by Kate Chopin
The day was much like that day a year ago when the leaves were falling and rain pouring steadily from a leaden sky which held no gleam, no promise. He had happened accidentally upon the package in that remote nook of her desk. And just as she herself had done a year ago, he carried it to the table and laid it down there, standing, staring with puzzled eyes at the message which confronted him:
“I leave this package to the care of my husband. With perfect faith in his loyalty and his love, I ask him to destroy it unopened.”
She had made no mistake; every line of his face — no longer young — spoke loyalty and honesty, and his eyes were as faithful as a dog’s and as loving. He was a tall, powerful man, standing there in the firelight, with shoulders that stooped a little, and hair that was growing somewhat thin and gray, and a face that was distinguished, and must have been handsome when he smiled. But he was slow. “Destroy it unopened,” he reread, half-aloud, “but why unopened?”
He took the package again in his hands, and turning it about and feeling it, discovered that it was composed of many letters tightly packed together.
So here were letters which she was asking him to destroy unopened. She had never seemed in her lifetime to have had a secret from him. He knew her to have been cold and passionless, but true, and watchful of his comfort and his happiness. Might he not be holding in his hands the secret of some other one, which had been confided to her and which she had promised to guard? But, no, she would have indicated the fact by some additional word or line. The secret was her own, something contained in these letters, and she wanted it to die with her.
If he could have thought of her as on some distant shadowy shore waiting for him throughout the years with outstretched hands to come and join her again, he would not have hesitated. With hopeful confidence he would have thought “in that blessed meeting-time, soul to soul, she will tell me all; till then I can wait and trust.” But he could not think of her in any far-off paradise awaiting him. He felt that there was no smallest part of her anywhere in the universe, more than there had been before she was born into the world. But she had embodied herself with terrible significance in an intangible wish, uttered when life still coursed through her veins; knowing that it would reach him when the annihilation of death was between them, but uttered with all confidence in its power and potency. He was moved by the splendid daring of the act, which at the same time exalted him and lifted him above the head of common mortals.
What secret save one could a woman choose to have die with her? As quickly as the suggestion came to his mind, so swiftly did the man-instinct of possession stir in his blood. His fingers cramped about the package in his hands, and he sank into a chair beside the table. The agonizing suspicion that perhaps another had shared with him her thoughts, her affections, her life, deprived him for a swift instant of honor and reason. He thrust the end of his strong thumb beneath the string which, with a single turn would have yielded— “with perfect faith in your loyalty and your love.” It was not the written characters addressing themselves to the eye; it was like a voice speaking to his soul. With a tremor of anguish he bowed his head down upon the letters.
A half-hour passed before he lifted his head. An unspeakable conflict had raged within him, but his loyalty and his love had conquered. His face was pale and deep-lined with suffering, but there was no more hesitancy to be seen there.
He did not for a moment think of casting the thick package into the flames to be licked by the fiery tongues, and charred and half-revealed to his eyes. That was not what she meant. He arose, and taking a heavy bronze paper-weight from the table, bound it securely to the package. He walked to the window and looked out into the street below. Darkness had come, and it was still raining. He could hear the rain dashing against the window-panes, and could see it falling through the dull yellow rim of light cast by the lighted street lamp.
He prepared himself to go out, and when quite ready to leave the house thrust the weighted package into the deep pocket of his top-coat.
He did not hurry along the street as most people were doing at that hour, but walked with a long, slow, deliberate step, not seeming to mind the penetrating chill and rain driving into his face despite the shelter of his umbrella.
His dwelling was not far removed from the business section of the city; and it was not a great while before he found himself at the entrance of the bridge that spanned the river — the deep, broad, swift, black river dividing two States. He walked on and out to the very centre of the structure. The wind was blowing fiercely and keenly. The darkness where he stood was impenetrable. The thousands of lights in the city he had left seemed like all the stars of heaven massed together, sinking into some distant mysterious horizon, leaving him alone in a black, boundless universe.
He drew the package from his pocket and leaning as far as he could over the broad stone rail of the bridge, cast it from him into the river. It fell straight and swiftly from his hand. He could not follow its descent through the darkness, nor hear its dip into the water far below. It vanished silently; seemingly into some inky unfathomable space. He felt as if he were flinging it back to her in that unknown world whither she had gone.
III
An hour or two later he sat at his table in the company of several men whom he had invited that day to dine with him. A weight had settled upon his spirit, a conviction, a certitude that there could be but one secret which a woman would choose to have die with her. This one thought was possessing him. It occupied his brain, keeping it nimble and alert with suspicion. It clutched his heart, making every breath of existence a fresh moment of pain.
The men about him were no longer the friends of yesterday; in each one he discerned a possible enemy. He attended absently to their talk. He was remembering how she had conducted herself toward this one and that one; striving to recall conversations, subtleties of facial expression that might have meant what he did not suspect at the moment, shades of meaning in words that had seemed the ordinary interchange of social amenities.
