The Fires of Spring Read Free Page A

spring in it. But he felt good, standing there with Tom. He took a deep breath. “Say!” he said. “Seems to me you can feel it. Spring’s comin’.”
    When Tom left, David lay straight and quiet for a long time. There were so many wonderful things to think about. Hector in Troy. The rotten Greeks. Why you could never get a 100. The strange sobbing of Gracey Kelley. How could a boy’s brain ever stop hammering and let him get some sleep?
    There was a gentle knocking at his door. Shivering in the cold night air, he jumped out of bed and admitted Old Daniel. The little old man didn’t have his teeth in. He was in a long nightshirt, and he carried a candle.
    “I brought you something, David,” he whispered. He closed the door and cautiously lit the candle. “Sometimes you may want to read,” he said.
    “I don’t have any books,” David explained.
    “I brought you one,” said the shadowy old man. He handed a well-worn book to David and then stood away from the bed.
    David opened the front cover of
Oliver Twist
, and there were the magic words: THIS BOOK BELONGS TO DAVID HARPER .
    “Oh, Daniel!” he cried, running his fingers along the careful printing. The old man fixed the candle above David’s head and started to leave. “Is the candle mine, too?” the boy asked.
    “Of course.” Daniel laughed. “How else could you read in bed?”
    David wanted to laugh, too, but tears filled his eyes. There were many things he did not understand about the poorhouse. Twice he had found old men hanging by their necks in the barn, but he had not understood the passionate tragedy that put them there. He had watched an old woman go crazy, one spring, when she thought that the fields of the poorhouse farm were her garden in Doylestown. She had tried to till them all. There were other things, too, that he did not understand, but he did know the meaning of a candle that cost a penny.
    In his eleven years he had spent—of his very own money—some twenty-eight pennies. They had not come from his aunt, of course, but from the old men on the hall, and every one of the twenty-eight had represented a real and terrible proportion of the wealth of the man who had given it. Presentsin a poorhouse were not like presents at Christmas, when the kind people of Doylestown brought good things for everybody, and never seemed to miss them in the giving. No! When a poorhouse man gave even so much as a candle that cost a penny, he gave part of his decency, part of the miserable hoard that kept him from being a complete and utter pauper.
    The candle flickered and Old Daniel’s white silken hair cast strange shadows on the wall. David rubbed his eyes and began to read, but as he did so the frail old man cried, “It’s so wonderful!”
    “What is?” David asked.
    “Reading your first book.”
    “Why?” David asked, pulling the smelly bedclothes about him.
    “It’s so wonderful to begin reading! And so terrible. Do you know what you’re doing? Learning leads only to unhappiness, David. When you start to learn and think and feel … Well, you step blindly into a fight you can never win.”
    “I don’t want to fight,” David said.
    “Your report card,” the old man said as he opened the door. “You must make it better next month.”
    But David scarcely heard him. He was already lying on his stomach, starting that magic journey from which no boy returns the same. He was reading, for the first time in his life, a book which was his own.
    It was not because of blindness or insensitivity that David loved his life in the poorhouse. During three seasons of the year, life in the long gray buildings was delightful. The men, no longer having money or position to protect, were kind and friendly.
    And there was surprisingly little recrimination—that is, during three seasons of the year. Of course, men who had lost their farms were inclined to blame Mr. Crouthamel, but such gossip against rich men was inevitable. It was the other kind of