ethan-frome-010-chapter-9

Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

CHAPTER 9

At the kitchen door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a big-boned grey who pawed the snow and swung his long head restlessly from side to side. Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by the stove. Her head was wrapped in her shawl, and she was reading a book called “Kidney Troubles and Their Cure” on which he had had to pay extra postage only a few days before.

Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and after a moment he asked: “Where’s Mattie?”

Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied: “I presume she’s getting down her trunk.”

The blood rushed to his face. “Getting down her trunk- alone?”

“Jotham Powell’s down in the wood-lot, and Dan’l Byrne says he darsn’t leave that horse,” she returned.

Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the phrase, had left the kitchen and sprung up the stairs. The door of Mattie’s room was shut, and he wavered a moment on the landing. “Matt,” he said in a low voice; but there was no answer, and he put his hand on the door-knob.

He had never been in her room except once, in the early summer, when he had gone there to plaster up a leak in the eaves, but he remembered exactly how everything had looked: the red-and-white quilt on her narrow bed, the pretty pin-cushion on the chest of drawers, and over it the enlarged photograph of her mother, in an oxydized frame, with a bunch of dyed grasses at the back. Now these and all other tokens of her presence had vanished and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands. She had not heard Ethan’s call because she was sobbing and she did not hear his step till he stood close behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders.

“Matt- oh, don’t- oh, Matt!”

She started up, lifting her wet face to his. “Ethan- I thought I wasn’t ever going to see you again!”

He took her in his arms, pressing her close, and with a trembling hand smoothed away the hair from her forehead.

“Not see me again? What do you mean?”

She sobbed out: “Jotham said you told him we wasn’t to wait dinner for you, and I thought-”

“You thought I meant to cut it?” he finished for her grimly.

She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.

Through the door they heard Zeena’s voice calling out from below: “Dan’l Byrne says you better hurry up if you want him to take that trunk.”

They drew apart with stricken faces. Words of resistance rushed to Ethan’s lips and died there. Mattie found her handkerchief and dried her eyes; then,- bending down, she took hold of a handle of the trunk.

Ethan put her aside. “You let go, Matt,” he ordered her.

She answered: “It takes two to coax it round the corner”; and submitting to this argument he grasped the other handle, and together they manoeuvred the heavy trunk out to the landing.

“Now let go,” he repeated; then he shouldered the trunk and carried it down the stairs and across the passage to the kitchen. Zeena, who had gone back to her seat by the stove, did not lift her head from her book as he passed. Mattie followed him out of the door and helped him to lift the trunk into the back of the sleigh. When it was in place they stood side by side on the door-step, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind his fidgety horse.

It seemed to Ethan that his heart was bound with cords which an unseen hand was tightening with every tick of the clock. Twice he opened his lips to speak to Mattie and found no breath. At length, as she turned to re-enter the house, he laid a detaining hand on her.

“I’m going to drive you over, Matt,” he whispered.

She murmured back: “I think Zeena wants I should go with Jotham.”

“I’m going to drive you over,” he repeated; and she went into the kitchen without answering.

At dinner Ethan could not eat. If he lifted his eyes they rested on Zeena’s pinched face, and the corners of her straight lips seemed to quiver away into a smile. She ate well, declaring that the mild weather made her feel better, and pressed a second helping of beans on Jotham Powell, whose wants she generally ignored.

Mattie, when the meal was over, went about her usual task of clearing the table and washing up the dishes. Zeena, after feeding the cat, had returned to her rocking-chair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who always lingered last, reluctantly pushed back his chair and moved toward the door.

On the threshold he turned back to say to Ethan: “What time’ll I come round for Mattie?”

Ethan was standing near the window, mechanically filling his pipe while he watched Mattie move to and fro. He answered: “You needn’t come round; I’m going to drive her over myself.”

He saw the rise of the colour in Mattie’s averted cheek, and the quick lifting of Zeena’s head.

“I want you should stay here this afternoon, Ethan,” his wife said. “Jotham can drive Mattie over.”

Mattie flung an imploring glance at him, but he repeated curtly: “I’m going to drive her over myself.”

Zeena continued in the same even tone: “I wanted you should stay and fix up that stove in Mattie’s room afore the girl gets here. It ain’t been drawing right for nigh on a month now.”

Ethan’s voice rose indignantly. “If it was good enough for Mattie I guess it’s good enough for a hired girl.”

“That girl that’s coming told me she was used to a house where they had a furnace,” Zeena persisted with the same monotonous mildness.

“She’d better ha’ stayed there then,” he flung back at her; and turning to Mattie he added in a hard voice: “You be ready by three, Matt; I’ve got business at Corbury.”

Jotham Powell had started for the barn, and Ethan strode down after him aflame with anger. The pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in his eyes. He went about his task without knowing what force directed him, or whose hands and feet were fulfilling its orders. It was not till he led out the sorrel and backed him between the shafts of the sleigh that he once more became conscious of what he was doing. As he passed the bridle over the horse’s head, and wound the traces around the shafts, he remembered the day when he had made the same preparations in order to drive over and meet his wife’s cousin at the Flats. It was little more than a year ago, on just such a soft afternoon, with a “feel” of spring in the air. The sorrel, turning the same big ringed eye on him, nuzzled the palm of his hand in the same way; and one by one all the days between rose up and stood before him…

He flung the bearskin into the sleigh, climbed to the seat, and drove up to the house. When he entered the kitchen it was empty, but Mattie’s bag and shawl lay ready by the door. He went to the foot of the stairs and listened. No sound reached him from above, but presently he thought he heard some one moving about in his deserted study, and pushing open the door he saw Mattie, in her hat and jacket, standing with her back to him near the table.

