Seed on the Wind

The blankets were his last gift, and that was almost his last speech — at any rate the last which contained any friendly implications. More than four months were to pass before his final flight, months during which Lora often felt that if she were called upon for one more sacrifice — of pride, or convenience, or more especially of the skin of her defense against the scratches and lacerations of his suddenly hostile and alien claws — one more sacrifice for the sake of a breath of a hope which she scarcely dared believe in — she would — she would — well, she would do something. Only there was nothing to do; she was trapped. So without any outward sign she accepted the rather difficult conditions which followed upon Steve’s emancipation from his novitiate. His gifts ceased abruptly; within a month he had stopped entirely coming to the flat for dinner, though he still slept there. For a while he continued to give her money, a little now and then, but it was not long before that too stopped. She tried running a bill at the delicatessen shop, but at the end of the week he refused flatly to pay it, standing at the door with his hat on, on his way to the office, looking her straight in the eye and reminding her that she had said he was free to leave whenever he wished. “If I was gone I wouldn’t be paying your bills, would I?” he demanded, which of course was unanswerable. Lora, not bothering even to observe that the delicatessen account included the morning coffee and cream which he helped to consume, let him go without a reply, and then systematically and thoroughly went over everything in the house. When she got through she had a pile on the living-room table of varied and miscellaneous objects: an etching he had once bought for her, two little figures of carved ivory, a fur neck-piece, three pairs of gloves she had never worn, bracelets, earrings, finger rings, a fountain pen, fifteen or twenty books, a tiny gold compact. Then she stood and considered: what to do with them? She bethought herself of two girls in the flat on the ground floor whom she’d grown to know fairly well; one was Janet Poole, who did designs for wallpaper, and the other Anne Whitman, a slim pale quiet girl, younger than Janet, who was studying at a music school. She went down and rang the bell; Anne opened the door and invited her in.

“I can only stay a minute,” said Lora, “I just came down to ask you a favor. I have some things I’d like to leave with you, only I’m afraid it will be a bother, I’ll have to be coming in from time to time, it’s nothing that will take up any space to speak of, just a few small things...”

It sounds idiotic, Lora thought, I should have made up some kind of plausible excuse. Obviously Anne didn’t understand the unusual request, she looked puzzled; but she was very nice about it, it wouldn’t be any bother at all, she said, they had plenty of room. So Lora made three trips up and down the stairs with the new suitcase Steve had given her, on the last trip leaving the suitcase itself, in a closet in the girls’ bedroom. Anne helped her, declaring that Lora mustn’t overdo; she had known of Lora’s pregnancy for a month or more and was quite excited about it, asking all sorts of questions.

Three days later, a Sunday, Lora, happening to look out of the living-room window around midday, saw Steve’s roadster, in which she had in days gone by had so many pleasant rides, standing at the curb below. The day was sunny and extraordinarily mild for February, and the top was down; thus her view was unobstructed of Anne Whitman on the roadster’s seat, in a fur cap and coat, with Steve beside her warming up the engine. Lora drew slightly back from the window and watched them until the car jerked forward and rolled off down the street; then with a grimace she said aloud, “Damn the luck anyway,” and turned and went directly downstairs and rang the bell at the ground floor flat. Luck was with her here at least; Janet was at home, in a pink negligee and fur-lined slippers. Half an hour later everything which had three days previously been so laboriously carried down had been equally laboriously lugged back up. Janet thinks I’m crazy, maybe I am, Lora reflected as she put the things away in the two lower drawers of the bureau. Would Steve’s emancipated ideas extend to the appropriation of the gifts of his former tenderness? She would have to chance it.