The Fires of Spring (24 page)

Against his sworn promise to himself, he finally plunged into the swampy shadows of the Coal Mine. Betty was there alone and she said, “You better knock off, kid. Take my advice. Nora is too old for you. She don’t care to have anything more to do with you.”

“Does she need money?” David asked.

“Everybody needs money,” Betty replied.

“Will you give her this?” He handed Betty his takings for the week. Then he pleaded, “What’s wrong, Betty? You can tell me. We used to live in Doylestown together.”

“Nothing’s wrong!” Betty insisted. She was matter-of-fact
and cold. “Now why don’t you beat it before she gets back with some fellow? Only make a scene.”

He left the dripping trestles and went to see Max Volo at the loganberry stand. “Max,” he said, “I’m worried. What’s the matter with Nora? Why won’t she talk with me?”

“Girls is girls,” Max said philosophically. “I hired about sixty in my day, here and in Philly, and I could write a book. The guy that can explain girls is gonna make a million dollars.”

“But what about Nora? Is she working for you now?”

“Yep. She came back the last of June, I guess. I didn’t see her all winter. Now if you’re hot for her, come down some night.”

“I don’t mean that!” David snapped. “Max, I love Nora … and she won’t even speak to me.”

“Whores,” said Max, drawing upon his long experience, “are damned queer people. They cry their eyes out over some nice clean guy. They’re gonna marry him. Settle down in Kentucky. I bet I listened to more stories about nice clean guys than God ever had time to make. Last year, when Nora left the Coal Mine, she gave me the old song and dance. Well, now it’s this year and the song is different.”

The days dragged on and David lived in a world of misery. He would catch glimpses of Nora, and she would tantalize his mind, even when he tried to sleep at night. As he worked, he could see the loftiest peaks of the timbered mountains that rose above the Coal Mine, and they mocked him with their secrets of what Nora was doing with some strange man far beneath their summits. Klementi Kol came to relieve Sousa and one day David frankly poured his problem on the big musician, who listened gravely and said about what Max Volo had reported: “Nobody has ever understood a woman.” But he also added, “Not even another woman.” He told David to forget the girl. “I know it’s impossible, David, and I know you’ll never forget her. But you’ve got to divert your mind. The girl doesn’t want you, that’s clear. Now, have you been reading?” He brought David
Eugénie Grandet
, but David could not follow the story because tears came to his eyes at every indignity the heroine suffered, for it was clear that Eugénie was meant to be Nora.

Finally he went to see aloof Mr. Stone. They talked of Park politics for half an hour, David standing with his left foot on the booth foundations. When the stupid men who ran Paradise had been sufficiently vilified David stood silent
for several minutes and Mr. Stone asked gruffly, “Well, what’s eating you?”

“That girl you don’t like,” David began. “She won’t …”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Mr. Stone said. “You thought she was in Denver. I met her in Florida. She was with the biggest, noisiest, drunkenest bastard I ever saw in Palm Beach.”

David gasped. “I don’t see how …”

“It’s pretty simple,” Mr. Stone said. “She got to Denver and found she had to work for a change. Some guy in a check suit came along and said, ‘You oughtn’t a be workin’ yourself to death, baby.’ ‘What better can I do?’ she asked, and he said, ‘Like to go to Florida?’ She’d been there the year before, so she went.”

David hated to hear words which he himself would probably have framed later. “She’s not a strong girl, Mr. Stone,” he argued. “Maybe the work was too hard for her.”

“Girls like her,” Mr. Stone pontificated as he rolled nickels into dollar lots, “any work is too much for them. Except one kind, that is.”

“You can’t say that!” David flared up.

“For God’s sake!” Mr. Stone snapped. “Don’t you know any clean, pretty girls?”

David left the Hurricane, but the tornado of his spirit stayed with him. He could not then—or ever—reconcile the way Mr. Stone looked at life with the way Klementi Kol did. Kol had said: “If you see a picture you like, stand before it until your head swims. You can never see enough beauty. Play music that you love a thousand times. Take all experience into your heart. That’s why, with Nora, you have a right to love her as long as she brings meaning to you. Because even if love is unsatisfactory, or ridiculous, it’s still the best thing we know.” Opposed to this was Mr. Stone’s cruel imperative: “Cut her out of your mind, kid. She’ll poison you.”

