Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (18 page)

‘Get up!’

‘Why?’

‘I want to sit in front.’

‘No, no! How can you steer in front?’

‘I don’t have to. We’ll follow the track.’

They spoke in smothered whispers, as though the night were listening.

‘Get up! Get up!’ he urged her; but she kept on repeating: ‘Why do you want to sit in front?’

‘Because I – because I want to feel you holding me,’ he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

The answer seemed to satisfy her, or else she yielded to the power of his voice. He bent down, feeling in the obscurity for the glassy slide worn by preceding coasters, and placed the runners carefully between its edges. She waited while he seated himself with crossed legs in the front of the sled; then she crouched quickly down at his back and clasped her arms about him. Her breath in his neck set him shuddering again, and he
almost sprang from his seat. But in a flash he remembered the alternative. She was right: this was better than parting. He leaned back and drew her mouth to his …

Just as they started he heard the sorrel’s whinny again, and the familiar wistful call, and all the confused images it brought with it, went with him down the first reach of the road. Halfway down there was a sudden drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious descent. As they took wing for this it seemed to him that they were flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy night, with Starkfield immeasurably below them, falling away like a speck in space … Then the big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of the road, and he said between his teeth: ‘We can fetch it; I know we can fetch it—’

As they flew toward the tree Mattie pressed her arms tighter, and her blood seemed to be in his veins. Once or twice the sled swerved a little under them. He slanted his body to keep it headed for the elm, repeating to himself again and again: ‘I know we can fetch it’; and little phrases she had spoken ran through his head and danced before him on the air. The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it he thought: ‘It’s waiting for us: it seems to know.’ But suddenly his wife’s face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal, and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside. The sled swerved in response, but he righted it again, kept it straight, and drove down on the black projecting mass. There was a last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires; and then the elm …

The sky was still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star, and tried vaguely to reckon whether it were Sirius, or – or – The effort tired him too much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he would sleep … The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened
cheep
like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that
he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his palm, which rested on something soft and springy. The thought of the animal’s suffering was intolerable to him and he struggled to raise himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying on him. But he continued to finger about cautiously with his left hand, thinking he might get hold of the little creature and help it; and all at once he knew that the soft thing he had touched was Mattie’s hair and that his hand was on her face.

He dragged himself to his knees, the monstrous load on him moving with him as he moved, and his hand went over and over her face, and he felt that the twittering came from her lips.

He got his face down close to hers, with his ear to her mouth, and in the darkness he saw her eyes open and heard her say his name.

‘Oh, Matt, I thought we’d fetched it,’ he moaned; and far off, up the hill, he heard the sorrel whinny, and thought: ‘I ought to be getting him his feed …’

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T
he querulous drone ceased as I entered Frome’s kitchen, and of the two women sitting there I could not tell which had been the speaker.

One of them, on my appearing, raised her tall bony figure from her seat, not as if to welcome me – for she threw me no more than a brief glance of surprise – but simply to set about preparing the meal which Frome’s absence had delayed. A slatternly calico wrapper hung from her shoulders and the wisps of her thin grey hair were drawn away from a high forehead and fastened at the back by a broken comb. She had pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing, and her narrow lips were of the same sallow colour as her face.

The other woman was much smaller and slighter. She sat huddled in an arm-chair near the stove, and when I came in she turned her head quickly toward me, without the least corresponding movement of her body. Her hair was as grey as her companion’s, her face as bloodless and shrivelled, but amber-tinted, with swarthy shadows sharpening the nose and hollowing the temples. Under her shapeless dress her body kept its limp immobility, and her dark eyes had the bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives.

Even for that part of the country the kitchen was a poor-looking place. With the exception of the dark-eyed woman’s chair, which looked like a soiled relic of luxury bought at a country auction, the furniture was of the roughest kind. Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood meagrely against the plaster walls.

‘My, it’s cold here! The fire must be ‘most out,’ Frome said, glancing about him apologetically as he followed me in.

The tall woman, who had moved away from us toward the dresser, took no notice; but the other, from her cushioned niche, answered complainingly, in a high thin voice: ‘It’s on’y just been made up this very minute. Zeena fell asleep and slep’ ever so long, and I thought I’d be frozen stiff before I could wake her up and get her to ‘tend to it.’

I knew then that it was she who had been speaking when we entered.

Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains of a cold mince-pie in a battered pie-dish, set down her unappetizing burden without appearing to hear the accusation brought against her.

Frome stood hesitatingly before her as she advanced; then he looked at me and said: ‘This is my wife, Mis’ Frome.’ After another interval he added, turning toward the figure in the arm-chair: ‘And this is Miss Mattie Silver

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Mrs Ned Hale, tender soul, had pictured me as lost in the Flats and buried under a snow-drift; and her satisfaction on seeing me safely restored to her the next morning made me feel that my peril had caused me to advance several degrees in her favour.

