Conflict (Prouty)/Book 4/Chapter 3
It all would have been a simple matter if Sheilah had been a different kind of woman. Roger was ready to do anything to assume the complete responsibility of her happiness, and there were avenues of escape that he could have opened for her. But Sheilah would not even reach out toward a happiness that any one else must pay for.
'I shall never do anything to hurt Felix,' she said. 'I want you to know that. If we can be friends without hurting Felix, all right. But otherwise' She shook her head. 'Felix is my duty, Roger, while you,' she smiled and shrugged, 'while you are only my joy.'
'Haven't you a right to a little joy?' asked Roger. 'Haven't you paid your debt to duty? Haven't you been paying it all your life?'
'When is it right for one ever to stop?' she asked wistfully, 'and when is it right for one ever to hurt an innocent person? Felix has always been good and faithful to me. He has always done all he could to make me happy. Such a man does not deserve to be treated cruelly. It would just about kill Felix if he lost me, or his faith in me. I married him of my own free will, of my own accord, against the advice of others. I took him on. He is my responsibility, and always will be. Besides there's my duty to my children.'
'I would do anything for your children, Sheilah—give them everything that money, combined with my love for their mother, could provide.'
'I know, Roger. I know you would. But it wouldn't make up for what they would lose. What sort of an example would I be to them if I should run away from the responsibility I took on? If I should desert the father whom I've taught them to love and honor for his gentleness and kindness and faithfulness. No, I shall never even consider deserting Felix. And please let us never mention it again,' she pleaded. 'It hurts me too much. It makes me realize how far away I've strayed. And you mustn't think I don't love Felix,' she added. This was in the very beginning of the realization of her love for Roger, when she was fighting hard to love Felix too—to love two men at once. 'I do. I always have loved him, I think. Differently, of course. It's sort of pity I feel for Felix, while for you'
'Yes, for me, Sheilah?'
'Oh, for youit's just a sort of steady wanting—a kind of gnawing hunger.'
When a woman says a thing like that, in a voice that breaks, and with her eyes misty with tears—when the woman you love says a thing like that, it takes a strong man indeed—or a light man indeed (a faun-like creature whom love touches superficially) to resist satisfying that wanting, that hunger a little. Roger was not a light man, nor yet a very strong one, he concluded, when he was near Sheilah and her voice broke and there were tears in her eyes. Was he greatly to be blamed for taking her in his arms that day?
He didn't kiss her. He seldom kissed her, she paid so highly for it afterward. He simply held her in his arms a moment and breathed into her soft thick hair—as warm as a bed of meadow-moss under a hot mid-day sun, and as alive and vibrant. And as fragrant too! He had never observed that strange, sweet fragrance of a woman's hair when you breathe into it, before. He had never breathed into a woman's hair before. He told Sheilah so. Womanlike she loved being told that she was the first one with whom he had shared this or that experience, however slight. And he could often tell her so, even though she had arrived so late. For never before had he been forced to seek beauty by such circuitous routes. In many things Sheilah held the position of priority with him, due to the restrictions he was obliged to observe.
But in spite of the restrictions, and the mutual acceptance of the fact that they never could be more than friends, as it is phrased, still their love for each other, hidden though they kept it, slowly and inevitably continued to grow and to expand under the constant warmth of their companionship, as the life hidden inside a shell slowly and inevitably grows and expands under the constant warmth of the robin's breast. The walls of the little front room finally proved too small to hold it. To Sheilah's despair the city itself finally proved too small to hold it.
It wasn't, however, until November, nearly six months after the dark night in the hall when Roger had kissed her, that Sheilah arrived at the conclusion that she must eliminate from her otherwise barren life her relationship with him. For a long time she turned her face away from the slow accumulation of evidences that it was having an undesirable effect upon her. She didn't tell even Roger at first. She kept it locked in her heart, like the secret knowledge of a fatal disease she would hide. Silently, fearfully, she watched one ideal of hers after another being attacked by it.
Her pride first became undermined. By the end of the summer she was ready to stoop to all sorts of cheap little tricks and devices in order to see Roger. Her sense of honor, too, was crumbling. After the first few weeks she was able to deceive Laetitia without a qualm. And worse than all, it was incapacitating her as a wife and mother. By September Roger was seldom absent from her thoughts. All during the grim carrying-out of her day's schedule, the possibility of seeing him, or of hearing from him (sometimes he called her by telephone, sometimes wrote to her, sometimes simply passed her house in his car, blew his horn and waved), kept her in a state of constant waiting and expectation. If several days passed with no sign from him, she became sensitive, raw to every sudden sound of bell or horn, or knock, and was a less cheerful and responsive mother, a less cheerful and responsive wife.
Roger did all he could to save her from unnecessary waiting and uncertainty. But there were times, of course, that in spite of all his care and protection Sheilah must be patient and trust him. She did trust him (their honesty with each other had begotten trust), but trusting him wasn't much help to her during the terrible ten days when she didn't hear from him at all, and finally, sick with anxiety, called up his office (she had never called Roger at his office, an instinctive fastidiousness in such matters preventing her from even running the risk of being the cause of possible embarrassment), and was told briefly that Mr. Dallinger was ill with pneumonia, but no further information could be given to strangers.
During the days of the crisis that followed Sheilah was forced to seek a public telephone-booth (for Laetitia chanced to be at home with a cold), call Roger's country house where he still lived on alone, since his mother's death, and beg for bulletins from a trained nurse, who treated the woman with the trembling voice who preferred not to give her name, with insinuating curtness; and finally with a refusal to answer any questions at all, as if she was some one Roger ought to be ashamed of. Roger got into communication with Sheilah as soon as possible, but not until it had been demonstrated to her that no woman should care like that for any man, or for any child, or for any human being whom she could not acknowledge.
'It can't go on,' she told Roger the first time he came to see her after his illness. 'It's disabling me. I'm losing my usefulness. I'm losing my grip on my job. I was worse than no mother when you were so sick. I'm not thinking about anything in the world but you. I'm not caring about anything in the world but you. And that's wrong. That's wasted thought, wasted caring, because I can't have you. At least I won't have you,' she brought out savagely.
She had become savage now. Her gentleness had disappeared, even her wistfulness. There were no similes any more, no play any more. There were even fewer caresses, so intense had become her despair.
'Oh, I won't let it ruin my life, and rob me of my pride, and sense of honor, and destroy my will, and eat into my ideals of right and wrong. I must get over it. I must. A strong woman would get over it. I must be strong. You must help me, Roger. I mustn't see you. I don't know how I shall be able to live, but we mustn't see each other, Roger. We mustn't even hear from each other. That's the way to get over it, they say. That's the way to try, anyway.'
Roger, filled with despair because of Sheilah's despair, suffering because she suffered, hands tied, helpless to help in any other way, complied.
They didn't see each other, they didn't even hear from each other, for over three weeks. But after the first four or five days of this self-inflicted separation, Sheilah was guilty of haunting the public parking-space, where Roger left his car during office hours. It had suddenly occurred to Sheilah that pneumonia was often followed by a relapse. The gray car with the number she knew so well was proof that Roger was at his work. Moreover, the gray car itself had come to seem so much a part of him that the mere sight of it gratified a little her aching desire. Roger on his part was guilty also of passing Sheilah's house frequently in the evening for the comfort of the glimmer of her lights.
They had agreed to test the separation for two months, but near the end of the third week they met unexpectedly, late one afternoon, just outside the parking-space where Roger left his car. Sheilah was standing on the sidewalk, beside a lighted shopwindow (it was November and dark), waiting for a street-car to take her home. Roger saw her as he turned the corner.
There followed half an hour of such sweet and poignant reunion inside Roger's car, that all Sheilah's firm resolves were swept away. After that, for a brief week or two, she succumbed. Roger came to see her again. And thus it was proved the city wasn't big enough to hold the thing between them that insisted upon maturing.
'One or the other of us must go away,' finally Sheilah told Roger. 'There must be space between us, so that it is impossible for us to see each other.'
'I doubt,' said Roger, 'if even space can keep us apart now, Sheilah.'
'Well, our wills can then,' she replied grimly, 'and space will help.'
She was seated during this conversation beside Roger in his car, drawn up in the black shadow of an empty building. This was the third time since their reunion that Sheilah had met Roger outside the parking-space by the shop window, as if by accident.
'Oh, can't you see,' she burst out now, 'I can't go on seeing you like this, and yet I can't stop seeing you like this or any other way, it appears, so long as it is possible. One or the other of us must go away.'
'But how, and when, and where?'
'Of course, you can't go,' she smiled, 'you'd be miserable and unhappy without your work. Besides, you're too big and important a man here, doing big and important things. If you should go away everybody would wonder and want to know why. But I—I'm nothing—nobody. If I should disappear no one would wonder, or want to know why. It's I who must go away, Roger.'
'Oh, Sheilah, in a little time, with a little patience I can arrange things so that what we feel for each other can be acknowledged. Why do you try to kill so beautiful a thing so insistent upon living?'
'Because other beautiful things would have to die to let it live,' promptly she replied, as she had often before. 'And besides,' bluntly she went on, 'it isn't right, and you know it isn't, and I know it isn't, according to our standards, and because in that case it wouldn't be beautiful, and we wouldn't be happy.'
'Then why can't we go on as we are for a little while?'
'Because it hurts too much. The joy I used to feel in being with you for short periods—seeing you, and talking with you, and touching you just a little—is gone now, swallowed up in a terrible desire to be with you all the time, and entirely.'
He groped for her hand, 'Oh, I know. I know.'
'And I'm afraid,' she went on,'the desire is doing something to me subconsciously that's not good.'
Twice within the last month the dream about the Chinaman had revisited Sheilah, for the first time since her girlhood, when her instincts had come into opposition with her ideals. Both times the dream had recurred after Sheilah had made a supreme effort to be generous to Felix, in way of expiation for the wrong she felt she had done him in caring for another man.
'I mustn't let Felix become unwelcome to me, must I? And lately it's harder for me to be what I should to him, at times. Do you understand?'
Of course Roger understood. He always understood, although sometimes, as now, with a stab of pain. Of what act of self-sacrifice was not Sheilah capable if it was for a principle? She would do anything for the sake of duty. More, it occurred to him bitterly, than for the sake of love. He murmured something of the sort to her now.
'Oh, Roger,' she replied. 'Does it seem to you I have given you so little?'
'No. No. Forgive me. I know you have given me more, being who and what you are, than most women who give all. It's only that I want all so, and want so very much to make you happy. And I cannot. I cannot. It seems to me all I've done is to bring you unhappiness, Sheilah. I think it would have been better if I had never come into your life.'
'Oh, don't say that. It isn't true. I'm glad of every moment I've had with you, just as I'm glad of every moment I had with Esther, my baby, who was so beautiful and perfect. She was a hope, an ideal that came true. And so are you. It isn't as if you were leaving me embittered, disillusioned, and disappointed in you, you know. Besides,' she added with a little forced smile, laying her hand on his knee, 'you're making me great, Roger. You're giving me the opportunity to do a big thing—the biggest thing I shall ever do—give you up.' And she pushed him from her with a little gentle shove, and drew her hand away.
It didn't prove so easy, after all, for Sheilah to leave Boston as she had implied to Roger. Felix's pay had gradually climbed to an amount he could never hope to earn in a new position, and every cent of it was needed by the growing children. The suggestion from Roger that he help her financially to renounce him, was unthinkable to Sheilah.
'No,' she replied instantly, firmly. 'So long as we care for each other in the way we do, anything mercenary would spoil the beauty.'
And not only was the financial problem a difficulty. Old vines whose roots have become deeply embedded in the soil, and twisted around the various rocks and difficulties in the paths they have tunneled, do not thrive well when transplanted. Felix even in his youth was never adaptable to new scenes, new people, new demands. It would be a painful experience for Felix to make a fresh start in a strange environment. Moreover, what excuse could she give him for suggesting that he suddenly terminate his relationship with Mr. Fairchild, his employer, when for years she had been emphasizing the importance of strengthening it in every way possible? Oh, perhaps after all she was attempting too drastic a course of action in order to make her renouncement easier.
Other women had been caught as she had been caught, and had been unable to run away. And had conquered. And others, alas, had not conquered! She would always be kind and tolerant after this to the women who had not conquered, held by chains they could not break, to that which constantly lured and tempted them. People who judged and blamed didn't understand the terrific power of propinquity. The very air seemed permeated with the consciousness of Roger's nearness. It was like being tied beneath a tree heavy with fragrant bloom, and attempting to escape its overpowering sweetness.
He might be around any corner. Any automobile that her little Ford crawled up on at the congested crossings, might bear his registration plate. Any late night, after Felix and the children were safely in bed she had only to murmur a number into the telephone receiver to hear his voice; or if she resisted the temptation, he had only to murmur a number to hear hers. She used to lie awake often till after midnight, hoping that he would prove less strong than she, and ignoring their resolutions, as a forest-fire a brook, leap over them, and send her to sleep with the music of his brief good-night singing in her ears. During the month in midsummer when he had been in Newfoundland, fishing, she was aware of the soothing effect of inaccessibility; and as the days had piled up softly upon his absence, conscious of a growing strength in her to resist her desire for him.
Oh, what ought she to do? Run grave risks of uprooting Felix and seek safety in flight? Or run graver risks and remain in the danger-zone? 'What would a woman wiser, stronger, better than I do?' Suddenly, miraculously, it seemed to Sheilah, all doubt and uncertainty were swept away. Her course was made clear!