She started at his approach and turning quickly, said: “Is it time?”

“What are you doing here, Matt?” he asked her.

She looked at him timidly. “I was just taking a look round- that’s all,” she answered, with a wavering smile.

They went back into the kitchen without speaking, and Ethan picked up her bag and shawl.

“Where’s Zeena?” he asked.

“She went upstairs right after dinner. She said she had those shooting pains again, and didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Didn’t she say good-bye to you?”

“No. That was all she said.”

Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone. Then the sense of unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to believe that Mattie stood there for the last time before him.

“Come on,” he said almost gaily, opening the door and putting her bag into the sleigh. He sprang to his seat and bent over to tuck the rug about her as she slipped into the place at his side. “Now then, go ‘long,” he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly jogging down the hill.

“We got lots of time for a good ride, Matt!” he cried, seeking her hand beneath the fur and pressing it in his. His face tingled and he felt dizzy, as if he had stopped in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day for a drink.

At the gate, instead of making for Starkfield, he turned the sorrel to the right, up the Bettsbridge road. Mattie sat silent, giving no sign of surprise; but after a moment she said: “Are you going round by Shadow Pond?”

He laughed and answered: “I knew you’d know!”

She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown wave of hair. They drove slowly up the road between fields glistening under the pale sun, and then bent to the right down a lane edged with spruce and larch. Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills stained by mottlings of black forest flowed away in round white curves against the sky. The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow. As they entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the branches with the dropping needles. Here the snow was so pure that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze.

Ethan drove on in silence till they reached a part of the wood where the pines were more widely spaced, then he drew up and helped Mattie to get out of the sleigh. They passed between the aromatic trunks, the snow breaking crisply under their feet, till they came to a small sheet of water with steep wooded sides. Across its frozen surface, from the farther bank, a single hill rising against the western sun threw the long conical shadow which gave the lake its name. It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his heart.

He looked up and down the little pebbly beach till his eye lit on a fallen tree-trunk half submerged in snow.

“There’s where we sat at the picnic,” he reminded her.

The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had taken part in together: a “church picnic” which, on a long afternoon of the preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merry-making. Mattie had begged him to go with her but he had refused. Then, toward sunset, coming down from the mountain where he had been felling timber, he had been caught by some strayed revellers and drawn into the group by the lake, where Mattie, encircled by facetious youths, and bright as a blackberry under her spreading hat, was brewing coffee over a gipsy fire. He remembered the shyness he had felt at approaching her in his uncouth clothes, and then the lighting up of her face, and the way she had broken through the group to come to him with a cup in her hand. They had sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and she had missed her gold locket, and set the young men searching for it; and it was Ethan who had spied it in the moss…. That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods…

“It was right there I found your locket,” he said, pushing his foot into a dense tuft of blueberry bushes.

“I never saw anybody with such sharp eyes!” she answered.

She sat down on the tree-trunk in the sun and he sat down beside her.

“You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat,” he said.

She laughed with pleasure. “Oh, I guess it was the hat!” she rejoined.

They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.

Suddenly she rose to her feet and said: “We mustn’t stay here any longer.”

He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only half-roused from his dream. “There’s plenty of time,” he answered.

They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were straining to absorb and hold fast the other’s image. There were things he had to say to her before they parted, but he could not say them in that place of summer memories, and he turned and followed her in silence to the sleigh. As they drove away the sun sank behind the hill and the pine-boles turned from red to grey.

By a devious track between the fields they wound back to the Starkfield road. Under the open sky the light was still clear, with a reflection of cold red on the eastern hills. The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more alone.

As they turned into the Starkfield road Ethan said: “Matt, what do you mean to do?”

She did not answer at once, but at length she said: “I’ll try to get a place in a store.”

“You know you can’t do it. The bad air and the standing all day nearly killed you before.”

“I’m a lot stronger than I was before I came to Starkfield.”

“And now you’re going to throw away all the good it’s done you!”

There seemed to be no answer to this, and again they drove on for a while without speaking. With every yard of the way some spot where they had stood, and laughed together or been silent, clutched at Ethan and dragged him back.

“Isn’t there any of your father’s folks could help you?”

“There isn’t any of ‘em I’d ask.”

He lowered his voice to say: “You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you if I could.”

“I know there isn’t.”

“But I can’t-”

She was silent, but he felt a slight tremor in the shoulder against his.

“Oh, Matt,” he broke out, “if I could ha’ gone with you now I’d ha’ done it-”

She turned to him, pulling a scrap of paper from her breast. “Ethan-I found this,” she stammered. Even in the failing light he saw it was the letter to his wife that he had begun the night before and forgotten to destroy. Through his astonishment there ran a fierce thrill of joy. “Matt-” he cried; “if I could ha’ done it, would you?”

“Oh, Ethan, Ethan- what’s the use?” With a sudden movement she tore the letter in shreds and sent them fluttering off into the snow.

“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!”