back the fringe of hair about his red face and peered at the students.
Then his voice mounted in slowly rising scorn as he read off the novelists mentioned: “Thomas Hardy. John Galsworthy. R. D. Blackmore. Richardson. Defoe. Walpole!” He crumpled the list he had made and tossed i
“Lissen, students!” he begged. “Yew and I got to get down to fundamentals. And quick. Ah not gonna be here long.” He dropped words from sentences when he felt them needless. “But this nation is a meltin’ pot. Yew people before me, yew come f’um all corners of the known world. Ah see Jews here, and Poles and Russians and Slovaks and Dutch and Norwegians! Yet yew tryin’ to tell me that all yew ever read was the watered thought of a few Englishmen! Yew tryin’ to get good marks f’um me ’cause Ah’m an English teacher? Well, doan’ do it, ’cause Ah’m a Scotsman. Mah pappy came to Texiss years ago to drink in the air of freedom. And yew believe this! The air of freedom is not composed from the wind of jes’ one nation. It’s a magnificent and complex production from all the known quarters of the world.” He stood fat and mouselike by his desk and said in organ tones, “Yew are the inheritors of all the world. Yew’re a new brand of people. Yew’re Americans.” His voice was strange, as if he were singing, and it was that very night that Doc Chisholm first appeared in the dormitory with his gittar.
He arrived about eight and dropped into a room down the hall from David’s. He carried with him a battered guitar, sweat-stained on the hand side. He introduced himself and asked, “Yawl do much singin’ ’round here?” The room’s occupants were so baffled they didn’t know what to say, so Chisholm pulled up a chair and started to plunk his gittar. “Yawl know Red River Valley?”
From his room David heard the strange music and cried brashly, “Can the racket!” but the racket continued and he stamped down the hall to see what was happening. He saw fat Doc Chisholm plunking on a gittar and singing faraway notes through his nose. The professor nodded quietly at David and when the song was ended asked, “ ’M I disturbin’ yew?”
“I couldn’t guess what it was!” David laughed.