Sylva

by Vercors (Jean Bruller)

Part One

Chapter 1

MY name is Richwick, and if I answer to the Christian name of Albert it is out of pure courtesy, for I hate Albert and would have liked to be called Bruce. Anybody can look up my birth certificate at Somerset House in London, in the register for 1892, a leap year, under the date February 29th. I am giving these particulars to enable the incredulous to assure themselves, if they wish, of my existence.

I was born in Richwick Manor and my paternal grandmother brought me up, both my parents having died in a hunting accident deep in the Ardennes forest, where they had been invited by the Baron Antoine van Werpen (a near relation, as everyone knows, of the Dutch royal family) . My mother, who was born in Antwerp, was a second cousin of the Baron, whom my father used to supply with stock-bred—i.e. semiwild—foxes. People have often attributed to this Belgian ancestry certain apparently Continental traits in my character, such as—according to my friends—an immoderate liking for statements of principle and for Byzantine arguments. After the death of my parents the stock breeding was abandoned, and my grandmother had the fences pulled down and the animals scattered. I grew up with her in the manor house, a lonely old place isolated from the world, in the midst of fields and woods. When I was old enough to ride to hounds, she passed away, and with her dying breath she made me swear that I would never hunt. I gladly complied, for the stories she had told me together with my parents’ death had left me with a loathing for this bloody sport. My principal pastime, therefore, apart from my work—I manage the farm—was reading.

Ever since childhood I have lived among books. They have formed my character. As far as one can know oneself, I would describe myself thus: I am a good Christian, though doubtless from habit, since my faith lacks vigor. From what I have read I have not gained a high opinion of mankind, despite its supposed mental powers. It shuns stern truths and welcomes flattering errors. The prophets were only human, so how can I be sure that they did not err in interpreting their divine revelations? Nor do I trust churches and men of the cloth any more than philosophers and scholars. Only one artifact seems to me to deserve adherence, and that is the least reasoned and humblest one, yet also the oldest and most enduring: tradition. And with tradition, decorum; and with them religion; and that is why, even without much belief in its dogmas, I do remain faithful to it. It makes for a gentler, easier life among men. It eschews violence. One cannot ask for more, I am sure.

I believe this more than ever since the strange experience which befell me and which I propose to set down today, though not for public consumption. Indeed, I have decided to let three decades pass before publishing these pages—a precaution prompted by elementary prudence. People will only believe in miracles consecrated by the Scriptures; they will refuse to admit a single one, even though it happen under their very eyes, unless it is vouched for by the authorities which they themselves have established.

It must not be inferred from this remark that I have some foolish leaning toward anticonformism. No, on the contrary: I think the existing state of society quite right and proper. I have intimated what great store I set by law and order, and if free thought became too widespread these would soon disappear.

And yet, what I have to tell is definitely a miracle, even though nobody will believe it. There might ensue, were I to publish this tale too soon, a number of unpleasant investigations into a certain person on the pretext of exposing me and my fantasies. In thirty years’ time it will be too late for such prying, and though the world will probably not believe me any more than now, the practical inconveniences of its disbelief will have disappeared, I hope, by 1962. Meanwhile, it is 1925, and I am thirty-three years old. Only last year I was still a confirmed bachelor, with occasional vague thoughts of marriage as I wearied of the short-lived involvements in which I became entangled, and as quickly disentangled, in London where I used to spend the winter months, at least whenever the farm could spare me. I toyed with the idea of marriage without much eagerness, I confess. One Monday in September, as I sat, a little bored, in the train that was taking me back to Wardley, I foraged in my suitcase full of books—I always bring back plenty of new ones from the bookshops around Charing Cross Road—and chose one by David Garnett that friends had recently mentioned with favor, praising its attractive and subtle humor. I was disappointed. That a young woman turns into a fox under the eyes of her poor husband was an amusing idea, and I accepted it with amusement. But the subsequent slow transformation of a well-bred lady into a wild beast seemed to me tedious and lacking in force and interest. I had, not long before, read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, just published in German. What a difference![1]

As can be seen, my feelings did not differ from what was, in fact, the fairly general literal judgment. The idea of taking this improbable story seriously, or rather literally, could hardly have come to a man of sound mind. It was not a long story; I had finished it by the time the train pulled into Wardley Station. I stuffed the book into my suitcase and promptly forgot it.

I swear the story never once crossed my mind again until one evening in the autumn when I was both witness and object of a similar adventure, though in reverse. I mention this to make it quite clear that neither imagination nor autosuggestion nor memory can have played any part in it. Garnett feels obliged to bolster up his story with all sorts of precautions and furthermore with a dozen trustworthy witnesses. Whereas I, for my part, cannot produce a single one, for a good reason. The reader must simply take my word for it.

Still, just as he can check up on my existence at the local registrar’s, so he can, if he likes, check the registers for the whole of England without finding any Sylva Richwick. Though everyone in the village has seen the girl out walking in my company many times, it is within the power of the most hardened skeptic to verify that, legally, she did not exist. I can provide no other evidence.

So, to the point.

The date is October 16, 1924. Dusk is falling, it is five o’clock. As usual, whenever the weather is fine, I am taking a walk in the woods of Richwick Manor, which once belonged to the family but had to be sold to pay estate expenses. I had reserved for myself the right to walk in it, though I was unable to prevent the land I had sold from being thrown open to hunting: there are still some stag there and a number of foxes, survivors of the past.

This evening I am walking alone—I always walk alone, but this evening, I don’t know why, the rustle of the leaves under my boots exacerbates my loneliness. Can it be that it is beginning to weigh on me? And yet, I could continue to walk untiringly if the last light of day were not fading fast. I am strolling slowly back toward the house, its calm and comfort already beckoning as I inhale the scent of moss and mushrooms. No, this lonely life does not weigh on me, I still love it as much as ever. I am happy, peaceful, infinitely calm.

I emerge from the woods. Another few hundred yards through the fields, a fence to cross, and I’ll be home. Just then I hear, from quite far off in the forest, the baying of a pack of hounds.

My dislike for the sport has only grown with the years. As soon as I hear the dogs I begin to hate hounds and hunters and all my sympathy goes out to the quarry. An ineffectual sympathy, unfortunately, for there is nothing I can do about it. Moreover, I don’t decline the gift of a haunch or saddle which is often brought to me—as the former squire, no doubt. And if the whole truth be told, I generally send the joint to the kitchen and don’t deny myself the pleasure of relishing roast venison.

On that particular evening, when I reached the garden gate which opens straight onto the fields, it was already dark. The clamor of the hunt seemed to be drawing near. It is extremely rare for them to go on so late, and they must have been following a very experienced beast. If it could evade the hounds long enough, there was a good chance it might get away under cover of night. From the bottom of my heart I hoped it would. I don’t know why it occurred to me (could it be, after all, the unconscious memory of the last hunt that ends David Garnett’s story, when the heroine is mangled by the hounds in the very arms of her husband?) to leave the little gate open, in the faint and rather foolish hope that the hunted animal might run to me for shelter. But the noise faded, silence fell again. The quarry—stag or fox—must have fled elsewhere. I entered the house and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I was just about to pour myself a cup of tea when I thought I heard muffled sounds of barking. I left my tea, went outside, and found that the hunt had come quite close. And I saw, running out of the woods toward me, a superb fox, tired out by the chase, the hounds almost upon him. Had he seen the open gate? He was making straight for it. But it was a mistake to have shown myself, for at the sight of me he suddenly swerved and began to race madly along the hedge. I was distressed and furious; the hounds would get him and only my stupidity would be to blame. Forgetting the danger of a pack in full cry, and at the risk of being knocked down, I rushed out of the house, gesturing wildly, hoping to scare the animal and drive it back toward the gate. But the fox fled before me, searching for a hole in the hedge, frantic with fear, the yelping dogs hard on its heels. I covered my eyes before the horror of the spectacle. The hounds’ baying pierced my ears.

And suddenly there was silence. Or rather, a vast sough of breath, gaping and gasping. The hounds were around me, their heads averted. They turned this way and that in foolish, awkward uncertainty.

There was no fox. But protruding from the hedge, on the ground, a pair of bare legs. They were kicking. The rest of the body, caught in the hedge and slashed by the thorns, was trying to push through. One or two of the hounds sniffed at the feet, then moved away silently, their tails between their legs. But the horsemen were arriving. I had no time to stop and think or even marvel. I dashed out again, plunged forward, pulled the creature out of the hedge. It struggled to escape me. I felt the cruel bite of sharp teeth in my hand, but I flung myself on it with all my weight and pinned it to the grass. I heard the thudding of hoofs, shouts and questions, exclamations of surprise. It seemed to me that these lasted a long time, because of my struggle on the ground in the now complete darkness. The creature wriggled beneath me, and I had the greatest trouble holding it down. Actually, only a brief moment could have passed. I heard orders being shouted, the crack of whips. The dogs whined. The horses’ hoofs stamped the ground close to the hedge, a few feet from my ears.

When at last I could no longer hear a sound, I relaxed my grip. The creature did not move. It remained stretched out on its flank, exhausted.

I got up and looked at it.

It was a woman.

Chapter 2

AS I have said, I have no witness to this singular occurrence. I can only affirm that I was at least as doubtful as my most skeptical readers of what had just occurred before my very eyes. Even later, when there was no longer room for doubt, I relived over and over again in my memory each second, each sequence, in the course of which a hunted fox, within sight of my eyes, had suddenly changed into a woman. All I can say is that a faked substitution—to trick whom? for what purpose?—would be even more incredible, would require the invisible presence, right among the pack of hounds, of a prodigious conjurer. In any case, the subsequent course of events would render such an assumption even more absurd.

Not that it matters, anyway. What I intend to relate is not the phenomenon itself. I have said all there is to say about it; there is nothing I can add to my account. And if what went before was not a miracle, what followed happened nonetheless. The rest, after all, is of no great importance except to minds obsessed by metaphysics. Let them plague themselves with questions if that is what they enjoy.

In any event, there I stood on the lawn that occupies most of my garden, under the darkened sky in which the first stars glittered. I gazed down at the young creature, swooning and naked at my feet, who, though she might be only a fox, bore henceforth all the outward appearance of a young girl.

She was naked but covered with mud and bruises, stained with blood. I picked her up in my arms. She was slim and light. Her eyes were hidden under silky eyelids, tinted blue by fatigue and perhaps the cold. When I raised her she gave a start and drew back her chops—her lips—over small but very sharp teeth, with an instinctively threatening growl. That was all. She was panting, her breathing short and labored.

Holding her in my arms, I found myself exceedingly embarrassed. My first thought was to carry my prey up to the farm and entrust it to the farmer’s wife. But nobody had been present at the metamorphosis. What explanation could I give? Imagine my walking into the farmer’s house, bringing them a stark-naked girl, half dead with exhaustion, striped with blows and covered with bruises. What would they have thought? No, it was impossible. I must carry her into the house and hope that not a soul, near or far, would see me with my singular burden. Fortunately I reached the front door without impediment.

I climbed to the second floor, laid the girl down on my bed, and ran the water for a bath, seeking to confine my thoughts only to my actions, to wonder as little as possible. Meanwhile, a contrite voice within me paid tribute to David Garnett. I reproached myself, in petto, for my so-called common sense, my vulgar incredulity. There are more things, Horatio… There you go! Right away the great Will on your lips! Isn’t that like you, you bookish monkey! Try and think for yourself once in a while… I watched the hot water run into the tub and began to envisage the consequences of my adventure. Here you are with a woman on your bed as naked as on Judgment Day, but one who does not descend from Eve or Adam, with no birth certificate, without the merest beginning of a passport, the least scrap of an identity. What are you going to do with her? Who can you show her to? What can you tell the Home Office, the Immigration Department? Who’d believe a word of what you would say? It was much more awkward than a murder, I realized with a kind of terror. A man or a woman too few is reasonably easy to justify, especially a foreigner: he might have gone back to his country. But one too many! How can you explain that? I could see myself grappling with an enormous felony which, though the very opposite of a murder, was nonetheless an act of the same ilk, equally out of conformity with the law.

And a woman too many who was, moreover, in actual fact no more than a vixen. For she was nothing else, as she showed me without delay. When the bath was ready, I went to fetch her from my bed. She opened her eyes for a split second—her narrow, brilliant eyes. But she let herself be borne away. Extreme fatigue or a budding confidence? I was almost moved to tenderness, but as soon as she felt the water, her whole body gave a frenzied jerk, she slipped from my arms and struggled to get out of the tub. I was determined to keep her there. A battle ensued which I am not likely to forget. Within three seconds I was soaked from head to foot, and as I was dressed for autumn in corduroy and suede, I became as clumsy as a bear. She caught hold of my tie with her little jaws and would not let go of it. Fortunately I must have been roughly twice her weight and this, added to her great exhaustion, finally compelled her to give in. Perhaps, too, the warmth of the bath gradually filled her with its soothing gentleness. Whatever the cause, in the end she kept still. With a thousand precautions, I began to sponge her poor scratched body (so pitiful in aspect, truly, as to disarm all sensuality) and she lay quiescent. She only moaned faintly when the sponge touched her wounds. Her eyes were open but she was not looking at me. An occasional tremor hinted at an urge to flee; but I needed only to press her shoulder to restrain her. In the end, she must have felt such a sense of well-being that she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.

I took this opportunity to get her out of the bath, wrap her in a big bathrobe, dry her and tuck her into bed. Then, while I was taking off my wet clothes and getting into a dressing gown, I got a glimpse of that famous duplicity, that Reynard cunning which I had so far known only from Aesop and other authors. As I suddenly turned around I saw that she was not asleep at all. On the contrary, she was looking at me with those narrow, overbrilliant eyes. A moment later she seemed once more sunk in a deep slumber. I concluded that she was waiting for the first opportunity to give me the slip.

It was at this moment that certain reactions, certain inexplicable feelings, began to stir in my mind. What more could I hope for than that she’d escape? She wanted to recover her freedom, her wild life? Well, do so, my girl! Go back to your forest! No more problems. Good riddance. That’s what should have been the normal effect produced on a reasonable man by this cunning, this transparent plan to regain her freedom. Yet that wasn’t what I was thinking, not at all. I told myself, on the contrary, that if she escaped I would never forgive myself. For if she tried to resume her wild life in the forest, I told myself, she would either die of cold or hunger, or would sooner or later be discovered by the gamekeepers, taken to the village and inevitably sent to some asylum where she would end her life in a strait jacket. I was the only witness to her birth as well as to her true nature; the only one, in consequence, able to understand her. This, then, I went on, dictates your duty, which is to keep her here, even against her will, to shelter her for as long as necessary.

But even as I experienced those exalted sentiments, something within me took a perverse pleasure in mocking them. Your duty? What duty? An asylum or this room, it’s all the same to her. For her this is a prison, for you a pack of trouble. And who appointed you her guardian? Your real duty, my good fellow, is to report her presence to the authorities. It is up to them to disentangle the affair, to decide what is to be done with such a creature. But I was looking down the while at her pointed face, so touching and tender in its feigned sleep, and I was thinking: Don’t go away… I was thinking it with a stupidly anxious, stupidly heavy heart, and I was forced to admit to myself that what I really dreaded was quite simply losing her again—that it was no longer just for her sake in fact that I feared her escape…

Amazed and quite upset by these surprising thoughts, I carefully closed the doors and windows and went downstairs to cook my dinner. While I was stewing some mushrooms, I tried to look at the situation in a sensible way. I was about to keep imprisoned a woman of whom nobody knew or could know anything. She was naked, I had not even a rag with which to clothe her and how could I ask the farmer’s wife for a dress or a shift without attracting undue attention? And how long could I keep this compromising presence secret? I received few visitors, but all the same, in the long run… And the day when, by chance—and the chance was bound to come—she was discovered locked away here, I would most certainly risk being prosecuted. Furthermore, as I would be unable to say anything about her or where she came from, there would be an additional charge of contempt of court—goodness knows what else. Madness. Sheer madness. Come now, go upstairs, wake her up and open the doors for her, you idiot!

But I went on stirring the sauce and knew that I would do nothing of the sort. What I need, I told myself, is someone to whom I can tell the whole story, a friendly soul to share my secret. All right, but who? Rack my brain as I might, I could not think of a confidant. Everyone would think I was crazy—just as they had thought of David Garnett’s poor hero.

Meanwhile my dinner was ready. I swallowed it absent-mindedly, hastily and without pleasure (yet I adore mushrooms). Then it entered my mind that she might be hungry. I found a young capon in the larder and took it upstairs with me. When I opened the door she jumped out of bed and dashed in a panic all around the room, trying to climb up the walls, the curtains. I sat down in an armchair and kept perfectly still, to let her terror abate. She had huddled in a corner of the room, between the wall and the small bow-fronted chest of drawers. She watched me with her bright eyes, not missing my smallest movement. Thus I in turn could examine her at leisure. Did she look like a fox? Yes, if one knew it. The finely chiseled nose, the very high Mongoloid cheekbones, the triangular cheeks and the pointed chin—all subtly recalled her origin. Her hair too, a beautiful red with a hint of tawny here and there. It wasn’t very long, just covering her shoulders. She had an adorable figure, but though her shapely curves revealed that she was a woman, she was so very dainty and frail that one would otherwise have taken her for a very young girl. Her small feet, so long and slender, were positively touching: the ankles were so delicate that one feared they might break like glass. The hands, even slimmer and longer than the feet, never stopped fidgeting, moving this way and that with a perpetual quivering of the fingers.

When I thought the moment had come, I tossed the chicken on the floor in such a way as to make it roll toward her. She immediately started up, her fingers clutching the wall, ready to flee, and remained for a few seconds in this catlike attitude, her eyes turned now on me, now on the bird. Then she relaxed again. The fowl was a step away. She stared at it for a long time, motionless as a stone, with an almost drowsy expression. At last, with a single pounce, she snatched it and carried it off under the bed.

For almost half an hour I heard the crunch of bones. Then, silence. I could not see her, but I guessed that her sharp, slit eyes were watching my feet, observing their movements. I arose, removed my dressing gown and went to bed. I left the light on for a long while, waiting, hoping perhaps, for something to happen. But nothing did: not a move, not a breath. I might just as well have been all alone in my room. At last sleep overcame me and I switched off the lamp.

Chapter 3

WHAT wakened me the next morning was not the noise, but the smell. The reader will have to excuse these disagreeable details. They will help him to understand what difficulties, what unpleasantness I had to cope with at first. What I had interned under my bed was, after all, just a fox, whose human form merely made matters more difficult. I had not foreseen this sort of inconvenience (and would it have made any difference if I had?) and when the odor apprised me of it, I leaped out of bed. At one bound, too, the creature emerged on the opposite side, jumped on a chair, from there onto the chest of drawers, then to the top of a cupboard whence she watched me with her catlike stare. I moved the bed to lift the carpet which I proceeded to shake out of the window, before fetching a basin to give it a thorough wash. As I was doing this, I was stirred by curious feelings. Naturally, as I stood there mopping the rug, I felt a certain disgust. But I was rather touched, too, somehow. I would have to educate her as one trains a puppy, a kitten—as one teaches a baby to be “clean.” With the added complication, however, that she was an adult and that I would first have to gain her confidence. And the prospect of this future confidence melted my heart.

Now I am not sure mine was a very noble emotion. Mothers know well the kind of exaltation one derives from having a human being all to oneself, from keeping it for one’s pleasure, like an object, like a thing. But they feel this for a baby, I was feeling it for a grown woman.

Still, I had to win her confidence, but first I had to think up ways of doing so. Would patience be enough? Anyway, I realized, I was holding a trump card of first magnitude: food. She would receive it from me, and me alone, day after day. No animal can resist it. Why should she prove more intractable?

I prepared some eggs and bacon for myself, and for her a kipper and some hard-boiled eggs. When I went upstairs to take them to her, I found her nestling in the warmth of the bed, but she immediately climbed onto the cupboard again. I deposited the fish and eggs on the chest of drawers on a sheet of tissue paper, settled down in front of a small table at the far end of the room and, my back turned, began to eat my breakfast. After some little time I heard her stir and the wood creak. At last there was the noise of rustling paper, broken shells.

The next problem was my departure. I wanted to appear at the farm at the same time as usual. To lock the creature in my bedroom meant running the risk of finding goodness knows what carnage on my return. It did cross my mind to stow her in the bathroom, but how was I to get her there? To chase her all over the room was out of the question, for she was much nimbler than I; I would simply waste my time and cause useless damage. Never mind, I would leave her where she was and hope for the best.

When I arrived home at noon, bringing a small duckling for her, I felt a pang of anguish: there was nobody in the room. I ran to the window, but I had fastened it well. It was only as I approached the bed that a slight bulge in the coverlet revealed her hidden presence to me. She must be asleep under it, snug and warm, tightly curled up. I placed the duckling on the pillow and sat down in an armchair to read the Morning Post, keeping one eye on the counterpane. After a while I saw it stir with intestinal undulations; a pink nose tip finally emerged and began to sniff the fowl. The whole head followed, examined the surroundings and noticed me. It shrank back, like that of a tortoise. Then it reappeared, cautiously. A hand in its turn emerged, seized the duck, then all of them—nose, hand and bird—disappeared under the coverlet. Damn! I would have to change the sheets, but it was too late to think of that now. I listened with a smile to the cracking of the duck’s bones under the brocade.

I shall spare the reader the boredom of repetitions. Day after day, during that early period, events did indeed repeat themselves more or less in the same way. Under the bed I had placed a rubber mat, more easily washed. Fairly soon she stopped climbing to the top of the cupboard on awakening, but she kept her distance, in the true sense of the word. She often shivered with cold, but all my attempts to slip a dressing gown or wrapper over her by stealth were foiled by her speed in taking flight, her startling agility. It was just as well that natural decency prevented me from harboring any improper designs on her graceful nudity, for she was incredibly lithe. Anyway, despite her attractiveness, I was still at the stage where I saw in her just a vixen.

I do not know what she did with her days, if she slept, snooped around or lounged, since I was out in the fields or at the farm; but every evening, at nightfall, I witnessed the same performance. She would go to the door with an anxious, nervous air and press her muzzle against the keyhole or move it along the cracks, sniffing here and there with short, ceaseless, spasmodic snuffles. She would scratch at the wood. Then she would trot along the walls and start the same business all over again at the window. Then trot again, back to the door. She would scratch obstinately, moaning noiselessly and sniffing. This would last till night had fallen completely. When at last the room was entirely dark (I purposely did not put on the light) she would stop the performance, as if regretfully, and return to snuggle under the counterpane. I let her sleep there and went downstairs to dine. I would spend the evening, as was my habit, reading in the study. Toward eleven I would go upstairs to bed. However fast asleep she was, she would never be caught unawares. I would slip between the sheets but already she was gone: a lizard could not have slid away more rapidly. She would settle down under the bed where she found the thick woolen blanket I had left there permanently and snuggle into it—and so we would spend the night, one above the other, as though in a sleeping car.

Just as I had hoped, however, she gradually grew used to my presence, as it proved harmless and moreover was accompanied three times a day by food. She no longer hid when I came in, no longer took to flight; on the contrary the slim, tapering face would shoot out from under the bedcovers and watch me, no longer with fear but with the fixed stare of expectancy and greed. She soon came to recognize my step on the stairs, in the passage, and I would find her behind the door, wriggling her little backside with joy. She took the cutlet or the roasted fowl from my hands, and though she would still go and devour it out of my sight—under the bed or in the bathroom—this was just one last atavistic precaution, and eventually it too disappeared.

I had told myself from the very first that she would have to be given a name. I called her Sylva, of course; I owed this approximation to David Garnett. To accustom her to it, I would stand for a moment behind the door, softly calling her by her name; she would scratch the wood, I would hear her whine with impatience. Within a short time her little brain established a link between this name and food; when she heard it she would come running up to me and I would give her an extra titbit. Later she obeyed even without this bait, and when I ordered: “Sylva, come here!” she would stop still and come back to devour her meal at my feet. But it was a very long time before she accepted my first caress. A motion of the fingers when my hand was empty would cause her to bolt.

At long last, however, she consented to let me scratch the scruff of her neck, the top of her forehead, while she ate, squatting. Gradually she even came to like it. She would gently rub her nape against my bent finger, and when the nail reached the first vertebra, her whole back quivered and hunched around her shoulder blades. Rigidly and as if in a trance, she would close her eyes, her head thrown back. Often now, at the end of a meal, she would slip her little skull under my hand of her own accord, for the pleasure of it, and the day came when she turned up her face under my fingers and, with a flick of her tongue, thanked the open palm that was fondling her. This touched me more than was reasonable, I am afraid, but the affection of a small wild animal is always a heart-stirring victory.

It had taken us all of a fortnight to reach that stage. In the meantime, the major complication was Fanny, the farmer’s daughter, whom I employed to attend to the household chores. I ordered her to confine her cleaning, polishing and sweeping to the ground floor because, I told her, I had started to repaint the second-floor rooms (which I proceeded to do for credibility) . Yet I trembled. A noise, a cry, anything, might betray a presence; and although poor Fanny was too stupid to be really inquisitive, she was after all a woman and I had no doubt that the least carelessness on my part would prompt her to investigate. The next day the whole village would have known that the squire was hiding a stark-naked girl in his bedroom.

The first thing to do, at all costs, was to clothe her. Ever since she had let herself be approached, I had repeatedly tried to make her accept a dressing gown. To no avail, and worse: she grew frightened and it took me two or three days to regain the lost ground in her confidence. Moreover, if Fanny were to discover Sylva in one of my dressing gowns, it would hardly be better than finding her in the nude. I decided to go into town to buy her some clothes. But going into town meant being away for a whole day, and I could not overcome my apprehension of what might happen.

I was all the less tempted to overcome this apprehension since her nakedness, to tell the truth, no longer bothered me personally. Apart from the fact that it is a charming sight, nakedness, by becoming habitual, ceases to draw the eye, loses its excitement, and even inspires satiety. One need only think of the beach at Brighton to understand how my propinquity with Sylva, constantly in Eve’s dress, left my heart and senses generally untroubled. And if only my feelings had been involved, I would gladly have let her stay in this attire as long as she felt like it. Her wounds had healed; her skin had the bloom and softness of satin; her muscles, slender and long, rippled gently under the skin. Why conceal those appealing charms with a barbarous fabric, a badly cut frock? I had no illusions about my talents in this field, and knew beforehand what a poor dress buyer I would make.

But downstairs, through the floor, I could hear Fanny whistling and humming appallingly out of tune as she dusted the furniture, polished the brass, shook out the rugs. It was really too risky. I definitely could not delay any longer. Wednesday being market day at Wardley, I mixed into Sylva’s breakfast a good dose of sleeping powder, had the gig harnessed, locked the whole house with the greatest care, and bade the farmer’s son drive me into town.

Chapter 4

I SENT the boy to the seed merchant and told him to meet me at Wardley Station, where I said I wanted to pick up a trunk I had left in the cloakroom on my last trip. I actually bought a large carryall, crammed it at Marks Spencer’s with underwear and feminine attire of roughly the right size, and took a cab to the station where the gig, as arranged, picked me up twenty minutes later. We reached Richwick Manor just before nightfall.

I found the house in order—that is to say, safely locked just as I had left it. But upstairs in the bedroom there was an indescribable havoc. I was a little surprised that Sylva had waked up, though less surprised that she had flown into a rage. Waking to find herself all alone and locked in, she must have passed through successive fits of fear and anger. She had probably searched for me too: my wardrobe had been gutted as if by a hurricane and my clothes flung all about, sprawling one on top of the other like the dismembered victims of a massacre. She had treated the sheets and blankets in the same fashion. A pillow lay ripped open, the down scattered everywhere. And there, upright above the wreckage, stood Sylva looking at me.

I remained rooted to the threshold, in the grip not so much of anger or even amusement as, strangely enough, fascination—I would even say, if I dared to face the ridicule, of ecstasy. Caught like this, rising perfectly straight from amid the white, motionless froth of down and linen, naked like an aphrodite anadyomene, my Sylva, it is true, was beautiful; but what overwhelmed me was the shock of an illumination infinitely more breath-taking than her mere beauty. There was all that inanimate paraphernalia, with this admirable body rising above it, a living body and nothing more since it was still unlit by the least human spark, yet one whose palpitation, whose self-affirmation, whose innate will toward a lofty harmony triumphantly opposed the chaos. Never, perhaps, so strongly as in that minute have I realized, with spontaneous, sensuous evidence, the truth that is apparently beginning to impress itself on physicists: that inanimate matter is disorder and that the only order is life.

