Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (34 page)

‘But it’s been good, though, hasn’t it, Charity?… What’s the matter – why do you stand there staring at me? Haven’t the days here been good?’ He went up to her and caught her to his breast. ‘And there’ll be others – lots of others … jollier … even jollier … won’t there, darling?’

He turned her head back, feeling for the curve of her throat below the ear, and kissing her there, and on the hair and eyes and lips. She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss.

T
hat night, as usual, they said good-bye at the wood’s edge. Harney was to leave the next morning early. He asked Charity to say nothing of their plans till his return, and, strangely even to herself, she was glad of the postponement. A leaden weight of shame hung on her, benumbing every other sensation, and she bade him good-bye with hardly a sign of emotion. His reiterated promises to return seemed almost wounding. She had no doubt that he intended to come back; her doubts were far deeper and less definable.

Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day was so rich that it absorbed her.… Now her first feeling was that everything would be different, and that she herself would be a different being to Harney. Instead of remaining separate and absolute, she would be compared with other people, and unknown things would be expected of her. She was too proud to be afraid, but the freedom of her spirit drooped.…

Harney had not fixed any date for his return; he had said he would have to look about first, and settle things. He had promised to write as soon as there was anything definite to say, and had left her his address, and asked her to write also. But the address frightened her. It was in New York, at a club with a long name in Fifth Avenue: it seemed to raise an insurmountable barrier between them. Once or twice, in the first days,
she got out a sheet of paper, and sat looking at it, and trying to think what to say; but she had the feeling that her letter would never reach its destination. She had never written to anyone farther away than Hepburn.

Harney’s first letter came after he had been gone about ten days. It was tender but grave, and bore no resemblance to the gay little notes he had sent her by the freckled boy from Creston River. He spoke positively of his intention of coming back, but named no date, and reminded Charity of their agreement that their plans should not be divulged till he had had time to ‘settle things’. When that would be he could not yet foresee; but she could count on his returning as soon as the way was clear.

She read the letter with a strange sense of its coming from immeasurable distances and having lost most of its meaning on the way; and in reply she sent him a coloured post-card of Creston Falls, on which she wrote: ‘With love from Charity’. She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it. She could not forget that he had never spoken to her of marriage till Mr Royall had forced the word from his lips; though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.

She had not seen Mr Royall on her return to the red house. The morning after her parting from Harney, when she came down from her room, Verena told her that her guardian had gone off to Worcester and Portland. It was the time of year when he usually reported to the insurance agencies he represented, and there was nothing unusual in his departure except its suddenness. She thought little about him, except to be glad he was not there.…

She kept to herself for the first days, while North Dormer was recovering from its brief plunge into publicity, and the subsiding agitation left her unnoticed. But the faithful Ally
could not be long avoided. For the first few days after the close of the Old Home Week festivities Charity escaped her by roaming the hills all day when she was not at her post in the library; but after that a period of rain set in, and one pouring afternoon Ally, sure that she would find her friend indoors, came around to the red house with her sewing.

The two girls sat upstairs in Charity’s room. Charity, her idle hands in her lap, was sunk in a kind of leaden dream, through which she was only half-conscious of Ally, who sat opposite her in a low rush-bottomed chair, her work pinned to her knee, and her thin lips pursed up as she bent above it.

‘It was my idea running a ribbon through the gauging,’ she said proudly, drawing back to contemplate the blouse she was trimming. ‘It’s for Miss Balch: she was awfully pleased.’ She paused and then added, with a queer tremor in her piping voice: ‘I darsn’t have told her I got the idea from one I saw on Julia.’

Charity raised her eyes listlessly. ‘Do you still see Julia sometimes?’

Ally reddened, as if the allusion had escaped her unintentionally. ‘Oh, it was a long time ago I seen her with those gaugings.…’

Silence fell again, and Ally presently continued: ‘Miss Balch left me a whole lot of things to do over this time.’

‘Why – has she gone?’ Charity inquired with an inner start of apprehension.

‘Didn’t you know? She went off the morning after they had the celebration at Hamblin. I seen her drive by early with Mr Harney.’

There was another silence, measured by the steady tick of the rain against the window, and, at intervals, by the snipping sound of Ally’s scissors.

Ally gave a meditative laugh. ‘Do you know what she told me before she went away? She told me she was going to send for me to come over to Springfield and make some things for her wedding.’

Charity again lifted her heavy lids and stared at Ally’s pale
pointed face, which moved to and fro above her moving fingers.

‘Is she going to get married?’

Ally let the blouse sink to her knee, and sat gazing at it. Her lips seemed suddenly dry, and she moistened them a little with her tongue.

‘Why, I presume so … from what she said.… Didn’t you know?’

‘Why should I know?’

Ally did not answer. She bent above the blouse, and began picking out a basting thread with the point of the scissors.

‘Why should I know?’ Charity repeated harshly.

‘I didn’t know but what … folks here say she’s engaged to Mr Harney.’

Charity stood up with a laugh, and stretched her arms lazily above her head.

‘If all the people got married that folks say are going to you’d have your time full making wedding-dresses,’ she said ironically.

‘Why – don’t you believe it?’ Ally ventured.

‘It wouldn’t make it true if I did – nor prevent it if I didn’t.’

‘That’s so.… I only know I seen her crying the night of the party because her dress didn’t set right. That was why she wouldn’t dance any.…’

Charity stood absently gazing down at the lacy garment on Ally’s knee. Abruptly she stooped and snatched it up.

