Conflict (Prouty)/Book 1/Chapter 3
'Look at that girl over there,' whispered a man seated a few rows behind the Millers to a young woman whose hymn-book he was sharing.
The young woman raised her eyes.
'I see her.'
'Lovely, isn't she?' the man replied.
The woman nodded. Roger was always seeing lovely things everywhere. Promiscuously. She would have shrugged if she hadn't been in church.
'With that light on her, I mean, and that expression,' he explained.
Amusing Roger! It was only little Sheilah Miller standing in a shaft of sunlight that the sexton had been careless enough to allow inside the church to disturb the parishioners as it strayed from pew to pew, staring up into it and singing.
'Who was that girl?' Roger persisted as he walked home from church that noon with Cicely Morgan.
'Why, Roger, she's only a child. Still in the high-school.' And she did shrug now. 'You wouldn't be interested, my dear.'
Cicely was always quipping him like that lately. He could scarcely admire a portrait of a beautiful woman in an art gallery, but that she saw something humorous about it.
'I'm interested in everything that's lovely.'
'Oh, I'm aware of that,' replied Cicely; 'especially if it has any connection with the feminine sex,' she added with a laugh that had a little sharp edge of scorn to it.
'Nonsense. If the shaft of sunlight had picked out a young boy to make the one shining figure in the whole church, I'd have thought the effect just as extraordinary—that is, if he had looked up into it and begun to sing with the same amazing expression. Did you get the little girl's expression?'
'I get yours,' Cicely replied with a sidelong glance and another shrug.
Roger thought best to ignore the persistent gibing.
'She reminded me of some picture or other I've seen,' he went on. 'I can't quite place it. I've been trying. Must be some sort of religious picture, for as she stood there looking up, with that heavenly expression I could almost see a circle of light in the dust-motes just over her head.'
'Really you ought to have been a poet, Roger,' remarked Cicely with a forbearing sigh.
'Well, all poets don't write verses.'
'Or an artist. Then you could paint her.'
'Nor all artists paint pictures,' he added in the same vein.
Roger was a little tantalizing this morning.
They walked on in silence for half a block.
Then, 'What is the little high-school girl's name?' Roger inquired.
He was more than tantalizing! He was dull and lacking in perception. Wasn't he aware that she didn't want to talk about the little high-school girl now? Didn't he know that in ten minutes they would be at her front door, and that this was the only ten minutes that they would have alone before he left for his train? There was never any opportunity for conversation alone on Sunday once inside the heavy black-walnut doors of her father's house. Her father always monopolized Roger after dinner.—Roger knew it. This wasn't the first Sunday he had spent with her.
'Her name,' Cicely replied, 'is Miller.' Cicely's voice was flat and uninteresting.
'Miller? Miller what?'
'Miller is her last name, Roger,' patiently Cicely explained.
'And what is her first?'
Really he was incorrigible!
'Sheilah.'
'Sheilah Miller. Sheilah Miller.' He said it twice. 'That's pretty.'
'Is it? Of course! I might arrange a meeting, Roger.'
'Don't be absurd, Cicely.'
('No, don't. Don't. For heaven's sake!') Cicely said to herself. But against her will, against her wish, she heard her voice remarking scathingly, 'I don't admire cradle-snatching, Roger.' And Roger inquiring in that surprised, naïve way of his, 'Why, what's gotten into you, Cicely?'
What indeed had gotten into her? Evidently something that hadn't gotten into him! That was what hurt so. That was what made her so unreasonable. Oh, she mustn't spoil things. The precious moments were sifting away. She made a tremendous effort.
'Oh, nothing—nothing,' she assured him lightly. 'Let's talk of something else. Isn't the fresh snow lovely? See it on all the little branches.'
And then Roger smashed straight into her heroic effort, head on, shattering it completely.
'I've got it!' he exclaimed exultingly. 'I know now!'
'Know what, Roger?'
'What she reminds me of—the little high-school girl, I mean. It's a window—a stained-glass window in a church I sometimes stray into. A memorial window to a young girl. Shows her kneeling, looking up a flight of steps, towards heaven, I suppose, for there is an angel or two at the top of the steps, waiting for her. And a bright light streaming down on her. The look of—sort of relief on her face, was just like.
