I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you
know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop
the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick
pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was.
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much
his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled
out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the
careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step
like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable
in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an
old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.
I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge
to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the
families on his line.
“He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that’s
twenty-four years ago come next February,” Harmon threw out between
reminiscent pauses.
The “smash-up” it was—I gathered from the same informant—which, besides
drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome’s forehead, had so shortened and
warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few
steps from his buggy to the post-office window. He used to drive in
from his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for
fetching my mail I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him
while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the
grating. I noticed that, though he came so punctually, he seldom
received anything but a copy of the _Bettsbridge Eagle_, which he put
without a glance into his sagging pocket. At intervals, however, the
post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zenobia—or Mrs.
Zeena—Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand
corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name
of his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without
a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and
variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master.
Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to
his own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on
rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for
a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the
speaker’s face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached
me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in
his left hand and drive slowly away in the direction of his farm.
“It was a pretty bad smash-up?” I questioned Harmon, looking after
Frome’s retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown
head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong
shoulders before they were bent out of shape.
“Wust kind,” my informant assented. “More’n enough to kill most men. But
the Fromes are tough. Ethan’ll likely touch a hundred.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to
his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a wooden
box—also with a druggist’s label on it—which he had placed in the back
of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought
himself alone. “_That_ man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and
in hell now!”
Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and
pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek. “Guess he’s been in
Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.”
“Why didn’t _he_?”
“Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn’t ever anybody
but Ethan. Fust his father—then his mother—then his wife.”
“And then the smash-up?”
Harmon chuckled sardonically. “That’s so. He _had_ to stay then.”
“I see. And since then they’ve had to care for him?”
Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. “Oh, as to
that: I guess it’s always Ethan done the caring.”
Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral
reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had
the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But
one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I
grouped my subsequent inferences: “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too
many winters.”
Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant.
Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural
delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain
villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and
Shadd’s Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which
the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter
shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow
perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life
there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome’s young
manhood.
I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big
power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn carpenters’ strike
had so delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfield—the
nearest habitable spot—for the best part of the winter. I chafed at
first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually
began to find a grim satisfaction in the life. During the early part of
my stay I had been struck by the contrast between the vitality of
the climate and the deadness of the community. Day by day, after the
December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents
of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an
intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must
quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce
no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of
Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this
phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold;
when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the
devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to
their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its
six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.
Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer,
and the enemy in command of almost all the lines of access between the
beleaguered villages; and, considering these things, I felt the sinister
force of Harmon’s phrase: “Most of the smart ones get away.” But if that
were the case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the
flight of a man like Ethan Frome?
During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow
colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale. Mrs. Hale’s father had been the
village lawyer of the previous generation, and “lawyer Varnum’s house,”
where my landlady still lived with her mother, was the most considerable
mansion in the village. It stood at one end of the main street, its
classic portico and small-paned windows looking down a flagged path
between Norway spruces to the slim white steeple of the Congregational
church. It was clear that the Varnum fortunes were at the ebb, but the
two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity; and Mrs.
Hale, in particular, had a certain wan refinement not out of keeping
with her pale old-fashioned house.
In the “best parlour,” with its black horse-hair and mahogany weakly
illuminated by a gurgling Carcel lamp, I listened every evening to
another and more delicately shaded version of the Starkfield chronicle.
It was not that Mrs. Ned Hale felt, or affected, any social superiority
to the people about her; it was only that the accident of a finer
sensibility and a little more education had put just enough distance
between herself and her neighbours to enable her to judge them with
detachment. She was not unwilling to exercise this faculty, and I had
great hopes of getting from her the missing facts of Ethan Frome’s
story, or rather such a key to his character as should co-ordinate the
facts I knew. Her mind was a store-house of innocuous anecdote and any
question about her acquaintances brought forth a volume of detail; but
on the subject of Ethan Frome I found her unexpectedly reticent. There
was no hint of disapproval in her reserve; I merely felt in her an
insurmountable reluctance to speak of him or his affairs, a low “Yes, I
knew them both ... it was awful ...” seeming to be the utmost concession
that her distress could make to my curiosity.
