The Fires of Spring (32 page)

“What’s eating you?” Vaux asked.

“Doc Chisholm,” David said. “I was thinking that he’s a citizen of the entire world. Somehow or other he became a free man.”

“That’s right,” Joe agreed. “He doesn’t pose much, does he?”

“Unless,” David added suspiciously, “it’s all a pose.” The two students looked at each other as must have looked the students of Socrates, or Abelard, or William James, and none of them ever knew whether their great teachers were merely simple men of truth or the most consummate poseurs.

“I don’t know,” Vaux mused. “Sometimes I think that guitar of his an act, but the other night that song of the Negro labor camp. Jesus! That hit me over the heart!”

But
Pelle, the Conqueror
hit them much harder. They were able to find only one second-hand copy of the first two volumes, bound together in red and with the penciled notation:
“Laura Estervelt, London. May 6, 1924. See the Rubens’ landscape.”

It was a terrible thing Doc Chisholm did, sending David to that book. For six days the young student could think of nothing but Pelle, the little Danish boy living in the Ark, pushing his way ahead in the world and bearing in his heart the grief of an entire people. A dozen times David slammed the book shut in real confusion of spirit and vowed he would read no more. Then he would be lured back to the relentless steps by which Nexo explained the working-class movement. David could sense every climax the young workman went through. He felt as if Pelle were dragging him, willy-nilly, along the same path. But David refused to go. The brilliant and terrifying story was Pelle’s, not his. He had been able to imagine himself Hector slain in dust, or Père Goriot betrayed and alone, or Old Clays, or even an impossible prince in a fairy tale. But he could not imagine himself Pelle, the fighter and the conqueror. He was not Pelle, and he would never be. He was not a man sprung from the people, fighting for a dim social justice that would make all men decent.

He closed the first two volumes in tremendous spiritual agitation. He was glad the rest of the novel was missing, for he never wanted to finish the book. He knew that it was a merciless indictment of David Harper, who had seen most of what Pelle had seen, but who felt no burning sympathy for the writhing masses for the simple reason that he had long since closed his eyes and told himself over and over again: “It isn’t like that! People don’t sicken and die from lack of food! In America it isn’t like that! It isn’t! It isn’t!” David felt wretched and vastly disturbed.

He was not surprised, however, when Joe Vaux picked up the agitating book and thumbed through it. “This book as good as Moon Face said it was?” he asked.

“It’s …” David stopped. How could he describe it?

“I’ll give it a fling,” Vaux replied. He pulled his knees up and forthwith launched into the novel. For two days he stayed in David’s room entranced. On the third afternoon he rubbed his tired eyes and cried, “My God! Dave! We’ve got to find the last two parts.”

He called his father in Boston and asked him to have someone search the bookshops. “Go to all the old stores,” he begged. He cut class for two days and reread the first two parts. “This is some book!” he said.

Most of the students in Doc Chisholm’s class were goaded
into reading some one book which had upon their minds an effect equal in purpose if not in intensity to the effect of
Pelle
upon Joe and David. The books which Doc Chisholm recommended were what he called “the mordant novels.” He said, “Mordant novels are those which cut away all pretense, not within their own character, mind yew, but in the inner being of the person who reads. Mordant novels are often ugly novels. There is sand and gristle in them, and Ah can’t name four that are well written.” He directed his students to
Vanity Fair
,
Moby Dick
,
Casuals of the Sea
, and
Oblomov
. He especially recommended
The Old Wives’ Tale
. “There isn’t much Ah’d like to gamble on,” he said, “but Ah would gamble that a thousand years from now this book is goin’ to be held up as the model of its age. Ah commend it to yew wid great warmth!” Three students read it and said they didn’t catch the greatness. He was pleased with their honesty, for he made it clear that he thought it one of the great books.

“Ah doan’ expect yew to see in a book what Ah see in it,” he said. “But Ah think our nation is goin’ to be the battleground for the mighty struggle between the cities and the countryside. It’s a mighty admission for me to say that. Ah was brought up on ranches where the eye could look beyond the horizon itse’f. Then in Europe Ah saw the mean cities, and right yere in America, too, and Ah was thoroughly repelled by them. But Ah got to admit that the future lies wid the cities.” He paused and looked out the window.

