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The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part One

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part One



KERFOL
as first published in
Scribner's Magazine, March 1916


I


"You ought to buy it," said my host; "it's just the place for a
solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth
while to own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present
people are dead broke, and it's going for a song--you ought to
buy it."

It was not with the least idea of living up to the character my
friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my
unsociable exterior I have always had secret yearnings for
domesticity) that I took his hint one autumn afternoon and went
to Kerfol. My friend was motoring over to Quimper on business:
he dropped me on the way, at a cross-road on a heath, and said:
"First turn to the right and second to the left. Then straight
ahead till you see an avenue. If you meet any peasants, don't
ask your way. They don't understand French, and they would
pretend they did and mix you up. I'll be back for you here by
sunset--and don't forget the tombs in the chapel."

I followed Lanrivain's directions with the hesitation occasioned
by the usual difficulty of remembering whether he had said the
first turn to the right and second to the left, or the contrary.
If I had met a peasant I should certainly have asked, and
probably been sent astray; but I had the desert landscape to
myself, and so stumbled on the right turn and walked on across
the heath till I came to an avenue. It was so unlike any other
avenue I have ever seen that I instantly knew it must be THE
avenue. The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great
height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long
tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly. I know most
trees by name, but I haven't to this day been able to decide what
those trees were. They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity
of poplars, the ashen colour of olives under a rainy sky; and
they stretched ahead of me for half a mile or more without a
break in their arch. If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakeably
led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol. My heart beat a
little as I began to walk down it.

Presently the trees ended and I came to a fortified gate in a
long wall. Between me and the wall was an open space of grass,
with other grey avenues radiating from it. Behind the wall were
tall slate roofs mossed with silver, a chapel belfry, the top of
a keep. A moat filled with wild shrubs and brambles surrounded
the place; the drawbridge had been replaced by a stone arch, and
the portcullis by an iron gate. I stood for a long time on the
hither side of the moat, gazing about me, and letting the
influence of the place sink in. I said to myself: "If I wait
long enough, the guardian will turn up and show me the tombs--"
and I rather hoped he wouldn't turn up too soon.

I sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette. As soon as I had done
it, it struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with
that great blind house looking down at me, and all the empty
avenues converging on me. It may have been the depth of the
silence that made me so conscious of my gesture. The squeak of
my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost
fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the grass. But
there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness,
of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke
into the face of such a past.

I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany,
and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day
before--but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without
feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of
history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only the sheer
weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a kind of
majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol suggested
something more--a perspective of stern and cruel memories
stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of
darkness.

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken
with the present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and
gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument.
"Tombs in the chapel? The whole place is a tomb!" I reflected.
I hoped more and more that the guardian would not come. The
details of the place, however striking, would seem trivial
compared with its collective impressiveness; and I wanted only to
sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence.

"It's the very place for you!" Lanrivain had said; and I was
overcome by the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any
living being that Kerfol was the place for him. "Is it possible
that any one could NOT see--?" I wondered. I did not finish the
thought: what I meant was undefinable. I stood up and wandered
toward the gate. I was beginning to want to know more; not to
SEE more--I was by now so sure it was not a question of seeing--
but to feel more: feel all the place had to communicate. "But to
get in one will have to rout out the keeper," I thought
reluctantly, and hesitated. Finally I crossed the bridge and
tried the iron gate. It yielded, and I walked under the tunnel
formed by the thickness of the chemin de ronde. At the farther
end, a wooden barricade had been laid across the entrance, and
beyond it I saw a court enclosed in noble architecture. The main
building faced me; and I now discovered that one half was a mere
ruined front, with gaping windows through which the wild growths
of the moat and the trees of the park were visible. The rest of
the house was still in its robust beauty. One end abutted on the
round tower, the other on the small traceried chapel, and in an
angle of the building stood a graceful well-head adorned with
mossy urns. A few roses grew against the walls, and on an upper
window-sill I remember noticing a pot of fuchsias.

My sense of the pressure of the invisible began to yield to my
architectural interest. The building was so fine that I felt a
desire to explore it for its own sake. I looked about the court,
wondering in which corner the guardian lodged. Then I pushed
open the barrier and went in. As I did so, a little dog barred
my way. He was such a remarkably beautiful little dog that for a
moment he made me forget the splendid place he was defending. I
was not sure of his breed at the time, but have since learned
that it was Chinese, and that he was of a rare variety called the
"Sleeve-dog." He was very small and golden brown, with large
brown eyes and a ruffled throat: he looked rather like a large
tawny chrysanthemum. I said to myself: "These little beasts
always snap and scream, and somebody will be out in a minute."

