Conflict (Prouty)/Book 1/Chapter 6
Sheilah was glad that her note to Felix had actually been written before she had met Nevin. She didn't approve of girls who slipped out of an engagement already made, in order to accept a more attractive one. She could have explained to any ordinary boy, with whom she had hac an ordinary engagement like skating, about the dance, of course, and he would have understood and let her off. But Felix wasn't ordinary. The engagement wasn't ordinary.
She was glad she wouldn't be anywhere around when he received her note. He would go off somewhere alone with it, she supposed, and read it over and over again. And next Saturday, when she was having a marvelous time with Nevin Baldwin and all Nevin's marvelous friends at his fashionable school, Felix would be skating all alone somewhere on the dark river, still hurt and wondering. Oh, dear! She hated to hurt people—and animals—dumb, silent creatures. Well, she mustn't sentimentalize. It was only by chance that she would be having a marvelous time while Felix was suffering.
She would deliver the note, before Opening Exercises if there was time. There was time! Just barely. Already the last bell had begun to ring when Sheilah lifted the cover of Felix Nawn's desk in his study-room on the third floor, and laid the note in plain view, underneath an ink-eraser on his pencil-rack.
But Felix never got that note. There seemed to be a sort of conspiracy working against Sheilah's brave efforts to break off her relations with him. He didn't go to his study-room after Opening Exercises, as was his custom. It was Monday, and on Mondays he went directly to the manual-training building. He didn't go to his study-room even before recess. That was because of the tragedy that took place during the Third Period. He was too stunned to go anywhere then. He just sat where they left him.
The tragedy would never have taken place if Miss Bigelow, one of the Latin teachers, hadn't tripped on a piece of loose rubber on the stairs, and sprained her ankle. Felix was one of the pupils in the class to which she had been hurrying when she fell. Fifteen minutes later it was announced to the waiting class, eagerly hoping for release, that it would join Division A in Latin this morning in Room 12 on the floor below. Miss Marks would conduct the recitation of the combined divisions. Sheilah was in Division A. Felix had never been in any division in any subject with Sheilah. He had never recited in the same room with her.
As he entered Room 12 at the end of the line of the dozen or so pupils of his division, he shuffled into the brightness, keeping his eyes downcast, yet seeing Sheilah too, over there by the window in the sunlight. He looked for a back seat, but there was none empty. He was obliged to take a front one immediately opposite the platform. He slid down underneath the desk as far out of sight as he could get. But it didn't cover him up very well. Why hadn't he escaped when he had the chance out there in the hall, and suffer the consequences? Even when he had prepared his lesson in Latin—spent long laborious hours with dictionary and grammar, and under Miss Bigelow's kind and gentle protection, he was never anything but awkward and shy. But to-day he had not prepared his Latin at all. He had sat with the book before him for a whole hour last night—true—after he had left Sheilah, but his thoughts, his feelings. He had given it up finally, and shoved the book away. If it weren't for Sheilah, Felix wouldn't be taking Latin at all. It was so that she needn't be ashamed of him that he was trying so hard to go to college. He glanced at the door. Too late to escape now. Well, perhaps—possibly—there was just a chance that he might not be called.
But fate was not so kind. Miss Marks was very thorough and efficient, and very different from Miss Bigelow. She never felt kindness for dullness, nor protection for failure. She considered it her duty to expose unprepared lessons, mistakes, and stupidity whenever she had the opportunity.
As soon as the pupils in the visiting division were settled, Miss Marks told them to take places at the blackboard and copy their prepared home-work (twelve sentences, she had been informed, on such and such a page), while she, in the meanwhile, continued with the recitation with her own division. Later the combined divisions would correct the copied sentences.
Felix hadn't a single sentence to copy! It was out of the question for him to attempt impromptu work in Latin composition. He stood in hopeless dejection before the great black, blank, space before him, chalk in one hand, book in the other, hot all over, painfully conscious of the rapid, efficient scratching going on on either side of him, painfully conscious of the disgrace about to befall him when the blank space before him was discovered with his name signed to it. Perhaps it would be well to tell Miss Marks that he was unprepared. He turned to do so. He tried to do so. But she wasn't looking at him. No one was looking at him.
It was when Felix realized that no one was looking at him that he saw his way out. Pamela Hyde was standing on one side of Felix. She had just finished her first sentence. Pamela stood at the head of her division in Latin. Why, Sheilah needn't see him fail after all!
Fifteen minutes later when Pamela Hyde took her seat she laid a piece of folded paper on Miss —Marks's desk.
'Read it later,' she said in a low tone, holding her head very high, her outraged sense of right making her press her thin lips together tightly. Pamela was a plain girl, with a high, shining forehead with pimples on it.
Miss Marks read Pamela's note while Cicero continued to declaim from a rear seat. 'I made my mistakes on purpose. Pamela Hyde,' it said.