“Yew may ask why it is, then, that Ah’ve dedicated my intellectual life, as it were, to range songs. Well, a man doan’ have to dedicate his life to what he knows is true. Ah know the world rides wid the cities, but Ah choose to ignore that fact. Ah choose to say to hell wid the cities, and Ah cast my lot wid the open land.” He grinned at his students and added, “A fool says in his heart, ’If Ah want to do a thing, then that’s the right thing to do,’ and a truly great man says, ‘No matter what Ah want to do, Ah’m goin’ to do what Ah know to be right.’ But most of us, yew and me alike, is neither fools nor great men, and so we say, ‘Ah know what is right, and Ah praise those who follow that, but in my weakness Ah must pursue another course.’ ”

From that day on the night songs of Doc Chisholm had an effect on David—and on many of his friends—more powerful than the music of Beethoven. They became the deep, penetrating songs of a free man, imprisoned within his own longings and follies, a man of conflict and emotional
disturbance. When Chisholm sang, David could hear the hammer of men across a prairie, or the whimpering of a coyote when night had fallen. The round-faced Texan became a symbol of the splendid confusion in which all men live, the good and the bad alike. They knew where the future of the world lay, but they lusted after another road.

When the time came to write a term paper David launched into a sententious essay on “Social Conflicts in Five Modern Novelists.” But he could not deceive himself as to the emptiness of his writing. One night in the observatory he found courage to tear up the pompous paper and to start again. He thought of Doc Chisholm singing and vowed: “I have an immortal mind! It was operating before I got it and it’ll go on after I’m dead. I’ll tell that damned Texan exactly what I think!”

For some reason he was furious at Doc Chisholm, and he worked for five days on a carefully worded essay. “The Earth,” he called it. In glowing terms he spoke of the novels which had come close to expressing and explaining the earth as he had loved it in Bucks County. He wrote of Hardy, Rolvaag, Reymont, Mrs. Gaskell, Turgenev, Chaucer, and Balzac. He culled, sometimes from memory, illuminating passages which came close to the thoughts of a boy upon a farm, the smells, the sound of animals at dawn, the richness of milk pouring from a clean can. He built a solid structure of impassioned reasoning to prove that no matter what happened in the cities, men would always be forced back to the earth for spiritual as well as physical sustenance.

David wrote with fervor, but when he studied his work he found it much too florid. Again he threw away most of it and sat quietly in the dark observatory trying to imagine what he really did think. It was the first time in his life he ever cut away all the sham of words and acquired education and pretty moral phrases. What, in the presence of his naked self, did he believe?

And as he sat there he thought of Eustacia Vye watching on the moors, and he could see her and the Reddleman more clearly than he could see the dim distant wall of the observatory, and it came to him that what he was more interested in than any other thing were the passions of men upon earth. He started to write again and quoted a long passage from
Oblomov
, and this time—at last—he wrote freely, saying almost exactly what was in his mind.

He had to write in longhand, for Joe Vaux was banging
away on the typewriter. Joe called his paper “Foreshadows of the Great Decline.” He based it mostly upon
Pelle
, but he did not refer very often to the novel. If Doc Chisholm wanted the picture of a mind torn apart by a book, Joe Vaux would give him just that! The second volume of
Pelle
had arrived from Boston, and as soon as he had finished it, Joe handed it breathlessly to David. “Don’t write your paper till you’ve read it!” he implored, but David would not take the book.

“It’s too long,” he said. Joe smiled at him knowingly and never again mentioned the great novel. He understood that it cut much too close to David’s inner thoughts.

Instead, David read
Oblomov
again. He found the brooding Russian novel much to his liking. He had it with him when he went to type his paper at Dr. Tschilczynski’s. When the mathematician saw the book he grabbed it unceremoniously and started to read stray passages. Tears came into his eyes. “My Ongle Peter!” he chuckled. “Goncharov he could have sued. Oblomov is my ongle!” He burst into a florid account of his worthless uncle, who sat by the fire and read English novels. Uncle Peter was very fond of Walpole—that is, the elder Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Warm tears of memory trickled down Tschilczynski’s scarred cheeks. “Ongle Peter and my father and especially my sister Elizabeth’s husband. They were no good! But they were lovely people. My father destroyed a business … How you say it? Sixty thousand dollars a year profit. My father and Ongle Peter ran it down to ten thousand a year, gross. He survived the revolution because everyone knew he wasn’t a businessman. He used to write to me in Paris, ‘They have ruined me!’ ” He patted the book affectionately, as if it were indeed his Uncle Peter, and handed it back to David.

