
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 21, 1936.
“To-day,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the first day of Spring.”
“I remember one time,” I retorted, “that it snowed on May 17th.”
“In the Spring,” quoted Jimmie, emotionally, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”
“But older men,” I said in prose, “think of gardening. Or fishing. Or golf.”
“To us who live in cities and towns,” said Jim, “Spring has really a very small meaning. It means, as you say, golf or planting a few seeds in a pathetic grubby little backyard. Spring wakes a feeble emotion in us city people. We are like people with no ear or sense of music sitting politely through a concert by a great symphony orchestra.”
“I don’t think city people are quite so soulless as you make out,” I objected.
“They are not soulless,” agreed Jim. “They are just underprivileged.”
“We city people,” I declared stoutly, “have finer and subtler sensibilities. We may not have the opportunities to observe the Spring, but we appreciate it more.”
“I wonder,” said Jim.
“Think of us anglers,” I cried. “How we are suffering, right now, counting the weeks to May the first.”
“May,” scoffed Jim. “By May the Spring is over.”
“Over!” I exclaimed.
“Have you no conception,” begged Jim, “of what Spring means to millions of your fellow Canadians? May, if you please! Why, by May the summer has come. All the lambs have been born. Most of the calves have arrived and the colts are on the pastures. The plows are long ago worn bright and dull. The seeds are springing. By what you call Spring, my poor fellow, summer lies o’er all the pleasant land.”
“Tut, tut, Jimmie,” I protested.
“To-day is the first day of Spring,” declared Jim. “And to-day, even though a blizzard should rage, a million farmers are at their doors sniffing the tide of life. The ditches are loud with a singing sound of water. The bright sun grasps the earth in its mighty hands and caresses and hugs it. The earth, the sweet earth, lifts its breast upward, and a fragrance you and I are unable to sense, much less know, rises from it in an incense ancient and eternal.”
“A kind of sour, mouldy smell?” I agreed.
“Haw, haw,” scorned Jimmie. “Sour and mouldy to your poor, fume-ruined city nose. But what makes the birds sing along the fence posts, this very day, is that sweet incense of resurrection. The south walls of the barns are bright with the sun, and the warmth flows inward and all the cattle are bawling to be out. The horses kick their stalls and cry. The mother sheep are hoarse with bleating.”
“I see it,” I confessed.
“In the barn the farmer,” said Jimmie. rapidly, “is laboring with his implements. mending harness, tightening up the bolts of share and counter. In the bright kitchen the wife is scouring pails and scalding out the separator.”
A Kind of Dizziness
“But there’s weather ahead,” I interjected.
“Yet in the shelter of the fences,” said Jim, “the grass is green, and the buds on the dogwood scrub are swollen, dark and sticky. In the woodlot, far at the back, there is a sense of unseen excitement, the branches wave sadly no more, like they do in winter wind, but like young ladies taking setting up exercises, gaily, eagerly, the branches wave…”
“Crows, like black rags, blowing on the wind,” I contributed.
“The lady in the kitchen,” said Jim, “busy with the pails, sees something touch her eye, like a little burning thing, out of the corner of her eyes she sees it. She stops, the pail held motionless, and looks out the window. stealthily, her eyes creeping, into the orchard. And there, a bluebird!”
“Aw, Jim,” I complained.
“So the lady walks over, slightly weak in the legs, and sits down in the rocking-chair with the old cushion on it,” sang Jimmie, “and starts gently to rock, and the smile on her face, the smile of remembering all her Springs and all the babies she has rocked in this same chair, and all the bluebirds and the sound of calves bawling and sheep calling and water in the eaves and men kicking mud from their boots at her door – the smile on her face flows right out that window, a prayer, a gift, a part of the Spring.”
I said nothing.
“Do you ever see that?” demanded Jim, sharply.
“I’m sorry,” I confessed.
“Then,” said Jim, “don’t ever try to pretend you know anything about the Spring just because you fish or play golf or stick seeds from ten-cent packets into your sour city dust plots.”
