Seed on the Wind

It was he who solved her immediate and pressing problem, when she was well enough to leave, by getting a job for her through a friend of his who was a high official in the export sales department of the Federal Oil Company. Later, presumably, through that friend, if he was still curious, he learned at least her true name, for she decided to use it on the application form that was given her to fill out; but she never saw Dr. Nielsen again. From her brief local eminence as an insolent rebel against the demands of social responsibility, she was swallowed into the churning amorphous mass of a metropolitan digestive apparatus that assimilates daily much tougher and more unlikely material than a redheaded good-looking girl.

From nine till twelve-thirty and from one-thirty till five she sat at a telephone switchboard, and twice each month received the sum of fifty-five dollars. That was on account of the war, the other girls told her; three years before it would have been only forty. She had a room on West Thirty-fourth Street, a neat clean little room with a view of the river from the window. She ate breakfast there, an apple and a roll and milk; lunch was provided for its employees by the company, at cost they said with dignity; and for dinner she went usually to a little place not far from her room where they had good soup and plenty of bread and butter.

Five evenings a week she went to a business school. Dr. Nielsen’s friend, Mr. Pitkin, the high official, had said that if she learned stenography he would see that she was given a chance to get ahead; that offered the best opportunity, he explained. His secretary, who had been a stenographer only twelve years, got twenty-eight hundred a year. Good god, twelve years, Lora thought. Twelve years! Incredible; even more incredible that the secretary, a plump efficient person with intelligent brown eyes, looked contented, lively, and not at all decrepit. In twelve years, Lora reflected, she would be thirty-two. Well. At any rate she might as well learn it; she had to acquire some sort of competence beyond sticking brass pegs in little holes.

She did not at all know, that spring and summer, what she was looking forward to. But forward she must and would look, there was to be no glancing backward, no examination of that scar. Sometimes at night before she went to sleep it would be suddenly upon her like a flood, overwhelming her; her father’s presence and voice, her mother’s pallor and tears, Pete Halliday’s irresistible smile, all in a jumble, defying chronology, merging into a thick vapor of misery that for the moment overpowered her brain and stifled her. She would not fight it, feeling it was useless. She would lie on her back in the dark, perfectly still, her arms straight at her sides, thinking, it will go away, it might as well go away, for I’m not afraid of it and I’m not going to think about it. Some day someone is going to pay for it, that’s all. You’ll see.

Pete was dead probably. She had heard nothing, but he had been in the war over a year — angrily she stopped herself, What did it matter whether Pete was dead or not? No more of that.

Jostled by a passerby on the sidewalk one August evening, walking home from the office, to her astonishment she became suddenly aware that the daydream she had been bumped out of was a baby cradled in her arms. For ten blocks she had been carrying a baby, now in her arms, now inside of her, now beside her in bed nestling against her. Tommyrot! she exploded. Imbecile! That’s a swell idea, that is. Oh, grand. You damn fool. But before she got home the baby was back again, and this time she merely smiled at herself. Why not, if it’s fun, she thought. Sure it’s silly, but anything to amuse a poor girl alone in a great city. After that she accepted it whenever it came, and it came more and more often; rarely did she walk home without it. Idle at the switchboard she would sometimes be startled by the buzzer out of that dream; once at school in the evening the instructor asked her a question three times before she heard it.