David drifted about the Park until he simply had to return to work. Then immediately he hired a substitute and ran down to the Coal Mine and under the waterfall. He found Nora and she said, “You don’t take ‘No’ for an answer, do you?”

“Nora!” he blurted out. “Why did you go back to Florida?”

“How did you know?” she demanded.

“Mr. Stone saw you,” he explained.

“Oh, that devil!” she cried. She became very angry, not with herself, but with Mr. Stone. “He’s a nosy, David. So high and mighty. You’d do well to stay away from that devil. I’ll bet he’s never kissed a girl. Would warm him up a bit if he did.”

“But why did you … Why didn’t you write to me? I’d’ve gotten you money. Anything, Nora.”

She said, “Let’s get out of here. Betty’s coming back pretty soon and she may have a guy with her.” They walked down by the trolley tracks, where no one would see them. “It was hard work in Denver,” she said. “I’m not strong any more. Three or four hours and I feel, honest to God, I got to lay down. A man used to come into the restaurant, and he was taking a long vacation. All those nice, warm places.” She stopped and then said, “I went along.”

For some time David could not look at her. He was too ashamed and too unwilling to believe that Mr. Stone should have guessed so clearly. He felt as if a part of his world had changed forever. The dream of fair women was gone. Standing by the trolley tracks he thought of the finest girls he knew. Miss Meigs and Marcia, probably. He wondered what they were like, and suddenly he realized, for the first time, that everything Klementi Kol had said about love could be explained if Miss Meigs were a lot like Nora, only better dressed. But Marcia Paxson wasn’t like that, and then he saw that she was like Mr. Stone: hard and tough and never in love with anyone. Finally he said, “Nora, you’re kinder and sweeter than any person I’ve ever known. I don’t care if you did go to Florida.” Tenderly he caught her by the shoulders and kissed her without passion. The thin wanderer stayed close to him until the kiss was spent and then stepped away.

“Go away!” she pleaded. “Get a decent job somewheres else. The Park’s no good for you, and I’m no good, either. I’m rotten bad for you, kid.” He stopped the flow of her words by pressing his hand across her mouth, and she kissed the palm of his hand, proving to his satisfaction that her words were false.

He began to cry and she looked away until he gained control of his quivering lip. Then she said, “I’m going back to the Coal Mine now.” He could not stop her, nor could he follow her. Forlorn, he stayed beside the weed-grown tracks and listened to the distant carrousels.

“Nora! Nora!” he lamented. She was the first member he
had met of the world’s willfully defeated, and the tragedy he saw in her was more than he could bear.

Klementi Kol guessed at what was happening and he came several days to have dinner with Capt. Sousa. During each visit he stopped by David’s booth to talk with him. One day David bluntly asked, “Are you in love with Miss Meigs?”

“Of course I am,” the conductor replied.

“I just wondered,” David added.

“I’m sure I know what you’re wondering, too. But I won’t answer, David. When my concerts begin you’ll hear a new piece. By me. It won’t say so on the program, but it’s a love song to Miss Meigs.”

David was about to ask, “Then why don’t you get married?” but the disclosures of the past week imposed caution. There were things everywhere that could not easily be explained. Instead of probing further, he took down his own love songs, the poems he had written to Nora. The musician looked at them with increasing interest.

“These are good,” he said. “This one? What’s it mean?” He returned a scrap of paper with a short elegy beginning:

Like a wise animal retreating caveward to repair his wounds, David lost himself in the willing anonymity of freshman year in college. After the violent excitement of Paradise, he was glad for the refuge of books.

The fraternities were content to let him hide. Their scouts reported: “He’s got no money. Not a cent. How could he pay dues, let alone dance fees?” Men who had seen him play basketball said: “In his jerk-water league he was all-county for three years. But you know the small-town athletes. They bloom in the bushes but they bust in college.” Most damning of all, one of the scouts discovered his marks: “Another brain trust. Probably wind up as a radical. Hands off! We’ve got our share of headaches as is.”