“I feel something though,” I said weakly. “I feel a kind of dizziness. Or a limpness. Couldn’t that be the Spring?”
“No doubt,” granted Jim, “a certain decayed remnant of the feeling of Spring still lingers in city and town men’s minds. But it is only a shabby tatter. A sort of thing like you see in a poodle dog when it turns round three or four times before lying down in its bed. Spreading a bed in imaginary grass, a faint memory out of the forgotten ages.”
“I like to read poetry in the Spring,” I declared.
“A sort of sulphur and molasses1,” decreed Jim. “A Spring tonic.”
“I get a kind of religious feeling,” I insisted, “when I hear the first robin, at sundown, on a rooftop.”
“You would be practically dead if you didn’t feel that,” pronounced Jimmie. At certain times of the year Jimmie gets a terrible homesickness for the country where he was born and raised. Right now is one of those times. Another is when the great winds of autumn blow, with immense sounds, and the trees wheel and lash in the gales that do not rest at night, but cough and thunder in our chimneys. At such a time, Jimmie is restless and fey, and he buys things at stores and carries them home, hams and bags of potatoes, whole sacks of biscuits for his dogs, as if he were storing up against some strange and hopeless winter. But in the Spring he can’t work; he stands hours at his high windows, far in the tipmost top of The Star building, staring with face thrust forward at the dim fringes of the great gray city spread like an old carpet beneath. There he stood, trying to see the fields, the dark meadows, the green veils of winter wheat, beyond the vasty doormat…
“We could go for a walk?” I suggested.
The wind of Spring was blowing.
“We could go home,” muttered Jim, “and spend the afternoon putting away our winter coats in large pillow slips and stuff our goloshes and scarves and wool-lined gloves into boxes, for there is no use trying to work with that wind blowing.”
Which seemed to me a curious thought, since we were tight and sound behind strong windows, where no wind can even moan.
Blowing in a Window
But down we went and walked to the car park, and men clutched their worn winter hats and girls leaned back against the gale, one arm stretched down to control their festive skirts. Dust and old papers. and all manner of unmentionable and unthinkable things blew in the breeze off the pavement, and we puckered our eyes and breathed carefully through our noses.
Out along the Lake Shore we drove, seeing the lake, all yellow with the silt of dying rivers, heaving and bucking in a kind of joy and slight anger.
Up through High Park we turned, merely to see the trees dancing, to see the brown hillsides facing the sun, to look, with a quiet triumph, at the cowering islands of fouled snow in the shadows.
Re-entering the residential streets again, we were in time to behold a comedy. A young man, just as we were about to pass him, had his fedora blown off. I sailed up against the wall of a large apartment house. It bumped along the wall, falling slightly, and came to an open window. It fell unsteadily on to the window sill and, to our joy and excitement, hovered there a moment and then, like a homing creature, right inside the window.
“Ho, ho,” laughed Jim and I, slowing the car and looking back at the young man. He was standing speechless and amazed, staring up at the window.
“Wait,” I cried; “let’s see what happens.”
But nothing happened. The young man stood awkwardly staring up at the window, but nobody came. He looked abashed all around him, as if for witness to the incredible incident and perhaps for suggestions. Then he started slowly to walk on.
“The silly fellow,” I said. “Back up, Jim. He isn’t even going to inquire.”
We backed, and encountered the young chap, all flushed looking, after he was well past the apartment house entrance.
“That was a funny one,” I hailed him. “Never saw that before.”
“It sure was funny,” agreed the young man shyly. He was one of those slow-speaking shy youths, with a strained expression in their eyes when you talk to them.
“Well,” I said, “aren’t you going to go in and ask for your hat?”
“No,” he said.
“A hat costs five bucks,” I pointed out. “And if I saw right it was a new hat.”
“Yes, just got it three weeks ago,” admitted the young man, anxiously beginning to move on.
“But hold on,” I laughed. “Don’t be shy. Look here, all you have to do is go in and ask for the janitor and point out to him which window.”
“I always leave my hat go,” said the young man, “when it blows in any window.”
