Ethan Frome
flat surface over the region of her heart. “That pie of yours always
sets a mite heavy, Matt,” she said, not ill-naturedly. She seldom
abbreviated the girl’s name, and when she did so it was always a sign of
affability.
“I’ve a good mind to go and hunt up those stomach powders I got last
year over in Springfield,” she continued. “I ain’t tried them for quite
a while, and maybe they’ll help the heartburn.”
Mattie lifted her eyes. “Can’t I get them for you, Zeena?” she ventured.
“No. They’re in a place you don’t know about,” Zeena answered darkly,
with one of her secret looks.
She went out of the kitchen and Mattie, rising, began to clear the
dishes from the table. As she passed Ethan’s chair their eyes met and
clung together desolately. The warm still kitchen looked as peaceful as
the night before. The cat had sprung to Zeena’s rocking-chair, and the
heat of the fire was beginning to draw out the faint sharp scent of the
geraniums. Ethan dragged himself wearily to his feet.
“I’ll go out and take a look around,” he said, going toward the passage
to get his lantern.
As he reached the door he met Zeena coming back into the room, her lips
twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face.
The shawl had slipped from her shoulders and was dragging at her
down-trodden heels, and in her hands she carried the fragments of the
red glass pickle-dish.
“I’d like to know who done this,” she said, looking sternly from Ethan
to Mattie.
There was no answer, and she continued in a trembling voice: “I went to
get those powders I’d put away in father’s old spectacle-case, top of
the china-closet, where I keep the things I set store by, so’s folks
shan’t meddle with them—” Her voice broke, and two small tears hung
on her lashless lids and ran slowly down her cheeks. “It takes the
stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple’s
pickle-dish up there o’ purpose when we was married, and it’s never been
down since, ’cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it
with my own hands, so’s ’t it shouldn’t get broke.” She laid the fragments
reverently on the table. “I want to know who done this,” she quavered.
At the challenge Ethan turned back into the room and faced her. “I can
tell you, then. The cat done it.”
“The _cat_?”
“That’s what I said.”
She looked at him hard, and then turned her eyes to Mattie, who was
carrying the dish-pan to the table.
“I’d like to know how the cat got into my china-closet,” she said.
“Chasin’ mice, I guess,” Ethan rejoined. “There was a mouse round the
kitchen all last evening.”
Zeena continued to look from one to the other; then she emitted her
small strange laugh. “I knew the cat was a smart cat,” she said in a
high voice, “but I didn’t know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces
of my pickle-dish and lay ’em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked
’em off of.”
Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. “It wasn’t
Ethan’s fault, Zeena! The cat _did_ break the dish; but I got it down from
the china-closet, and I’m the one to blame for its getting broken.”
Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony
image of resentment, “_You_ got down my pickle-dish—what for?”
A bright flush flew to Mattie’s cheeks. “I wanted to make the
supper-table pretty,” she said.
“You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back
was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got,
and wouldn’t never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner,
or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge—” Zeena paused with a
gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. “You’re a
bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It’s the way your father
begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my
things where you couldn’t get at ’em—and now you’ve took from me the one
I cared for most of all—” She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that
passed and left her more than ever like a shape of stone.
“If I’d ’a’ listened to folks, you’d ’a’ gone before now, and this
wouldn’t ’a’ happened,” she said; and gathering up the bits of broken
glass she went out of the room as if she carried a dead body....
VIII
When Ethan was called back to the farm by his father’s illness his
mother gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted
“best parlour.” Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built
himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on
a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham
Lincoln and a calendar with “Thoughts from the Poets,” and tried, with
these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a
“minister” who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at
Worcester. He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to
live at the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room
was uninhabitable for several months of the year.
To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena’s
steady breathing from the bed had assured him that there was to be
no sequel to the scene in the kitchen. After Zeena’s departure he and
Mattie had stood speechless, neither seeking to approach the other. Then
the girl had returned to her task of clearing up the kitchen for the
night and he had taken his lantern and gone on his usual round outside
the house. The kitchen was empty when he came back to it; but his
tobacco-pouch and pipe had been laid on the table, and under them was
a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman’s catalogue, on which
three words were written: “Don’t trouble, Ethan.”
Going into his cold dark “study” he placed the lantern on the table
and, stooping to its light, read the message again and again. It was the
first time that Mattie had ever written to him, and the possession of
the paper gave him a strange new sense of her nearness; yet it deepened
his anguish by reminding him that henceforth they would have no other
way of communicating with each other. For the life of her smile, the
warmth of her voice, only cold paper and dead words!
Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too
strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the
destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side
of a bitter querulous woman? Other possibilities had been in him,
possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena’s narrow-mindedness
and ignorance. And what good had come of it? She was a hundred times
bitterer and more discontented than when he had married her: the one
pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the healthy instincts
of self-defence rose up in him against such waste....
He bundled himself into his old coon-skin coat and lay down on the
box-sofa to think. Under his cheek he felt a hard object with strange
protuberances. It was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when they
were engaged—the only piece of needlework he had ever seen her do. He
flung it across the floor and propped his head against the wall....
He knew a case of a man over the mountain—a young fellow of about his
own age—who had escaped from just such a life of misery by going West
with the girl he cared for. His wife had divorced him, and he had
married the girl and prospered. Ethan had seen the couple the summer
before at Shadd’s Falls, where they had come to visit relatives. They
had a little girl with fair curls, who wore a gold locket and was
dressed like a princess. The deserted wife had not done badly either.
Her husband had given her the farm and she had managed to sell it, and
with that and the alimony she had started a lunch-room at Bettsbridge
and bloomed into activity and importance. Ethan was fired by the
thought. Why should he not leave with Mattie the next day, instead of
letting her go alone? He would hide his valise under the seat of the
sleigh, and Zeena would suspect nothing till she went upstairs for her
afternoon nap and found a letter on the bed....
His impulses were still near the surface, and he sprang up, re-lit the
lantern, and sat down at the table. He rummaged in the drawer for a
sheet of paper, found one, and began to write.
“Zeena, I’ve done all I could for you, and I don’t see as it’s been any
use. I don’t blame you, nor I don’t blame myself. Maybe both of us will
do better separate. I’m going to try my luck West, and you can sell the
farm and mill, and keep the money—”
His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless
conditions of his lot. If he gave the farm and mill to Zeena what would
be left him to start his own life with? Once in the West he was sure of
picking up work—he would not have feared to try his chance alone. But
with Mattie depending on him the case was different. And what of Zeena’s
fate? Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even
if she found a purchaser—in itself an unlikely chance—it was doubtful if
she could clear a thousand dollars on the sale. Meanwhile, how could
she keep the farm going? It was only by incessant labour and personal
supervision that Ethan drew a meagre living from his land, and his wife,
even if she were in better health than she imagined, could never carry
such a burden alone.
Well, she could go back to her people, then, and see what they would do
for her. It was the fate she was forcing on Mattie—why not let her try
it herself? By the time she had discovered his whereabouts, and brought
suit for divorce, he would probably—wherever he was—be earning enough to
pay her a sufficient alimony. And the alternative was to let Mattie go
forth alone, with far less hope of ultimate provision....
He had scattered the contents of the table-drawer in his search for a
sheet of paper, and as he took up his pen his eye fell on an old copy of
the _Bettsbridge Eagle_. The advertising sheet was folded uppermost, and
he read the seductive words: “Trips to the West: Reduced Rates.”
He drew the lantern nearer and eagerly scanned the fares; then the paper
fell from his hand and he pushed aside his unfinished letter. A moment
ago he had wondered what he and Mattie were to live on when they reached
the West; now he saw that he had not even the money to take her there.
Borrowing was out of the question: six months before he had given his
only security to raise funds for necessary repairs to the mill, and
he knew that without security no one at Starkfield would lend him ten
dollars. The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders
handcuffing a convict. There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for
life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.
He crept back heavily to the sofa, stretching himself out with limbs so
leaden that he felt as if they would never move again. Tears rose in his
throat and slowly burned their way to his lids.
As he lay there, the window-pane that faced him, growing gradually
lighter, inlaid upon the darkness a square of moon-suffused sky. A
crooked tree-branch crossed it, a branch of the apple-tree under which,
on summer evenings, he had sometimes found Mattie sitting when he came
up from the mill. Slowly the rim of the rainy vapours caught fire and
burnt away, and a pure moon swung into the blue. Ethan, rising on his
elbow, watched the landscape whiten and shape itself under the sculpture
of the moon. This was the night on which he was to have taken Mattie
coasting, and there hung the lamp to light them! He looked out at the
slopes bathed in lustre, the silver-edged darkness of the woods, the
spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as
though all the beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his
wretchedness....