Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, during the American Civil War. Wharton published her first short story in 1891; her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, in 1899; a novella called The Touchstone in 1900; and her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, in 1902. The book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. She died in 1937.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I.

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at thewindy 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 sotransparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked grey against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows ofthe church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations.

Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the desertedstreet, past the bank and Michael Eady’s new brick store and Lawyer Varnum’shouse with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate,where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared its slimwhite steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked toward it the upperwindows drew a black arcade along the side wall of the building, but from thelower openings, on the side where the ground sloped steeply down to the Corburyroad, the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in thetrack leading to the basement door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, aline of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and purethat it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was ratherof a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than etherintervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic domeoverhead. ‘It’s like being in an exhausted receiver,’ he thought. 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 unexpectedmoments, through the totally different associations of thought in which he hadsince been living. His father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enoughto be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of hugecloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharptramp. At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum’s spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Stark field, andon 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. The hush of midnight lay on the village, and all its wakening life was gatheredbehind the church windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with thebroad bands of yellow light.

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing raysfrom within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging theshadow, 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.

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which hestood, it seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and the iron flanksof the stove at the end of the hall looked as though they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with girls and young men. Down the sidewall facing the window stood a row of kitchen chairs from which the older womenhad just risen. By this time the music had stopped, and the musicians — a fiddler, and the young lady who played the harmonium on Sundays — were hastily refreshing themselves at one corner of the supper-table which aligned its devastated pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall. The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect. The musicians hurried to their instruments, the dancers — some already half-muffled for departure — fell into line down each side of the room, the older spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young man, after diving about here and there in thethrong, 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.

Frome’s heart was beating fast. He had been straining for aglimpse of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scar fand it vexed him that another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel, who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf flew off her head and stood out behind her 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 off lying lines.

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. Now and then he turned his eyes from the girl’s faceto that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the dance, had taken on alook of almost impudent ownership. 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. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the girl did not seem aware of it: that she could 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.

Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetchhome his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some chance of amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested, when the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be put in her way. Mattie Silver came from Stamford, and when she entered the Frames’ household toact 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. But for this — as Frome sardonically reflected —it would hardly have occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl’s amusement.

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.

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...