Edith Wharton
Kerfol
Wharton, Edith. "Kerfol."
Scribner's Magazine 59 (Mar. 1916): 329-41.
Illustration by Elenore Plaisted Abbott.
About the print version
Kerfol.
Wharton, Edith
Scribner's Magazine Mar. 1916
Note: Illustrations included by Elenore Plaisted Abbott
Note: Volume 59
Published: 1916
"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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Go to the beginning of the document
Go to previous page
Go to next page
Go to the end of document