Towering above the inert rubbish that littered the floor, Sylva presented such a pure, proud figure, an outline of such grace, that if one could venture to apply to the sense of sight the term voluptuousness, I would like to say that what I experienced was a visual thrill so intense that it became voluptuous, an exalting feeling that life, just life, was the only miracle. What I mean to say is that at that minute Sylva was no longer a woman or a vixen in my eyes, that the miracle of her metamorphosis seemed to me paltry and insignificant, that the real, the sole miracle was this vital harmony, it was—in the midst of anarchy, of the slow universal disintegration—the noble, organized, living body and this beauty of a human form, all the more overpowering in its miraculous grace for being as yet uninhabited by a mind. So much so that I caught myself wishing that I might henceforth live always in chaos if only this grace would crown it forever.

And to think I was trailing those idiotic garments about in my suitcase! If I bundled up this living purity in their lifeless folds, would I not be pushing it back into incoherence? I felt strongly inclined to throw the whole lot out of the window. That divine body should stay radiant as it stood before me at that moment, naked and resplendent and victoriously imposing on disorder the order of its own beauty. Yes, it should stay like that, come what may!

Having attained these crystalline heights my thoughts, alas, began to waver. I felt, apart from some dim protests voiced by my common sense, that my exaltation was sprouting disturbing ramifications within me, was straying from the solemn gaze to less noble regions. A certain trembling of my hands signified the first alarm. The nature of my enthusiasm changed, while Sylva’s nature too seemed to evolve: I suddenly found her beauty, less pure, more desirable. I became aware that our attitudes, hers and mine, had altered ever so little. My knees were bent, my hands stretched out, but it was the sight of her knees, flexing as if on the verge of flight, that made me notice my own posture. It was a posture from which not only all dignity of bearing but even simple decency had so utterly disappeared that I was mortified to the bottom of my heart, to the very core of my self-respect. Besides, this evident intrusion of brutish lust had abruptly spoiled everything: within a moment my superb aphrodite had returned to the state of a frightened female, her grace had contracted into strained tension, and all I had before me now was a fox bitch on the alert, a beast that had sunk back into the disorder of things, the same disorder of which I myself felt shamefully captive.

With a sigh of bitter annoyance, and smarting with contrition, I pushed the suitcase under a table and began to tidy up the room.

I have forgotten to mention that ever since Sylva had come to stay with me, I had trained myself to think aloud. Or rather to express in words whatever I was doing: opening a door, a drawer, folding a sheet, shaking out a rug. If a talking bird can repeat what it hears, I said to myself, why not a fox which is, after all, more intelligent, if it happens to be gifted with articulate speech? And indeed, Sylva soon began to repeat what she heard me say; she repeated it very badly and with a comical acid twang which reminded me of the South of France. Have you ever heard Shakespeare recited with a Marseilles accent? It is irresistible. Whenever Sylva opened her mouth, I could not help laughing. She herself never laughed. She did not know how to, and only much later did I hear her laugh for the first time.

I laughed at her accent, her lisp, her mistakes, but at the same time I marveled that after a fairly short time she stopped repeating things at random, parrot-fashion. Before long I found that she roughly understood what she was saying, sometimes quite wrongly no doubt, but even then not lacking in sense. I hasten to add that this did not go beyond the most concrete terms, those most useful in obtaining some immediate satisfaction. I had so often asked, “Are you hungry?” before letting her have her food that I was scarcely surprised when for the first time, to cut short this tantalizing ordeal, she repeated, “Hungry… hungry…” wagging her little behind like a dog to whom you hold out a lump of sugar. And I was hardly more surprised on the occasion when, scratching at the door as she did every evening at the same time, instead of whimpering as usual she begged, “Go h’out! Go h’out!” until I cried “No!” in such a tone that she fell silent. But from that day onward she too would answer “No!” more often than I should have liked.

I had hoped that, just by seeing me put on my dressing gown every morning, and impelled by the cold (I purposely did not heat the room), she might eventually imitate me. But she preferred to trail her blanket around and whenever I tried to persuade her to exchange it for a garment, she eluded me with a categorical “No!” However, I put a chemise, some light underwear, and a woolen dress underneath the counterpane. Sylva spent most of her time sleeping under this coverlet, tightly curled up, and as she thus impregnated the garments with her smell and found them there habitually I thought she might come to accept them. She did indeed begin to drape herself with them, but in a silly way, dropping them all over the place. But I had resolved to be patient, and bided my time.

She was understanding more and more things—only the most practical, the most everyday ones to be sure, not above the level of, say, a clever dog. But one can make a dog understand an enormous number of things, and that is how one trains him: he begins to grasp that a prohibited action, or a command, are invariably followed, one by the whip, the other by a titbit. The day Sylva understood when I told her, “You’ll go out when you get dressed,” I had won the battle—or almost. She obediently let me slip the chemise over her and instantly rushed to the door. It was impossible to make her see that this was not enough, impossible even to make her listen, and she bruised herself, so hard did she batter against the door. The worst of it was that since I would not let her go out though, as she believed, she had obeyed me, I lost a good deal of the ground which had been conquered by patient training.

To be quite honest, this failure only half distressed me. I had not given her this promise without considerable apprehension. Her first outing scared me for several reasons. What if she were to escape? Or suppose someone met us? Or even if she did not escape, would I be able to get her back to the house? She was too nimble to be brought home by force if she did not want to come. It was therefore a reckless gamble, and I was relieved I had lost it before even seeking to win.

The thought that she might run away became ever more intolerable to me. My feelings for her at that time were, to say the least, extremely ambiguous. The blaze of sensuality which her beauty had kindled in me on the day of my return from Wardley had, I thought, been extinguished once and for all, so much had I been revolted by it—not for Sylva’s sake but for my own. I could not quite explain this to myself; when I felt for her as one feels for a baby or for one’s horse, one’s cat, a dog or a bird, it made me happy. Whenever I found I was attached to her as to a woman I was stirred with uneasiness, a kind of shame. As if it were an unnatural passion. Perhaps because as yet there was so little of a woman about her, so much of a fox? At any rate, I could think of no other explanation for this inner resistance, not to say aversion.

Anyhow, I was soon to be spared this temptation, at least in its most extreme form. Once she had put on her woolen chemise, Sylva felt so comfortable in it that she no longer wanted to take it off. Since it was impossible to give her a bath her natural odor, strong and rank, not too unpleasant as long as she was nude, soon turned beneath the chemise into an acrid smell of perspiration. Soap and water continued to inspire her with terror and repugnance.

I had nonetheless succeeded, once or twice, with many promises of a due reward, in making her take off her chemise and giving her a more or less thorough rubdown. By infinite stealth I also managed to slip a light cotton dress over her head together with the chemise. For a few days her smell was bearable and she looked almost civilized. But soon the dress was stained and torn, and with the same guile I had somehow to get it off her to mend and clean; in the meantime the odor under the wool turned sour once more and I had to start from the beginning.

That was the stage we had reached when one day there occurred such a serious accident that I was afraid that all was discovered.

Chapter 5

IT was on a lovely autumn evening. The moon had already risen and I was reading by the lamp in my study. Outside I saw Fanny’s figure go past on the way back from the well. Suddenly I heard her cry out. She dropped the pail, spilling all the water, and ran off as fast as she could. I jumped up, opened the door and shouted, “What’s the matter?” My voice must have reassured her. She leaned against the wall, however, before turning around to answer.

“A ghost!” she gasped.

“Now really!” I said, with an effort to laugh it off, but my calm was only skin-deep: what had she seen?

She shook her head. “Yes, there is, up in your bedroom, at the window. A face was staring at me through the glass. Quite pale under the moon. And the body below was all white.”

She was trembling like a leaf. I brought her into the study and poured her a big glass of whisky which she downed with fervor. She was still shivering.

“Would it set your mind at rest if I had a look?”

“Oh yes!” she said, nodding vehemently.

I went upstairs, came back. “You’re having visions, my poor girl. There’s nothing there, everything is just as usual.”

She slowly recovered her peace of mind. I made her drink a second whisky. Eventually she believed me and joined in my laughter. “And yet I saw it quite clearly! Fancy me seeing things now! It looked just like someone who’d been drowned.”

I went with her to the well to draw some more water. The window was dark and empty—I breathed with relief. Then I escorted Fanny back to the farm. She thanked me and I went home.

The danger was over, but the risk remained too great. I definitely could not keep the secret to myself any longer nor remain the sole guardian of a creature who was only waiting for an opportunity to run away. I told myself that since the progress made in “breaking her in” had by now rendered my vixen more or less presentable, it was high time to engage a trustworthy person to watch over her when I was out in the fields, to keep her company, supervise her future education and develop her speech and mental capacities if possible—in other words to try to turn her, with patience and plenty of time, into a creature of respectable appearance whom I might one day show to my friends without constantly being afraid or ashamed.

Naturally, I had already concocted a watertight story for the farmer’s family as well as for the future nurse: a sister of mine, in Scotland, was marrying again and had asked me to take charge of the unfortunate girl until such time as her new husband became used to the idea of having an abnormal child living with them. I therefore advertised in the Sunday Times for a nurse to take care of a spastic girl. I went through the replies with great care, corresponded with two or three applicants and finally fixed my choice on a former schoolmistress, herself the mother of a backward child whom she had lost at the age of twelve and who, since this bereavement, had dedicated her life to helping similar unfortunates.

I arranged to meet her in the lounge of Brompton House Hotel in London, one Wednesday morning. I drove off the night before without telling anybody and took care not to be seen as I left the manor with Sylva. I put up the horse and gig at the inn by the station, as usual. To avoid any trouble, I had contrived a set of handcuffs out of two old dog collars which kept us linked together by the wrists. We would be back with the nurse early in the afternoon of the following day.

On the outward journey Sylva behaved fairly well, although her behavior would certainly have seemed strange in the eyes of fellow passengers, had we had any. But I had taken care to book a whole compartment for ourselves. The darkness, the station, the din of the steam engine, at first frightened her out of her wits, and when I opened the door of the compartment she must have been so terrified lest she be left on the platform that she jostled to clamber into the carriage before me, pulling me along so brutally that I almost missed my step. But once inside the carriage with the doors safely shut, I released her and she began to sniff and smell in all the corners and even under the seats. She next tried to climb up onto the luggage rack, and I had no end of trouble to keep her still on her seat, on which she squatted with her legs crossed under her instead of letting them dangle. Gradually the train’s vibration made her drowsy; I switched off the light and she fell asleep.

The most difficult part was our arrival at Paddington.

Though at this station taxis and cabs are allowed to come right alongside the train, I still had to drag Sylva along as hard as I could while she emitted inarticulate yells, panic-stricken by the stream of travelers, the lights, noise and movement. The sight of the cab horses intensified her panic, and I was very hard put to approach a taxi. People were turning toward us, the driver eyed us suspiciously. Fortunately, I look rather respectable and bear myself with a certain authority that never fails to make some impression. Sylva was squirming at my side, but she did not reach up to my shoulder and with the handcuffs I kept her pretty well in place.

I merely said to the driver with an air of dignified affliction, “Don’t mind her, the poor child,” and he opened the door of the cab himself when we arrived and helped us to get out. At the hotel I asked with the same air of superior self-denial for the help of a maid, who attended to Sylva with a mixture of pity and repulsion.

Next morning Mrs. Bumley presented herself. I was not disappointed. She was a tall, rather bulky woman, and her size reassured me: she would have to measure her strength against her charge more than once. Her face was of the bulldog type—a big, threatening-looking jaw between sagging jowls—but her eyes were moist with a bottomless tenderness. The enveloping look she gave Sylva when I introduced her removed any apprehensions I might still have harbored. She smiled broadly.

“But she is as pretty as a picture!” she said.

While we were talking, she never stopped observing Sylva with the same affectionate smile and finally declared:

“This child amazes me. She isn’t the least like any of the children I’ve had in my care. Probably it’s because she is so pretty. But above all, she is not at all clumsy or awkward in her movements!”

She asked me, of course, for all sorts of particulars of birth, childhood, first troubles and progress. I had rehearsed most of the answers beforehand and did not manage too badly. She expressed the wish to meet the girl’s mother, but I explained the fictitious situation and told her we would have to do without such a meeting, at least in the beginning.

“A pity,” she answered, and tried to approach Sylva. But Sylva gave a sideways jump, leaped onto the armchair and thence onto the wardrobe. The look that came over the kindly bulldog face was one of such utter surprise that I could not help bursting into laughter.

Mrs. Bumley looked from one to the other, as if wondering which of the two—Sylva up on her cupboard or her uncle convulsed with laughter—was the more crack-brained, and she said curtly, “Does she often behave like this?”

Unable to recover my seriousness I turned up my hands to signify ignorance and helplessness. I was still laughing as I answered, “I don’t know, I’m as surprised as you are.” Sylva did not take her eyes off the nurse. Mrs. Bumley meanwhile had recovered her spirits. Her expression softened, lit up.

“The look in her eyes!” she murmured at last. “So piercing and bright! There is something wide awake behind them.”

She turned her big, kind, doglike face toward me with an air that was both affirmative and questioning, and once again I could only raise my hands wordlessly, but I did not laugh.

“Something must have happened to her,” she said in the same tone of deep meditation. “I wonder what. I’d stake my life that her brain is not impaired organically. It will be thrilling to re-educate her,” she said and her eyes were sparkling. Then suddenly the sparkle went out of them. “But this agility—that’s not at all spastic! Are you sure,” she inquired with suspicion in her voice, “that she really is spastic? That she hasn’t… that she isn’t… perhaps… quite simply insane? I am quite incompetent to deal with madness,” she added apprehensively.

“No, no,” I reassured her. “The doctors are all agreed, it’s a nervous activity that has not developed properly. Or rather, developed abnormally. There’s been some progress, but not nearly enough.”

“But why is she afraid of me?” muttered Mrs. Bumley. “I never frighten children, not even the most timid ones.”

“She has lived in great isolation all her childhood. Her mother is a widow and lives in a very remote part of Scotland.”

“How old is the girl?”

“Getting on for eighteen, I believe.”

“How are we going to make her come down from that cupboard?” Mrs. Bumley asked, puzzled.

I went and got a hard-boiled egg and a kipper from my traveling bag; they were two delicacies Sylva was very fond of.

“Stay where you are,” I told the nurse. “Don’t move.”

I turned toward Sylva, approached her.

“Come on, get down,” I ordered, “don’t be afraid. Aren’t you hungry?”

I was standing between the two of them, and this protection reassured her. She let herself slip to the ground with great dexterity, seized the kipper with one hand, the egg with the other, and without taking her eyes off the newcomer, went off to munch them in the narrow gap behind the bed. Mrs. Bumley was resting the kindly gaze of a peaceful mastiff on her. Sylva stopped eating for a moment; something flashed in her eyes that might, at a pinch, be called a smile.

“As pretty as a picture,” Mrs. Bumley said again, with melting tenderness. “Those high cheekbones, those lovely almond-shaped slit eyes! And that pointed chin! A real little vixen!”

Chapter 6

SHE is one,” I said point-blank.

I had only wavered for a few seconds. Contrary to all I had foreseen and upsetting my carefully hatched plans, I had made up my mind on the spur of the moment. Though I could not yet say why exactly, I told myself that I must seize the occasion, that it would not come again.

“A what?” asked Mrs. Bumley.

“A vixen.”

“Is she so cunning?”

I shook my head, looked deep into her eyes.

“I’m saying that she is a fox,” I said slowly, stressing each word. “A real one. She has the appearance of a woman, but in fact she is only an animal. A young vixen, actually.”

She opened her gray eyes saucer-wide, and they filled with alarm, with anguish. I smiled.

“Don’t be upset, I have all my faculties. My mind isn’t wandering. Sit down and listen to me quietly.”

I made the inviting gesture of pushing an armchair forward. She sat down in it slowly, without taking her eyes off me.

“All I have told you is a pack of lies. This isn’t a backward child. And I haven’t any sister in Scotland.”

She had placed a big, gnarled hand on her bosom. Doubtless her heart was beating fast. I smiled as best I could to calm her, afraid of one thing only: that she might become frightened and call for help. It was essential that I reassure her.

“You’re the first person to whom I’ve dared talk about it. I would have to, sooner or later, anyhow. So far I have never ventured to confide this to anyone for fear they might take me for a madman. As they well might.”

I then told her everything, in detail. The hunt, the hounds in full cry ready for the kill, the sudden transformation. She could question the people in the neighborhood: the strange disappearance of the fox when the hunters and their horses were already almost on top of it had provided food for discussion for many an evening at the village pub. I related the vicissitudes of the training, the progress made and the gaps that persisted, the enormous trouble to get her dressed. The good woman listened to me in silence; her fat cheeks quivered a little, her eyes wrenched themselves from mine to stare at Sylva gnawing at her kipper, then wrenched themselves away again to meet mine. While I was telling my story, the ghost of a smile began to hover on her rotund face, a kind of wondrous amusement. I had won: she believed me.

“Not half an hour ago,” I confessed in conclusion, “I never guessed I would tell you all this. I was prepared to let you find out for yourself a sufficient number of oddities to come pressing me with questions. But you’ve made me feel I can trust you,” I added, putting my hand on hers. “I am sure you won’t give me away.”

She understood this familiar gesture which the strange circumstances warranted, and for a long while she left her hand beneath mine, giving me a hesitant smile, a moist, anxious look. Then she got up, in a flutter of excitement.

“This is even… even more thrilling!” she cried in a stifled voice. She was devouring Sylva with her eyes, with far more avidity than Sylva displayed in eating her kipper. “I said right away that… that she seemed different from all the girls I’d known!”

“But you’ll keep all this to yourself, won’t you?” I said imperatively.

“Of course!”

“They’d shut us both up!”

She gave a little giggle.

“Most likely, indeed! In fact, it did cross my mind, a moment ago, to have you put in a strait jacket.”

“Or else we might be accused of goodness knows what—abduction, illegal restraint, all the rest of it.”

“She is your niece,” said Mrs. Bumley firmly. “Your sister is getting married again, she lives in Scotland and has entrusted you with her daughter. I know nothing else.”

To familiarize Sylva with her nurse, I asked Mrs. Bumley a little later to give Sylva her lunch (a pair of pigeons bought in Soho) and they became friends. The kind-hearted nurse tried hard to start a conversation with her new pupil, but failed at once. Sylva was still incapable of understanding any abstract question, however simple, if it was not intimately linked to her most immediate material needs.

Mrs. Bumley heaved a sigh. “Maybe she knows a lot already for a fox, but it is awfully little for a woman—even a very backward one.”

We traveled back to Wardley in an ordinary compartment; that is to say, I had not booked it entirely for ourselves this time. The presence of a nurse would render any possible incidents less significant in the eyes of fellow passengers, and it seemed to us that this was a useful time for experiment. Sylva proved docile between Mrs. Bumley and myself. We had come early to take our seats in order to be the first. Every time a passenger came in, Sylva gave a start and we had some trouble calming her fears. During the whole beginning of the journey she remained nervous and watchful, her eyes glued on the people opposite her, scared by their slightest movement, their every word.

Our attitude toward her had at once enlightened our fellow passengers and they showed no surprise at the unwonted behavior of “the poor child.” Embarrassed and constrained at first, as one usually is in such a case, they averted their eyes. But our placid serenity put them at ease, they relaxed and even displayed much kindliness, smiling frequently at the young girl, asking us if they could offer her a piece of chocolate.

Mrs. Bumley shook her head. “She does not care for sweets. Now if you had a sausage about you,” she said humorously, “a piece of meat…”

“Does she understand what one says?” asked an elderly lady, with eager solicitude.

“You can talk freely in front of her,” I assured her. “She understands only the simplest words.”

I had to answer a slightly perverse, though kindly and compassionate curiosity. I had the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Bumley butt in to supply imaginary facts that were far more authoritative than any I could have given. When the slow train stopped at Wardley Station, the whole compartment helped us to get out, vying in kindliness and tokens of friendship. Sylva had by now become quite reassured. To the passengers’ “good-by” she even answered “Bye… bye…” which increased their smiles and friendly waves: she was so sweet, so charming to look at! When the train had left, Mrs. Bumley and I exchanged a proud smile—and a sigh of relief. It had been a ticklish experiment and it had succeeded; our hopes had not been disappointed.

We found the horse and the gig where I had left them, and drove back to the manor. I introduced Mrs. Bumley and her ward to the farmer and his family, with the explanations I had previously prepared. They greeted these with the same blank indifference they showed for all that did not concern their own affairs. I had been a little worried about Fanny’s recollections, but she made no link whatsoever with the “ghost” she had perceived a fortnight earlier. She came with us to help Mrs. Bumley get her room ready as well as the one, between her room and mine, which Sylva was to occupy henceforth, if she consented to sleep in it. We had no great hopes in this respect and expected to meet with strong resistance. On this point we were neither right nor wrong, for Sylva’s behavior proved very different from what we had foreseen.

Chapter 7

ACTUALLY, she did not refuse to sleep anywhere, but she was not content with any one bed, either. Each night she emigrated several times from one to the other, apparently gripped—even more so in the darkness—by a feverish agitation which seemed to come over her whenever she was left alone. I would suddenly feel her warmth and weight on my feet, she would sleep there for an hour, rolled up in a ball, then a sudden lightening would wake me, she was no longer there. It was now Mrs. Bumley’s turn to receive her visit, or else it would be the other way around; we could never foresee in which room, on whose bed, we would find her in the morning. We did try locking ourselves in to force her to stay in her own room, but she scratched at our doors so obstinately that we could not sleep. We had to adapt to this restless, fickle disposition, and not only did we soon stop noticing it but even when, much later, these visits suddenly stopped, we found ourselves at a loss, disturbed in an old-established habit and positively unhappy to be abandoned, as we laughingly had to admit.

Mrs. Bumley called me “sir” and I called her “Nanny.” Hearing this repeatedly, Sylva too began to address me as “sir,” so I persuaded Nanny, despite her profound reluctance, to call me Bonny, which was the name I went by in my childhood. Sylva called “Nanny” at all hours of the day, but whenever I happened to be at home, it was “Bonny” that could be heard all over the place.

Mrs. Bumley was a little hurt by this preference, although she admitted I was entitled to it, at least by seniority. We did not dare suggest that there might, perhaps, also come into it a question of sex, but we both thought of it. Nanny therefore had her eye on me; I knew it, and it would have helped me in case of need. I readily admit, too, that it was not quite fair that I remained the favorite: for food, play, and toilet were now Nanny’s concern.

One Thursday morning, after breakfast, while Nanny was helping Sylva to dress, I received an unexpected visit which made me see the danger I was still exposed to despite the presence of the nurse, as long as I had not publicly put matters right. And this, as one knows, was not an easy thing on account of Sylva’s official nonexistence.

It was not such a surprising visit, either. Though not exactly my neighbor, Dr. Sullivan lived in the vicinity, in an old house called Dunstan’s Cottage, at some small distance from Wardley. It is a charming place, a little reminiscent of the house that sheltered the blind Milton and his daughters near Aylesbury, which every respectable Englishman has been to see: walls of weather-beaten old brick, narrow windows with small panes, a steep low roof that must have been thatched in the old days, a garden ablaze with a thousand flowers in spring but of modest size.

Our relationship, though close and cordial, was only intermittently renewed. Five or six miles is not much of a drive, but you have to prepare for it: get the gig out or saddle a horse, and as I have no telephone—what would I do with one?—one can never be sure that one is not taking a lot of trouble for nothing. We generally dropped a line to invite one another or to announce a forthcoming visit, no more than twice or three times a year. Numerous friendships are fed on absence; and we thus preserved an old affection which had succeeded the one that had linked my father to him: they had been to the same public school, near Taunton.

Dr. Sullivan had been widowed early in life; his wife died in giving birth to their first child, a girl whom he called Dorothy after the departed. With the years, he has come to look more and more like some eighteenth-century figure straight out of Rowlandson’s caricatures. He has always worn, and still does, a loose black jacket, a waistcoat that mounts right up to his stiff white collar, stovepipe trousers that are tight around his knees and ankles. In fact, he looks like a bishop in mufti. He has the big nose of a fat vulture, a forehead which, for lack of hair, climbs halfway up his shiny skull; and this carries aft a frill of soft white, curly, almost fuzzy hair which shivers like foam in the wind.

His daughter is the same age as I, more or less. At twenty, she contracted a very bad marriage. Fortunately she was hardly given time to suffer from it: her husband got himself knocked on the head in some disreputable place in Chelsea. A rather mysterious murder, in circumstances that were probably more than a little sordid. He was found unconscious in some fetid alleyway where the murderer had shoved him behind some dustbins. He died on his way to the hospital.

The marriage had been a blow to me. I had been pretty much in love with her. But I was still a greenhorn, quite powerless to compete against the enticements of a glib adventurer. Once he was dead, I had hoped the young woman would come back, so I might try to win her heart, on the rebound from her disappointment and grief. But she did not come back. She found a job and stayed on in London. And gradually I forgot her—I mean that with absence and the passage of time my feelings changed, and when next I saw her again, a few years later, my love had dissolved into friendship. I went to see her in her little flat at the far end of Fulham, to take her a message from her father; and though we fell into each other’s arms, we did so like two childhood friends, who know each other too well to entertain anything more vivid than an old mutual tenderness. At least so I believed.

Nevertheless, when Dr. Sullivan and I met, two or three times a year, we would avoid talking of his daughter. He too had been distressed by her marriage, and later deeply hurt that she should prefer to stay in London. Nevertheless he would go and look her up there, from time to time. I have no idea what made him think he had guessed that I was still in love with her. I did not know how to undeceive him. So that it was probably to spare my feelings that he made an effort not to mention her, whereas I did likewise to spare his.

Now on that Thursday morning, I was busy straightening the accounts for the annual audit when I heard the gravel of the drive crunch under the wheels of a carriage. And getting up to have a look I recognized Dr. Sullivan alighting from it.

He waved a long, black-sleeved arm, laughing and shouting:

“Just thought I might have a look-in!”

While I was helping him park the carriage behind the elms, I was wondering and worrying what he had come to “look in” on. Had he already heard about Sylva? He wouldn’t for a second believe the myth of my sister in Scotland. I am an only child and he knows it well.

“I am on my way back from old Trilling,” he explained. “He had the wind up for a mere chill. I thought I’d find you in. I know you rarely leave the estate at this time of year.”

We went into the drawing room. He flung his greatcoat over an easy chair and walked across to the fireplace.

“I seized the chance of being in the neighborhood to tell you a great piece of news. Dorothy will be back on Sunday.”

“She’s coming back to Dunstan’s Cottage? You mean she’s leaving London? For good?”

“I hope so. I’m getting old, and she’s a good girl after all. She worries about my being all on my own.”

He rubbed his hands in front of the fire with cheerful vigor, his long, ruddy old clergyman’s face beaming with pleasure.

“Moreover, the job she had in London held no future for her. She never really got used to city life.”

“I’ve often wondered why she stayed on.”

The doctor’s face clouded over. He made a vague motion with his hand. “Pride, I suppose. Let’s say self-respect, if you like. She didn’t want to return as a prodigal, I imagine.”

But the tone was as vague as the gesture had been. It seemed to me not so much an answer as an evasion.

“This is great news indeed,” I said with less assurance in my voice than I would have liked.

I did not know what to think of this return. Quite simply I ought to have been glad of it, but for some reason I could not explain, some disquiet mingled with my gladness.

The old doctor must have ascribed my confusion to more obvious motives. He gazed at me with a broad grin and said:

“It was she who asked me to let you know.”

“Do thank her. Does she expect me to meet her at the station on Sunday?”

“You’d have to get up too early; the night train gets in just after six. No, don’t. Just come to Dunstan’s whenever you like, later in the day. We’ll have dinner together.”

I told myself it would have been more friendly to insist on meeting her. But I devoted my Sunday mornings to Sylva. It would have seemed to me cruel, for her as well as for me, to give up the only morning we still had together since Mrs. Bumley had taken over.

“Actually,” I said, “it wouldn’t be very easy to make myself free. Do ask Dorothy to excuse me, give her my love and tell her I’ll drive over at teatime.”

He picked up his coat, but on the doorstep he seemed to hesitate. It was obvious he would have liked to talk to me at greater length about his daughter of whom we had spoken so little during the past ten years. But I dared not retain him for fear of seeing Nanny and her protegée appear at any moment at the top of the stairs. What would I say, how would I explain? I had not yet prepared anything, and I reproached myself for my lack of foresight.

“Don’t talk to Dorothy of her marriage,” the old man said at last, with some embarrassment.

Strange advice: he knew very well that I had seen his daughter several times in London.

“I never have,” I reassured him nonetheless, accompanying him back to his carriage. I was increasingly afraid that he might linger a little too long.