He meant it. He was one of those drawling young men almost paralyzed with bashfulness. His face was apoplectic. His eyes were suddenly bloodshot with shyness. He tried to withdraw from the magnetic fastening of my gaze.
“My dear boy,” I said, opening the car door and stepping out, “don’t be absurd. If you lose your hat you go and get it. Come. I’ll go in with you. We’ll call the janitor.”
“This,” said Jim, getting out of the car, “too, ought to be good.”
So we entered the apartment house entrance and on the list of tenants I found the bell of the janitor and rang it summarily. We waited, smiling. The young man was now a fixed purple in color and he was perspiring in large loose beads. Speech had entirely deserted him. He had the expression in his eyes you see in the eyes of a young bull which has a ring in its nose for the first time and is being led about by it.
“I wouldn’t bother,” he said in a weak voice.
“You Home Wreckers!”
The janitor did not answer. I rang again. I stepped down a flight of marble steps and looked along a corridor. I called. I whistled.
“Oh, janitor,” I yodelled.
“Leave it go,” said the young man.
“Not at all,” I assured him heartily. And stepping out the entrance for a moment I fixed in my mind the location of the open window through which the hat had blown, and then walked up one flight, beckoning Jim and the young gentleman to follow me.
“I spotted the apartment,” said I. “It’s either the third or the fourth apartment along I should say.”
“Leave it go,” repeated the young man.
Apartments are so hushed. At least from the corridors they are hushed. A faint radio. A muffled step.
But from the third apartment, as we came abreast there rang loud and challenging voices. A man’s voice. And a lady’s voice.
“H’m,” said I, “a little Spring song going on in here.”
“Leave it go,” pleaded the young man, but Jimmie was holding his arm in a friendly and encouraging embrace.
I rapped smartly. And smartly a man appeared.
An angry-faced, glare-eyed man whose teeth were bared in the very midst of a snarl.
“Pardon me,” I said, “but is there a hat…”
“Hat,” shouted the angry man, leaning out the door and seeing the shy young man with Jimmie. “So you came back for your hat, huh?”
“This young man’s hat,” I began, pleasantly.
The gentleman in the doorway squared himself off and began making small circles with his clenched fists in front of his chest.
“You come back for your hat,” he yelled, “but you bring your gang with you.”
“My dear sir,” I said soothingly, “can a gentleman help it if the Spring breezes-“
“Ah,” screamed the gentleman, crouching, and spitting on his hands.
A woman’s voice from within said reproachfully:
“Joe-werge! I was resting. I didn’t even see the hat.”
“Hah.” said the gentleman. “I come home unexpectedly. I find your hat square in the middle of the chesterfield. So what?”
“Sir,” I said calmly, “his hat blew in. This is the first day of Spring. The equinoctial gales. The wind.”
“What a story, what a story,” the poor gentleman sobbed, for now, in addition to crouching down and circling his fists menacingly in the doorway, he had suddenly been stricken with the injustice of it all. “I know my own strength, or I’d beat the whey out of all three of you. You sneaks. You home wreckers.”
“Leave it go,” said the shy young man, backing away from Jimmie.
“May we have the hat?” I demanded firmly, but preparing to retreat.
With a final heartbreak, the gentleman wheeled, dashed furiously into the room, thudded furiously back and, making a drop kick, he booted the hat savagely into the corridor and slammed the door. I picked the hat up, bulged it back to shape, put a nice tidy dent in it and following the youth, handed it him.
“What a mess,” strangled this young man, as I went down the stairs beside him.
“At least, I got your hat,” I pointed out, a little huffed at his ingratitude.
“Imagine a stranger’s hat blowing into a happy home,” moaned the young fellow.
“It is the Spring.” I said. “March gales.”
The young man jammed his hat on and fled down the street.
“In the Spring,” quoted Jimmie, as we got into the car, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”
“And,” I added, “suspicion.”

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on April 1, 1944 as “Spring Song“.
- Old wives’ tales indicated that sulphur & molasses, drank by children in early spring, provided a needed thickening of the blood, thinned down by winter. ↩︎