IV

After his wife’s death, Fred Clark went to live with his brother Philip

and Phil’s wife, Myrtle. Fred missed his wife a great deal, especially

during the first few months after her death. A companionship of ten

years—and as close a companionship as a married couple, living together

in a city apartment, without children, are bound to have, is not easily

forgotten.

But, in a few months, Fred grew accustomed to life at Phil’s house,

which was not much different from his old life. It was the same social

stratum. Fred enjoyed the company of his two little nephews and liked

to bring small presents home to them when he came in early on Saturday

afternoon. He got along quite well with Myrtle, a pleasant-faced

pale woman, who was glad of the extra money that Fred paid into the

housekeeping fund.

Fred’s share of the expenses, as proportioned by Phil, was much less

than he had ever paid for the upkeep of his own apartment and he was

able to begin saving money immediately after the funeral expenses were

paid.

Often, when he was alone in his room, Fred thought of Anna and of her

death.

At first he had been too startled, too numbed into silence to think

that there had to be a reason for her suicide. It had seemed more like

an accidental death, something that had taken Anna unawares as it had

taken him. He and Anna had shared so many of their sensations that it

seemed hard for Fred to believe that Anna had done this thing herself.

But, gradually, the unreality of the situation wore away and Fred

came to know that Anna was really dead—and by her own hand. And, as

he realized that she had killed herself, at the same time came the

realization of the motive for it, the only possible motive. Anna had

killed herself because she was poor! It had been under the burden of a

continued poverty that must have eaten into her spirit as he had often

felt it eat into his, that Anna had decided not to live any more. Anna

had never said anything to Fred about it. He was surprised, now, that

she never had—for he thought that she had told him everything. And yet,

he had felt the same thing so often himself that he was not surprised

to find that Anna had felt it and that it had been too much for her.

They had never really experienced the pangs of poverty, it is true.

Fred felt that it would have been easier to bear if they had. He had

always “done well,” in that he had made a living. Each month, by

hurrying around to dozens of little, retail groceries, he had sold

enough spices to maintain his simple household.

But each month there had been the fear that, perhaps, there wouldn’t be

enough for the month to come.

Each month some household article had advanced in price and had to be

purchased less frequently or not at all. If he and Anna went to the

theatre—balcony seats—there could be no other luxuries that week or the

week that followed. Even a guest in to dinner—and the Clarks had little

company—made a difference in the household money. New shoes were to

be talked over, several weeks ahead, at the dinner table. A new suit

meant that they had to start saving for it a month or two in advance,

and, if one made a mistake and bought the wrong suit, which happened

quite often enough, the suit had to be worn just the same, throughout

the season. Fred had to look neat all the time. And Anna had a certain

position to uphold too. She had to prove to “the girls” and to the rest

of her small world, that she was the wife of a prosperous city salesman.

Anna was not extravagant. Fred knew that. He could picture her,

brow-knitted, looking over small household bills, trying to find which

could be reduced without radically altering a fairly comfortable manner

of living. Anna cleaned her own gloves and her own thin waists. Outside

of a few ice cream soda “treats” for “the girls” she spent little money

foolishly.

Fred knew that Anna had always been a true wife to him. He knew that

he was the only man she had ever cared about and that she had cared

for him sincerely and devotedly. He knew that there could have been no

other trouble. He knew only too well why Anna died.

Fred had felt like that—himself. He and Anna must have lain on the same

bird’s-eye maple bed and thought the same things about living. Only,

Anna had ended it and he had kept on.

He hadn’t wanted Anna to work. He didn’t believe that married women

ought to have positions. A woman’s place is in the home, he always

maintained, and a position for Anna, as a possible way out of their

poverty, had never entered his mind.

But, how often he had wished for money, for some of the smaller,

cheaper luxuries! He had often gone to sleep wondering how many years

more he could keep up the strain of spice-selling, the constant

hammering of it, the continued striving to make a living. Always, in

the end, he felt himself beaten, saw himself, before he had reached

old age, being overtaken by real poverty, finding that he was unable

to sell enough spices to support himself and Anna. There was nothing

else he could do as well. He knew that. Selling, selling, day after

day, just for the privilege of living in a little, stuffy apartment and

never enough left over to put some by. No wonder the outlook had been

too much for Anna. He hadn’t known that she had felt deeply about it—or

cared. And she had cared, so very much.

