With so much room for ambiguity, mystery and the purely subjective, ghost stories are perfect for short fiction. This one begins with the standard trope, with a house so cheap there’s bound to be a supernatural catch. This house is an ancient French chateau, haunted by a pack of dogs that don’t attack the narrator, when she comes to view the property, but simply stand their ground in silence. The legend unfolds, of an aristocrat who strangles his wife’s dogs one by one, until suddenly, and mysteriously, the dogs wreak their revenge. We never find out if the narrator makes an offer on that house, and there’s much else about the framing story that’s unresolved or hinted at, an affinity perhaps between the visitor, the chateau and the ‘deep, dark memory’ attached to the dogs. Wharton captures that strange mixture of unknowability and empathy behind the dogs’ eyes. And, dead or not, those are real dogs, carefully observed.
First published in Scribner’s,1916. Read it here
A Personal Anthology 