Ethan Frome
“Tell me, Matt! Tell me!” he adjured her.
She was silent for a moment; then she said, in such a low tone that he
had to stoop his head to hear her: “I used to think of it sometimes,
summer nights when the moon was so bright. I couldn’t sleep.”
His heart reeled with the sweetness of it. “As long ago as that?”
She answered, as if the date had long been fixed for her: “The first
time was at Shadow Pond.”
“Was that why you gave me my coffee before the others?”
“I don’t know. Did I? I was dreadfully put out when you wouldn’t go to
the picnic with me; and then, when I saw you coming down the road, I
thought maybe you’d gone home that way o’ purpose; and that made me
glad.”
They were silent again. They had reached the point where the road
dipped to the hollow by Ethan’s mill and as they descended the darkness
descended with them, dropping down like a black veil from the heavy
hemlock boughs.
“I’m tied hand and foot, Matt. There isn’t a thing I can do,” he began
again.
“You must write to me sometimes, Ethan.”
“Oh, what good’ll writing do? I want to put my hand out and touch you. I
want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you’re sick
and when you’re lonesome.”
“You mustn’t think but what I’ll do all right.”
“You won’t need me, you mean? I suppose you’ll marry!”
“Oh, Ethan!” she cried.
“I don’t know how it is you make me feel, Matt. I’d a’most rather have
you dead than that!”
“Oh, I wish I was, I wish I was!” she sobbed.
The sound of her weeping shook him out of his dark anger, and he felt
ashamed.
“Don’t let’s talk that way,” he whispered.
“Why shouldn’t we, when it’s true? I’ve been wishing it every minute of
the day.”
“Matt! You be quiet! Don’t you say it.”
“There’s never anybody been good to me but you.”
“Don’t say that either, when I can’t lift a hand for you!”
“Yes; but it’s true just the same.”
They had reached the top of School House Hill and Starkfield lay below
them in the twilight. A cutter, mounting the road from the village,
passed them by in a joyous flutter of bells, and they straightened
themselves and looked ahead with rigid faces. Along the main street
lights had begun to shine from the house-fronts and stray figures were
turning in here and there at the gates. Ethan, with a touch of his whip,
roused the sorrel to a languid trot.
As they drew near the end of the village the cries of children reached
them, and they saw a knot of boys, with sleds behind them, scattering
across the open space before the church.
“I guess this’ll be their last coast for a day or two,” Ethan said,
looking up at the mild sky.
Mattie was silent, and he added: “We were to have gone down last night.”
Still she did not speak and, prompted by an obscure desire to
help himself and her through their miserable last hour, he went on
discursively: “Ain’t it funny we haven’t been down together but just
that once last winter?”
She answered: “It wasn’t often I got down to the village.”
“That’s so,” he said.
They had reached the crest of the Corbury road, and between the
indistinct white glimmer of the church and the black curtain of the
Varnum spruces the slope stretched away below them without a sled on its
length. Some erratic impulse prompted Ethan to say: “How’d you like me
to take you down now?”
She forced a laugh. “Why, there isn’t time!”
“There’s all the time we want. Come along!” His one desire now was to
postpone the moment of turning the sorrel toward the Flats.
“But the girl,” she faltered. “The girl’ll be waiting at the station.”
“Well, let her wait. You’d have to if she didn’t. Come!”
The note of authority in his voice seemed to subdue her, and when he
had jumped from the sleigh she let him help her out, saying only, with a
vague feint of reluctance: “But there isn’t a sled round anywheres.”
“Yes, there is! Right over there under the spruces.” He threw the
bearskin over the sorrel, who stood passively by the roadside, hanging
a meditative head. Then he caught Mattie’s hand and drew her after him
toward the sled.
She seated herself obediently and he took his place behind her, so close
that her hair brushed his face. “All right, Matt?” he called out, as if
the width of the road had been between them.
She turned her head to say: “It’s dreadfully dark. Are you sure you can
see?”
He laughed contemptuously: “I could go down this coast with my
eyes tied!” and she laughed with him, as if she liked his audacity.
Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long
hill, for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when
the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in
a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances.
“Now!” he cried.
The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk,
gathering smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night
opening out below them and the air singing by like an organ. Mattie sat
perfectly still, but as they reached the bend at the foot of the hill,
where the big elm thrust out a deadly elbow, he fancied that she shrank
a little closer.
“Don’t be scared, Matt!” he cried exultantly, as they spun safely past
it and flew down the second slope; and when they reached the level
ground beyond, and the speed of the sled began to slacken, he heard her
give a little laugh of glee.
