Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (16 page)

The more he considered his plan the more hopeful it seemed. If he could get Mrs Hale’s ear he felt certain of success, and with fifty dollars in his pocket nothing could keep him from Mattie …

His first object was to reach Starkfield before Hale had started for his work; he knew the carpenter had a job down the Corbury road and was likely to leave his house early. Ethan’s long strides grew more rapid with the accelerated beat of his thoughts, and as he reached the foot of School House Hill he caught sight of Hale’s sleigh in the distance. He hurried forward to meet it, but as it drew nearer he saw that it was
driven by the carpenter’s youngest boy and that the figure at his side, looking like a large upright cocoon in spectacles, was that of Mrs Andrew Hale. Ethan signed to them to stop, and Mrs Hale leaned forward, her pink wrinkles twinkling with benevolence.

‘Mr Hale? Why, yes, you’ll find him down home now. He ain’t going to his work this forenoon. He woke up with a touch o’ lumbago, and I just made him put on one of old Dr Kidder’s plasters and set right up into the fire.’

Beaming maternally on Ethan, she bent over to add: ‘I on’y just heard from Mr Hale ’bout Zeena’s going over to Bettsbridge to see that new doctor. I’m real sorry she’s feeling so bad again! I hope he thinks he can do something for her? I don’t know anybody round here’s had more sickness than Zeena. I always tell Mr Hale I don’t know what she’d ’a’ done if she hadn’t ’a’ had you to look after her; and I used to say the same thing ’bout your mother. You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome.’

She gave him a last nod of sympathy while her son chirped to the horse; and Ethan, as she drove off, stood in the middle of the road and stared after the retreating sleigh.

It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs Hale had said ‘You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,’ and he felt less alone with his misery. If the Hales were sorry for him they would surely respond to his appeal …

He started down the road toward their house, but at the end of a few yards he pulled up sharply, the blood in his face. For the first time, in the light of the words he had just heard, he saw what he was about to do. He was planning to take advantage of the Hales’ sympathy to obtain money from them on false pretences. That was a plain statement of the cloudy purpose which had driven him in headlong to Starkfield.

With the sudden perception of the point to which his
madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.

He turned and walked slowly back to the farm.

A
t the kitchen door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a big-boned grey who pawed the snow and swung his long head restlessly from side to side.

Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by the stove. Her head was wrapped in her shawl, and she was reading a book called ‘Kidney Troubles and Their Cure’ on which he had had to pay extra postage only a few days before.

Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and after a moment he asked: ‘Where’s Mattie?’

Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied: ‘I presume she’s getting down her trunk.’

The blood rushed to his face. ‘Getting down her trunk – alone?’

‘Jotham Powell’s down in the wood-lot, and Dan’l Byrne says he darsn’t leave that horse,’ she returned.

Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the phrase, had left the kitchen and sprung up the stairs. The door of Mattie’s room was shut, and he wavered a moment on the landing. ‘Matt,’ he said in a low voice; but there was no answer, and he put his hand on the door-knob.

He had never been in her room except once, in the early summer, when he had gone there to plaster up a leak in the eaves, but he remembered exactly how everything had looked: the red and white quilt on her narrow bed, the pretty pincushion on the chest of drawers, and over it the enlarged photograph of her mother, in an oxydized frame, with a bunch of dyed grasses at the back. Now all these and other tokens of her presence had vanished, and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and
on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands. She had not heard Ethan’s call because she was sobbing; and she did not hear his step till he stood close behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders.

‘Matt – oh, don’t – oh,
Matt!
’

She started up, lifting her wet face to his. ‘Ethan – I thought I wasn’t ever going to see you again!’

He took her in his arms, pressing her close, and with a trembling hand smoothed away the hair from her forehead.

‘Not see me again? What do you mean?’

She sobbed out: ‘Jotham said you told him we wasn’t to wait dinner for you, and I thought—’

‘You thought I meant to cut it?’ he finished for her grimly.

She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.

Through the door they heard Zeena’s voice calling out from below: ‘Dan’l Byrne says you better hurry up if you want him to take that trunk.’

They drew apart with stricken faces. Words of resistance rushed to Ethan’s lips and died there. Mattie found her handkerchief and dried her eyes; then, bending down, she took hold of a handle of the trunk.

Ethan put her aside. ‘You let go, Matt,’ he ordered her.

She answered: ‘It takes two to coax it round the corner’; and submitting to this argument he grasped the other handle, and together they manœuvred the heavy trunk out to the landing.

‘Now let go,’ he repeated; then he shouldered the trunk and carried it down the stairs and across the passage to the kitchen. Zeena, who had gone back to her seat by the stove, did not lift her head from her book as he passed. Mattie followed him out of the door and helped him to lift the trunk into the back of the sleigh. When it was in place they stood side by side on the door-step, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind his fidgety horse.

It seemed to Ethan that his heart was bound with cords which an unseen hand was tightening with every tick of the clock. Twice he opened his lips to speak to Mattie and found no breath. At length, as she turned to re-enter the house, he laid a detaining hand on her.

‘I’m going to drive you over, Matt,’ he whispered.

She murmured back: ‘I think Zeena wants I should go with Jotham.’

‘I’m going to drive you over,’ he repeated; and she went into the kitchen without answering.

