Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton Read Free Book Online Page B

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. First 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 hypnotizing effect of routine, gradually began to find a grim satisfaction in the life. During the early part of my stayI 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