When Doc Chisholm reported on the term papers there was an extra silence. He said, in a very low voice, blowing his red nose on a dirty handkerchief, “Yew have made some progress. Ah had sublime faith that yew would. Some of these yere papers are mighty creditable.” He returned each with a comment. Vaux’s was “stirring.” David’s was “disorganized and essentially disappointing.” David gritted his teeth and refused to listen to the rest of the comments, but when he got his paper he saw scratched on it an untidy A—.

At the end of class the fat Texan asked David to remain for a moment. “Yew doin’ anithin’?” he asked. David winced and thought of Science II. It was a dismal class.

“I’m free,” he said, glad of any excuse to cut the dreadful monotony of science as taught at Dedham.

“Ah’ve got a bottle of beer in my ice chest,” the professor said. “Why don’t we discuss that bottle and yore paper at the same time?” He led David to the bootleg beer and mused, “Yore fund of knowledge is both refreshin’ and superior. But yew seem to have no standards of judgment. And yew have no idea at all about paragraphin’.”

The Texan guzzled his beer and wiped his red face. “Yew seem unwillin’ to come right out and say somethin’ is either good or bad. Like an enormous sponge, suckin’ things up. Yew got no character to yore thought.” He insulted David for some minutes and then asked, “Doan’ yew ever fight back?”

“I’m trying to get a lot of things straightened out all at once,” David replied.

“Good!” Chisholm cried. “That’s fine! But, son, yew been followin’ the wrong track. Ah truly think yore country and mine is headin’ for leadership of the known world! There is no glory on earth that is beyond us. But we got to have a knowledge worthy of that leadership. We got to rely upon strong young men like yew to know somethin’.”

“I study,” David contested.

“But yew know nothin’ about the spirit of man! Yore papers sound as if books were only paper and some ink and some words. But books are the spirit of man! I grant yew, sometimes, they’re purty, like yew said in yore paper, but …” He fumbled for words and put his beer bottle down. “David,” he said, “the spirit of man jes’ plain ain’t purty. Yew can call it magnificent or bewilderin’ or powerful to the point of despair. But it ain’t college-English purty. And yew ought to stop writin’ as if it was.”

When Chisholm left Dedham several other students besides David felt a regretful longing. The roly-poly, bald, red-faced Texan was remembered as a new kind of man. He had a mind that played honestly upon the broad experience of the world. He saw things pretty much as they were, and his vast learning in many fields never seduced him into an Oxford accent nor lured him to the apostasy of alien values. He spoke in a low voice, and many of his songs were vulgar. He spoke through his nose, and he wore sloppy clothes; but he was a free man.

Not even the unpleasant facts uncovered by the head of science after Doc Chisholm had left changed David’s opinion
of the Texan. On the very afternoon when the scandal broke David tossed a book through the observatory window and muttered, “To hell with them all! I’d like to be Doc Chisholm.” That was when he decided not to be a mathematician. “I’ll study people!” he pledged. “People, just as they are.” And that was the beginning of his education.

Yet at the very moment when David was most sincerely dedicating himself to the understanding of what was best in American life, he was involving himself more deeply with Mona Meigs. They had reached the point at which she called him at the college to tell him when Klementi would be out of town. Then David would hurry into the city.

For sentimental reasons they met in mid-town and went to the vaudeville at the Earle. Mona carried on a kind of machine-gun comment on the acts: “Look at her legs! She’ll get nowhere. You watch Milton Berle, the way he sort of comes in on the up-beat when you’re already beginning to chuckle. That’s timing, Dave.”

Then, at the apartment, she would revel in the security of locked doors and Klim’s absence. She would skip about the room and cry, “It’s wonderful to have a place all to yourself.”

On the day Doc Chisholm left Dedham David watched Mona dance about the room, her arms high above her head. Overcome with desire for her, he caught her and carried her into Klim’s bedroom. She laughed and kicked vigorously as he tried to take off her stockings. “Nothing to worry about tonight!” she cried. “Make as much noise as you want!” She beat him with pillows, laughed and squealed like a little girl. Again David was impressed by the fact that for Mona sex was nothing but a violent, super-urgent release. She was like the young animals he had seen on the poorhouse farm. When the great urge was upon them neither fences nor barns could restrain them, and when the act was completed they stood in shadows, lowing softly. There was something wild and glorious in those animals, and much of that primitive grandeur Mona exhibited that night when she returned from the shower and sat with a towel about her shoulders, fixing her hair. She took infinite pains with each wastrel lock at the back of her neck.