Conflict (Prouty)/Book 4/Chapter 7
One afternoon Phillip brought home a letter for his father. The address was typewritten. It had been posted in Boston. Felix seldom received any mail, except advertisements and bills occasionally.
Sheilah placed the letter on the kitchen shelf. It was once her custom to open Felix's mail herself, but since Roger's advent, she had made a point with Felix and the children, of the importance of respecting the privacy of any sealed message.
Luckily Felix was alone when he opened his letter, and so had an opportunity to devise some sort of explanation to give to Sheilah. He told her when he joined her at supper later, that the agent who had sold his doll-house several years ago, had had an inquiry for another doll-house, and he guessed he'd better run down to Boston in a day or two and see him about it, though probably it would prove a wild-goose chase. Felix still worked at his bench evenings. It was set up in a corner of the dining-room here in the brown house, too.
In reality Felix's letter was from Mr. Bullard, the president of the concern where he had been employed by Mr. Fairchild for so many years. The first sentence of the letter referred to Mr. Fairchild's death. Felix hadn't even heard of it! He didn't read the Boston papers thoroughly. Mr. Fairchild had died last October (it was January now) and Mr. Bullard was the executor of his estate. There had been found, among Mr. Fairchild's papers, a demand note of Felix's for a thousand dollars. There was an insurance policy as collateral on this note, but it was not due to be paid for half a dozen years yet, except in the event of Felix's death. Mr. Bullard was anxious to settle the estate as soon as possible, as he was leaving in a few weeks for a year's travel in Europe. Therefore he trusted it would be convenient for Felix to pay the small amount of the note without delay.
'But I can't pay it any easier now than I could three years ago,' Felix told Mr. Bullard several days later, closeted in his private office.
Mr. Bullard was a short, erect, closely knit man, with the quick, clipped, self-confident speech and manner of a very busy and successful one. A hard, compact little unit of efficiency and great productive power. No superfluous inches, no superfluous pounds, no superfluous words or motions—or emotions either. Felix trembled before him.
'I am familiar with the circumstances of this loan,' he said to Felix, looking at him through his clear, crystal eye-glasses with significant sharpness. 'I am the only one Mr. Fairchild took into his confidence in regard to that unfortunate affair of yours. I didn't approve of his policy in the matter. From the start I told him I thought your wife should be told the truth, and both of you clear up the indebtedness and start with a clean slate. Your wife has money, or recourse to it. I happen to know, because your boy is attending the same private school as my own and it isn't an inexpensive one.'
'But it will be just as bad for my wife to know now what I did, as it was a while ago—more, because now she'd feel'
Mr. Bullard interrupted Felix with a frown. 'I haven't time to discuss your wife's feelings. They really aren't my affair. This estate is my affair. All I ask is for you to see to it that I have that note of yours paid in full, within the next three weeks.'
'But don't you see I can't pay it without telling my wife, and she'
'Sorry, Nawn, but I really haven't time to discuss the matter. There's another man waiting for me.'
'But if ICould I ask you one more question?'
'As briefly as possible, please.'
'Well, if I did—if I could raise the money somehow, outside, I mean, borrow it from some one, get it to you some way, without telling my wife, would you feel it your duty to tell her yourself?'
'Tell her? Why should I?'
'Well, just because you think she ought to know.'
'Of course I wouldn't tell her,' he laughed with a touch of impatience in his voice.
'Never?'
'Why certainly not! I've far too much to do, Nawn, than to go out of my way to interfere in other people's private affairs. That's your business. All I want is for you to pay that note as soon as possible, so I can get away on my trip.' He leaned and pressed a button. 'It will be much better for you, too, believe me—the whole affair all cleared up and off your conscience, and your insurance policy back in your own possession again.'
A private secretary appeared.
Felix stood up.
'Well, good-bye.' Mr. Bullard smiled at him genially. 'And good-luck. I guess we understand each other now.'
Felix walked slowly out of Mr. Bullard's office. He had taken a single bedroom in an inexpensive hotel back of the State House. He made his way back to that bedroom along various surface, subway, and elevated tracks, plodding the last half-mile on foot across the Boston Common—gray, dank, unbeautiful, with its patches of snow-like mould—overrun with bold, scurrying squirrels, some of them furless like rats.
It was an inside bedroom, dim as early dawn all day long. Felix groped his way to the single electric fixture beside the chiffonier, and turned the button of the shadeless bulb. A dim red worm of electric wire vied with the bit of white daylight that sifted into the room through the single window by way of an airshaft. Felix standing close to the electric-light bulb produced a letter from his inside pocket. It was the same letter Sheilah had placed on the kitchen shelf three days ago. He opened it, and gazed at it long and fixedly.
'Except in the event of your death.'
