Conflict (Prouty)/Book 1/Chapter 7

by Olive Higgins Prouty

Chapter VII

I

Sheilah stopped at Nevin Baldwin's on her way home from school. Nevin opened the door himself, so she couldn't leave the note of explanation she had written to him. She was sorry. It would have been easier.

'Hello, Sheilah. I saw you coming,' he exclaimed, eyes shining at her. 'I don't seem to remember having had a call from you before, though all the other girls have paid their respects, of course! Say, that scarf of yours is a peach.'

It was red. So were Sheilah's cheeks. It was really her cheeks Nevin wanted to remark upon.

'Has your mother gotten back from Boston yet?' Sheilah inquired.

'Nope, but dad's inside having lunch, if it's a chaperon you're thinking about. But I promise to behave. Come on in.'

'Well,' calmly Sheilah went on, impervious to Nevin's facetiousness, 'I just stopped to ask you to tell your mother please not to call up my mother. About next Saturday, I mean. Because——' She hesitated.

Nevin had been lolling nonchalantly against the casing of the door, but now he stood up straight, and his manner became as serious as it had been light and gay.

'What's the idea?'

'I can't go Saturday, after all.'

'What's the matter?'

'I have another engagement.'

'You didn't say anything about another engagement this morning.'

'I didn't actually have it this morning.'

'Oh, it's come up since!'

'No, it hasn't exactly come up since. I thought——You see——I——' She gave it up at last. 'Well, I can't go anyway, Nevin.'

'Oh, I get the idea. You don't have to hammer it in.'

He was holding himself straight and taut, shouldders squared, head high. Sheilah glanced at him. His eyes were flashing, but not with fun now.

'I'm ever so sorry. It was awfully good of you.'

He gave a little laugh and shrug.

'Oh, that's all right.'

'I hope you understand.'

'Perfectly. Better luck next time.'

But as Sheilah turned and left Nevin, she felt almost sure that there would never be a 'next time.'

She walked home slowly. The crisp sunlight of early morning had been drooping ever since recess—the clean-cut outline of the shadows on the snow growing blurred and faint. Disappearing entirely finally. There was a soft, mouldy-gray cloudiness over everything now. It was much warmer. It began to snow in the early evening. The snow turned into rain during the night. Sheilah, again lying awake, could hear it, pattering against her windowpane.

The next morning when she went to school, the firm white drifts of the morning before were shrunken, like an old person's skin over muscles that have lost their tone, and their soft silky surface had become coarse-grained and gray.

II

Mrs. Miller always remembered that it was during the January thaw that she became seriously concerned about Sheilah. That was several weeks before Sheilah's actual 'breakdown' (she always referred to it as Sheilah's 'breakdown'), so she hadn't been careless or unobservant. She remembered it was during the January thaw because the walking was so frightful on the morning when she went over to the high-school to talk to Mr. Bond, the principal, about Sheilah's work.

All the fall Sheilah hadn't been eating very well, but 'the books' said it was wiser to ignore the fluctuations of a growing girl's appetite than to centralize her attention on it by constant nagging. But when Mrs. Miller discovered Sheilah wasn't sleeping she decided it was time to act.

Mrs. Miller had gotten up one night to see if Sheilah was properly covered, and had found her propped up in bed with a book and paper and pencil.

'Why, my dear child, whatever are you doing?'

'Just algebra, mother.'

'At this hour! Sheilah, is your algebra bothering you?'

'No, not a bit,' Sheilah had replied calmly.

'And so you are working on it at two o'clock in the morning!'

'Yes,' smiled Sheilah.

At the earliest possible moment Mrs. Miller called up Mr. Bond and made an appointment. She would tell him that Sheilah must drop algebra. She had never wanted her to go to college, anyway. But Mr. Bond told Mrs. Miller that Sheilah was one of the best students in algebra in the high-school. They discussed her other work. She was doing well in everything. He had no complaint to make of Sheilah. So Mrs. Miller went to talk to John Sheldon finally.

