Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (36 page)

After Harney’s departure she had returned her bicycle to its owner at Creston, and she was not sure of being able to walk all the way to the Mountain. The deserted house was on the road; but the idea of spending the night there was unendurable, and she meant to try to push on to Hamblin, where she could sleep under a wood-shed if her strength should fail her. Her preparations had been made with quiet forethought. Before starting she had forced herself to swallow a glass of milk and eat a piece of bread; and she had put in her canvas satchel a little packet of the chocolate that Harney always carried in his bicycle bag. She wanted above all to keep up her strength, and reach her destination without attracting notice.…

Mile by mile she retraced the road over which she had so often flown to her lover. When she reached the turn where the wood-road branched off from the Creston highway she remembered the Gospel tent – long since folded up and transplanted – and her start of involuntary terror when the fat evangelist had said: ‘Your Saviour knows everything. Come and confess your guilt.’ There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown. The impulse did not shape itself in thought: she only knew she must save her baby, and hide herself with it somewhere where no one would ever come to trouble them.

She walked on and on, growing more heavy-footed as the day advanced. It seemed a cruel chance that compelled her to retrace every step of the way to the deserted house; and
when she came in sight of the orchard, and the silver-grey roof slanting crookedly through the laden branches, her strength failed her and she sat down by the roadside. She sat there a long time, trying to gather the courage to start again, and walk past the broken gate and the untrimmed rose-bushes strung with scarlet hips. A few drops of rain were falling, and she thought of the warm evenings when she and Harney had sat embraced in the shadowy room, and the noise of summer showers on the roof had rustled through their kisses. At length she understood that if she stayed any longer the rain might compel her to take shelter in the house overnight, and she got up and walked on, averting her eyes as she came abreast of the white gate and the tangled garden.

The hours wore on, and she walked more and more slowly, pausing now and then to rest, and to eat a little bread and an apple picked up from the roadside. Her body seemed to grow heavier with every yard of the way, and she wondered how she would be able to carry her child later, if already he laid such a burden on her.… A fresh wind had sprung up, scattering the rain and blowing down keenly from the mountain. Presently the clouds lowered again, and a few white darts struck her in the face: it was the first snow falling over Hamblin. The roofs of the lonely village were only half a mile ahead, and she was resolved to push beyond it, and try to reach the Mountain that night. She had no clear plan of action, except that, once in the settlement, she meant to look for Liff Hyatt, and get him to take her to her mother. She herself had been born as her own baby was going to be born; and whatever her mother’s subsequent life had been, she could hardly help remembering the past, and receiving a daughter who was facing the trouble she had known.

Suddenly the deadly faintness came over her once more and she sat down on the bank and leaned her head against a tree-trunk. The long road and the cloudy landscape vanished from her eyes, and for a time she seemed to be circling about in some terrible wheeling darkness. Then that too faded.

She opened her eyes, and saw a buggy drawn up beside her,
and a man who had jumped down from it and was gazing at her with a puzzled face. Slowly consciousness came back, and she saw that the man was Liff Hyatt.

She was dimly aware that he was asking her something, and she looked at him in silence, trying to find strength to speak. At length her voice stirred in her throat, and she said in a whisper: ‘I’m going up the Mountain.’

‘Up the Mountain?’ he repeated, drawing aside a little; and as he moved she saw behind him, in the buggy, a heavily coated figure with a familiar pink face and gold spectacles on the bridge of a Grecian nose.

‘Charity! What on earth are you doing here?’ Mr Miles exclaimed, throwing the reins on the horse’s back and scrambling down from the buggy.

She lifted her heavy eyes to his. ‘I’m going to see my mother.’

The two men glanced at each other, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

Then Mr Miles said: ‘You look ill, my dear, and it’s a long way. Do you think it’s wise?’

Charity stood up. ‘I’ve got to go to her.’

A vague mirthless grin contracted Liff Hyatt’s face, and Mr Miles again spoke uncertainly. ‘You know, then – you’d been told?’

She stared at him. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I want to go to her.’

Mr Miles was examining her thoughtfully. She fancied she saw a change in his expression, and the blood rushed to her forehead. ‘I just want to go to her,’ she repeated.

He laid his hand on her arm. ‘My child, your mother is dying. Liff Hyatt came down to fetch me.… Get in and come with us.’

He helped her up to the seat at his side, Liff Hyatt clambered in at the back, and they drove off toward Hamblin. At first Charity had hardly grasped what Mr Miles was saying; the physical relief of finding herself seated in the buggy, and securely on her road to the Mountain, effaced the impression
of his words. But as her head cleared she began to understand. She knew the Mountain had but the most infrequent intercourse with the valleys; she had often enough heard it said that no one ever went up there except the minister, when someone was dying. And now it was her mother who was dying … and she would find herself as much alone on the Mountain as anywhere else in the world. The sense of unescapable isolation was all she could feel for the moment; then she began to wonder at the strangeness of its being Mr Miles who had undertaken to perform this grim errand. He did not seem in the least like the kind of man who would care to go up the Mountain. But here he was at her side, guiding the horse with a firm hand, and bending on her the kindly gleam of his spectacles, as if there were nothing unusual in their being together in such circumstances.

For a while she found it impossible to speak, and he seemed to understand this, and made no attempt to question her. But presently she felt her tears rise and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must have seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low voice: ‘Won’t you tell me what is troubling you?’

She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in the same low tone, so that they should not be overheard: ‘Charity, what do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?’

She controlled herself, and answered: ‘Nothing, only what I heard Mr Royall say one day. He said he brought me down because my father went to prison.’

‘And you’ve never been up there since?’

‘Never.’

Mr Miles was silent again, then he said: ‘I’m glad you’re coming with me now. Perhaps we may find your mother alive, and she may know that you have come.’