Those words alone jumped out at him and gripped him, as they had three days ago, only they gripped harder now. Gosh! Had he the courage?
If only he didn't have to do it himself! If only it could just happen, somehow. Felix still believed there was a heaven and hell, in some form or other, as punishment or reward for what one did in this life. And he had always been taught that putting an end to things one's self was about the worst sin aman could commit. Well, wasn't he willing to commit the worst sin and suffer the consequences to save Sheilah? He'd been willing to go to hell for her when he joined the army. Wasn't he still willing? Of course she mustn't suspect. He must see to it that there was no danger of branding her with an act even worse than stealing. There mustn't be a trace of a motive left behind. Better destroy Mr. Bullard's letter immediately. He tore it slowly into tiny bits, and then burned them in the bowl on the washstand.
Afterward he turned off the light and went over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. Oh, my! Wasn't there some other way? Slowly, painstakingly, he proceeded again for the hundredth time, to pursue all the old paths of possible escape, although he already knew they ended in blank walls. He had no friend from whom he could borrow a thousand dollars. His father had no such amount to spare, and if he had, his father might tell Sheilah. There was the same grave risk with Gretchen's husband. Of course banks lent money, if you had property for collateral, but the insurance policy was the only property Felix owned in the world. He couldn't get the whole thousand on that, could he, and Mr. Bullard wanted it all. He wished he dared go to a lawyer and ask him if he had to pay it all. But he was afraid of lawyers. They get you to tell them things you don't want to sometimes. No, it wasn't safe to ask anybody to advise him. Well, he didn't need any one to advise him not to tell Sheilah, in spite of what Mr. Bullard said.
Sheilah seemed so much happier lately. The children were turning out so much better than she'd been afraid, and since she'd come to live with his folks, she appeared to be more reconciled to their inheritance. She didn't seem even to object very much to Phillip's always saying that he wanted to be like his father. But if she knew his father was a criminal she wouldn't want to hear Phillip say it once. If she knew what her children's father really was, it would stop her humming forever. Felix had heard Sheilah humming over her work many times this last year—a low, throaty sound, beautiful, he thought. Like purring. The only way to keep Sheilah humming was to make that insurance policy payable to Mr. Bullard within the next three weeks. Mr. Bullard had assured him he wouldn't tell Sheilah. All Mr. Bullard wanted was the thousand dollars so he could clear up the estate and get away to Europe. Yes, if Felix could just 'slip out,' somehow, within the next fortnight in some natural, normal way, like pneumonia, or a railroad accident, his crime would be wiped out forever. And Sheilah would be safe forever. And free forever, too.
Suddenly Felix stood. Gosh! he hadn't thought of that till now. He had been ransacking his brain since last October, trying to find a way to give Sheilah her freedom without telling her he had found Roger Dallinger's letters. Felix had run across the letters by chance one Sunday afternoon, when he had been left alone in charge of his mother. The invalid had asked him to get a certain sweater of Sheilah's to put over her shoulders. She told Felix she thought Sheilah kept it in a drawer in her closet. Felix opened every drawer, and finally every box in the closet (the invalid insisting no other sweater would do) before he found the desired article hanging over the back of a chair in his mother's room.
Later he went back to Sheilah's closet, and carefully replaced everything he had disarranged. It was then that he found the packet of letters. He didn't read them all—only the first two or three, because he was afraid Sheilah might return unexpectedly. He tied them up just as he had found them, in the same order with the same small bow-knot, and laid them back where he supposed they had lain before—underneath the India shawl.
The full truth had dawned upon Felix for the first time that afternoon. Of course he had known Roger Dallinger and Sheilah liked each other. But he supposed it was just as friends. Felix was painfully aware of his own shortcomings, and of how miserably he had failed to give Sheilah what she ought to have. It had seemed to him ungenerous to begrudge her the pleasure she got in the companionship of a man like Roger Dallinger. But he didn't suppose they loved each other. The letters, however, left him in no doubt. So that was why Sheilah had wanted to come to Terry—to run away from the man she loved, and to be true to the man she didn't love. And had never loved, he guessed—no, he knew. He had always known Sheilah had married him just out of kindness of heart. He ought never to have allowed it. He'd been a drag, and a weight on her all her life. Roger Dallinger was the sort of man to have married her and made her happy. And he wanted to marry her and make her happy now. The letters said so.
Knowing Sheilah, loving Sheilah, Felix was very careful not to let her guess by word or look that he had discovered her secret. It would hurt her terribly if she ever knew she had hurt him so. Buried in Felix beneath his rough, crude exterior there was a fine and delicate perception. If ever he gave Sheilah her freedom it must be without her knowledge of his motive. He hadn't seen how it could be accomplished until to-day. But now suddenly it was clear. Two birds killed with one stone—two birds of prey menacing Sheilah's happiness.