III

Only a few of John Sheldon's patients 'consulted' him. Most of them, like Dora, just went to talk to him. There was no man in Wallbridge more in demand than John Sheldon. And no man more modest and self-effacing. Once he had overheard Charlotte, his wife, early in their married career, refer to him to an acquaintance as 'the doctor.' 'As if,' he had laughed at her, 'there was only one doctor in town.' So after that she usually said just John. All of his friends said just John too. Many of them felt for him a deep sense of gratitude for help he had given them through some ordeal or other in the past, but they seldom expressed it. He disliked praise for doing what was his job, he said, and at the least sign of an encomium, always laughed and changed the subject, launching quickly into the last funny story he had heard.

There were many 'specialists' now in Wallbridge, as everywhere else. But John Sheldon was 'a general man,' and insisted on calling himself such. He had heard Charlotte at a dinner-party tell a stranger once that her husband was a diagnostician. 'No such thing!' he had denied, 'just an old-fashioned family doc.' He was always belittling himself, and calling himself uncomplimentary names, if he had a chance.

He bore few of the signs of success. Unlike the specialists he could always be gotten at some hour during his elastic twenty-four. And he never seemed to be in a hurry, often spending an extra fifteen minutes or so with a patient to talk and swap stories, although it might mean no lunch.

There was a stuffed trout hanging on the rather dingy walls of his office. He had caught it twenty years ago. He had a passion for fishing. Some day he meant to go fishing again, when he could afford it. He had several expensive children to bring up, and one thing John Sheldon didn't know, was how to make money. The specialists, who came over from Boston, were always calling him in to relieve symptoms while they were considering causes. Often the symptoms under his treatment (though he insisted it was under Nature's) would disappear, and the cause would never be discovered at all. But still he couldn't bring himself to charge over five dollars a call, in spite of the specialists' five hundred.

Dora stared at the one stuffed trout while she waited for John to finish a conversation over the telephone dealing with the details of a baby's digestive activities. She had been waiting for five minutes. It must be a very stupid woman on the other end of the line. John Sheldon had to repeat everything he said about three times. But judging from the tone of his voice, he might have been chatting about books and plays with the woman at an afternoon tea-table. Charlotte often told him he didn't have a bit of a professional manner.

When finally he hung up the receiver (he had already nodded and smiled at Dora as she came in), he got up and went over to her, and shook hands.

'Hello, Dora,' he said. They'd known each other for years. 'Awfully nice to see you,' just as if her call was a pleasure to him. And he didn't say, 'What can I do for you?'

IV

'I've come to talk to you about Sheilah. We're worried about her,' said Dora.

John Sheldon sat down.

'Tell me about it,' he replied, and leaned back in his chair, and folded his hands. He didn't even twiddle a pencil.

'Well, she isn't eating and she isn't sleeping,' Dora went on, 'and she is losing weight. And I've caught her crying several times. When I ask her what is the matter she just says, "Nothing. Please leave me alone." So unlike her. We've always been the closest mother and daughter in the world. But lately I feel as if—well, almost as if she didn't want me around sometimes. I thought it might be her school work. Two nights ago I caught her doing algebra at two o'clock in the morning, but Mr. Bond says she's doing excellent work in algebra. Last night I heard her crying and when I tried to open her door it was locked! And she wouldn't unlock it. Why, I was frightened. I woke up Sidney and told him, but he thought I'd better let her alone. So I did. This morning when she came down to breakfast she ate practically nothing. She says food makes her feel sick. I read about a girl who had a grumbling appendix. It didn't bother her much. But she had the operation, and afterwards she was an entirely different creature. It changed her whole disposition. Sheilah has had stomach upsets occasionally lately. Possibly she has a grumbling appendix.'

John Sheldon didn't smile. He nodded, gravely attentive.

'Possibly. Why don't I drop in to-morrow sometime, and look her over? We'll soon find out.'

'Oh, I wish you would!'

