Seed on the Wind

I’m making a fool of myself, go to hell, Lora thought, and climbed down the steps of the car to the platform. At the gate at the platform’s end was a waiting throng; she saw uniforms, she thought, but walked straight through with her chin up and was not stopped. In the station she conquered the impulse to break into a run; and a few moments later, safely in the taxicab, she first became aware that she was in fact ill, almost to the point of collapse. It was a terrifying and overwhelming wave of physical despair, worse than any pain; her nerves and muscles and veins were giving way, impersonally and inevitably, like a beam subjected to a load beyond the maximum calculations of the engineers. She might die, that was all right. But also she might not die; the cab driver might find her helpless and insensible there on the seat, and somehow they’d find out who she was and send her back. Was there anything in her purse that would tell them? She would throw it out of the window, at once, while she could still move. Then what, with her money gone? Give him the address of the apartment, where Cecelia was? Ha, she was not such a fool. She bent over double, with her head touching her knees, by instinct or pure luck, for that brought a sharp stabbing pain that roused her and made her gasp. When the taxi reached its destination and the driver opened the door she was sitting up straight with her clenched fists in her lap. She got her purse open and handed him some bills.

“Will you get me a ticket to New York on the next train,” she said.

He kept his squinting knowing eyes on her.

“The next one’s more than an hour,” he said. “Seven-twenty. It’s no good. The fast ones are all gone.”

“And a lower berth,” she said. “I don’t feel very well. I want a lower berth.”

He made no reply, but turned and disappeared into the station. A few minutes later he came out again and handed her the tickets and change; she put them carefully in her purse and closed it.

“Can I wait here till it goes?” she said.

“Sure, in the waiting room. They got seats, and there’s a place you can lay down.”

“I mean here in the cab.”

“Sure, if you pay for it. There won’t be no heat though with the engine off.”

“How much?”

“Three dollars.”

She decided it was worth it; she couldn’t risk the waiting room. Twice during the hour and a half she felt herself going again; each time she tried the trick of doubling over with her head on her knees, and was convulsed back into life. When the driver finally opened the door she let him help her out and held his arm through the station and down the platform clear to the steps of the pullman. There he turned her over to the porter, squinted at her, “Good luck, lady,” and went off shaking his head. The porter asked her doubtfully if she wanted the berth made up at once; she nodded and sank into a seat at the end of the car. A little later he came for her and helped her down the aisle; she was dimly aware that the train had begun to move and that other passengers were staring at her. Sprawled out in the berth, face down, with all her clothes on, she heard a man’s voice, in a moment of extreme clearness that came just before consciousness departed, asking the porter if a glass of brandy might not be helpful to the lady in lower six. But some time later, she did not know when, only it seemed like the middle of the night, she came to again, half freezing. She got her dress and shoes and stockings off, and the porter brought extra blankets. Interminably she lay under them numb as ice, not suffering for she was not feeling anything; but at length she got frightened and called the porter again and told him desperately that of course he did not have a hot water bag. He disappeared and soon returned with one so hot she could not touch it, wrapped in a towel. As its warmth called her blood back to duty her body, relinquishing by slow degrees its tenseness, ached and throbbed in protest; for hours, it seemed to her, it fought against renascence, then gradually it surrendered, relaxed completely, and she slept.

Late the next afternoon — early evening, rather, for the eager January darkness had fallen three hours before — she stood in the middle of the vast hall of Grand Central Station. There were no seats. A porter directed her to the waiting room, and there she sank into a vacant corner of a bench and turned to the list of furnished rooms in the newspaper she had just bought. She had resolved not to waste money on a hotel even for one night. Not many rooms were listed, and she decided she hadn’t got the right paper; in Chicago, she remembered, it was the Globe. However, one of these would probably do; too bad she knew nothing about neighborhoods. Didn’t railroad stations in big cities have bureaux of information where you could ask questions like that? She twisted around on the bench to look for signs, then suddenly came back again straight front and sat quite still.

If it hurt her like that again she would scream or faint.