Seed on the Wind

When he had gone she dropped into her chair again, and heard his car backing out and swinging into the road. What she had to do, at once, was to get her mind straightened out and find out what was going on. That seemed to present considerable difficulty, for it wouldn’t fasten on anything. After having successfully evaded complicated questions all her life, she suddenly found herself confronted by several all at once, each demanding immediate consideration, and she knew not where to begin or what direction to take. There was her father; or rather, there he wasn’t. That fact was of profound significance... and yet... it was of no significance at all. But he had always been dead! It was incredible. All those years, with Steve and Albert and Max and Lewis... even at the very first, as she lay on the hospital bed in New York, gathering unconsciously her forces for a struggle that would last as long as her breath lasted, he had been dead. Really dead. Gone. A ghost had lived in her... all that had been a ghost. Her mind darted back over the years, pouncing on this situation then that, feeling it and weighing it in the light of this amazing disembodiment. What would she have said here, how would she have acted there?

Rot, she said to herself of a sudden, impatiently; that was all poppycock, it would have mattered not at all. More to the point to consider what was going to happen now. But for some reason that consideration couldn’t be made to stick; it shied off from her intention like a wise old crow from a gun under cover. What was she going to do now? Well, nothing. What was there to do? Lewis would attend to Pete, she felt sure of that, it would be arranged somehow; there was nothing for her to worry about. But she could not rid herself of the feeling that she was immediately confronted by the necessity of making the most important decision of her life; that this was indeed the focus toward which all the radii of her character and of the past years were pointed, and that the direction they would take from this focal point into the future was put strictly up to her and the decision must be hers. Regarding this feeling about the future her common sense spoke as it did of her fancies about her suddenly dead father and the past. Rot; poppycock; where was the dilemma? For Lewis maybe it was difficult; poor dear Lewis, he would hate to give in to Pete, he would hate to give in to anybody, for he was accustomed to having his own way. Not so long ago he had said that he had to buy everything he got; well, it would be hard to pay the price this time, but he would pay. For his reputation, for his son, possibly even for something else — an extension of his privileges? Oh. That. No, decidedly not. She was sorry she had offered him hope in that direction. Decidedly not that...

The doorbell rang.

Startled, she glanced at her watch. She would have guessed that an hour or more had passed since Lewis had left, and was surprised to see that it had not been more than fifteen or twenty minutes; it was only a little past eleven. She went to the door and was minded to call out to ask who it was, but after a moment’s hesitation she opened it, pulling it wide with a sweep of her arm; and when she saw Pete Halliday standing there on the stone terrace in the shaft of light that shot out at him through the door, she knew what it was she had to decide.

XVII

Inside, with the door closed, after throwing his coat on a chair, Pete asked abruptly:

“Did you expect me back?”

Lora shook her head. “Why should I?”

“Intuition,” he grinned. “You might have, since there’s no train for nearly an hour.”

“You’ve been to the station and back?”

“Sure. When I walk fast I jerk a bit — souvenir of the war — but I can still get along.”

“Well. You have thirty minutes to wait. You may as well come in and sit down.”

He followed her into the living room, back to the chairs in front of the fire. She was thinking, I shouldn’t have let him in, I’ve got to have more time, I won’t say a word and just wait for him to go, it wasn’t fair for him to come back like this...

“It’s crazy not to wear gloves,” Pete was saying. He stood close to the fire, warming his hands, exactly as he had done when he had entered with Lewis two hours before. “You can’t walk satisfactorily with your hands in your pockets, and nowadays it takes a couple of miles or more to get my blood going enough to reach my fingers. Not age, surely; I’m not that far gone; I think it must be another trench memento. It thickened my brain and thinned my blood.”

He paused, rubbing his hands, and Lora inquired politely how long he had been in France.

“Four months and eleven days after the armistice. Then I went back again. But I’m sorry I mentioned it. It’s not fit to talk about.”

“You came back here then?”