Ethan Frome
easily and simply. They spoke of every-day things, of the prospect
of snow, of the next church sociable, of the loves and quarrels of
Starkfield. The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan
an illusion of long-established intimacy which no outburst of emotion
could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that
they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing
so....
“This is the night we were to have gone coasting, Matt,” he said at
length, with the rich sense, as he spoke, that they could go on any
other night they chose, since they had all time before them.
She smiled back at him. “I guess you forgot!”
“No, I didn’t forget; but it’s as dark as Egypt outdoors. We might go
to-morrow if there’s a moon.”
She laughed with pleasure, her head tilted back, the lamplight sparkling
on her lips and teeth. “That would be lovely, Ethan!”
He kept his eyes fixed on her, marvelling at the way her face changed
with each turn of their talk, like a wheat-field under a summer breeze.
It was intoxicating to find such magic in his clumsy words, and he
longed to try new ways of using it.
“Would you be scared to go down the Corbury road with me on a night like
this?” he asked.
Her cheeks burned redder. “I ain’t any more scared than you are!”
“Well, _I’d_ be scared, then; I wouldn’t do it. That’s an ugly corner down
by the big elm. If a fellow didn’t keep his eyes open he’d go plumb into
it.” He luxuriated in the sense of protection and authority which his
words conveyed. To prolong and intensify the feeling he added: “I guess
we’re well enough here.”
She let her lids sink slowly, in the way he loved. “Yes, we’re well
enough here,” she sighed.
Her tone was so sweet that he took the pipe from his mouth and drew his
chair up to the table. Leaning forward, he touched the farther end of
the strip of brown stuff that she was hemming. “Say, Matt,” he began
with a smile, “what do you think I saw under the Varnum spruces, coming
along home just now? I saw a friend of yours getting kissed.”
The words had been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had
spoken them they struck him as inexpressibly vulgar and out of place.
Mattie blushed to the roots of her hair and pulled her needle rapidly
twice or thrice through her work, insensibly drawing the end of it away
from him. “I suppose it was Ruth and Ned,” she said in a low voice, as
though he had suddenly touched on something grave.
Ethan had imagined that his allusion might open the way to the accepted
pleasantries, and these perhaps in turn to a harmless caress, if only
a mere touch on her hand. But now he felt as if her blush had set a
flaming guard about her. He supposed it was his natural awkwardness that
made him feel so. He knew that most young men made nothing at all of
giving a pretty girl a kiss, and he remembered that the night before,
when he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had
been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm
lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order,
she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.
To ease his constraint he said: “I suppose they’ll be setting a date
before long.”
“Yes. I shouldn’t wonder if they got married some time along in the
summer.” She pronounced the word _married_ as if her voice caressed it.
It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades. A pang shot
through Ethan, and he said, twisting away from her in his chair: “It’ll
be your turn next, I wouldn’t wonder.”
She laughed a little uncertainly. “Why do you keep on saying that?”
He echoed her laugh. “I guess I do it to get used to the idea.”
He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped
lashes, while he sat in fascinated contemplation of the way in which her
hands went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen
a pair of birds make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were
building. At length, without turning her head or lifting her lids, she
said in a low tone: “It’s not because you think Zeena’s got anything
against me, is it?”
His former dread started up full-armed at the suggestion. “Why, what do
you mean?” he stammered.
She raised distressed eyes to his, her work dropping on the table
between them. “I don’t know. I thought last night she seemed to have.”
“I’d like to know what,” he growled.
“Nobody can tell with Zeena.” It was the first time they had ever spoken
so openly of her attitude toward Mattie, and the repetition of the name
seemed to carry it to the farther corners of the room and send it back
to them in long repercussions of sound. Mattie waited, as if to give the
echo time to drop, and then went on: “She hasn’t said anything to _you_?”
He shook his head. “No, not a word.”
She tossed the hair back from her forehead with a laugh. “I guess I’m
just nervous, then. I’m not going to think about it any more.”
“Oh, no—don’t let’s think about it, Matt!”
The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with
a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought
stealing slowly across her heart. She sat silent, her hands clasped on
her work, and it seemed to him that a warm current flowed toward
him along the strip of stuff that still lay unrolled between them.
Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his
finger-tips touched the end of the stuff. A faint vibration of her
lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had
sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless
on the other end of the strip.
As they sat thus he heard a sound behind him and turned his head. The
cat had jumped from Zeena’s chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot,
and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a
spectral rocking.
