Seed on the Wind

That was the beginning of April, and Lora had entered upon a new experience. She had sat at a restaurant table and seen Pete Halliday’s hand resting on the cloth before her, within reach; and later, alone in her room, had shivered with pleasure at the thought of that hand touching her. She did not like the feeling and assuredly did not invite it, but try as she might to replace it with more comfortable reflections, such as the birthday present soon to be sent to her mother or Grace Ranley’s recipe for fudge, there the hand was back again, on her shoulder or arm — even, if not caught in time, on her leg or her breast — the skin shrinking and tingling with horrified delight, her throat obstructed so that she had to gulp two or three times to get her breath normal again. It created in her a curious sort of panic, more confused than frightened; she simply didn’t understand it. Its threat was much more profound than anything she had guessed the existence of. Factually she was anything but ignorant; two of her school friends had already become mothers before she left home; another had been disgraced and the details were known to her; while she had never actually seen a man naked she knew the geography of the male form as well as she did that of Illinois, her native state; and she knew that girls trembled and lost their heads — lucky if that was all — under certain trying conditions. She herself had momentarily trembled now and then, having indeed on one occasion been sufficiently aroused so that by way of reaction she almost cracked the young man’s head in two. But this was so different that it was not the same thing at all. Pete Halliday had not once offered to touch her; she had no reason to suppose that the idea had ever occurred to him; and yet she would sit at night on the little chair at the dressing-table she shared with Cecelia, her hair down over her shoulders like a rich dark shawl, the brush forgotten and idle in her hand, lost in a vague but overwhelming expectancy that seemed to begin in her stomach and spread irresistibly — destroying even the wish to resist — throughout every drop of her blood and every ounce of her flesh. It came with greatest force just then and there, with the hairbrush in her hand, for he had used that brush himself one evening on his own tangled hair, having walked four miles in Chicago’s March wind with no hat.

“It won’t help any,” he had declared, jabbing the bristles violently into the disorderly mass. “Anyway it’s better not; when it once gets good and matted it can’t blow around so much.”

“Let me do it,” Lora offered. He grinned and sat down.

With the aid of a comb she finally got the tangles out and achieved a semblance of order. She detected a salty odor, she thought, and wondered if the ocean smelled like that. She kept her hands indifferent and perfectly steady; it was an effort, but a choking feeling in her throat made her aware how perilously near she was to betraying herself. Until that moment, indeed, until she felt herself almost overpowered by the salty odor from his hair, there had been no real alarm. She had to be careful about her face too, for he could see her in the mirror.

“It’s too dry, may I wet it?” she said.

“And me with no hat, and going out into that wind? Delilah with her scissors wanted only castration, you would take life itself. I prefer tonsorial chaos to pneumonia.”

“Does castration mean cutting off hair?”

“Symbolically, yes.” He grinned at her reflection in the mirror. “It makes the hair fall out, they say.”

“I don’t know much about words. I wish I did.”

“You don’t need to. You know something much more important than words. Words are no good.”

She wanted to ask what it was that she knew more important than words, but was afraid further to trust her voice. As she placed the comb and brush on the dressing-table she saw some of his hairs, lighter in color than her own, clinging to the bristles. Cecelia will notice that, she thought, and picked the comb and brush up again and put them away in a drawer.