Conflict (Prouty)/Book 2/Chapter 4
Sheilah received her first letter from Felix in less than two weeks. It was postmarked Wallbridge.
'I've gotten a job in the bank here in your city,' it said. 'They say I can work up to almost anything, if I try, and I'm going to try. You know why, I guess. I got it through Mr. Spaulding at the church. I saw you at church last Sunday, but you didn't see me. Will you be at church next Sunday?'
'I'm sorry. I shan't be at church next Sunday,' Sheilah wrote back. Felix's letter had come two days before she was sailing for a second trip to Europe, this time with two boarding-school friends. 'But I'll see you when I come back in the fall,' her pen went on kindly. At least she could be kind. 'I hope you'll get on well at the bank, Felix. I wish you all sorts of good luck.'
That brief little note of Sheilah's became to Felix like a prayer, which he used to read at night for inspiration. He knew it by heart at the end of the first week, but he always referred to the written page, for he liked seeing with his own eyes the actual words Sheilah had written to him, especially his own name, in her handwriting, alone like that, in the middle of the line. Usually he read it out loud, fondling the words with his voice, as well as with his eyes, stopping a long time after the 'Felix' to let it sink deeper and deeper into his consciousness.
In July she sent him a picture postcard from Switzerland. Across a very blue sky, above a white-capped mountain, she had written a message. 'Hope everything is going beautifully, Sheilah!' To Felix the message became a second prayer to read at night. And not only at night. For not only across the blue sky on the card, but above his head, among the clouds as he walked, he saw her message and her name. He thought the card itself was the most beautiful one he had ever seen. The blue sky flushed into a lovely peach-like pink along the horizon line of the mountain, and she—Sheilah had picked it out for him! He cherished it as if it were a sacred symbol.
The fact was Sheilah had jotted down Felix's initials in the corner of the card, where later the stamp was to be affixed, without even looking at the other side. There had been several other cards, and she had allotted them all in the same hasty fashion, on the eve of the day she was leaving Switzerland. True, later, she had hesitated, pen poised above the blue sky, before writing the message. And afterwards for a moment before adding the address on the other side. But if Felix was to settle in Wallbridge, she must establish a practical basis of friendship with him. Surely the careless postcard with a message dashed off across its face, for the world to read, would act as a sort of forerunner of her intentions.
Queer how often Felix was in her thoughts that summer. How persistently she had to crowd him out on the occasions when she was idle. Again and again she saw him standing big and stooped and helpless—a tragic figure—alone in his bare, lonely room, with the yellow sunset behind him, and the box between them, like something deformed, his love for her had brought forth.
She hadn't shown the box to her mother and father. She had hidden it in an empty drawer. It was impossible for her to talk about Felix to any one. She had exchanged with the other girls in the party all sorts of confidences about other affairs—about other love affairs. She had had her share since she had come out. But always she had kept Felix buried, and her feelings about him imprisoned, like the box. Well, she wouldn't, once she was home! Feelings, unlike the box, were alive, and live things shut up in the dark fretted and gnawed. She would let them out. She would let Felix out.
It was with this idea in view that Sheilah recognized Felix openly as her friend when she returned to Wallbridge in the late summer. She returned earlier than she had planned. It was the summer the World War was declared. There was a stampede for early returns to America in August, 1914.
Sheilah saw Felix the first Sunday she went to church, and asked him to drop around in the afternoon. There were usually several callers on Sunday afternoon. A fortnight later she invited him to one of her Sunday-night chafing-dish suppers.
Felix's appearance was not impossible. He had been to college for nearly two years, where at least he saw good taste in clothes on occasions. Moreover, one of the requirements of the position he had taken at the bank was a neat appearance. That was the chief reason why he had taken it. It had seemed to him that a 'gentleman's job,' where he must dress carefully and keep his hands clean, would bring him nearer Sheilah.
Sheilah had influence in Wallbridge since her successful début. She asked her friends to be nice to Felix Nawn. They were, for her sake. But it was an effort. It was awful if you ever got stranded alone with him. Who was he, anyway? And why should Sheilah Miller attempt to float such a piece of dead wood? Yes, some of them did remember that he attended the high-school once upon a time—wasn't he the boy who had cheated once in class and got caught at it?—and that Sheilah Miller used to be nice to him even then. But, my gracious, that was years ago. However, in the end, they accepted Felix. He was an extra man, and helped augment the group of stags at a subscription dance. He became a familiar object in that group as time went on, and like all familiar objects soon was merged in the general composition of the picture, and was unnoticed and unremarked upon.
Sheilah felt a great comforting sense of satisfaction. Not only was she letting Felix out of the dark, but also she was discharging a debt she felt she owed him. He had been alone and neglected at college. He had failed at college. If she saw to it that he was not alone and neglected in Wallbridge, if she helped him to succeed in Wallbridge, then that strange hungry sense of obligation to him, always fumbling for food just over her heart, would be satisfied, perhaps; would become weaned in time, and she would be free again, and happy, seeing him prosper on the milk of others' kindness.
But to Felix the recognition meant only one thing—chances to see Sheilah. Social functions were torture to Felix, to be endured for the sake of a possible glimpse of Sheilah. Nor did he care for success, only inasmuch as success led to Sheilah. At the dances he attended he seldom took any part, though occasionally he did 'sit out' with a left-over girl, persuaded by an usher. He usually spent his time with the smokers, in a near-by anteroom (though he never smoked himself), furtively emerging from time to time to look for Sheilah, and possibly to receive one of her smiles as she swept past him. And sometimes he took her home! Very frequently he took her home after the Millers sold their limousine and dismissed the chauffeur.
The limousine was sold and the chauffeur dismissed during the second year of the war. Sidney Miller manufactured carpets. There wasn't much demand for carpets during the war. It made it awkward for Sidney because the same month war was declared,' he had doubled his capacity for making carpets. The result was he was forced into raising money quickly. Long before it became necessary to sell the limousine and dismiss the chauffeur, Sidney Miller had moved out of his two spacious safe-deposit boxes at the bank, and was paying rent on only one small one. And he rattled around in that! By October, 1915, practically all of the crisp, crinkly papers Sidney used to handle so proudly the first of every month were scattered around in various banks, as collateral, like a family dispersed by force of catastrophic circumstances.
One day it became apparent to Sidney that he had got to borrow money on the very house he lived in, in order to pay its upkeep. Of course the obvious thing to do was to reduce the upkeep as much as possible.
'Just till the war is over,' he told Dora, making as light of it as he knew how. 'Just till things get straightened out a bit on the other side.'
'I don't mind for myself so much,' Dora said. 'It's Sheilah I'm thinking about. If only she were married and settled and in a home of her own, I'd just as soon go and live in an apartment.'
'I know,' said Sidney. 'The war has come just at the wrong time for Sheilah, I'm afraid.'
'No,' said Dora. 'It would have been worse the year she was coming out. The débutantes aren't going to have a bit of a good time this fall.'
Sidney smiled wearily.
'That's too bad for the débutantes,' he replied.
Sheilah didn't mind the economies. The chauffeur wasn't the only member of the Miller menage who was dismissed that fall. Sheilah said she liked making her own bed, and argued that it was splendid preparation for marrying a poor man.
'If there are any men, rich or poor, left after this dreadful war to marry,' sighed her mother. 'I just know all our boys will get drawn into it before it's over. If ever I was glad you're a girl, it's now.'
Sheilah had looked grave.
'It might drag even a girl in, mother,' she had replied.