“She was eighteen at the time… a chunk of juicy young flesh for that wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’ve been racked with remorse and regret that I didn’t unmask him when there was still time.”

We had reached the dogcart. He untied the horse. Before climbing onto the seat he grasped my hand in his for a moment, one foot on the step.

“If my blindness turned out to have spoiled Dorothy’s life, I’d never forgive myself,” he said, looking at me with moist eyes and an insistence that embarrassed me.

“She is still very young!” I stammered.

“Not as young as all that,” he murmured, then dropped my hand and hoisted himself onto the step. “That isn’t the point, anyway,” he muttered into his scarf, without turning around.

Although he had seemingly talked to himself, I realized he would have liked to hear me say: “What then is the point?” But despite my curiosity I didn’t ask it. He settled down on the box and I said, “Have a good ride!”

He gave a click with his reins and his tongue, and the carriage moved off, creaking. I had caught a glimpse, behind my back, of Nanny on the threshold. She was gazing inquisitively after the receding vehicle, holding Sylva fast behind her. Suppose the old man turned around! But he was content to wave his arm widely, and the carriage at last disappeared around a bend of the road. I walked back to the house, mopping my forehead.

Chapter 8

ON the following Sunday, therefore, I went to have tea at Dunstan’s, as promised. Nothing much had changed in the dear old house during those ten years, nor had we aged so greatly as to be forced reluctantly to measure the years gone by. Each one had instinctively taken his accustomed place—the doctor in his deep armchair, Dorothy on the chesterfield whose needlework seat she had once stitched herself, and I between the two of them. The same muffins and the same scones accompanied the tea, which always was a strong brew at Dunstan’s. It seemed to me that we were resuming an old conversation at the point where we had left off. Except that I could not recapture my former sentiments. And I was not even sure of that, because I felt such sweetness and warmth. But I had hardly any time to question myself clearly, for a single preoccupation filled my thoughts: how was I to announce Sylva’s existence to them?

Just as in the old days, Dr. Sullivan was the most talkative of the three of us. He spoke slowly and accompanied his words with sweeping gestures of his arm, which made him look at times as if he were in the pulpit. Dorothy smiled in silence with the same mysterious smile that used to trouble me so much in my young days. I answered the old man’s questions as far as my obsession with what I was going to say would let me. While Dorothy was pouring a third cup of tea, there was a pause, and I turned it to account to blurt out a stupidly precipitate question:

“Tell me, Doctor, do you believe in miracles?”

Dorothy stopped still for a second, the teapot in midair. Her father gulped back what he had been about to say and stared at me in surprise. His eyelids fluttered. The doctor is a religious man, with a solid, deep-rooted faith, though he fervently defends Darwin’s theories against his old chum, the Bishop of Yeovil.

“We must believe the Scriptures,” he said at last.

I shook my head.

“I’m talking of miracles that happen in our day,” ] explained, “before our very eyes.”

He seemed taken aback.

“In order to answer you, there’d first have to be some. But I haven’t seen a single one in all my long life.”

“What about Lourdes, though?”

He shook a disbelieving finger.

“Allow me to keep my reservations. I’m not a Papist and I give little credit to their parsons’ tales. Moreover, many doctors, even believing Roman Catholics, are agreed. A number of those alleged healings, supposing they really have occurred, can be explained without a miracle. A sudden acceleration of a normal biological process, under the impact of strong emotion, would be enough to account for it.”

“And nobody’s yet seen a leg grow again,” remarked Dorothy.

I took the cup she was handing me and said:

“Excuse me, you’re forgetting the miracle of Calanda, where Miguel Juan Pellicer, by the grace of our Lady of Pilar of Saragossa, did indeed recover his amputated leg.”

“When was that?” asked Dorothy, holding out the sugar bowl.

“In the seventeenth century.”

“That’s a long time ago,” said Dorothy. “Nothing since?”

“Not to my knowledge, but just on this point David Garnett has made a very pertinent remark. Miracles are not so uncommon as one thinks, he says; they rather occur irregularly. Sometimes a whole century goes by without anyone observing the least little miracle, and then there’s suddenly a rich crop of them, in quick succession.”

Stirring the spoon in my cup, I added:

“I don’t know if a series of them has started. But in any case I have seen one.”

“A miracle?” said Dorothy.

She did have rather beautiful eyes, when she opened them wide like this. They were blue but in the background there seemed to lurk a black glint that troubled their blueness—and troubled me. They strangely adorned a face that was a little too regular, the purity of the features obscured by a symmetry which, at first sight, seemed deceptively banal. “Do tell!” she said. Her father’s eyes were not agape; he had knit his brows and was gazing at me thoughtfully, gnawing at his lip.

“I would like to ask you two favors,” I began. “First, to believe what I’m going to tell you, which won’t be easy. And then, not to take me for a madman. And finally, not to tell a soul alive what you’re going to hear.”

“That makes three,” Dorothy corrected me playfully—it was obvious that she thought it was just a joke. “But it’s a promise all the same.”

The doctor too acquiesced, but less affirmatively, with a simple nod. He must have realized from my tone of voice that I was speaking seriously.

I was about to say “I’ve seen a fox change into a woman,” but on the point of uttering what I thought were easy words, they seemed even to me so preposterous that I swallowed them. There followed a long silence during which I saw their eyes slowly fill with astonishment, then with alarm. In the end I shook my head with discouragement.

“No, I can’t,” I breathed, “it’s impossible.”

And since they evidently could not understand, I added; “You wouldn’t be able to believe me.” Dorothy stretched out one hand to seize mine, but I snatched it away. I put my cup down and got up.

“Forgive me,” I said. “I’m cutting short our reunion, and even spoiling it, I’m afraid. I shouldn’t have talked about it so soon. But you cannot imagine how I… Never mind, the fat’s in the fire, it’s too late to draw back and talk of other things. But I do see now it would defy belief unless you’re properly prepared for it. And I also realize that I’ll have to keep you out of it, Dorothy, at least to begin with. I beg you not to take offense, but I’ll have to speak to your father first: it would be inconceivable otherwise.”

She did not seem disappointed or saddened, rather a little frightened. I laughed to reassure her and said, “Don’t worry!” but found nothing to add in support of this advice. I went on: “It would be better, much better, if your father first came by himself. Yes,” I said, turning toward him, “may I ask you to call again at Richwick Manor some day soon? If it doesn’t inconvenience you too much?”

I caught father and daughter exchanging a glance in which even the least observant could have read a veiled alarm.

“I can come tomorrow, if you like,” he said.

“Oh, there isn’t that much of a hurry!” I protested. “Besides,” I added precipitately, for the idea had just flashed through my mind, “I’d like us to meet at the Unicorn. You don’t mind going to the pub first?”

“Wherever you like, whenever you like,” said the doctor, and we fixed a date for a drink before lunch in the middle of the coming week. “So as to be undisturbed,” I explained. And after an exchange of affectionate courtesies, behind which each of us took pains to conceal his surprise or embarrassment, I took my leave at once.

The innkeeper’s name was Anthony Brown, and his ruling passion was fox hunting. I was almost certain that he had followed the hunt in which my vixen had vanished before the hunters’ eyes. In any case I knew that the matter had been hotly debated at the Unicorn, and a score of theories aired though none adopted. That’s why I had chosen the place to meet Dr. Sullivan. When we had sat down at a table apart, I asked Mr. Brown to have a drink with us. I had no difficulty in leading him on to his favorite sport. We first had to listen at length to numerous tedious exploits in which he had figured with modest dash.

“Since we are on the subject,” I broke in, “what’s that story, Mr. Brown, about a fox having vanished in thin air? I’ve been told that you were present at the time.”

“Present! You may say I saw it, with my own eyes, bursting like a soap bubble!” he cried.

“Go on! Tell us about it.”

“By the way, now I think of it, didn’t it happen just outside your place?” He turned to Dr. Sullivan. “The fox was leading us straight on to Richwick Manor. It was a cunning beast, it had led the hounds a hell of a dance almost till nightfall. But its game was up. The pack was after it. There wasn’t much light any more, it’s true, but I have sharp ears. When the hounds are all set for the kill, you’d have to be a raw novice to mistake the noise they make. They were right on top of it, and no mistake.”

“And it disappeared?” asked the doctor.

“Burst like a ruddy bubble before their very noses, I tell you! I’ve never seen such a stunned pack of curs as those we found when we got there. Dumb-struck they were, a right lot of idiots! Not that we,” he added with a laugh, “looked any brighter than they!”

“I’ve had a good look at my hedge, you know,” I said with casual hypocrisy. “It’s full of holes.”

“Do you think if that devilish beast had slipped through a hole,” he cried, “the hounds wouldn’t have followed it? I don’t want to speak ill of your hedge, Mr. Richwick, but they’ve jumped higher ones than yours! No, just a blasted bubble, that’s the word for it. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it in fox hunters’ memory. We haven’t stopped arguing about it. Do you hunt, too?” he asked the doctor.

Sullivan said he didn’t. The discussion went on for a while, and then we bade the innkeeper good-by. I got into the doctor’s carriage and while he clicked his tongue to the horse, I said:

“I take it this has convinced you of that strange disappearance?”

“Is that your miracle?” asked the doctor.

“Heavens no, unfortunately! It’s only half of it. I’m taking you along to the other half.”

“Besides, couldn’t the animal have passed through those holes in the hedge, after all?”

“Of course,” I laughed, “and that’s just what it did. Only the point is this: why didn’t the hounds follow it? Isn’t that inexplicable? And why did they suddenly stop barking?”

“Because,” the doctor retorted, laughing too, “they must have come up slap against one of your ghosts. I’ve always suspected Richwick Manor of harboring whole regiments of them.”

“Ghosts, my foot!” I growled, not laughing any more, and the doctor looked at me intrigued. “You won’t tell anyone about it?” I said suddenly, with some agitation, for we were getting near. “You remember your promise, don’t you?”

“Of course, of course! What are you afraid of?”

“Neither explicitly nor implicitly?” I persisted. “By hinting for instance that, don’t you see, you must hold your tongue but if you only could…”

“I swear, you latterday Hamlet, do calm yourself! Damn it all, it’s only a fox! You couldn’t be more excited if you’d committed a murder!”

“If only I’d committed a murder,” I sighed, “I’d be in less of a stew.”

“Am I the first person you’ve told about this?”

“The second one, after Mrs. Bumley.”

“Who is Mrs. Bumley?”

“Sylva’s governess.”

“And who is Sylva? Have you many more unknown females up your sleeve?”

“No, only those two. But we’re almost there. You’ll soon get an answer to all this.”

We had indeed arrived. We left the carriage at the farm and walked into the house. Mrs. Bumley was up in her room (I had asked her to stay there). I suggested we should first have another double scotch to give ourselves courage.

“Upon my word, you’re beginning to worry me,” said the doctor, still making an effort to laugh. “Are you hiding a corpse?”

I said that he certainly couldn’t have the slightest notion of the surprise I had in store for him. Then I took my courage in both hands and said, “All right, let’s go up.”

I walked up the stairs before him. I listened at the door. Nothing. Sylva must be asleep. I knocked with my fist to wake her up and did indeed hear her trot. Then I opened the door wide and pushed the doctor in before me.

I was counting on the passably strange appearance of this man in black, long as a breadless day, with his horsy face and foaming mane, to give my vixen a shock of surprise, and I was not disappointed. Sylva was wearing her chemise. She jumped up, yelped, and scampered all over the room in a panic, trying to climb up the curtains as she had once done, leaping at last onto the chest of drawers and from there on top of the wardrobe, whence she observed us, all atremble. That was what I had expected, so I closed the door again and said to the doctor, “You have seen her. Let’s go back.”

If I had said, “Let’s climb on the roof,” he would probably have followed me too. He was plainly so utterly stunned that he marched behind me like an automaton, stumbling a little on the steps. Only after we had sat down in the living room did he recover his speech sufficiently to exclaim in a toneless voice: “Heavens alive!” and asked at last: “Who is that creature?”

Then I told him everything, from the beginning. When I had finished, he said, “It can’t be,” and began to pace up and down the room.

I simply said, “If you can give me another explanation…” but he shook his head.

“If what you have told me is true, then it is really a miracle. There is no possible explanation from a biological point of view. It isn’t a question, as at Lourdes, of a somatic evolution accelerated by the psyche. Such a transformation, in the matter of size alone, is beyond any natural process, even the most exceptional one. As a scientist I have absolutely no right to believe in it.”

“But as a believer?”

“It would seem to me exceedingly hazardous.”

I sighed.

“Very well,” I said, “then don’t give it another thought. You have not seen anything. Go home and forget all about it. But remember your promise!”

He stopped still to gaze at me with pathetic insistence.

“And do you swear,” he asked, “that you have told me the truth?”

“I swear it. Why should I want to hoax you?”

He went on staring at me in silence and then began to massage his skull, though it was red enough as it was, with an air of bewilderment. “I’ll be damned… I’ll be damned…” was all I heard him grunt during the minutes that followed. Then he moved his big chin up and down, and finally said:

“What actually do you expect me to do?”

“Nothing in particular,” I admitted. “You’d have discovered her some day, anyhow. I preferred to show her to you myself. And perhaps I’m expecting some confirmation from you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, couldn’t you examine her, perhaps? Do you think it’s possible that she has a perfectly normal constitution?”

“How the devil do you expect me to know?”

Anyway, how could one get Sylva to submit to such an examination? One would have to tie her up hand and foot or bash her on the head.

“There’s no hurry,” I said after some moments’ thought. “Cheer up! You’ve seen her, that’s already something. You have time to think about it while I am gradually breaking her in. Come and see us now and then so that she gets used to you. And bring Dorothy along—Sylva very soon got used to Mrs. Bumley. The day will come when you’ll be able to study her physique thoroughly and at leisure.”

Was he listening? He did not answer. After a certain while he said:

“This is a pretty kettle of fish, anyhow! I wonder how you’ll get out of it in the long run.”

That was just the kind of reflection I needed! As if I hadn’t realized myself, and for some time already, what a hornets’ nest I had brought about my ears!

“Still, you aren’t suggesting, are you,” I said, “that I should call in the vet and have her put to sleep?”

This was so obviously out of the question that he rubbed his skull even harder. Suddenly he gave a funny laugh.

“Shall I tell you? The only way you’ll get out of this scrape is by marrying her!”

This last remark was so obviously meant as a silly joke that I did not even reply.

Chapter 9

ONLY after he had gone did I belatedly realize that he had not believed me, after all. It is bad form to show openly a wounding incredulity, whatever the circumstances. Moreover, it is an old English habit, I suppose, to concede that everything is possible in this world—whence our timeworn belief in ghosts. Dr. Sullivan had behaved toward me like a man of breeding: he had not doubted my words although he did not put the slightest faith in my story. How could I blame him?

But what had he tried to insinuate with that last remark? When you considered it closely, it hardly disguised what he thought: I was hiding in my house—for reasons of my own—a young person who was certainly weird but rather too pretty. I told some people that she was my niece, when in fact I had no sister; and to others I tried to account for her presence by an improbable miracle which nobody in his senses could believe. In the long run it could only result in one thing: a public scandal—unless I scotched it by marrying the girl.

And that, I thought with an unpleasant twinge, is what he’ll tell his daughter on his return! I could not doubt that he had lately nursed the hope that I might represent a possible future for Dorothy. Nor, in consequence, that he must have been rather unfavorably impressed by my story of a vixen turned into a woman, and by the pres-ence—more or less surreptitious or mendaciously explained—of that young person in my house. I could certainly be sure of his discretion and even, if need be, of his public support, but assuredly not of his private approval. Was I to lose then, if not a friendship, at least an esteem by which I set great store? And with his esteem, that of Dorothy’s?

The blow this dealt me made me realize how much I still needed the young woman’s affectionate respect. No, I won’t lose it without a struggle, I told myself. After all, I am not guilty! It is a miracle! Sylva is really only a fox in human guise! I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, I have no need to prevaricate. The old doctor hadn’t believed me, had he? Well, he’ll just have to believe me, and so will Dorothy!

This was my state of mind at the end of the nerve-racking Sunday that followed the doctor’s visit. I promptly wrote the Sullivans a note saying I would come to see them the Sunday after. But by the end of the week I had become less cocksure. What proof could I offer them? It is the mark of such a phenomenon that it contains no proof. What I would have to obtain, on the strength of my testimony alone, was an act of faith.

As bad luck would have it, on the Tuesday of that week Mrs. Bumley received an urgent telegram from one of her sisters; her mother had just had a stroke and was at death’s door. This spoiled everything. I had more or less planned to take her along to the Sullivans and make her talk: she would explain to them the differences between Sylva and a “retarded child,” and there was a chance that the opinion of a professional nurse might be accepted by them as supporting evidence. That chance was now washed away. I could obviously not detain her. She took the train that very evening, leaving me alone with Sylva.

I then decided, in the absence of Mrs. Bumley, to take my vixen herself along to Dunstan’s Cottage. Wasn’t she the most convincing proof of the truth of my story? Of course, the difficulties of such a project soon became apparent to me. First of all, elementary common sense obliged me to foresee her behavior, or rather misbehavior, in a strange house, and the resultant wreckage. To chase after her amid a hundred precious knickknacks might provide a film sequence worthy of Mack Sennett, but was unthinkable in respectable real life. Furthermore, if Nanny had acquired the knack of dressing her almost decently, I myself only succeeded at the cost of disheartening difficulties which, on some days, even proved insuperable. And neither I nor the nurse was as yet able to force her to have a bath. With the result that when the doors and windows were kept shut her room was very soon impregnated with a rather powerful animal odor. This was the case once more in Nanny’s absence, since I was busy on the farm and unable to keep watch on her all day. When I returned in the evening, the smell almost choked me.

I could not ask Fanny to replace me: she dared not come close to “my poor niece” who, she confessed scared the life out of her. “I haven’t much brains as it is,” she said, “and to see some who have none at all gives me the creeps! I’d ever so much rather run away,” she added, and did as she said.

To get rid of this unbearable odor I would have to throw the room open to wholesome drafts, spread the rugs and blankets out in the garden. But how could I, all by myself, leave a window open without running the risk that Sylva would jump out? A six- or eight-foot leap would not scare her, I thought, and nothing allowed me to suppose that she had lost her desire to run away, to return to the alluring forest. I would therefore have to tie her up. But that was easier said than done. To put a buckle on one of my belts, a chain to the buckle, and fix the chain to the bedpost presented no problem; but there remained the problem of finding a means of slipping the belt onto Sylva. It was rather like putting a pinch of salt on a bird’s tail.

Take advantage of her sleep? Her slumber was too light and tense, too wary to ensure success. She still slept like a fox; anything would wake her. I eventually decided that I had only one chance to succeed: during our games. For Sylva loved to play with Nanny or me whenever we were willing.

And we found we had to be willing, if only to keep her awake. For whenever we did not busy ourselves with her, the time that was not occupied by eating or trying to get out of the room—trotting, sniffing, whining, despite our efforts to make her drop this habit—was spent by her almost entirely in sleeping. The most painful ordeal that besets an animal in idleness is boredom. As if, as soon as it is unoccupied, the living being becomes aware of its condition as an inexplicable, unexplained creature whose existence seems void of all usefulness as well as of any reasonable motive. The animal’s boredom, even more than ours, takes on a meaning of utter futility, and against so vast a tedium the animal has but one remedy: sleep.

Twenty times a day Sylva would yawn her head off, like a dog who has been shut up, and with the same long, plaintive whine. Like a dog, she would curl up and fall asleep for ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. No sooner did she wake than she would start to prowl about, seeking to play. If Nanny and I were engaged elsewhere, she would hunt: her favorite plaything was an upholstered stool. Small and round, it rolled between her hands like a ball of wool worried by a cat. She would amuse herself chasing it, then tire of it, have a go at a chair for a change, and had thus broken two or three. I marveled that she never hurt herself in the course of these games, however much she fell with her prey. She would break the chair but never incur so much as a bruise herself.

When I was about and in a mood to join in, she preferred to play with me. I was more amusing than a chair although the game did not vary: a sham fight. I was much stronger than she, but she was much nimbler, and it was not always deliberately that I let her get the better of me. She would then playfully snap at my ear, my throat. I could not let the game go on for too long: to grapple with a pretty girl in light attire is not the best way to keep one’s self-control, even if one knows she is only a fox. I would push her back a little roughly; she did not take it amiss but simply remained motionless, gazing at me out of her cold and fixed onyx eyes, then she would yawn, whine, and go to sleep.

It was during one of those sessions that I grasped the opportunity to slip my belt around her waist. It is not easy to close a buckle singlehanded, but I was just about to manage it all the same when she realized what was happening. She tried to escape but the buckle held fast. I thought she would kill herself, so much did she struggle, but the chain was solid, the bed heavy and, though at the end of this hurricane, frantic capers, somersaults and jerks fit to strangle her waist, the bed had landed all askew at the other end of the room, Sylva, for her part, found herself lying on the ground, exhausted and breathless as on the day of the hunt after the hounds had pursued her.

I turned this momentary calm to account by opening wide the door and windows, carrying the mattress and bedding out into the sunshine, spreading the carpet and counterpane on the lawn. Several times during this house-cleaning, Sylva renewed her struggle, but in vain. To undo the buckle was too difficult for her. When the odor was dispelled I closed the door and windows and released her: that is, I unbuckled the chain but left her with the belt, well aware that I would never be able to slip it on her a second time. Whereas to snap the hook on the buckle would only require speed and stealth.

Meanwhile, I had quite a fight merely to unfasten the chain, for she was still mad with fright and fury and completely beside herself. I was fiercely bitten. When at last I had managed it, she jerked away to escape and huddled in her favorite corner, as in the early days, between the wall and the small bow-fronted chest, where she stayed on the alert, watching me with the tense expression she used to have. I locked the chain away in a drawer, pulled the bed back into place, put everything in order and left the room to give my vixen time to calm down.

During the rest of the day she refused all nourishment. The next day she accepted it, but from afar, and went off to eat it under the bed. She seemed to have lost the few words she knew, and they came back to her only very slowly with her returning calm.

But though she was appeased, the presence of the belt continued to worry her. She constantly tugged at it, fiddled with the buckle—but always in vain—until finally she seemed to get used to it. However, the room once more began to smell like a menagerie, and when on the following Friday I found my gentle Sylva tamed at last, it was time to start all over again. I took advantage of a moment when she was busy sucking clean the carcass of a chicken, with her back turned to me, and quickly hooked the chain onto the belt without her even noticing it at first. But when she saw me open door and window, she jumped to her feet and, feeling herself held back, began to struggle as before, albeit a trifle less frantically and never ceasing to watch my every move. So much so that hearing me say soothingly over and over again, “Come now… come… keep still… you know I’ll unfasten you presently…” she eventually did keep quiet, just pulling obstinately at her belt with both hands. I aired the bedding and dragged the carpets outside. I was about to spread them out on the grass when I heard the thud of a soft fall behind me. And turning around, I saw Sylva, still on all fours, straightening up in the polyanthus bed at the foot of the house. She was no sooner on her feet than she reached the hedgerow in three bounds. I was paralyzed with surprise. She was wearing her woolen chemise, but the belt had gone: had she, by dint of fiddling with it and with the aid of chance, succeeded in undoing the buckle? It was a bit late in the day to worry about that. Before I had recovered my wits, she had jumped over the fence and was streaking toward the woods with the swiftness of a doe. I rushed after her, shouting her name, but I did not run half as fast as she. Like a wisp of smoke she had vanished in the forest before I was halfway across the field.

For a long time I called her name among the trees with a kind of despair, for I knew only too well that she would not answer and that trying to find her again in the undergrowth was a hopeless endeavor. Nevertheless I returned to the farm, saddled a horse, and set out on a one-man hunt through the woods, furiously keeping on till nightfall. I flushed a number of animals and among them a fox, but a bigger and older one than Sylva had been before her transformation; it was grayer, too, and I did not pursue it. However, the fact that the idea had occurred to me even for a moment showed that a miracle in reverse would not actually have surprised me, that I even expected perhaps to discover her in this guise. Simultaneously, I had to confess that my attachment for her was no less ambiguous than herself. In whatever shape I would have found her again—animal or human—I was prepared to give thanks to heaven with the same grateful heart.

I rode home only when the moon rose, deeply disheartened and deeply troubled, too. The room seemed lugubrious to me—cold and deserted. If I don’t find her again, I told myself, I’ll take a wife. I have forgotten how to live all alone. I’ll marry Dorothy. But now the idea of letting any creature other than my vixen into this room filled me with a sort of revolt and with the feeling, both strange and unbearable, of an impossible breach of faith. Like a widower who, with his wife hardly cold in her grave, was already toying with the unseemly idea of marrying again. And all this for a vixen! The thought left me aghast and distressed. The truth was, if at that moment I had been obliged to choose between marrying the most beautiful girl in Britain or finding my vixen again even in her original form, I believe I would not have wavered for an instant… One can gather from this the degree my obsession had reached at the end of an exhausting chase.

Chapter 10

THE next day was a Saturday, and there was a meet scheduled. I saddled my horse again and scoured the woods all day, trembling whenever I heard the distant clamor of hounds and horn. Toward evening I went all the way up to the inn to have a beer at the public bar where I hoped to gather news, yet dreaded to hear it. How could I have dared mention Sylva’s escape and my fear that she might have changed back into an animal of the chase? Fortunately they had been after a stag and left the foxes alone. Nor did anyone talk of a mysterious girl, whom I would have had some trouble to claim without first mentioning her escape… If I found her again, I vowed to myself I would introduce her to all my friends in the village, so as to prevent my getting caught another time in such an absurd predicament.

I returned to the manor with a somewhat easier heart. But I was thinking: This is only a momentary respite; if I cannot lay my hands on Sylva soon, the outcome is bound to be dramatic, whether she is run to earth in one shape or the other. I thought of asking to join in the fox hunt, despite my convictions about the sport.

At any rate, the next meet was not due until the following Saturday. What was I to do till then? On Sunday I rode through the woods again, for a long time and without result, before knocking at the Sullivans’ door as I had promised.

The door was opened by Dorothy. I must have looked rather wild with my clothes torn and my hair sticky with perspiration, for she exclaimed, “Good Lord! What’s the matter?” She called her father and showed me into the drawing room. While she was pouring me a glass of whisky and the old doctor, sitting opposite me, was silently gazing down at me from above his black frock coat, I recovered some of my self-control. I even managed to laugh like someone poking fun at himself.

“Don’t take any notice. I’ve been riding cross-country all day and I’m fagged out. An idiotic story.”

I turned to the young woman.

“Your father was splendid the other day, but I’m not cherishing any illusions. My story did not convince him. I suppose he told you?”

She acknowledged it, but was obviously on her guard.

“What did you think of it?” I asked bravely.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Told like that to someone who hasn’t seen anything, it really sounds past belief,” she admitted. “Will you show me that… the creature?”

“Too late,” I said. “She’s escaped.”

“How’s that?” cried the doctor.

“Through the window. She’s run off into the woods.”

I must have looked distraught. There was a pause and the old man said:

“Come now, isn’t that the best joke she could play on you? You’re well rid of her now.”

“Yes,” I agreed sourly, “that’s no doubt what I ought to be thinking, if I were sensible. Unfortunately I’m thinking the very opposite. I am reproaching myself most bitterly.”

I told them of all I feared: the hunters, perhaps the lunatic asylum.

Dorothy remarked, a little edgily, “But if she’s only a vixen, what do you care? You aren’t responsible for her any more!”

I said that, on the contrary, I felt deeply responsible. That I didn’t know why exactly, but if she met with an accident I would find it hard to forgive myself. And moreover, in the village, she was now considered my niece. I could no longer let her disappear just like that.

After a moment Dorothy asked, “But how do you yourself consider her? Still as a vixen or already as a girl?”

The question delighted me. For the putting of it meant that Dorothy must have begun to accept things as they were. But it also embarrassed me.

“That’s just it, I don’t know.” I sighed. “She has a woman’s form but the mind of a fox. Is anatomy enough?”

“If she behaves in all respects like a fox…” Dorothy started but broke off and blushed slightly.

I finished the thought for her:

“You’d leave her in the forest, if you were I?”

She probably didn’t dare answer “yes” and slowly rubbed the side of her nose. I turned toward her father. “What do you think, Doctor?”

“Supposing she’s a real vixen?” he asked cautiously.

“Yes, supposing she is. What would you answer if you were sent for to treat her? Would you say, ‘This is a vet’s business?’ ”

“Of course not, but that, as you said yourself, is just a question of anatomy. I’d attend her, even if she were a vixen. But afterward I’d recommend that she be put away. It’s the only solution, believe me,” he added, looking hard into my eyes.

