Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (11 page)

Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan ‘never listened’. The charge was not wholly
unfounded. When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked. Of late, however, since he had had reasons for observing her more closely, her silence had begun to trouble him. He recalled his mother’s growing taciturnity, and wondered if Zeena were also turning ‘queer’. Women did, he knew. Zeena, who had at her fingers’ ends the pathological chart of the whole region, had cited many cases of the kind while she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of certain lonely farm-houses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined, and of others where sudden tragedy had come of their presence. At times, looking at Zeena’s shut face, he felt the chill of such forebodings. At other times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far-reaching intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicions and resentments impossible to guess. That supposition was even more disturbing than the other; and it was the one which had come to him the night before, when he had seen her standing in the kitchen door.

Now her departure for Bettsbridge had once more eased his mind, and all his thoughts were on the prospect of his evening with Mattie. Only one thing weighed on him, and that was his having told Zeena that he was to receive cash for the lumber. He foresaw so clearly the consequences of this imprudence that with considerable reluctance he decided to ask Andrew Hale for a small advance on his load.

When Ethan drove into Hale’s yard the builder was just getting out of his sleigh.

‘Hello, Ethe!’ he said. ‘This comes handy.’

Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big grey moustache and a stubbly double-chin unconstrained by a collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt was always fastened by a small diamond stud. This display of opulence was misleading, for though he did a fairly good business it was known that his easy-going habits and the demands of his large family frequently kept him
what Starkfield called ‘behind’. He was an old friend of Ethan’s family, and his house one of the few to which Zeena occasionally went, drawn there by the fact that Mrs Hale, in her youth, had done more ‘doctoring’ than any other woman in Starkfield, and was still a recognized authority on symptoms and treatment.

Hale went up to the greys and patted their sweating flanks.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘you keep them two as if they was pets.’

Ethan set about unloading the logs and when he had finished his job he pushed open the glazed door of the shed which the builder used as his office. Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against a battered desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm, genial and untidy.

‘Sit right down and thaw out,’ he greeted Ethan.

The latter did not know how to begin, but at length he managed to bring out his request for an advance of fifty dollars. The blood rushed to his thin skin under the sting of Hale’s astonishment. It was the builder’s custom to pay at the end of three months, and there was no precedent between the two men for a cash settlement.

Ethan felt that if he had pleaded an urgent need Hale might have made shift to pay him; but pride, and an instinctive prudence, kept him from resorting to this argument. After his father’s death it had taken time to get his head above water, and he did not want Andrew Hale, or any one else in Starkfield, to think he was going under again. Besides, he hated lying; if he wanted the money he wanted it, and it was nobody’s business to ask why. He therefore made his demand with the awkwardness of a proud man who will not admit to himself that he is stooping; and he was not much surprised at Hale’s refusal.

The builder refused genially, as he did everything else: he treated the matter as something in the nature of a practical joke, and wanted to know if Ethan meditated buying a grand piano or adding a ‘cupolo’ to his house; offering, in the latter case, to give his services free of cost.

Ethan’s arts were soon exhausted, and after an embarrassed pause he wished Hale good-day and opened the door of the
office. As he passed out the builder suddenly called after him: ‘See here – you ain’t in a tight place, are you?’

‘Not a bit,’ Ethan’s pride retorted before his reason had time to intervene.

‘Well, that’s good! Because I
am
, a shade. Fact is, I was going to ask you to give me a little extra time on that payment. Business is pretty slack, to begin with, and then I’m fixing up a little house for Ned and Ruth when they’re married. I’m glad to do it for ’em, but it costs.’ His look appealed to Ethan for sympathy. ‘The young people like things nice. You know how it is yourself: it’s not so long ago since you fixed up your own place for Zeena.’

Ethan left the greys in Hale’s stable and went about some other business in the village. As he walked away the builder’s last phrase lingered in his ears, and he reflected grimly that his seven years with Zeena seemed to Starkfield ‘not so long’.

The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane spangled the cold grey dusk and made the snow look whiter. The bitter weather had driven every one indoors and Ethan had the long rural street to himself. Suddenly he heard the brisk play of sleigh-bells and a cutter passed him, drawn by a free-going horse. Ethan recognized Michael Eady’s roan colt, and young Denis Eady, in a handsome new fur cap, leaned forward and waved a greeting. ‘Hello, Ethe!’ he shouted and spun on.

The cutter was going in the direction of the Frome farm, and Ethan’s heart contracted as he listened to the dwindling bells. What more likely than that Denis Eady had heard of Zeena’s departure for Bettsbridge, and was profiting by the opportunity to spend an hour with Mattie? Ethan was ashamed of the storm of jealousy in his breast. It seemed unworthy of the girl that his thoughts of her should be so violent.

He walked on to the church corner and entered the shade of the Varnum spruces, where he had stood with her the night before. As he passed into their gloom he saw an indistinct outline just ahead of him. At his approach it melted for an instant
into two separate shapes and then conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a half-laughing ‘Oh!’ provoked by the discovery of his presence. Again the outline hastily disunited and the Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead of him. Ethan smiled at the discomfiture he had caused. What did it matter to Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum if they were caught kissing each other? Everybody in Starkfield knew they were engaged. It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.

