The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
“He’s locked in!” David laughed, violently. “He’s all locked up. The Gonoph did it!”
When the two lovers fell back upon the bed, exhausted, the distant knocking continued, and Mona suddenly snapped her fingers. “Of course! She told you what the signal was!” But she did not laugh. No, she buried her pounding head against David’s and whispered softly, “She must love you very much.”
And that was when David made his third discovery of the summer. He found that love is never to be defined, that it grows and changes with every year of life, that each person knows it as a different miracle. Love can beat and scream at the edge of a tornado and then surrender completely an hour later. It can wander and search over the face of the earth and alight nowhere. It can crawl in gutters or hide in the late afternoon behind crocheted gloves serving tea in a garden. Nothing can shame it. Nothing can make it more splendid than it already is. Shared, wantoned or hidden forever, it can fill a life. There is no understanding love, and there is no defeat so precious as trying. No aspect of life is more complex, and none so simple. A look, a word, and the heart is torn forever; a touch, and it is mended. Love is brave and cowardly. In the same person it is secret and garrulous. But above all, love establishes its own rules and no man can know its complete manifestation in the heart of another. It can even drive a person to stand watch in a long hall while the heart’s desire is lusting with another.
In the days that followed. Cyril Hargreaves was coldly correct. He called David “Mr. Harper” and was studiously formal to him both off- and onstage. Once he reprimanded David for mispronouncing a word. He treated Wild Man and the Gonoph in the same austere manner, for he had not yet determined who had been David’s accomplice.
The Gonoph was delighted with what had happened after the fire. She told David three times about the scene in the long hall. Cyril had finally torn the rope loose, but in doing so had ripped off the door handle. There was no way for him to get out. “He yelled like he was stuck in the belly,” the pudgy woman reported, chuckling as she recalled the incident. “He wakened up the clerk, who let him out with a screwdriver. Then he stormed down the hall to see Mona. ‘Go away!’ she said. I was hiding in the women’s toilet, laughing near to death. ‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted at Mona, and people began to come into the hall. Sir Cyril just didn’t care. ‘Who’s in that room with you?’ he kept shouting, so finally she unlocked the door and threw it open and the light was on and there wasn’t anybody there. ‘Go on to bed!’ Miss Meigs said, and all the people in the hall laughed. I stuck my head around the corner and saw him stomping down the hall as if he was in a play. He slammed his door shut and the next morning the clerk had to let him out again with a screwdriver.”
Because of some ancient slight the Gonoph took real pleasure in Cyril’s discomfort. “Look at him!” she would whisper to David during the play. “Lord Cyril’s really got a worm eating him! Look at him!”
She now talked with David in their afternoon sessions as if he were her lover, as if he had crept to her room instead of Mona’s. “Didn’t we have a good time that night?” she chuckled, delighted that no one had thought of such a trick before. She spoke more kindly of Mona, too. “She’s not so bad, really,” the fat woman mused. “On Broadway she might get by. Of course, she don’t have it for Hollywood. That takes class, and she’s getting on. But I got to admit, she can act.”
She was extremely proud of David’s part in the fire. “I saw you go back in,” she said quietly. “I was proud of the way Jensen worked on the pole, but, after all, his girl was caught under the pole. You …” She leaned back to survey her young man. She liked his sandy hair and muscled neck. “You didn’t have to go.” She wrote to the Bellehaven paper for pictures of David and sent six copies to friends who had acted with her in one play or another.
And the more David talked with her the more pathetic she seemed. She came to represent, for him, the tragic contradiction of art. She was empty and forlorn, yet onstage she stood for solid family virtues. Cyril was vain and selfish and arrogant, but in the play he was a wise, kindly judge. Vito was a grown man, caught in midstream and tortured by the doubts of ever finding a girl he could marry, but in the play he was a boy. Mona wrestled each night with her vast ambitions, but onstage she was a young girl burdened with success.