Was he beginning to believe in the miracle, too? Or was it only a piece of… not quite disinterested advice? I looked away and said:

“No, really, that’s impossible! She’d die in a mental home. Just as she’ll die in the forest if she persists in staying there. She has need of me.”

“And you of her, perhaps?” said Dorothy in a tone that seemed to me a little acid.

“Perhaps I do,” I agreed very quietly, “I’ve grown used to her presence.”

Tibbles, the Siamese kitten, was fondly rubbing himself against one of my legs. I fondled him with one hand while smiling at his mistress.

“And if Tibbles disappeared, wouldn’t you miss him?”

“That’s true,” said Dorothy. And as if this remark, by defining the nature of my feelings, had cheered her up, she returned my smile with friendliness. She added, however, “But that’s not quite the same thing, is it?”

My smile broadened. “No, not quite…” Tibbles jumped onto my knee and purred under my stroking. Dorothy and I were now looking at each other with a kind of complicity.

“I’d like to see her,” she said, “when she’s back at the manor.”

“Do you think she’ll come back?” I cried.

“Tibbles often runs away but he always comes back.”

“Sylva isn’t a cat, she’s a fox,” I said in a worried tone.

Dorothy put a sympathetic hand on mine.

“Would it help you to be patient if I came and kept you company for a few days?”

“Who would look after your father in the meantime?”

“We’re having the Dean in to lunch on Tuesday,” the doctor reminded her.

“I’ll be along on Wednesday,” Dorothy decided.

This visit calmed me a little. I slept fairly well. On Monday the various jobs on the farm occupied my actions and thoughts all day. I reached home tired, but it was a welcome fatigue. After dinner I settled down by the fire and tried to read. It was an uneasy attempt, preoccupied as I was. Nevertheless I was just beginning to succeed when a soft scratching on the door made me raise my head. The scratching was repeated several times. I went to open the door with a throbbing heart. It was Sylva.

She slipped inside like a shadow and sank down beside the fireplace. She was panting a little, though almost quietly. But her appearance wrung my heart: her poor chemise hung in pitiful rags, and her body underneath was clawed, bleeding, prickling with thorns. She had slumped down on her side, in the gently relaxed, weary attitude of a greyhound after a race, her head thrown back a little, her hair spread out. She closed her eyes and breathed less noisily.

I knelt down beside her and started to pull away her rags which in places were stuck with clotted blood and sweat. She let me do it, only quivering a little when I had to pull at the cloth to make it come away. I went to fetch a basin of water and began to sponge her gently, extracting a thorn, a bur here and there. She did not object, just moaned a little, but without resistance. I also discovered tooth marks: she must have tried to return to her burrow, to her fox and fox cubs. But she was a woman; how could they have recognized her? They had defended themselves against her as against an intruder, an enemy.

For how long after that had she gone on roaming, too tall and clumsy and hurt by every thorn, before she had decided to come back? Perhaps she had also fled from the fox hunt.

When I had cleansed her thoroughly, I applied a healing balm to her scratches and sprayed talcum powder all over her body. We were near the fire; it was warm; she nestled close to me and began to murmur gently with sleepiness and well-being. I wrapped my arms around her and rocked her softly like a child. It was the first time I had dared to take her close to me, naked and abandoned. I am a self-respecting man but a prudent one, too, and I have always considered that the surest way of resisting temptation is to avoid it. But on that evening Sylva’s return—when I had already almost despaired of it—the intense relief at seeing my fears dispelled, my slightly overwrought joy at her sweet fidelity, all overwhelmed my watchfulness. I felt lighthearted, gay, carefree with a dash of boldness in which there soon mingled a new tenderness that was freer, more unrestrained, soon even more audacious and almost reckless, and gradually tending to libertinism… After all, I told myself with a sort of delightful dizziness, she’s a woman, isn’t she? What harm would there be? And if she’s a fox, she probably hasn’t even a soul, so what sin would there be in it? She was purring under the caresses with which I was soothing her to sleep, very chaste caresses but which I now found hard to control, for they were wandering a little over her arched hips, her breasts. My fingers were trembling.

The purring stopped, or rather it changed into the tender mewing of a cat. The body quivered and rippled. My nerves were taut, and when she jerked round to flatten herself against me, I only just managed not to lose my head completely. But now the mewing, which had been meek and peaceful, became more violent and at last so totally feline, so totally beastlike, that it shocked me through and through. I let the bewitching body slide to the carpet and walked away, quivering with a kind of dizziness, a horror, an anguish, perhaps even with terror and a piercing interrogation, merciless as the stab of a stiletto between the ribs.

As soon as I released her, my lascivious vixen simply ceased mewing and even purring. She sprawled on the carpet, rolling about a little, softly rubbing her cheek. I looked at her from a distance and felt seething in me a strange mixture of desire and repulsion—one I had felt before, it is true, on several occasions but never with the violence of that night. Luckily for me, Sylva instantly dropped into slumber, like a very young child. She fell asleep with such animal languor, too, that the last fires died within me, leaving room only for tenderness. I took advantage of her abandon to make her take a bath. She gave no more than a little start when the warm water touched her, and continued to sleep. And I carried her, still asleep, to her bed. I had put a fresh chemise on her.

A long time ago I had lost the habit of praying, but that night I thanked the Lord for His assistance. I felt, without quite being able to explain it, that I had escaped from a particularly heinous sin. I remembered how insidiously temptation had overcome my senses while I was clasping in my arms my little vixen in human shape. Why, who’d know about it? I had said to myself. Not even she: you’ll pass in her like a sword through water, like a lizard over a stone, she won’t even remember it tomorrow… I thank Thee, my Lord, for having spared the sinner the shame of his own remembrance in the gray morning light of a nauseous awakening…

I went to bed in my turn. As often now in the middle of the night, I felt a weight, a warmth against me. This presence so close and tempting, roused again my senses and their sting for a moment. But I had recovered my self-control. Having resisted at the height of the tempest, I was not going to succumb on reaching the port.

Chapter 11

NEVERTHELESS, a disappointment lay in store for me the next morning. When she felt I was stirring, Sylva too woke up, yawned, stretched herself and finally jumped to the floor. And almost at once she was at the door again, scratching and sniffing. Then trotting around the room. Then looking through the window, whining softly.

“So you want to run away again!” I said to myself sadly. “Are you incapable, then, of the least memory… ?” To see what she would do, and knowing that the whole house had been locked up for the night, I opened the door. She almost knocked me down and ran along the corridor, but on the point of starting to descend the staircase she seemed to hesitate, slowed down and remained leaning over the bannister with an air of uncertainty and alarm, as if she were listening to sounds I could not hear. She remained thus for so long that finally I went to her. And she let herself relax against me, nuzzling her little face into my armpit as if to seek shelter there against the hardships of the world. I did not dare to move. But when at last I lifted her chin to look at her face, I saw a tear roll down.

I felt stirred by a deep emotion. Tears! The first tears she had shed! Hitherto she had moaned very often, whimpered sometimes, but never any tears. Was this the prelude to a change? Was it something to hope for or fear? At any rate, without a shadow of doubt, it was the sudden emergence of memory. As long as we had kept her imprisoned in the house all her instinct, as a wild animal, strained toward freedom. In the locked bedroom this morning, awakening, it was still this instinct—and this instinct only—which had flooded back and filled her entirely. But when I had let her out, when she had thought she could escape again to the forest, to her fox and her cubs, the memory of the day before must suddenly have surged up in all its cruelty. One could not otherwise explain, I believe, that she had so brusquely stopped short, showing her grief and those tears. For the first time, therefore, my little vixen had not automatically followed her unreflecting instinct, but had drawn the lesson of a misadventure like a sentient being. I did not, however, indulge in exaggerated illusions: this is the sort of memory, after all, which is not lacking in my dogs. I was moved and uncertain whether to rejoice or not.

I led her back to the bedroom—I did not have to lead her, she was sticking to me as she had done on the day of the train journey, as if she were afraid of losing me; and no words could have made me understand more clearly that since the forest was rejecting her, this room and I had now become her whole universe. Yet for many nights to come I would still hear her trot along the walls, sniff and scratch at her door, at the window. Any other behavior would have been surprising on the part of a creature who was still steeped to the core in atavistic independence. It would have been most surprising if the memory of her mishaps had not faded at times, in her savage soul, before the irresistible call of her native earth. Was it not already wonderful that I could now open doors and windows, at least in the daytime, without having to dread her escape? Fear of the unknown seemed to have succeeded the lure of the forest. Inside the house she would not now leave my side, any more than a puppy would. And when I came home from the farm I would find her behind the door, sitting cross-legged, waiting for me.

I felt calm and reassured at last. It never crossed my mind that this tranquillity might still prove deceptive.

Meanwhile, according to her promise, Dorothy had arrived on the Wednesday following Sylva’s return. As she got out of the pony trap which she drove herself, the first word she said was: “Well?”

I answered, “She is back!”

With a big smile, Dorothy passed the reins to the farm boy to take the trap around to the stables, and cried, “I told you so!” She was carrying a small traveling bag. “I have brought my things but is there any need now?”

I took the bag out of her hand. “You don’t imagine I’m going to let you go away again!” I exclaimed, and preceded her into the house.

We entered. She first warmed herself at the fire and then I said, “I’ll show you to your room.” We went upstairs. As we passed the door of my bedroom we could hear the noise of trotting feet, scratching on wood, impatient whining.

Dorothy stopped me. “Is that she?”

I nodded.

“Oh!” she said, “I’d love to see her!”

“Settle in first, then I’ll take her to you.”

“Oh no! Right now!” she said. She was so eager, her face alight with curiosity, that I could not resist.

“Stay there,” I said, and went to open the door. Sylva was standing behind it in her woolen shirt. Seeing I was in company, she gave a start and tried to run away. I held her back by the wrist. “Come on, come… don’t be afraid…”

Dorothy gently stepped forward, one hand outstretched, smiling exaggeratedly as one does for a very small child. Sylva watched her approach with fixed eyes. Her lips drew up, baring her sharp little teeth. And a deep snarl rose from her throat.

I quickly warned: “Don’t come closer!” There was no doubt that if Dorothy persisted she would be bitten. She must have realized it, for she swiftly pulled her hand back and looked at me with deep dismay.

“She is a little wild animal,” I said. “Give her time to get used to you.”

“Animals generally like me,” she complained, “and let me stroke them.”

I smiled. “It’s not quite the same thing. Didn’t you say so yourself last Sunday?”

“Do you mean… it might be… feminine jealousy?”

“Might be. It’s not impossible.”

Sylva never took her eyes off the newcomer, nor did she stop growling darkly.

A little later, when Dorothy was back in the living room with me, the poor reception she had been given still seemed to rankle a little.

“She is very pretty to look at,” she admitted. “But what a foul temper!”

“Go on! Complain!” I protested. “She has let herself be locked up unprotestingly. Have you often come across such meekness in a wild beast? Or in a jealous woman?”

“You defend her very well,” said Dorothy.

I did not take the hint (if it was one) and contented myself with smiling.

“What are you going to do with her in the long run?” she asked after a moment.

“As for that…” I said, with a gesture of ignorance. “The first thing is to tame her, isn’t it?”

“But isn’t she tame, since she has come back? She seems very fond of you.”

“She is, but you have seen for yourself she knows only me. Apart from Mrs. Bumley, of course. I’ve got to make her more sociable.”

“Do you think you’ll succeed?”

“The progress she has made makes me hope so. If you had seen her in the first days! Why, just ask your father!”

Dorothy kept silent for a moment before saying, “That’s just it. My father isn’t very hopeful.”

“Why?” I said, worried.

“He says that she was born too old.”

I merely raised my eyebrows and waited for what was to follow.

“He says that if the basis, the groundwork of intelligence has not been laid in the earliest youth, between the age of two and six, it is too late afterwards. At the age of your… fox… he says you might perhaps train her like a cat or a dog, if as much.”

This coincided so exactly with my own fears that all I could manage to do was to show myself disagreeable.

“That’s what you’re hoping, I suppose?” I snapped.

Dorothy grew pale, then blushed, her lips quivering with anger too.

“What are you trying to say? Why should it matter to me? I didn’t make this lucky find in my garden!”

I felt contrite. It was true, what had I meant to say?

“Forgive me,” I apologized. “I don’t know what came over me—probably the fear that you might be right.”

“I don’t quite see why it should matter to you, either. This creature has no claim on you—nor you on her, for that matter.”

“The fact remains that I rescued her. I suppose this implies some duties. At all events, I can’t bear the idea of letting her molder in this savage state, without lifting a finger.”

“Just because of her anatomy? But if, in every other respect, she’s only a fox, after all?”

“If there is just one chance that she is no longer a fox, have I the right to neglect any means in my power?”

“But in that case there are plenty of educators, specialized institutions that know a lot more about it than you or even Mrs. Bumley.”

It was a curious thing: what I had so much wanted to talk about with Dorothy and her father was precisely this. And now this discussion was irritating me, I found it almost hateful.

“I have already explained to you,” I said testily, “that that is impossible for all sorts of reasons. But one reason will do. I can’t give any proof of her existence. I have no status in respect to her: I am neither her father, brother, cousin or guardian. By what right could I ask for her to be shut away?”

“You might just tell the truth—or almost: that you don’t know where she came from, that you found her roaming near your place in a pitiful state, that you gave her shelter and some care. But now you’re asking the public authorities to take charge of her.”

“It’s too late for that. The whole village believes by now that I have taken in my sister’s daughter.”

“The Board of Control is discreet. They’ll investigate—there’s no doubt about the result of their inquiries. Your objections won’t wash. My father could testify if you wanted him to. Why are you so set on it? You’re assuming an absurd responsibility without any reason.”

This was wisdom itself speaking, yet such a project went deeply against my grain. And I was annoyed with Dorothy for forcing me to oppose it when I was unable to advance any reasons that I could believe in myself.

I had asked Fanny to cook dinner for us. During the meal and after it both Dorothy and I avoided continuing this argument. We talked of one thing and another, of the lives we led, of our childhood memories. She remained oddly elusive on the subject of her stay in London. Being naturally reserved, I did not press her for confidences. Moreover, I feared that my insistence, apart from being rude, might only make her withdraw into her shell. Whereas her trustfulness filled my heart with gentle warmth. And hers too, it seemed. We remained chatting by the fireside till deep into the night.

At last I led her to her room and went into mine. Sylva was sleeping, rolled up in a ball, under the counterpane below the bed, as usual. She moaned a little when I put on the light, but without waking up. It seemed to me that, with Dorothy under my roof, it would have been bad form to share a room with Sylva, even in all propriety. I went to lie down in the room next door.

I found it hard to get to sleep. My feelings were mixed up and contradictory. Why shouldn’t we have more delightful evenings like this one? Why didn’t I marry Dorothy? Love? We were both past thirty; love is not indispensable for a happy union. And there would be two of us instead of one to bring up Sylva. She would be our foster child. But this idea struck against some obstacle that I could not manage to locate. As if I had sensed that the two women could never bear each other, get on with each other. That, sooner or later, I would certainly be forced to sacrifice one to the other. And that it would necessarily be Sylva. That was something I could not make up my mind to. Was I, then, going to sacrifice the prospect of a future filled with mellow, quiet happiness for the sake of this silly vixen? I had to admit that I would be acting like a fool. Come on, I told myself, stop driveling! Don’t think about it any more and go to sleep. But my thoughts continued their endless merry-go-round. I only dozed off at the first light of dawn.

I don’t know what Dorothy had thought about during the night, but in the morning she was more charming than ever, and in the kindliest disposition toward Sylva.

“Let me take her up her breakfast,” she begged me. “We have got to make friends.”

Together we fried some eggs and bacon and I walked upstairs behind her, at a distance but not too far away. I was not very sure of Sylva’s mood when, despite the appetizing smell of breakfast, she would see a woman instead of me.

I did not have to step in, but it was not a success. When Sylva saw Dorothy with the tray, she began to growl, and shouted: “No!” She wrenched the tray out of Dorothy’s hands and sent it flying, whereupon she picked up from the floor whatever she could of the eggs and bacon and went off to devour them under the bed, like a messy little animal.

“I am so sorry!” said Dorothy, contritely.

She helped me scrub the dirty floor. I was very annoyed, but with whom? Sylva or Dorothy? I watched the latter cleaning up; she really had a natural, simple grace. Would Sylva whenever crossed always fall back into her primitive savagery? Wasn’t I inviting an endless series of troubles if I persisted in keeping her?

Dorothy was mopping and I was looking at her profile, slightly banal but full of gentle sweetness under the very fair hair coiled in intertwining plaits. And I thought of my nocturnal reveries and told myself again that I would be a fool if I didn’t marry her.

When everything was clean she stood up and said, “You won’t punish her, will you?”

I protested, “If she were a child she’d be punished. You can’t overlook such bad behavior. She’d only start again.”

Dorothy was insistent. “If she gets punished on account of me she’ll bear a grudge against me for ages.”

I finally had to promise. Sylva stayed on under her bed although she must certainly have finished the crumbs of her meal. It was obvious that she was sulking.

“Let’s leave her,” said Dorothy.

We went down to the study and sat at the fireside. After a while I said, “Maybe you’re right. Perhaps I should hand her over to an institution.”

“There’s no hurry,” said Dorothy (which surprised me a little) .

She was smiling at me with trustful affection.

“I’m wondering whether the passage of time…” I began.

She interrupted me. “Wait and see. Mind you, in any case…”

She seemed uncertain whether to go on. I said, “Well?” and she continued:

“In any case—whatever progress she makes—to whom could you show her afterwards? You’ll have taken a lot of trouble for nothing.”

“What do you mean: to whom?”

“Well, I mean, she’s not one of our sort.”

I suppose my eyes must have expressed my blank incomprehension.

“I mean you’ll only be able to present her as a freak,” she went on, a little crossly. “Not as a relative, or even a friend.”

“Why ever not?” I was amazed.

“Well, it would shock people.”

“For heaven’s sake, do explain!” I cried impatiently.

“She has a pretty skin, but it’s amber-colored. Her eyes are fine, but black as jet. Her eyelids are almond-shaped, and her cheeks like apricots…”

“Are you composing a poem or a still life?”

“In a word, she is an Asiatic, my boy. I suppose foxes must have come originally from Asia. She looks as if she were born in India or Annam.”

“With red hair?”

She pursed her lips ironically, and said, “Some misalliance, perhaps…”

I was rather taken aback. I had thought myself that Sylva had a vaguely exotic look, but not to that extent… If this were so, there would indeed be some rebuffs coming to me on the day I tried to introduce a “native” among the gentry. I wanted to get this straight at once. “Let’s go and see her,” I said.

We went upstairs again. We found Sylva asleep, snuggled up in an armchair, her face still smeared with egg. We could thus scrutinize her for a long moment; then we withdrew as quietly as we had come and I closed the door.

“You must admit you’ve exaggerated,” I said at once.

“You don’t agree with me?”

“I won’t say there isn’t a little something. But from there to…”

“Little or not, isn’t it too much already?”

“I didn’t know you were so particular,” I said with astonishment.

“Me? I adore Indians—Gandhi, Krishnamurti, Tagore… But everyone in his place, don’t you think?”

“I think she looks a bit like the Duchess of Melcombe,” I persisted.

“Everyone knows that the duchess’s mother was on the best of terms with I don’t know what Maharajah.”

“Well then, as you said yourself: some misalliance—like the Duchess of Melcombe. Not worth talking about.”

“As you like, dear boy. But I’ve warned you.”

The tone adopted by each of us was courteous but a trifle sharp. I had not liked those remarks. To be sure, everyone in his place or society will go to pot, but all the same, I don’t support the theories of that little Frenchman—what’s his name?—Gobineau or Gobinot. We mustn’t exaggerate.[2]

To make a diversion, I suggested going for a walk. As soon as Sylva was not involved, we rediscovered our mutual sympathy, a warm affection and a tenderness of long standing which went straight to my heart. We spent an exquisite hour wandering through the woods. On our way back, tired with walking, she let herself lean lightly on my arm. Was I so sure, after all, that I was no longer in love with her?

Chapter 12

DOROTHY prolonged her stay till the end of the week. She had made it a point of honor to become friends with Sylva before she left. She only half succeeded, but still enough to save her face. The next time Sylva saw us both together, she growled once more. But Dorothy was the one who brought her the food—a chicken, some ham. When my vixen understood that she would have to fast or show friendliness she became less hostile and gradually almost cordial. But she never displayed toward the young woman the flattering eagerness she showed toward me or even toward Nanny.

When Dorothy had gone, it seemed to me, curiously enough, that Sylva was missing her. But it is often like that with domestic animals: in many cases attachment is just a form of habit and they are distressed by a change. When she next saw me alone, Sylva went behind me to see where the second person might be. She inspected the corridor and the stairs. Not finding anyone, she returned, vaguely worried, and ate a little absent-mindedly. She went to make sure, two or three times, of an absence that was upsetting her. And then progressively she accepted the fact, did not seem to think of it any more. But when, some eight or ten days later, Dorothy paid us another visit, Sylva gave her an almost festive welcome. I say almost, because her attitude retained an ambiguity that was not without its comical side, for it expressed in a naïve way the complication of her soul—if I may use this word for a young vixen. She let Dorothy caress her head, at first purring, then suddenly, as if angry with herself for this abandon, she dug her sharp little teeth into the hand that was stroking her; it is true she did not press very hard, not enough to lacerate but just enough to hurt. Whereupon she quickly moved away with a frightened look. Then seeing that Dorothy was laughing, and I too, she sidled up to her again.

I have always felt a greater liking and respect for wild beasts than for domestic animals (apart from horses) and I could not conceal from myself that Sylva was becoming domesticated. She was becoming so all the faster ever since being reconciled, once for all, to living between the four walls of Richwick Manor. Now that she had become home-loving and obedient she consented to have baths and even enjoyed them, and she no longer showed the same obstinate distaste for putting on a dress. She could even pronounce a hundred words or so, always the most prosaic ones but happily with the same comically sharp and sunny accent which delighted me.

Although she charmed me less now that she had become less wild, at the same time something else in her touched me, filled me with a worried tenderness, an upsurge of slightly anxious affection: it was a kind of feverish impatience that gripped her at the slightest provocation, often without any discernible cause. This had nothing in common any more with the agitation she displayed when scratching the door, sniffing the window, trotting along the walls. It was rather a sort of local impatience, a need to change places, to pass incessantly from one room to the other. Though I could not tell whence it sprang, I did understand one of its causes: to escape from boredom she would now less and less take refuge in sleep, and this fidgetiness in some way replaced it.

When Mrs. Bumley returned, after burying her mother at the end of a long agony, I told her of this change. She answered that one ought to take her for a walk.

Everyone in the neighborhood, at the farm, in the village, was aware that I had taken into my care the abnormal child of one of my sisters, and whenever one or the other passed by the farm I made a point of letting them meet her. I therefore had nothing to hide any more, nor any cause, in consequence, to fear a possible escape: for the worst that could happen now was that she would be brought back to me more or less quickly, more or less bruised and tired. I therefore entrusted her to Nanny’s care and let them go for a stroll in the country without apprehension. And they did indeed come home very properly after an hour or two.

The departure itself was a joy to watch. Every morning Sylva displayed the same enthusiasm, as if the previous day’s walk had left no imprint in her memory; each departure seemed to her the first after a long confinement. She exploded with uncontrollable joy, frisking hither and thither through the garden with shouts and leaps, went scouting ahead, ran back to make sure that Nanny was following, raced off again, returned. I saw them disappear (never in the direction of the woods, however—we didn’t dare yet) and when they appeared in the country lane on their return, a very different Sylva was walking sedately at Nanny’s side. Calmed at last, exhausted but radiant, her hair streaming in the wind, her rough woolen dress falling in heavy folds, and her woolen sweater molding her lovely figure, she looked to me, as I watched her approach, like an exceedingly smart golfer on her way back from a long match.

I would hold out my arms; she did not fling herself into them as a child would have done, but cuddled up, rubbing herself against me and, with a flick of her tongue, licked me under the chin. “Not like that!” I would chide her, and I would kiss her, in turn, in a highly educational manner. But she did not seem to grasp the difference and took a very long time to learn to put her lips to my cheek without damping me.

A few weeks passed in this way. Dorothy came to see us fairly frequently, her father accompanied her twice or three times and, little by little, Sylva thus grew accustomed to the presence of strangers and they alarmed her no longer. Never, though, to the point of letting herself be examined by the doctor, as I would have wished. Still, the latter was reasonably affirmative: there was no reason to suppose, he said, that her constitution was not in every way that of a human being. As for the progress she might make, he remained pessimistic on this count. And dear Nanny, who was impressed by the doctor and his opinions, would give way to laments: the progress indeed seemed very slow to her.

Yet there was no doubt that Sylva did progress, and even very much so. But her progress was always confined to mechanical achievements, like that of a trained monkey or a parrot rather than of a child who is beginning to understand and reason. She had many more words at her command now, and even a small number of sentences—though these were very short and formed by single syllables so that in fact they were less long than certain German words, less complicated than certain French ones; and they did not express any ideas but always an appetite or a very rudimentary feeling: fear, impatience, dislike.

Poor Nanny would ask her ten times a day, “Do you love me, my little Sylva?” and Sylva would answer docilely, “Love you,” but it was obvious that the word meant nothing to her and that the affection she bore us, though genuine and even violent, did not in any way correspond to what that word expresses for us. It was a simple wild attachment, an organic fidelity, the hollow mold of her fear of loneliness, her immense need of protection since she had found herself a stranger in the forest, clumsy and spurned, a hunted outcast.

Perhaps there mingled in her inclination toward me something else, which I should have been hard put to define: a certain sensitivity to my mood, a more sedulous attention to my words and deeds, and that primitive jealousy when I was talking to Dorothy or even to Nanny and seemed to be forgetting her presence. She would draw closer at such moments and, as she had done under Dorothy’s caresses, would plant her incisors into my ear lobe just enough to hurt without wounding me. I would rap her fingers and she would go and sulk in a corner, her eyes fixed on me.

Her progress in practical life was of the same type: pertaining to the training of an animal rather than to education. She could wash and dress herself (as long as there were no buttons or shoelaces—she never bothered about them), she ate at table, but with her fingers, and licked her plate clean of the last trace of gravy. She later learned to clean it with a piece of bread instead, a habit she never lost.

As the days passed, I saw Dr. Sullivan increase the rhythm of his visits. Had he finally accepted in his own mind that Sylva was indeed a former fox? He had never said anything to the contrary and, at all events, it was evident that he was beginning to be passionately interested.

“It is a unique experiment!” he said, shaking his foamy hair. “Actually this creature takes us back five hundred thousand years: when the very first men, with their brains fully constituted but still, like this one, void of experience and of knowledge, had sprung brand-new from animality! What is going to happen to this brain is of fantastic interest—supposing, of course, that anything does happen,” he added with cautious reserve. But he seemed to have shed, for some time already, part of his pessimism.

I observed that the experiment would be completely falsified by the mere fact that we, who surrounded my little fox, were equipped with twentieth-century brains.

He shook his head. “No, no, the experiment will be accelerated no doubt—happily for us. If we had to wait for two or three hundred thousand years… but it won’t be falsified. Even supposing the impossible—that her intelligence might some day catch up with ours—it will necessarily have to pass through all the various stages first. For instance, does Sylva know something that seems quite simple to us: that she exists? Certainly not: no more than a fox, a horse, or a monkey does, no more than the first men could have known it, steeped as they were in their dark instincts. Now that is the very first and absolutely indispensable stage. In what form did it present itself, how was it passed, what wouldn’t we give to be present at this first awakening of consciousness in our earliest forefathers! And here, perhaps, with your Sylva, it may happen under our very eyes! She will need our help, of course. We must push her toward it with all our might. I still do not know how. Let me think it over.”

Was I myself very set on the success of these “experiments”? To see Sylva actually pass these “stages”? On the one hand, of course, I ardently wished it; on the other I was dimly afraid of it. However, when Herbert Sullivan talked to me of mirrors, I did not dream of opposing his projects. Actually, I was a little mortified to see Sylva still behaving, in front of mirrors, just as a fox would have done: she never looked at herself in them.

“Fine! Fine!” said Dr. Sullivan. “So we’re really starting from scratch. The thing to do is to produce a shock,” he explained, and we set out on a search for a large-sized looking glass.

We wandered together through the innumerable empty rooms of this too-vast mansion and eventually discovered an enormous cheval glass under the dust of the linen room. After cleaning it thoroughly we carried it into the young girl’s room. We were all there: the doctor, Dorothy, Mrs. Bumley and myself. But my vixen did not glance at it, any more than at the other mirrors in the house.

