The Fires of Spring (37 page)

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.” Then he grinned and reached across the platform to shake Joe’s hand.

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:

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 integrity consisted of, but the inner integrity whose absence breaks a man had not yet developed. He was twenty-two years old, and he was slipping dreamily from one choice to another.

“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.

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
Pax
sons by Carwers
ville
. 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?”

“That’s what I called about, kid. How would you like a job? Yes, a real job! With a play company? Sure, you’d act!”

From the scrambled sounds that reached her, Mona judged that David was bursting for such a job. “Are you kidding?” he exploded.

“No!” she assured him. “I have a six-months’ tour with Chautauqua. A swell comedy. There’s a part for you. And you’re to help with a marionette show in the afternoons. How about it?”

“Do I travel with you?” David asked.

“All over the country,” she said. “But I’ve got to warn you …”

The telephone whistled, like the escape valve of a long-pent engine. David interrupted her warning. “Mona,” he cried, “I’m sorry for your bad luck in Hollywood. I’ve prayed for you, but I’ve also had my heart crossed, hoping for some job like this one …”

“Look, Dave,” Mona cautioned. “There’s one thing about the job you may not understand …”

“If it’s with you, it’s all right!” he cried.

She gave him directions and then added, “Now I want to tell you, Dave …” but the operator broke in, asking for twenty cents. “All right!” Mona cried. “Here’s two dimes, and you know what you can do with them!” But David was gone. She shook her head and muttered, “He’ll raise hell when he finds out, but he’s got to grow up some time.”

She stepped back into the shoving crowd. Two men passed her and turned back. “Why don’t you put your arms in the sleeves, baby?” they asked. She ignored them and they teased her, “You’re gonna lose that lovely coat wearin’ it thataway. Then who’ll keep you warm?”

She smiled to herself and whispered, “Men, men.”

When Marcia answered the phone and called David from the fields, she sensed that the woman’s voice was Mona’s. “Long distance,” she told David as he hurried into the house. While he talked she brought him a pencil and some paper. He nodded his thanks, but she could see that even his eyes were absorbed in the telephone conversation.

Marcia felt that she must not eavesdrop, but she could not force herself to leave the room. She sensed that this was the climactic moment of her life so far. That afternoon she
had quarreled with her parents: “If David isn’t ready, I’ll simply have to wait for him. No! I’ve gone with Harry Moomaugh for three and a half years. That’s a good trial, and I don’t love him.” She had thought: “It’s funny! I always think of Harry as a man, but I don’t love him.”

Now David’s eager voice was speaking:
Where are you, Mona?
So it was that silly singer. Marcia could remember the day when she and David first heard John Philip Sousa. “I wonder if Mona Meigs was singing then? She could have been. She’s as old as Methuselah.” The thought gave her pleasure and she leaned against the door, watching David twist the phone cord about his thumb.

It had been a grand spring, so far. On First Days they attended Solebury Meeting. They sat in deep silence, and in the quietness of those stately sessions it was apparent that they were intended to marry, to live among the quiet trees of Solebury, and to have children who would attend First Day School in that very building.

I don’t get a chance to see
Variety
very often
. David had promised her that he would accept the scholarship to Chicago, but she sensed that he was not happy about his decision. Yet, deep within, she knew that in being a college professor there was stability. He would get a job at Haverford or Dedham, and in the summer they would live at Solebury, and the happy years would go on forever.