That was the nature of art. Deaf Beethoven wrote the fabulous symphonies. Dying Keats sang of life’s subtlest beauties, and Van Gogh, mad as the night owls, showed all the world how to see yellow and blue. David looked at the Gonoph, vacant-minded, and thought of the great artists he had loved: Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Melville, Giorgione, Duccio. They were tricksters, all of them. There could never be a judge’s wife so stupid as the Gonoph, just as there could never be a boat so blue as the one Van Gogh painted. This fundamental duplicity of art fascinated David, and he tried to comprehend it through comprehending the Gonoph.
One day he asked her, “Why did you help me to trick Cyril?” and she chuckled, pulling her shawl about her shoulders, “I like to have everyone find his heart’s desire.” He was caught in a passionate desire to know all he could about this formless woman.
“Why did you decide to go on the stage?” he asked, and she replied, “What else was there for me to do? I guess you might honestly say I was a born actress.”
“Have you ever had good reviews? That is, rave notices?” She thought a while and said, “In Tulsa, Oklahoma, I got a very good review for a Swedish maid. I was pretty good in that. Comedy, you know.”
He asked her many questions, and when he was through he knew no more about her than when he started, for she always returned to a few simple statements. “You must be careful at night,” she warned.
“Why?” David asked.
“Sir Cyril’s gunning for you,” she said solemnly. “He’ll get you.”
“Not me,” David boasted. But Cyril did even the score. It happened in a small Pennsylvania town called Slaghill.
That day at Slaghill started with a bang, for two detectives appeared at the tent to arrest the young man who took tickets. He had been selling them twice and had bilked Chautauqua of something like ninety dollars. Now he was off to jail.
“Ninety dollars!” David gasped. “I used to make that much in a day!” He began to shiver and felt alarmed when he and Cyril had to go to the prison to represent Chautauqua. They spoke very formally to each other and to the thief, who sat dejectedly in a barren cell.
“Couldn’t you keep your hands off other people’s money?” Cyril asked severely. The young college man did not reply and the actor continued, “All through the years the theatre has suffered from dishonesty in the box office.”
“Let’s leave him alone,” David suggested. “Is there anything we can do for you?” he asked the frightened young man. The ticket-taker looked back through the steel bars and shook his head. He was twenty-three years old, a sandlot baseball player, and David could remember him in the mornings, playing baseball with the kids around the tent.
Cyril wiped his brow with a carefully folded handkerchief and said good-bye. “If there’s anything you need, let us know. You were stupid to have stolen money when the tickets were all numbered.” He huffed and puffed a bit of everyday morality and left, but David turned at the door and saw the panic-stricken baseball player, and it seemed to David that he saw himself sitting there behind the bars.
“God, that must be awful!” he mumbled to Cyril.
“The man’s a common thief,” Cyril snapped, and that was all he would say.
When the two actors returned to the tent, a group of small boys surrounded them immediately. “Are you Dave Harper?” they cried. “Well, the biggest car you ever saw wants to see you. It’s in back!” David hurried through the tent and was greeted with a tough bellow.
“Hiya, kid! Ya look swell!” He recognized some of Max Volo’s bodyguards and spoke to them. “Max is over here,” they explained, adding in a whisper, “Do ya kiss the babes on the stage? Babes go for actors,
“Hello, kid!” Volo said quietly. He wore a much better suit than when David had last seen him.
“Hello, Max!” David replied. “What you doing up here?”
“On my way to New York,” Volo said. “Took a detour to see you. And Mona.”
“Mona doesn’t show up till seven-thirty,” David explained.
“I can wait,” Volo replied.
“How was Hollywood?” David asked.
“Oh, so-so,” Volo replied. He sent his attendants on into town for supper but stayed himself to talk with David. “How you like this racket?” he asked.
“It’s fun,” David said.
“They tell me you play with dolls!” He persuaded David to unwrap Bosco and make him drink beer. “Say!” the little crook cried. “You’re good! Part of the reason I dropped by was to see if you’d go to work for me when the tour’s over. I got me nine movie houses in Philly. I think I move into New York, maybe. I could use you for a manager. Maybe even a field manager. Wonderful dough!”