He led the conversation to the subject of women, probing these men for their opinions and experiences. There was not one but claimed some infallible power to command the affections of any woman whom his fancy might select. He had heard the empty boast before from the same group and had always met it with good-humored contempt. But to-night every flagrant, inane utterance was charged with a new meaning, revealing possibilities that he had hitherto never taken into account.
He was glad when they were gone. He was eager to be alone, not from any desire or intention to sleep. He was impatient to regain her room, that room in which she had lived a large portion of her life, and where he had found those letters. There must surely be more of them somewhere, he thought; some forgotten scrap, some written thought or expression lying unguarded by an inviolable command.
At the hour when he usually retired for the night he sat himself down before her writing desk and began the search of drawers, slides, pigeonholes, nooks and corners. He did not leave a scrap of anything unread. Many of the letters which he found were old; some he had read before; others were new to him. But in none did he find a faintest evidence that his wife had not been the true and loyal woman he had always believed her to be. The night was nearly spent before the fruitless search ended. The brief, troubled sleep which he snatched before his hour for rising was freighted with feverish, grotesque dreams, through all of which he could hear and could see dimly the dark river rushing by, carrying away his heart, his ambitions, his life.
But it was not alone in letters that women betrayed their emotions, he thought. Often he had known them, especially when in love, to mark fugitive, sentimental passages in books of verse or prose, thus expressing and revealing their own hidden thought. Might she not have done the same?
Then began a second and far more exhausting and arduous quest than the first, turning, page by page, the volumes that crowded her room — books of fiction, poetry, philosophy. She had read them all; but nowhere, by the shadow of a s
ign, could he find that the author had echoed the secret of her existence — the secret which he had held in his hands and had cast into the river.
He began cautiously and gradually to question this one and that one, striving to learn by indirect ways what each had thought of her. Foremost he learned she had been unsympathetic because of her coldness of manner. One had admired her intellect; another her accomplishments; a third had thought her beautiful before disease claimed her, regretting, however, that her beauty had lacked warmth of color and expression. She was praised by some for gentleness and kindness, and by others for cleverness and tact. Oh, it was useless to try to discover anything from men! He might have known. It was women who would talk of what they knew.
They did talk, unreservedly. Most of them had loved her; those who had not had held her in respect and esteem.
IV
And yet, and yet, “there is but one secret which a woman would choose to have die with her,” was the thought which continued to haunt him and deprive him of rest. Days and nights of uncertainty began slowly to unnerve him and to torture him. An assurance of the worst that he dreaded would have offered him peace most welcome, even at the price of happiness.
It seemed no longer of any moment to him that men should come and go; and fall or rise in the world; and wed and die. It did not signify if money came to him by a turn of chance or eluded him. Empty and meaningless seemed to him all devices which the world offers for man’s entertainment. The food and the drink set before him had lost their flavor. He did not longer know or care if the sun shone or the clouds lowered about him. A cruel hazard had struck him there where he was weakest, shattering his whole being, leaving him with but one wish in his soul, one gnawing desire, to know the mystery which he had held in his hands and had cast into the river.
One night when there were no stars shining he wandered, restless, upon the streets. He no longer sought to know from men and women what they dared not or could not tell him. Only the river knew. He went and stood again upon the bridge where he had stood many an hour since that night when the darkness then had closed around him and engulfed his manhood.
Only the river knew. It babbled, and he listened to it, and it told him nothing, but it promised all. He could hear it promising him with caressing voice, peace and sweet repose. He could hear the sweep, the song of the water inviting him.
A moment more and he had gone to seek her, and to join her and her secret thought in the immeasurable rest.
TWO SUMMERS AND TWO SOULS
I
He was a fine, honest-looking fellow; young, impetuous, candid; and he was bidding her good-bye.
It was in the country, where she lived, and where her soul and senses were slowly unfolding, like the languid petals of some white and fragrant blossom.
Five weeks — only five weeks he had known her. They seemed to him a flash, an eternity, a rapturous breath, an existence — a re-creation of light and life, and soul and senses. He tried to tell her something of this when the hour of parting came. But he could only say that he loved her; nothing else that he wanted to say seemed to mean so much as this. She was glad, and doubtful, and afraid, and kept reiterating:
“Only five weeks! so short! and love and life are so long.”
“Then you don’t love me!”
“I don’t know. I want to be with you — near you.”
“Then you do love me!”
“I don’t know. I thought love meant something different — powerful, overwhelming. No. I am afraid to say.”
He talked like a mad man then, and troubled and bewildered her with his incoherence. He begged for love as a mendicant might beg for alms, without reserve and without shame, and the passion within him gave an unnatural ring to his voice and a new, strange look to his eyes that chilled her unawakened senses and sent her shivering within herself.
“No, no, no!” was all she could say to him.
He willed not to believe it; he had felt so sure of her. And she was not one to play fast and loose, with those honest eyes whose depths had convinced while they ensnared him.
“Don’t send me away like this,” he pleaded, “without a crumb of hope to feed on and keep me living.”