Already Dora felt better about Sheilah. It was always like that after talking to John Sheldon.

V

Sheilah had never thought of John Sheldon as a human being. To her he was more like a clinical thermometer, something you referred to when you were sick, as a matter of habit. Or a surgical instrument, perhaps. Because he was so clean. He even smelled clean. Like a roll of sterilized gauze when you first open it. Particularly his hands were like a surgical instrument—firm as steel, smooth as polished nickel, and unhesitating. You could always trust John Sheldon's hands. They never drew back if you jerked, or slipped if you twinged.

It was because John Sheldon was so much like an instrument that you didn't mind telling him things about your body. But it had never occurred to Sheilah to talk to him about anything else. Until he came to examine her for appendicitis. And then suddenly he became quite different from an instrument. No instrument could have understood about the algebra.

John Sheldon was holding her hand in his firm, clinical grasp, taking her pulse, she supposed, when he asked her about the algebra, casually, in an offhand manner.

'Your mother tells me you're working on your algebra late at night. In bed.'

'Yes.'

'Bothering you a little, is it?'

'No, it isn't bothering me at all. I told mother it wasn't.'

'Then why work on it in the middle of the night?' he asked casually, his eyes on his investigating fingers.

'Because it doesn't bother me,' said Sheilah.

'Because it doesn't bother you,' he paused a moment. 'Oh, I see!' he exclaimed softly. 'To put yourself to sleep. Instead of counting sheep.'

She looked up to him gratefully.

'Yes,' she sighed. 'Instead of counting sheep.'

'Things loom up pretty big about two a.m., don't they, if there's something on your mind?'

'There's nothing on my mind.'

John Sheldon laid down Sheilah's hand beside her on the bed, as if it had been a book, or something unalive, and took out of his bag near by an accessory that was almost as much a part of him as his glasses. He slipped it over his head, but he didn't put the little hard rubber ends into his ears. Not immediately. First he said, 'Well, even if there was something on your mind, you don't have to tell me. I'm here just to help you sleep better, Sheilah, and eat better. That's what your mother has asked me to come here to do.'

Suddenly Sheilah turned towards him and burst out, 'Oh, mother's the trouble, partly,' and then stopped.

John Sheldon waited. He didn't urge. He leaned back in his chair and waited.

'I can't bear to have mother touch me lately. I lock my door at night for fear she'll come in, and talk to me, and stroke my arm, and I'll burst out and tell her to go away. It would hurt her dreadfully if I did, for she thinks we're especially sympathetic. And we used to be. I didn't use to mind her coming in, but now—oh, now—isn't it awful?—I don't want her near me!'

'Not so very awful,' commented John Sheldon, turning his eyes away from Sheilah's, so pleading and full of pain. Often he had to turn his eyes away from suffering not to show his sympathy. It was the ability to maintain an impersonal attitude that made confidences run fluently sometimes.

'You see she expects so much of me,' Sheilah went on. 'I'm all she has, and if I should make a mistake—if I should disappoint her—and I'm almost certain I'm going to make a mistake—that I'm going to disappoint her—— But why do I tell you all this?' She turned as suddenly away from John Sheldon as she had towards him a moment before.

He said quietly, prosaically, 'Simply because it is my business to be told, I guess. Part of my job, if you feel like telling anybody.'

'Oh, I'm so unhappy! I'm so unhappy!' she cried out. And she turned and buried her face in the pillow, and her shoulders shook with silent sobbing.

John Sheldon didn't put his hands on her. There was no sign of pity from him.

'It's a good idea to cry,' he commented, in a professional voice, and went over to the window and looked out. Later he came back to her. 'Now, shall I do a little listening, Sheilah?' he asked her. Still later, before he left her, 'Get up and dress and go down to dinner when I go,' he said. 'I'm coming around again to-morrow, after school. I've got a case out in North Wallbridge. Perhaps you'll run out with me in the car. It's bad going, but I guess we can make it.'