He fetched the greys from Hale’s stable and started on his long climb back to the farm. The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push up over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.

Ethan’s ears were alert for the jingle of sleigh-bells, but not a sound broke the silence of the lonely road. As he drew near the farm he saw, through the thin screen of larches at the gate, a light twinkling in the house above him. ‘She’s up in her room,’ he said to himself, ‘fixing herself up for supper’; and he remembered Zeena’s sarcastic stare when Mattie, on the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with smoothed hair and a ribbon at her neck.

He passed by the graves on the knoll and turned his head to glance at one of the older headstones, which had interested him deeply as a boy because it bore his name.

He used to think that fifty years sounded like a long time to live together; but now it seemed to him that they might pass in a flash. Then, with a sudden dart of irony, he wondered if, when their turn came, the same epitaph would be written over him and Zeena.

He opened the barn-door and craned his head into the obscurity, half-fearing to discover Denis Eady’s roan colt in the stall beside the sorrel. But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the greys and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers. His was not a tuneful throat, but harsh melodies burst from it as he locked the barn and sprang up the hill to the house. He reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to his touch.

Startled at finding it locked he rattled the handle violently; then he reflected that Mattie was alone and that it was natural she should barricade herself at nightfall. He stood in the darkness expecting to hear her step. It did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he called out in a voice that shook with joy: ‘Hello, Matt!’

Silence answered; but in a minute or two he caught a sound on the stairs and saw a line of light about the doorframe, as he had seen it the night before. So strange was the precision with which the incidents of the previous evening were repeating themselves that he half expected, when he heard the key turn, to see his wife before him on the threshold; but the door opened, and Mattie faced him.

She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.

She wore her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her neck; but through her hair she had run a streak
of crimson ribbon. This tribute to the unusual transformed and glorified her. She seemed to Ethan taller, fuller, more womanly in shape and motion. She stood aside, smiling silently, while he entered, and then moved away from him with something soft and flowing in her gait. She set the lamp on the table, and he saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh dough-nuts, stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass. A bright fire glowed in the stove and the cat lay stretched before it, watching the table with a drowsy eye.

Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being. He went out into the passage to hang up his coat and pull off his wet boots. When he came back Mattie had set the teapot on the table and the cat was rubbing itself persuasively against her ankles.

‘Why, Puss! I nearly tripped over you,’ she cried, the laughter sparkling through her lashes.

Again Ethan felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. Could it be his coming that gave her such a kindled face?

‘Well, Matt, any visitors?’ he threw off, stooping down carelessly to examine the fastening of the stove.

She nodded and laughed ‘Yes, one,’ and he felt a blackness settling on his brows.

‘Who was that?’ he questioned, raising himself up to slant a glance at her beneath his scowl.

Her eyes danced with malice. ‘Why, Jotham Powell. He came in after he got back, and asked for a drop of coffee before he went down home.’

The blackness lifted and light flooded Ethan’s brain. ‘That all? Well, I hope you made out to let him have it.’ And after a pause he felt it right to add: ‘I suppose he got Zeena over to the Flats all right?’

‘Oh, yes; in plenty of time.’

The name threw a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking sideways at each other before Mattie said with a shy laugh: ‘I guess it’s about time for supper.’

They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden,
jumped between them into Zeena’s empty chair. ‘Oh, Puss!’ said Mattie, and they laughed again.

Ethan, a moment earlier, had felt himself on the brink of eloquence; but the mention of Zeena had paralysed him. Mattie seemed to feel the contagion of his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her tea, while he feigned an insatiable appetite for dough-nuts and sweet pickles. At last, after casting about for an effective opening, he took a long gulp of tea, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Looks as if there’d be more snow.’

She feigned great interest. ‘Is that so? Do you suppose it’ll interfere with Zeena’s getting back?’ She flushed red as the question escaped her, and hastily set down the cup she was lifting.

Ethan reached over for another helping of pickles.

‘You never can tell, this time of year, it drifts so bad on the Flats.’ The name had benumbed him again, and once more he felt as if Zeena were in the room between them.

‘Oh, Puss, you’re too greedy!’ Mattie cried.

The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena’s seat to the table, and was stealthily elongating its body in the direction of the milk-jug, which stood between Ethan and Mattie. The two leaned forward at the same moment and their hands met on the handle of the jug. Mattie’s hand was underneath, and Ethan kept his clasped on it a moment longer than was necessary. The cat, profiting by his unusual demonstration, tried to effect an unnoticed retreat, and in doing so backed into the pickle-dish, which fell to the floor with a crash.

Mattie, in an instant, had sprung from her chair and was down on her knees by the fragments.

‘Oh, Ethan, Ethan – it’s all to pieces! What will Zeena say?’

But this time his courage was up. ‘Well, she’ll have to say it to the cat, any way!’ he rejoined with a laugh, kneeling down at Mattie’s side to scrape up the swimming pickles.

She lifted stricken eyes to him. ‘Yes, but, you see, she never meant it should be used, not even when there was company; and I had to get up on the step-ladder to reach it down from
the top shelf of the china-closet, where she keeps it with all her best things, and of course she’ll want to know why I did it—’