Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

But without sleep — his thoughts continued — how can I put forty more rose bushes in the ground tomorrow? Then at the prospect of tomorrow his mind rebelled. No, he simply could not go on as he’d done today. No matter what the consequences, that was his decision.

He was still lying there about eight when Stella returned. “Mrs. Kopping is very pleased with the work you did today,” she said.

“I’m glad,” he said, “because it’s the last work I’ll do for her.” Stella came to the bed and glared down at him. She was getting fat, he noticed suddenly, but without great interest. Her face, always round and plain, was even rounder than it used to be. Life in the Kopping house somehow agreed with her.

“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.