The little animal stood before me, forbidding, almost menacing:
there was anger in his large brown eyes. But he made no sound,
he came no nearer. Instead, as I advanced, he gradually fell
back, and I noticed that another dog, a vague rough brindled
thing, had limped up. "There'll be a hubbub now," I thought; for
at the same moment a third dog, a long-haired white mongrel,
slipped out of a doorway and joined the others. All three stood
looking at me with grave eyes; but not a sound came from them.
As I advanced they continued to fall back on muffled paws, still
watching me. "At a given point, they'll all charge at my ankles:
it's one of the dodges that dogs who live together put up on
one," I thought. I was not much alarmed, for they were neither
large nor formidable. But they let me wander about the court as
I pleased, following me at a little distance--always the same
distance--and always keeping their eyes on me. Presently I
looked across at the ruined facade, and saw that in one of its
window-frames another dog stood: a large white pointer with one
brown ear. He was an old grave dog, much more experienced than
the others; and he seemed to be observing me with a deeper
intentness.

"I'll hear from HIM," I said to myself; but he stood in the empty
window-frame, against the trees of the park, and continued to
watch me without moving. I looked back at him for a time, to see
if the sense that he was being watched would not rouse him. Half
the width of the court lay between us, and we stared at each
other silently across it. But he did not stir, and at last I
turned away. Behind me I found the rest of the pack, with a
newcomer added: a small black greyhound with pale agate-coloured
eyes. He was shivering a little, and his expression was more
timid than that of the others. I noticed that he kept a little
behind them. And still there was not a sound.

I stood there for fully five minutes, the circle about me--
waiting, as they seemed to be waiting. At last I went up to the
little golden-brown dog and stooped to pat him. As I did so, I
heard myself laugh. The little dog did not start, or growl, or
take his eyes from me--he simply slipped back about a yard, and
then paused and continued to look at me. "Oh, hang it!" I
exclaimed aloud, and walked across the court toward the well.

As I advanced, the dogs separated and slid away into different
corners of the court. I examined the urns on the well, tried a
locked door or two, and up and down the dumb facade; then I faced
about toward the chapel. When I turned I perceived that all the
dogs had disappeared except the old pointer, who still watched me
from the empty window-frame. It was rather a relief to be rid of
that cloud of witnesses; and I began to look about me for a way
to the back of the house. "Perhaps there'll be somebody in the
garden," I thought. I found a way across the moat, scrambled
over a wall smothered in brambles, and got into the garden. A
few lean hydrangeas and geraniums pined in the flower-beds, and
the ancient house looked down on them indifferently. Its garden
side was plainer and severer than the other: the long granite
front, with its few windows and steep roof, looked like a
fortress-prison. I walked around the farther wing, went up some
disjointed steps, and entered the deep twilight of a narrow and
incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide enough for one
person to slip through, and its branches met overhead. It was
like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to
the shadowy greyness of the avenues. I walked on and on, the
branches hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry
rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy top of the chemin
de ronde. I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking down into
the court, which was just below me. Not a human being was in
sight; and neither were the dogs. I found a flight of steps in
the thickness of the wall and went down them; and when I emerged
again into the court, there stood the circle of dogs, the golden-
brown one a little ahead of the others, the black greyhound
shivering in the rear.

"Oh, hang it--you uncomfortable beasts, you!" I exclaimed, my
voice startling me with a sudden echo. The dogs stood
motionless, watching me. I knew by this time that they would not
try to prevent my approaching the house, and the knowledge left
me free to examine them. I had a feeling that they must be
horribly cowed to be so silent and inert. Yet they did not look
hungry or ill-treated. Their coats were smooth and they were not
thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if they had
lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked
at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually
benumbed their busy inquisitive natures. And this strange
passivity, this almost human lassitude, seemed to me sadder than
the misery of starved and beaten animals. I should have liked to
rouse them for a minute, to coax them into a game or a scamper;
but the longer I looked into their fixed and weary eyes the more
preposterous the idea became. With the windows of that house
looking down on us, how could I have imagined such a thing? The
dogs knew better: THEY knew what the house would tolerate and
what it would not. I even fancied that they knew what was
passing through my mind, and pitied me for my frivolity. But
even that feeling probably reached them through a thick fog of
listlessness. I had an idea that their distance from me was as
nothing to my remoteness from them. In the last analysis, the
impression they produced was that of having in common one memory
so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth
either a growl or a wag.

"I say," I broke out abruptly, addressing myself to the dumb
circle, "do you know what you look like, the whole lot of you?
You look as if you'd seen a ghost--that's how you look! I wonder
if there IS a ghost here, and nobody but you left for it to
appear to?" The dogs continued to gaze at me without moving. . .


It was dark when I saw Lanrivain's motor lamps at the cross-
roads--and I wasn't exactly sorry to see them. I had the sense
of having escaped from the loneliest place in the whole world,
and of not liking loneliness--to that degree--as much as I had
imagined I should. My friend had brought his solicitor back from
Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat and affable
stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol. . .

