Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (35 page)

When she came out of the glazed door Dr Merkle followed, and led her into another room, smaller, and still more crowded with plush and gold frames. Dr Merkle was a plump woman with small bright eyes, an immense mass of black hair coming down low on her forehead, and unnaturally white and even teeth. She wore a rich black dress, with gold chains and charms hanging from her bosom. Her hands were large and smooth, and quick in all their movements; and she smelt of musk and carbolic acid.

She smiled on Charity with all her faultless teeth. ‘Sit down, my dear. Wouldn’t you like a little drop of something to pick you up?… No.… Well, just lay back a minute then.… There’s nothing to be done just yet; but in about a month, if you’ll step round again … I could take you right into my own house for two or three days, and there wouldn’t be a mite of trouble. Mercy me! The next time you’ll know better’n to fret like this.…’

Charity gazed at her with widening eyes. This woman with the false hair, the false teeth, the false murderous smile – what was she offering her but immunity from some unthinkable crime? Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood. She had come to this dreadful place because she knew of no other way of making sure that she was not mistaken about her state; and the woman had taken her for a miserable creature like Julia.… The thought was so horrible that she sprang up, white and shaking, one of her great rushes of anger sweeping over her.

Dr Merkle, still smiling, also rose. ‘Why do you run off in such a hurry? You can stretch out right here on my sofa.…’ She paused, and her smile grew more motherly. ‘Afterwards – if there’s been any talk at home, and you want to get away for
a while … I have a lady friend in Boston who’s looking for a companion … you’re the very one to suit her, my dear.…’

Charity had reached the door. ‘I don’t want to stay. I don’t want to come back here,’ she stammered, her hand on the knob; but with a swift movement Dr Merkle edged her from the threshold.

‘Oh, very well. Five dollars, please.’

Charity looked helplessly at the doctor’s tight lips and rigid face. Her last savings had gone in repaying Ally for the cost of Miss Balch’s ruined blouse, and she had had to borrow four dollars from her friend to pay for her railway ticket and cover the doctor’s fee. It had never occurred to her that medical advice could cost more than two dollars.

‘I didn’t know … I haven’t got that much …’ she faltered, bursting into tears.

Dr Merkle gave a short laugh which did not show her teeth, and inquired with concision if Charity supposed she ran the establishment for her own amusement? She leaned her firm shoulders against the door as she spoke, like a grim gaoler making terms with her captive.

‘You say you’ll come round and settle later? I’ve heard that pretty often too. Give me your address, and if you can’t pay me I’ll send the bill to your folks.… What? I can’t understand what you say.… That don’t suit you either? My, you’re pretty particular for a girl that ain’t got enough to settle her own bills.…’ She paused, and fixed her eyes on the brooch with a blue stone that Charity had pinned to her blouse.

‘Ain’t you ashamed to talk that way to a lady that’s got to earn her living, when you go about with jewellery like that on you?… It ain’t in my line, and I do it only as a favour … but if you’re a mind to leave that brooch as a pledge, I don’t say no.… Yes, of course, you can get it back when you bring me my money.…’

On the way home, she felt an immense and unexpected quietude. It had been horrible to have to leave Harney’s gift in the woman’s hands, but even at that price the news she brought
away had not been too dearly bought. She sat with half-closed eyes as the train rushed through the familiar landscape; and now the memories of her former journey, instead of flying before her like dead leaves, seemed to be ripening in her blood like sleeping grain. She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have grown suddenly clear and simple. She no longer had any difficulty in picturing herself as Harney’s wife now that she was the mother of his child; and compared to her sovereign right Annabel Balch’s claim seemed no more than a girl’s sentimental fancy.

That evening, at the gate of the red house, she found Ally waiting in the dusk. ‘I was down at the post-office just as they were closing up, and Will Targatt said there was a letter for you, so I brought it.’

Ally held out the letter, looking at Charity with piercing sympathy. Since the scene of the torn blouse there had been a new and fearful admiration in the eyes she bent on her friend.

Charity snatched the letter with a laugh. ‘Oh, thank you – good-night,’ she called out over her shoulder as she ran up the path. If she had lingered a moment she knew she would have had Ally at her heels.

She hurried upstairs and felt her way into her dark room. Her hands trembled as she groped for the matches and lit her candle, and the flap of the envelope was so closely stuck that she had to find her scissors and slit it open. At length she read:

She read the letter with a rush; then she went over and over it, each time more slowly and painstakingly. It was so beautifully expressed that she found it almost as difficult to understand as the gentleman’s explanation of the Bible pictures at Nettleton; but gradually she became aware that the gist of its meaning lay in the last few words. ‘If ever there is a hope of realizing what we dreamed of …’

But then he wasn’t even sure of that? She understood now that every word and every reticence was an avowal of Annabel Balch’s prior claim. It was true that he was engaged to her, and that he had not yet found a way of breaking his engagement.

As she read the letter over Charity understood what it must have cost him to write it. He was not trying to evade an importunate claim; he was honestly and contritely struggling between opposing duties. She did not even reproach him in her thoughts for having concealed from her that he was not free: she could not see anything more reprehensible in his conduct than in her own. From the first she had needed him more than he had wanted her, and the power that had swept them together had been as far beyond resistance as a great gale loosening the leaves of the forest.… Only, there stood between them, fixed and upright in the general upheaval, the indestructible figure of Annabel Balch.…

Face to face with his admission of the fact, she sat staring at the letter. A cold tremor ran over her, and the hard sobs struggled up into her throat and shook her from head to foot. For a while she was caught and tossed on great waves of anguish that left her hardly conscious of anything but the blind struggle against their assaults. Then, little by little, she began to relive, with a dreadful poignancy, each separate stage of her poor romance. Foolish things she had said came back to her, gay answers Harney had made, his first kiss in the darkness between the fireworks, their choosing the blue brooch together, the way he had teased her about the letters she had dropped in her flight from the evangelist. All these memories, and a thousand others, hummed through her brain till his nearness grew so vivid that she felt his fingers in her hair, and
his warm breath on her cheek as he bent her head back like a flower. These things were hers; they had passed into her blood, and become a part of her, they were building the child in her womb; it was impossible to tear asunder strands of life so interwoven.