So marked was the change in her manner, such depths of sad initiation
did it imply, that, with some doubts as to my delicacy, I put the case
anew to my village oracle, Harmon Gow; but got for my pains only an
uncomprehending grunt.
“Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of it,
she was the first one to see ’em after they was picked up. It happened
right below lawyer Varnum’s, down at the bend of the Corbury road, just
round about the time that Ruth got engaged to Ned Hale. The young folks
was all friends, and I guess she just can’t bear to talk about it. She’s
had troubles enough of her own.”
All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had
troubles enough of their own to make them comparatively indifferent to
those of their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome’s
had been beyond the common measure, no one gave me an explanation of the
look in his face which, as I persisted in thinking, neither poverty
nor physical suffering could have put there. Nevertheless, I might have
contented myself with the story pieced together from these hints had
it not been for the provocation of Mrs. Hale’s silence, and—a little
later—for the accident of personal contact with the man.
On my arrival at Starkfield, Denis Eady, the rich Irish grocer, who was
the proprietor of Starkfield’s nearest approach to a livery stable, had
entered into an agreement to send me over daily to Corbury Flats, where
I had to pick up my train for the Junction. But about the middle of the
winter Eady’s horses fell ill of a local epidemic. The illness spread
to the other Starkfield stables and for a day or two I was put to it to
find a means of transport. Then Harmon Gow suggested that Ethan Frome’s
bay was still on his legs and that his owner might be glad to drive me
over.
I stared at the suggestion. “Ethan Frome? But I’ve never even spoken to
him. Why on earth should he put himself out for me?”
Harmon’s answer surprised me still more. “I don’t know as he would; but
I know he wouldn’t be sorry to earn a dollar.”
I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the saw-mill and the arid
acres of his farm yielded scarcely enough to keep his household through
the winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon’s
words implied, and I expressed my wonder.
“Well, matters ain’t gone any too well with him,” Harmon said. “When a
man’s been setting round like a hulk for twenty years or more, seeing
things that want doing, it eats inter him, and he loses his grit. That
Frome farm was always ’bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat’s been
round; and you know what one of them old water-mills is wuth nowadays.
When Ethan could sweat over ’em both from sunup to dark he kinder choked
a living out of ’em; but his folks ate up most everything, even then,
and I don’t see how he makes out now. Fust his father got a kick, out
haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts
afore he died. Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as
weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she’s always been the greatest hand
at doctoring in the county. Sickness and trouble: that’s what Ethan’s
had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping.”
The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between
the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin,
made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he
drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the
afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to
Starkfield. The distance each way was barely three miles, but the old
bay’s pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were
nearly an hour on the way. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins
loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the
helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the
bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or
answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight
pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy
landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm
and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing
unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of
moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that
his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic
as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the
profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.
Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment;
and the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know more. Once I
happened to speak of an engineering job I had been on the previous year
in Florida, and of the contrast between the winter landscape about us
and that in which I had found myself the year before; and to my surprise
Frome said suddenly: “Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while
afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it’s all
snowed under.”
He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his
voice and his sharp relapse into silence.
Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume
of popular science—I think it was on some recent discoveries in
bio-chemistry—which I had carried with me to read on the way. I thought
no more about it till I got into the sleigh again that evening, and saw
the book in Frome’s hand.
“I found it after you were gone,” he said.
I put the volume into my pocket and we dropped back into our usual
silence; but as we began to crawl up the long hill from Corbury Flats to
the Starkfield ridge I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his
face to mine.
“There are things in that book that I didn’t know the first word about,”
he said.
I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in
his voice. He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at his own
ignorance.
“Does that sort of thing interest you?” I asked.
“It used to.”
“There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been
some big strides lately in that particular line of research.” I waited
a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: “If you’d like to
look the book through I’d be glad to leave it with you.”
He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to
yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, “Thank you—I’ll take it,” he
answered shortly.
I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication
between us. Frome was so simple and straightforward that I was sure his
curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject.
Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast
more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs, and I
hoped that the chance of giving expression to the latter might at least
unseal his lips. But something in his past history, or in his present
way of living, had apparently driven him too deeply into himself for any
casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. At our next meeting he made
no allusion to the book, and our intercourse seemed fated to remain as
negative and one-sided as if there had been no break in his reserve.
Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one
morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall. The height of
the white waves massed against the garden-fence and along the wall of
the church showed that the storm must have been going on all night,
and that the drifts were likely to be heavy in the open. I thought
it probable that my train would be delayed; but I had to be at the
power-house for an hour or two that afternoon, and I decided, if Frome
turned up, to push through to the Flats and wait there till my train
came in. I don’t know why I put it in the conditional, however, for I
never doubted that Frome would appear. He was not the kind of man to be
turned from his business by any commotion of the elements; and at
the appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a
stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze.
I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude
at his keeping his appointment; but I exclaimed in surprise as I saw him
turn his horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road.
“The railroad’s blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift
below the Flats,” he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging
whiteness.
“But look here—where are you taking me, then?”
“Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way,” he answered, pointing
up School House Hill with his whip.
“To the Junction—in this storm? Why, it’s a good ten miles!”
“The bay’ll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business
there this afternoon. I’ll see you get there.”
He said it so quietly that I could only answer: “You’re doing me the
biggest kind of a favour.”
“That’s all right,” he rejoined.
Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane
to the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their trunks by the
weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew
that the solitary roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of
the hill was that of Frome’s saw-mill. It looked exanimate enough, with
its idle wheel looming above the black stream dashed with yellow-white
spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome
did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began
to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never
travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over
a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow
like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard
lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the
fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of
those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.
“That’s my place,” said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow;
and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not know what to
answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the
house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black
wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin
wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the
wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.
“The house was bigger in my father’s time: I had to take down the ‘L,’
a while back,” Frome continued, checking with a twitch of the left rein
the bay’s evident intention of turning in through the broken-down gate.
I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was
partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the “L”:
that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main
house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the
wood-shed and cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image
it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the
chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because
of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh
climate to get to their morning’s work without facing the weather, it
is certain that the “L” rather than the house itself seems to be the
centre, the actual hearth-stone of the New England farm. Perhaps this
connection of ideas, which had often occurred to me in my rambles about
Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome’s words, and to
see in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body.
“We’re kinder side-tracked here now,” he added, “but there was
considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to the
Flats.” He roused the lagging bay with another twitch; then, as if the
mere sight of the house had let me too deeply into his confidence for
any farther pretence of reserve, he went on slowly: “I’ve always set
down the worst of mother’s trouble to that. When she got the rheumatism
so bad she couldn’t move around she used to sit up there and watch the
road by the hour; and one year, when they was six months mending the
Bettsbridge pike after the floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage
round this way, she picked up so that she used to get down to the gate
most days to see him. But after the trains begun running nobody ever
come by here to speak of, and mother never could get it through her head
what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died.”
As we turned into the Corbury road the snow began to fall again, cutting
off our last glimpse of the house; and Frome’s silence fell with it,
letting down between us the old veil of reticence. This time the wind
did not cease with the return of the snow. Instead, it sprang up to
a gale which now and then, from a tattered sky, flung pale sweeps of
sunlight over a landscape chaotically tossed. But the bay was as good
as Frome’s word, and we pushed on to the Junction through the wild white
scene.
In the afternoon the storm held off, and the clearness in the west
seemed to my inexperienced eye the pledge of a fair evening. I finished
my business as quickly as possible, and we set out for Starkfield with
a good chance of getting there for supper. But at sunset the clouds
gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall
straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal
diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It
seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night
itself descending on us layer by layer.