Now that Anna was dead, things were different. Fred wondered if Anna

ever looked down from Up There and saw that her sacrifice had not been

in vain. The burden of supporting two was lifted. He paid Myrtle each

week, bought little things for the boys and little extras for himself

that he never could have afforded before—a more expensive brand of

cigarette, a new cane, some collars of an odd shape, and each week he

put a little money into a savings account.

Fred felt years younger. He was preparing for old age. There was

something to look ahead to. But—to have kept on the other way ...

trudging always to a poorer future.... It had looked mighty black. Too

black, sometimes. Fred had considered, often enough, the very thing

that Anna had done. He had been insured for three thousand dollars, in

her name, and he felt that her sisters would both rather look out for

her—they had good homes—and she could have stayed with them and gone to

work at an easy job, if necessary. It seemed such a cowardly thing to

do—to step from under, and he had never quite got to it, after all. And

now—he was free.

But Anna—wasn’t she free, too? Hadn’t she taken the way out, as she saw

it, a way that meant no more scraping and saving, no more using up of

left-overs, of planning for new bargain shoes three weeks before the

soles ran through the old ones? It was sad enough, losing Anna, but

when he thought it over, Fred understood perfectly. It was the simplest

solution. He didn’t blame Anna at all. Compared to living on, doing

without nice things, planning to keep on doing without them, and with

the strain drawing tighter and tighter, Anna had certainly chosen the

better way.

V

On the morning that she committed suicide, Anna Clark waked up at

seven. The round nickeled clock on the bird’s-eye maple dresser awoke

her as usual. She yawned and stretched her arms above her head as she

did every morning. Then she nudged Fred, sleeping rather noisily with

his mouth not quite tightly closed, as he always slept. Then, as she

never missed doing, Anna got up and shut off the alarm, went into the

bathroom, hung up the towels that Fred had thrown on the floor the

night before, and took a hurried bath. She put on her “morning clothes”

that hung in the disorderly, tightly-crowded closet. They differed from

her “best clothes” in that the cheap lace edging of the underthings was

badly worn and that, instead of a dark skirt and a georgette waist—her

usual afternoon outfit—Anna wore a checked gingham dress. Anna had

three morning dresses. Two were blue and white and one pink and white.

The pink and white one was slightly faded. By wearing aprons over them,

when she cooked, one dress looked plenty clean enough to wear mornings,

and when she got dinner, for a whole week.

After she had bathed, Anna went back into the bedroom to dress and

again waked Fred, who always fell asleep after the first waking. This

time, Anna talked to him about what had happened to both of them the

day before. She had been with Ruth to call on Mrs. Ambier, an old

friend, who had just had her third baby at a neighbourhood hospital.

“She doesn’t look strong,” Anna said. “She ought not to have any more

children.”

Fred didn’t remember whether or not Mrs. Ambier had looked strong the

last time he had seen her—for several months, Mrs. Ambier had not

performed her accustomed social duties—but agreed that, if she looked

badly, there should be no more children.

Fred told Anna about old Klingman, one of his regular customers, and

how he made him taste the pickled herring and other Klingman-prepared

specialties.

“He’s quite a character,” Fred added.

While Fred shaved, Anna got breakfast. It was the usual breakfast.

There was half of a large orange for each. When oranges were smaller,

Fred and Anna each had a whole one, but grapefruit and large oranges

were always divided. Then there was oatmeal, cooked the night before

and left standing, wrapped in a towel, on the radiator all night.

It’s just as good that way, Anna always told her friends, as if

prepared in a fireless cooker—and a great deal less trouble. There

were two soft-boiled eggs apiece—on alternate mornings the eggs were

scrambled—but to-day was the day to soft-boil them.