After an hour’s vain waiting during which Sylva passed to and fro before the glass some twenty times without even noticing it, the doctor asked Nanny to take her pupil right to it and force her, if possible, to look at herself. Nanny did as she was told, and we could fancy that the experiment was going to succeed. Kept almost by force face to face with her own image, Sylva seemed at last to see, to discover herself. But—typical behavior—she immediately went to look behind the glass for the person whom she had seen in it; came back discomfited; found her reflection again, walked close up to it, sniffed it for a time; and perceiving no smell, lost all interest in it.

It was a rather smarting defeat for the doctor, but as a scientist he did not take it overmuch to heart. “Too soon,” he said. “Leave the mirror where it is. There’ll come a day, no doubt, when by dint of meeting her likeness, she’ll end up by recognizing herself. I only regret one thing, and that is that I won’t be present… You’ll tell me.”

But poor Nanny felt the sting of disappointment more sharply. “We’ll never get anywhere,” she wailed when we were alone again that evening. “Her poor little brain remains that of a fox. The doctor’s first view was the right one: we’ll turn her into a nice little trained animal, but not much more.”

I remembered that Dorothy had smiled mysteriously at this failure. But she had not given her own opinion. As for myself, I was more inclined to share Nanny’s pessimism, but what I felt without admitting it was a sort of relief which in many ways resembled a keen satisfaction. As long as my Sylva, so sweet and easy, remained a fox, we’d be avoiding a lot of complications, wouldn’t we? I could go on harboring my uncertain feelings for Dorothy, which were not too uncertain, however, to preclude dreams or plans. And I could at the same time keep near me a companion such as every man has caught himself wishing for more or less secretly: unobtrusive, faithful as a dog can be, and like a dog attached without any reticence—or any claims. The more Sylva stayed as she was, as she had been on the day of her metamorphosis, the happier and more contented I was, the better I could love her in peace. It is true that I have always strongly distrusted women: what little thought and reason they have lodged in their mysterious little skulls invariably tends to spoil everything. Dorothy did not entirely escape this distrust. Oh, if only my little Sylva, I thought, could remain for a long time to come the sweet vixen she still is …

As for the mirror, we did indeed leave it where it was. I do not know if the doctor really clung to the hope that it might produce a revelation some day, or if he simply persisted in order not to cry off at once. He questioned me about it from time to time. Then, after always getting the same reply, he too seemed to lose hope. And with his hopes fading, he showed himself less often, letting his daughter drive over on her own. She often did. I was delighted with these newly found bonds of friendship and grateful to my little vixen who had so charmingly forged them without knowing it.

Chapter 13

THIS close companionship, those evenings spent by the fireside with Dorothy, sometimes with her father, leave me with memories full of charm, but also of monotony. What I mean is that nothing noteworthy ever happened, they were all very much alike and they have all merged in my mind. Several times, carried away by the warmth of the moment, I tried to lead the conversation toward veiled hints at a life together. Every time Dorothy contrived to divert its course before it risked involving a frank avowal of her feelings or mine. They were, quite visibly, of the same kind: enough tenderness and understanding to make for a successful marriage but not enough love to rush into it. I would admire her prudence after she had gone; and though I sometimes resented it a little, I nonetheless applauded this circumspection which prevented me, against my own will, from plunging headlong into too-hasty decisions.

When did I notice a change? Did I even notice it or was it much later only that I became aware of it in retrospect? Still, I may have been alive to odd quirks in Dorothy’s behavior, to some often rather queer changes of mood. There were days when she was, if not exactly morose, at least absent-minded, a little unresponsive; then gradually she would be gripped by a sort of excitement, a volubility that drowned me in meaningless chatter. On other occasions, on the contrary, she arrived in high spirits which would slowly subside into an indifference that was almost melancholy. It was quite unpredictable. I also had the impression that she was spacing out her visits, but I did not keep count of them; I only remember several times preparing everything as if I were expecting her and then being slightly disappointed to find my expectations dashed.

All these oddities ought to have disquieted me but, as I say, these recollections strike me only today; at the time I hardly paid heed to them, if I noticed them at all. The reason was that around that time there occurred some dramatic events at Sylva’s end, and they were sufficiently startling to mobilize all my attention.

Already the gold of the winter jasmine was fading, giving way to that of the forsythias, brightly blazing all alone among the bare, black branches of the hawthorn bushes only just bursting into bud. Snowdrops and crocuses were springing up on the lawn; the Virginia creeper was licking the walls with its thousand pointed little crimson tongues. The sun was now rising to the east of the forest which all through the winter had hidden its birth. Life was quivering everywhere.

It is in spring and autumn that the forest calls me—when it is dying and when it returns to life. The birches are the first to turn green, tinting the nakedness of the oaks and elms with a fine spray no denser than a mist. The carpet of dead leaves has taken on a moist tinge of mahogany, of maroon. You no longer crush it underfoot with a dry, metallic crunch; it rather yields resiliently with the muffled sound of seaweed at low tide. The deep, stagnant, brooding stillness of October—a cathedral stillness—has been succeeded all of a sudden by the fervent chirping of birds calling to each other. One can see them darting in a muted flutter through the fine lacework of the boughs; the leaves have not yet put up a screen of thick embroidery that masks this winged coming and going in summer. A thousand other sounds burst gently, the creaking of a breaking twig above our heads, the patter of a soft-footed scurry on the dead leaves, a growl, a distant call, a sigh. You advance in the midst of this murmuring which crackles softly, rustles, whispers, whistles, drones, fragmenting the heavy, motionless silence of the trees, though powerless to destroy it. Sometimes, just for a moment, all this noise stops as if to listen, and you almost feel you can hear the rising of the sap…

Should I take Sylva into the heart of this seething life of which, so recently, she had still formed an intimate part, like a fish in water, flesh of its flesh? I did not make up my mind to it without some fear. But I now had too much affection for her, unselfish affection; yes, I loved her too much for what she was—a vixen—to want to deprive her of the forest and the ecstasy of spring which I myself felt so strongly. What risk was I running, after all? If her homeland reclaimed her and if she escaped, what else could she do but return to me, as she had done the first time? And even if she did not, I could nowadays call out the whole village to be my beaters, since she passed for my niece, a “backward” child. And if, assuming the worst, one did not find her again, it meant that she had resumed her pristine shape—so much the better for her—and I should be free for Dorothy… Come on, I thought, be a little bold, be generous…

Six days a week Nanny would take her for a walk. On Sundays it was my turn, unless some unforeseen problem kept me at the farm. The wild joy Sylva displayed every morning when setting out was even more rapturous when she saw me put on my boots, coat and hat. While I was going through the garden, she would gambol all around me, skipping and shouting: “Bonny walk! Bonny walk!” Then she would streak through the gate before me, along the path through the fields which she took with Nanny every day.

This time I called out to her: “Sylva!” She stopped still, turned around, the pointed little face gazing at me with a questioning look. I thought I even saw her ears prick up.

I motioned to her and turned toward the path leading to the forest. With a bird’s cry she came scampering back, overtook me and ran on for some twenty yards, still uttering those larklike cries. Then she fell silent, hesitated as if to listen, set off again. Was she running less quickly? It seemed to me that something was restraining her. She stopped again and then, as if regretfully, turned around and came back toward me with uncertain steps. She seemed constrained, intimidated. When she was level with me, she came close a little gauchely and clung to my side to keep in step with me, silently and with lowered head. It seemed to me that she was trembling a little.

I could well understand that the forest, if not exactly frightening her, had at least assumed for my vixen since her last flight an unfriendly, hostile, perhaps even a cruel, face. So that, to check it, I turned around and walked toward the house. But when I looked back Sylva was gazing at me fixedly, with that particular look in her eyes that dogs have when they are on a track and see their master does not follow them. I naturally gave in to this mute appeal and we set out again toward the woods. Sylva was calming herself, anyway, and by the time we had reached the edge of the wood she was no longer trembling.

The path narrowed amidst the fern and trees. We could not walk abreast. Sylva left my side, slipped in front to walk ahead. I noticed, to my great confusion, that it was my heart now that beat with emotion. What was I expecting, then? I do not know. Perhaps to see her turn into a fox again, before my eyes? I caught myself, if not precisely wishing it, at least contemplating the possibility with a sort of secret longing which left me half amazed, half troubled. Did I not love her any more? Did I (for Dorothy’s sake perhaps) want to lose her? At this thought my heart beat more violently and dictated to me a very different fantasy which filled my chest with the fragrance of the woods: the fantasy that we should both meet again as foxes.

Which of us has not wished some time to be a gazelle, a dolphin, a swallow? In other words, to regain Eden—innocence, joy and freedom—to cast off the burden of the human estate, the strictness of the state of a Christian, the glum duties of the condition of a British subject… Oh, to be able to gallop along the tracks with my vixen, leap over the ferns, pursue a hare, a stoat… These kinds of wish-dreams are never very serious, and this one hardly any more so, but if I did not really wish to become a fox, could I still long, then, for her to become one without me? Besides, wasn’t she a fox anyhow, despite her appearance?

I gradually realized that what I regretted was that she was in fact neither woman nor fox. Seeing her in this human shape so brutally “detached” from her natural setting, as a scissor cut is “detached,” a silhouette cut out amidst this vast organic element which we passed through but with which we could not merge, I realized intensely the extent to which her little soul must unconsciously feel wrenched and lonely. Before, she had breathed with the forest’s breath, mingling with it fiber by fiber; now she too could only watch it like a spectacle, enjoy it from outside like myself, however much we were inside it. What had been a communion of each moment, each look, each movement, was now no more than a foreign scrutiny, a face-reading, however fascinating it still might be. And seeing her move her head this way and that with the quickness of a squirrel; raise it to follow the flight of a wood pigeon, a linnet; leave the path with a doe’s leap to inspect an anthill; scratch in passing as if with claws the trunk of a dead tree to try and discover in it a little honey of wild bees; start up at the cracking of a bough, stop dead at the stifled complaint of a stone marten—seeing her thus repeat her foxy movements though they could no longer be those of a wild beast but only a vain imitation, a make-believe, my heart contracted with pity and tenderness.

And yet what a lovely sight she was in the forest, my Sylva! Her hair had the flamboyant hue of larches in autumn; her neck rose proud and straight, supple and nervous and strong like a horse’s leg; her slender back, molded in a sweater that was the color of autumn leaves too, rippled and quivered at the slightest noise, the softest breath; as for her legs, they were so noble and beautiful that one could have loved them for their own sake, a supple pair of salmon swimming a continuous minuet in the subaqueous light of the undergrowth…

Thus we strolled, she in front and perpetually in a buoyant rhythm halfway between walking and running, all her pores—or so it seemed—open to the thousand murmurs, the thousand scents, the thousand tremors of the springtime awakening; and I walking behind, forgotten, I told myself, so completely forgotten…

But though I may have thought it with a little melancholy, it did not really pain me; on the contrary, I was hoping, hoping with all my heart and all my strength at that moment, that she might recapture however little of that—but what can one call it? pulsation? rapture?—ah! a little of the bubbling delight that was hers before the transformation, a little of the ineffable fullness of her life as a fox subjected only to its nature—to Nature.

Three hours thus passed like a minute. Only when I noticed that I was dragging my legs did my sudden fatigue make me abruptly aware of the lapse of time. I looked at my wrist watch: half past twelve! I was not even very sure where we were, since Sylva had been pulling me along in all sorts of directions, on the spur of her impulses. But I figured that Richwick Manor must be quite a mile away. What would Nanny say! The Sunday dinner would be burned. Sylva continued to gambol with the same winged ease, impervious to tiredness. I called her.

I thought at first that she had not heard me—or did not wrant to hear. I called more loudly and she turned around, gave me a faithful doggy look with a facial twitch that could have been a smile had she known how to smile. But she set off again at a run. This time I shouted her name peremptorily, with a hint of anger in my voice. She began to trot in a circle, almost turning around herself, but still trotting until she was face to face with me. She waited. I said, “It’s very late, we must go home.”

She remained silent, gazing at me with an attentive, distant look in her eyes.

“And I don’t even know where we are! Can you guide us?”

As if in answer, she passed in front and streaked off like an arrow. “Not so fast!” I cried, laughing.

She probably did not understand and went on. I had to make an effort to catch up with her, grab her skirt, pull her back.

“Not so fast,” I repeated, and she slowed down her pace. We walked like that for a good quarter of an hour. I was not in the least worried about the way we were going: I was sure that she still had that innate sense of direction which civilized man has lost with his wildness. And indeed we soon found ourselves at the edge of the wood—-much closer, happily, than I had feared.

Sylva had stopped on the verge of the forest, she let me pass, as if courteously stepping aside in a doorway. I took a few steps forward, in the direction of the house where I could see Nanny anxiously waiting for us on the threshold. She motioned to me wildly. I was gaily waving back when, I don’t know why, I had the feeling that Sylva was not following me. I just caught a fleeting glimpse of both Nanny’s arms flung up in despair before I turned around.

Sylva was no longer there.

Chapter 14

I RUSHED into the forest in an immediate reflex, calling her as on the day of her first flight. But once I found myself among the trees and bushes, amid all this forest murmur deeper than silence, I did not take long to recover my wits and recognize wisely—with consternation—that it would be a waste of time to search for her. Sylva had vanished in the forest like a lizard in long grass; it was quite vain to pursue her.

Thus, what I so much feared on setting out had completely slipped my mind on the way back, had taken me completely unawares. I was furious and vexed, though more the latter, for once again, beneath my anger against myself, I found the subtle feeling of serenity, if not of elation, that I had felt a little earlier at the thought that she might resume her original shape. The pleasure of knowing Sylva free in her former kingdom weighed in my heart against the displeasure of seeing her disappear. I could measure in these contradictory emotions the strength of my affection for her.

In any case, this loss no longer racked me to excess. As I have said, I had envisaged this accident and even foreseen what might follow: probably a spontaneous return when Sylva had roamed to her heart’s content; if not, a combined search that could not reasonably be expected to meet with failure.

I walked back to the house. On the edge of the wood I almost knocked down a panic-stricken Nanny, breathless from running on her short legs. I soothed her as best I could, but she gave me a thorough dressing down. When she saw us walk toward the forest, she could have sworn this would happen! she cried. What stupid imprudence, what reckless foolishness! A man of my age! And what would happen to her now, poor mite?

“What do you think can happen to her?” I said with the greatest calm (fortified by my earlier experience).

“How can I tell?” she wailed. “Anything can happen!”

“Such as?” I inquired with a hint of irony.

We were striding back toward the house. She stopped and glowered at me. When Nanny was in a temper, she looked even more like a bulldog. Between her flabby cheeks which shook with anger, under the truffle of a nose with flaring, quivering nostrils, her lips bared ferocious fangs. In this state she would have scared a tiger. Not being a tiger I smiled, and this smile brought her rage to a climax.

“What about the wood choppers?” she spluttered into my face. “The poachers? Tramps, hooligans, the woods are full of satyrs on Sundays! Don’t you know that?”

My smile faded. She was exaggerating, but good Lord, she was right! By thinking of the young creature as a fox all the time, I had totally forgotten that for a resolute fellow on the lookout for adventure she would be just a pretty wench like any other—prettier than any other. She would run away, I told myself to set my mind at rest. But was I so sure she would? And I recalled a scene which had occurred that very morning.

Nanny had accustomed her, when waking up, to go and “kiss Bonny good morning” at an hour when I was still in bed. She had been doing so for a long time now, of her own accord and very willingly. On this morning, after kissing me (always moistening my cheek, my nose a little), she had suddenly slipped between the sheets and rubbed herself against me with such ardor that I understood, amused and embarrassed, what was the matter: the awakening of spring, by Jove!… Her wild little animal nature remained subservient to the seasons.

I had repulsed her by getting out of bed at once and, promptly distracted according to the normal habit of her little feather brain, she had forgotten me and set to play with one of her objects.

I had hastened to forget this bout of discomfiting heat but now, at the thoughts suggested by Nanny, I felt gripped by fever. In an instant, icy perspiration broke out all over me. And why only one? Why not two, or ten? How many foxes, it suddenly flashed through my mind with a sharp and sudden pain, had already previously imposed their male ardor on her?

I retained just enough self-control to be stupefied and appalled at having this thought: what was coming over me? Jealous of the past loves of a fox bitch? It was too funny for words! And I tried to laugh about it. Alas, there was no room for doubt: I was not laughing, I was in agony. I had abruptly left Nanny and was stalking fast toward the house while she was calling after me: “Sir! Sir!” in a worried, rueful voice, not quite knowing, I suppose, what could have offended me in her words but guessing that she had somehow hurt me. I rushed up the stairs, locked myself in my room, and paced from one wall to the other, groaning and clenching my fists, while a voice inside me spoke up in revolt: Steady now! Steady! Have you gone mad?

However, as I honestly questioned my heart I could no longer hide from myself that I was madly jealous. Jealousy in all its forms has always struck me as a most improper feeling. The French hold it up to ridicule and make fun of it in their theatre. (But as they make even more fun of deceived and complacent husbands, they contradict themselves in this respect as they do in all others.) As for me, I don’t think that jealousy is so much a laughing matter as a repulsive one. This is partly why for so many years I have hesitated to get married: against jealousy there is nothing more effective than celibacy… And here I was, racked by pain and hatred at the idea of rutting foxes around a vixen, and the favors she had granted them! Was I, then, forced to admit to myself that I could possibly be in love with her—and in the throes of the most common, vulgar sort of love at that?

I called to my rescue the memory of Dorothy, but this only exacerbated the confusion of my thoughts. To be sure, I had once been in love with Dorothy; perhaps I had never stopped completely; but never had I, in her respect, been stirred by thoughts like this. Not even at the time of her awful marriage—no, never had I sunk, even to mortify myself, to imagining her in the arms of her abominable husband. Such images would have disgusted me with myself for conjuring them up. And now they were submerging me, because they no longer applied lo a young lady of good family but to a female fox! I tried to persuade myself that these feelings could be better explained if they were not those of a lover, but a father. And for almost an hour I even managed to convince myself of it: yes, I felt for Sylva an anxious, authoritarian affection,

I was pained by her lapses from virtue, I worried about her future, I loathed her seducers. Nothing that was not very high-minded in all this. Unfortunately, this fiction could not be maintained for long, and the pain that griped my stomach at any too imaginative evocation was void of paternal feeling. So much so that after torturing myself in this way, I fell to wondering whether, for the sake of my moral health and self-respect, it would not be best never to see her again, to abandon her to her destiny in the forest. And to marry Dorothy as soon as possible.

But even supposing that I would have found sufficient strength in this wise resolution to put it into effect, was it still practicable? Could I openly abandon my “niece”—since I thought I had been so clever in passing her off as such? No, I told myself, it is too late for that. In the eyes of all, such an abandonment would be incomprehensible and criminal. Willy-nilly, I had to find Sylva again. And I realized without surprise that this necessity filled me at once with apprehension and a somber glee.

I had flung myself on the bed; these contradictory emotions had shaken me violently, and I eventually fell asleep. I woke up toward evening in a state of mind which seemed to me extremely lucid: A storm in a teacup, all this, old chap! Sylva is not a vixen any more, her past love affairs are like those of a Hindu princess before her metempsychosis, when she was still a sow: dissolved in Nirvana. She is not a woman either, and if you once, in a fleeting moment, felt for her an impious lust, you never allowed it to show more than the tip of its nose. Your dignity is unimpaired. You are jealous, are you? So what, if you surmount your jealousy? Come on, since you are fond of her, whether as a lover or a father, let her be happy according to her nature and not according to yours—by gratifying her instincts, by unconsciously carrying out the orders they subject her to.

I got up. I had completely recovered my composure, or so I thought. The nobility of those feelings, the high-mindedness of this self-denial, gave me an encouraging opinion of myself. I regained my strength and calm, and when I found poor Mrs. Bumley waiting for me at the dinner table, looking so stricken that it made me smile, I said: “Come on, Nanny, this isn’t a tragedy! Just look at me; I slept soundly—she tired me out with that three hours’ sprint through the woods! Come on, come on, she’ll soon come back, and if she doesn’t we won’t have much trouble finding her.”

She gazed at me wordlessly for a moment with her big kind, sorrowful eyes. She shook her head.

“She won’t come back at all,” she said.

Chapter 15

I ATTACHED little importance to this pessimistic forecast. Mothers and nannies always take the blackest view of the least little upset: a touch of cold will turn to pneumonia, a child that is late has been run over. For three days we awaited the return of the runaway, with a certain calm as far as I was concerned, with a plaintive agitation on Nanny’s part.

Sylva did not come back.

I jolly well had to make up my mind. Early one morning I went to the village to pay a visit to my friend John Filbert Walburton, who had been Mayor for the past ten years. As the owner of a stud farm famous all over Somerset (two or three of the top winners of these last years were bred in his stables) he was also the Master of the local Fox Hounds. He was a sort of giant, with a ruddy face and a thick fair mustache that drooped into his mouth. When he saw me come in he cried: “I was just going to look you up!”

I had no need to explain. Sylva had been found. Or rather, her whereabouts were known: she was at a wood-cutter’s shack. There had always been a fair number of them working in the forest. The man concerned was a young chap named Jeremy Hull, taciturn and—so they said—a bit half-witted. The other woodcutters were older than he and bullied him, only too happy to relieve their own misery by wreaking their malice on someone more wretched than themselves. He therefore lived apart, shy and suspicious, withdrawn in his solitude. On Monday evening, they had caught a glimpse of Jeremy coming back from his work in the company of a young lady. From a distance she seemed elegant, but she also appeared to be very tired. At first they had thought it was Walburton’s daughter, for she often rode to hounds with her father. They thought she might have got lost and spent the night in the thickets where Jeremy had probably found her, and after leading her to his hut for a meal and a rest he would take her back to the village.

It was not without surprise and indignation (nor, I suspect, without jealousy) that they saw Sylva reappear with Jeremy the next morning when he set out. She was following him like a shadow. She returned with him in the evening. The virtuous woodcutters pondered their duty deeply and only an hour before one of them had been delegated to inform Walburton. He had expected to find a distraught father but the door was opened by Miss Walburton herself. The Mayor and he had then wondered who that creature of the woods could be. The sketchy description given by the woodcutters tallied with none of the girls of the neighborhood. Then it had suddenly occurred to Walburton, he himself told me, that he had never seen my adopted daughter or niece, and he was on the point of riding over to me when I had appeared on his doorstep.

We set out at once. In the forest the woodcutters showed us the way and we soon discovered Jeremy’s shack. It stood in the middle of a narrow clearing, under the verdant shimmer of trailing birches. There was no one in it. But according to his cronies, Jeremy was used to coming back for a snack around ten o’clock. It was past nine. I asked Walburton to be good enough to wait with me and he accepted with a jovial alacrity which barely concealed a keen curiosity. We examined the shack. It was a rather dreadful hovel. I could see that my friend’s eyes, like mine, roved obstinately toward the shapeless litter that served as a bed. At the foot of the litter lay something that, at a pinch, might be taken for a pallet of leaves and dry twigs. With a little willingness, Sylva could have laid herself down and slept there amidst a welter of heterogeneous objects: rusty, peeling household utensils, more or less warped and worn-out tools, and other decrepit oddments in such an inextricable muddle that it was almost impossible to identify them.

Walburton was sucking at his mustache. There was an odd, somewhat sly glint in his bulging eyes which he tried to extinguish before turning toward me. He was shaking his head with a look of gravity on his face but his big, carroty nose twitched peculiarly. “I hope,” he said, “that this den has not been the scene of some regrettable impropriety…”

He seemed to be waiting for me to express a similar hope; but after the wise resolutions I had taken I no longer knew what, if anything, I was hoping for. All I could produce in answer was an embarrassed grunt, and he added in a slow, emphatic drawl: “Because if, don’t you see, there were any consequences… I mean to say, between this half-wit, don’t you know, and this… h’m… poor child…”

But I did not say a word, and he became irritated. “Can you imagine the consequences?” he said with some brutality.

“Oh, you never know,” I stammered in a dubious tone, but he brushed the words aside with a “Come now, really!” which he rapped out so ruthlessly that he left no room for the least uncertainty. He kept his eyes fastened on me and repeated: “Can you imagine?” and I acquiesced mutely, but with a more worried expression than I actually felt.

Try as I would, I could not manage to find myself guilty. “Consequences”? Well, if there were any, worse luck, I’d take care of them, that was all. As for the rest, the “regrettable impropriety,” ever since the brainstorm I had passed through, victoriously as I believed, I flattered myself on accepting it as what it was in fact for those primitive creatures: a mere act of nature, an innocent obedience to instincts, very far removed from what we called good or evil, or sin.

But when, twenty minutes later, I saw the supposed “culprits” returning, my fine composure abandoned me in a jiffy.

A stiff, matted mop of hair which must have been fair but was blackened with soot and ashes; a young but wrinkled, ravaged face stuck upon the massive hulk of an orangutan; the torso itself crushing the legs into a pair of brackets like those of stiff-jointed old horsemen; moreover, a swelling of the throat which, without being a goiter, was at least a crop; vacant eyes blinking under the jutting visor of a brow arched like a Romanesque vault and bristling with stubble. In a word, a brute of the Stone Age.

Sylva was walking at his side, hanging slightly back. When she recognized me, she flung herself on my neck with quiet joy, cuddled up a little and kissed me under the chin in her fashion, with a flick of her tongue. Seeing us, the fellow had stopped six steps away. He rapped at her with a rough, caveman’s voice:

“Who’s the man? Be he your father?”

She turned her face toward him, but did not answer: how could she? The word “father” was still unknown to her. He took a few strides on his bandy legs and gripped her wrist. He repeated more loudly, motioning toward me with his chin, with an increasingly furious look on his face:

“I’m askin’ yer who that feller is, be he yer father?”

He was shaking her by the arm. She must have realized unconsciously what was upsetting her swain for she said “Bonny” and kissed me.

The lad planted himself right in front of us. I towered over him by a good head and he had to raise his. I saw his eyes flash under the bristly brows. He growled, “What ’ave yer come for?” and without even waiting for my reply, he yelled, “She’s mine. D’ye hear? Be off and leave us alone!” He clasped the fragile wrist even more tightly.

The Mayor had stepped forward. He loomed very high above all three of us.

“Listen, my lad. You’ll have no trouble if you’re reasonable. But this girl is under age. You have a good chance of getting sent to jail, I’m warning you.”

“I want ter wed ’er,” said the other somberly.

“Well, then,” answered Walburton, laughing, “you’ll make your official proposal of marriage at the proper place and time. Till then, be a good lad,” he repeated, “and let her go home with her uncle. You can pay your respects to her, if you like, every Sunday. Right?” he said, looking at me.

I had not yet been able to utter a word, so choked was I with rage, so hard was it for me to contain myself. That savage, that monster, that ape! To think he may already have crushed her under his hairy chest! All my fine feelings of generous wisdom had evaporated; I was consumed with torturing anger. Fool! Fool! I raged to myself with stark male fury which could no longer even be called jealousy. I would have liked to seize Sylva by the hair, drag her to the first mossy litter on my way, make her groan with pleasure in my arms and then let her rot there, if she wanted to.

I retained just enough common sense to note the intrigued glance w?hich Walburton cast at me. I had not answered his question and my pallor must have betrayed my feelings. I controlled myself in time to save appearances, before the ironic glint of surprise which lurked in his gray eyes had lit up altogether. And I managed to utter in a voice, whose roughness masked its tremor:

“He can come when he likes. Come on, let’s go.”

In my turn, I gripped Sylva by the wrist; the brute did not let go of the one he held. For a long moment, we stood glaring at each other. If I had been alone, I don’t know what turn things would have taken. I believe, yes, I do believe that we would have fought and torn each other like two reindeer stags at rutting time until death had put an end to one or the other. Happily, the presence of that distinguished giant, the phlegmatic, civilized man of taste that was my friend Walburton, spared me this extremity. He was patting the horrible, hairy arm, saying over and over again: “Come on, come on… no rough stuff… be sensible…” and the brute did indeed loosen his grip.

I said gently, “Come…” and began to pull Sylva along. She seemed to give in at first and followed me unresistingly. So that I too gripped her wrist less strongly.

We thus took a few steps. And then, with such unexpected suddenness that I did not immediately grasp what was happening, she wrenched herself free and, in three jumps across the fern, reached the thick undergrowth. And the crackle of breaking twigs faded in the distance.

For a moment we stood speechless, all three of us, staring at the bushes that had closed upon their prey as if to defend her from pursuit. What broke the silence was the brute’s enormous roar of laughter—triumphant, insulting. “Well, go and take ’er away now, what are yer waitin’ for?” and already he was shambling off to his lair, his laughter bellowing ever more loudly.

“Just a moment, my lad!”

It was the Mayor speaking, and his voice was so hard and peremptory, so threatening, that the fellow shut up and turned around. He was glowering at the tranquil giant from under his monstrous eyebrows, with a crafty but not very reassured look.

“You’ve been warned,” said the colossus. “The girl is under age. If you don’t bring her back yourself to Richwick Manor before night, of your own free will, I’ll send the constabulary out tomorrow. And you are good for a stretch in jail, maybe even hard labor. So get that into your thick skull and mind what you do.”

And without giving him time to answer, he gripped me by the arm and dragged me away.

Chapter 16

WE made our way back through the forest without exchanging a word. He was walking in front of me on the narrow path, and while his back was toward me I tried to regain control of myself. I found it very hard. It has been said that love is an itch you cannot scratch. That was just the sort of unbearable, nagging discomfort I felt, and it blighted all efforts to be cool and collected.

On the edge of the forest we parted, and he said to me: “Don’t worry. Hull will bring her back to you or else the police will. In any case, no need to be alarmed. Anyhow,” he added, with a genial laugh (why “anyhow,” and why did he laugh?), “anyhow, these primitive creatures have sometimes more chivalrous feelings than one gives them credit for. You know young Nancy, the barmaid at the inn? He was courting her for a long time—if that’s the right word. It tickled her all the more since he never once dared to kiss her, not even on the finger tips.”

Was he saying that to reassure me? That Nancy with her mocking laughter had scared the poor chap was natural enough. It was a case of awe rather than chivalry. But why should he be awed by Sylva?

The most elementary good manners required that I should ask Walburton to come home for a drink. I did not have the will power. I was so impatient to be alone again, to be able to “scratch” myself to my fill, that I let him leave.

I did not go home right away. The idea of having to face Nanny in my present state (and in the state she must be in) was more than I could stand. I tried to wear out my agitation by striding fast all the way to the ancient windmill whose crumbling frame towers above the gorse at the top of Swallowsnest Hill. There I sat down, among the ruins thickly clad with immemorial ivy, recovered my breath and made an effort to think calmly.

When I want to ponder over a personal problem I always begin by honestly examining my rights. This gives me a twofold advantage: first, I feel honest, which is not at all negligible; second, if my rights are confirmed (and they rarely fail to be) I no longer fear fresh trouble with my conscience when riding roughshod over all obstacles. This is a mental hygiene which has always proved effective.

But this time it was not so simple. Far from confirming my rights toward Sylva, careful consideration rather confirmed those I did not possess. The only right I could grant myself was the de facto authority one has over a domestic animal. She was neither my daughter, sister nor fiancée, not even an orphan or a child entrusted to me by a friend. I could claim no other rights over her than those one assumes as a matter of course over one’s dog, one’s horse. Very well! I tried to triumph, you don’t let a tabby cat run loose in spring, you prevent its misalliance and pick a mate worthy of her. So far, so good: you refuse to give Sylva to this ape man, and you are certainly well advised. But what other mate do you offer her instead?

That’s where the trouble started. I could think of two or three handsome chaps in the village. And I became aware that, far from satisfying me, the thought of their mating with Sylva revolted me no less than that of the ape man, perhaps even more. An insistent voice took advantage of this to suggest, despite my opposition: “Well, then… what about you?… Why not?” Of course I rejected the suggestion but it would obstinately return, so that in the end I had to face it squarely. Except that I put myself in the position of a spectator. I imagined the respectable Albert Richwick lying with a fox bitch whose only human characteristic was her anatomy, indulging in a beastly copulation with an anatomy for the sole purpose of stilling, deep inside a creature without mind or soul, a mere impatience, a blind hunger, a carnal itch. Repulsive! All in all, the business was less repulsive with a cave man, much less.

Did honor and wisdom command, then, that I should leave Sylva in the arms of that gorilla? Wouldn’t he, after all, be the best match for a fox-woman? Weren’t they made for each other, spurred by the common savagery of their primitive natures? Made to suit and understand each other without need of words, destined to mate in innocence? Hadn’t that heavy-jowled oaf sensed that no woman could fit him so well, could give him more happiness? And what about her? I asked myself, and the answer was so obvious that it stabbed me like a dagger. She too would never find a companion better attuned to her state. She too had guessed it with the sureness of her instinct: male and female, a fox and his vixen, nothing more, nothing less. It was their truth, it could never be mine.

Well, then? If so, could I part them? Had I a right to? But revolt again overwhelmed me, a revolt of the senses no doubt but one which, as I gradually perceived, pushed its roots to much greater depths, to strata of my mind that were still clouded with shadows. Yes, I gradually realized that to abandon Sylva to the wretched Jeremy might possibly spell happiness for her, but would certainly be a betrayal. I could not dig deeper than that. The feeling that I would be betraying something very precious in her remained an overriding presentiment, though it did not yet light up with any intelligible meaning. I would be betraying her, but in what way? Certainly not in her fox nature. Nor in her chances of happiness. Where then, I kept wondering, where then, betrayal, is thy sting? But I could not find an answer and once again felt irritated and on edge.

And suddenly this inner agitation resolved itself in a pressing urge that was most singular in the circumstances: an urge to be among people. As if I could find the answer to that irritating question in contact with other human beings. I have always been a recluse. I go to town as little as possible; people normally tire and annoy me; more often than not they make me uneasy. I feel vulnerable amidst them and have only one desire: to be back among my books in the snug silence of the old manor. And suddenly this solitude amid the wind-swept gorse, the fields around me, the nearby forest and all this vast vegetable kingdom were oppressing me! I had the dim but powerful feeling that if I could not find an answer to my self-interrogations, the fault lay above all with this luxuriance around me, this immense burgeoning of inarticulate life and my own isolation in it—infinitesimal mankind dissolving in the welter of this blind and triumphant sea of proliferating vegetation which sided with the gorilla against me. So long as I was deafened by this elementary exuberance, I would be unable to hear a human reply. I got up, left the melancholy ruins and made for the hamlet. There I borrowed a trap from a friendly farmer who agreed to drive me to town himself. Wednesday was market day in Wardley; there would be no lack of people. Half an hour later I was strolling amid the crowd, or rather adrift in it like flotsam carried by the sea, by its heaving and tossing, by its ebb and flow loud with the drone of surf breaking on the shingle. I no longer thought of anything. I was looking.

Ears. Necks. Fuzzy hair. Chests straining under jerseys, others heavy and limp, wobbling like jelly. Brick-colored faces, faces the color of turnips or potatoes, two cheeks stretched tight like red marble, a chin burgeoning as if in spring, a nose like a knife stuck into a pear. Breath, shouts, laughter, groans of strain, sighs of weariness, a vast smell of meat warmed by the sun that floated above this shambling jostle, big sudden eddies beginning to liquefy like turning mayonnaise, then just as suddenly thickening again, whisked together by the reflux. I felt stifled. Once again I was flooded by the same nauseous obsession of organic proliferation that I had fled from; I had merely exchanged one surfeit for another, and whether animal or vegetable it still was on the gorilla’s side against me. All I could see in this welter of human flesh was a blind, limp lurching toward obscene agglutinations, a bestial heel-kicking until four walls and nightfall would bring it carnal release in a vast fornication. I thought of an article I had read in The Times a few days previously, expressing alarm at the growing population of the globe, which had doubled in fifty years and would be tripled again before the end of the century. Meat, meat, apes, apes everywhere! There was nothing to look for in this swarming genesis; this human glut could not give me the answer I needed.

I felt so depressed, so disheartened, that I walked into the first public house I came to, sat myself down in the barroom in a deep leather armchair shiny with wear, and ordered a whisky, then another. I dimly felt that I was making a mistake somewhere, since in spite of everything the idea of leaving Sylva to her pithecanthrope left me with that feeling of betrayal which I could neither banish nor admit. How many whiskies did I drink? I do not know. Nor how much time I spent, sprawling in the armchair with closed eyelids, in the fumes of alcohol, subjected to an endless procession of lewd pictures which I did not even have the strength to dismiss.

How I came to be outside I have forgotten, except that it was dark. How I hired a cart (or how it was hired for me, and by whom), how it got me back to Richwick Manor, I have forgotten too. The first picture I can see, shaky and blurred, is the bulldog face of Mrs. Bumley. Or rather pieces of her face which I cannot manage to put together: a pair of eyes full of sorrow; two sagging cheeks quivering with disapproval; two thin, long lips opening on a gulf, in the depths of which quivers a lump of moist flesh whose crimson color fascinates me. And words reach me as if from another world: “Sylva is back. She is upstairs.”

I recollect an endless flight of stairs which rises and rolls with me, and starts over and over again. I must have fallen down several times, for next morning my knees were very sore. A door in a dark corridor resists malignantly. Even more malignantly it suddenly opens; I am sent sprawling and crawl across the carpet on all fours, I pull the bed sheets toward me, the blanket comes with them, what I now see sobers me suddenly—or rather, ah! my drunkenness amplifies strangely, breaks into an inspired paean, bursts out like a heavenly fanfare…

Faced with this sleeping body in the reclining grace of a Correggio, it seems to me that everything has at last become marvelously clear. No more mystery. A dazzling brightness floods me, I send up to heaven a Te Deum which, though somewhat profane, is nonetheless a thanksgiving—Halleluja! Halleluja! But what happened afterward I cannot say. I would set it down quite truthfully if my memory could conjure up the slightest picture, however dim. But there is nothing: what comes after this hosanna is a drop into a black hole. At most I retained on waking the very vague impression of having spent a restless night.

Chapter 17

NEXT morning when I woke, sobered, I was holding between my chest and my knees, as if in a pair of nutcrackers, a very small, frail Sylva, curled up, foxlike, in a ball, her hair caressing my chin. And I was amazed that, with my drunkenness gone, I did not feel at all ashamed, or at least embarrassed or perplexed, at holding the sweet creature in my arms. On the contrary, I felt lighthearted, happy. I remembered having thought, as in my drunken stupor I gazed at the sleeping sylph in her amber-colored indolence, that I had at last “understood everything.”

“No more mystery.” But I vainly tried to recapture that sense of sudden perspicacity and, with it, what it was that I had perceived so irrefutably in my drunkenness. I could recapture none of it. Nor, as a matter of fact, could I rediscover the source from which, the night before, had sprung the sort of shame or disgust that had impregnated me for so long: six glasses of whisky had swept it away, but logically it ought to have reappeared. The conditions, I reflected, are the same as they were yesterday, and the warm little animal I am holding ensconced like a sweet hazelnut in the crook of my body still has nothing feminine about her except her appearance. I am not trying to deceive myself. She is a vixen. And yet I feel no confusion, no regret, at imagining (quite mistakenly, perhaps) what may have happened last night. All my previous repugnance now seems to me silly and prejudiced. What has changed then? If Sylva hasn’t, have I?

I first tried to assume with Christian humility that since I had not raised Sylva to a human level I myself might consequently have sunk to the level of a fox. Was that not highly probable, alas? Had I not experienced a bestial carnal obsession among the crowd in the market? Was this not the ominous portent of a degradation? But I was clasping my sleeping vixen in my arms, I felt her breathing gently swell and relax the young body coiled against mine, and I felt no shame, not even a stirring of the senses. I merely smiled with great tenderness, convinced there was nothing brutish in this gentleness, in the quiet calm that pervaded me.

For better proof of the peace in my soul and to make quite sure of these new thoughts, I woke Sylva and softly caressed her spine, as one does to a cat to make it purr. And as this murmur of pleasure rose in her throat I realized with a sort of exaltation that I was sure, profoundly sure, that some day, under my guidance, the purring would cease to be the solitary noise of unconscious flesh; that some day it would become the love song of a being who no longer submits but gives herself, who dedicates herself body and soul to the ineffable communion of human love. I realized that if I had wrested my vixen from her ape man, from the innocent but blind debauchery of mindless creatures, it was (even before I knew it) because of this—today luminous—certainty that she would later become capable of this communion under my guidance; that to abandon her to her instincts forever, even if to her it meant happiness and—quite literally—a fool’s paradise, it was yet a betrayal; that true loyalty and courage demanded on the contrary that I help this peaceful little animal to blossom slowly into a woman in love, into a lover—even if she had to suffer for it; and that I would henceforth live in this hope, or, more exactly, in this determination.

While this mental avalanche swept all before it, I did not once think, I confess it with shame, of Dorothy.

But when, early in the morning, Mrs. Bumley discovered me in Sylva’s bed (wasn’t that the shortest way of introducing her to my new disposition?) it would be putting it mildly to say that she was indignant. She gasped for breath and almost fainted. I made her drink a glass of rum, put on my dressing gown and pulled her into the living room.

She was too agitated to be capable of listening to me. Words poured from her quite incoherently, as if the shock had released a talking machine of which she had lost control. Like a tune ground out by a barrel organ, certain words recurred over and over again to express her disapproval: “Taking advantage of the poor creature!” It was hard to make out from her vehemence whether she felt more ashamed for me or more fearful for “the poor child.” I eventually grasped that while her imagination was outraged by what seemed to her (as it had to me only the day before) an abominable depravity, she feared above all that it might jeopardize the evolution of the retarded child entrusted to her care.

“Won’t she soon be needing you as a father?” she repeated with an excessive gush of pity. “Just think what it will be like for her when…”

I vainly tried to interrupt the torrent and explain to her the discovery I had made: how in the course of time I hoped to bring the darling child to look upon me in a quite different light. But she just would not listen. More than ten times I started my explanations, but she obstinately shook her head and continued inveighing against me.

In the end, she exasperated me to such an extent that I jumped up and lost my temper. “Damn you for a pigheaded old fool! If you don’t like it…”

She promptly jumped to her feet in turn, ran toward the door. I caught her by the arm and forced her to sit down. And for the eleventh time I was about to resume my arguments when there was a knock, and the French window leading from the garden opened.

It was the wretched Jeremy. Visibly, he had scrubbed himself from head to foot; he had put on his Sunday best, and his metallic blond hair, which a thorough wash had restored to its natural fuzz, surrounded his brutish face like the petals of a dandelion. But I was much too angry to be alive to humor or pathos. I thrust Nanny back into her armchair, spun around furiously and, as that grotesque clown came in, strode toward him with such a resolute and probably menacing air that he shrank back to the terrace. I was shaking with fury.

“Get out!” I yelled. “Be off and don’t let me see you again, or I’ll set the dogs on you!”

I would have been hard put to carry out the threat, for my two mastiffs, though ferocious-looking, were incapable of harming a fly. Jeremy fortunately did not know this; he shrank back even farther and I slammed the French window in his face, turning the key in the lock. With clenched fists and still shaking, I turned back toward Nanny, who was staring at me, pale and gaping, her chin a-tremble—perhaps she was afraid I would strangle her? Come, come, I told myself, pull yourself together. I approached her, trying to smile.

A windowpane crashed in pieces.

Then another, then a third. A stone fell at my feet. Was I to let this brute smash all my windows? But by the time I reached the garden Jeremy was no more than a distant figure fleeing toward the woods—as Sylva had fled not long ago. At this memory my rage subsided. Poor chap! I understood his despair all too well. And for the last time I asked myself whether, by tearing my little vixen from her native forest and from the savage love of this Lord Utan, I was not being very selfish and very cruel.

In a pensive mood I walked back into the living room, and found there a very pensive Nanny too. We exchanged a long look, this time without impatience or anger on either side.

“You think I’m wrong of course.” I sighed, and as indeed she did not answer, I went on: “She’d be happier with this man in the forest. Much happier. Yes, that’s certain.”

Nanny gazed at me without a word. “She’s a young vixen,” I admitted sadly, “and she’ll probably remain one. Our plans for her future are just wishful thinking, it may be quite absurd to persist.”

I fell silent and sat down, stirring the dying embers in the fireplace; and for a minute or so there was silence in the room.

Nanny sat motionless as a tree stump. The stillness was becoming unbearable. I shouted without looking at her:

“Say something, for God’s sake! I know what’s in your mind: it’s Dorothy, isn’t it? I’m behaving like a cad toward her, that’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you? Well, say so, damn it! Spill it out!”

“Miss Dorothy is old enough to look after herself,” Nanny said at last, and she rapped out the name in a curiously rough, almost aggressive voice. “No, I wasn’t thinking of her,” she went on, and added: “When you haven’t seen someone with your own eyes…”

“But you’ve seen her almost every week!” I cried.

“I’m not talking of her,” said Nanny, “but of him. That monster! That gorilla. I never imagined…”

She fidgeted in her armchair, the wood creaked.

“That monstrous ape… What a blessing!” she cried, and this time I was completely at sea.

It must have shown so clearly on my face that she began to chuckle silently while a thin line of moisture shone on the rim of her eyelids. She waved her hand feebly as if to say: “It’ll pass, don’t mind me,” and blew her nose loudly, then folded her handkerchief and smoothed it with the flat of her hand on a thigh as thick and large as a table.

“That poor child, I keep forgetting,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”

She shook her head wistfully, regretfully, while I wondered what she was forgetting.

“I never knew her as a fox, did I? That’s my excuse. I did not see her metamorphosis as you did. I keep forgetting that she is not a backward child, that she is still a young female animal, with all her instincts. She has got to satisfy them, poor thing. Even in the arms of a monster like that… that… And what would become of her?” she cried. “Oh, do forgive the scene I made just now,” she said with eager contrition. “I didn’t understand. But now… now that I have seen him… How right you were! And what a blessing that you… that you…”

She blushed crimson, like a very young girl.

“She will love you one day,” she said with a kind of fervor. “Oh yes, she must! You’ll make a woman of her through love!”

These were, almost word for word, the arguments she had refused to listen to three minutes ago. Yet coming back to me from Nanny’s lips like an echo they seemed to me so preposterous and out of season, they made me feel so ill at ease, that I found nothing else to do but laugh sarcastically. The bulldog face, however, seeing me sneer, took on an expression of such grieved astonishment that I rebuked myself for my childish cruelty.

Chapter 18

THE village tom-toms operate quite as effectively in Somerset as in Zambezi. Soon the whole neighborhood knew of the affair of the backward young girl from Richwick Manor and the forest idiot. Tongues wagged ceaselessly. Some praised me for having put a stop to it, others criticized me for having wrecked the only possible happiness for those hapless creatures. Fortunately nobody seemed to suspect that I might have done it for any other motive than the strictest respectability. All this came to my ears via old Walburton, who would tell me this gossip with a hint of irony, not to say a slight sarcasm. I wondered what he was thinking deep down. Overtly, he was one of those who approved my having put an end to that “grotesque union,” as he called it. But he had a funny way of adding “I hope she has consoled herself?” which I didn’t like. Perhaps I was imagining things.

It was the same with Dorothy, and even with her father. They both came to see me shortly after. Despite the sultry heat that brooded over the countryside, the doctor wore his perennial black frock coat and the waistcoat that rose right to his collar. His daughter, more sensibly, wore a light dress which disclosed her beautiful shoulders. The doctor made me relate in detail the walk in the forest and Sylva’s flight, the discovery of her presence in Jeremy’s hut, her attitude and second flight, and finally her return to the fold, brought back by the gorilla who had fortunately been scared by Walburton’s threats.

“All you have told me would apply perfectly well,” he said when I had finished, “to a clever young bitch. A springtime escapade. Odd, that. For if I am to believe what Dorothy has told me after each one of her visits here, our young lady is making rather sensational progress in other ways.”

I replied that she had indeed made some progress; but sensational seemed a rather big word for it. To me, on the contrary (but of course I was always about), it seemed slow and doubtful. It was a fact that she had made various kinds of progress which might appear “human” in all sorts of domains: cleanliness; speech, using a vocabulary which, though still exceedingly poor, was definitely increasing every day; the use of objects too, very simple tools: combs, spoons, forks, dusters, brooms. She had learned without much difficulty to sweep her own room, make her bed, yet in most essential matters she remained subject, just as in the first days of her training, to her appetites, her fears, her impulses; she obeyed them implicitly and without even a second’s reflection, seeming unable even to conceive the possibility of a refusal, still less of choice or consideration or even hesitation. Yes, she did behave like a “clever young bitch,” and even like a very clever one, to whom one could teach all sorts of tricks—save one: reasoning.

“Nothing new as regards the looking glass?” asked the doctor.

“Oh!” I said. “The other day I thought we’d got somewhere! After watching Nanny for a long time at her dressing table, she too sat down in front of it. She picked up a brush and went on brushing her hair for a long while. Unfortunately, it was only an illusion. Just enjoying the mimicry, like any monkey. But she did not see herself. We had proof of that pretty soon. Nanny stepped up to her silently and put a rose into her curls. Sylva reached out her arm and hit her fingers trying to seize the flower not on her own head but where she saw it: in the glass. She hurt herself and got a great fright and has since been sulking against all mirrors, even more than before if possible.”

“But this is interesting!” the doctor exclaimed to my surprise. “Damned interesting!”

Seeing my astonishment, he explained:

“You say this was only an illusion. Not at all. What you call an illusion is itself illusory. All you have gathered from a failure is its negative aspect. You are not thinking of the invisible work, caused by each one of these missed opportunites, which goes on day by day in a new brain: what junctions, what concatenations of frustrated impressions, unfinished acts, forgotten emotions, lost visions, what dim associations, what sudden flashes… You know nothing of them and cannot, of course, imagine them, but how do you think that reflection is built up in the brain of a young child? Already your vixen no longer behaves like a small wild mammal, but like a highly developed primate. That is a good stretch along the road of evolution, my boy! It proves that her gray matter does not remain inactive, as might have been feared. Patience, patience—you may be sure that things will begin to happen, perhaps quite soon.”

With his big fat nose, his bald pate fringed with white foam, the grandiose gestures of his long hands and skinny arms, he had, as he spoke, the somewhat odd look of an old ecclesiastic prophet out of a Rowlandson print. This gave his words a curious effect, halfway between the ridiculous and the inspired. At the time, I was particularly alive to the preposterous side of it and had to prevent myself from smiling. But what he said must have silently burrowed into my mind, for when the day came on which, in his words, “things began to happen,” I was not as surprised as I would probably otherwise have been. However, at the moment, as I said, I saw in his optimism only the doggedness of an old scientist who doesn’t like to have been wrong.

Nor was I the only one to think so: Dorothy did not restrain herself as she listened to her father, and laughed almost openly. She remarked that he did not seem to mind contradicting himself, for a few weeks earlier he had predicted that Sylva, on the contrary, would prove too old for intelligence still to be able to form.

“Yes, I said that,” Dr. Sullivan agreed. “That was my opinion, and I’d still hold to it if it were not for all these obvious signs that a certain form of intelligence is about to dawn. Actually, I had not considered the fact that her brain was just as blank as that of a newborn babe. The only difference is that it has the dimensions of an adult brain. That’s the whole point, and that’s what is so thrilling!”

Whereupon he gave a huge yawn and asked if he could have a little nap before driving home: the effect of a heavy lunch on an aged stomach, he said. Nanny led him into the living room and made him comfortable on the sofa with some blankets. Then she went upstairs to Sylva, who could be heard trotting up there with nervous impatience. She must have heard the sound of voices.

No sooner were we alone than Dorothy snapped in a fierce whisper:

“Do you think you can fool me?”

I was so staggered by this brusque attack that I remained dumb. I could barely stammer:

“What do you mean?”

“That business with poor Jeremy.”

“Well? What of it?”

“You don’t care a rap for respectability!”

“What do you mean, I—”

“Tell me the truth: are you in love with her?”

“Now really, Dorothy…”

“I’m not a prude and if you want to go to bed with her I shan’t kick up a fuss about it. She won’t be your first mistress, as everyone knows. But I beg you not to forget who you are, where you come from. It would be an appalling scandal.”

“What would? Do you suppose I want to marry her?” I exclaimed.

“Who knows? I wonder.”

“I’ve never heard anything so ludicrous. Does one marry a fox? You know perfectly well she is nothing else yet.”

“Not yet, as you say yourself. But she’ll change. My father is probably quite right.”

“Well, then it’ll be time to think of it, won’t it?” I said sarcastically, for she had upset me.

“No, that’s just it. You must think of it now!”

She said this very insistently, in a tone of alarm, and gripped my hands with an expression of urgency.

“You are in great danger,” she said. “Remember Pygmalion.”

“What’s he got to do with it? Sylva isn’t made of marble.”

“I’m thinking of Shaw’s. What you are going to do goes even beyond Professor Higgins’s exploit. He merely transformed a flower girl into a lady. You’re going to transform a beast into a woman. You’ll love her. You already do.”

“I? But you’re raving mad! Besides, I’ll have you know that if there’s someone I love—”

“Shut up!” she shouted.

I can’t bear to be silenced. And yet I ought to have welcomed her violence. What a moment for making a declaration of love, when I was steeped in the most extreme sentimental confusion! But this “Shut up!” instead of curbing my rashness, made me lose my temper.

“Why should I shut up? I have kept my mouth shut for ten years! I let you slip once already, I’m not going to start again!”

I saw her turn pale. She lifted a warning hand to silence me. Her lips quivered but no word came. I seized her hand in both of mine.

“I am in danger, am I?” I cried. “Well, help me out of it! Provided, that is, that you love me,” I added, lifting her hand to my face.

But she tore it away and got up. She began to walk up and down, bending and unbending the fingers of her clasped hands.

“That’s what I should have cried to you ten years ago,” she said tonelessly. She gave a stricken sigh. “I’m too much of a wreck,” she murmured. “I can’t save anybody any more.”

“Look here, Dorothy…”

“No!” she cried, then added more softly, musingly: “If I love you? Can I still love? Shall I ever be able to again?” She bent and unbent her fingers. “I thought I loved that man,” she said in a very low, rather husky voice. “I would have given my life for him. In a way I have given it: he horrified me and yet I’d have stood up to the whole earth. His death came as a relief. It also made me desperate, it left me just like one of those jellyfish that one finds motionless on the beach: limp and without feeling. Just anybody can pick up a jellyfish—and for ten years I let myself be picked up by just anybody. I hardly even remember it.”

My heart had turned to ice while I listened to this sudden confession, but I could think of nothing to say. She looked at me thoughtfully.

“Whatever happens, whatever you may do, I want you to know that you’ll be forgiven,” she said strangely.

I got up, walked over to her, grasped her beautiful shoulders and forced her to turn toward me.

“Dorothy,” I said to her calmly, “suppose Sylva could hear us now, do you think she would understand a single word of what we are saying?”

Was it the beginning of a smile or only color returning to her cheeks? She repeated like an echo:

“No, she would not understand a single word.”

“Can you seriously imagine that I could think of marrying so rudimentary a being, even on some very distant day, when you are about, right here, close to me? Doesn’t it strike you as completely absurd?”

She shook her head. This time she was really smiling. But joylessly.

“I’m not a woman one marries, either,” she murmured, and hung her head. “I have nothing to offer. I’m a dried-out crab: a carapace with nothing inside.” She raised her head. “Life doesn’t return to an empty shell. Sylva too is empty—for the time being. But in her something some day may come to life. That’s just what makes me afraid for you.”

She must have seen from my blank look that I did not understand. She took my hands, removed them from her shoulders.

“What she’ll have in her brain cells will have been put there by you. What the Pygmalions of this world love is precisely their own likeness. How can they resist it? And on that day there’ll be nothing I can put in the balance. My presence would soon weigh on you like a cumbersome piece of furniture. But if you marry that creature it’ll be the end of you, Albert. I’m not jealous—nor prudish, I repeat. I’ve less right than anyone, alas, to sermonize you! But I’m afraid that once she has a mind, a physical affaire won’t be enough for you.”

“Well then, marry me,” I said gently.

But she shook her head obstinately.

“I’d be your mistress if you like,” she said, very simply. “It would be more honest but I’m afraid that it wouldn’t make any difference when the day comes—it would merely make me a little more miserable.”

“Let’s try anyhow,” I said just as simply; but I was deeply moved.

She took my head between her hands and kissed me lightly on the lips.

“Not now,” she breathed. “When you really want me.”