'Roger, please,' Cicely broke in. 'Spare me. I beg of you. I'm not interested. Really I'm not. Your flights of enthusiasm and young ragings are incomprehensible to me at times. And so are you. So are you!'
There! Now she'd broken it, the delicate thing she wanted more than anything in the world not to break. Roger was staring at her open-eyed, and exclaiming, 'Why, Cicely! Why, Cicely!' And seeing her flushed cheeks and smouldering eyes; and hearing her voice flash scorn and disapproval at him.
Ten minutes later Cicely in the haven of her own room was saying, too, as she covered her face with her hands, 'Why, Cicely! Why, Cicely!' The queenly, the immune Cicely Morgan brought down to the dust like this!
Roger Dallinger was very thoughtful as he went back to Boston on the four-o'clock train that afternoon. He hadn't intended to go back on the four-o'clock train. He had had a distinctly different plan in his mind when he had started out in the morning—a plan slowly and carefully formed during the last fourteen days since last he had seen Cicely Morgan.
If the day proved fine (and it did), he had decided to stay over till the evening train this week, if Cicely would let him (and he had an idea she would), hire one of those old-fashioned bob-sleigh affairs, and escape with her after dinner to the white, quiet hills behind Wallbridge. And let happen what might! But he couldn't suggest such a plan to her after her eyes had flashed at him like that, just before dinner, and thereafter carefully and —persistently avoided meeting his. Well, perhaps it was just as well.
Queer about Cicely. It seemed to annoy her lately if he saw too much beauty in anything. And he did like beauty—even little unimportant, pinpricking bits of beauty, that interrupted you right in the midst of something serious, possibly, and made you exclaim about it. There was no one whose appreciation of beauty in art or music or literature was keener than Cicely Morgan's, but she seemed to think it unbecoming—'maudlin' was the word she used once—to enthuse over trivial things. He was sorry for that. He was very anxious to discover no serious differences of opinion or feeling between himself and Cicely Morgan.
The first time he had been aware of this queer twist in her was one day last April, when he had interrupted her, to admire a group of birch trees on the marshy edge of a river. The birch trees were just coming into leaf. Their branches shone white and bare through a haze of faint green.
'Aren't they exquisite?' he had exclaimed—'Like young girls in thin green gauze, wading.'
He thought it rather a pretty idea. But her reply had left him in no doubt as to her difference of opinion.
'You don't talk a bit like a lawyer. More like a lady-novelist,' she had retorted.
It had chilled him for a moment, but later he concluded that a little healthy intolerance of his nonsense would prove a good thing for him in the long run, and Cicely wasn't always intolerant of it, he observed. For instance, when later that same April day he had playfully likened her to a pansy—a big rich black pansy, with her soft, sooty-black eyes, and soft, sooty-black hair, and voice smooth as a velvet petal, she had flushed with pleasure, and hadn't said he talked like a lady-novelist.
That flush of pleasure had surprised Roger Dallinger. It had pleased him, too. He had supposed Cicely Morgan was as indifferent to his absurdities as the very flowers he likened her to. It had emboldened him to ask her if he might run up again to Wallbridge some Sunday and see her.
For six months now, Roger Dallinger had been running up to Wallbridge to see Cicely Morgan. As he sat staring out at the quiet, waiting hills, which all the week he had been picturing as a background to the most beautiful hour of his life, perhaps, it wasn't so much the immediate disappointment that the hills would wait in vain to-day that hurt him as the shocking possibility, that, instead of just barely having missed heaven, he may just barely have escaped a catastrophe.
Roger's route from the station to his room that night chanced to take him past the memorial window that had been the cause of Cicely's outburst. He had always seen the window from the inside before, with the daylight illuminating it. He couldn't have said definitely on what street it faced. But suddenly there it was before him! There was a service going on inside the church, and all its windows were glowing like soft dark jewels in antique settings.
He stopped and looked at the memorial window. Yes, to the life! The same light bright hair, the same flushed cheeks, lifted chin, and parted lips; and the same look of relief and joy blended in the wideapart eyes, as if the fear of dying had completely disappeared. Really lovely! No good as glass, perhaps, but charming nevertheless. Now why, why in heaven's name, shouldn't Cicely share his pleasure in a thing like that? Why, she was incomprehensible to him! Perhaps she wasn't the woman after all. Perhaps he wasn't the man.