Ethan Frome quotes

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

If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade;

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

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

If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was.

“

That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!

”

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

Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.

”

Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. “

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

”

Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she’s always been the greatest hand at doctoring in the county.

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

”

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

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence.

I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, …

and to my surprise Frome said suddenly: “

Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it’s all snowed under.

”

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners.

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

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners.

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

The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the …

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

Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horsewhipping.

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.

as she jumped down with her bundles, while he reflected, looking over her slight person: “She don’t look much on housework, but she ain’t a fretter, anyhow.”

But it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth.

The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear:

But it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her.

She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty.

Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand, he wondered how he could ever have thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference.

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset.

He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him:

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.

”

“Why, where were you? How did you know? I never saw you!”

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

Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and ingenious. To prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in a growl of rapture: “Come along.”

“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.

These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome.

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches.

These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome.

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches.

The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him, and feared;

On the farther side of the hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars. Sometimes their way led them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless trees.

Here and there a farmhouse stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a gravestone.

The night was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome gravestones slanted at crazy angles through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously.

For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom.

“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.”

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 felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.

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.

Zenobia, though doubtful of the girl’s efficiency, was tempted by the freedom to find fault without much risk of losing her; and so Mattie came to Starkfield.

Zenobia’s faultfinding was of the silent kind, but not the less penetrating for that.

During the first months Ethan alternately burned with the desire to see Mattie defy her and trembled with fear of the result. Then the situation grew less strained.

… 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.

Though she was but seven years her husband’s senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already an old woman.

Ethan tried to say something befitting the occasion, but there was only one thought in his mind: the fact that, for the first time since Mattie had come to live with them, Zeena was to be away for a night.

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

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

Even Bettsbridge or Shadd’s Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity.

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.

When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like the very genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had been acquired by the absorbed observation of her own symptoms.

Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan “never listened.” The charge was not wholly unfounded.

Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them.

A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.

Ethan’s ears were alert for the jingle of sleigh-bells, but not a sound broke the silence of the lonely road. 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.

They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden, jumped between them into Zeena’s empty chair. “Oh, Puss!” said Mattie, and they laughed again.

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

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

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

It seemed to him as if the shattered fragments of their evening lay there.

“Here, give them to me,” he said in a voice of sudden authority.

Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her. She did not even ask what he had done.

Except when he was steering a big log down the mountain to his mill he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery.

She laughed with pleasure, her head tilted back, the lamplight sparkling on her lips and teeth. “That would be lovely, Ethan!”

He kept his eyes fixed on her, marvelling at the way her face changed with each turn of their talk, like a wheat-field under a summer breeze.

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

She turned and looked at him a moment. “Good night, Ethan,” she answered, and went up.

When the door of her room had closed on her he remembered that he had not even touched her hand.

Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant.

People struggled on for years with “troubles,” but they almost always succumbed to “complications.”

Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.

In the agitation caused by the gravity of her announcement he sought a consolatory shortcut. “What do you know about this doctor anyway? Nobody ever told you that before.”

He saw his blunder before she could take it up: she wanted sympathy, not consolation.

“I didn’t need to have anybody tell me I was losing ground every day. Everybody but you could see it. And everybody in Bettsbridge knows about Dr. Buck.

“Yes; and my folks all told me at the time you couldn’t do no less than marry me after—”

Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart at each other like serpents shooting venom.

Ethan was seized with horror of the scene and shame at his own share in it. It was as senseless and savage as a physical fight between two enemies in the darkness.

yet it deepened his anguish by reminding him that henceforth they would have no other way of communicating with each other.

For the life of her smile, the warmth of her voice, only cold paper and dead words!

Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman?

Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him.

He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes.

Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman? Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena’s narrow-mindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it?

Borrowing was out of the question: six months before he had given his only security to raise funds for necessary repairs to the mill, and he knew that without security no one at Starkfield would lend him ten dollars.

The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders handcuffing a convict.

There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.

Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer heard what she was saying. Her hat had slipped back and he was stroking her hair.

He wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it would sleep there like a seed in winter.

Once he found her mouth again, and they seemed to be by the pond together in the burning August sun.