Some mornings there was toast, but this morning the bread was soft

enough to be eaten without toasting—and coffee. Before putting the

eggs in water Anna went to see how far Fred had progressed with his

dressing. He was putting his shirt on, which meant that Anna would have

to hurry things a little—as she always did towards the end.

Breakfast was at eight-thirty. Before sitting down, Fred got the paper,

which the boy had left at the door, and read it as he ate. He was not

too absorbed in the news to listen to what Anna had to say nor pass

morsels of the last twelve hours’ happenings to her.

After eating, Fred looked at his watch, a $2.50 Ingersoll, which kept

just as good time for him as a gold one that he had had given to him

when he was twenty-one, and found that he was a trifle late. He tried

to be at the office at nine-thirty, starting from there on his rounds

of spice-selling, after dictating a few business letters and handing in

reports that he had not attended to the night before.

As usual, Fred was a trifle late. He folded his paper irregularly

and thrust it into his overcoat pocket. It was early in the fall and

slightly cool. He kissed Anna good-bye a bit hurriedly, as usual, but

he remembered later that the kiss she gave him in response was no

warmer, no colder, for that matter, than the kiss she usually gave him.

It was the last time Fred saw Anna alive.

After Fred left, Anna gathered together the breakfast dishes and washed

them in the sink, without a dishpan. She preferred this method because

it was quicker. The water was not very warm. It scarcely ever was warm

enough to wash dishes properly and she frequently spoke to the janitor

about it. With the use of a cleaning powder, she got the dishes fairly

clean and dried them slowly.

After putting the dishes away, Anna made the one bed. Then, with a

carpet sweeper which needed oiling and squeaked badly she went over

the brightly coloured rugs in the living and dining-rooms. She did the

bedroom on alternate days. She dusted the furniture with an irregularly

shaped piece of cloth, the tail of one of Fred’s old shirts.

A package she had ordered the day before came up the dumb-waiter. Anna

opened it. It was a bargain shirtwaist and she noticed that one of the

sleeves was sewed in crooked. She took it into the bedroom, glanced at

the clock and saw that it was nearly ten-thirty.

Anna tried on the shirtwaist. It fitted well enough, except where the

sleeve was wrong. She could wear it that afternoon and fix it—in half

an hour—some other time. The collar was rather nice.

She picked up a woman’s magazine—she had subscribed to it and two more

a few months before, “to help a boy through college”—and read two

stories in it. The second story was quite pathetic and she wiped her

eyes at the ending.

She looked over the back of the magazine at the cooking recipes and

found a simple recipe for spice cakes with one egg. She found she

had all the ingredients in the house and Fred and she both liked

spice cakes. She went back into the kitchen, propped the magazine

against the built-in cabinet, using a yellow mixing bowl, and made the

cakes, following the recipe carefully, humming a little to herself

as she cooked. Anna was not especially fond of cooking. She had been

housekeeping for ten years.

While the little cakes were baking—she had poured the batter into

muffin tins—she read some more of the magazine. When the cakes were

done, she spread them on a clean towel, and, as soon as they were cool

enough, bit into one. It was quite good. If the cakes had failed,

those who wondered about her suicide might have found the spice cakes

and considered them as a motive. But the cakes were so good Anna ate

two of them. She put the others into the cake box along with a stale

piece of baker’s cake, left over from three days before, gathered up

the crumbs, washed the dishes her baking had soiled and went into the

bedroom. It was eleven-fifteen.

She washed and started to change into her “afternoon clothes,” choosing

the new waist that Ruth found her in. The ’phone rang just before she

finished dressing. It was Marie Cluens, one of “the girls,” asking her

to come over in the afternoon. Marie was expecting a few other callers.

Anna said that Ruth was coming for her and if Ruth had made no other

plans she’d be glad to go.

She was all dressed, and looking at herself in the bird’s-eye maple

dresser mirror. She approved of her looks, for, at thirty-five, it was

quite all right to have a few wrinkles and a sprinkling of grey hair.

Most women of thirty-five looked older.

