Ethan Frome
perfectly black, and not a sound was audible but Zeena’s asthmatic
breathing. Ethan felt confusedly that there were many things he ought
to think about, but through his tingling veins and tired brain only one
sensation throbbed: the warmth of Mattie’s shoulder against his. Why had
he not kissed her when he held her there? A few hours earlier he would
not have asked himself the question. Even a few minutes earlier, when
they had stood alone outside the house, he would not have dared to think
of kissing her. But since he had seen her lips in the lamplight he felt
that they were his.
Now, in the bright morning air, her face was still before him. It was
part of the sun’s red and of the pure glitter on the snow. How the
girl had changed since she had come to Starkfield! He remembered what a
colourless slip of a thing she had looked the day he had met her at the
station. And all the first winter, how she had shivered with cold when
the northerly gales shook the thin clapboards and the snow beat like
hail against the loose-hung windows!
He had been afraid that she would hate the hard life, the cold and
loneliness; but not a sign of discontent escaped her. Zeena took the
view that Mattie was bound to make the best of Starkfield since she
hadn’t any other place to go to; but this did not strike Ethan as
conclusive. Zeena, at any rate, did not apply the principle in her own
case.
He felt all the more sorry for the girl because misfortune had, in
a sense, indentured her to them. Mattie Silver was the daughter of
a cousin of Zenobia Frome’s, who had inflamed his clan with mingled
sentiments of envy and admiration by descending from the hills to
Connecticut, where he had married a Stamford girl and succeeded to
her father’s thriving “drug” business. Unhappily Orin Silver, a man of
far-reaching aims, had died too soon to prove that the end justifies the
means. His accounts revealed merely what the means had been; and these
were such that it was fortunate for his wife and daughter that his books
were examined only after his impressive funeral. His wife died of the
disclosure, and Mattie, at twenty, was left alone to make her way on the
fifty dollars obtained from the sale of her piano. For this purpose her
equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make
molasses candy, recite “Curfew shall not ring to-night,” and play “The
Lost Chord” and a pot-pourri from “Carmen.” When she tried to extend the
field of her activities in the direction of stenography and book-keeping
her health broke down, and six months on her feet behind the counter of
a department store did not tend to restore it. Her nearest relations had
been induced to place their savings in her father’s hands, and though,
after his death, they ungrudgingly acquitted themselves of the Christian
duty of returning good for evil by giving his daughter all the advice
at their disposal, they could hardly be expected to supplement it by
material aid. But when Zenobia’s doctor recommended her looking about
for some one to help her with the house-work the clan instantly saw the
chance of exacting a compensation from Mattie. Zenobia, though doubtful
of the girl’s efficiency, was tempted by the freedom to find fault
without much risk of losing her; and so Mattie came to Starkfield.
Zenobia’s fault-finding was of the silent kind, but not the less
penetrating for that. During the first months Ethan alternately burned
with the desire to see Mattie defy her and trembled with fear of the
result. Then the situation grew less strained. The pure air, and the
long summer hours in the open, gave back life and elasticity to Mattie,
and Zeena, with more leisure to devote to her complex ailments, grew
less watchful of the girl’s omissions; so that Ethan, struggling on
under the burden of his barren farm and failing saw-mill, could at least
imagine that peace reigned in his house.
There was really, even now, no tangible evidence to the contrary; but
since the previous night a vague dread had hung on his sky-line. It was
formed of Zeena’s obstinate silence, of Mattie’s sudden look of warning,
of the memory of just such fleeting imperceptible signs as those which
told him, on certain stainless mornings, that before night there would
be rain.
His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.
The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself. He had scrambled
up on the logs, and was sitting astride of them, close over his shaggy
grays, when, coming between him and their streaming necks, he had a
vision of the warning look that Mattie had given him the night before.
“If there’s going to be any trouble I want to be there,” was his vague
reflection, as he threw to Jotham the unexpected order to unhitch the
team and lead them back to the barn.
It was a slow trudge home through the heavy fields, and when the two
men entered the kitchen Mattie was lifting the coffee from the stove and
Zeena was already at the table. Her husband stopped short at sight of
her. Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her
best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which
still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard
perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan’s clearest notion was that he
had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium. On the floor
beside her stood his old valise and a bandbox wrapped in newspapers.
“Why, where are you going, Zeena?” he exclaimed.
“I’ve got my shooting pains so bad that I’m going over to Bettsbridge
to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor,” she
answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into
the store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go
over the blankets.
