The Story of an Hour
The Story of an Hour
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 some one 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 her 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 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.
Some one 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 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.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had
died of heart disease—of joy that kills.
http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/library/storyofanhour.html
Komentar
Posting Komentar