“I don’t think so, Max,” David replied.
“You’re the boss! Say!” he said sharply. “I hope you ain’t in love with Miss Meigs.”
“No, I’m not,” David assured him.
“Good!” Volo said. He walked up and down and then asked, “She tell you about Hollywood? What a flop she was! And on my five grand! She put on dog like she was a queen. The whole town was laughin’ at her. I did my best to get her fixed up with some important people. But she loused up every deal. I don’t mind tellin’ you, kid, she treated me like I was dirt. But I got a terrific yen for that twisty blonde.”
Volo’s gang came back. They brought him a cheese sandwich, melted, and two malted milks. He insisted that David take one. At seven-thirty Mona appeared, followed by Cyril and the Gonoph. Volo sidled up and Mona shook hands with him. “Hello, Max,” she said in a flat voice.
“Hello, kid!” he replied, eagerly. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“It’s almost curtain time,” she said, but he pulled her into the outer shadows. He talked with her seriously for some minutes and came back to the dressing area trembling with rage.
“Who’s Hargreaves?” he demanded sharply. The elderly actor stepped forward and Max grabbed him by the shirt. “I want to talk to you!” he said. With three of his henchmen helping he dragged Cyril into the shadows. They conversed seriously for several minutes and Volo cried, “I’ll be damned if he does!” Whereupon he stormed back to the dressing rooms and cried to his gang, pointing at David, “Get that sonofabitch!”
Two men dragged David past the marionette boxes. A third slugged him from behind, so that his neck seemed about to break. “Wild Man!” he shouted, but it was no use. Jensen was absent in the truck and the tent captain was in jail. Quietly, and with maximum efficiency, Volo’s thugs administered a masterful beating.
“No snotnose college kid’s goin’ to make a sucker out of me!” Volo said through tight lips, standing apart as his men finished their work. A big boxer shot four blows to David’s face. The third smash knocked his jaw loose. The fourth knocked it back the other way. Then he was allowed to fall into the dust and hay. The long, expensive car squealed in the night, and Volo’s gang resumed its way to New York.
The curtain was delayed half an hour. Jensen was switched to David’s part and Cyril, calm and possessed, handled the Wild Man’s original lines via the telephone. David lay propped up in the men’s dressing room. Whenever she was offstage the Gonoph nursed him. She cried when the Slaghill doctor said it was a miracle the jaw wasn’t broken. “It’ll be painful for two more days, but you should be able to eat by then,” the white-haired man said.
“How soon can I act?” David asked through clenched teeth.
“Soon as the swelling goes down,” the doctor said. “Little make-up on that eye and you’ll be OK.” He had a breezy manner and gave David a sedative. “Two days you’ll be fine!” He stayed to see the play and gave the Gonoph additional instructions when she pestered him.
Neither Cyril nor Mona spoke to David about his beating. The tall actor dressed in his corner of the canvas dressing room and said, “You were admirable tonight, Mr. Jensen.” Then he went to the areaway and called, “Miss Meigs! Miss Clews! Stop!”
Apparently the Gonoph and Mona had been fighting, for David, his head throbbing, heard the former cry, “You cheap alley cat!” She refused to ride with Cyril and Mona. “I’d rather walk!” she shouted contemptuously with more feeling than she had ever crammed into a stage line.
Puffing heavily, she climbed into the truck with David. “You ride up front with Mr. Jensen,” she told Vito. David was drowsy from the sedative given him by the Slaghill doctor and he understood only part of what the Gonoph told him in the darkness of the truck. He got the sentences: “Lord Cyril, the dirty bastard, told that little man you were with Mona all the time. I caught the slimy old devil smiling to himself after they beat you up.”
David wished the ugly woman would go away and let him sleep. Drowsily he turned on his hard bed, but the movement made him wince with pain. The Gonoph banged on the window. “Drive slower!” she commanded, and then she sat on David’s bed. She took his aching head in her hands, but he drew away, hating this fat woman.
