“You’re talking nonsense,” she said. “If Mrs. Kopping wants roses, you’ll plant roses.”
“I am not taking orders from Mrs. Kopping any more.”
Stella hesitated for just a moment, perhaps shocked. But she rallied quickly. “What do you mean by that?”
“I am quitting this job. I am leaving this place.”
“Oh no...”
“Oh yes, Stella. Don’t argue. I’ve already decided. If I cannot get another job somewhere... an easier job... then that will have to be. If you are afraid what will become of us, you can stay here.”
She answered him with an obvious lack of wifely affection. “I wouldn’t mind that a bit, staying here and sending you off. But she wouldn’t let me do it. She wants a couple to run the place, and if you’d leave she’d find another couple, and I’d be out in the cold. So it’s either both of us or none of us, my lad, and we’ll have to stick together.”
“All I know is,” Anton said with great fatigue, “I am leaving. It’s been a soft life for you here, Stella. In the house all day, with all the new machines to help you. You’ve gotten fat with it. But I’ve worked hard... too hard. And today was the last.”
That was when her quick temper broke loose. First she hurled imprecations at him, all the unpleasant names she could put her tongue to. Then she hurled her person, fists flailing, nails clawing. And when he had managed to fling her off, she used the last weapon in her arsenal — the threat.
“I’ll have the police after you. It’s against the law in this country for a man to leave his wife and not support her...”
He was no expert on what the law did or didn’t say. But he caught the menace in Stella’s tone, and it made him pause. This sign of weakness only encouraged her.
“And if you think you can run away and hide somewhere, Anton, you’re mistaken. You’ve talked of leaving before, and once I told Mrs. Kopping about it. And do you know what she said? She said a man’s a dog who’d run away and leave his wife. And she’d spend her own money to hire detectives to go out and look for you. And when they found you, you’d be clapped in jail where you belong...”
Anton Vandrak was by nature a mild-mannered man, a man of the soil, patient, plodding, humble, not given to rebellion or violence. But Stella’s revelation goaded him to a sudden, white-hot fury.
That his wife should have discussed him with another woman... that they had understood his anguish and his desires... but should have plotted together to thwart him... to keep him in slavery here...
Such was the blinding power of his anger that he forgot his weariness and the pains in his back. But even in his righteous wrath, he at first intended only escape. He lurched to his feet and made for the door. “I am going now,” he said.
But Stella was fully as angry and desperate as he. She interrupted him, grabbing at his clothes, screaming repetitions of her threat into his ear.
Stung, hounded, beseiged, Anton Vandrak reacted with primitive passion. This time he did not merely try to fling her off. Rather, he counter-attacked. His muscular arms, the arms of a man who had labored physically all his life, turned aside her blows. His powerful hands, unwashed and ingrained with the dirt of decades, went by instinct to the most fatal area, Stella’s throat.
Possibly she managed one shriek of terror, but if so, it was lost amid the other sounds she was already making. And Anton’s great hands immediately choked off her breath. Now that he had her in this deadly grip, now that he held this ultimate power over her, all his hatred burst, as it were, from its containment deep in his heart and coursed through all his veins, screaming for vengeance down to the tips of his fingers.
He knew what he was doing. He knew the facts of life and death well enough to realize what was meant when her face grew red, then purple, when her eyes bulged out of her fat face, when her speechless tongue groped out to lap up air that couldn’t be swallowed. He knew that he was killing her, and he wanted to do it.
Then, when it was over and he let her body fall out of his grip, he knew that she was dead, without having to feel for a pulse or listen for a heart beat. He simply stepped over the corpse, went back to his bed, and lay down for a few moments. For a man already tired from a hard day’s work, it had been a strength-sapping task, choking Stella. For her neck had been fat and her ample lungs had contained a large supply of reserve air. So the strangling had taken some time.
But as he lay there, his mind was active. More active than it had been for years. Not since he’d had the farm, with all its responsibility of figuring how to battle enemies like weather, insects, crop diseases — had his mind been prodded to such activity as this.
He had a new enemy now, and he was aware of it. Stella had said there were laws against a man’s leaving his wife. He knew that there were also laws, sterner laws, against a man’s killing his wife. And he knew that the law does not forgive or forget.
He did not want to go to prison or to give his own life for killing Stella. What would he have accomplished, only to have exchanged this prison for another? No, he wanted to gain something, to be ahead in the long run.
Go back to the farm maybe. He was a practical man. It had always made more sense to him to grow wheat rather than roses. And with the machinery one can use on a farm, perhaps he could work without straining his back. Yes, to be a farmer, not a gardener, that would be progress, a step ahead. And this time without having to provide for Stella.
Only he was not yet free of the burden. Stella’s presence, her voice, her appetite, her nasty humor — they were gone, to be sure. But her body remained, still a burden to him. He wouldn’t be free till he’d rid himself of that last part of Stella.
He thought, and the solution came quickly and easily. If there was no body, there was no murder.
He raised himself from the bed, his weariness suddenly gone. It wasn’t yet nine, and he couldn’t be sure that Mrs. Kopping would be in bed till ten at least. But there was other work to be done in the meantime.
He spent the next two hours packing the pair of suitcases and the trunk that he and Stella had come to this place with. The trunk could be sent for later. He filled it, locked it, and left it sitting in a corner. He put into one suitcase things he might need immediately, and into the other, similar things for Stella. He felt he was shrewd in this... just in case someone might search those suitcases.
By ten-thirty he had erased from the two little rooms all evidence of his and Stella’s occupancy. Then he turned out the lights, lifted Stella’s body to his shoulder. She’d been getting fat, but she’d been a short woman. With his mind ecstatic in his new freedom, his back did not complain of the weight.
He carried her down the drive to the last bush he’d planted that afternoon. He was forty-five years old. Four... five. He would bury Stella between the fourth and fifth rose bushes.
He was glad now that the earth was already turned over. And the well-kept soil was soft and grainy, not hard-packed. It was a matter only of minutes to dig the grave. Three feet by three feet. Curled up on her right side, Stella fitted into it neatly.
He did not stop for any formal leave-taking. He covered her up, replaced the tools, and went calmly to bed.
...And in the morning he went to see Mrs. Kopping. The old lady would be wanting her breakfast, and it would be just as well to break the bad news to her before she’d worked up too great a state of impatience.
He found her in the dining room, sitting at the bare table, reading the newspaper which this morning she seemed to have fetched for herself. But the fact that Stella had not brought her the paper and the fact that here was no sign of activity from the kitchen had not as yet disturbed her. She received Anton in frosty silence. She was a tall, spare, bony woman, austere, unhandsome. She looked this morning as she had always looked.