The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
“No!” he cried, immersed in the problems of the next exam. Then, as he stood with the crumpled paper in his hand, he sensed the terrible right of intrusion that people retain if they have slept with each other. “Mona!” he mumbled to himself. “I’d like to see you tonight, but I just can’t leave!”
He destroyed the telegram and said nothing to Joe, but Mona forced her way into his book and he rubbed his eyes. “No!” he cried again. “Damn it all, no!”
Outside his window there was a honking and students began to shout, “Harper! Harper! It’s the longest car east of Hollywood!” He went to the window and recognized Max Volo’s special limousine. Two plug-uglies were in front. “Hiya, kid,” they called. “Max is giving a farewell for the blonde. You’re to come along.” For a moment David was determined to slam the window and get back to work. Then he thought of Mona and her last night in Philly.
“Vaux!” he shouted. “Leave me your outlines of Chaucer. I’ll be back late.”
The farewell dinner was a gala affair and all during it David pushed away the glasses and bottles of Max’s bootleg. But when Mona toasted “The first man to tell me I’d make good! Dave Harper!” he felt a lump in his throat and drank a full glass to her success. He had two more following Max’s speech and two more after a tearful tribute to Klementi Kol. Then he waved his empty glass and said, “To the best of them all, John Philip Sousa!”
At eleven two limousines drove the party to West Philadelphia, where Mona boarded the train for Chicago. She had a suite, and Max had ordered it filled with flowers. David lugged her baggage in, and then he and Max stood in the doorway. “Thank you!” she cried in thick tones. “Thank you both!” But it was David she kissed.
The conductor cried, “Everybody off that’s getting off!” and Max disappeared; but the announcement of actual departure frightened David, and he had a sense that he might never again see Mona. Swaying gently, he watched her shaking her lovely head to clear away the mists, and in this last moment of their time he blurted out: “Mona? What was wrong with Uncle Klim?”
“What do you mean?” she snapped, trying to focus her champagned eyes on David. “Who said there was anything wrong with good old Klim?”
“Was he injured when he was a boy? Or in the war?” David was fighting for one last understanding of the man he had wronged. “I mean, why couldn’t he make love to you?”
“Why, you dirty …” Mona began. “You get out of here with your filthy mind!” She shoved him toward the door and then recognized who he was. She stood swaying before him, and the conductor blew his whistle. “Dave,” she explained hurriedly. “Sometimes a man can be the best man in the world. He can be kind to people and love a girl until his heart breaks. But things don’t work out for him, so he shoots himself.” Her lips moved vacantly and then, as if she knew that one day she might herself be subjected to the whim of an implacable injustice, she flung her unsteady arms about David and begged, “Wish me luck, kid. Wish me luck!”
When the train chugged away Max asked, “Were you sweet on that dame?”
“Sure!” David replied defiantly. “Who wasn’t?” Then he saw a clock and cried, “My God, Max! I got to get back to college!”
“They lock you in at night?” Max asked.
“Exams.”
“You’re smart enough already,” Max objected roughly, shoving David toward the cars. “We’ll celebrate.”
“Max!” David protested weakly, and even when he staggered up the steps to Betty’s house on Race Street he was still talking about Chaucer.
“Meet Mr. Chaucer!” Max cried in taut accents. The girls were delighted and laughed at the unsteady college student.
“Sing us a college song!” they demanded. Their voices were shrill and exciting and David said, “I’ll sing you the daddy of ’em all!” And he began to intone “Fair Dedham, in that distant day …” The words reminded him of college. “Hey!” he roared. “I got to get to college!”
The night wore on. Betty and the girls sang. An expensive radio picked up stations ever westward as the eastern ones closed down. Max sat regally in a red chair and studied the clowns about him as might Caesar have studied Egyptian dancing girls and Grecian fools. At three he said, “OK. Let’s get going.” He and Betty piled into the limousine and ordered three men to lift David in after them. The big car roared back to West Philly, and Max boarded a Pullman. The train disappeared into the night and David asked, “Where’s he going?” And big Betty replied, “He’s going out to Hollywood. He catches up with Mona’s train in Chicago.”
There was a buzzing in David’s head and he never knew how he got back to Dedham or how the two men dragged him up to Joe Vaux’s room. The first thing he remembered was looking up at Joe from a bed. “You look just fine!” Joe declared.
“God! My head!” David moaned. He belched and added, “My stomach, too.”
“Get into the shower!” Carefully Joe herded him under the cold water and then gave him a brisk rubdown. “Drink this,” he said.
“I don’t wanna drink anything!” David protested.”
Joe smacked him in the face. “Dave!” he said pleadingly. “This is where they separate the men from the boys!” He propped him up and started reading the notes on Chaucer, but before he had reached the second page David was asleep. Joe allowed him to lie in his stupor until ten minutes to nine. Then he thrashed the half-drunken student into shape and dragged him off to the examination room.