‘Well, I guess she won’t dance in this either,’ she said with sudden violence; and grasping the blouse in her strong young hands she tore it in two and flung the tattered bits to the floor.

‘Oh, Charity—’ Ally cried, springing up. For a long interval the two girls faced each other across the ruined garment. Ally burst into tears.

‘Oh, what’ll I say to her? What’ll I do? It was real lace!’ she wailed between her piping sobs.

Charity glared at her unrelentingly. ‘You’d oughtn’t to have brought it here,’ she said, breathing quickly. ‘I hate other people’s clothes – it’s just as if they was there themselves.’ The
two stared at each other again over this avowal, till Charity brought out, in a gasp of anguish: ‘Oh, go – go – go – or I’ll hate you too.…’

When Ally left her, she fell sobbing across her bed.

The long storm was followed by a north-west gale, and when it was over the hills took on their first umber tints, the sky grew more densely blue, and the big white clouds lay against the hills like snow-banks. The first crisp maple-leaves began to spin across Miss Hatchard’s lawn, and the Virginia creeper on the Memorial splashed the white porch with scarlet. It was a golden triumphant September. Day by day the flame of the Virginia creeper spread to the hillsides in wider waves of carmine and crimson, the larches glowed like the thin yellow halo about a fire, the maples blazed and smouldered, and the black hemlocks turned to indigo against the incandescence of the forest.

The nights were cold, with a dry glitter of stars so high up that they seemed smaller and more vivid. Sometimes, as Charity lay sleepless on her bed through the long hours, she felt as though she were bound to those wheeling fires and swinging with them around the great black vault. At night she planned many things … it was then she wrote to Harney. But the letters were never put on paper, for she did not know how to express what she wanted to tell him. So she waited. Since her talk with Ally she had felt sure that Harney was engaged to Annabel Balch, and that the process of ‘settling things’ would involve the breaking of this tie. Her first rage of jealousy over, she felt no fear on this score. She was still sure that Harney would come back, and she was equally sure that, for the moment at least, it was she whom he loved and not Miss Balch. Yet the girl, no less, remained a rival, since she represented all the things that Charity felt herself most incapable of understanding or achieving. Annabel Balch was, if not the girl Harney ought to marry, at least the kind of girl it would be natural for him to marry. Charity had never been able to picture herself as his wife; had never been able to arrest the vision and follow it out in its daily consequences;
but she could perfectly imagine Annabel Balch in that relation to him.

The more she thought of these things the more the sense of fatality weighed on her: she felt the uselessness of struggling against the circumstances. She had never known how to adapt herself, she could only break and tear and destroy. The scene with Ally had left her stricken with shame at her own childish savagery. What would Harney have thought if he had witnessed it? But when she turned the incident over in her puzzled mind she could not imagine what a civilized person would have done in her place. She felt herself too unequally pitted against unknown forces.…

At length this feeling moved her to sudden action. She took a sheet of letter paper from Mr Royall’s office, and sitting by the kitchen lamp, one night after Verena had gone to bed, began her first letter to Harney. It was very short:

She posted the letter early the next morning, and for a few days her heart felt strangely light. Then she began to wonder why she received no answer.

One day as she sat alone in the library pondering these things the walls of books began to spin around her, and the rosewood desk to rock under her elbows. The dizziness was followed by a wave of nausea like that she had felt on the day of the exercises in the Town Hall. But the Town Hall had been crowded and stiflingly hot, and the library was empty, and so chilly that she had kept on her jacket. Five minutes before she had felt perfectly well; and now it seemed as if she were going to die. The bit of lace at which she still languidly worked dropped from her fingers, and the steel crochet hook clattered to the floor. She pressed her temples hard between her damp hands,
steadying herself against the desk while the wave of sickness swept over her. Little by little it subsided, and after a few minutes she stood up, shaken and terrified, groped for her hat, and stumbled out into the air. But the whole sunlit autumn world reeled and roared around her as she dragged herself along the interminable length of the road home.

As she approached the red house she saw a buggy standing at the door, and her heart gave a leap. But it was only Mr Royall who got out, his travelling-bag in hand. He saw her coming, and waited in the porch. She was conscious that he was looking at her intently, as if there was something strange in her appearance, and she threw back her head with a desperate effort at ease. Their eyes met, and she said: ‘You back?’ as if nothing had happened, and he answered: ‘Yes, I’m back,’ and walked in ahead of her, pushing open the door of his office. She climbed to her room, every step of the stairs holding her fast as if her feet were lined with glue.

Two days later, she descended from the train at Nettleton, and walked out of the station into the dusty square. The brief interval of cold weather was over, and the day was as soft, and almost as hot, as when she and Harney had emerged on the same scene on the Fourth of July. In the square the same broken-down hacks and carry-alls stood drawn up in a despondent line, and the lank horses with fly-nets over their withers swayed their heads drearily to and fro. She recognized the staring signs over the eating-houses and billiard saloons, and the long lines of wires on lofty poles tapering down the main street to the park at its other end. Taking the way the wires pointed, she went on hastily, with bent head, till she reached a wide transverse street with a brick building at the corner. She crossed this street and glanced furtively up at the front of the brick building; then she returned, and entered a door opening on a flight of steep brass-rimmed stairs. On the second landing she rang a bell, and a mulatto girl with a bushy head and a frilled apron let her into a hall where a stuffed fox on his hind legs proffered a brass card-tray to visitors. At the back of the hall was a glazed door marked: ‘Office’. After waiting a
few minutes in a handsomely furnished room, with plush sofas surmounted by large gold-framed photographs of showy young women, Charity was shown into the office.…