Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters

by Edith Wharton

  He stood a moment behind the desk, resting his finger-tips against it, and bending slightly toward his audience; then he straightened himself and began.

  At first she paid no heed to what he was saying: only fragments of sentences, sonorous quotations, allusions to illustrious men, including the obligatory tribute to Honorius Hatchard, drifted past her inattentive ears. She was trying to discover Harney among the notable people in the front row; but he was nowhere near Miss Hatchard, who, crowned by a pearl-grey hat that matched her gloves, sat just below the desk, supported by Mrs Miles and an important-looking unknown lady. Charity was near one end of the stage, and from where she sat the other end of the first row of seats was cut off by the screen of foliage masking the harmonium. The effort to see Harney around the corner of the screen, or through its interstices, made her unconscious of everything else; but the effort was unsuccessful, and gradually she found her attention arrested by her guardian’s discourse.

  She had never heard him speak in public before, but she was familiar with the rolling music of his voice when he read aloud, or held forth to the selectmen about the stove at Carrick Fry’s. Today his inflections were richer and graver than she had ever known them: he spoke slowly, with pauses that seemed to invite his hearers to silent participation in his thought; and Charity perceived a light of response in their faces.

  He was nearing the end of his address … ‘Most of you,’ he said, ‘most of you who have returned here today, to make contact with this little place for a brief hour, have come only on a pious pilgrimage, and will go back presently to busy cities and lives full of larger duties. But that is not the only way of coming back to North Dormer. Some of us, who went out from here in our youth … went out, like you, to busy cities and larger duties … have come back in another way – come back for good. I am one of those, as many of you know.…’ He paused, and there was a sense of suspense in the listening hall. ‘My history is without interest, but it has its lesson: not so much for those of you who have already made your lives in other places, as for the young men who are perhaps planning even now to leave these quiet hills and go down into the struggle. Things they cannot foresee may send some of those young men back some day to the little township and the old homestead: they may come back for good.…’ He looked about him, and repeated gravely: ‘For good. There’s the point I want to make … North Dormer is a poor little place, almost lost in a mighty landscape: perhaps, by this time, it might have been a bigger place, and more in scale with the landscape, if those who had to come back had come with that feeling in their minds – that they wanted to come back for good … and not for bad … or just for indifference.…

  ‘Gentlemen, let us look at things as they are. Some of us have come back to our native town because we’d failed to get on elsewhere. One way or other, things had gone wrong with us … what we’d dreamed of hadn’t come true. But the fact that we had failed elsewhere is no reason why we should fail here. Our very experiments in larger places, even if they were unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North Dormer a larger place … and you young men who are preparing even now to follow the call of ambition, and turn your back on the old homes – well, let me say this to you, that if ever you do come back to them it’s worth while to come back to them for their good.… And to do that, you must keep on loving them while you’re away from them; and even if you come back against your will – and thinking it’s all a bitter mistake of Fate or Providence – you must try to make the best of it, and to make the best of your old town; and after a while – well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my recipe for what it’s worth; after a while, I believe you’ll be able to say, as I can say today: “I’m glad I’m here.” Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.’

  He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran through the audience. It was not in the least what they had expected, but it moved them more than what they had expected would have moved them. ‘Hear, hear!’ a voice cried out in the middle of the hall. An outburst of cheers caught up the cry, and as they subsided Charity heard Mr Miles saying to someone near him: ‘That was a man talking—’ He wiped his spectacles.

  Mr Royall had stepped back from the desk, and taken his seat in the row of chairs in front of the harmonium. A dapper white-haired gentleman – a distant Hatchard – succeeded him behind the goldenrod, and began to say beautiful things about the old oaken bucket, patient white-haired mothers, and where the boys used to go nutting … and Charity began again to search for Harney.…

  Suddenly Mr Royall pushed back his seat, and one of the maple branches in front of the harmonium collapsed with a crash. It uncovered the end of the first row and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and in the next a lady whose face was turned toward him, and almost hidden by the brim of her drooping hat. Charity did not need to see the face. She knew at a glance the slim figure, the fair hair heaped up under the hat-brim, the long pale wrinkled gloves with bracelets slipping over them. At the fall of the branch Miss Balch turned her head toward the stage, and in her pretty thin-lipped smile there lingered the reflection of something her neighbour had been whispering to her.…

  Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and Miss Balch and Harney were once more hidden. But to Charity the vision of their two faces had blotted out everything. In a flash they had shown her the bare reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of her lover’s caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of his life: his relations with other people – with other women – his opinions, his prejudices, his principles, the net of influences and interests and ambitions in which every man’s life is entangled. Of all these she knew nothing, except what he had told her of his architectural aspirations. She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations – but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness in which his words enclosed her.

  Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and whispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. The feeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of his love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysterious attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own powerlessness to contend with them.

