Fires of Spring, The by Michener James A

Author:Michener, James A. [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Historical Research, Novel
ISBN: 9780804151382
Publisher: Dial Press / Random House LLC
Published: 1949-01-15T03:00:00+00:00

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

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