The small ray of Frome’s lantern was soon lost in this smothering
medium, in which even his sense of direction, and the bay’s homing
instinct, finally ceased to serve us. Two or three times some ghostly
landmark sprang up to warn us that we were astray, and then was sucked
back into the mist; and when we finally regained our road the old horse
began to show signs of exhaustion. I felt myself to blame for having
accepted Frome’s offer, and after a short discussion I persuaded him
to let me get out of the sleigh and walk along through the snow at the
bay’s side. In this way we struggled on for another mile or two, and
at last reached a point where Frome, peering into what seemed to me
formless night, said: “That’s my gate down yonder.”
The last stretch had been the hardest part of the way. The bitter cold
and the heavy going had nearly knocked the wind out of me, and I could
feel the horse’s side ticking like a clock under my hand.
“Look here, Frome,” I began, “there’s no earthly use in your going any
farther—” but he interrupted me: “Nor you neither. There’s been about
enough of this for anybody.”
I understood that he was offering me a night’s shelter at the farm, and
without answering I turned into the gate at his side, and followed him
to the barn, where I helped him to unharness and bed down the tired
horse. When this was done he unhooked the lantern from the sleigh,
stepped out again into the night, and called to me over his shoulder:
“This way.”
Far off above us a square of light trembled through the screen of snow.
Staggering along in Frome’s wake I floundered toward it, and in the
darkness almost fell into one of the deep drifts against the front of
the house. Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging
a way through the snow with his heavily booted foot. Then he lifted his
lantern, found the latch, and led the way into the house. I went
after him into a low unlit passage, at the back of which a ladder-like
staircase rose into obscurity. On our right a line of light marked the
door of the room which had sent its ray across the night; and behind the
door I heard a woman’s voice droning querulously.
Frome stamped on the worn oil-cloth to shake the snow from his boots,
and set down his lantern on a kitchen chair which was the only piece of
furniture in the hall. Then he opened the door.
“Come in,” he said; and as he spoke the droning voice grew still....
It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put
together this vision of his story.
I
The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy
corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was
so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray
against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the
basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across
the endless undulations.
Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past
the bank and Michael Eady’s new brick store and Lawyer Varnum’s house
with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate,
where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared
its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked
toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade along the side wall of
the building, but from the lower openings, on the side where the ground
sloped steeply down to the Corbury road, the light shot its long bars,
illuminating many fresh furrows in the track leading to the basement
door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with
heavily blanketed horses.
The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave
little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of
a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than
ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic
dome overhead. “It’s like being in an exhausted receiver,” he
thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year’s course at a
technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with
a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that
experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally
different associations of thought in which he had since been living. His
father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature
end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be
of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge
cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.
As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in
his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp.
At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the
church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and
down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of
the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum’s spruces, was the favourite
coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner
rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled
darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay
on the village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church
windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands
of yellow light.
The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope
toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing rays
from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually
approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging
the shadow, he edged his way cautiously forward to the nearest window,
holding back his straight spare body and craning his neck till he got a
glimpse of the room.
Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it
seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the
gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and
the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as though
they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with
girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of
kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen. By this time
the music had stopped, and the musicians—a fiddler, and the young lady
who played the harmonium on Sundays—were hastily refreshing themselves
at one corner of the supper-table which aligned its devastated
pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall.
The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward
the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a
sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of
the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect.
The musicians hurried to their instruments, the dancers—some already
half-muffled for departure—fell into line down each side of the room,
the older spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young
man, after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl
who had already wound a cherry-coloured “fascinator” about her head,
and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its length
to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.
Frome’s heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse
of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed him that
another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel,
who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his
partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure
swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf
flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each
turn, caught sight of her laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair
about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points
in a maze of flying lines.
The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep
up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing their
mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window
that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the
girl’s face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the
dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership. Denis Eady was
the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness
and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of “smart” business
methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the
attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile
applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood.
Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but
now he positively invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the
girl did not seem aware of it: that she could lift her rapt face to her
dancer’s, and drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the
offence of his look and touch.
Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his
wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some chance of
amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested,
when the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be
put in her way. Mattie Silver came from Stamford, and when she entered
the Fromes’ household to act as her cousin Zeena’s aid it was thought
best, as she came without pay, not to let her feel too sharp a contrast
between the life she had left and the isolation of a Starkfield farm.
But for this—as Frome sardonically reflected—it would hardly have
occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl’s amusement.
When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an occasional
evening out he had inwardly demurred at having to do the extra two miles
to the village and back after his hard day on the farm; but not long
afterward he had reached the point of wishing that Starkfield might give
all its nights to revelry.
Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early
morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing her;
but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in
his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they
walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken to the girl from
the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats to meet her, and
she had smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, “You must be
Ethan!” as she jumped down with her bundles, while he reflected, looking
over her slight person: “She don’t look much on housework, but she ain’t
a fretter, anyhow.” But it was not only that the coming to his house of
a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold
hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had
thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her
things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he
imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.
It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most
intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more
sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His
unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his
unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful
persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even
know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he
was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that
one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder: that at his
side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom
he could say: “That’s Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is
Aldebaran, and the bunch of little ones—like bees swarming—they’re the
Pleiades...” or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite
thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the
ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that
admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie’s wonder at what he
taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other
sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together
with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter
hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the
intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him
once: “It looks just as if it was painted!” it seemed to Ethan that the
art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been
found to utter his secret soul....
As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the
floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought
that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her
presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she
lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always
looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or
three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him:
a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her
laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when
anything charmed or moved her.
The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears.
His wife had never shown any jealousy of Mattie, but of late she had
grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique ways of
attracting attention to the girl’s inefficiency. Zeena had always been
what Starkfield called “sickly,” and Frome had to admit that, if she
were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of a stronger arm
than the one which lay so lightly in his during the night walks to the
farm. Mattie had no natural turn for housekeeping, and her training had
done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful
and dreamy, and not disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had
an idea that if she were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant
instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the
county; but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first
she was so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she
laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to
supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light
the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the
mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day.
He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen floor after
the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had surprised him at the
churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks.
Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but
more disquieting. One cold winter morning, as he dressed in the dark,
his candle flickering in the draught of the ill-fitting window, he had
heard her speak from the bed behind him.
“The doctor don’t want I should be left without anybody to do for me,”
she said in her flat whine.
He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had
startled him, though she was given to abrupt explosions of speech after
long intervals of secretive silence.
He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined under
the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish tinge from
the whiteness of the pillow.
“Nobody to do for you?” he repeated.
“If you say you can’t afford a hired girl when Mattie goes.”
Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the
reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-glass above
the wash-stand.
“Why on earth should Mattie go?”
“Well, when she gets married, I mean,” his wife’s drawl came from behind
him.
“Oh, she’d never leave us as long as you needed her,” he returned,
scraping hard at his chin.
“I wouldn’t ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl
like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady,” Zeena answered in
a tone of plaintive self-effacement.
Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw
the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude was an
excuse for not making an immediate reply.
“And the doctor don’t want I should be left without anybody,” Zeena
continued. “He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he’s heard
about, that might come—”
Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.
“Denis Eady! If that’s all, I guess there’s no such hurry to look round
for a girl.”
“Well, I’d like to talk to you about it,” said Zeena obstinately.
He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. “All right. But I
haven’t got the time now; I’m late as it is,” he returned, holding his
old silver turnip-watch to the candle.
Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in silence
while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked his arms
into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and
incisively: “I guess you’re always late, now you shave every morning.”
That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about
Denis Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver’s coming he had taken
to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he
left her side in the winter darkness, and he had stupidly assumed that
she would not notice any change in his appearance. Once or twice in the
past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia’s way of letting things
happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in
a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and
drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there had been no room in his
thoughts for such vague apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive
reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived
in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive
of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw
Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded
hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain....