Seed on the Wind

It was in midsummer that she received an unheralded visit from Anne Whitman. Coming home early one afternoon from a job uptown, Eileen, on the sidewalk as usual with Roy in his carriage, greeted her with the announcement that she had a caller. Mrs. Pegg, on her way to the meat market, had stopped and told her, she said; a young woman had come and, being told of Lora’s absence, had prevailed on Mrs. Pegg to let her in to wait. Lora asked Eileen to keep Roy out a little longer and, entering her room, found Anne lying on the bed with her eyes closed.

Lora guessed the story before she heard it, but it was none the less painful. At first Anne wouldn’t talk; she said merely that she didn’t know where Steve was, and that she had come to find out if Lora had seen him or heard from him. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and stared as Lora changed her dress, her hands folded in her lap, motionless.

“I’m going to kill myself,” she said finally.

“Not for Steve Adams, he’s not worth it,” said Lora.

Anne went on, “I started to yesterday, and what stopped me was the thought that maybe he was with you and I could see him. So I went to the tea-room and Mrs. Crosby told me you were still here. You’ve got a new room, it’s very nice. You don’t know where he is?”

“I haven’t seen him since the day he went off with you.”

“Oh. You haven’t. He left me a week ago. Twice before he left me and I found him again and he took me back. He said he pitied me.”

“That’s funny. Steve’s supply of pity—”

“Now I can’t find him.” Anne got up and started to walk towards Lora, then went back and sat down again. “First he went away, uptown, I found him up there with a woman as old as you and me put together, and then in May he went out to Pennsylvania and got a job with the Pittsburgh office of that same oil company. He was out there alone; anyway I didn’t see anybody. God knows where he is now; down at the Federal Oil Company they won’t tell me anything, they say they don’t know.”

She stopped, her eyes levelled on Lora, and said with sudden shrill sharpness:

“I think you’re lying. You’ve seen him.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

“He used to talk about you and call you names and wonder about the baby.”

“How did he know there was one?”

“He didn’t. I don’t know.” Anne got up, took a step, and stood there drooping, all will visibly gone from her body, her face, her spirit. “You’ve got to tell me where he is, Lo, somebody has got to tell me, I’ve done everything I can. I am going to kill myself, really I am.”

“You’re not pregnant are you?”

“No. I thought it was better to be careful, after the way he acted with you...”

“Have you got any money?”

“Yes.” Anne’s shoulders lifted a fraction of an inch and dropped again. “I get money from home.”

Lora regarded her a moment in silence. She sighed, shook herself a little, went to the front window and called out to Eileen to bring the baby in, and then turned again to Anne:

“You’d better lie down a while. Later we’ll have something to eat and talk things over.”

For a month after that she had Anne on her hands. Lora’s old room upstairs was taken for her. She asked that she be permitted to take Eileen’s place in caring for the baby during Lora’s absences, but Lora firmly said no; and she gave Eileen private instructions never to leave Roy alone. She thought Anne was half crazy; there was no other way to account for her idiotic mooning over Steve Adams — over any man, for that matter, but particularly Steve. Of him nothing could be learned, he seemed this time to be gone for good, until one day Lora, nagged into it by Anne and sure that nothing would come of it, wrote a letter to the Federal Oil Company representing herself as Steve’s sister. Within a week a reply came stating that Stephen R. Adams had on July twenty-seventh been transferred to the Shanghai sales office. His mail would be forwarded. The next day, without warning or farewell, Anne disappeared. When Lora got home in the afternoon she was gone.

The little fool has actually made for China, Lora thought, and was convinced of it when no word came from her for months. Autumn arrived; the trees in the Square dropped their scrawny and grimy leaves; snow had fallen and the winter holidays come and gone, when one morning Lora found in the mail an engraved notice which stated that on January eleventh Miss Anne Whitman had been married to Mr. Ernest Joseph Seaver.