“My head!” David repeated. When he sat down, the room remained standing and he could not get it to obey him. Then he saw the white paper staring up at him and three thoughts flashed through his throbbing mind. First he thought: “I’m going to be sick, like the women in the poorhouse.” Next he tensed his stomach muscles and thought: “This is where they separate the men from the boys.” Finally he saw that name on the examination paper: Chaucer! And he began to grin. If there was in all the history of the world one man upon whom to write after a night of drunken foolery and kissing fair women good-bye and singing to the stars and being young and turbulent and in love and confused and wildly happy, that man was Geoffrey Chaucer. And David thought: “Especially in the spring.”
In the public interrogation David did very well and experienced a new sense of affection for Dedham and its intellectual fellowship. At each question the Dedham faculty leaned forward, visibly hoping that their prize student would answer with distinction. But it was the interrogation of Joe Vaux that filled the hall! For three weeks Joe had publicly been threatening to humiliate the crisp English visitor. “If you want to hear something good,” Joe had said grimly, “listen to me tear into that pompous ass.” He launched his assault on Mr. Dalling’s first question: “In your opinion, Mr. Vaux, how do you account for Pitt the Younger’s intransigent resistance to Napoleon?”
Joe thrust his Irish chin toward the Englishman and said, “I imagine, sir, that he was held up by two outmoded beliefs. One, an ingrained love of imperialism, his brand. Two, like all members of the ruling classes everywhere, Pitt was constitutionally afraid of any progress, French or English.”
From that blast the interrogation continued. Mr. Dalling never betrayed the least irritation with Joe’s astonishing replies. Nor did this disturb Joe, who called upon all of his learning to antagonize the cool Englishman. The Dedham faculty was both embarrassed and surprised at the depth of Joe’s knowledge. They were humiliated by his behavior.
At the end of an hour Mr. Dalling rose and smiled at the audience. “I understand that I must submit my reports in private, but in view of the interest in this interrogation I shall submit this report publicly.” He bowed crisply to the Dedham faculty as if to say: “What can you do about it?”
“I must award Mr. Vaux two marks instead of one. For his grasp of British history. Very, very superior. But when I was a small lad in a school where unruly boys were whipped, I was often whipped and given a rating that disturbed my mother very much. I now pass that on to Mr. Vaux. Deportment, Failing.” Th
At seven that night the student body gathered to hear the final marks read. On a small platform the visiting scholars sat informally. The dean raised his typed sheet and read with impressive pauses. Joe Vaux, Magna Cum Laude. A few students applauded. Then, in conclusion, he said, “The examiners were especially pleased to award David Harper Summa Cum Laude in two fields: English and history.” The Dedham faculty started to applaud politely but was interrupted by a twilight voice that sang: “Fair Dedham, in that distant day …” and David was so filled with emotion that he dared not look up, for in those days Dedham was the only American college where the student body could get as excited about distinguished scholarships as it did about football.
That summer Joe Vaux worked in a steel factory. He tried to make David join him. “Don’t you see?” he pleaded. “Chisholm was right. The future of the world is in the cities. What happens there is what’s important.”
But Marcia Paxson had other plans. She drove to Dedham on graduation day and said, “Daddy’d like to hire you for the farm this summer.” She spoke firmly and with no embarrassment, yet she and David each knew that what she was suggesting was as truly a proposal of marriage as if she had said: “Let’s spend the summer studying each other. I don’t really like Harry Moomaugh, and if you and I find that we are in love, there’s no reason we shouldn’t marry and go to Chicago together.”
“I’d enjoy such a summer,” David replied, but inwardly he was afraid that he was signing his life away. Marcia drove him to Solebury and when they passed the poorhouse he laughed and said, “If I had any spunk I’d go in there and spit in Aunt Reba’s eye. She’ll blow a gasket when she hears I’m not going to work in the pants factory.”
“Was she so awful?”
“She’s a perfect example of old people hating young people,” David replied.
“Where did you ever hear such a silly idea?” Marcia demanded.
David explained about Mr. Thorpe; and all through the June days when he plowed the rich fields of Solebury, he thought again and again of something the art teacher had said: “You study poetry so you won’t be ashamed of yourself when you’re alone.”
So as he worked the fields and watched the swallows and the barn owls and the mice, he started to recall the snatches of poetry he had learned, odd bits and fragments of felicitous summary: “Music when soft voices die vibrates in the memory.” “Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.” Sometimes he could not recall much of a poem, only a phrase that hung in memory as if some ancient hand had arranged the words and put a spell upon them so they could never be changed: “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” “Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.” “Nor the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come.”
As such words clung about him David felt that he was indeed the inheritor of the world’s accumulated beauty. He could do no single thing that someone before him had not done, and relished and compressed into memorable wisdom. He would look across the fields of Bucks County, and they had been described long, long ago by Wordsworth and by Shelley. Keats was with him, and Thomas Campion, and Shakespeare everywhere. He could find Robbie Burns under any stone, or brooding Goethe or the far-flung glories of Homer.
