The Fires of Spring (31 page)

“Books bore me,” she explained. “When you want to be an actress, you study how people do things. Want to see yourself?” With affectionate yet acid burlesques of David she portrayed an indecisive college student hastening to and hiding from a fatal charmer.

“I don’t look as silly as that!” David objected.

“Sure you do! You’re my silly Stage-door Johnny!” she teased, peering nervously around the edge of an imaginary door. Then she stopped teasing and allowed David to kiss her. “And like they say in plays,” she whispered, “you’re my lover. If you hadn’t of come today I’d’ve died.”

David wanted to ask, “What about Klim?” but he had reached the point at which Klim could be exorcized at will. In fact, on this day David himself went methodically from window to window, lowering the shades, but when he reached the darkened davenport, method ceased, and Mona crushed him to her. “You are my lover!” she said over and over, repeating the phrase even when they lay back exhausted; but David had the strange feeling that she was saying this only because she had heard it in some play. He didn’t believe for
a moment that she meant the words. He even doubted that she understood what they were intended to convey.

In the late 1920’s most American colleges were little more than outposts of England, and as long as David lived he would bear a peculiar love for that tight little island. This was because his teachers had really loved only one thing: English culture. They extolled the grandeur of English common law and the sovereign accomplishment of English writers. Since Dedham was a Quaker college which considered art and music probably immoral, David did not discover until late how barren England was in those twin fields which illuminate so much of life.

For students of David’s generation the excellence of the world lay distilled in England, and those few of his professors who had chanced to study in that fortunate realm comprised the Dedham hierarchy. The accepted Dedham pronunciation was a bastard British; the style of clothes and the look of life were English; and the Nirvana to which even the lowliest student might properly aspire was “a summer in the Lake District.”

The result of this shameless sycophancy was snobbery on the one hand and ridicule of American culture on the other. Only three American writers were deemed worthy of study: Emerson, Howells, Henry James, and they were dealt with condescendingly. Most students graduated without ever having had a course in American history, and as for the concept of a rough and sometimes brutal American freedom, the idea would have been lashed from the halls of Dedham as vulgar and offensive. What civil freedoms America had attained were thought of as stolen from early English settlers.

In fact, anything American was slyly laughed at as unfortunate, or grotesque, or immature, or downright uncouth. And as David slowly built his moral and cultural judgments, he accepted blindly this evaluation of his own land. He was taught to be ashamed of it, for it was so deficient in quality. In the normal course of events he would have graduated with honors in German mathematics and English affectation. Then he would do graduate work in Chicago and Leipsic, after which he would find himself to be a pallid imitation of a pallid interpretation of an essentially pallid mock-European culture. Then he would be enshrined as a professor, and he would seduce other young Americans into the same folly. He would laugh snidely as he referred to “American Corinthian,
the Bible Belt, Longfellow, and the great unwashed.” He would, in short, have become an American intellectual. Fortunately, a moonfaced Texan changed all that.

Doc Chisholm was a professor of English in one of the Texas colleges. He was built like a barrel, had very long apelike arms and a florid complexion. He massacred pronunciation and drawled in a voice that was sometimes so low as to be inaudible. He was becoming bald. And he had a gittar.

How a man like that ever got to Dedham, David never knew, but the roly-poly man appeared one Friday night and it was announced that he would teach three special classes. Purely because of a schedule mix-up, David took Doc Chisholm in the novel. And as long as he lived the results of that accident would haunt him.

For Doc Chisholm was a free man. He was the first completely free man David had ever known. Even cold Mr. Stone was tied to his glossy change board, but fat Doc Chisholm was free. His mind was a thing of placid, rare excellence, as beautiful as a lake in summer when the slightest feather from a passing bird establishes a ripple that ultimately finds shore.

In his third lecture—in which he reported on the first batch of papers: “My Three Favorite Novels”—Doc Chisholm spoke in a very low and soft voice. “Ah won’t tear up yore papers,” he said softly, “for Ah gotta admit that anithin’ once written has value to the guy that did the writin’. But these papers!” He waved them contemptuously. “Yawl tryin’ to impress me? Yew men are the hope of this nation. Yew mean to admit that the books yew tellin’ me about are what yore greatness feeds upon! Or yew jes’ tryin’ to impress me wid the fact yew read all the best books? Hmmmm?” He brushed back the fringe of hair about his red face and peered at the students.

Then his voice mounted in slowly rising scorn as he read off the novelists mentioned: “Thomas Hardy. John Galsworthy. R. D. Blackmore. Richardson. Defoe. Walpole!” He crumpled the list he had made and tossed it in the air. Then, like a strong halfback, he punted it out the window.

“Lissen, students!” he begged. “Yew and I got to get down to fundamentals. And quick. Ah not gonna be here long.” He dropped words from sentences when he felt them needless. “But this nation is a meltin’ pot. Yew people before me, yew come f’um all corners of the known world. Ah see Jews here,
and Poles and Russians and Slovaks and Dutch and Norwegians! Yet yew tryin’ to tell me that all yew ever read was the watered thought of a few Englishmen! Yew tryin’ to get good marks f’um me ’cause Ah’m an English teacher? Well, doan’ do it, ’cause Ah’m a Scotsman. Mah pappy came to Texiss years ago to drink in the air of freedom. And yew believe this! The air of freedom is not composed from the wind of jes’ one nation. It’s a magnificent and complex production from all the known quarters of the world.” He stood fat and mouselike by his desk and said in organ tones, “Yew are the inheritors of all the world. Yew’re a new brand of people. Yew’re Americans.” His voice was strange, as if he were singing, and it was that very night that Doc Chisholm first appeared in the dormitory with his gittar.

He arrived about eight and dropped into a room down the hall from David’s. He carried with him a battered guitar, sweat-stained on the hand side. He introduced himself and asked, “Yawl do much singin’ ’round here?” The room’s occupants were so baffled they didn’t know what to say, so Chisholm pulled up a chair and started to plunk his gittar. “Yawl know
Red River Valley?
”

From his room David heard the strange music and cried brashly, “Can the racket!” but the racket continued and he stamped down the hall to see what was happening. He saw fat Doc Chisholm plunking on a gittar and singing faraway notes through his nose. The professor nodded quietly at David and when the song was ended asked, “ ’M I disturbin’ yew?”

“I couldn’t guess what it was!” David laughed.

“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.”