Conflict (Prouty)/Book 2/Chapter 1
Felix Nawn roomed alone on Greene Street on the top floor of a three-family house over a mile away from the campus. He was the only college boy in the house. He was the only college boy on the street. Greene Street was on the other side of the railroad track from the college buildings, and the fraternity houses, and the various restaurants and lunch-rooms planted here and there for the boys.
The railroad track was like a wall. The college boys seldom crossed it. It was because Felix had as usual been wandering alone, away from the herd, that he chanced to pass through Greene Street and see the placard in the window announcing that there was a room to let. He had had no idea where to hunt for a room, only a dull, steady desire, like a dull, steady ache, to get away from the enthusiasm and boisterous greetings which he had been witnessing for three days at every corner around the campus, as old friend met old friend, or group fell into step with group, or reunited club members sprawled in luxurious comradeship over the steps and broad verandas of the fraternity houses.
The room on Greene Street looked away from the spires of the college chapel. There was a view of nothing but a steeply rising hill with a fringe of dark woods at the top from its windows. He could study here, undisturbed by college cheers and songs, and halloos of passing friends, with no friend to call and halloo to him. He had got to study, too. Besides, there was something about Mrs. Sparks, the landlady, that gave him a comfortable feeling—the first comfortable feeling he had had since he had reached this confusing mass called college, into which he felt sure he could never mix. Mrs. Sparks wore a big, full, white apron tied around her waist, and her steel-bowed spectacles were rusty.
Felix told her he would take the room and move in the next day. He hadn't much to move, he said—some books, two tables, a chair. They were now at the freight office. And a box of tools. Did she object to the tools? Carpenter's tools. One of the tables was a carpenter's bench. He didn't know that he'd have much time at college to work at it, but he liked making things out of wood. Little things. Inlaid boxes, book-ends, frames, dolls' chairs and bureaus. He wouldn't make much noise. And he always brushed up after himself.
Mrs. Sparks said she wouldn't mind brushing up a little sawdust along with his cigarette ashes, she guessed. But Felix said there wouldn't be any cigarette ashes. He didn't smoke.
Four years ago Felix had promised Sheilah he wouldn't smoke. Four years ago, in the Wallbridge high-school, promising a girl you wouldn't smoke for her sake sealed a secret compact between you, when you were both too young and timid to talk of love. Four years ago Sheilah had accepted the position of Felix's good angel. Girls were good angels to boys when Sheilah was in her early teens. To Felix she was still his good angel.
He hadn't seen Sheilah for over two years when he engaged the room on Greene Street, but there hadn't been a day that he hadn't thought of her. Everything he did, like coming to college, everything he didn't do, like not smoking, was for Sheilah. Still for Sheilah! Even though she had hurt him so, too. Even though his common sense told him that he had faded to nothing but a memory to her. Oh, but once she had cared! Once he could keep her by him by just laying his fingers on her wrist. And once—the last time he had seen her—it had not been by her wrist that he had kept her by him, so still and quiet there in the inky blackness of the ice-house.
It hadn't been a kiss, exactly. Less definite than a kiss. No real beginning. No real ending. She had pushed against him a little at first. He liked to recall—the feeling of Sheilah pushing against him a little. And then had become willing. Afterwards she had whispered, close, 'We mustn't. Oh, we mustn't.' And he had made her struggle against him again. And become quiet and willing again.
When Felix got to thinking about the last time he saw Sheilah, he would shove his books away from him and close his eyes, and the sea of his consciousness would rise and fall and billow around him with surging thought-waves of Sheilah. Like great combers. One after another. Mounting high and higher. Threatening to drown him. Would have drowned him, perhaps, but for the carpenter's bench.
Often, when Felix got to thinking too much about Sheilah, he would sit down at his carpenter's bench, and with saw, and chisel, and plane, fashion little things with his hands. And the waves would subside, and Sheilah would withdraw again into the mist.
During the second winter, however, that Felix occupied the room on Greene Street, Sheilah didn't withdraw into the mist when he worked at his carpenter's bench. She couldn't while her very name—her very lovely name—was growing beneath his fingers in white ivory bordered with ebony, planted in satinwood.