At dinner Ethan could not eat. If he lifted his eyes they rested on Zeena’s pinched face, and the corners of her straight lips seemed to quiver away into a smile. She ate well, declaring that the mild weather made her feel better, and pressed a second helping of beans on Jotham Powell, whose wants she generally ignored.

Mattie, when the meal was over, went about her usual task of clearing the table and washing up the dishes. Zeena, after feeding the cat, had returned to her rocking-chair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who always lingered last, reluctantly pushed back his chair and moved toward the door.

On the threshold he turned back to say to Ethan: ‘What time’ll I come round for Mattie?’

Ethan was standing near the window, mechanically filling his pipe while he watched Mattie move to and fro. He answered: ‘You needn’t come round; I’m going to drive her over myself.’

He saw the rise of the colour in Mattie’s averted cheek, and the quick lifting of Zeena’s head.

‘I want you should stay here this afternoon, Ethan,’ his wife said. ‘Jotham can drive Mattie over.’

Mattie flung an imploring glance at him, but he repeated curtly: ‘I’m going to drive her over myself.’

Zeena continued in the same even tone: ‘I wanted you should stay and fix up that stove in Mattie’s room afore the girl gets here. It ain’t been drawing right for nigh on a month now.’

Ethan’s voice rose indignantly. ‘If it was good enough for Mattie I guess it’s good enough for a hired girl.’

‘That girl that’s coming told me she was used to a house where they had a furnace,’ Zeena persisted with the same monotonous mildness.

‘She’d better ha’ stayed there then,’ he flung back at her; and turning to Mattie he added in a hard voice: ‘You be ready by three, Matt; I’ve got business at Corbury.’

Jotham Powell had started for the barn, and Ethan strode down after him aflame with anger. The pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in his eyes. He went about his task without knowing what force directed him, or whose hands and feet were fulfilling its orders. It was not till he led out the sorrel and backed him between the shafts of the sleigh that he once more became conscious of what he was doing. As he passed the bridle over the horse’s head, and wound the traces around the shafts, he remembered the day when he had made the same preparations in order to drive over and meet his wife’s cousin at the Flats. It was little more than a year ago, on just such a soft afternoon, with a ‘feel’ of spring in the air. The sorrel, turning the same big ringed eye on him, nuzzled the palm of his hand in the same way; and one by one all the days between rose up and stood before him …

He flung the bearskin into the sleigh, climbed to the seat, and drove up to the house. When he entered the kitchen it was empty, but Mattie’s bag and shawl lay ready by the door. He went to the foot of the stairs and listened. No sound reached him from above, but presently he thought he heard some one moving about in his deserted study, and pushing open the door he saw Mattie, in her hat and jacket, standing with her back to him near the table.

She started at his approach and turning quickly, said: ‘Is it time?’

‘What are you doing here, Matt?’ he asked her.

She looked at him timidly. ‘I was just taking a look round – that’s all,’ she answered, with a wavering smile.

They went back into the kitchen without speaking, and Ethan picked up her bag and shawl.

‘Where’s Zeena?’ he asked.

‘She went upstairs right after dinner. She said she had those shooting pains again, and didn’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Didn’t she say good-bye to you?’

‘No. That was all she said.’

Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone. Then the sense of unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to believe that Mattie stood there for the last time before him.

‘Come on,’ he said almost gaily, opening the door and putting her bag into the sleigh. He sprang to his seat and bent over to tuck the rug about her as she slipped into the place at his side. ‘Now then, go ‘long,’ he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly jogging down the hill.

‘We got lots of time for a good ride, Matt!’ he cried, seeking her hand beneath the fur and pressing it in his. His face tingled and he felt dizzy, as if he had stopped in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day for a drink.

At the gate, instead of making for Starkfield, he turned the sorrel to the right, up the Bettsbridge road. Mattie sat silent, giving no sign of surprise; but after a moment she said: ‘Are you going round by Shadow Pond?’

He laughed and answered: ‘I knew you’d know!’

She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown wave of hair. They drove slowly up the road between fields glistening under the pale sun, and then bent to the right down a lane edged with spruce and larch. Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills stained by mottlings of black forest flowed away in round white curves against the sky. The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow. As they entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the branches with the dropping
needles. Here the snow was so pure that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze.

Ethan drove on in silence till they reached a part of the wood where the pines were more widely spaced; then he drew up and helped Mattie to get out of the sleigh. They passed between the aromatic trunks, the snow breaking crisply under their feet, till they came to a small sheet of water with steep wooded sides. Across its frozen surface, from the farther bank, a single hill rising against the western sun threw the long conical shadow which gave the lake its name. It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his heart.

He looked up and down the little pebbly beach till his eye lit on a fallen tree-trunk half submerged in snow.

‘There’s where we sat at the picnic,’ he reminded her.

The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had taken part in together: a ‘church picnic’ which, on a long afternoon of the preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merry-making. Mattie had begged him to go with her but he had refused. Then, toward sunset, coming down from the mountain where he had been felling timber, he had been caught by some strayed revellers and drawn into the group by the lake, where Mattie, encircled by facetious youths, and bright as a blackberry under her spreading hat, was brewing coffee over a gipsy fire. He remembered the shyness he had felt at approaching her in his uncouth clothes, and then the lighting up of her face, and the way she had broken through the group to come to him with a cup in her hand. They had sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and she had missed her gold locket, and set the young men searching for it; and it was Ethan who had spied it in the moss … That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods …