Edith Warton's Ethan Frome

During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow
colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale.

He followed her and brought the
other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in a cracked custard bowl and the
German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop.

Say, Matt, that's tough!

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.

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.

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.

As if expecting a protest, she continued plaintively; "If you're too
busy with the hauling I presume you can let Jotham Powell drive me over
with the sorrel in time to ketch the train at the Flats."

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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.

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"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.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.

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.

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A moment later he heard the jingle of departing
sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty
expanse of snow before the church.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

"It ain't done me a speck of good, but I guess I might as well use it
up," she remarked; adding, as she pushed the empty bottle toward Mattie:
"If you can get the taste out it'll do for pickles."

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.

Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains
of a cold mince-pie in a battered pie-dish, set down her unappetising
burden without appearing to hear the accusation brought against her.

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.

Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so
excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through
his own body.

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.

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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.

The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself.

Mattie seemed to feel the
contagion of his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her
tea, while he feigned an insatiable appetite for dough-nuts and sweet
pickles.

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

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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?"

The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself.

He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at his own
ignorance.

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.

The sun slanted through the south
window on the girl's moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on
the geraniums brought in from the door-way, where Ethan had planted
them in the summer to "make a garden" for Mattie.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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.

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.

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your equipment.

1.F.2.

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I chafed at
first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually
began to find a grim satisfaction in the life.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

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.

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.

She
had measured out some drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed
and, after swallowing them, and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow
flannel, had lain down with her face turned away.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.

"Guess he's been in
Starkfield too many winters.

The cry was balm to his raw wound.

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.

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.

"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.

If he glued it together the next morning
months might elapse before his wife noticed what had happened, and
meanwhile he might after all be able to match the dish at Shadd's Falls
or Bettsbridge.

The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy.

"It takes the
stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple's
pickle-dish up there o' purpose when we was married, and it's never been
down since, 'cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it
with my own hands, so's 't shouldn't get broke."

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.

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.

I finished
my business as quickly as possible, and we set out for Starkfield with
a good chance of getting there for supper.

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."

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.

Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought:
"He's wondering why he doesn't get his supper..."

She struggled to her feet, and he rose and followed her helplessly while
she spread out the pieces of glass on the kitchen dresser.

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1.B.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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."

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.

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.

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.

Beaming maternally on Ethan, she bent over to add: "I on'y just heard
from Mr. Hale 'bout Zeena's going over to Bettsbridge to see that new
doctor.

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."

Now, in the warm
lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order,
she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.

Most of the smart ones get away."

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."

"Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him," Harmon said.

It made a small
frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if
it were hurt.

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.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

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.

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."

You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Again the outline hastily disunited
and the Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead
of him.

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.

"Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt," Denis called to her,
springing toward the shed.

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.

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.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where,
enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles
through the snow.

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.

At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as they
drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his words.

The sunrise burned red in a
pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and
beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung
like smoke.

You'll ketch your death.

Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

"Guess he's been in
Starkfield too many winters.

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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.

If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.

She seldom
abbreviated the girl's name, and when she did so it was always a sign of
affability.

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.

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 stretch...

The kitchen was empty when he came back to it; but his
tobacco-pouch and pipe had been laid on the table, and under them was
a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman's catalogue, on which
three words were written: "Don't trouble, Ethan."

She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work
table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about
a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live.

Other possibilities had been in him,
possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena's narrow-mindedness
and ignorance.

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 floor was thronged with
girls and young men.

He never turned his face to mine, or
answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight
pleasantries as I ventured.

The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself.

A dead cucumber-vine dangled
from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and
the thought flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was there for Zeena--"
Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep,
her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...

Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug
had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple
of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood
meagrely against the plaster walls.

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.

If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office.

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.

Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

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.

Business is pretty
slack, to begin with, and then I'm fixing up a little house for Ned and
Ruth when they're married.

But since he had seen her lips in the lamplight he felt
that they were his.

"If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes."

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

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.

She had plunged the breakfast
dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms
bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead
and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils
on the traveller's joy.

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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.

To
prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in
a growl of rapture: "Come along."

"It takes the
stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple's
pickle-dish up there o' purpose when we was married, and it's never been
down since, 'cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it
with my own hands, so's 't shouldn't get broke."

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Then he lifted his
lantern, found the latch, and led the way into the house.

The tall woman, who had moved away from us toward the dresser, took no
notice; but the other, from her cushioned niche, answered complainingly,
in a high thin voice.

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."

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Then, when the loading finally
began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and the tree trunks were
so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift them and get
them in place on the sledge.

The cat rubbed itself
ingratiatingly against her, and she said "Good Pussy," stooped to stroke
it and gave it a scrap of meat from her plate.

The least swerve,
and we'd never ha' come up again.

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.

She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she stood looking
uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show himself.

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.

During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow
colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale.

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.

"Why, what do
you mean?" he stammered.

She
sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of
snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened
the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous
lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth.

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.

Frome
did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began
to mount the next slope.

Jotham's facial muscles were unmoved by this appeal and, his vocabulary
being limited, he merely repeated: "I guess I'll go along back."

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.

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.

Zeena always
came back laden with expensive remedies, and her last visit to
Springfield had been commemorated by her paying twenty dollars for an
electric battery of which she had never been able to learn the use.

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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.

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.

Her husband had given her the farm and she had managed to sell it, and
with that and the alimony she had started a lunch-room at Bettsbridge
and bloomed into activity and importance.

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.

I got the roan colt too.

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.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

Her nearest relations had
been induced to place their savings in her father's hands, and though,
after his death, they ungrudgingly acquitted themselves of the Christian
duty of returning good for evil by giving his daughter all the advice
at their disposal, they could hardly be expected to supplement it by
material aid.

"Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him," Harmon said.

I went
after him into a low unlit passage, at the back of which a ladder-like
staircase rose into obscurity.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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rules is very easy.

Once, in the stillness, the call of a bird in a mountain ash
was so like her laughter that his heart tightened and then grew large;
and all these things made him see that something must be done at once.

As she passed Ethan's chair their eyes met and
clung together desolately.

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.

They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid
gooseberry bushes.

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.

Again the outline hastily disunited
and the Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead
of him.

Harmon chuckled sardonically.

Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly
double-chin unconstrained by a collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt
was always fastened by a small diamond stud.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

They
had a little girl with fair curls, who wore a gold locket and was
dressed like a princess.

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"Yes, but, you see, she never meant it
should be used, not even when there was company; and I had to get up on
the step-ladder to reach it down from the top shelf of the china-closet,
where she keeps it with all her best things, and of course she'll want
to know why I did it--"

The case was so serious that it called forth all of Ethan's latent
resolution.

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.

She set the lamp on the table,
and he saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts,
stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass.

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.

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.

He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his
voice and his sharp relapse into silence.

"Why, Puss!

She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp bringing
out with microscopic cruelty the fretful lines of her face.

"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.

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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.

"But look a here, ain't it
lucky I got the old man's cutter down there waiting for us?"

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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.

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.

"Would you be scared to go down the Corbury road with me on a night like
this?" he asked.

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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.

He did not know why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing was
changed in his life or hers.

The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening
in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow.

When she tried to extend the
field of her activities in the direction of stenography and book-keeping
her health broke down, and six months on her feet behind the counter of
a department store did not tend to restore it.

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.

"If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes."

"We never got away--how should you?" seemed to be written on every
headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a
shiver: "I shall just go on living here till I join them."

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.

She wore her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her
neck; but through her hair she had run a streak of crimson ribbon.

It was a slow trudge home through the heavy fields, and when the two
men entered the kitchen Mattie was lifting the coffee from the stove and
Zeena was already at the table.

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.

Fact is, I was going to ask
you to give me a little extra time on that payment.

She was no longer the listless
creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption,
but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long
years of silent brooding.

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.

You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the floor
beside her stood his old valise and a bandbox wrapped in newspapers.

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.

The strange exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits
of boastfulness.

Fust his father--then his mother--then his wife."

He would have liked to stand there with her all night in the
blackness.

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.

At first its weak flame made no impression on
the shadows; then Zeena's face stood grimly out against the uncurtained
pane, which had turned from grey to black.

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.

He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant
the thought of tramps tore through him.

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.

He was not sorry to assure himself of Jotham's
neutralising presence at the supper table, for Zeena was always
"nervous" after a journey.

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.

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.

III


There was some hauling to be done at the lower end of the wood-lot, and
Ethan was out early the next day.

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 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.

IX


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.

Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her
best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which
still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard
perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he
had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium.

He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste.

Zeena herself, from an oppressive
reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade.

It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from
the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing
him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and
freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days,
when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic.

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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 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.

"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.

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.

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.

The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena's seat to
the table, and was stealthily elongating its body in the direction
of the milk-jug, which stood between Ethan and Mattie.

He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant
the thought of tramps tore through him.

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world
glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars.

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.

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.

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.

It made a small
frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if
it were hurt.

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.

He luxuriated in the sense of protection and authority which his
words conveyed.

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.

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.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires.

The stillness was so profound that he heard a little
animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow.

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 stretch...

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.

"Ain't you riding, Mattie?" a woman's voice called back from the throng
about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump.

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and
pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek.

"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks.

And everybody in Bettsbridge knows
about Dr. Buck.

"Why didn't he?"

He could not pronounce the
name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.

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.

The light, on a level with her chin, drew
out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the
hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and
prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins.

I got the roan colt too.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

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.

And within
a year of their marriage she developed the "sickliness" which had since
made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.

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.

Ethan, a moment earlier, had felt himself on the brink of eloquence;
but the mention of Zeena had paralysed him.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

It
seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night
itself descending on us layer by layer.

He woke up with a touch o' lumbago, and I just
made him put on one of old Dr. Kidder's plasters and set right up into
the fire."

The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself.

"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.

It was what Jotham called a sour morning
for work, and the horses, shivering and stamping under their wet
blankets, seemed to like it as little as the men.

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.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Ethan felt confusedly that there were many things he ought
to think about, but through his tingling veins and tired brain only one
sensation throbbed: the warmth of Mattie's shoulder against his.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires.

"You must be frozen," she went on, fixing lustreless eyes on him.

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.

"Why, you told me yesterday you'd fixed it up with him to pay cash down.

Fust his father got a kick, out
haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts
afore he died.

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.

When he re-entered the kitchen the lamp lit up the same scene of shining
comfort as on the previous evening.

I went
after him into a low unlit passage, at the back of which a ladder-like
staircase rose into obscurity.

"Why, Puss!

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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.

As he reached the door he met Zeena coming back into the room, her lips
twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face.

After his father's death it had taken time
to get his head above water, and he did not want Andrew Hale, or any one
else in Starkfield, to think he was going under again.

Then he lifted his
lantern, found the latch, and led the way into the house.

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.

Eliza
Spears was wasting away with kidney trouble before she went to him, and
now she's up and around, and singing in the choir."

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.

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."

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.

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.

"Would you be scared to go down the Corbury road with me on a night like
this?" he asked.

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.

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.

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."

"I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge
to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor," she
answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into
the store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go
over the blankets.

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."

But if that
were the case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the
flight of a man like Ethan Frome?

"I ain't tried them for quite
a while, and maybe they'll help the heartburn."

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.

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.

He felt all the more sorry for the girl because misfortune had, in
a sense, indentured her to them.

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.

"Yes, but, you see, she never meant it
should be used, not even when there was company; and I had to get up on
the step-ladder to reach it down from the top shelf of the china-closet,
where she keeps it with all her best things, and of course she'll want
to know why I did it--"

The case was so serious that it called forth all of Ethan's latent
resolution.

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.

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.

Far off above us a square of light trembled through the screen of snow.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most
intensely the sweetness of this communion.

Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

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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.

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.

He pulled on his wet coat again and went back to the barn to
feed the greys.

Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek.

Mattie was washing up the dishes, humming one of the dance tunes
of the night before.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where,
enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles
through the snow.

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.

"I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge
to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor," she
answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into
the store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go
over the blankets.

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.

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.

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.

She had plunged the breakfast
dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms
bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead
and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils
on the traveller's joy.

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The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane
spangled the cold gray dusk and made the snow look whiter.