Then Anna remembered that she had neglected to put on her spats. She

had bought some tan ones, a few weeks before, while shopping with Ruth,

who had bought grey. Spats are awkward things to button, after one is

dressed, when one hasn’t a maid, and Anna had taken on a few extra

pounds recently. She finally managed to button them. Then, suddenly,

button-hook still in her hand, after she had finished buttoning her

spats, Anna sat upright on the bird’s-eye maple chair and thought, for

the first time in months, about herself.

Here she was—buttoning spats! She hated to button them. What a bore,

what a terrible bore it was, to button them! And, to-night, she would

have to unbutton them, and to-morrow afternoon, she would have to take

the spots out of them, if there were any spots, and button them again.

And it wasn’t only spats. Of course she didn’t have to wear spats.

It was the other things. Anna thought of all of the other pieces of

clothes she wore, her vest, copied after its more expensive Italian

silk sisters, her “Teddy-bears,” the delicate and modest name “the

girls” had taken to calling their combinations, then corsets,

stockings, camisole, skirt—every garment requiring buttoning or

fastening or tying or pinning. Each one had to be pulled in place or

puffed or tied. And, in the evening, each one had to be taken off again.

Anna thought of how, each morning, she had to go through the same

process of bathing and putting on a number of things. Then, she had

to get breakfast and wash the dishes. Then she had to clean and do

some washing, usually those same underneaths, and then dress again.

And then go out and then come home and cook dinner—and eat it—and then

wash more dishes and then spend an evening at something tiresome—and

then undress again. Life stretched out before Anna—a void of little

things—punctuated only by dressing and undressing.

The worst of it was, after she was dressed, there was nothing to do.

There is some object in dressing if one has an appointment, a little

secret meeting, a half hour’s flirtation, a dinner, the meeting of

new people, adventure, anything. Then, indeed, may one dress without

heeding the buttons. But Anna knew that there were no surprises in her

day—that there never could be—that nothing could come that would be

pleasurable enough to make up for the thousand unbuttonings.

Sitting there, button-hook held in her right hand, Anna went over her

life as it drifted back to her. First, years of school, slow, stupid

years, of little quarrels with playmates, little misunderstandings with

her teachers, lessons at night at a round table, with Sophie and Ruth;

occasionally very dull parties on Friday evenings. Then, the death of

her parents. Then, school days were over and the dull years stretched

into long days of working and long evenings with “the boys” and “the

girls.” “The boys” were the masculine set, who, attracted by “the

girls,” took them to possible social diversions. Fred had been one of

“the boys.” Three years of a dull monotone of a courtship and she and

Fred were married and the years had gone on—and she had dressed each

morning for a day of colourless calm and undressed in the evening to

get rest for another.

All things had come to Anna, and yet nothing had come. School,

courtship, marriage, and then, after two years, a baby, a sickly,

crying boy baby, who had taken all of her time from useless things to

the doing of little, constantly repeated things for him. And then,

after a year of the baby, he had died and she and Fred had decided that

they did not want another. Mourning, then, calm, placid. And then two

years of absolute blankness.

Then, Anna had had an admirer. It had seemed the one experience that

her grey life had missed, the one thing that might have had some

significance. Her admirer had been the family dentist, a ruddy young

fellow, getting bald too young. In the unpicturesque pose of being

open-mouthed in a dentist chair she had fallen in love with him and he

had seemingly reciprocated her affection.

Anna’s passion had been brief, shallow. There had been a number of

pseudo-appointments, which had been given over to love-making.

Then the dentist, his first name was Harvey, had called during the

mornings, when Anna knew “the girls” weren’t likely to come in. Harvey

had stayed for lunch, and, as that was the one meal of the day which

Anna did not usually have to prepare, she rebelled at having to cook

it for her lover, who had a large appetite. After only the smallest

glimmer of pleasurable excitement, Harvey had dimmed into the monotony

of her regular life, his visits, the lunches with him, the fear of

being discovered with her lover gradually blotched into the background.

And, as unexcitedly as he had drifted in, Harvey, perhaps finding Anna

as monotonous as she found him, perhaps because a prettier patient

appeared, drifted out.