Great was her amazement, and that of old Mrs Varnum, on learning that Ethan Frome’s old horse had carried me to and from Corbury Junction through the worst blizzard of the winter; greater still their surprise when they heard that his master had taken me in for the night.

Beneath their exclamations of wonder I felt a secret curiosity to know what impressions I had received from my night in the Frome household, and divined that the best way of breaking down their reserve was to let them try to penetrate mine. I therefore confined myself to saying, in a matter-of-fact tone, that I had been received with great kindness, and that Frome had made a bed for me in a room on the ground-floor which seemed in happier days to have been fitted up as a kind of writing-room or study.

‘Well,’ Mrs Hale mused, ‘in such a storm I suppose he felt
he couldn’t do less than take you in – but I guess it went hard with Ethan. I don’t believe but what you’re the only stranger has set foot in that house for over twenty years. He’s that proud he don’t even like his oldest friends to go there; and I don’t know as any do, any more, except myself and the doctor …’

‘You still go there, Mrs Hale?’ I ventured.

‘I used to go a good deal after the accident, when I was first married; but after a while I got to think it made ’em feel worse to see us. And then one thing and another came, and my own troubles … But I generally make out to drive over there round about New Year’s, and once in the summer. Only I always try to pick a day when Ethan’s off somewheres. It’s bad enough to see the two women sitting there – but
his
face, when he looks round that bare place, just kills me … You see, I can look back and call it up in his mother’s day, before their troubles.’

Old Mrs Varnum, by this time, had gone up to bed, and her daughter and I were sitting alone, after supper, in the austere seclusion of the horse-hair parlour. Mrs Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though trying to see how much footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed that if she had kept silence till now it was because she had been waiting, through all the years, for some one who should see what she alone had seen.

I waited to let her trust in me gather strength before I said: ‘Yes, it’s pretty bad, seeing all three of them there together.’

She drew her mild brows into a frown of pain. ‘It was just awful from the beginning. I was here in the house when they were carried up – they laid Mattie Silver in the room you’re in. She and I were great friends, and she was to have been my brides-maid in the spring … When she came to I went up to her and stayed all night. They gave her things to quiet her, and she didn’t know much till to’rd morning, and then all of a sudden she woke up just like herself, and looked straight at me out of her big eyes, and said … Oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,’ Mrs Hale broke off, crying.

She took off her spectacles, wiped the moisture from them, and put them on again with an unsteady hand. ‘It got about
the next day,’ she went on, ‘that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she and Ethan were doing that night coasting, when they’d ought to have been on their way to the Flats to ketch the train … I never knew myself what Zeena thought – I don’t to this day. Nobody knows Zeena’s thoughts. Anyhow, when she heard o’ the accident she came right in and stayed with Ethan over to the minister’s, where they’d carried him. And as soon as the doctors said that Mattie could be moved, Zeena sent for her and took her back to the farm.’

‘And there she’s been ever since?’

Mrs Hale answered simply: ‘There was nowhere else for her to go;’ and my heart tightened at the thought of the hard compulsions of the poor.

‘Yes, there she’s been,’ Mrs Hale continued, ‘and Zeena’s done for her, and done for Ethan, as good as she could. It was a miracle, considering how sick she was – but she seemed to be raised right up just when the call came to her. Not as she’s ever given up doctoring, and she’s had sick spells right along; but she’s had the strength given her to care for those two for over twenty years, and before the accident came she thought she couldn’t even care for herself.’

Mrs Hale paused a moment, and I remained silent, plunged in the vision of what her words evoked. ‘It’s horrible for them all,’ I murmured.

‘Yes: it’s pretty bad. And they ain’t any of ’em easy people either. Mattie
was
, before the accident; I never knew a sweeter nature. But she’s suffered too much – that’s what I always say when folks tell me how she’s soured. And Zeena, she was always cranky. Not but what she bears with Mattie wonderful – I’ve seen that myself. But sometimes the two of them get going at each other, and then Ethan’s face’d break your heart … When I see that, I think it’s
him
that suffers most … anyhow it ain’t Zeena, because she ain’t got the time … It’s a pity, though,’ Mrs Hale ended, sighing, ‘that they’re all shut up there’n that one kitchen. In the summertime, on pleasant
days, they move Mattie into the parlour, or out in the door-yard, and that makes it easier … but winters there’s the fires to be thought of, and there ain’t a dime to spare up at the Fromes’.’

Mrs Hale drew a deep breath, as though her memory were eased of its long burden, and she had no more to say; but suddenly an impulse of complete avowal seized her.

She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: ‘There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn’t live. Well, I say it’s a pity she
did
. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was shocked at me. Only he wasn’t with me that morning when she first came to … And I say, if she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.’

A
girl came out of lawyer Royall’s house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only roadside shadow between lawyer Royall’s house and the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery.

The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the straw hat of a young man just passing under them, and spun it clean across the road into the duck-pond.