Conflict (Prouty)/Book 2/Chapter 5
One reason why Felix Nawn found himself, to his delight, conveying Sheilah home from so many evening engagements during the second winter of the war, was because there were fewer other men to perform the service. The girls in Wallbridge felt the dearth of young men at their parties almost as soon as war was declared. Nevin Baldwin had set the pace.
Dressed in an English uniform, Nevin was fighting in France before the first Christmas, and imbued with Nevin Baldwin's example, a dozen or more young men in Wallbridge managed somehow to get onto the other side that first winter. Of course there were still many young men left, but none Sheilah could impose upon as upon Felix. It really wasn't imposing upon Felix. It was bestowing.
Sheilah was aware of the unabated intensity of Felix's devotion, but she believed she had become acclimatized to it now, as one does after a while to a tropical climate, and knew how to adapt herself to it. How unwise it was, for instance, ever to allow the direct rays of the heat to touch her. And what methods to employ to protect herself against exposure. She ran to cover now always at the slightest contact of Felix's scorching hand or foot—for still they scorched. He never held her wrists now, though sometimes they skated together.
One starlight night they had skated as far as the old ice-house. They had hobbled on their skates over the snow to an open gash in the side of the building, and peered in. But they had not gone in. He had not kissed her. He had never kissed her since that far-away afternoon at dusk. But he had murmured, standing very close behind her, 'I still think of it—every night, Sheilah.'
Instantly she had moved away.
'Come on, let's skate. I hate this spooky place.' She had laughed. So long as there was the shelter of careless good-comradeship for her to run to, she was not afraid of sunstroke.
When Felix had first appeared among the callers on Sunday afternoon, Dora had strongly objected. She had had a talk with Sheilah. With John Sheldon, too. But time had reassured Dora. By the second year of the war, Dora had concluded Felix was harmless. And but for the war Felix would have remained harmless. But for the thorough upheaval of Sheilah's straight, careful furrows of peace-time plans and resolves, her patriotism and pity and love would not have become so hopelessly confused, and her garden would have grown in rows.
The girls in Wallbridge, as the war persisted, became more and more possessed with a desire to serve, and in some more personal way than rolling bandages or writing letters to unknown soldiers. Several became nurses and joined hospital units going to France; others secretaries, or war-time workers of one kind and another, and went to Washington. But nothing in the way of service that necessitated absence from home was to be thought of as far as Sheilah was concerned. Her father hadn't been very well lately, and such a look of distress would cross her mother's face, if she even referred to leaving home, that Sheilah put all hope of it out of her mind. But the prick that she wasn't doing her share recurred again and again.
In the fall of 1916 came the news of the death in action of Nevin Baldwin. It stirred the city to its depths. His mother in her deep mourning became a symbol epitomizing all the mourning mothers on the other side. The reality of the war struck deep into every woman's heart in Wallbridge.
Within a fortnight after the news of the death of Nevin Baldwin, Millicent Phillips, a friend of Sheilah's and her own age, sailed for England with 'her mother, to be married quietly to one of the boys who had enlisted in the Canadian Army. Three months later, Millicent Phillips—Millicent Blake then—was wearing mourning also.
There followed several war marriages then, and by the time the United States entered the war in April, 1917, there was quite a little group of war-brides in Wallbridge. By June, 1917, the group had doubled.
Sheilah helped double it.
Sheilah told John Sheldon that one reason she was going to marry Felix was because he looked so funny—or was it tragic—in his uniform. She hadn't known whether to laugh or cry. It was much too small and second-hand. It strained at the buttons across the front, and wrinkled in tight folds across the back, and bulged and protruded, as if it was stuffed. And it was just a private's uniform, too!
One of the women at the Red Cross Headquarters who had seen Felix had described him, and everybody at the table had laughed. Sheilah had been at the table. She herself hadn't seen Felix then (he was just back on his first twenty-four-hour leave from training-camp). But he came around that evening. The woman had said Felix looked more like one of those dummies they use for bayonet practice at training-camp than a human being. And another had answered, that from what she had heard of him, she guessed he'd act like a dummy too. She couldn't imagine Felix Nawn bayoneting back.