They sprang off and started to walk back up the hill. Ethan dragged the
sled with one hand and passed the other through Mattie’s arm.
“Were you scared I’d run you into the elm?” he asked with a boyish
laugh.
“I told you I was never scared with you,” she answered.
The strange exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits
of boastfulness. “It _is_ a tricky place, though. The least swerve,
and we’d never ha’ come up again. But I can measure distances to a
hair’s-breadth—always could.”
She murmured: “I always say you’ve got the surest eye....”
Deep silence had fallen with the starless dusk, and they leaned on each
other without speaking; but at every step of their climb Ethan said to
himself: “It’s the last time we’ll ever walk together.”
They mounted slowly to the top of the hill. When they were abreast of
the church he stooped his head to her to ask: “Are you tired?” and she
answered, breathing quickly: “It was splendid!”
With a pressure of his arm he guided her toward the Norway spruces. “I
guess this sled must be Ned Hale’s. Anyhow I’ll leave it where I found
it.” He drew the sled up to the Varnum gate and rested it against the
fence. As he raised himself he suddenly felt Mattie close to him among
the shadows.
“Is this where Ned and Ruth kissed each other?” she whispered
breathlessly, and flung her arms about him. Her lips, groping for his,
swept over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise.
“Good-bye-good-bye,” she stammered, and kissed him again.
“Oh, Matt, I can’t let you go!” broke from him in the same old cry.
She freed herself from his hold and he heard her sobbing. “Oh, I can’t
go either!” she wailed.
“Matt! What’ll we do? What’ll we do?”
They clung to each other’s hands like children, and her body shook with
desperate sobs.
Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five.
“Oh, Ethan, it’s time!” she cried.
He drew her back to him. “Time for what? You don’t suppose I’m going to
leave you now?”
“If I missed my train where’d I go?”
“Where are you going if you catch it?”
She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his.
“What’s the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one
now?” he said.
She remained motionless, as if she had not heard him. Then she snatched
her hands from his, threw her arms about his neck, and pressed a sudden
drenched cheek against his face. “Ethan! Ethan! I want you to take me
down again!”
“Down where?”
“The coast. Right off,” she panted. “So ’t we’ll never come up any
more.”
“Matt! What on earth do you mean?”
She put her lips close against his ear to say: “Right into the big elm.
You said you could. So ’t we’d never have to leave each other any more.”
“Why, what are you talking of? You’re crazy!”
“I’m not crazy; but I will be if I leave you.”
“Oh, Matt, Matt—” he groaned.
She tightened her fierce hold about his neck. Her face lay close to his
face.
“Ethan, where’ll I go if I leave you? I don’t know how to get along
alone. You said so yourself just now. Nobody but you was ever good to
me. And there’ll be that strange girl in the house ... and she’ll sleep
in my bed, where I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the
stairs....”
The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the
hated vision of the house he was going back to—of the stairs he would
have to go up every night, of the woman who would wait for him there.
And the sweetness of Mattie’s avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at
last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the
other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return
to....
Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer
heard what she was saying. Her hat had slipped back and he was stroking
her hair. He wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it
would sleep there like a seed in winter. Once he found her mouth again,
and they seemed to be by the pond together in the burning August sun.
But his cheek touched hers, and it was cold and full of weeping, and he
saw the road to the Flats under the night and heard the whistle of the
train up the line.
The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence. They might have been
in their coffins underground. He said to himself: “Perhaps it’ll feel
like this...” and then again: “After this I sha’n’t feel anything....”
Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought:
“He’s wondering why he doesn’t get his supper....”
“Come!” Mattie whispered, tugging at his hand.
Her sombre violence constrained him: she seemed the embodied instrument
of fate. He pulled the sled out, blinking like a night-bird as he passed
from the shade of the spruces into the transparent dusk of the open. The
slope below them was deserted. All Starkfield was at supper, and not a
figure crossed the open space before the church. The sky, swollen with
the clouds that announce a thaw, hung as low as before a summer storm.
He strained his eyes through the dimness, and they seemed less keen,
less capable than usual.
He took his seat on the sled and Mattie instantly placed herself in
front of him. Her hat had fallen into the snow and his lips were in her
hair. He stretched out his legs, drove his heels into the road to keep
the sled from slipping forward, and bent her head back between his
hands. Then suddenly he sprang up again.
“Get up,” he ordered her.
It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat,
repeating vehemently: “No, no, no!”
“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