The
Story of An Hour
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 latch key. 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.