'I thought it was so cruel to say that! And I told her so. It's easier for some boys, than for others, to go into this war, Dr. Sheldon. People don't know what courage it took for Felix. It wasn't the bayonets he was afraid of so much (I don't believe he has looked that far ahead), as of what comes before—the life at a training-camp. The crowds. Being slow and awkward and made fun of. You know comradeship can be awfully cruel if it isn't kind, and Felix is aware of it. He has had experience. And yet knowing what torture it would be to him, he went into it. He didn't have to. His eyes aren't right, but I told him about a boy I knew who got a copy of one of those test-cards they use for eyes and learned it by heart. And Felix did the same thing. And got by! It was I who gota copy of the test-card for Felix, Dr. Sheldon. It was I who helped him learn it. All of a sudden Felix found himself plunged into what was a kind of hell to him. That's what he told me camp-life was to him, but he said he didn't care if it was what I wanted. Why, of course, I had to do my part. When I saw Felix that first night, crammed into that ridiculous uniform and realized that it was all my own work, I'd have felt the worst traitor in the world not to have accepted it as mine.'
'Perhaps,' suggested John Sheldon quietly, 'just because it was an object for ridicule was why you accepted it. Pity and loyalty are often confused.'
'Well,' Sheilah admitted, 'perhaps if Felix were a fine and splendid figure in his uniform whom everybody praised and admired, he wouldn't need me and my loyalty so much. But oh—don't you see, as it is, he has no one else—nothing else—but me in the world, to make up a little for all he is suffering? I've talked to mother. I've tried to explain. But she just can't see it.'
That was why Sheilah was's seated at three o'clock in the afternoon in John Sheldon's office—because Dora couldn'tseeit. Nor Sidney either. Distraught, they had both sought John Sheldon the night before. He told them to send Sheilah around sometime, and he'd talk it over with her.
'It strikes me a promise of marriage is pretty big recompense for a girl to pay a man for doing his duty,' he remarked when Sheilah paused.
'It doesn't strike me so,' instantly she replied. And John could feel the iron in her. 'Nor my friends either. We think it's the least a girl can do for a boy who is willing to risk his life. It's been done before, you know I'm not the only girl who has married a soldier just before he went to war.'
'But usually the girl loves the soldier, Sheilah.'
She didn't flinch at that.
'I do, too,' she replied.
'You love Felix?'
'I think so,' she went on, calm, quiet, judicial. 'I think I always have. I've always fought it—you helped me fight it—because I knew it would disappoint mother and father so. And perhaps,' she added candidly, 'because I was a little too proud.'
'Don't you think a girl should feel pride in the man she marries, war or no war?'
She held her head a little higher.
'I do feel pride! Just think what Felix is doing! Why he may come back blind! I do feel pride!' she repeated, and she flushed.
John Sheldon turned his eyes away from the flame in her cheeks. What fires a war can kindle!
'Do you think,' he pursued, 'you can feel pride in him in peace as well as in war?'
'I should hope I would always remember what he has done,' she said.
'Do you think you can be happy with him during the long years after this brief war is over?'
She made a little impatient gesture at that. 'Oh, that's what mother says. Always discussing my own little state of happiness. Dr. Sheldon, I don't think it's a time for any girl—for any human being to be splitting hairs about individual happiness just now. If any one can do anything to help win this war, I think it ought to be done, and quick, too. Nevin Baldwin wasn't thinking about his individual happiness, I guess, when he rushed up over that trench at four o'clock in the morning.'
'Will it help win the war for you to marry Felix?'
'Oh, only indirectly, I suppose,' she sighed, 'by making the man I sent into it a little bit happier. But it's all I can do. It's the only way I can take part. And I do want to take part so! I don't want to be a slacker, Dr. Sheldon. You see,' she shrugged, 'I'm one of those individuals who didn't enlist early. I wanted to be a nurse—awfully. If I was a nurse in France, it wouldn't be my duty, perhaps, to marry Felix. But it is my duty now. I've been drafted, don't you see? I've been drafted for this job, and I'm not going to run away from it. You can talk till doom's-day.'
'I think your mother might let you be a nurse in France now,' remarked John Sheldon, 'if you'll break off with Felix.'
'Break off with Felix? Now? Why, it would kill him. He's always cared so terribly—so simply terribly. No. It's too late now.'
'But'
'Oh, let's not talk about it.' She stood up. 'It won't do the least good. You must reconcile mother and father to it. Make them realize, somehow, there is a war going on. Other girls' parents understand and codperate. I wish they would. Then I would be happy. I did so want to please them when I married.'
'But you won't actually marry Felix, will you?'
'Not unless he's sent across. I shall give him everything if he's sent across, for perhaps that woman was right about the bayonet. I have an idea, if Felix goes across, he'll never come back.'
But he did come back, without a decoration or a stripe of any kind, in a private's uniform, as he went. He came back for his reward, three weeks after the armistice was signed, without ever having gotten beyond a training-camp in England, where he took care of horses. And Sheilah, head high, shoulders squared, began her term of service.