“She’ll be rocking in it herself this time to-morrow,” Ethan thought.
“I’ve been in a dream, and this is the only evening we’ll ever have
together.” The return to reality was as painful as the return to
consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with
indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do
that should arrest the mad flight of the moments.
His alteration of mood seemed to have communicated itself to Mattie. She
looked up at him languidly, as though her lids were weighted with sleep
and it cost her an effort to raise them. Her glance fell on his hand,
which now completely covered the end of her work and grasped it as if it
were a part of herself. He saw a scarcely perceptible tremor cross her
face, and without knowing what he did he stooped his head and kissed
the bit of stuff in his hold. As his lips rested on it he felt it glide
slowly from beneath them, and saw that Mattie had risen and was silently
rolling up her work. She fastened it with a pin, and then, finding
her thimble and scissors, put them with the roll of stuff into the
box covered with fancy paper which he had once brought to her from
Bettsbridge.
He stood up also, looking vaguely about the room. The clock above the
dresser struck eleven.
“Is the fire all right?” she asked in a low voice.
He opened the door of the stove and poked aimlessly at the embers. When
he raised himself again he saw that she was dragging toward the stove
the old soap-box lined with carpet in which the cat made its bed. Then
she recrossed the floor and lifted two of the geranium pots in her arms,
moving them away from the cold window. He followed her and brought the
other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in a cracked custard bowl and the
German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop.
When these nightly duties were performed there was nothing left to do
but to bring in the tin candlestick from the passage, light the candle
and blow out the lamp. Ethan put the candlestick in Mattie’s hand and
she went out of the kitchen ahead of him, the light that she carried
before her making her dark hair look like a drift of mist on the moon.
“Good night, Matt,” he said as she put her foot on the first step of the
stairs.
She turned and looked at him a moment. “Good night, Ethan,” she
answered, and went up.
When the door of her room had closed on her he remembered that he had
not even touched her hand.
VI
The next morning at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan
tried to hide his joy under an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging
back in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the weather,
and not so much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away
the dishes.
He did not know why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing was
changed in his life or hers. He had not even touched the tip of her
fingers or looked her full in the eyes. But their evening together had
given him a vision of what life at her side might be, and he was glad
now that he had done nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture. He
had a fancy that she knew what had restrained him....
There was a last load of lumber to be hauled to the village, and Jotham
Powell—who did not work regularly for Ethan in winter—had “come round”
to help with the job. But a wet snow, melting to sleet, had fallen in
the night and turned the roads to glass. There was more wet in the air
and it seemed likely to both men that the weather would “milden” toward
afternoon and make the going safer. Ethan therefore proposed to his
assistant that they should load the sledge at the wood-lot, as they had
done on the previous morning, and put off the “teaming” to Starkfield
till later in the day. This plan had the advantage of enabling him to
send Jotham to the Flats after dinner to meet Zenobia, while he himself
took the lumber down to the village.
He told Jotham to go out and harness up the greys, and for a moment he
and Mattie had the kitchen to themselves. She had plunged the breakfast
dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms
bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead
and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils
on the traveller’s joy.
Ethan stood looking at her, his heart in his throat. He wanted to say:
“We shall never be alone again like this.” Instead, he reached down his
tobacco-pouch from a shelf of the dresser, put it into his pocket and
said: “I guess I can make out to be home for dinner.”
She answered “All right, Ethan,” and he heard her singing over the
dishes as he went.
As soon as the sledge was loaded he meant to send Jotham back to
the farm and hurry on foot into the village to buy the glue for the
pickle-dish. With ordinary luck he should have had time to carry out
this plan; but everything went wrong from the start. On the way over
to the wood-lot one of the greys slipped on a glare of ice and cut his
knee; and when they got him up again Jotham had to go back to the barn
for a strip of rag to bind the cut. Then, when the loading finally
began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and the tree trunks were
so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift them and get
them in place on the sledge. It was what Jotham called a sour morning
for work, and the horses, shivering and stamping under their wet
blankets, seemed to like it as little as the men. It was long past the
dinner-hour when the job was done, and Ethan had to give up going to the
village because he wanted to lead the injured horse home and wash the
cut himself.
He thought that by starting out again with the lumber as soon as he had
finished his dinner he might get back to the farm with the glue before
Jotham and the old sorrel had had time to fetch Zenobia from the Flats;