In spite of her sedentary habits such abrupt decisions were not without
precedent in Zeena’s history. Twice or thrice before she had suddenly
packed Ethan’s valise and started off to Bettsbridge, or even
Springfield, to seek the advice of some new doctor, and her husband had
grown to dread these expeditions because of their cost. Zeena always
came back laden with expensive remedies, and her last visit to
Springfield had been commemorated by her paying twenty dollars for an
electric battery of which she had never been able to learn the use. But
for the moment his sense of relief was so great as to preclude all other
feelings. He had now no doubt that Zeena had spoken the truth in saying,
the night before, that she had sat up because she felt “too mean” to
sleep: her abrupt resolve to seek medical advice showed that, as usual,
she was wholly absorbed in her health.
As if expecting a protest, she continued plaintively; “If you’re too
busy with the hauling I presume you can let Jotham Powell drive me over
with the sorrel in time to ketch the train at the Flats.”
Her husband hardly heard what she was saying. During the winter months
there was no stage between Starkfield and Bettsbridge, and the trains
which stopped at Corbury Flats were slow and infrequent. A rapid
calculation showed Ethan that Zeena could not be back at the farm before
the following evening....
“If I’d supposed you’d ’a’ made any objection to Jotham Powell’s driving
me over—” she began again, as though his silence had implied refusal. On
the brink of departure she was always seized with a flux of words. “All
I know is,” she continued, “I can’t go on the way I am much longer.
The pains are clear away down to my ankles now, or I’d ’a’ walked in to
Starkfield on my own feet, sooner’n put you out, and asked Michael Eady
to let me ride over on his wagon to the Flats, when he sends to meet the
train that brings his groceries. I’d ’a’ had two hours to wait in the
station, but I’d sooner ’a’ done it, even with this cold, than to have
you say—”
“Of course Jotham’ll drive you over,” Ethan roused himself to answer.
He became suddenly conscious that he was looking at Mattie while Zeena
talked to him, and with an effort he turned his eyes to his wife. She
sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of
snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened
the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous
lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth. Though she was but
seven years her husband’s senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was
already an old woman.
Ethan tried to say something befitting the occasion, but there was only
one thought in his mind: the fact that, for the first time since
Mattie had come to live with them, Zeena was to be away for a night. He
wondered if the girl were thinking of it too....
He knew that Zeena must be wondering why he did not offer to drive her
to the Flats and let Jotham Powell take the lumber to Starkfield, and
at first he could not think of a pretext for not doing so; then he said:
“I’d take you over myself, only I’ve got to collect the cash for the
lumber.”
As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them, not only because
they were untrue—there being no prospect of his receiving cash payment
from Hale—but also because he knew from experience the imprudence of
letting Zeena think he was in funds on the eve of one of her therapeutic
excursions. At the moment, however, his one desire was to avoid the long
drive with her behind the ancient sorrel who never went out of a walk.
Zeena made no reply: she did not seem to hear what he had said. She had
already pushed her plate aside, and was measuring out a draught from a
large bottle at her elbow.
“It ain’t done me a speck of good, but I guess I might as well use it
up,” she remarked; adding, as she pushed the empty bottle toward Mattie:
“If you can get the taste out it’ll do for pickles.”
IV
As soon as his wife had driven off Ethan took his coat and cap from the
peg. Mattie was washing up the dishes, humming one of the dance tunes
of the night before. He said “So long, Matt,” and she answered gaily “So
long, Ethan”; and that was all.
It was warm and bright in the kitchen. The sun slanted through the south
window on the girl’s moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on
the geraniums brought in from the door-way, where Ethan had planted
them in the summer to “make a garden” for Mattie. He would have liked to
linger on, watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but
he wanted still more to get the hauling done and be back at the farm
before night.
All the way down to the village he continued to think of his return to
Mattie. The kitchen was a poor place, not “spruce” and shining as his
mother had kept it in his boyhood; but it was surprising what a homelike
look the mere fact of Zeena’s absence gave it. And he pictured what it
would be like that evening, when he and Mattie were there after supper.
For the first time they would be alone together indoors, and they would
sit there, one on each side of the stove, like a married couple, he in
his stocking feet and smoking his pipe, she laughing and talking in that
funny way she had, which was always as new to him as if he had never
heard her before.
The sweetness of the picture, and the relief of knowing that his fears
of “trouble” with Zeena were unfounded, sent up his spirits with a rush,
and he, who was usually so silent, whistled and sang aloud as he
drove through the snowy fields. There was in him a slumbering spark of
sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished.
By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in