Anna did not grieve for him. Occasionally she shuddered at the thought

of what might have happened if Fred or Ruth had discovered the affair,

but even the shudders grew to lack distinction.

After Harvey, Anna had had no more lovers. Now, thinking about it, Anna

found that she had not talked, seriously, to a man alone, for over

three years. There was no one she was interested in, no one she knew or

cared to know whom being alone with was worth the effort of planning

for it. She knew so few men. There was a stupid grocer’s clerk with

long lashes, a drug clerk who simpered at her and a friend of Fred’s,

who held her hand when he told her good-night—and they all lacked sex

interest.

Anna knew that Ruth was having a silly affair with a friend of Dick’s,

but it didn’t bother her. It didn’t interest her enough to make her

wish that Ruth would get confidential about it. She had had her affair.

She knew what a bore affairs were.

Anna had hoped, when she was younger, that she might have a real lover,

a great passion, but, as the years passed, and she saw her youth

slipping away, saw that her social position was not one to attract men

and that she had no special gift of attraction, anyhow, she almost

forgot about it.

She thought of Fred, pleasantly. Fred was good, awfully good and

awfully, awfully tiresome. There hadn’t been a surprise in anything

that Fred had done in five years. Anna knew that he never could do

anything but calm, expected things. Fred had always been kind to her.

How different from Sophie’s husband, who was such a terror. Poor

Sophie! She tried so hard, always, to conceal things. Well, there was

nothing she could do to help her, so she had never spoken to Sophie

about it, let her believe that no one knew what a brute Steve was. Anna

knew she wouldn’t have stood him a week.

Anna thought of other things, of money. She knew Fred worried quite

a lot about it. She would have liked to have money, too, of course,

but, as long as Fred made a good living, and she felt that he always

would do that, the question of finances did not greatly concern her.

She would have liked to have been rich, but, after all, they were poor

people and she had been brought up modestly.

She still sat, button-hook in hand. And she looked at the

button-hook—and at her spats—and thought of the thousands of other

buttons that would have to be attended to, on thousands of succeeding

days. What was the use of it all, anyhow? Why keep on? Why bother? She

really wasn’t interested in living, in anything. Why, there was a way

out, a way that meant no buttons at all!

Anna felt, suddenly, that she couldn’t stand it another day. The years

that stretched out—the years of getting old, monotonously, of hundreds

of calls on and from “the girls,” thousands of moving pictures with

Fred, thousands of dishes, thousands of—buttons. She couldn’t stand it!

Anything else!

She threw the button-hook on the floor. It hit the mahogany door, which

she rubbed down so carefully, every week, so it would retain its shine.

And Anna smiled. She could get out of polishing that door! It had never

occurred to her before. It had never entered her mind that she washed

the dishes and talked to Fred and buttoned and unbuttoned because she

wanted to—because she chose that way. There was another way, after

all, a way that might hold something else or nothing else at the end,

but that, at least, would end, for always, the things that kept on,

unbearable, now.

She went into the bathroom. From the top shelf of the medicine chest

she took a large blue bottle. On the label it was marked “Poison” in

large, black letters. It was an excellent germicide.

Anna tasted it. It rather burnt her lips a little and was decidedly

unpleasant. But—after all—it would taste unpleasant for only a few

minutes. And then it would all be over—everything would be over.

It seemed a miracle that things could be ended thus, slightly. One

drink and dirty dishes, bedmaking, dresssheitel and undressing would

cease to be. Fred would cease to be—for her. There would be no need

of trying to appear interested when he was talking to her, of trying

to say things that would interest him. No dinners to plan or cook.

Nothing to have to waste time over! No time that needed wasting! And

she had never thought of it before! Anna looked at her tan spats. They

were buttoned—and would stay that way—until some other hands than hers

unbuttoned them. If it hadn’t been for the spats, now, for that last

straw of additional buttons....

Anna poured the poison into a glass—she never liked to drink things

out of a bottle—and tasted it again. Then she remembered what she was

doing, and smiled. It seemed unbelievable that there could be such an

easy solution. She drank the glassful.

Ruth, coming in, later in the afternoon, with the extra key, found her.