  She had given him all she had – but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough: it could not buy more than a few moments.…

  The heat had grown suffocating – she felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr Royall’s countenance detached itself from the general blur. He had resumed his place in front of the harmonium, and sat close to her, his eyes on her face; and his look seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confused sensations.… A feeling of physical sickness rushed over her –and then deadly apprehension. The light of the fiery hours in the little house swept back on her in a glare of fear.…

  She forced herself to look away from her guardian, and became aware that the oratory of the Hatchard cousin had ceased, and that Mr Miles was again flapping his wings. Fragments of his peroration floated through her bewildered brain.… ‘A rich harvest of hallowed memories.… A sanctified hour to which, in moments of trial, your thoughts will prayerfully return.… And now, O Lord, let us humbly and fervently give thanks for this blessed day of reunion, here in the old home to which we have come back from so far. Preserve it to us, O Lord, in tim
es to come, in all its homely sweetness – in the kindliness and wisdom of its old people, in the courage and industry of its young men, in the piety and purity of this group of innocent girls—’ He flapped a white wing in their direction, and at the same moment Lambert Sollas, with his fierce nod, struck the opening bars of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.… Charity stared straight ahead of her and then, dropping her flowers, fell face downward at Mr Royall’s feet.

  XIV

  North Dormer’s celebration naturally included the villages attached to its township, and the festivities were to radiate over the whole group, from Dormer and the two Crestons to Hamblin, the lonely hamlet on the north slope of the Mountain where the first snow always fell. On the third day there were speeches and ceremonies at Creston and Creston River; on the fourth the principal performers were to be driven in buck-boards to Dormer and Hamblin.

  It was on the fourth day that Charity returned for the first time to the little house. She had not seen Harney alone since they had parted at the wood’s edge the night before the celebrations began. In the interval she had passed through many moods, but for the moment the terror which had seized her in the Town Hall had faded to the edge of consciousness. She had fainted because the hall was stiflingly hot, and because the speakers had gone on and on.… Several other people had been affected by the heat, and had had to leave before the exercises were over. There had been thunder in the air all the afternoon, and everyone said afterward that something ought to have been done to ventilate the hall.…

  At the dance that evening – where she had gone reluctantly, and only because she feared to stay away, she had sprung back into instant reassurance. As soon as she entered she had seen Harney waiting for her, and he had come up with kind gay eyes, and swept her off in a waltz. Her feet were full of music, and though her only training had been with the village youths she had no difficulty in tuning her steps to his. As they circled about the floor all her vain fears dropped from her, and she even forgot that she was probably dancing in Annabel Balch’s slippers.

  When the waltz was over Harney, with a last hand-clasp, left her to meet Miss Hatchard and Miss Balch, who were just entering. Charity had a moment of anguish as Miss Balch appeared; but it did not last. The triumphant fact of her own greater beauty, and of Harney’s sense of it, swept her apprehensions aside. Miss Balch, in an unbecoming dress, looked sallow and pinched, and Charity fancied there was a worried expression in her pale-lashed eyes. She took a seat near Miss Hatchard and it was presently apparent that she did not mean to dance. Charity did not dance often either. Harney explained to her that Miss Hatchard had begged him to give each of the other girls a turn; but he went through the form of asking Charity’s permission each time he led one out, and that gave her a sense of secret triumph even completer than when she was whirling about the room with him.…

  She was thinking of all this as she waited for him in the deserted house. The late afternoon was sultry, and she had tossed aside her hat and stretched herself at full length on the Mexican blanket because it was cooler indoors than under the trees. She lay with her arms folded beneath her head, gazing out at the shaggy shoulder of the Mountain. The sky behind it was full of the splintered glories of the descending sun, and before long she expected to hear Harney’s bicycle-bell in the lane. He had bicycled to Hamblin, instead of driving there with his cousin and her friends, so that he might be able to make his escape earlier and stop on the way back at the deserted house, which was on the road to Hamblin. They had smiled together at the joke of hearing the crowded buck-boards roll by on the return, while they lay close in their hiding above the road. Such childish triumphs still gave her a sense of reckless security.

  Nevertheless she had not wholly forgotten the vision of fear that had opened before her in the Town Hall. The sense of lastingness was gone from her and every moment with Harney would now be ringed with doubt.

  The Mountain was turning purple against a fiery sunset from which it seemed to be divided by a knife-edge of quivering light; and above this wall of flame the whole sky was a pure pale green, like some cold mountain lake in shadow. Charity lay gazing up at it, and watching for the first white star.…

  Her eyes were still fixed on the upper reaches of the sky when she became aware that a shadow had flitted across the glory-flooded room: it must have been Harney passing the window against the sunset.… She half raised herself, and then dropped back on her folded arms. The combs had slipped from her hair, and it trailed in a rough dark rope across her breast. She lay quite still, a sleepy smile on her lips, her indolent lids half shut. There was a fumbling at the padlock and she called out: ‘Have you slipped the chain?’ The door opened, and Mr Royall walked into the room.