They had reached Hamblin, where the snow-flurry had left white patches in the rough grass on the roadside, and in the angles of the roofs facing north. It was a poor bleak village under the granite flank of the Mountain, and as soon as they
left it they began to climb. The road was steep and full of ruts, and the horse settled down to a walk while they mounted and mounted, the world dropping away below them in great mottled stretches of forest and field, and stormy dark blue distances.

Charity had often had visions of this ascent of the Mountain but she had not known it would reveal so wide a country, and the sight of those strange lands reaching away on every side gave her a new sense of Harney’s remoteness. She knew he must be miles and miles beyond the last range of hills that seemed to be the outmost verge of things, and she wondered how she had ever dreamed of going to New York to find him.…

As the road mounted the country grew bleaker, and they drove across fields of faded mountain grass bleached by long months beneath the snow. In the hollows a few white birches trembled, or a mountain ash lit its scarlet clusters; but only a scant growth of pines darkened the granite ledges. The wind was blowing fiercely across the open slopes; the horse faced it with bent head and straining flanks, and now and then the buggy swayed so that Charity had to clutch its side.

Mr Miles had not spoken again; he seemed to understand that she wanted to be left alone. After a while the track they were following forked, and he pulled up the horse, as if uncertain of the way. Liff Hyatt craned his head around from the back, and shouted against the wind: ‘Left—’ and they turned into a stunted pine-wood and began to drive down the other side of the Mountain.

A mile or two farther on they came out on a clearing where two or three low houses lay in stony fields, crouching among the rocks as if to brace themselves against the wind. They were hardly more than sheds, built of logs and rough boards, with tin stove-pipes sticking out of their roofs. The sun was setting, and dusk had already fallen on the lower world, but a yellow glare still lay on the lonely hillside and the crouching houses. The next moment it faded and left the landscape in dark autumn twilight.

‘Over there,’ Liff called out, stretching his long arm over Mr Miles’s shoulder. The clergyman turned to the left, across a bit of bare ground overgrown with docks and nettles, and stopped before the most ruinous of the sheds. A stove-pipe reached its crooked arm out of one window, and the broken panes of the other were stuffed with rags and paper. In contrast to such a dwelling the brown house in the swamp might have stood for the home of plenty.

As the buggy drew up two or three mongrel dogs jumped out of the twilight with a great barking, and a young man slouched to the door and stood there staring. In the twilight Charity saw that his face had the same sodden look as Bash Hyatt’s, the day she had seen him sleeping by the stove. He made no effort to silence the dogs, but leaned in the door, as if roused from a drunken lethargy, while Mr Miles got out of the buggy.

‘Is it here?’ the clergyman asked Liff in a low voice; and Liff nodded.

Mr Miles turned to Charity. ‘Just hold the horse a minute, my dear: I’ll go in first,’ he said, putting the reins in her hands. She took them passively, and sat staring straight ahead of her at the darkening scene while Mr Miles and Liff Hyatt went up to the house. They stood a few minutes talking with the man in the door, and then Mr Miles came back. As he came close, Charity saw that his smooth pink face wore a frightened solemn look.

‘Your mother is dead, Charity; you’d better come with me,’ he said.

She got down and followed him while Liff led the horse away. As she approached the door she said to herself: ‘This is where I was born … this is where I belong.…’ She had said it to herself often enough as she looked across the sunlit valleys at the Mountain; but it had meant nothing then, and now it had become a reality. Mr Miles took her gently by the arm, and they entered what appeared to be the only room in the house. It was so dark that she could just discern a group of a dozen people sitting or sprawling about a table made of boards
laid across two barrels. They looked up listlessly as Mr Miles and Charity came in, and a woman’s thick voice said: ‘Here’s the preacher.’ But no one moved.

Mr Miles paused and looked about him; then he turned to the young man who had met them at the door.

‘Is the body here?’ he asked.

The young man, instead of answering, turned his head toward the group. ‘Where’s the candle? I tole yer to bring a candle,’ he said with sudden harshness to a girl who was lolling against the table. She did not answer, but another man got up and took from some corner a candle stuck into a bottle.

‘How’ll I light it? The stove’s out,’ the girl grumbled.

Mr Miles fumbled under his heavy wrappings and drew out a match-box. He held a match to the candle, and in a moment or two a faint circle of light fell on the pale aguish heads that started out of the shadow like the heads of nocturnal animals.

‘Mary’s over there,’ someone said; and Mr Miles, taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up unblinkingly at the candle that trembled in Mr Miles’s hand.

‘She jus’ dropped off,’ a woman said, over the shoulder of the others; and the young man added: ‘I jus’ come in and found her.’

An elderly man with lank hair and a feeble grin pushed between them. ‘It was like this: I says to her on’y the night before: if you don’t take and quit, I says to her …’

Someone pulled him back and sent him reeling against a bench along the wall, where he dropped down muttering his unheeded narrative.

There was a silence; then the young woman who had been lolling against the table suddenly parted the group, and stood in front of Charity. She was healthier and robuster looking than the others, and her weather-beaten face had a certain sullen beauty.

‘Who’s the girl? Who brought her here?’ she said, fixing her eyes mistrustfully on the young man who had rebuked her for not having a candle ready.

Mr Miles spoke. ‘I brought her; she is Mary Hyatt’s daughter.’

‘What? Her too?’ the girl sneered; and the young man turned on her with an oath. ‘Shut your mouth, damn you, or get out of here,’ he said; then he relapsed into his former apathy, and dropped down on the bench, leaning his head against the wall.

Mr Miles had set the candle on the floor and taken off his heavy coat. He turned to Charity. ‘Come and help me,’ he said.