The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener

  “Siddown!” the Texan said. Soon the room was filled and Doc Chisholm kept plunking his gittar, not strumming it but hitting soft notes here and there. “Yawl know Camptown Races?” he asked. When singing, he had a strong, nasal twang that David had never heard before. “It’s cowboy singin’, mostly,” the florid man explained. “Jes’ some cowhands singin’ to theyselves at night. Ah picked up most of these songs goin’ here, goin’ there.”

  They sang from eight until eleven that first night, the unaffected songs of Foster and the nameless troubadours of the West. Finally the professor laughed and said, “Ah got to be goin’. Ah’m pourin’ it on mah students in the mornin’. Ah’ll knock some sense in their heads elsen Ah’ll die a-tryin’.”

  And the next morning he made a frontal assault on David in particular. “Mr. Harper,” he said slowly, “Ah’ve looked into your record. It’s a distinguished one, so Ah have no hesitancy in sayin’ what Ah’ve got, in all sincerity, to say. Yore paper in particular is a disappointment. It says nothin’ and it says it well. But when yew write a paper like this yew should always begin with a holy vow to yorese’f, somethin’ like this.” He closed his eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. “ ‘Once there was an immortal mind, against which a thousand arrows were loosed. The multitude fell short or overshot their mark. A slim few reached that mind but all of them were glanced aside by its prejudices. Yet of the thousand, one sped true and shot into the very core of that mind and turned it into all confusion, whereupon the man who owned the mind had to set hisself down and make a new pattern of convolutions.’ Whenever yew start to write, think of that, and then doan’ waste yore time wid enny of the arrows that fell short.” Suddenly his voice rose to a shout. “What books have blasted yore mind loose, Mr. Harper?”

  David was so surprised he could not reply. “That’s right!” the professor said very quietly. “Take yore time! All of yew. Go back to yore rooms and write me some new papers. Doan’ impress me wid what yew had last year in Freshman Lit. But tell me in simple words what arrows blasted yore shallow stupidities and forced yew to rebuild yore world on a more secure footin’. If it was Black Beauty, say so! For me I guess it was a handwritten book of some cowboy ballads. But once I read those words I could never be the same again. Now this time tell me the truth.” He looked at the clock. “No more class today,” he said. “When a man’s got to do some hard thinkin’, he needs lots of spare time.”

  Doc stayed out of the dormitory that night, and the next night, too, but on Sunday he appeared with his gittar and started to sing the real cowboy songs of the West, songs no one in Dedham had ever heard before. And as the fat man sang the whining songs of loneliness and love’s complaint, David began to sense the vastness of the land from which this strange man had come. New words crept through the songs: sage, dogies, corral, arroyo. More than words, however, was the spacious, quiet flow of life as it was lived in a land of immense distances and hard-hewn culture.

  Doc was not an impressive figure when he sang. He allowed a cigar to hang in the left corner of his mouth and even when he was not playing the gittar his right hand continued a series of nervous plucking motions. His round face began to sweat and his hair soon became rumpled, for whenever he changed the position of his cigar he passed his hand on up and across his head. But when he sang, everyone listened.

  They listened, too, on Monday morning when he said in quiet disgust, “Today I see real livin’ people. But Ah see also a poverty of mind that is appallin’. Yawl think life is goin’ to wait for yew? For yew alone? Yawl think yew can grow to full manhood” (He never admitted that girls existed.) “feedin’ yoreselves on the wretched stuff yew been readin’?” He threw the new essays on his desk.

  “Yore national genius! Has it never been reborn in yore own precious minds? Melville? Nobody mentioned him. Frank Norris? No one! Upton Sinclair? Nobody. Dreiser? Three people! Out of forty! Willa Cather? Edith Wharton? Mark Twain?

  “All right! Yew turn yore back upon yore own country. What about the great geniuses of the world? How do they fare in yore hands? Students!” he bellowed. “Yew are already in yore twenties! And yew have not met the Russians, or the Scandinavians? Reymont? Who has heard of him? Couperus? No one knows his name! and Balzac! Now there’s a name to sigh upon! How many of yew … No, doan’ raise yore hands. But how many of yew joined this class because some day yew hope to be writers. Fine! Ah’m proud you had the energy! But in twenty years yew had not the sense to find Balzac for yorese’f, and he is the supreme teacher! Only one of yew mentioned him. What are yew doin’ with yore lives?”

  Following this class the run on the library was sensational. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Frank Norris were gone in a moment. There was no Upton Sinclair, of course, and Dreiser was kept locked up. Nor had the librarians ever heard of Couperus, Reymont, or Nexo.

  Doc Chisholm was not at all perturbed when his students reported the deficiency of the library. “Colleges are not for education,” he observed. “Colleges merely tell yew what to do if yew honest-to-God want an education. Yawl got some money! Ah see you spendin’ it on the most ridiculous things. Take it an’ buy books!” He broke into an expansive smile. “Yew are students!” he cried joyously. “That word is sacred. It gives yew the right to do strange and wonderful things. Like spendin’ all yore money for a book they never heard of in yore proper little library. And if yew want to underline the spicy passages and send the book from hand to hand … Why, students have always done that, too.”

  On that night Doc Chisholm first sang Foggy Foggy Dew, and the men liked the song so much that he had to sing it many times, teaching them the fine musical words. The song had a powerful effect upon David. It spoke to him of a life not bound in by the narrow conventions of his Aunt Reba’s poorhouse maxims nor by the niceties of Dedham’s proper and British-yearning education. It was as if Old Daniel were singing the song, and it was a promise of prairies and starlight. For several days David read Willa Cather and hummed, “He reminds me of the winter time, part of the summer, too …” He was lost in a dream world, but Doc Chisholm blasted him out of it with his lecture on Nexo.

  “How many yawl plannin’ to go into business or gov’mint? Or maybe into the labor movement? Why yawl think yew have a right to enter those professions if yew haven’t read Pelle, the Conqueror? ’Course, yew won’t find it in the library. I ’spose yew never even heard of the author, Martin Andersen Nexo. It’s a long book, four volumes, but for a young man, it’s the key to.…”

  He sent David and Joe Vaux into Philadelphia to buy some copies, if they could be found, and as the train jogged along David thought: “It’s strange. Doc Chisholm is a free man. He doesn’t have to act up about anything. He doesn’t pose about having been to Europe, because he lived there, and I guess he’s read most of the novels in the world. He’s the only teacher I’ve had who is willing to tell the whole truth. Even Miss Chaloner made the world a little better than it is.”

  “What’s eating you?” Vaux asked.

  “Doc Chisholm,” David said. “I was thinking that he’s a citizen of the entire world. Somehow or other he became a free man.”

  “That’s right,” Joe agreed. “He doesn’t pose much, does he?”

  “Unless,” David added suspiciously, “it’s all a pose.” The two students looked at each other as must have looked the students of Socrates, or Abelard, or William James, and none of them ever knew whether their great teachers were merely simple men of truth or the most consummate poseurs.

  “I don’t know,” Vaux mused. “Sometimes I think that guitar of his an act, but the other night that song of the Negro labor camp. Jesus! That hit me over the heart!”

  But Pelle, the Conqueror hit them much harder. They were able to find only one second-hand copy of the first two volumes, bound together in red and with the penciled notation: “Laura Estervelt, London. May 6, 1924. See the Rubens’ landscape.”

  It was a terrible thing Doc Chisholm did, sending David to that book. For six days
the young student could think of nothing but Pelle, the little Danish boy living in the Ark, pushing his way ahead in the world and bearing in his heart the grief of an entire people. A dozen times David slammed the book shut in real confusion of spirit and vowed he would read no more. Then he would be lured back to the relentless steps by which Nexo explained the working-class movement. David could sense every climax the young workman went through. He felt as if Pelle were dragging him, willy-nilly, along the same path. But David refused to go. The brilliant and terrifying story was Pelle’s, not his. He had been able to imagine himself Hector slain in dust, or Père Goriot betrayed and alone, or Old Clays, or even an impossible prince in a fairy tale. But he could not imagine himself Pelle, the fighter and the conqueror. He was not Pelle, and he would never be. He was not a man sprung from the people, fighting for a dim social justice that would make all men decent.

  He closed the first two volumes in tremendous spiritual agitation. He was glad the rest of the novel was missing, for he never wanted to finish the book. He knew that it was a merciless indictment of David Harper, who had seen most of what Pelle had seen, but who felt no burning sympathy for the writhing masses for the simple reason that he had long since closed his eyes and told himself over and over again: “It isn’t like that! People don’t sicken and die from lack of food! In America it isn’t like that! It isn’t! It isn’t!” David felt wretched and vastly disturbed.

  He was not surprised, however, when Joe Vaux picked up the agitating book and thumbed through it. “This book as good as Moon Face said it was?” he asked.

  “It’s …” David stopped. How could he describe it?

  “I’ll give it a fling,” Vaux replied. He pulled his knees up and forthwith launched into the novel. For two days he stayed in David’s room entranced. On the third afternoon he rubbed his tired eyes and cried, “My God! Dave! We’ve got to find the last two parts.”

  He called his father in Boston and asked him to have someone search the bookshops. “Go to all the old stores,” he begged. He cut class for two days and reread the first two parts. “This is some book!” he said.

  Most of the students in Doc Chisholm’s class were goaded into reading some one book which had upon their minds an effect equal in purpose if not in intensity to the effect of Pelle upon Joe and David. The books which Doc Chisholm recommended were what he called “the mordant novels.” He said, “Mordant novels are those which cut away all pretense, not within their own character, mind yew, but in the inner being of the person who reads. Mordant novels are often ugly novels. There is sand and gristle in them, and Ah can’t name four that are well written.” He directed his students to Vanity Fair, Moby Dick, Casuals of the Sea, and Oblomov. He especially recommended The Old Wives’ Tale. “There isn’t much Ah’d like to gamble on,” he said, “but Ah would gamble that a thousand years from now this book is goin’ to be held up as the model of its age. Ah commend it to yew wid great warmth!” Three students read it and said they didn’t catch the greatness. He was pleased with their honesty, for he made it clear that he thought it one of the great books.

  “Ah doan’ expect yew to see in a book what Ah see in it,” he said. “But Ah think our nation is goin’ to be the battleground for the mighty struggle between the cities and the countryside. It’s a mighty admission for me to say that. Ah was brought up on ranches where the eye could look beyond the horizon itse’f. Then in Europe Ah saw the mean cities, and right yere in America, too, and Ah was thoroughly repelled by them. But Ah got to admit that the future lies wid the cities.” He paused and looked out the window.

  “Yew may ask why it is, then, that Ah’ve dedicated my intellectual life, as it were, to range songs. Well, a man doan’ have to dedicate his life to what he knows is true. Ah know the world rides wid the cities, but Ah choose to ignore that fact. Ah choose to say to hell wid the cities, and Ah cast my lot wid the open land.” He grinned at his students and added, “A fool says in his heart, ’If Ah want to do a thing, then that’s the right thing to do,’ and a truly great man says, ‘No matter what Ah want to do, Ah’m goin’ to do what Ah know to be right.’ But most of us, yew and me alike, is neither fools nor great men, and so we say, ‘Ah know what is right, and Ah praise those who follow that, but in my weakness Ah must pursue another course.’ ”

  From that day on the night songs of Doc Chisholm had an effect on David—and on many of his friends—more powerful than the music of Beethoven. They became the deep, penetrating songs of a free man, imprisoned within his own longings and follies, a man of conflict and emotional disturbance. When Chisholm sang, David could hear the hammer of men across a prairie, or the whimpering of a coyote when night had fallen. The round-faced Texan became a symbol of the splendid confusion in which all men live, the good and the bad alike. They knew where the future of the world lay, but they lusted after another road.

  When the time came to write a term paper David launched into a sententious essay on “Social Conflicts in Five Modern Novelists.” But he could not deceive himself as to the emptiness of his writing. One night in the observatory he found courage to tear up the pompous paper and to start again. He thought of Doc Chisholm singing and vowed: “I have an immortal mind! It was operating before I got it and it’ll go on after I’m dead. I’ll tell that damned Texan exactly what I think!”