He marveled constantly at the seductive power of words, the way they possessed him forever: “Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart.” “The holy time is quiet as a Nun breathless with adoration.” “O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?” “While greasy Joan doth keep the pot …”
There were special poems which he found he knew fairly well by heart, Milton on his blindness or the sonnets of Shakespeare. As he plowed, he would sometimes recite a single sonnet a half dozen times, savoring the nuances of expression, and from these special poems certain lines stood out as if intended for him:
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
Those lines were particularly disturbing because in David’s life they applied to no one person. His heart simply did not leap up when he beheld Marcia. She was a fine friend to him in those early June days. She saw to it that there were towels in his room when he came in from the fields, and in the evenings she was always ready to go where he wished.
On Sundays they went to Solebury Quaker Meeting, and by the third week it was acknowledged in the community that David and Marcia would marry, even before he went to Chicago to become a professor of English. But in the long weekdays under the warm sun, working again with the earth he knew, David became increasingly opposed to his easy destiny. A phrase from Shakespeare possessed his mind: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past …” It recurred endlessly, in time to the hammering of the tractor pistons, and as he drove across the fields, back and forth toward the canal that had lured him so strongly when he was a boy, he felt offended with himself that he should drift into a marriage that contained no passion and into a profession that dealt not with the fires of spring but with the learned ashes of winter.
“No! No!” he muttered to himself as he shepherded his noisy tractor home at night. “The testimony of everything I know tells me this is wrong!” Restlessly he went to his room and saw by chance a map of America. He was vividly called back to Miss Chaloner’s math class, and he could hear her speaking of the Rockies. “I’ve never seen a mountain!” he muttered.
“David!” Marcia called. “Dinner’s on.”
“All right,” he replied grudgingly, and all during the meal he felt resentment against the quiet girl.
“What’s the matter?” Marcia asked.
“Did you study much about America in Swarthmore?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, reflecting the college tradition of the time, “we didn’t study it at all.”
“Neither did I,” he replied. “This is a pretty big country.” Mr. Paxson looked at him and agreed.
For two days he was depressed and would have nothing to do with Marcia. Her father noticed this and waited for his daughter to mention it. When Marcia did, he laughed easily and reassured her that “Dave’s pretty much like a new-broken horse. He’s testing his shoulders against the harness.”
But David’s agitation went deeper than that. He did not want to be a college professor. He felt that surely somewhere there must be a more urgent life than that. Nor did he want to marry Marcia. He could not help comparing her with Mona, and the terrible fable of American middle-class life plagued him: Marcia was a nice girl, therefore she would be cold and distant. He shivered at the prospect and stayed by himself among the horses and the cows.
As he worked, new fragments of poetry flashed through his mind, all bearing testimony to the fact that there is in life a fiery passion which alone makes the long years tenable: “About, about, in reel and rout, the death-fires danced at night,” he chanted, swinging over to the chopped lines of Blake: “What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”
Finally David became so nervous that he could not eat with the Paxsons. He felt like an intruder. He walked about the farm studying the fall of the fields and the trees at dusk. A single line of poetry, remembered from high-school days, but unplaced among the jumbled ends that cluttered his mind, slipped into his consciousness: “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” He began to repeat the words and wondered from their strange beat what poem they were attached to. Then, slowly, the meaning of the words broke upon him, and he felt quite breathless, as if he had been running.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he admitted. “I refused to work in a pants factory. But this is worse, because I’m doing all of this consciously.” He leaned against a fence and surveyed himself. By hard experience he had learned what honesty was, had acquired a certain physical courage. Mr. Chisholm had taught him what intellectual inte
“No!” he shouted at the sunset. “I won’t go to prison!” He would rush in and tell the Paxsons, but he heard Marcia calling him. He was wanted on the telephone.
PART 4
Chautauqua
Mona came back. She reached North Philadelphia at dusk and immediately called David at Dedham. The operator said, “He’s gone back to Doylestown.” Mona called the poorhouse and after a long interval heard an elderly woman’s plaintive voice, “Daywid ain’t here yet. He won’t be here. He’s against the Paxsons by Carwersville. I told him to come …” Mona sensed that the complaining voice would continue, so she hung up. These calls were costing money, but she decided on one more. This time she reached David.
“It’s Mona,” she said.
“As if I wouldn’t know!” an excited voice cried. It made her feel good. She threw her shoulders back. “Good news?” the eager voice inquired.
“No!” she snapped, and her shoulders dropped. “You read Variety? Those dirty bastards! Said I went west lit up like a Christmas tree. I didn’t get to first base.”
There was a long silence and then David said, “Oh.”
“But there’s one thing you can be sure of,” Mona said with much satisfaction. “That dirty little pimp Max Volo didn’t get any good out of it. He trailed me all the way to the coast. And he came back, too. Alone.”
There was another awkward silence and David asked, “What are you going to do?”