But the gesture made his head ache dreadfully, down where the lower jaw joined the skull. “Ughhhh,” he grunted, and this sound of pain was more than the Gonoph could bear. Against David’s will she cradled his sore face in her soft arms, pressed his bruised head against her fabulous bosom. “Oh, David! David!” she chanted. “You are my one heart’s desire.”
The whole experience was sickening to David and again he tried to move away, but the combined action of pain and the sedative was too much for him. He fell back in her arms and moaned, “God! I feel awful.”
The Gonoph sat with him until he fell asleep. Jensen drove slowly and Vito dozed on the front seat. Toward morning Jensen looked back to see how David was, and he saw the Gonoph rocking back and forth, her eyes closed.
“Well!” the Gonoph announced some days later. “Everything’s all right again. Grand Duke Cyril himself got into bed with her last night.”
“Shut up!” David shouted. “Get the hell away from me!” He pushed her out of the tent and resumed packing the dolls. When she returned she was carrying a bag of jelly beans. He refused to take them and shouted, “Leave me alone!” She went to the women’s dressing room and sat on a bench, staring at him as he worked, but he would not let her come near him. “Why don’t you go for a walk?” he snapped.
Even though David had acknowledged to himself that sexual love is not the prerogative of youth—as most young people suppose—he was shocked that a graceless woman like the Gonoph should actually be in love in a breathless, panting sort of way. And he was repulsed by the thought of old Mr. Hargreaves presuming to sleep with a girl as beautiful as Mona. Suddenly he thought of his math professor, Tschilczynski. “When he married the Greek widow, I thought it was because he wanted someone to cook for him. Gosh! Imagine those two actually sleeping together in bed. It’s repulsive!” But when he recalled the Russian’s passionate nature he realized that it had been the sexual part of marriage that had inspired the wedding.
Normally David would have sought counsel from Wild Man Jensen, but he had not spoken to the athlete since the fight with Volo’s gang. The cause of his disaffection was ridiculous, and David admitted that fact to himself, but when he had sat with ice about his bruised jaw he had listened to the Wild Man usurp his place on the stage. And the big clown had been much better in the role than David had ever been. He was freer, less affected, and more outgiving. David, sulking with his dislocated jaw, suffered the exquisite pain of overhearing Mona and Mr. Hargreaves saying, “We should have used Jensen in that part in the first place!”
So, following the beating in Slaghill, David found himself alienated from the players of Cyril Hargreaves Broadway Troupe. He loathed the Gonoph. He was jealous of Jensen. Mona looke
He discovered her in Punxsutawney, Pa. He saw her standing in front of a bakery and he jammed on the brakes so that he could get a better look. Jensen and Vito were sleeping in the rear and their heads banged. “What gives?” the Wild Man cried.
“Checking the oil,” David explained, and he slipped out of the truck and asked a man, “Who’s that little girl?”
“That’s Ed Fletcher’s daughter. Real estate.”
“How old is she?”
“Say! You’re nosy! She’s twenty and she’s a dwarf.”
“Ed Fletcher. Ed Fletcher,” David said, and he drove to the next town.
But when the puppet show was unloaded he slipped off to a telephone and asked the operator to get him Ed Fletcher, a real-estate man, in Punxsutawney. During the wait David heard the operators repeating his request, and he became actually frightened. “What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself in astonishment. He was about to hang up and run away from the phone when he heard a professionally hearty voice say, “Ye—sss! Ed speaking!”
“This is going to sound silly as the devil, Mr. Fletcher,” David began. “But I’m Dave Harper. I’m from Dedham, Pennsylvania, and I’m an actor on Chautauqua.”
“Ye—sss, Mr. Harper. What can I do for you?”
“I’m in Kittanning …” There was a long pause.
“Ye—sss, Mr. Harper.”
“This morning I saw your daughter …” There was an agonizing pause and then David rushed his words. “The man who runs our puppet show is forty-one inches high. He’s the finest man I’ve ever known, Mr. Fletcher, and I want him to meet your daughter. I’ll drive back right away if you say the word, so you can see who I am. This is very important.”