He wished he had known early in the fall that Sheilah was coming to the Prom in February, then he could have started his task sooner, and his studying need not have suffered so. The menacing midyear examinations were only three weeks away when it first occurred to Felix to make something at the bench for Sheilah. It was just after the Christmas holidays that Nevin Baldwin told him that Sheilah was coming to the Prom.
Felix and Nevin had little in common. Nevin, of course, was a fraternity man. Felix, of course, was not. They seldom saw each other. At least Nevin seldom saw Felix. Felix had more opportunity. He could see Nevin every time he went to a football game, and hear his name shouted, too. Felix never shouted his name, however. Felix seldom joined in the college cheering, he was so aware of his own voice. Nevin and Felix might have met in the recitation room had they been members of the same class, but Nevin was a year ahead of Felix. They might have met in the gymnasium, or on the running-track, or at the training-table, had Felix 'gone out' for anything athletic. But he hadn't. He hadn't gone out for anything. He hadn't known how. Nevin, of course, had gone out for everything when he was a freshman. Nevin had known how.
Nevin had entered college from a prominent boarding-school, with a group of boys who were the sons of prominent men. Felix had entered college from an undistinguished high-school, alone, and was the son of anything but a prominent man. He had been painfully aware of the difference the first time he saw Nevin Baldwin, and two others of his kind, swinging across the campus. He had been painfully aware of the difference every time he saw him later. However Nevin Baldwin was the only person he knew in the whole college. If he made himself known to Nevin, perhaps he would give him a little advice, tell him what he should do to get into the college life, slipping by him—always slipping by him, like a moving sidewalk, while he stood stationary and watched. Timidity, and a pressing desire to become a good-fellow, like Nevin, fought for weeks in Felix's heart before he dared to approach Nevin. Nevin, always bent upon some urgent business, simply hadn't seen Felix.
'Why, hello there! If it isn't old Pastey,' he had exclaimed to Felix's shy 'Do you remember me?' 'Glad to see you, Pastey. How are things going?' He had been in a great hurry. 'Five minutes late already, old man. Sorry. See you later.' And later, it had always only been, 'Hello, there, Pastey. How are you?' Though once he had added, 'Drop in at my diggin's sometime.'
But of course Felix never had dropped in at the big, mansion-like fraternity house that was Nevin's 'diggin's.'
Felix had never dropped in anywhere. People thought he didn't want to, perhaps, if they thought at all. But he did. He did want to! Sheilah would like a fellow who had places to drop in.
It was one late afternoon in January, walking away from the library, that Nevin told Felix about Sheilah. They had met on the library steps. Felix had been spending three long terrific hours in the library, trying to dig the important facts out of fifty pages of prescribed history, and then attempting to transport them across the great, wide, all but unnavigable space that yawned between the white pages of the book and his brain. And, once transported, to keep them there, in some sort of order and state of preservation until they were needed for consumption in class the next day, or the next week. One never could tell when. Nevin had been spending less than one hour transporting, from twice the number of pages to his brain, similar facts which, when once they were landed, seemed mechanically to slip into their proper cells and places.
It was raining when Nevin came running down the library steps behind Felix. Felix carried an umbrella. He always carried an umbrella when it rained. Nevin never carried an umbrella.
'Hello, Pastey. Going in my direction?'
Felix decided that he was.
'Yes. Come on under,' eagerly he replied.
Nevin slipped his arm through Felix's familiarly, just as if he were a fellow club member, thought Felix, and hugged up to him close, as they splashed through the slush of the melting snow.
'You don't live in Wallbridge any more, do you?' Nevin inquired.
'No. My folks moved away three years ago,' Felix told him.
'Thought so. Never see you.' Then, abruptly, 'Remember Sheilah Miller?'
'Yes. I remember her.'
'She remembers you too. Asked me how you were last time I was home.'
'Did she?'
'She's coming on for the Prom next month.'
'With you?'
'Well, chiefly. Three of us invited her, and she's cutting herself up in thirds, she says, and leaving the distribution to me.'