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.

"Oh, as to
that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was in the early morning stillness, when his muscles were swinging
to their familiar task and his lungs expanding with long draughts of
mountain air, that Ethan did his clearest thinking.

There was a last load of lumber to be hauled to the village, and Jotham
Powell--who did not work regularly for Ethan in winter--had "come round"
to help with the job.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once or twice, hearing
sleigh-bells, Ethan turned his head, fancying that Zeena and Jotham
might overtake him; but the old sorrel was not in sight, and he set his
face against the rain and urged on his ponderous pair.

Having satisfied himself that there was no risk of
immediate discovery he went back to the kitchen with a lighter step, and
found Mattie disconsolately removing the last scraps of pickle from the
floor.

She's
had troubles enough of her own."

She set the lamp on the table,
and he saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts,
stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass.

After a moment Mattie seemed to be affected by the same sense
of constraint.

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.

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.

It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from
the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing
him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and
freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days,
when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic.

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.

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.

Ethan set about unloading the logs and when he had finished his job he
pushed open the glazed door of the shed which the builder used as his
office.

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.

He would have liked to
linger on, watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but
he wanted still more to get the hauling done and be back at the farm
before night.

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.

A slatternly calico wrapper hung from her shoulders
and the wisps of her thin grey hair were drawn away from a high forehead
and fastened at the back by a broken comb.

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.

"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.

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.

"Oh, as to
that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring."

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.

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.

"I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back, almost
indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step.

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.

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.

Most of the smart ones get away."

"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.

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.

Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built
himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on
a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham
Lincoln and a calendar with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with
these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a
"minister" who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at
Worcester.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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She changed her position, leaning forward to bend her
head above her work, so that he saw only the foreshortened tip of her
nose and the streak of red in her hair; then she slipped to her feet,
saying "I can't see to sew," and went back to her chair by the lamp.

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 stretch...

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.

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.

"And then the smash-up?"

His wife's attitude was
unchanged, her face inexorable, and he was seized with the despairing
sense of his helplessness.

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.

Again the outline hastily disunited
and the Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead
of him.

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Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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.

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.

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.

"It takes the
stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple's
pickle-dish up there o' purpose when we was married, and it's never been
down since, 'cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it
with my own hands, so's 't shouldn't get broke."

"Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden
drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeena--ain't suited with me any
more?" she faltered.

When they married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out
the difficulties resulting from Mrs. Frome's long illness, they would
sell the farm and saw-mill and try their luck in a large town.

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it
seemed to be seething in a mist of heat.

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.

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.

"There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been
some big strides lately in that particular line of research."

"Gentleman friend gone back on you?

I thought
no more about it till I got into the sleigh again that evening, and saw
the book in Frome's hand.

"Well, she'll have to say it to the
cat, any way!" he rejoined with a laugh, kneeling down at Mattie's side
to scrape up the swimming pickles.

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.

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.

By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in
others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.

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.

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 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 name threw a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking
sideways at each other before Mattie said with a shy laugh.

"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.

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and
pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek.

The sweetness of the picture, and the relief of knowing that his fears
of "trouble" with Zeena were unfounded, sent up his spirits with a rush,
and he, who was usually so silent, whistled and sang aloud as he
drove through the snowy fields.

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Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: "What on earth's your
father's cutter doin' down there?"

Not for the world would he have made
a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next
gesture.

Tell me!" he adjured her.

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.

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.

The
cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot,
and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a
spectral rocking.

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.

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.

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.

Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

They hailed Ethan with ironic
compliment and offers of conviviality; but no one knew where to find
the glue.

Ethan'll likely touch a hundred."

She wore her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her
neck; but through her hair she had run a streak of crimson ribbon.

I ain't as low-down as
that."

He looks as if he was dead and
in hell now!"

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.

"Come along!

Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly
double-chin unconstrained by a collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt
was always fastened by a small diamond stud.

His hard day's
work in the keen air made him feel at once lazy and light of mood, and
he had a confused sense of being in another world, where all was warmth
and harmony and time could bring no change.

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.

Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging
a way through the snow with his heavily booted foot.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and
pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek.

The light, on a level with her chin, drew
out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the
hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and
prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins.

But a wet snow, melting to sleet, had fallen in
the night and turned the roads to glass.

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.

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.

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.

"Yes, but, you see, she never meant it
should be used, not even when there was company; and I had to get up on
the step-ladder to reach it down from the top shelf of the china-closet,
where she keeps it with all her best things, and of course she'll want
to know why I did it--"

The case was so serious that it called forth all of Ethan's latent
resolution.

"No."

She shone at him across the table.

When he came
back Mattie had set the teapot on the table and the cat was rubbing
itself persuasively against her ankles.

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.

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.

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.

On the floor
beside her stood his old valise and a bandbox wrapped in newspapers.

Ethan therefore proposed to his
assistant that they should load the sledge at the wood-lot, as they had
done on the previous morning, and put off the "teaming" to Starkfield
till later in the day.

Opposite the Varnum gate,
where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared
its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle.

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The leader of the reel,
who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his
partner caught his fire.

Twice or thrice before she had suddenly
packed Ethan's valise and started off to Bettsbridge, or even
Springfield, to seek the advice of some new doctor, and her husband had
grown to dread these expeditions because of their cost.

Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw.

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.

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.

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.

The sunrise burned red in a
pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and
beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung
like smoke.

Then the room grew
perfectly black, and not a sound was audible but Zeena's asthmatic
breathing.

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.

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.

And all the first winter, how she had shivered with cold when
the northerly gales shook the thin clapboards and the snow beat like
hail against the loose-hung windows!

He saw a scarcely perceptible tremor cross her
face, and without knowing what he did he stooped his head and kissed
the bit of stuff in his hold.

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.

His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile
applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood.

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.

His wife died of the
disclosure, and Mattie, at twenty, was left alone to make her way on the
fifty dollars obtained from the sale of her piano.

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.

Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her
best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which
still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard
perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he
had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium.

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.

"I'd like to go over things with you first," Zeena continued in an
unperturbed voice.

"I suppose it was Ruth and Ned," she said in a low voice, as
though he had suddenly touched on something grave.

