Seed on the Wind

She decided all at once, calmly, that a furnished room was out of the question. So was a hotel. She was damn good and sick and there was no use being stupid about it. For a single instant she was overwhelmed by the flash of an amazing suspicion: was there another one inside of her? Or maybe it had never really come out, maybe she had been wrong all the way through...

No, this was different, totally different. If she didn’t watch out she’d get hysterical and be no better than a lunatic. This was different; she was just sick. She sat a long while, considering, laboriously calculating this chance and that; then she opened her purse and removed each object from it, one by one, inspecting each in its turn and making a pile of them on the bench beside her. When she was through and the purse was empty she returned to it all but three things: a letter in an envelope, a printed card, and a little silver-backed mirror with initials engraved on it, LW. These she grasped in one hand, placed the purse securely under one arm, and walked down the aisle until she found a refuse can over against the wall. In it, into the midst of a pile of old newspapers and orange-skins, she deposited the envelope and card and mirror. Then she stopped a passing porter and asked to be directed to the bureau of information.

One of the men at the little circular desk in the middle of the vast hall looked up at her wearily.

“I’m sick and I’ve got to go to a hospital,” she said. “What do I do?”

He looked slightly wearier. “Travellers’ Aid second room through there,” he said, pointing. Then he straightened up and called past her shoulder, “Hey, take this lady to Travellers’ Aid.”

The redcap preceded her, walking so fast she almost lost him in the crowd. At the desk in the second room he touched his cap and left her. A man and woman were behind the desk, talking.

“I want to go to a hospital,” Lora said.

The woman looked at her. “What’s the trouble?”

“I’m sick and I haven’t any money.”

“You’re sick all right,” said the man.

“A charity ward is pretty bad,” said the woman. “Haven’t you any friends or relatives in the city? Do you know what it is that’s wrong?”

“Please don’t make me talk,” Lora pleaded. “Just send me to the nearest hospital. I have no friends.”

“I can’t do that till I know what’s wrong with you. Were you on a train?”

“Yes. I had a miscarriage on a train. Please hurry. Please let me sit down. The charity ward’s all right.”

“Have you got enough money to pay for a taxi?”

“Yes. Please hurry.”

The man had come through the desk gate and was standing beside her. “I’ll run her up to Presbyterian,” he said.

“I’ll have to phone first,” said the woman.

“You can phone after we’re gone. If you phone now they’ll say take her to Bellevue. She don’t want to go to Bellevue.”

“Ha, I know, it doesn’t matter about the old ugly ones,” said the woman.

“Please,” Lora said.

The man took her arm. “This way, the taxis are this way,” he said.

She was in the hospital three weeks. It was an acute inflammation, they told her, and that was all she ever learned about it, for she didn’t want to ask questions. Nor would she answer any: at first she refused even to give her name, then when they insisted on that and other details she invented one, Mary Scott she told them, but that was as far as she would go. Her home? Was she married? What train had she been on? Who was to be notified in case of emergency? Not bothering to argue, she merely smiled and shook her head until officially they gave it up. Thus without identity, invulnerable to official curiosity, she became mysterious: obviously either criminal or sublime. The nurses glanced at her speculatively as they passed, and the internes on their rounds lingered at her bedside. There she was, a perverse fish on a bank, flopped by her own will out of the soothing oblivious stream of history; it was at once offensive and fascinating. There were no more princesses, but she might be almost anything else. The petty and desperate insistence of society that no one under any circumstances shall lose his tag kept her on the defense up to the very minute she walked out of the hospital doors.

Even Dr. Nielsen, who saw her every day for the first week because her condition required it, and thereafter because she had aroused his interest, joined mildly in the hunt. “Come,” he said, “we know you haven’t told the truth. You couldn’t have had a miscarriage on the train. I’m discreet and it needn’t go on the records; you’d better tell me. In fact, Hornsby suggests that the circumstances require a report to the police. I’m not trying to frighten you; I talked him out of it.”

“Thank you, thank you so much,” Lora smiled. But she told Dr. Nielsen no more of her past than any of the others.