Chapter 19

AFTER Dorothy’s departure, I was back in a state of extreme confusion. Yet I am not a fickle-hearted Latin, a Frenchman for whom every girl he meets is immediately the prettiest one, a Sicilian who swears eternal love to three different women on the same day. I had been quite sincere with Dorothy. But when she was gone and I found myself alone with Sylva again, all I had said seemed to me rash madness. It was not as though my feelings for Sylva were more certain, less ambiguous than before. I had not lied to Dorothy when, some little time ago, I had compared this attachment to hers for her Siamese kitten. But on the other hand hadn’t I, if not confessing it outright, at least stopped denying the strong attraction that Sylva exercised on my senses? Above all, I had concealed even more dangerous thoughts from Dorothy; and though she had divined the gist of them this did not alter the fact that I had hidden them. I had not breathed a word of the exultant joy that had gripped me at the idea that love might change Sylva into a real woman. It was true that I had since told myself, with returning composure, that I was indulging in pipe dreams, that I had turned the order of things upside down and that, in actual fact, it was only provided I could first make a woman of her that Sylva might subsequently be able to feel human love. But that was just it: finding Sylva again as she still was, pretty as a picture but sunk to the very soul in the dark maze of her animal mentality, I could not fool myself. I was quite determined to lift her out of it, to do all that lay in my power to awaken a human intelligence in her. Dorothy had warned me that by doing so I ran the risk of falling in love for good with a woman who, to a considerable extent at least, would be my own creation. But I knew I would do it all the same. And thus, by nevertheless offering my heart to Dorothy, I was becoming perilously guilty toward her.

At the same time I told myself that I was quite as guilty, for that matter, toward Sylva. If Dorothy had been less shrewd or less honest, what would I have done in the long run? At best, I would have abandoned Sylva to the care of Mrs. Bumley—but what would have become of her afterward? At worst, I would have followed the Sullivans’ sound advice and entrusted her at once to some institution. That might have meant arresting her development. Well, wouldn’t that be wiser? Wasn’t it better, after all, that she should remain a vixen? Wouldn’t the woman she might become in the best hypothesis still be full of gaps and deficiencies, incapable of adapting herself to our modern world? Wouldn’t I make her unhappy by vowing her to so doubtful a destiny? But a powerful voice within me protested against these pessimistic views, assured me that to abandon her now in her present state might smack of criminal desertion.

For there were numerous signs which convinced me that the doctor was right, that the time was approaching when “things would begin to happen.” I did not imagine, however, that the time was so close at hand.

I don’t want to pretend that those precursory signs always struck us clearly, Nanny and me. Many of them escaped us (one cannot always be on the watch) ; others were fallacious. Like all primates, Sylva was naturally gifted with a great talent for imitation. By regularly repeating our words and acts she eventually linked the acts to the words with apparent logic. But how difficult it was to know when the appearance was deceptive and when it was not! More than once we looked at each other, her governess and I, seized with emotion, in the belief that we had witnessed in our pupil a great step from her condition of an unthinking creature; and then we had to admit that it was only a sham without substance, a mere aping, a parody without reality. Such, it will be remembered, was the episode of the dressing table, of the rose in her hair. But at other times, on the contrary, an act that should have intrigued us, captured our attention, passed us by and we thoughtlessly paid it no heed.

I remember, for instance, the following little incident. One evening when Fanny had prepared some chocolate ice for us Sylva, after tasting it, began to blow on it in her plate. We laughed about it without realizing at once how much this mistake on her part already represented an association between cause and effect. Only later did we recall it to distinguish a posteriori its faintly precursory indication. It’s so much easier to be wise after the event!

By and large, Sylva’s very slow and sporadic type of progress, broken by forward leaps and disquieting retrogressions, continued to present far less resemblance to the progress of a backward child than to that of an animal in training, and this bewildered Nanny as much as me. Nothing allowed us to affirm that Sylva’s nature was changing.

She was just a vixen becoming more and more domesticated, to an exceptional degree no doubt, but to believe anything else for the time being would have been sheer wishful thinking. That is at least what we kept telling ourselves.

With the result that while I was prepared for fresh progress, even for great changes, while I was even watching out for them with a confused mixture of fear and hope, I did not expect to see them crop up so soon or so suddenly. Perhaps it is a general rule with human beings that they are always caught unawares by events, even those they have watched for most closely.

I might say in my defense that I had, moreover, some reason to be absent-minded. Dorothy had returned only once, with her father, since the poignant scene in which she had reduced me to silence in order not to hear me. To tell the truth, I had not been able to efface the painful impression left by her exclamation concerning herself: “An empty shell!” She seemed to me to have lost weight and her complexion was dull. She avoided my eyes. It also seemed to me that the doctor was below par. I said to Dorothy, “Come and help me make tea,” hoping thereby to have a chance of talking to her alone. But she eluded the suggestion.

“I’ll go and make it with Mrs. Bumley,” she said, and we were left standing there, her father and I.

“I have the impression,” I said to him, “that Dorothy isn’t looking very well. Anything wrong?”

Upon my word, the old man too was avoiding my eyes!

“London has tired her,” he said vaguely. “She must pick up again. That takes time.”

“Nothing pathological?” I asked, worried.

“No, no. Just an upset of the neuro-vegetative system. Quiet life and country air will put it right in time. And your little vixen?” he inquired without transition, as if he was in a hurry to change the subject. “Anything new?”

“Pah!” I said. “Pretty little. She is marking time. Just two or three new words caught here and there. But hardly anything as far as essentials go.”

“What do you call essentials?”

“Well, I mean, for instance, that the only way to oblige her to resist her instinctive urges and behave in a bearable manner is still punishment. Nothing else. The fear of being punished stands her in stead of reason or, if you like, of second nature.”

“Well,” the doctor said, laughing, “isn’t that actually the beginning of ethics?”

“Yes, the ethics of an animal trainer,” I said ironically. “You see, this tends to confirm in me some age-old certainties. I’ve always thought that prison, capital punishment as a deterrent, are just survivals of the Stone Age; they solve nothing, prevent nothing. There are no fewer thefts or murders in our era than there were at the time of the Visigoths or the Vandals. The human conscience must have sprung from altogether different sources. But which ones? You can’t imagine the number of books poor Nanny has been poring over these last weeks: on primitive psychology, the metaphysics of manners or the immediate data of consciousness… without finding anything remotely applicable to the case of a fox-woman.”

“The mind of man,” said the doctor, “is born with the individual. That’s the clue to everything. When he discovered that he existed, separately from the rest of things, and from the rest of his pack. Obviously, the pack served him as a mirror for this discovery, but at the same time it retarded it. We are now faced with the same dialectic. Your vixen must learn in the first place that she exists. Nanny and you are helping her and retarding her at the same time. That’s why I thought of those mirrors. Nothing new in that respect?”

He had not mentioned them for a long time.

“No. Actually, I’ve even removed the cheval glass from her room and put it up in mine, where it is more useful.”

“Quite, quite,” he said, suddenly abstracted. “Did it really strike you so much that she wasn’t looking well?”

It took me quite two seconds to realize that he was talking of Dorothy again.

“Well, she seems to have lost weight,” I said, “and her complexion isn’t as clear as it was. Are you more worried about her health than you care to admit?”

“If it only were her health!” he muttered.

“You’re hiding the truth from me, Doctor… Am I to blame for something?” I asked courageously.

“You, my poor boy?” he exclaimed, and I never knew whether or not he had been on the verge of telling me more, for Dorothy appeared with a well-laden tray. Nanny had gone to fetch Sylva from her room.

As usual, Sylva flung herself on me with puppylike manifestations, snapping at my ear, licking the hand with which I was trying to protect myself. Whenever she had been kept locked up by herself for too long she would fall back into these old habits and recover her manners only after the first joy of reunion had been calmed. I pushed her back as best I could, and now it was the doctor’s turn. She had grown accustomed to the black frock coat and for a long time now had been great friends with the old man. Good-naturedly he let himself be kissed and snapped at, then gently pushed her away too.

“What about me?” asked Dorothy.

Sylva went up to her, with less enthusiasm but still with some eagerness. As they were about to kiss, Sylva suddenly gave a start, or rather a shudder. She jumped back, slipped out of Dorothy’s already outstretched hands and took shelter behind Mrs. Bumley’s armchair. From there she gazed at the young woman, her cat’s eyes aglow with a watchful attention. Something had alarmed her—but what?

Dorothy had remained with her hands in mid-air. She slowly lowered them under our surprised stare. She herself seemed not so much surprised as the prey of a strange ccmmotion. Her features seemed to decompose. She almost frightened me for a few seconds. And I realized that what had stirred her father when he had talked of her a moment ago was also some sort of fear. “A dead crab”—it was as if someone had just whispered those words into my ear. I perceived that I did not know her, that she was a mystery to me. That, actually, I did not know anything of her life, nor of the reasons for her return.

All these thoughts occurred to me in less than an instant. The moment after, Dorothy was smiling again, her face had resumed its calm, slightly banal beauty under the coiled plaits of her blond hair. I could believe that it had all been just a dream.

“Well,” she said quietly, “so you don’t love me any more?”

And with an amused expression, she held out to Sylva a slice of toast spread with liver paste, for she knew that Sylva still had not the least liking for sweets.

Sylva took the toast, Nanny poured the tea, and there was no further incident.

Chapter 20

IT was toward the middle of the following week, a little before midnight, that the event occurred.

I cannot recollect the scene without being gripped once again by emotion. Did I realize at the time that it was really my vixen’s first big step in the direction of a human consciousness—the first step out of the dark ramparts in which the animal is imprisoned? Judging by the excitement which overcame me, I think I can claim I did, even though I was not as categorically certain as Doctor Sullivan when I told him about it.

Yet nothing had happened in the way he had foreseen. He had hoped, it will be remembered, that Sylva might eventually recognize herself in the cheval glass by constantly seeing herself in it but that, after weeks during which her indifference for this object and her inattention bordered on purblindness, I had decided to move the glass into my bedroom. There, at least, somebody wrould be making use of it. Most of all, this permanent failure was getting on my nerves. I did not, therefore, expect any more from this direction. And if the very first stage in the awakening of my vixen must be, as Dr. Sullivan said, the discovery of her own existence, I had given up hope that a looking glass might be instrumental to it.

Nor was I altogether wrong. For Sylva awoke to this revelation not by recognizing herself at last but because, on the contrary, she suddenly no longer found her image in it. Nanny’s persistence had been greater than mine, and despite the recurrent failure she would make her pupil sit down, every day, morning and evening, in front of her own reflection. This made me think of Trotty, my parents’ fox terrier. When I was a child, I used to hold him up to the wardrobe mirror so that he should see himself; and he too, after sniffing it, would become annoyed and wriggle in my arms until I let him go. Sylva, as the little fox she was, acted just like him: she would tear herself impatiently out of Nanny’s arms, and curl up on the floor by the bed, yawn, close her eyes and fall asleep. It seemed, oddly enough, that far from increasing her familiarity with mirrors, these daily attempts increasingly irritated her.

“Leave her alone,” I would say to Nanny, myself exasperated by my discouragement. But Nanny was as obdurate as her pupil.

Then one evening, as I was sitting before the dressing-table in my room, filing my fingernails before going to bed, I saw Sylva come in, probably to kiss me good night after her fashion, as she did every night. I perceived her in the mirror, for my easy chair had its back to the door. Its back was tall and stood between Sylva and me so that she too could see only my reflection in the glass. The result was that she walked toward me, not where I really was, out of her sight, but where she saw me—the cheval glass. Thus she had first to pass close to my chair.

And so, for an instant, she saw us in the mirror, herself and me, side by side.

What did she think as she discovered this feminine shape next to “Bonny”? She stood motionless and began to snarl as she had done when she first saw me with Dorothy. She snarled for some time at her own immobile image next to mine, then she began to move. She walked to the looking glass, and her reflection, moving toward her, growled ever more strongly. And suddenly she pounced on the intruder. The result was a great racket of broken glass and Sylva, flabbergasted, sitting amid the splinters on the ground.

I saw at once that she was not hurt, but also that she was staring at all those pieces with the keenest surprise. She looked at her hand lying on a splinter of glass, withdrew it, put it back, withdrew it again, moving her fingers a little, must have seen her fingers move in the broken shards, rose quickly as if frightened, ran to where she thought she had seen me, stopped dead when she no longer saw me, turned back toward the cheval glass which was now merely an empty frame, gropingly touched (if one can say so) the emptiness inside with her hand, gave a start, ran behind it as if in a panic, suddenly saw me in the frame on the side where she was not expecting me, gave a cry, and fled into her room.

I had watched the whole scene without stirring or speaking, too curious to see what would happen. Nothing more did happen, as a matter of fact. Sylva did not reappear. I picked up the pieces and took them down to the dustbin, mounted the stairs again to go to bed, once more disappointed by this persistent lack of comprehension. I put out the light and tried to sleep.

I could not manage to fall asleep and my idle thoughts soon left my disappointing vixen to return to Dorothy. It was like that almost every night since her last visit. What was the matter with the young woman? What had happened between this last time and the one before? That wan complexion, those tired features. Had these changes something to do with me? But her father’s tone had been so startled and almost sarcastic when he said, “You, my poor boy!” Ought I to be relieved or offended by it? Did I love her or didn’t I? Everybody knows how one’s thoughts turn in circles in one’s half-sleep, and incessantly return to their point of departure. They prevent you from falling asleep but don’t progress an inch. That’s what happened this night too, and I was dozing fitfully.

And then, like a shock, I sensed a presence in the room. I heard nothing. Not a sound. But opening my eyes, I saw a shadow quite close to me, motionless at my bedside. The moon was shining into the room through the slatted shutters, shedding a milky, tiger-striped light, and the silhouette leaned slowly forward amid those bars of moving shadows. I pretended to be asleep but through my eyelashes I could see Sylva’s face approaching mine, and that face—there is no other word for it—was observing, scrutinizing mine. As she had never done before. As if she were trying to discover in it something unknown. With such an unwonted insistence that I hardly dared to breathe while, oddly enough, the doctor’s words came back to me, urging me to think of the invisible work which day after day was accomplished in this blank brain—what junctions, he said, what concatenations of frustrated impressions, forgotten emotions, lost visions, what dim associations, what sudden flashes… And then Sylva left my side, returned to the cheval glass, looked at it, doggedly groped in the empty space.

With a twinge of my heart, I thought I understood what was happening. I arose, took her in my arms. She allowed herself obediently to be led into the bathroom. Before the big wall mirror, I put on the light and for a moment—very brief or very long, I don’t know—she looked at herself at my side. Her eyes slowly widened. Was she going to recognize herself at last? But how could she, since she had never yet seen herself? And indeed, as always, she began to wriggle to escape me. I sought to hold her back, but then, in an upsurge of fear or rage, she bit my hand with a sort of dull bark, short as a cry, and I let her go, annoyed. But… what’s that? What’s she doing? For the first time for many a week, she huddled up between the wall and the little bow-fronted chest of drawers, where she remained trembling as she used to, her dilated eyes clinging to me.

I approached her; she did not move. I squatted down next to her. I pressed her to my shoulder. She did not protest. She was shaking. I murmured quite close to her ear, “Come… come now… what’s the matter?” But I knew, I knew too well that neither her vocabulary nor her embryonic intelligence would enable my vixen to answer such a question. However, she turned a stricken face toward mine. And meanwhile her hand rose with unsteady, almost frightened slowness, moved gropingly for a moment over her body, over the soft curve of her breast. And then her fingers began to climb along the slender, supple throat, like a quivering spider. They hesitated on her cheeks, her chin, her ears, her nose—a blind man’s exploring fingers gently deciphering a face. She thus deciphered it slowly and fearfully—discovered it or verified it?—and at last, at last she murmured, in a very small voice, in the tone of a question she might put to me in a quite small, anguished voice:

“Syl… va?”

For the very first time she was stammering her own name, and her hand, her fingers became motionless. And she waited, pressed more tightly against me, visibly expecting me to answer, “Why yes, my little Sylva, it’s you, of course…” and indeed that’s what I said. I said it very softly and then she was clinging to my chest with the abruptness of a child who feels the ground giving way under its feet, and I decided to push her a little. I got up and dragged her once more toward the bathroom. But she resisted, and I had the greatest trouble in making her move forward. She protested, “No! No!” in a stifled tone of dread, and I began to get irritated, to think that she was really too stupid. Why, what a to-do about recognizing oneself in a mirror! What an idiotic fear! In a moment she would be amused by it, would laugh with pleasure.

As if in response to my unspoken thoughts, she seemed momentarily to yield, but then, stepping closer, she suddenly dived, slipped between my hands, escaped me, ran toward the door, left, slamming it behind her, and I heard her dashing along the corridor and clambering up the stairs that led to the attic.

Should I go after her or not? Was I wrong to force her? But, for heaven’s sake, what a bizarre idea, to be frightened to death by one’s own likeness! I decided to let her sulk if she felt like it, and returned to bed.

But sleep evaded me more than ever, and strangely, I become more stirred, more intrigued by my vixen’s behavior than I had ever been before. Gradually, in this state of semiconsciousness in which I hovered once again, it seemed to me that I could guess or understand her better, that I could better identify myself with her, with what she felt. Or rather, I imagined what she had been, half an hour ago: an unconscious, carefree little being, absent from itself, who, as Dr. Sullivan had said, lived and acted without even knowing that it existed, without really distinguishing itself from the rest of things.

Ever since childhood, we ourselves have been accustomed to, been trained to, see ourselves and distinguish ourselves in this way, and this separateness is so natural to us that we never think of it. But a fox! Had I ever figured to myself what it could be like to discover suddenly that one is isolated, separated, exiled from tutelary nature with whom one had hitherto formed one warmth, one breath, one flesh? And I imagined too for the first time the dreadful revelation it must have been for our distant Neanderthal ancestors, for those bearded, shaggy primates who had no mirrors, to become self-conscious, who had to discover themselves in the eyes of others, in their shouts, their threats, their gesticulations and their hostility—and who discovered themselves as they were—fragile and naked and solitary, with nothing but their own strength in the midst of frightening forests…

At that moment, as if to illustrate those barbaric imaginings, an earsplitting pandemonium broke out. I sat up. The din started again a little farther away, with a noise of broken glass. I jumped out of bed and dashed into the corridor, where I found the two wall mirrors in pieces. At the same instant, the racket broke out downstairs, coming from the living room. Then from the hall. Then from the study. Nanny, in turn, popped out of her room, in dressing gown and curlers.

“It’s Sylva smashing the mirrors!” I shouted and hurled myself down the stairs.

But downstairs, there was no one in sight. Walking on shattered glass, I passed through the three downstairs rooms; not one mirror was whole. I walked up the other flight of stairs. Nothing. Not a sound. The door to Sylva’s room stood open. I walked in and found Nanny, motionless, looking at the bed. My vixen was lying on it, face downward, but bunched up, her head dug deep under the pillow and bolster—like a rabbit seeking refuge in its warren, like a terrorized child trying to return to the dark, reassuring, consoling warmth, to the lethe, the nepenthe, the primeval oblivion of the maternal womb… Had I not measured it before, then I could now measure at this sight alone what it must have meant for her, as for Neanderthal man, to realize with terror, to realize for the first time, for the first, decisive, irremediable time, with inexpressible terror, that the one who was here, face downward and bunched up, shaking under her pillow, and who had recognized herself in a mirror a moment ago, that this thing was she, that it was Sylva; and that this Sylva was therefore a separate thing from all others, a thing quite alone and apart which existed, which could not stop itself existing even by breaking all the mirrors; that this thing, this Sylva, was she, and that she thus existed—irremediably.

Part Two

But this man is an anachronism, for he dates from before the Iron Age, and even the Stone Age. Think of it, he stands at the beginnings of the history of man…

Rudyard Kipling, “In the Rukh”

Chapter 21

THE days that followed that surprising night seemed to me disappointing. Though I lay in bed open-eyed till the morning, it was now with impatience. In fact I was expecting miracles. Sylva had passed a borderline, I was certain of it. She had stepped into the true land of Man; I would now witness vast and rapid changes.

The first to throw cold water on my enthusiasm was Nanny. When I found her downstairs at breakfast, she seemed rested and was calmly buttering her toast. I said:

“You were able to sleep? I spent a sleepless night.”

“On account of the broken mirrors? Is it such a big sum?”

“Who’s talking of mirrors? I don’t care a rap. But the fact that Sylva… Goodness!” I cried. “That seems to leave you quite cold! The fact that she recognized herself and got scared—don’t you understand what all this means?”

“Nothing proves yet that she did recognize herself,” Nanny said cautiously. “You’re rather jumping to conclusions.”

“Well, what else can have scared her so?”

“I don’t know, it’s a bit early to say.”

“But it’s as plain as a pikestaff!” I said, trying as well as I could to restrain a mounting exasperation. “She has at last grasped that she exists, and that is a hell of a discovery for a fox, don’t you think? So she’s frightened by it, she has the wind up—what could be more natural?—and this anguish of hers is the first evidence she gives us of a reflective intelligence, the first trace of a cogito. It’s a sensational departure!”

“She may have been scared by anything,” said Nanny with a gentle obstinacy that put me beside myself, “something very simple and very ordinary which you, not being a fox, are quite unable to imagine. One has never seen a child, even the most backward one, take fright at a mirror. On the contrary, he usually claps his hands with joy and is delighted to recognize himself.”

“That’s just it!” I retorted. “That’s what I’m saying. Wasn’t that what we expected to happen when Sylva recognized herself? And isn’t it very singular that she didn’t act like that but rather took fright?”

“That’s why I keep thinking that she did not recognize herself,” Nanny persisted doggedly, chewing her buttered toast with her head above her breakfast cup, for she had the bad habit of “dunking.”

“We’ll probably find out some day or other what frightened her, and we’ll be amazed what a commonplace thing it was.”

In spite of my excitement I could not help thinking that the cautious Nanny’s remarks were nothing if not reasonable. So much so that in the afternoon I drove over to Dr. Sullivan in quest of comfort. I was not disappointed. He was absolutely enthusiastic.

“What did I tell you? What did I tell you?” he said over and over again, leaning against the oaken mantelpiece in the familiar prophetic attitude.

“So you think that she has taken a decisive step?”

“Without a shadow of doubt. Your Nanny is just a fool, with her backward children. Sylva is nothing of the kind, she’s a creature who dates from before prehistory—yes, that’s what she is! Of course, I wouldn’t have thought, either, before you told me, that the first reaction of such a creature to such a discovery would be sheer panic and fright. But if you give it a little thought, you easily understand that this was quite inevitable.”

“What’s going to happen now,” I asked, “according to you? What’ll be the next stage?”

He raised his long arms as if taking heaven for witness.

“Can’t say, old man, I’m not a diviner! On the contrary, I’m waiting to learn from her how things happened in the dim brains of the first men.”

“Unfortunately, those things took a few thousand years to happen… If we have to wait all that long…”

“Naturally, nothing proves that Sylva will pass the various stages at breakneck speed and nonstop. Still, she’s just done it, and what with her environment and the aid you give her, we may hope that she’ll continue.”

“Yes, but how can we be of assistance if we don’t know a word of the syllabus?”

“Oh,” said the doctor, “you’ll see all right how things will shape. I suppose that now that she has discovered herself she’ll start putting questions. You’ve got your work cut out.”

“Dorothy isn’t in?” I blurted out, for her continued absence was beginning to surprise me.

The doctor’s face literally changed, as if this sudden question had taken him by surprise. His cheeks had turned crimson on either side of the big, fat nose which, having blushed more faintly, bore an irresistible resemblance to the beak of a frightened toucan.

“I believe she’s got a headache,” he said.

I didn’t believe a word of it.

“May I at least say hello to her?”

“Do excuse her,” he said quickly. “I think she’s gone to lie down.”

“Doctor,” I said reproachfully, “you aren’t forthright with me. Have I made a faux pas somewhere? Why does Dorothy refuse to see me? It seemed to me a few days ago…”

He interrupted me in a most comical way: by blowing his nose. He shook his curly wreath of foam while producing from his nose a thunderous snort.

“No, no,” he answered into his handkerchief. “She doesn’t refuse. It has nothing to do with you, I assure you. Don’t question me,” he went on, folding the handkerchief. “We’re going through a trying time. It’s a consequence of her life in London… She’ll talk to you about it herself later. Later,” he repeated, holding out the palms of his hands as if begging for alms. “Right?” he said insistently with an engaging and rather pathetic smile, so that there was nothing to do but smile back and put my palms into his.

“You know my friendship for you. I don’t need to tell you…”

“I know, I know I can count on you. Just now you could be of no help. Oh!” he corrected himself precipitately. “Don’t make me say more than I’ve said! It’s nothing serious. It’ll pass. It’s a trying time. Everything will be all right later on.”

I was not, however, more than half reassured when I left him. What had he meant by twice repeating “a trying time”? I was not at all certain that Dorothy’s attitude had really nothing to do with me.

During the following days I dared not be too insistent in getting Sylva in front of a looking glass again. I had immediately replaced all the mirrors, including the cheval glass, but Sylva at first pretended not even to notice their presence—though she could not prevent herself, when passing through the gallery where two tall pier glasses faced each other, from quickening her pace and even running.

Nevertheless, we saw her gradually losing her fear. She could no longer avoid seeing her face from time to time in a windowpane, reflected in a glass case or the high polish of a piece of furniture. There came a day when, instead of running away or pretending not to have seen it, she looked at it and stopped. Thereafter she would approach her reflection. Timidly at first, then with curiosity, then with absorbed attention. The cheval glass became a center of interest for her, one of which she did not seem to tire. She would now look at herself at all hours of the day. But not as a woman does, admiringly or disconsolately, nor even simply to study herself. Rather as a sort of constant checkup, as if she were never sure of finding opposite her, returning stare for stare, this creature whose reality seemed to plunge her into endless perplexity.

She would leave the mirror and curl up at the foot of the bed, her face in her cupped hands, her eye’s staring straight ahead without seeing anything, never batting an eyelid, like a motionless cat. At those moments, I would have gladly given months of my life to be able to penetrate that little brain and witness what was going on in it. Perhaps nothing much was, at least after the fashion that our too highly developed brains are able to imagine.

When at last she emerged from this unseeing contemplation she would huddle up even more tightly and go to sleep, or else skip around and start to play as she used to. I have told how she enjoyed pouncing on objects, on all sorts of “quarry,” showing a marked preference for those that could be knocked over or sent rolling: a stool, a chair, Nanny’s needlework basket (when the contents scattered all over the place, she would take refuge in a corner and wait for the nurse’s outburst with a half-roguish, half-rueful expression), or else a pitcher, a box. But now she would suddenly stop playing, grasp the object between her hands, inspect its every side. Sometimes she would carry it in front of the mirror and gaze at herself with it, a strained look in her fixed eyes. It was hard to say whether they expressed anguish, absent-mindedness or deep thought. As a rule, after such a scrutiny she would drop the object, go and curl up on her bed again, her chin in her hands, with staring, vacant eyes. She almost always fell asleep in the end.

One day, in the course of playing she flung herself on a small basket filled with apples which Nanny had gone to fetch from the loft. The apples naturally rolled in all directions. Sylva chased them with the bounding grace of a young gazelle at large. At last she picked one up and began to munch it. Suddenly, as if prompted by a brain wave, she jumped to her feet, left the room, ran downstairs. Nanny and I followed her, much intrigued. We found her in the dining room gazing at the large still life copied after the Master of Munich above the sideboard. She turned toward us and said, “Apples.”

I cast a triumphant glance at Nanny, who grew pale, then blushed and lifted her hand to her bodice with emotion. She took Sylva by the fingers.

“And this?” she asked.

“Grapes.”

“And this?”

She was pointing at a corner of the painting, to a small silver statue representing a standing, young Bacchus, with his face raised and a bunch of grapes held against his lips. But Sylva did not say anything. She looked at it for a long time but did not speak. Nanny said, “That’s a gentleman.” But Sylva looked without saying a word. Then her eyes slipped away, she withdrew her fingers, with one leap she was on a chair, which fell over, and she resumed her game without paying attention to us.

“That was too difficult,” I told Nanny. “The painting of a sculpture, and a silver one at that! That is quite meaningless for her. Too far removed from reality.”

But Nanny vehemently shook her kind, doggy face, which made her heavy jowls ripple like washing being laundered in the river.

“The grapes and apples aren’t much like real fruit, either. It’s fantastic that she recognized them. I have read that certain savages in Indonesia are still quite incapable of it. Quite fantastic that she has grasped that apples are something that can be portrayed.”

“Has she really understood it? That’s not so sure,” I said prudently. (It was my turn to show circumspection.) “I’ve been observing her ever since that mirror business. What seems to me beyond doubt is that she has begun to be able to ‘separate’ objects from one another, just as she has done for herself. To isolate each object. And once they are isolated, she can recognize them even when portrayed. Which doesn’t mean that she is already able to—”

But Nanny wasn’t listening. I saw her open her mouth a little, as if to interrupt me. But this was immediately wiped away by an expression of such startled surprise that I spun round full-circle.

The French window was open. And Sylva, darting with a swallow’s speed, was running toward a distant figure, short and squat, which loomed in the twilight like a ghost of the Stone Age.

