40
Ethan Frome ~Chapter I
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 white-ness 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.
41
Sous la neige~ Chapitre I
d'un institut technique, à Worcester, et manipulé quelque peu dans un laboratoire grâce à la complaisance d'un pro-fesseur de physique. Depuis, les images suggérées par cette expérience lui revenaient souvent d'une façon inattendue, malgré la direction si différente que son existence actuelle imposait à ses pensées. La mort de son père et les malheurs subséquents avaient en effet écourté ses études : il n'avait pu en retirer aucun bénéfice pratique, mais elles avaient nourri son imagination et lui avaient donné l'idée du vaste et nébu-leux mystère qui se dérobe derrière les apparences quotidi-ennes des choses.
Tandis qu'il cheminait à grands pas sur la neige, le sen-timent de ce mystère embrasait son esprit et avivait encore la bienfaisante exaltation physique déterminée par cette marche rapide. Au bout du village, devant le péristyle de l'église, il s'arrêta pour reprendre haleine. La pente de la route de Cor-bury s'amorçait un peu au-dessous des sombres sapins qui gardaient l'entrée du notaire Varnum. C'était à cet endroit que les jeunes gens de Starkfield se retrouvaient pour s'exerc-er à la luge. Par les nuits claires, le carrefour devant l'église re-tentissait jusqu'à une heure tardive de leurs cris joyeux ; mais, ce soir, aucun de leurs petits traîneaux ne dessinait sa tache noire sur la longue et blanche descente. Le silence de minuit planait sur le village. Tout ce qui veillait était rassemblé dans l'église : un lointain écho d'air à danser et les larges rais d'une lumière dorée arrivaient, confondus, des fenêtres.
Le jeune homme contourna l'édifice. Il descendit la rampe et se dirigea vers la porte qui ouvrait sur la salle du rez-de-chaussée. Il fit un crochet à travers la neige non foulée pour éviter la clarté jusqu'à l'angle opposé du bâtiment. Une fois là, tout en prenant garde à rester dans l'ombre, il fit effort pour atteindre la fenêtre la plus voisine. Il dissimula son corps long et mince dans l'obscurité et tendit le cou de manière à pouvoir risquer on œil dans la salle.
42
Ethan Frome ~Chapter I
Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The met-al 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.
43
Sous la neige~ Chapitre I
Ainsi considérée, de la nuit pure et glacée où Ethan demeurait invisible, elle apparaissait, cette grande pièce, en pleine ébullition. Les réflecteurs à gaz projetaient une lu-mière crue contre ses parois blanchies à la chaux. A l'une des extrémités, le poêle ronflait comme s'il eût contenu dans ses flancs un feu volcanique. Des couples jeunes et nombreux se pressaient sur le plancher. Face à la fenêtre, le long des murs, étaient alignées des chaises de paille : les femmes plus âgées, qui les avaient occupées jusqu'alors, venaient de se lever. La musique avait cessé. Le violon et la jeune organiste des dimanches, — tout l'orchestre, — se restauraient en hâte sur un coin de la table dressée pour le souper, où s'offraient encore des restes de pâtés de glaces. Chacun s'apprêtait à partir et se dirigeait déjà vers le vestiaire lorsqu'un jeune garçon ébouriffé et leste, sauta au milieu du plancher et se mit à frapper dans ses mains. Ce geste eut un effet subit : les musiciens se précipitèrent sur leurs instruments, et, bien que divers danseurs fussent déjà vêtus pour le départ, tous reprirent leurs places, des deux côtés de la salle. Les gens d'âge mûr se glissèrent vers leurs sièges. L'endiablé jeune homme, plongeant à travers la foule, entraîna jusqu'au bout de la pièce une jeune fille qui avait déjà coiffé une écharpe en laine cerise ; puis il commença de tourner avec elle sur un air de scottish.
44
Ethan Frome ~Chapter I
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 shoul-ders, 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 mu-sicians, 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 Stark-field 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