She dismissed him with a promise that it might not be final. “Who knows! I will think; but leave me alone. Don’t trouble me; and I will see — Good-bye.”
He did not once look back after leaving her, but walked straight on with a step that was quick and firm from habit. But he was almost blind and senseless from pain.
She stayed watching him cross the lawn and the long stretch of meadow beyond. She watched him till the deepening shadows of the coming night crept between them. She stayed troubled, uncertain; tearful because she did not know!
II
“I remember quite well the words I told you a year ago when we parted,” she wrote to him. “I told you I did not know, I wanted to think, I even wanted to pray, but I believe I did not tell you that. And now, will you believe me when I say that I have not been able to think — hardly to pray. I have only been able to feel. When you went away that day you seemed to leave me in an empty world. I kept saying to myself, ‘to-morrow or next day it will be different; it will be with me as it was before he came.’ Then your letters coming — three of them, one upon the other — gave voice to the empty places. You were everywhere after that. And still I doubted, and I was cautious; for it has seemed to me that the love which is to hold two beings together through life must be love indeed.
“But what is the use of saying more than that I love you. I would not care to live without you; I think I could not. Come back to me.”
III
When this letter reached him he was in preparation for a journey with a party of friends. It came with a batch of business letters, and in the midst of the city’s rush and din which he had meant in another day to leave behind him.
He was all unprepared for its coming and unable at once to master the shock of it, that bewildered and unnerved him.
Then came back to him the recollection of pain — a remembrance always faint and unreal; but there was complete inability to revive the conditions that had engendered it.
How he had loved her and how he had suffered! especially during those first days, and even months, when he slept and waked dreaming of her; when his letters remained unanswered, and when existence was but a name for bitter endurance.
How long had it lasted? Gould he tell? The end began when he could wake in the morning without the oppression, and free from the haunting pain. The end was that day, that hour or second, when he thought of her without emotion and without regret; as he thought of her now, with unstirred pulses. There was even with him now the touch of something keener than indifference — something engendered by revolt.
It was as if one loved, and dead and forgotten had returned to life; with the strange illusion that the rush of existence had halted while she lay in her grave; and with the still more singular delusion that love is eternal.
He did not hesitate as though confronted by a problem. He did not think of leaving the letter unnoticed. He did not think of telling her the truth. If he thought of these expedients, it was only to dismiss them.
He simply went to her. As he would have gone unflinchingly to meet the business obligation that he knew would leave him bankrupt.
THE UNEXPECTED
When Randall, for a brief absence, left his Dorothea, whom he was to marry after a time, the parting was bitter; the enforced separation seemed to them too cruel an ordeal to bear. The good-by dragged with lingering kisses and sighs, and more kisses and more clinging till the last wrench came.
He was to return at the close of the month. Daily letters, impassioned and interminable, passed between them.
He did not return at the close of the month; he was delayed by illness. A heavy cold, accompanied by fever, contracted in some unaccountable way, held him to his bed. He hoped it would be over and that he would rejoin her in a week. But this was a stubborn cold, that
seemed not to yield to familiar treatment; yet the physician was not discouraged, and promised to have him on his feet in a fortnight.
All this was torture to the impatient Dorothea; and if her parents had permitted, she surely would have hastened to the bedside of her beloved.
For a long interval he could not write himself. One day he seemed better; another day a “fresh cold” seized him with relentless clutch; and so a second month went by, and Dorothea had reached the limit of her endurance.
Then a tremulous scrawl came from him, saying he would be obliged to pass a season at the south; but he would first revisit his home, if only for a day, to clasp his dearest one to his heart, to appease the hunger for her presence, the craving for her lips that had been devouring him through all the fever and pain of this detestable illness.
Dorothea had read his impassioned letters almost to tatters. She had sat daily gazing for hours upon his portrait, which showed him to be an almost perfect specimen of youthful health, strength and manly beauty.
She knew he would be altered in appearance — he had prepared her, and had even written that she would hardly know him. She expected to see him ill and wasted; she would not seem shocked; she would not let him see astonishment or pain in her face. She was in a quiver of anticipation, a sensuous fever of expectancy till he came.
She sat beside him on the sofa, for after the first delirious embrace he had been unable to hold himself upon his tottering feet, and had sunk exhausted in a corner of the sofa. He threw his head back upon the cushions and stayed, with closed eyes, panting; all the strength of his body had concentrated in the clasp — the grasp with which he clung to her hand.
She stared at him as one might look upon a curious apparition which inspired wonder and mistrust rather than fear. This was not the man who had gone away from her; the man she loved and had promised to marry. What hideous transformation had he undergone, or what devilish transformation was she undergoing in contemplating him? His skin was waxy and hectic, red upon the cheek-bones. His eyes were sunken; his features pinched and prominent; and his clothing hung loosely upon his wasted frame. The lips with which he had kissed her so hungrily, and with which he was kissing her now, were dry and parched, and his breath was feverish and tainted.