Cautiously, Cicero still declaiming, Miss Marks's eyes traveled to Pamela's mistakes. And to the mistakes beside Pamela's!
Afterwards a swift glance of complete comprehension passed between Miss Marks and Pamela Hyde. They were two of a kind.
Miss Marks waited till near the end of the period before executing Felix. It was her custom to correct written work on the board with a piece of chalk, underlining the mistakes with little sharp digs at the board, accompanied by monosyllabic exclamations, such as 'Mood! Tense! Careless! Case! Vocabulary! Inexcusable!' spitting out the single words explosively as if they were expletives, while the class watched and listened. Felix, his eyes upon the clock, had begun to think that his sentences might escape correction entirely, when Miss Marks skipped several intervening exercises on the board and approached Pamela Hyde's in the corner.
'One of our best students in Latin in the high-school,' she remarked, and proceeded to amaze the class with the best student's fantastic exhibition. With the exception of Pamela's first sentence there were scarcely three words in succession that escaped the chalk. Pamela's work fairly bristled with mistakes—absurd, ridiculous mistakes. And once an entirely different sentence from another exercise.
Every pupil in the room stared bewildered. What had happened to Pamela Hyde? She couldn't be playing a practical joke on Miss Marks, could she? No. Not Pamela. She wasn't the kind of girl to play practical jokes on anybody in authority. What was her motive? Felix knew before Miss Marks had reached Pamela's third sentence.
Three minutes later and the flaying chalk was stabbing at his sentences, underlining, with rapid accuracy, absurdity after absurdity identical to Pamela Hyde's. Blindly, trustfully, Felix had followed Pamela, only occasionally changing an ending in a weak attempt at concealment. Even the sentence from another exercise appeared in his copy! The class became tensely quiet as the truth of the situation slowly dawned. There was not even the shifting of a hand or foot when Miss Marks launched forth into an impassioned speech of contempt and condemnation. Miss Marks believed in public ignominy for so despicable a creature as a cheat. 'Robber, liar, coward—all in one,' she said (she had spoken on the subject before), 'and poor sportsman, too!'
The merciful bell put an end to Felix's torture at last. Awed and shocked, the pupils of the two divisions gathered their books together and silently trooped out of the room, looking askance at Felix Nawn as they passed him, cowering in his seat, his big body slid down as far as it would go beneath the inadequate shelter of the desk, his shoulders crumpled forward, his head sunk between them—a shapeless mound of something alive, trying to hide itself. Like a dog whipped, thought Miss Marks. Like a Stephen stoned, thought Sheilah.
It was the recess-hour. All the classrooms were emptying into the halls. Soon there were little eager whispering groups everywhere. They gathered in close, intimate circles and oh'd and ah'd in undertones. The biggest circle of all to-day gathered around Pamela Hyde. She became red-cheeked with the excitement of her sudden importance. Everybody seemed to think her very clever to have caught a cheat like that.
Sheilah didn't think her clever. Sheilah thought her mean and contemptible. Why, Pamela Hyde had cheated too! She had cheated Felix—a fellow-student, a comrade, and that was worse sportsmanship than cheating teachers, who were often enemies. She would tell her so, sometime, too! Not now. Now she would go to Felix. He was alone in there—despised and scorned, and stared at. She was something special to Felix. He was something special to her. They both knew it. Only a girl as mean and contemptible as Pamela Hyde would desert Felix now.
Sheilah crossed the hall from the classroom opposite, where she had been hovering, and reëntered Room 12. She closed the door behind her, standing for a moment with her back against it, gazing at Felix.
He didn't look up, but he was conscious of the sudden relief of the closed door, and muffling of the buzz and chatter. He was conscious, too, a moment later of the soft, swishing sound of a felt eraser rubbing against a blackboard. Sheilah was erasing Felix's exercise and Pamela Hyde's beside it, with long, strong sweeps of her arm.
Afterwards she turned, covered with the white dust of Felix's disgrace, and looked at him. He was still sitting there just as Miss Marks had left him, shoulders bent, head drooping. She went over to him.
'Oh, why did you do it, Felix?'
'For you,' he murmured; 'I didn't want to fail before you.'
She left him almost immediately, carefully reclosing the door behind her, and hurried up the main stairway, to the third floor. She was breathless when she reached Felix's study-room. There was a group of boys in one corner of the room, eating sandwiches and apples, but she didn't hesitate. She went immediately to Felix's desk and raised the cover. No! He hadn't read her note yet! There it was, untouched, still underneath the ink-eraser on the pencil-rack, just as she had left it in the early morning.
She opened it. Why, of course Felix mustn't read it now! He would think she had written it because he had cheated, and he had cheated for her! Quickly she tore off the top portion of the paper, and crumpled it up. Then in the blank space left, she wrote another note to Felix: 'Dear Felix, don't forget our engagement next Saturday. I will be there at four o'clock. Sheilah.' Refolded it, and laid it back again underneath the ink-eraser.