........................................................by
Kate Chopin
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a
heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the
news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in
broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's
friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the
newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with
Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only
taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had
hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad
message.
She did not hear the story as many women have
heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept
at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of
grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one
follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a
comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical
exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house
the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious
breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his
wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her
faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and
there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west
facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the
cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her
throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob
in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose
lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull
stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches
of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a
suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was
waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and
elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her
through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was
beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she
was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white
slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered
word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under the
breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror
that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her
pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her
body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a
monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to
dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she
saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save
with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter
moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.
And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those
coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will
bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they
have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention
or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in
that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she
had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for
in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized
as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept
whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door
with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the
door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing,
Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill."
No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead
of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her
own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday
she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her
sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she
carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's
waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them
at the bottom.
Someone was opening the front door with a
latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained,
composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene
of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at
Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view
of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of
heart disease--of the joy that kills.