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.

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.

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He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the
rainy winter twilight.

Mattie rose obediently,
and seated herself in it.

Almost everybody in
the neighbourhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified;
but only the chosen had "complications."

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."

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

It's the way your father
begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my
things where you couldn't get at 'em--and now you've took from me the one
I cared for most of all--" She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that
passed and left her more than ever like a shape of stone.

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.

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.

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.

"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks.

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

The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself.

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.

Having satisfied himself that there was no risk of
immediate discovery he went back to the kitchen with a lighter step, and
found Mattie disconsolately removing the last scraps of pickle from the
floor.

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.

The floor was thronged with
girls and young men.

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.

"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks.

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.

A moment later he heard the jingle of departing
sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty
expanse of snow before the church.

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.

He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to
live at the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room
was uninhabitable for several months of the year.

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.

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.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

The crash of a loaded branch
falling far off in the woods reverberated like a musket-shot, and once a
fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her steps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be
delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier
for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on
foot, and drive the load down to the village himself.

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.

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.

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.

He used to think that fifty years sounded like a long time to live
together, but now it seemed to him that they might pass in a flash.

VIII


When Ethan was called back to the farm by his father's illness his
mother gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted
"best parlour."

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.

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.

She
looked up at him languidly, as though her lids were weighted with sleep
and it cost her an effort to raise them.

He was planning to take advantage of the Hales' sympathy to obtain
money from them on false pretences.

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.

*****
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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.

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.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
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permission and without paying copyright royalties.

It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with
lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across the
threshold of their room.

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.

She
sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of
snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened
the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous
lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth.

The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf
irresolutely about her fingers.

She set the lamp on the table,
and he saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts,
stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass.

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.

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.

They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid
gooseberry bushes.

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.

But about the middle of the
winter Eady's horses fell ill of a local epidemic.

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.

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.

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.

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 stretch...

"No, of course I'm not," she quavered.

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.

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.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.

It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with
lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across the
threshold of their room.

On
the brink of departure she was always seized with a flux of words.

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.

II


As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing.

Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being.

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at
last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the
other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return
to...

At
Worcester, though he had the name of keeping to himself and not being
much of a hand at a good time, he had secretly gloried in being clapped
on the back and hailed as "Old Ethe" or "Old Stiff"; and the cessation
of such familiarities had increased the chill of his return to
Starkfield.

In the summertime, on pleasant days, they move Mattie into
the parlour, or out in the door-yard, and that makes it easier... but
winters there's the fires to be thought of; and there ain't a dime to
spare up at the Fromes.'"

Almost everybody in
the neighbourhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified;
but only the chosen had "complications."

"There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set," she said.

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.

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.

It was intoxicating to find such magic in his clumsy words, and he
longed to try new ways of using it.

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.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

They walked on as if they were floating on a summer stream.

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.

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.

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

The return to reality was as painful as the return to
consciousness after taking an anaesthetic.

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from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
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and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.

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."

"That's all right," he rejoined.

Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but
more disquieting.

He rummaged in the drawer for a
sheet of paper, found one, and began to write.

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.

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.

I went
after him into a low unlit passage, at the back of which a ladder-like
staircase rose into obscurity.

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.

"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.

"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.

Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her
best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which
still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard
perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he
had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium.

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.

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.

This display of opulence
was misleading, for though he did a fairly good business it was known
that his easygoing habits and the demands of his large family frequently
kept him what Starkfield called "behind."

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."

Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their
formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.

As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them, not only because
they were untrue--there being no prospect of his receiving cash payment
from Hale--but also because he knew from experience the imprudence of
letting Zeena think he was in funds on the eve of one of her therapeutic
excursions.

He never turned his face to mine, or
answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight
pleasantries as I ventured.

To-night the
pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the scale drooping toward
despair, and her indifference was the more chilling after the flush of
joy into which she had plunged him by dismissing Denis Eady.

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.

Under his cheek he felt a hard object with strange
protuberances.

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.

When they married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out
the difficulties resulting from Mrs. Frome's long illness, they would
sell the farm and saw-mill and try their luck in a large town.

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.

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.

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.

The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the
house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness.

He therefore made his demand with the awkwardness of a proud
man who will not admit to himself that he is stooping; and he was not
much surprised at Hale's refusal.

The mere fact of obeying her orders, of feeling free to go about
his business again and talk with other men, restored his shaken balance
and magnified his sense of what he owed her.

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.

By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in
others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.

He went out into the
passage to hang up his coat and pull off his wet boots.

To
prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in
a growl of rapture: "Come along."

The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena's seat to
the table, and was stealthily elongating its body in the direction
of the milk-jug, which stood between Ethan and Mattie.

It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from
the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing
him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and
freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days,
when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic.

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.

He therefore made his demand with the awkwardness of a proud
man who will not admit to himself that he is stooping; and he was not
much surprised at Hale's refusal.

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
with the poignancy of vanished things.

He felt all the more sorry for the girl because misfortune had, in
a sense, indentured her to them.

The
cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot,
and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a
spectral rocking.

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.

Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging
a way through the snow with his heavily booted foot.

He would have liked to
linger on, watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but
he wanted still more to get the hauling done and be back at the farm
before night.

"I've got the mill accounts to go over."

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

There was in him a slumbering spark of
sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished.

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.

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 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.

Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her
best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which
still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard
perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he
had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium.

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.

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
with the poignancy of vanished things.

Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment;
and the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know more.

"Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from behind
him.

He could not pronounce the
name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.

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.

Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built
himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on
a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham
Lincoln and a calendar with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with
these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a
"minister" who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at
Worcester.

"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.

"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.

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.

But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it.

So strange was the precision with which the incidents of
the previous evening were repeating themselves that he half expected,
when he heard the key turn, to see his wife before him on the threshold;
but the door opened, and Mattie faced him.

It was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad
seven years together, and Ethan felt as if he had lost an irretrievable
advantage in descending to the level of recrimination.

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.

But for this--as Frome sardonically reflected--it would hardly have
occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl's amusement.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's
had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping."

He was aware that he was "talking big," like Denis Eady; but his
reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the inflection with which she
had said of the engaged couple "They're so happy!" made the words sound
as if she had been thinking of herself and him.

