The Story of an Hour

by Kate Chopin

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard suffered with heart trouble, great care was taken to tell her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her in broken sentences; hints that revealed the event while half hiding it. Her husband's friend, Richards, was there too, near her. He had been in the newspaper office when news of the railway disaster arrived, with Brent Mallard's name at the top of the list of "killed". He had only taken the time to make sure the story was true before hurrying to prevent any less careful, less gentle friend from giving the sad news.

She did not hear the story as many women have, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance. She cried at once with sudden, wild hopelessness in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief was over, she went away to her room alone. She would allow no-one to follow her.

A comfortable armchair stood, facing the open window. She dropped into this, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to move into her soul.

She could see in the street in front of her house the tops of trees that were awake with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a salesman was shouting about his goods. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless birds were singing in the trees. There were bits of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds in the west facing her window.

She sat with her head on the back 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 suggested strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed in the distance on one of those bits of blue sky. It was not a look of reflection, but showed a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, afraid. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, coming out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the perfumes, the colour that filled the air.

Now her chest rose and fell. She was beginning to recognise this thing that was approaching her, and she was trying to push it back with her will power – but she was as powerless as her two slim white hands would have been. When she gave up struggling, 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 pulse beat fast and the blood warmed and relaxed every part of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were happiness.

She knew that she would cry again when she saw her husband’s kind, gentle hands folded in death; the face that had never looked at her except with love, fixed and grey and dead. But she saw past that bitter moment the long years to come that would be completely hers. And she opened her arms 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 shaping hers and which men and women believe they have a right to push onto another person. A kind intention did not make this seem less a crime as she looked at it in that brief moment of clarity.

And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter? What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for against the independence which she suddenly recognised as her strongest desire!

"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

Josephine was kneeling in front of the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, asking to enter. "Louise, open the door! Please open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? Please open the door for me."

"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in life through that open window. Her imagination was running 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 that she had thought the same thing with horror.

Eventually she got up and opened the door to her sister. There was triumph in her eyes and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess. She held her sister's waist and together they went down the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Someone was opening the front door with a key. It was Brent Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, calmly carrying his briefcase and umbrella. He had been far from the accident and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's cry; at Richards' quick movement to stand between him and his wife.

But Richards was too late.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of the happiness that kills.