But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted
in the study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the
drawing-room.

"Well--are you going to buy Kerfol?" she asked, tilting up her
gay chin from her embroidery.

"I haven't decided yet. The fact is, I couldn't get into the
house," I said, as if I had simply postponed my decision, and
meant to go back for another look.

"You couldn't get in? Why, what happened? The family are mad to
sell the place, and the old guardian has orders--"

"Very likely. But the old guardian wasn't there."

"What a pity! He must have gone to market. But his daughter--?"

"There was nobody about. At least I saw no one."

"How extraordinary! Literally nobody?"

"Nobody but a lot of dogs--a whole pack of them--who seemed to
have the place to themselves."

Madame de Lanrivain let the embroidery slip to her knee and
folded her hands on it. For several minutes she looked at me
thoughtfully.

"A pack of dogs--you SAW them?"

"Saw them? I saw nothing else!"

"How many?" She dropped her voice a little. "I've always
wondered--"

I looked at her with surprise: I had supposed the place to be
familiar to her. "Have you never been to Kerfol?" I asked.

"Oh, yes: often. But never on that day."

"What day?"

"I'd quite forgotten--and so had Herve, I'm sure. If we'd
remembered, we never should have sent you today--but then, after
all, one doesn't half believe that sort of thing, does one?"

"What sort of thing?" I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to
the level of hers. Inwardly I was thinking: "I KNEW there was
something. . ."

Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring
smile. "Didn't Herve tell you the story of Kerfol? An ancestor
of his was mixed up in it. You know every Breton house has its
ghost-story; and some of them are rather unpleasant."

"Yes--but those dogs?" I insisted.

"Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. At least, the
peasants say there's one day in the year when a lot of dogs
appear there; and that day the keeper and his daughter go off to
Morlaix and get drunk. The women in Brittany drink dreadfully."
She stooped to match a silk; then she lifted her charming
inquisitive Parisian face: "Did you REALLY see a lot of dogs?
There isn't one at Kerfol," she said.



II


Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the
back of an upper shelf of his library.

"Yes--here it is. What does it call itself? A History of the
Assizes of the Duchy of Brittany. Quimper, 1702. The book was
written about a hundred years later than the Kerfol affair; but I
believe the account is transcribed pretty literally from the
judicial records. Anyhow, it's queer reading. And there's a
Herve de Lanrivain mixed up in it--not exactly MY style, as
you'll see. But then he's only a collateral. Here, take the
book up to bed with you. I don't exactly remember the details;
but after you've read it I'll bet anything you'll leave your
light burning all night!"

I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it
was chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my
reading. The account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of
the lord of Kerfol, was long and closely printed. It was, as my
friend had said, probably an almost literal transcription of what
took place in the court-room; and the trial lasted nearly a
month. Besides, the type of the book was detestable. . .

At first I thought of translating the old record literally. But
it is full of wearisome repetitions, and the main lines of the
story are forever straying off into side issues. So I have tried
to disentangle it, and give it here in a simpler form. At times,
however, I have reverted to the text because no other words could
have conveyed so exactly the sense of what I felt at Kerfol; and
nowhere have I added anything of my own.



III


It was in the year 16-- that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain
of Kerfol, went to the pardon of Locronan to perform his
religious duties. He was a rich and powerful noble, then in his
sixty-second year, but hale and sturdy, a great horseman and
hunter and a pious man. So all his neighbours attested. In
appearance he seems to have been short and broad, with a swarthy
face, legs slightly bowed from the saddle, a hanging nose and
broad hands with black hairs on them. He had married young and
lost his wife and son soon after, and since then had lived alone
at Kerfol. Twice a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a
handsome house by the river, and spent a week or ten days there;
and occasionally he rode to Rennes on business. Witnesses were
found to declare that during these absences he led a life
different from the one he was known to lead at Kerfol, where he
busied himself with his estate, attended mass daily, and found
his only amusement in hunting the wild boar and water-fowl. But
these rumours are not particularly relevant, and it is certain
that among people of his own class in the neighbourhood he passed
for a stern and even austere man, observant of his religious
obligations, and keeping strictly to himself. There was no talk
of any familiarity with the women on his estate, though at that
time the nobility were very free with their peasants. Some
people said he had never looked at a woman since his wife's
death; but such things are hard to prove, and the evidence on
this point was not worth much.

