The Story of an Hour
Text 6
Kate Chopin
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 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.
Будь-те первым, поделитесь мнением с остальными.