  She started up, sitting back against the cushions, and they looked at each other without speaking. Then Mr Royall closed the door-latch and advanced a few steps.

  Charity jumped to her feet. ‘What have you come for?’ she stammered.

  The last glare of the sunset was on her guardian’s face, which looked ash-coloured in the yellow radiance.

  ‘Because I knew you were here,’ he answered simply.

  She had become conscious of the hair hanging loose across her breast, and it seemed as though she could not speak to him till she had set herself in order. She groped for her combs, and tried to fasten up the coil. Mr Royall silently watched her.

  ‘Charity,’ he said, ‘he’ll be here in a minute. Let me talk to you first.’

  ‘You’ve got no right to talk to me. I can do what I please.’

  ‘Yes. What is it you mean to do?’

  ‘I needn’t answer that, or anything else.’

  He had glanced away, and stood looking curiously about the illuminated room. Purple asters and red maple-leaves filled the jar on the table; on a shelf against the wall stood a lamp, the kettle, a little pile of cups and saucers. The canvas chairs were grouped about the table.

  ‘So this is where you meet,’ he said.

  His tone was quiet and controlled, and the fact disconcerted her. She had been ready to give him violence for violence, but this calm acceptance of things as they were left her without a weapon.

  ‘See here, Charity – you’re always telling me I’ve got no rights over you. There might be two ways of looking at that – but I ain’t going to argue it. All I know is I raised you as good as I could, and meant fairly by you always – except once, for a bad half-hour. There’s no justice in weighing that half-hour against the rest, and you know it. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have gone on living under my roof. Seems to me the fact of your doing that gives me some sort of a right; the right to try and keep you out of trouble. I’m not asking you to consider any other.’

  She listened in silence, and then gave a slight laugh. ‘Better wait till I’m in trouble,’ she said.

  He paused a moment, as if weighing her words. ‘Is that all your answer?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all.’

  ‘Well – I’ll wait.’

  He turned away slowly, but as he did so the thing she had been waiting for happened; the door opened again and Harney entered.

  He stopped short with a face of astonishment, and then, quickly controlling himself, went up to Mr Royall with a frank look.

  ‘Have you come to see me, sir?’ he said coolly, throwing his cap on the table with an air of proprietorship.

  Mr Royall again looked slowly about the room; then his eyes turned to the young man.

  ‘Is this your house?’ he inquired.

  Harney laughed: ‘Well – as much as it’s anybody’s. I come here to sketch occasionally.’

  ‘And to receive Miss Royall’s visits?’

  ‘When she does me the honour—’

  ‘Is this the home you propose to bring her to when you get married?’

  There was an immense and oppressive silence. Charity, quivering with anger, started forward, and then stood silent, too humbled for speech. Harney’s eyes had dropped under the old man’s gaze; but he raised them presen
tly, and looking steadily at Mr Royall, said: ‘Miss Royall is not a child. Isn’t it rather absurd to talk of her as if she were? I believe she considers herself free to come and go as she pleases, without any questions from anyone.’ He paused and added: ‘I’m ready to answer any she wishes to ask me.’

  Mr Royall turned to her. ‘Ask him when he’s going to marry you, then—’ There was another silence, and he laughed in his turn – a broken laugh, with a scraping sound in it. ‘You darsn’t!’ he shouted out with sudden passion. He went close up to Charity, his right arm lifted, not in menace but in tragic exhortation.

  ‘You darsn’t, and you know it – and you know why!’ He swung back again upon the young man. ‘And you know why you ain’t asked her to marry you, and why you don’t mean to. It’s because you hadn’t need to; nor any other man either. I’m the only one that was fool enough not to know that; and I guess nobody’ll repeat my mistake – not in Eagle County, anyhow. They all know what she is, and what she came from. They all know her mother was a woman of the town from Nettleton, that followed one of those Mountain fellows up to his place and lived there with him like a heathen. I saw her there sixteen years ago, when I went to bring this child down. I went to save her from the kind of life her mother was leading – but I’d better have left her in the kennel she came from.…’ He paused and stared darkly at the two young people, and out beyond them, at the menacing Mountain with its rim of fire; then he sat down beside the table on which they had so often spread their rustic supper, and covered his face with his hands. Harney leaned in the window, a frown on his face: he was twirling between his fingers a small package that dangled from a loop of string.… Charity heard Mr Royall draw a hard breath or two, and his shoulders shook a little. Presently he stood up and walked across the room. He did not look again at the young people: they saw him feel his way to the door and fumble for the latch; and then he went out into the darkness.