Well, in his sixty-second year, Yves de Cornault went to the
pardon at Locronan, and saw there a young lady of Douarnenez, who
had ridden over pillion behind her father to do her duty to the
saint. Her name was Anne de Barrigan, and she came of good old
Breton stock, but much less great and powerful than that of Yves
de Cornault; and her father had squandered his fortune at cards,
and lived almost like a peasant in his little granite manor on
the moors. . . I have said I would add nothing of my own to this
bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt myself
here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate of
Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also
dismounting there. I take my description from a rather rare
thing: a faded drawing in red crayon, sober and truthful enough
to be by a late pupil of the Clouets, which hangs in Lanrivain's
study, and is said to be a portrait of Anne de Barrigan. It is
unsigned and has no mark of identity but the initials A. B., and
the date 16--, the year after her marriage. It represents a
young woman with a small oval face, almost pointed, yet wide
enough for a full mouth with a tender depression at the corners.
The nose is small, and the eyebrows are set rather high, far
apart, and as lightly pencilled as the eyebrows in a Chinese
painting. The forehead is high and serious, and the hair, which
one feels to be fine and thick and fair, drawn off it and lying
close like a cap. The eyes are neither large nor small, hazel
probably, with a look at once shy and steady. A pair of
beautiful long hands are crossed below the lady's breast. . .

The chaplain of Kerfol, and other witnesses, averred that when
the Baron came back from Locronan he jumped from his horse,
ordered another to be instantly saddled, called to a young page
come with him, and rode away that same evening to the south. His
steward followed the next morning with coffers laden on a pair of
pack mules. The following week Yves de Cornault rode back to
Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants, and told them he was to
be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of Douarnenez. And
on All Saints' Day the marriage took place.

As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to
show that they passed happily for the couple. No one was found
to say that Yves de Cornault had been unkind to his wife, and it
was plain to all that he was content with his bargain. Indeed,
it was admitted by the chaplain and other witnesses for the
prosecution that the young lady had a softening influence on her
husband, and that he became less exacting with his tenants, less
harsh to peasants and dependents, and less subject to the fits of
gloomy silence which had darkened his widow-hood. As to his
wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her
behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her
husband was away on business at Rennes or Morlaix--whither she
was never taken--she was not allowed so much as to walk in the
park unaccompanied. But no one asserted that she was unhappy,
though one servant-woman said she had surprised her crying, and
had heard her say that she was a woman accursed to have no child,
and nothing in life to call her own. But that was a natural
enough feeling in a wife attached to her husband; and certainly
it must have been a great grief to Yves de Cornault that she gave
him no son. Yet he never made her feel her childlessness as a
reproach--she herself admits this in her evidence--but seemed to
try to make her forget it by showering gifts and favours on her.
Rich though he was, he had never been open-handed; but nothing
was too fine for his wife, in the way of silks or gems or linen,
or whatever else she fancied. Every wandering merchant was
welcome at Kerfol, and when the master was called away he never
came back without bringing his wife a handsome present--something
curious and particular--from Morlaix or Rennes or Quimper. One
of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination, an interesting
list of one year's gifts, which I copy. From Morlaix, a carved
ivory junk, with Chinamen at the oars, that a strange sailor had
brought back as a votive offering for Notre Dame de la Clarte,
above Ploumanac'h; from Quimper, an embroidered gown, worked by
the nuns of the Assumption; from Rennes, a silver rose that
opened and showed an amber Virgin with a crown of garnets; from
Morlaix, again, a length of Damascus velvet shot with gold,
bought of a Jew from Syria; and for Michaelmas that same year,
from Rennes, a necklet or bracelet of round stones--emeralds and
pearls and rubies--strung like beads on a gold wire. This was
the present that pleased the lady best, the woman said. Later
on, as it happened, it was produced at the trial, and appears to
have struck the Judges and the public as a curious and valuable
jewel.

The very same winter, the Baron absented himself again, this time
as far as Bordeaux, and on his return he brought his wife
something even odder and prettier than the bracelet. It was a
winter evening when he rode up to Kerfol and, walking into the
hall, found her sitting listlessly by the fire, her chin on her
hand, looking into the fire. He carried a velvet box in his hand
and, setting it down on the hearth, lifted the lid and let out a
little golden-brown dog.

Anne de Cornault exclaimed with pleasure as the little creature
bounded toward her. "Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!"
she cried as she picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her
shoulders and looked at her with eyes "like a Christian's."
After that she would never have it out of her sight, and petted
and talked to it as if it had been a child--as indeed it was the
nearest thing to a child she was to know. Yves de Cornault was
much pleased with his purchase. The dog had been brought to him
by a sailor from an East India merchantman, and the sailor had
bought it of a pilgrim in a bazaar at Jaffa, who had stolen it
from a nobleman's wife in China: a perfectly permissible thing to
do, since the pilgrim was a Christian and the nobleman a heathen
doomed to hellfire. Yves de Cornault had paid a long price for
the dog, for they were beginning to be in demand at the French
court, and the sailor knew he had got hold of a good thing; but
Anne's pleasure was so great that, to see her laugh and play with
the little animal, her husband would doubtless have given twice
the sum.

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