Ethan Frome

I had been sent to Starkfield, a small town in the Massachusetts hills, to work through the winter on the new power-house.A workers' strike held up the job, and I found myself stranded there for months in the deep snow and cold.It was in Starkfield that I first saw Ethan Frome.

He was the most striking figure in the town, tall and powerfully built, but bent and stiff down one side, and lame in his right leg.A red scar ran across his forehead, and though people told me he was only fifty-two, he looked far older."He's been in Starkfield too many winters," the old stage-driver said.

Frome came to the post office every day for the mail, sat silent in his sleigh, and spoke to almost no one.Little by little I gathered scraps of his story: a bad accident, a "smash-up," twenty-four years ago had nearly killed him and left him lame.His family had been a sickly, unlucky one, people said, and there had been a wife, but no one would tell me much more.

When my own horse could not be hired in the worst weather, Frome agreed to drive me the long cold miles to the railway and back, for a dollar a day.For more than a week we made that silent journey together through the snow.I lent him a book about science, and later he said, with a slow flush, that he had once been "crazy about that kind of thing."

So there had been a time when this shut-up, frozen man had wanted more from life than Starkfield could give him.One evening a great storm came down, and Frome said the snow was too deep to reach the station.He would take me home instead, he said, to shelter for the night at the Frome farm.

The house stood gaunt and half-ruined in the drifts, with one wing torn away, and inside I heard a woman's voice, thin and high, going on and on in complaint.That night, I felt, I had found the key to Ethan Frome, and began to put his story together.