The conviction gradually strengthened her, and she began to form in her mind the first words of the letter she meant to write to Harney. She wanted to write it at once, and with feverish hands she began to rummage in her drawer for a sheet of letter paper. But there was none left; she must go downstairs to get it. She had a superstitious feeling that the letter must be written on the instant, that setting down her secret in words would bring her reassurance and safety; and taking up her candle she went down to Mr Royall’s office.

At that hour she was not likely to find him there: he had probably had his supper and walked over to Carrick Fry’s. She pushed open the door of the unlit room, and the light of her lifted candle fell on his figure, seated in the darkness in his high-backed chair. His arms lay along the arms of the chair, and his head was bent a little; but he lifted it quickly as Charity entered. She started back as their eyes met, remembering that her own were red with weeping, and that her face was livid with the fatigue and emotion of her journey. But it was too late to escape, and she stood and looked at him in silence.

He had risen from his chair, and came toward her with outstretched hands. The gesture was so unexpected that she let him take her hands in his, and they stood thus, without speaking, till Mr Royall said gravely: ‘Charity – was you looking for me?’

She freed herself abruptly and fell back. ‘Me? No—’ She set down the candle on his desk. ‘I wanted some letter-paper, that’s all.’

His face contracted, and the bushy brows jutted forward over his eyes. Without answering he opened the drawer of the desk, took out a sheet of paper and an envelope, and pushed them toward her. ‘Do you want a stamp too?’ he asked.

She nodded, and he gave her the stamp. As he did so she felt that he was looking at her intently, and she knew that the candle light flickering up on her white face must be distorting her swollen features and exaggerating the dark rings about her eyes. She snatched up the paper, her reassurance dissolving under his pitiless gaze, in which she seemed to read the grim perception of her state, and the ironic recollection of the day when, in that very room, he had offered to compel Harney to marry her. His look seemed to say that he knew she had taken the paper to write to her lover, who had left her as he had warned her she would be left. She remembered the scorn with which she had turned from him that day, and knew, if he guessed the truth, what a list of old scores it must settle. She turned and fled upstairs; but when she got back to her room all the words that had been waiting had vanished.…

If she could have gone to Harney it would have been different; she would only have had to show herself to let his memories speak for her. But she had no money left, and there was no one from whom she could have borrowed enough for such a journey. There was nothing to do but to write, and await his reply. For a long time she sat bent above the blank page; but she found nothing to say that really expressed what she was feeling.…

Harney had written that she had made it easier for him, and she was glad it was so; she did not want to make things hard. She knew she had it in her power to do that; she held his fate in her hands. All she had to do was to tell him the truth; but that was the very fact that held her back.… Her five minutes face to face with Mr Royall had stripped her of her last illusion, and brought her back to North Dormer’s point of view. Distinctly and pitilessly there rose before her the fate of the girl who was married ‘to make things right’. She had seen too many village love-stories end in that way. Poor Rose Coles’s miserable marriage was of the number; and what good had come of it for her or for Halston Skeff? They had hated each other from the day the minister married them; and whenever old Mrs Skeff had a fancy to humiliate her daughter-in-law
she had only to say: ‘Who’d ever think the baby’s only two? And for a seven months’ child – ain’t it a wonder what a size he is?’ North Dormer had treasures of indulgence for brands in the burning, but only derision for those who succeeded in getting snatched from it; and Charity had always understood Julia Hawes’s refusal to be snatched.…

Only – was there no alternative but Julia’s? Her soul recoiled from the vision of the white-faced woman among the plush sofas and gilt frames. In the established order of things as she knew them she saw no place for her individual adventure.…

She sat in her chair without undressing till faint grey streaks began to divide the black slats of the shutters. Then she stood up and pushed them open, letting in the light. The coming of a new day brought a sharper consciousness of ineluctable reality, and with it a sense of the need of action. She looked at herself in the glass, and saw her face, white in the autumn dawn, with pinched cheeks and dark-ringed eyes, and all the marks of her state that she herself would never have noticed, but that Dr Merkle’s diagnosis had made plain to her. She could not hope that those signs would escape the watchful village; even before her figure lost its shape she knew her face would betray her.

Leaning from her window she looked out on the dark and empty scene; the ashen houses with shuttered windows, the grey road climbing the slope to the hemlock belt above the cemetery, and the heavy mass of the Mountain black against a rainy sky. To the east a space of light was broadening above the forest; but over that also the clouds hung. Slowly her gaze travelled across the fields to the rugged curve of the hills. She had looked out so often on that lifeless circle, and wondered if anything could ever happen to anyone who was enclosed in it.…

Almost without conscious thought her decision had been reached; as her eyes had followed the circle of the hills her mind had also travelled the old round. She supposed it was something in her blood that made the Mountain the only answer to her questioning, the inevitable escape from all that
hemmed her in and beset her. At any rate it began to loom in her now as it loomed against the rainy dawn; and the longer she looked at it the more clearly she understood that now at last she was really going there.

T
he rain held off, and an hour later, when she started, wild gleams of sunlight were blowing across the fields.