In spite of David’s satisfaction with the sanctuary of college, he experienced the bitter moment of knowing that the fraternities did not want him. The realization was heavy upon him, as if he were a small boy. “Well,” he mumbled when the others opened their envelopes and there was none for him, “I didn’t want much to join anyway.”

He could not delude himself, however, when football started. He was not heavy enough to make the team and for the first time sat in the bleachers while men his own age
played a thrilling game. Again he consoled himself: “I don’t care much for football anyway. Basketball’s my dish.” But as the Dedham-Swarthmore football game approached he became unbearably excited. He even found himself whispering at night: “I hope we win this year.” And on the day of the game he shouted with wild joy at the Dedham victory.

He had chosen Dedham principally because of Bobby Creighton. Fellows in Doylestown could laugh about Bobby and the long-ago basketball game, but most of them knew that if they ever went to college they would select Dedham. It was a quiet, somnolent place, some fifteen miles west of Philadelphia, and was dedicated to the Republican party, the glories of English literature, the perfection of Philadelphia society as opposed to New York’s hurly-burly, and the eventual triumph of everything that was good and beautiful and true. Dedham was a Quaker college, and although the tenets of Quakerism did not intrude, the quiet simplicity of that religion dominated college life, so that even when the dead average of Philadelphia living was being held up as the world’s ideal, Dedham always had room for a minority report from an abiding genius like Dr. Tschilczynski. For David, the towering Russian became a symbol of the difference between Dedham and Doylestown; for in his home town many citizens had argued whether Miss Chaloner were an atheist or a Russian or something equally awful, whereas at Dedham everyone was proud to explain that their Immanuel Tschilczynski was both. At least six students whispered to David: “You know he’s a genius, don’t you?” No one liked to take the Russian’s classes, for his English was not adequate to explain mathematical processes, but all the students were pleased that among the dead wood of their faculty there was one genius.

There were other excellent aspects of Dedham that David savored in the early days of his anonymity. It had the first real library he had seen, a wonderful place of old stacks and corners filled with books that must some day be catalogued. He was allowed to rummage through these musty corners and thus developed the first criterion of a scholar: that any book of any size or color or date or language or complexion be considered an avenue to some great adventure. In the dark enclaves of the library David punished his eyes and rebuilt his enthusiasm for all the facets of human knowledge; and never would he be able to forget the average autumn day when he made so unaverage a discovery: he stumbled upon
The Greek Anthology
; it was done into verse by some eighteenth-century scholar so that dead men seemed to be standing all around David with their tombstones and he was reminded of those fields of Troy upon which he had set out to redress each of the world’s wrongs.

As he tasted the deep pleasures of college life David began to feel that he had at last discovered a spiritual haven where the ugly life of Paradise could never intrude. Of course, that was before the Coronation of the May Queen or the shocking Case of the Assy Nude. But in his freshman ignorance he withdrew into a shell of quiet learning, and he would have stayed there, recapturing the innocent adolescence he had missed because of Paradise, had it not been for Professor Tschilczynski and Joe Vaux. Quietly at first, and then with a rush, they dragged him back into the main stream of life, whereby he saw that all living in the world is of a piece and there is no retreat.

It was autumn, in 1925, and the air was crisp and fine. In gutters old leaves burned and filled the town with Hallowe’en incense. The rich smell of it lingered for days. The earth was dusty green and then a dying brown, for all green things were dying.

That was the wonder of autumn in a college town! As the earth died, people grew into beings. The professors who had been rusticating on their farms sprang back into life and began to teach as if this were their last class before the final dismissal bell. Young men and women burst into flowering thought and started to write sonnet sequences or swore to themselves that this year they would master chemistry. The promises that were made! The old hopes that were taken out and dusted off! Why, it was spring itself in the human mind, and all the while the earth lay dying.

David’s close association with the seasons at the poorhouse had made him unusually aware of their sequence, and autumn had always been a lonely, confusing time. He had never believed that a given year ended in December. That was the glorious time of birth and violent happiness and the deep friendship of cold winter nights. No, it was obvious that the old year died and the new one began some time in late October or November when irresponsible gusts of wind ripped the last leaves loose and sent them howling into the long nights.