Seed on the Wind

But they both went with her through the snow-covered yard, down the walk to the curb, and stood there gazing after her till the cab turned the corner two blocks away. She saw them through the cab window, but somewhat dimly, for she was beginning to feel cold and faint again. She kept saying to herself, if once I get on the train I’m all right.

It was not so bad. The ticket-seller recognized her and was obviously surprised. Perhaps others did; she looked at no one. In a few minutes the train arrived and she went to the platform and got on, pulling herself up by clinging to the iron railings. There was an empty seat not far from the door and she sank into the corner of it and let her head go back. Her feet were terribly cold, there was an aching hurt inside of her, and her head was whirling madly, but as the train jerked forward she turned a little to look out of the window.

XV

If Lora’s mind had been consecrated to the preservation of enigmas a considerable portion of her waking thoughts, as well as her dreams, from her twentieth to her thirtieth year, might easily have been devoted to the several questionable aspects of her management of life during that period which began when Pete Halliday accosted her at Mrs. Ranley’s party, and ended when she sank into a seat in the day coach of the Chicago express. But in the first place she never at any time had the slightest idea that life was susceptible, in any broad sense, to management; and in the second place enigmas bored her. With her the fact that a question was complicated and difficult was proof that it deserved only to be ignored; and if the question were posed by the past instead of the present or the immediate future it wasn’t worthwhile even to listen to it. So in the hospital bed in New York she not only made no attempt to retrace to their sources the threads of accident and design that had led her into catastrophe, but even devised no solution of her present difficulties until one was offered to her through the interest of Doctor Nielsen; the day she looked out of the window and saw Anne Whitman and Steve Adams drive off in his roadster she went downstairs to get the things she had so carefully deposited in Anne’s room only three days earlier, and then calmly arranged herself for her afternoon nap; the broken baby-carriage wheel, which Albert Scher, his pockets inside out, despairingly and clumsily repaired with picture wire, produced in her one sole reaction, an added caution in avoiding bumps and negotiating curbs; when Max Kadish died she let his family take his body without a struggle, not enough interested in Albert’s feeling of outrage to try to comprehend it; and when Lewis Kane insisted that the four-page contract be signed before they proceeded to the execution of their project she would have affixed her name without reading more than a paragraph or two if he had not made her go through it from beginning to end. She kept the copy he gave her though, in a wooden box which contained an assortment of trinkets, some sketches Albert had made of her, a poem Max had written, and her snapshots.

She had been called a whore twice: once by Steve Adams and once by Max’s sister Leah. That created no problem whatever. She knew what a whore was of course: a woman who lets a man go to bed with her for money — just as a rug is a piece of carpet you put on the floor without tacking it down, or a doctor is a man who treats people when they’re sick. That she should have been called a whore neither offended nor amused her; it was simply nonsense. She had entirely forgotten that Albert Scher had once called her a prostitute, but then she seldom bothered to remember what Albert said on any subject. She had a suspicion that he remembered mighty little of it himself.

She was surprised that Albert and Lewis Kane became good friends and apparently had a good opinion of each other. This happened after she and the children had moved to the country, to the house on the edge of the village of Maidstone which Lewis paid for, with the title in her name.

She never felt that she understood what people were trying to do or why they were doing it, but Lewis Kane especially was a puzzle. He would prepare an elaborate contract, with intricate provisions against every imaginable circumstance, regarding a child not yet born, not conceived even; and on the other hand he would pay thousands of dollars for a house, with lawns and gardens and a garage, a meadow and a grove of birch trees, and put it in her name apparently without a thought. She could mortgage it or sell it or give it away, anything she wanted to. That seemed to her stupid; when one day she told him so he merely smiled and said she couldn’t do any of those things.

“Why not?” she demanded. “I own it.”

“Try it.”

“Oh. I see. You’ve done something legal.”

“Not at all. Just try it. Tomorrow morning, say.”

“But I don’t want to tomorrow morning. There’s no reason.”