  For some reason he was furious at Doc Chisholm, and he worked for five days on a carefully worded essay. “The Earth,” he called it. In glowing terms he spoke of the novels which had come close to expressing and explaining the earth as he had loved it in Bucks County. He wrote of Hardy, Rolvaag, Reymont, Mrs. Gaskell, Turgenev, Chaucer, and Balzac. He culled, sometimes from memory, illuminating passages which came close to the thoughts of a boy upon a farm, the smells, the sound of animals at dawn, the richness of milk pouring from a clean can. He built a solid structure of impassioned reasoning to prove that no matter what happened in the cities, men would always be forced back to the earth for spiritual as well as physical sustenance.

  David wrote with fervor, but when he studied his work he found it much too florid. Again he threw away most of it and sat quietly in the dark observatory trying to imagine what he really did think. It was the first time in his life he ever cut away all the sham of words and acquired education and pretty moral phrases. What, in the presence of his naked self, did he believe?

  And as he sat there he thought of Eustacia Vye watching on the moors, and he could see her and the Reddleman more clearly than he could see the dim distant wall of the observatory, and it came to him that what he was more interested in than any other thing were the passions of men upon earth. He started to write again and quoted a long passage from Oblomov, and this time—at last—he wrote freely, saying almost exactly what was in his mind.

  He had to write in longhand, for Joe Vaux was banging away on the typewriter. Joe called his paper “Foreshadows of the Great Decline.” He based it mostly upon Pelle, but he did not refer very often to the novel. If Doc Chisholm wanted the picture of a mind torn apart by a book, Joe Vaux would give him just that! The second volume of Pelle had arrived from Boston, and as soon as he had finished it, Joe handed it breathlessly to David. “Don’t write your paper till you’ve read it!” he implored, but David would not take the book.

  “It’s too long,” he said. Joe smiled at him knowingly and never again mentioned the great novel. He understood that it cut much too close to David’s inner thoughts.

  Instead, David read Oblomov again. He found the brooding Russian novel much to his liking. He had it with him when he went to type his paper at Dr. Tschilczynski’s. When the mathematician saw the book he grabbed it unceremoniously and started to read stray passages. Tears came into his eyes. “My Ongle Peter!” he chuckled. “Goncharov he could have sued. Oblomov is my ongle!” He burst into a florid account of his worthless uncle, who sat by the fire and read English novels. Uncle Peter was very fond of Walpole—that is, the elder Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Warm tears of memory trickled down
Tschilczynski’s scarred cheeks. “Ongle Peter and my father and especially my sister Elizabeth’s husband. They were no good! But they were lovely people. My father destroyed a business … How you say it? Sixty thousand dollars a year profit. My father and Ongle Peter ran it down to ten thousand a year, gross. He survived the revolution because everyone knew he wasn’t a businessman. He used to write to me in Paris, ‘They have ruined me!’ ” He patted the book affectionately, as if it were indeed his Uncle Peter, and handed it back to David.

  When Doc Chisholm reported on the term papers there was an extra silence. He said, in a very low voice, blowing his red nose on a dirty handkerchief, “Yew have made some progress. Ah had sublime faith that yew would. Some of these yere papers are mighty creditable.” He returned each with a comment. Vaux’s was “stirring.” David’s was “disorganized and essentially disappointing.” David gritted his teeth and refused to listen to the rest of the comments, but when he got his paper he saw scratched on it an untidy A—.

  At the end of class the fat Texan asked David to remain for a moment. “Yew doin’ anithin’?” he asked. David winced and thought of Science II. It was a dismal class.

  “I’m free,” he said, glad of any excuse to cut the dreadful monotony of science as taught at Dedham.

  “Ah’ve got a bottle of beer in my ice chest,” the professor said. “Why don’t we discuss that bottle and yore paper at the same time?” He led David to the bootleg beer and mused, “Yore fund of knowledge is both refreshin’ and superior. But yew seem to have no standards of judgment. And yew have no idea at all about paragraphin’.”

  The Texan guzzled his beer and wiped his red face. “Yew seem unwillin’ to come right out and say somethin’ is either good or bad. Like an enormous sponge, suckin’ things up. Yew got no character to yore thought.” He insulted David for some minutes and then asked, “Doan’ yew ever fight back?”

  “I’m trying to get a lot of things straightened out all at once,” David replied.