'Oh,' said Felix. Then, 'How is she?'
'Oh, great! She's doing the coming-out stunt, this year, you know.'
Felix did know, but he murmured, 'Is she?'
'Where you rooming, Pastey?' abruptly Nevin inquired.
'On Greene Street.'
'Greene Street? Where's Greene Street?'
'Across the railroad track.'
'Where's that?'
'You wouldn't know, I guess,' smiled Felix.
And suddenly he didn't care whether Nevin Baldwin knew or not, whether anybody knew. Sheilah had spoken his name! She had asked how he was. It was as if she had sent him a message. And she was coming! Here! Soon! Somehow, somewhere, he would see her! And the last time he had seen her he had kissed her! There had been no meeting since to dull that last time of its sharpness and its edge. No letter. No word of any kind. He was glad now. It was as if the last time he had seen Sheilah had been at the top of a height they had reached together. There had been no slow descent. The dark that had wrapped them round, as they had stood there together, had suddenly swallowed Sheilah up and she had disappeared. But he had not stirred. All these months and months he had not stirred! Sheilah would find him waiting just where she had left him on the same high peak.
Once inside his room that night, Felix took off his overcoat and overshoes and put them carefully away in the closet. Then sat down at his study-table, opened its single drawer, and took out from the back corner a long white envelope, and emptied its con tents into the bright circle of light before him.
It contained all the clippings which referred to Sheilah and her coming-out, which he had cut from the Wallbridge paper he subscribed to; a picture of Sheilah from the Sunday edition of a Boston paper; the notes she had written him in the high school—five in all; and a copy of the only letter he had ever written her. There had been no answer to that only letter. He wished now he had never written it. But the uncertainty that had stretched on and on after Sheilah had disappeared from the height beside him had been so awful.
Felix glanced away from the little collection in the bright circle before him, and gazed into a dark corner of the room, as his thoughts turned back to the long dark silence that had followed that night with Sheilah in the ice-house. She hadn't come to church the next day, nor to school on Monday. Somebody had said that she was sick. Night after night he had walked by her house during that first two weeks of wondering. Then one day at school he overheard somebody say that Sheilah Miller had gone away to boarding-school. Still Felix walked by Sheilah's house, even after it was barred and shuttered for the summer. The Millers took Sheilah to Europe on the first of June. They took her directly from her boarding-school to the dock in New York.
It was Felix's mother who told him that the Millers had gone to Europe for the summer. She had heard about it at church. No. It hadn't been mentioned when they were coming back. All during July and August Felix had walked by the Millers' closed house that summer, waiting for it to stir and come alive again.
But he never saw it stir and come alive. Felix's father moved his family away from Wallbridge in early September, when the Miller house was still asleep. He moved them to a little town in Vermont where a friend of his, who was a builder and in search of a partner, was running a lively business near a big new industrial plant, necessitating the putting up of a lot of new houses.
Felix's only letter to Sheilah had been written from the little town in Vermont. It hadn't said what he wanted it to. His thoughts about Sheilah were like wild birds soaring high above him, and wouldn't let themselves get caught by words. He opened his copy of the letter now, and read it through.
Dear Sheilah,
We've moved away from Wallbridge. My father has gone into a new business. My new address is Terry, Vermont. I feel just the same, Sheilah, I always will, about you. Even if you did go away without a word. Won't you write to me once in a while? I go toa high-school, ten miles from here, because you said once you hoped I'd go to college, and I'm trying to. It would help me if I could have a letter from you.
Hoping you are well, and that you will write me soon.
No wonder. She had never received it.
Mrs. Miller's conscience hadn't pricked her in the least when, after a careful perusal of Felix's letter, she had decided not to forward it to Sheilah, already returned to boarding-school for a second year. The result would have been the same. Sheilah would not have written to the boy. At least John Sheldon had persuaded her last spring when she first went away not to write to him. Mrs. Miller felt quite certain that the absurd little-girl interest that she had felt for this queer boy was all over now. Still there was nothing to be gained by reminding her of him. Mrs. Miller burned Felix's letter, and never referred to it. It might easily have been lost in the mail.