



Produced by Judith Boss









THE EARLY SHORT FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON

By Edith Wharton

A Ten-Volume Collection

Volume One



Contents of Volume One

                               Stories
              KERFOL.........................March     1916
              MRS. MANSTEY'S VIEW............July      1891
              THE BOLTED DOOR................March     1909
              THE DILETTANTE.................December  1903
              THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND.....August    1904


The following works not included in the present eBook:

                               Verse
              THE PARTING DAY................February  1880
              AEROPAGUS......................March     1880
              A FAILURE......................April     1880
              PATIENCE.......................April     1880
              WANTS..........................May       1880
              THE LAST GIUSTIANINI...........October   1889
              EURYALUS.......................December  1889
              HAPPINESS......................December  1889


                             Bibliography

              EDITH WHARTON BIBLIOGRAPHY:
              SHORT STORIES AND POEMS........Judy Boss





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 unmistakably 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