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope
toward the basement door.

"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.

It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put
together this vision of his story.

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.

She had plunged the breakfast
dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms
bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead
and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils
on the traveller's joy.

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.

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.

The kitchen was a poor place, not "spruce" and shining as his
mother had kept it in his boyhood; but it was surprising what a homelike
look the mere fact of Zeena's absence gave it.

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.

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.

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.

He stood up also, looking vaguely about the room.

For a while she sat motionless, as if reflecting, her arms stretched
along the arms of her chair, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper: "Where'd I go, if
I did?"

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.

"That's all right," he rejoined.

"Aunt Martha's ain't got a
faded leaf on 'em; but they pine away when they ain't cared for," she
said reflectively.

"But look here--where are you taking me, then?"

"I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge
to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor," she
answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into
the store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go
over the blankets.

"You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back
was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I've got,
and wouldn't never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner,
or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge--" Zeena paused with a
gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege.

II


As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing.

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.

To
Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came
with the intense precision of the last dream before waking.

He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his
voice and his sharp relapse into silence.

The builder refused genially, as he did everything else: he treated the
matter as something in the nature of a practical joke, and wanted to
know if Ethan meditated buying a grand piano or adding a "cupolo" to his
house; offering, in the latter case, to give his services free of cost.

She lingered, pressing closer to his side.

She
sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of
snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened
the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous
lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth.

Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug
had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple
of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood
meagrely against the plaster walls.

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.

"The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me,"
she said in her flat whine.

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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.

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.

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.

"You're--you're not coming down?" he said in a bewildered voice.

VI


The next morning at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan
tried to hide his joy under an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging
back in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the weather,
and not so much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away
the dishes.

A moment later he heard the jingle of departing
sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty
expanse of snow before the church.

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and
angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast,
while the other held a lamp.

But sometimes the two
of them get going at each other, and then Ethan's face'd break your
heart...

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.

But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it.

"Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden
drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeena--ain't suited with me any
more?" she faltered.

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It was a wedding present--don't
you remember?

"I've got
complications," she said.

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.

That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about
Denis Eady.

To-night the
pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the scale drooping toward
despair, and her indifference was the more chilling after the flush of
joy into which she had plunged him by dismissing Denis Eady.

Almost everybody in
the neighbourhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified;
but only the chosen had "complications."

He rummaged in the drawer for a
sheet of paper, found one, and began to write.

The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it
he thought: "It's waiting for us: it seems to know."

But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

To
prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in
a growl of rapture: "Come along."

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

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.

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.

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 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.

He no
longer believed what Zeena had told him of the supposed seriousness of
her state: he saw in her expedition to Bettsbridge only a plot hatched
between herself and her Pierce relations to foist on him the cost of a
servant; and for the moment wrath predominated.

To him, who was never gay but in her
presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference.

When these nightly duties were performed there was nothing left to do
but to bring in the tin candlestick from the passage, light the candle
and blow out the lamp.

When it was in place they stood
side by side on the door-step, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind
his fidgety horse.

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.

As her young brown head detached itself
against the patch-work cushion that habitually framed his wife's gaunt
countenance, Ethan had a momentary shock.

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.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Why had
he not kissed her when he held her there?

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.

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.

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.

When the end came
it was she who had to tell him to hitch up and go for the undertaker,
and she thought it "funny" that he had not settled beforehand who was
to have his mother's clothes and the sewing-machine.

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.

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.

As if expecting a protest, she continued plaintively; "If you're too
busy with the hauling I presume you can let Jotham Powell drive me over
with the sorrel in time to ketch the train at the Flats."

And he pictured what it
would be like that evening, when he and Mattie were there after 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.

After the mortal silence
of his long imprisonment Zeena's volubility was music in his ears.

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.

But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it.

Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his
soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her.

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.

"I don't know as he would; but
I know he wouldn't be sorry to earn a dollar."

It was the first time they had ever spoken
so openly of her attitude toward Mattie, and the repetition of the name
seemed to carry it to the farther corners of the room and send it back
to them in long repercussions of sound.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"I suppose it was Ruth and Ned," she said in a low voice, as
though he had suddenly touched on something grave.

The
iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness.

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.

A wave of shyness pulled him back into the dark angle of the
wall, and he stood there in silence instead of making his presence known
to her.

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.

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
with the poignancy of vanished things.

"Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him," Harmon said.

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.

"Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her," he returned,
scraping hard at his chin.

Then the
big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of the road,
and he said between his teeth: "We can fetch it; I know we can fetch
it--"

As they flew toward the tree Mattie pressed her arms tighter, and her
blood seemed to be in his veins.

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.

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.

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"Hello, Ethe!" he said.

And Zeena, she was always cranky.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where,
enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles
through the snow.

"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.

The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane
spangled the cold gray dusk and made the snow look whiter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Opposite the Varnum gate,
where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared
its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle.

It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from
the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing
him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and
freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days,
when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic.

Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

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.

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."

"I felt a little mite better, and Dr. Buck says I ought to eat all I can
to keep my strength up, even if I ain't got any appetite," she said in
her flat whine, reaching across Mattie for the teapot.

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.

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.

"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.

As he passed
into their gloom he saw an indistinct outline just ahead of him.

But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan
learned the impossibility of transplanting her.

Every yard of the road was alive with
Mattie's presence, and there was hardly a branch against the sky or a
tangle of brambles on the bank in which some bright shred of memory was
not caught.

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.

III


There was some hauling to be done at the lower end of the wood-lot, and
Ethan was out early the next day.

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.

He remembered what a
colourless slip of a thing she had looked the day he had met her at the
station.

It turned on the state of
the roads and on the possible lateness of the Bettsbridge train.

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.

Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's
had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping."

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.

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.

If the Hales were sorry for him they would surely
respond to his appeal...

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."

His hard day's
work in the keen air made him feel at once lazy and light of mood, and
he had a confused sense of being in another world, where all was warmth
and harmony and time could bring no change.

To Ethan there was something vaguely ominous in this stolid rejection of
free food and warmth, and he wondered what had happened on the drive to
nerve Jotham to such stoicism.

They went back to the kitchen, and he fetched the coal and kindlings
and cleared out the stove for her, while she brought in the milk and
the cold remains of the meat-pie.

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Now her departure for Bettsbridge had once more eased his mind, and all
his thoughts were on the prospect of his evening with Mattie.

Hale, after all, knew enough of Ethan's situation
to make it possible for the latter to renew his appeal without too much
loss of pride; and, moreover, how much did pride count in the ebullition
of passions in his breast?

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.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

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.

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.

"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.

Here, after
considerable search, and sympathetic questions as to what he wanted
it for, and whether ordinary flour paste wouldn't do as well if she
couldn't find it, the widow Homan finally hunted down her solitary
bottle of glue to its hiding-place in a medley of cough-lozenges and
corset-laces.

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.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
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of receipt of the work.

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.

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.

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.

His wife's attitude was
unchanged, her face inexorable, and he was seized with the despairing
sense of his helplessness.

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.

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.

To
prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in
a growl of rapture: "Come along."

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.

Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed
to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried
without repining the burden of three crippled lives.

As the shrill words shot out Ethan heard a tap on the door, which he had
drawn shut when he turned back from the threshold.

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and
pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek.

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

Ethan was aware that, in regard to the important question of surgical
intervention, the female opinion of the neighbourhood was divided, some
glorying in the prestige conferred by operations while others shunned
them as indelicate.

Zeena, who had at her fingers' ends the
pathological chart of the whole region, had cited many cases of the kind
while she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of certain lonely
farm-houses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined, and
of others where sudden tragedy had come of their presence.

He would have liked to
linger on, watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but
he wanted still more to get the hauling done and be back at the farm
before night.

At the moment, however, his one desire was to avoid the long
drive with her behind the ancient sorrel who never went out of a walk.

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.

Only one
thing weighed on him, and that was his having told Zeena that he was to
receive cash for the lumber.

The clock ticked above the dresser, a piece
of charred wood fell now and then in the stove, and the faint sharp
scent of the geraniums mingled with the odour of Ethan's smoke, which
began to throw a blue haze about the lamp and to hang its greyish
cobwebs in the shadowy corners of the room.

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.

Having satisfied himself that there was no risk of
immediate discovery he went back to the kitchen with a lighter step, and
found Mattie disconsolately removing the last scraps of pickle from the
floor.

Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even
if she found a purchaser--in itself an unlikely chance--it was doubtful if
she could clear a thousand dollars on the sale.

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1.F.2.

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.

But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with
toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the
grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers.

The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the
house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness.

Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their
formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.

The other he tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him
nimbly, and Frome's heart, which had swung out over a black void,
trembled back to safety.

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.

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.

"I'm obliged to you, but I'll try if I can get it down at Mrs. Homan's,"
Ethan answered, burning to be gone.

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."

The
iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness.

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she
turned with a quick "Oh!"

"Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?" he asked with sheepish glee.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires.

He could not pronounce the
name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.

She
sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of
snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened
the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous
lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth.

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.

She chose to look down
on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked
down on her.

Even a few minutes earlier, when
they had stood alone outside the house, he would not have dared to think
of kissing her.

Business is pretty
slack, to begin with, and then I'm fixing up a little house for Ned and
Ruth when they're married.

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and
angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast,
while the other held a lamp.

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 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.

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 only drawback to his
complete well-being was the fact that he could not see Mattie from where
he sat; but he was too indolent to move and after a moment he said:
"Come over here and sit by the stove."

This display of opulence
was misleading, for though he did a fairly good business it was known
that his easygoing habits and the demands of his large family frequently
kept him what Starkfield called "behind."

They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded
lane, where Ethan's sawmill gloomed through the night, and out again
into the comparative clearness of the fields.

Zeena came into the room with her dragging down-at-the-heel step, and
quietly took her accustomed seat between them.

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.

Mattie sat silent, giving no sign
of surprise; but after a moment she said: "Are you going round by Shadow
Pond?"

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.

When he came
back Mattie had set the teapot on the table and the cat was rubbing
itself persuasively against her ankles.

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.

The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the
house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness.

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.

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
with the poignancy of vanished things.

The sweetness of the picture, and the relief of knowing that his fears
of "trouble" with Zeena were unfounded, sent up his spirits with a rush,
and he, who was usually so silent, whistled and sang aloud as he
drove through the snowy fields.

Mattie seemed to feel the
contagion of his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her
tea, while he feigned an insatiable appetite for dough-nuts and sweet
pickles.

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.

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.

"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks.

Their arms had slipped apart and they stood motionless, each seeking to
distinguish the other's face.

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.

"I don't know as he would; but
I know he wouldn't be sorry to earn a dollar."

Zeena, who had at her fingers' ends the
pathological chart of the whole region, had cited many cases of the kind
while she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of certain lonely
farm-houses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined, and
of others where sudden tragedy had come of their presence.

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.

"More'n enough to kill most men.

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.

At
his approach it melted for an instant into two separate shapes and then
conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a half-laughing "Oh!" provoked
by the discovery of his presence.

"Good God!" I exclaimed.

"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.

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.

Ethan undressed
hurriedly and blew out the light so that he should not see her when he
took his place at her side.

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 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.

A dead cucumber-vine dangled
from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and
the thought flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was there for Zeena--"
Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep,
her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...

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.

"Good-bye!

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.

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.

For the first time they would be alone together indoors, and they would
sit there, one on each side of the stove, like a married couple, he in
his stocking feet and smoking his pipe, she laughing and talking in that
funny way she had, which was always as new to him as if he had never
heard her before.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"She's up in her room," he said to himself, "fixing
herself up for supper"; and he remembered Zeena's sarcastic stare when
Mattie, on the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with
smoothed hair and a ribbon at her neck.

His former dread started up full-armed at the suggestion.

As he walked away the builder's last phrase lingered in
his ears, and he reflected grimly that his seven years with Zeena seemed
to Starkfield "not so long."

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"I'll have
to hurry up to do it," Ethan mused, as the sleigh dropped down ahead
of him over the dip of the school-house hill.

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.

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.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Let me get
at it quick," he cried, waving the bottle in one hand while he put her
lightly aside; but she did not seem to hear him.

Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment;
and the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know more.

His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.

His hand was steady, but the attitude was an
excuse for not making an immediate reply.

Fust his father--then his mother--then his wife."

But she remained seated,
and he could think of nothing more felicitous than: "I presume you're
tired after the long ride."

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II


As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing.

But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with
toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the
grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers.

Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but
more disquieting.

Again he listened, fancying he heard a distant sound in the house; then
he felt in his pocket for a match, and kneeling down, passed its light
slowly over the rough edges of snow about the doorstep.

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.

The sunrise burned red in a
pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and
beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung
like smoke.

In the afternoon the storm held off, and the clearness in the west
seemed to my inexperienced eye the pledge of a fair evening.

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.

"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.

But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with
toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the
grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers.

Mattie, in an instant, had sprung from her chair and was down on her
knees by the fragments.

She drew aside without speaking, and Mattie and Ethan passed into the
kitchen, which had the deadly chill of a vault after the dry cold of the
night.

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.

But I've never even spoken to
him.

Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their
formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.

He
hurried forward to meet it, but as it drew nearer he saw that it was
driven by the carpenter's youngest boy and that the figure at his side,
looking like a large upright cocoon in spectacles, was that of Mrs.
Hale.

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.

As his lips rested on it he felt it glide
slowly from beneath them, and saw that Mattie had risen and was silently
rolling up her work.

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1.E.3.

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.

The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy.

Half-way up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen
obstruction and clutched his sleeve to steady herself.

Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built
himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on
a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham
Lincoln and a calendar with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with
these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a
"minister" who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at
Worcester.

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.

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.

She raised distressed eyes to his, her work dropping on the table
between them.

She drew aside, instinctively obeying his tone.

II


As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing.

The light, on a level with her chin, drew
out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the
hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and
prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins.

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.

Ethan had imagined that his allusion might open the way to the accepted
pleasantries, and these perhaps in turn to a harmless caress, if only
a mere touch on her hand.

"Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way," he answered, pointing
up School House Hill with his whip.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
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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 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.

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.

When
he raised himself again he saw that she was dragging toward the stove
the old soap-box lined with carpet in which the cat made its bed.

She nodded and laughed "Yes, one," and he felt a blackness settling on
his brows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back, almost
indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step.

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Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging
a way through the snow with his heavily booted foot.

He knew that Zeena must be wondering why he did not offer to drive her
to the Flats and let Jotham Powell take the lumber to Starkfield, and
at first he could not think of a pretext for not doing so; then he said:
"I'd take you over myself, only I've got to collect the cash for the
lumber."

The
cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot,
and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a
spectral rocking.

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.

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.

"She's up in her room," he said to himself, "fixing
herself up for supper"; and he remembered Zeena's sarcastic stare when
Mattie, on the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with
smoothed hair and a ribbon at her neck.

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.

He followed her and brought the
other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in a cracked custard bowl and the
German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop.

She looked so small and pinched, in her poor dress, with the red scarf
wound about her, and the cold light turning her paleness sallow, that
Ethan stood before her without speaking.

"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.

Leaning forward, he touched the farther end of
the strip of brown stuff that she was hemming.

She lingered, pressing closer to his side.

As he drew near the farm he saw,
through the thin screen of larches at the gate, a light twinkling in
the house above him.

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.

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Then he opened the door.

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.

Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being.

It did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he
called out in a voice that shook with joy: "Hello, Matt!"

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.

But for this--as Frome sardonically reflected--it would hardly have
occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl's amusement.

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.

He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was
faintly pressed against her side, but neither of them moved.

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.

The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it
he thought: "It's waiting for us: it seems to know."

Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his
soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her.

The wave of
warmth that went through him was like the prolongation of his vision.

Ethan's hand dropped from the door-knob, which he had held clenched
since he had drawn the door shut on Mattie.

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.

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.

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.

The floor was thronged with
girls and young men.

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."

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.

But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan
learned the impossibility of transplanting her.

The sunrise burned red in a
pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and
beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung
like smoke.

From where he stood he
could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced
a few steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-door; but through its
cracks he heard a clear voice answer: "Mercy no!

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.

I kinder
knew I'd want to take a ride to-night," Eady, in his triumph, tried to
put a sentimental note into his bragging voice.

She seldom
abbreviated the girl's name, and when she did so it was always a sign of
affability.

The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf
irresolutely about her fingers.

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.

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.

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.

The pure air, and the
long summer hours in the open, gave back life and elasticity to Mattie,
and Zeena, with more leisure to devote to her complex ailments, grew
less watchful of the girl's omissions; so that Ethan, struggling on
under the burden of his barren farm and failing saw-mill, could at least
imagine that peace reigned in his house.

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And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at
last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the
other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return
to...

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

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.

Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against
a battered desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm,
genial and untidy.

He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and
down the street, in which not another figure moved.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

VI


The next morning at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan
tried to hide his joy under an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging
back in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the weather,
and not so much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away
the dishes.

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 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 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.

At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as they
drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his words.

Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4517]
Posting Date: February 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo





ETHAN FROME


By Edith Wharton




ETHAN FROME



I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally
happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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.

His was not
a tuneful throat--but harsh melodies burst from it as he locked the barn
and sprang up the hill to the house.

When she tried to extend the
field of her activities in the direction of stenography and book-keeping
her health broke down, and six months on her feet behind the counter of
a department store did not tend to restore it.

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.

"We'll come to-morrow if there's a moon."

IV


As soon as his wife had driven off Ethan took his coat and cap from the
peg.

"Don't, Matt, don't--oh, don't!" he implored
her.

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.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires.

This plan had the advantage of enabling him to
send Jotham to the Flats after dinner to meet Zenobia, while he himself
took the lumber down to the village.

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.

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.

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.

The pains are clear away down to my ankles now, or I'd 'a' walked in to
Starkfield on my own feet, sooner'n put you out, and asked Michael Eady
to let me ride over on his wagon to the Flats, when he sends to meet the
train that brings his groceries.

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.

As his lips rested on it he felt it glide
slowly from beneath them, and saw that Mattie had risen and was silently
rolling up her work.

II


As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing.

Left alone, after
his father's accident, to carry the burden of farm and mill, he had had
no time for convivial loiterings in the village; and when his mother
fell ill the loneliness of the house grew more oppressive than that
of the fields.

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.

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 guess I can take you down all right!"
he said disdainfully.

He reached the kitchen-porch and
turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to his touch.

Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his
soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her.

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The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears.

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.

Ethan sat speechless, not pretending to eat, but Mattie nibbled
valiantly at her food and asked Zeena one or two questions about her
visit to Bettsbridge.

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.

The light, on a level with her chin, drew
out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the
hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and
prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins.

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.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires.

The name had benumbed
him again, and once more he felt as if Zeena were in the room between
them.

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 suddenly his
wife's face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between
him and his goal, and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside.

She
had measured out some drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed
and, after swallowing them, and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow
flannel, had lain down with her face turned away.

Under her shapeless dress her body kept its
limp immobility, and her dark eyes had the bright witch-like stare that
disease of the spine sometimes gives.

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.

She answered seriously: "I thought maybe you couldn't come back for me."

"I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge
to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor," she
answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into
the store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go
over the blankets.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

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.

Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even
if she found a purchaser--in itself an unlikely chance--it was doubtful if
she could clear a thousand dollars on the sale.

It was
part of the sun's red and of the pure glitter on the snow.

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.

By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could only
follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they continued
to move along the crest of the slope above him.

The doors of the two bedrooms faced each other across the
narrow upper landing, and to-night it was peculiarly repugnant to him
that Mattie should see him follow Zeena.

"Do what?" she emitted between flattened lips.

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.

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.

To him, who was never gay but in her
presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference.

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."

"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.

As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them, not only because
they were untrue--there being no prospect of his receiving cash payment
from Hale--but also because he knew from experience the imprudence of
letting Zeena think he was in funds on the eve of one of her therapeutic
excursions.

But
she's suffered too much--that's what I always say when folks tell me how
she's soured.

He had scrambled
up on the logs, and was sitting astride of them, close over his shaggy
grays, when, coming between him and their streaming necks, he had a
vision of the warning look that Mattie had given him the night before.

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.

"Now then, go
'long," he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly
jogging down the hill.

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.

"Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way," he answered, pointing
up School House Hill with his whip.

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.

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.

He came in after he
got back, and asked for a drop of coffee before he went down home."

It
seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night
itself descending on us layer by layer.

But that had
been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night.

But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with
toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the
grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers.

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.

They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

II


As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing.

He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of
him.

I therefore confined myself to saying, in a
matter-of-fact tone, that I had been received with great kindness, and
that Frome had made a bed for me in a room on the ground-floor which
seemed in happier days to have been fitted up as a kind of writing-room
or study.

The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had
thought her.

In spite of her sedentary habits such abrupt decisions were not without
precedent in Zeena's history.

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.

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.

The sun slanted through the south
window on the girl's moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on
the geraniums brought in from the door-way, where Ethan had planted
them in the summer to "make a garden" for Mattie.

She
sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of
snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened
the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous
lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth.

But the hired man, though seldom loth to
accept a meal not included in his wages, opened his stiff jaws to answer
slowly: "I'm obliged to you, but I guess I'll go along back."

"You might 'a' shook
off that snow outside," she said to her husband.

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.

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.

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.

The cutter was going in the direction of the Frome farm, and Ethan's
heart contracted as he listened to the dwindling bells.

Why on earth should he put himself out for me?"

He drew the lantern nearer and eagerly scanned the fares; then the paper
fell from his hand and he pushed aside his unfinished letter.

Ethan sat speechless, not pretending to eat, but Mattie nibbled
valiantly at her food and asked Zeena one or two questions about her
visit to Bettsbridge.

She had plunged the breakfast
dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms
bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead
and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils
on the traveller's joy.

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 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 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."

Even then he was the most striking figure
in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

"I guess I won't come up yet awhile," he said, turning as if to go back
to the kitchen.

The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena's seat to
the table, and was stealthily elongating its body in the direction
of the milk-jug, which stood between Ethan and Mattie.

Ethan set about unloading the logs and when he had finished his job he
pushed open the glazed door of the shed which the builder used as his
office.

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.

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.

"Matt--" he began, not knowing what he meant to say.

She seldom
abbreviated the girl's name, and when she did so it was always a sign of
affability.

At
his approach it melted for an instant into two separate shapes and then
conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a half-laughing "Oh!" provoked
by the discovery of his presence.

At
his approach it melted for an instant into two separate shapes and then
conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a half-laughing "Oh!" provoked
by the discovery of his presence.

Frome
did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began
to mount the next slope.

I nearly tripped over you," she cried, the laughter
sparkling through her lashes.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and
the sight pulled me up sharp.

He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant
the thought of tramps tore through him.

Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so
excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through
his own body.

"Nobody to do for you?" he repeated.

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.

"I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though even the
dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by
the graves, he thought: "We'll always go on living here together, and
some day she'll lie there beside me."

The builder refused genially, as he did everything else: he treated the
matter as something in the nature of a practical joke, and wanted to
know if Ethan meditated buying a grand piano or adding a "cupolo" to his
house; offering, in the latter case, to give his services free of cost.

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she
turned with a quick "Oh!"

"Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?" he asked with sheepish glee.

The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a
thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow.

He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped
lashes, while he sat in fascinated contemplation of the way in which her
hands went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen
a pair of birds make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were
building.

"Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from behind
him.

She let Denis Eady lead out the horse, climb
into the cutter and fling back the bearskin to make room for her at his
side; then, with a swift motion of flight, she turned about and darted
up the slope toward the front of the church.

Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her
best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which
still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard
perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he
had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium.

He threw the
bearskin over the sorrel, who stood passively by the roadside, hanging
a meditative head.

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.

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1.F.2.

The sky was still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star,
and tried vaguely to reckon whether it were Sirius, or--or--The effort
tired him too much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he
would sleep...

It was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when they
were engaged--the only piece of needlework he had ever seen her do.

He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and
down the street, in which not another figure moved.

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.

Zeena answered in her every-day tone and, warming
to the theme, regaled them with several vivid descriptions of intestinal
disturbances among her friends and relatives.