For the first time in my life I was sorry I wasn’t a marksman. That I could not dash to my gunrack, grab a weapon from the hook, fire into the air and oblige that cursed gorilla to flee for his life.

For lack of a gun I grabbed from behind the chest one of the ivory-knobbed sticks that had belonged to my father and rushed out, yelling curses; I had gripped the stick by the ferrule end and was whirling it around furiously.

I am of respectable size and as I came rushing up, yelling and flaying the air, I must have looked fairly horrifying. The result was that my pithecanthrope turned on his heels and decamped without asking for more. Sylva, seeing him run away, stopped in her course. She watched him disappear, with a look more curious than grieved on her face. I felt a distinct urge to break my stick on her back, but I flatter myself on keeping some self-control in all circumstances—or nearly all. I stopped, and let the stick glide along my hand until I could make use of it in the ordinary way: I leaned on it. Sylva had turned round and was eying me. I called her in a commanding voice.

I cannot describe her movement better than by saying that she came crawling. She was walking upright, but sideways like a crab, and her whole body was so full of reticence, so visibly drawn against her will, against her obvious desire to flee, that all my anger dissolved, gave way to amusement and tenderness. She was coming toward me to receive a prospective thrashing, without quite knowing the reason why, like a good little dog who only knows from his master’s voice that there are strokes in the offing.

When she was quite close, I let go of the stick, which dropped to the ground; Sylva gave a hedge sparrow’s chirp, picked it up, carried it away to the house frisking and gamboling, laughing with joy, put it back in its place behind the chest and, running back to meet me, flung herself at me just as I was passing the door with such strength that I stumbled and fell with her onto the carpet, where she hugged and licked me and nibbled my ear. Her body on top of mine was beginning to sway so gently and suggestively that I had to throw her aside so as not to lose, before the uproariously laughing Nanny, all decency together with her respect and my dignity.

And I was wondering, with growing perplexity, by what means it would ever be possible to teach my innocent little vixen, if not a sense of sin, at least a semblance of modesty.

This latter characteristic was indispensable if I hoped to be able some day to invite friends to the house or take Sylva visiting. I imagined with scowling embarrassment one of those overaffectionate displays that Sylva might indulge in, without any warning, amidst a circle of friends. If I were its object, I might put a stop to it quickly enough, but if it was some visitor she took a sudden fancy to?

I confided my apprehensions to Nanny, and we pondered them at length. I don’t know what people will be thinking about Freud in the 1960’s. As for me, I had only just discovered psychoanalysis, as had the rest of the civilized world. The aim of this method is not, of course, to implant complexes in people who don’t suffer from them, but rather to uproot them where they are burgeoning.

Still, we told ourselves that if in Sylva’s case it were possible to provoke the growth of some reasonable inhibitions it would make our life in the future a good deal easier. It was patently obvious that Sylva was absolutely devoid of those dark nooks and crannies in which the human being hides away his impure or odious impulses. If we wanted to turn Sylva quite simply into someone respectable (we were not presumptuous enough to hope we could make a lady of her), we would first of all have to build up against her appetites some of those foolproof impediments which at times no doubt are conducive to neuroses, but without which she would go on behaving with the innocent, savage shamelessness that foiled all efforts to civilize her.

So we both reread the major works of the inspired Viennese. Since they laid down suitable methods for unearthing sexual inhibitions, we were able to hope we might inversely discover some means of injecting them. But to our great regret it appeared that there was only one means to that end: to grow up in society from earliest infancy. Nothing proved applicable to a fox changed into a woman long after puberty. We also read the works of Jung, who ascribes our subconscious life to the existence of ancestral archetypes in our atavistic selves. Unfortunately, as far as Sylva was concerned, there were no ancestors other than foxes. Finally we were forced to conclude that all these explanations of the origin of our inhibitions merely shoved the mystery further away in order to side-step it more effectively.

We, however, were confronted with a human creature in a state as pure as that prevailing on the day after the first mutations, without ancestors and without a social environment, descended among us, as the doctor said, brand-new from its animality.

Chapter 22

I HAD not dared bother Dr. Sullivan again, either by driving over to him or asking him to come and see me. After what he had told me on my last visit, I could only wait for him to give me the first sign.

But he gave none. I was growing vexed with impatience, more and more convinced that I bore some blame. It was all because of my living with Sylva the way I did, I said to myself. Nanny had understood the need for it and did not blame me any more; Dorothy too had pretended to concur, but perhaps it had only been a face-saving device to make her appear broad-minded and hide her jealousy? Sylva’s and my equivocal propinquity had probably pained her after all, wounded her pride. And—perhaps—her unavowed love?

In churning up these conjectures I was also churning up my heart, torn in twain between two ever more irreconcilable sentiments. I was less than ever prepared to abandon Sylva now that she had given the first evidence of her ability to acquire a genuinely human nature. But to give up Dorothy! Her prolonged absence, the obstacles she seemed to put in the way of my desire to see her, aroused, as usually happens, feelings that might otherwise have remained dormant and uncertain.

I wrote her a first letter, couched in terms that were deliberately restrained, and received no reply. A second letter, already less reserved, remained similarly unanswered. I was preparing a third in which, losing all control, I was recklessly about to burn my boats when Dr. Sullivan made an unannounced irruption at Richwick Manor.

There is no other word to describe the way in which he arrived. It was raining, and over his black frock coat the old doctor was wearing an enormous old-fashioned cape which gave him, normally as lean as a furled umbrella in its sheath, the massive shoulders of a stevedore. I was alone; Nanny was upstairs helping Sylva to get undressed. I was reading the papers that had just arrived, or rather skimming through them with half an eye, my mind elsewhere. The door suddenly opened and somebody presented to me a back that I could not identify—in that vast cloak which he was shaking like a wet dog on the tiled floor of the hall. Then he turned around, removing his cloak, and at last I recognized the familiar figure. I jumped to my feet.

“You at last! After all this time! What kept you away?”

The doctor carefully folded his cloak, dry side out, and placed it with the same care over the back of an armchair. Obviously he was giving himself time to catch his breath and assume a calm countenance.

“What weather!” he said at last. “Forgive me. Yes, for coming without warning.”

“You’re always welcome, Doctor, so don’t apologize, but tell me, without further precautions—”

He raised his hand, sitting down in front of me, or rather letting his long body slump into one of the deep and somewhat worn leather armchairs. Then he looked at me and seemed to grope for words. His full lips, under the protuberant nose, were mutely forming words that he could not bring himself to utter. His eyes grew moist. And suddenly he stammered—but it was plain that it was not at all what he had meant to say:

“You must come. I’ve come to fetch you.”

“At this hour?” (Darkness had fallen.) “Is it so serious? What has happened?”

I was already on my feet to get my hat and raincoat. But he stopped me with a gesture, motioned me to sit down.

“No, there’s nothing new. Nothing urgent. But I’m powerless, I no longer know what to do. I’ve no idea whether you can do anything either. Perhaps you can. Perhaps it’ll only make it worse. I don’t know. We must try. What else can be done? It gets worse from day to day.”

This stammering did not enlighten me at all, and at the end of my tether with worry and impatience, I burst out:

“Will you tell me once for all what’s going on, for heaven’s sake!”

He seemed drained of all energy; his long black frock coat seemed to empty itself, to shrink deflated in the hollow of the armchair, while his bony knees stood out high in the tight trousers. His eyes looked at me as if through a rain-blurred window. His big chin moved and I heard, in a sigh of discouragement:

“It’s narcotics, my poor boy.”

“Even when she was still a little girl, I had to keep a close watch on her,” he said a little later, as he was sipping the tea which Mrs. Bumley had brought us—then she had tactfully withdrawn. “Yes, a studious child,” he said, “intelligent, but strangely weak-willed in the face of any temptation. She would guzzle sweets and marzipan in secret, and you’ll remember her at the age of twelve, fat as a goose, a real balloon. After the time of sweets, there came a more dangerous one: a period of dancing, flirting, boating. I could not always be about. You were too young, more’s the pity. There was that tall, handsome Godfrey above all, a brilliant fellow, too brilliant, but with something about his eyes that made me wary—not wary enough, alas! Perhaps I lacked energy.

“Dorothy told me the truth only a few months ago. One evening, lying on their backs, drifting in a punt, he held out his open hand to her: ‘Breathe this.’ She breathed it, and felt unbelievably happy. She has told me everything. She did not love Godfrey. He amused her, intrigued her, certainly dazzled her a little, but she did not love him. Not really. Only who else could have obtained for her the heavenly powder? She did not know where else to get it nor, had she known, would she have dared.

“Nobody understood her marriage, but nobody guessed the wretched reason for it, the impure, secret, squalid reason. Not even I, though I gradually learned appalling things about her husband and the revolting life he led—but not a word about drugs. His sordid death came as no surprise to me. I must confess I even gave a rather scandalous sigh of relief, all the more as Dorothy had never managed to hide from me how unhappy she was. I thought she would come back to me. And I failed to understand her reasons for staying on in London. She had found a fairly good job there but one that couldn’t possibly interest her: secretary to the manager of a brickworks.

“I only learned the truth when she had to go to hospital for the first time. The doctor wrote to me. There are always some risks involved during a cure—fits of raving madness, suicidal mania. I dashed up to London, but I was not allowed to see her. Fortunately everything went well. After the cure I wanted to take her back with me, but she pleaded her work, declared that she could not leave her employer in the lurch. It is a fact that he was full of praise for Dorothy when I went to see him. He had not guessed a thing and naturally I did not tell him. Perhaps I should have done so. He’d have kept an eye on her. But drug addicts are incredibly clever at outwitting surveillance, so probably it would have been no good.

“Anyhow, she started again. A relapse is always more serious. This time, her work suffered. She stayed away for two or three days at a time. So much so that, after her second cure, four years later, she found her place at the brickworks had been filled. In a sudden burst of clearsightedness she wisely decided to come home.”

As he was speaking Dr. Sullivan had remained with his empty cup in his hand, hunched forward, his eyes glued to the Tadjik carpet as if he wanted to engrave its pattern in his memory. He now put the cup down on a side table and turned toward me.

“I had counted so much on you.” He sighed.

I felt guilt-stricken and thought he was accusing me. But no, his disappointment was not caused by me.

“She was fond of you, more than fond—anyway, as much as a drug addict can be. When she was fourteen or fifteen she even had a crush on you. But you were too shy to notice it, and later your youthfulness played against you. Young girls have a weakness for men of a certain maturity, and afterward it was too late, she was in the grip of an exclusive passion which left no room for ordinary love. When she wrote me that she would like to see you again, I had great hopes. So had she perhaps. They lasted for a few weeks. And then… Ah, then…”

He had slumped down again in his armchair.

“I don’t know when she started again. I didn’t notice it at once. And even up to a few days ago I wondered how ever she could get hold of the stuff in a place like Wardley. An envelope in the wastepaper basket with a London postmark and a postbox address enlightened me on that point. I can’t keep her locked up, after all!” he exclaimed, and fell silent.

I was literally stunned. Nothing else can express what I felt as I listened to those revelations. To such a degree that I could not at first unclench my jaws and the silence between us grew too solid to be broken. How long it lasted I don’t know. What was the old man thinking? He remained motionless in the depths of the armchair, with that air of a broken old puppet which only added to the density of the silence. In the end he turned toward me a questioning, faraway gaze that seemed almost surprised at meeting mine. I found nothing to say except: “I’m stunned.”

He raised a weary hand, and his mouth twitched sideways in a grimace that might possibly be construed as a smile. “Quite so, quite so,” he said, just as he would have said to a child apologizing for being stumped by a difficult passage in Lucretius: Don’t get flustered, take your time, it’ll come.

I stammered something like “How could I have guessed…” or “It’s unimaginable…” to which he replied with rejoinders of the same type, such as “Naturally” or “I quite understand.” I too was slumped deep in my armchair, and the two of us must have looked very much like a pair of discarded marionettes after a show. The first clear thought I was eventually able to express was:

“When exactly did the last relapse occur?”

And as I uttered it I became clearly aware of the anxiety that had stealthily been gnawing at me: wasn’t it my doing, after all?

He said, “Let me see, let me see…” but could not manage to remember. However, by dint of checking his reminiscences, it appeared that the date was definitely prior to her last visit but one when Dorothy and I had had that curious conversation which had been first violent, then pathetic. And that very violence, and equally the pathos, were not at all normal for a woman who was so reserved as a rule, sometimes even to the point of being enigmatic. However, I still could not convince myself that I was quite free from blame.

“Deal as you wish with me,” I said. “I’ll do anything you like. I have a deep affection for Dorothy. If you think that marriage…”

At the same time I was thinking: Ah, never mind Sylva! She is nothing yet. The worst that can happen to her is not to become anything. Whereas Dorothy is a human being to be saved, a woman about to destroy herself, partly through your fault perhaps, because you don’t love her enough. Your duty is to love her: it’s probably the only way of rescuing her.

“Six weeks ago I’d have answered yes,” Dr. Sullivan was saying. “Now I’m wondering; and besides, it’s too late, it would be unreasonable to sacrifice the best years of your young life. I did not dare talk to you about it when maybe there was still time. I’m the only one that’s to blame,” he added, as if he had guessed my thoughts.

He had to start twice to heave himself out of his armchair.

“Shall I come with you?” I quickly suggested.

“What an idea, at this time of night! I won’t be home before one in the morning. I’ve only come to tell you honestly how things stand. Come whenever you can. Perhaps if she sees you, if she consents to see you… oh, I don’t know, I don’t know anything any more. But we must try. Yes, don’t delay too long, after all.”

“I’ll be over tomorrow, if I can. But tell me,” I added, “you don’t seem to have a third cure in mind. Why?” The thought had only just struck me.

He uttered a deep sigh and raised his long, lean arms.

“Who knows if it can still do any good?” he muttered. “The trouble with these cures is that they progressively lose their efficacy. Besides, Dorothy would first have to agree, to consent to undergo it. This doesn’t seem to be the case any more. You can’t imagine the state she’s in. It’s a complete collapse. Come and see for yourself. Thank you. I’ll be expecting you.”

Chapter 23

I AM not quite sure that what prevented me from going to Dunstan’s the very next day, as I had almost promised, was really work on the farm. It is a fact that I had some troubles: a sick cow, the beginnings of a fire in a barn right in the fields. But I could not conceal from myself that those successive delays, those successive excuses, brought me a cowardly relief. I was really frightened at the idea of finding Dorothy in the state which her father had left me imagining.

I was consequently at once surprised and reassured, as well as almost disappointed in a way, by the spectacle that awaited me when at last I showed up at the Sullivans’, on the third day. Dorothy was reading quietly, near her father, by the window. She gave me the same welcome to which I had become accustomed—the calm and mysterious smile. She even impressed me as looking better than the last time. But behind her I saw Dr. Sullivan sadly shake his head, as if to warn me: “Don’t you believe it.”

Dorothy asked me for news of my vixen; she knew about the enormous step forward which Sylva had made and seemed quite engrossed by the story of the apples she had recognized in the still life. Then she said, “I’ll go and make some tea.”

No sooner was she out of the room than I exclaimed cheerfully, “Why, she seems to me—”

“Tut, tut,” the doctor interrupted me. His face expressed the same anxious wistfulness it had shown a moment before. “Don’t trust appearances,” he went on. “Just wait an hour or so, till the effect of the drug begins to wear off.”

I gave a start. “Do you mean that at this moment… ?”

He nodded silently, and continued in the same melancholy tone. “I am powerless to prevent her. I can’t go and search her room.”

“But she seems perfectly normal. Are you sure that…?”

I could never manage to finish my questions, so much did a sort of instinctive reticence make me bite back words that seemed to me unutterable in front of a father—though he uttered them himself without false shame.

“The drug produces strange effects,” he said, “and they vary with the day, the hour, like everything that attacks the psyche. During the war I used to know a colonel in the Indian Army who would get drunk to keep going during his bouts of malaria. He never walked so straight as when he was tight. And he would produce metaphysical theories of which he couldn’t have grasped a word in his normal state. At other times, however, after just a few whiskies, he would leave the room tottering and collapse on his bed where he’d sleep like a log for three hours. Dorothy will sometimes pass two days in a semi-coma, and the next day she holds forth as if she were lecturing at the Royal Society. It’s unpredictable. Or else she talks and walks straight like the colonel, as she does today. But that is not a lasting state; in an hour’s time, she’ll either be prostrate or pour forth incredible rubbish for hours on end.”

“Have you reason to believe that she… every day, I mean really every day… that… she is never sober?”

“I can’t watch over her every minute of the day, but I know unfortunately that she’s got to the stage where she’d be even worse if she went without the stuff. It’s a vicious circle. And it can only get worse.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Tell me, and I’ll do it. Can an emotional shock still produce a beneficial effect? I’ll marry her tomorrow if she consents.”

“I am quite aware that you have already proposed to her; she was deeply moved by it, but still honest enough to refuse. I don’t know what to say. You see before you an old man, a poor old doctor completely outstripped by events. Perhaps I’m counting on your youth, yours and hers, for a miracle to happen.” He gave a poor little smile. “You’ve performed one already, why not a second?”

“Unfortunately, it was quite beyond me to perform it. It happened all by itself. Do give me your advice, though. Should I show initiative? Be bold and pressing? Or do you think, on the contrary, that a slow, tactful, tenacious persuasiveness—”

But I was not given time to finish, even less to obtain a reply. We heard Dorothy’s footsteps approaching as she came bringing in the tea.

The doctor had left us alone, on the pretext of a patient’s visit. He had scarcely gone when Dorothy forestalled me before I had time to open my mouth.

“I know my father has told you everything. But I don’t know whether, as a result, I feel more humiliated before you or more relieved. Now you know the lot. I warned you, and I don’t have to use any more arguments to make you see that I am not the sort of woman one marries. No!” she cried, for I was about to interrupt her. “Spare me your solicitude. I’ve not yet fallen so low that it would not wound me without doing me the least good. We don’t love each other. What sort of life do you think we would lead together?”

“And you,” I retorted, “spare me your subterfuges! We don’t love each other, you say? Allow me to consider that I know my own feelings at least a little better than you!”

She shook her head.

“The one you love isn’t me any more. And you’re right!” she said more loudly as I was about to protest. “Yes, a thousand times right! Forget what I once held against your vixen. I’ve thought a great deal about it since. Every woman is Galatea or she is nothing; every man is Pygmalion. Man loves his own creature in woman, a creature he has taken centuries to sculpt. Now that she is alive, he is hoist with his own petard, and so is she. But you’ll have pulled her from the clay with your own hands! She’ll become a woman, she’ll become a human being, whereas I… I, on the contrary…”

She broke off, as if she had tripped up. She had gone pale. I rose, threw myself at her knees, tried to take her in my arms, saying:

“I won’t let you… I’ll get you out of it… I’ll die if I don’t!”

But she dodged me with a sideways movement of her body, slipped out of the armchair and went to lean against the mantelpiece. I was left kneeling like a fool, while she gazed at me without irony, without severity either, but with a sort of loftiness that seemed to me a little wild-eyed.

“And how do you know I want to get out of it? What do you know of anything? Poor child. You know nothing at all. Nor does anybody. Who listens to us, anyway? Oh, you foolish Pygmalions!” she cried and threw out her arm straight before her so that she suddenly resembled her father in his preacher’s mood. She must have seen my surprise, my alarm. She motioned with her hand. “Don’t take any notice. You ought to go…” She was stammering. “If you… if you don’t go… you’ll… you’ll be sorry. Don’t listen,” she begged. “Please, I’m asking you,” and I saw that her body was quivering like that of a restive horse held reined in at the starting line. “I’ll talk an awful lot of drivel. Don’t wait, go! Are you deaf or what?”

But I was so fascinated that I could neither speak nor budge. Her voice became jerky, convulsive.

“Oh! I don’t care a damn, after all! Listen if you like! What does it matter? I’m not asking your opinion. Who ever asked for ours? You stupid sorcerers’ apprentices! Did we ask for anything? We were happy as females. What business had we with brains? The mind is a nuisance. It only spoils one’s pleasure and makes pain unbearable. What did we need? To be kept safe and warm, to enjoy our pleasures and to procreate. But no! That wasn’t enough. We had to start thinking, too. A fat lot further that got us! When the heart has a mind, it has to labor, suffer, defend itself. Against whom? The mind. And here I’m getting away from it, and you say you won’t let me!

“Well, I’m damned if I’ll let you prevent me! Go away. I stay where I am. I won’t be caught again. I won’t let anyone force me to my knees and make me knock my head against the cold stone of the world’s absurdity. That’s your lookout, your skull is thicker, sounder—and you were determined to rebel. But what about us, with our poor thin skulls? Bumps, that’s all. And they hurt. A great success! Oh, I too thought for a long time that the mind was superior to all. But what good has it done me? What good has all I’ve ever learned done me? No good at all, or as good as none. As soon as a thing was really important, phut! There was nobody, no thought, no nothing. Actually that’s the very sign, isn’t it, by which we recognize that a thing is important! Dare you say it isn’t?

“And what am I to do with a mind that fades out whenever I’m pressed to act? With a mill that turns around and around in a vacuum? That grinds nothing but crazy desires and useless remorse? Absurd difficulties. Imaginary fears. And what else could it grind, what other flour? Well, I’m no longer hungry. I’ve had my fill. I want to be left alone to sleep. I’ve found my home, my dump, my barrel. Don’t try to drive me out of it. Or would you rather have me pray myself silly in the gloom of churches, like so many scared old hens? If I have to choose a Nirvana… I understand you: love! Yes. That is a refuge too. To belong to a man entirely, and no more thinking! No more terror before the silence of the stars. No wonder they all rush into it! But at the bottom of love there is still something: suffering. And consequently a mind. And therefore muddle. A rotten remedy! I’ll have no more of it. I want oblivion, that’s all. Oblivion! Oblivion!” she cried crescendo.

She had reeled off this nonsense at such speed that I had not been able to get a word in edgeways. As she caught her breath, I tried to dam this flood with a fierce “Listen to me!” as one hurls a stick between the legs of a bolting horse. But she shouted an even louder “Shut up!” which silenced me once more. And suddenly I was a little horrified to notice a dribble of foaming saliva at the corner of her mouth.

“I’m talking like a madwoman, aren’t I?” she rapped out, as if she had read my thoughts. “And why do you think that princesses drink till they roll under the table when they’re all alone at the end of the day? Do you want to see other women as crazy as me? I’ll show you thousands of them, tens of thousands, all over England, if you like! Yes, I know, I know, I’m a bit different, I go one better, I’m destroying myself, but what if that suits me? Who is to stop me, and by what right? Shut up!” she rapped, and then abruptly: “I’m talking, talking, of course I’m talking too much.

“Don’t pay any attention,” she repeated in a suddenly cracked voice, as if she had broken it with too much shouting or as if there had suddenly dropped on her an insuperable fatigue. “All right, I know I may be saying a lot of rubbish along with the rest, it’s on account of the stuff, it’s always like that toward the end before it wears off. Don’t worry, I have to talk, I can’t stop myself talking, a sort of verbal fever,” she murmured. “Oh, I’m out of breath, I can’t go on any more. Be a pet, open the drawer over there, no, in the small table, behind the screen. Yes. There’s a snuffbox in it. Of old china. That’s it. Give it to me. Hurry up. What?”

I had said nothing, but I had opened the snuffbox and was staring at the white powder with disgust, with positive execration. I went over to the window and opened it.

“What are you doing?” she screamed, and hurled herself upon me.

But I had already tossed the snuffbox out into the garden, and all that remained of the powder was a cloud of dust carried away by the wind.

It was such a brutal attack that I fell against a stool, stumbled, sprawled headlong under a storm of shouts. I was struck, trampled, a heel dug into my cheek. I tried to get up, shielding my face behind my crooked arms, and received such a violent blow in the chest that I lost my balance again, caught myself up at the armrest of a settee, at last managed to get to my feet and fled under an avalanche of all kinds of objects and foul abuse. I no longer know how I got to my carriage. I was running away, not from cowardice, but from a kind of unsurmountable horror, a sacred revolt. On the road, I was still shaking in every limb as I staunched the blood on my wounded face.

Chapter 24

BY the time I got home I was somewhat calmer, and also a little ashamed of my panic-stricken flight. So that was all I had been able to accomplish. That was the sum total of all my boastful promises to Dr. Sullivan. I locked myself in my study in order to think without being disturbed, to try to see things straight.

I did succeed, in a way, but there was scant comfort in my conclusion. For I saw myself at last as I was: spread-eagled and torn between Sylva and Dorothy, between an animal whom I wanted to change into a woman and a woman who wanted to change back into a beast. You’ve run away like a coward, I told myself. Tomorrow you’ll go back. You won’t give up under any pretext. You’ll fight as long as necessary, until you’ve saved her from herself. Perhaps you’ve seen the worst, and in any event you know now what to expect. A modicum of courage should be enough to help you overcome your revulsion. I avoided saying: a modicum of love.

Those were fine resolutions. Perhaps I would have kept them, too. But the next day a short and distressed note from Dr. Sullivan informed me that Dorothy had returned to London.

I reproached myself bitterly. Wasn’t I to blame once again for this departure? What an idiot I had been to throw all her supplies of the drug out of the window. A handsome, gallant, virtuous and romantic gesture! As if the only possible result wasn’t to oblige Dorothy to procure more at all cost, without delay… Perhaps she had also run away from the awful self-portrait she had shown me.

For the time being there was no question of my going after her to London. Summer was approaching, although somewhat timidly as yet, haymaking was already in full swing, wheat and barley would soon require my full time, the harvester had to be overhauled, arrangements made with the neighbors for the threshing machine, not to mention the normal day-to-day problems.

To be frank, this flight also brought me a grim deliverance. I was prevented, at least for the one season, from having to fulfill a painful, heavy duty. What better excuse than one’s helplessness? And by the same stroke I could devote myself once more to my little vixen, without feeling guilty, without accusing myself of neglect or ulterior motives…

Actually, I had not for a single day dropped my concern for her. We hoped, Nanny and I, that we were well rid of the gorilla. I had ordered the farmer to loose the dogs as soon as he showed up. They were not vicious but their physiognomy inspired respect. Jeremy Hull was seen prowling about two or three times more, but each time he must have fled instantly.

During those few weeks I had kept Sylva, I must confess, more or less locked up in the house. The forest stroll had turned out too badly to encourage me to try new experiments. Moreover, Sylva at home no longer showed the animal boredom that had once made her yawn to distraction. Her games were more varied. The objects no longer represented mere quarry, Sylva began to have some intelligent relationships with them. It amused her less to scatter the contents of the needlework box; instead she tried to add to it things that did not belong there—my tooth paste or my cigars, for instance—which incidentally did not improve Nanny’s mood. Sylva also began to rummage in the cupboards or the sideboard, not without causing many a catastrophe. Occasionally some utensil would intrigue her for a long while and she would seek to use it for all sorts of purposes. Nevertheless, we did not restrain her, for this increase in her curiosity for “things” which her mind was obviously beginning to grasp as “objects” (and such a sudden and swift increase, at that) seemed to us extremely promising.

And, indeed, she greatly surprised us one day in this connection: the fancy took her to fashion an object herself! Nanny and I had to admit it, Sylva had discovered the notion of the tool. Oh, I don’t want to exaggerate. It was still a very rudimentary, very imperfect tool, and put to a rather comical use. But the idea of a tool was there all right.

We had noticed for some time that she was collecting a kind of hoard, as is common with many children and a few animals—magpies, squirrels, polecats. A hoard made up of various rubbish such as corks, bits of bark, old nails, scraps of silver paper. One fine morning we caught her before the cheval glass combing her hair with a very peculiar-looking instrument. At a closer glance, it turned out to be the backbone of a lemon sole, probably pinched from the garbage can, and she had covered the half of it which she was holding in her fingers with a folded piece of cardboard. However silly and imperfect this implement was, it nevertheless testified to a convergence of observation and reflection that was very much above the mind of a fox or even an ape. The mere idea of converting a fishbone for use as a comb was an “invention” that required certain mental qualities, whose emergence in Sylva, as can be imagined, excited us to a high degree.

Nor did she stop there. After thus discovering the tool, she discovered the magic object. Here too I shall try not to exaggerate. According to Dr. Sullivan, it was an extraordinary jump, a jump of tens of thousands of years and, he said, its having happened without our help was due to a quite extraordinary chance. That may be so. Personally I consider that such a chance, in some form or other, was bound to happen some day, and it was unlikely that it should fail to bear fruit in a mind on the march such as Sylva’s. But let others be the judge.

We generally kept Sylva away from the garden, which was too vast to be easily and effectively fenced in; but we did not, for all that, deprive her of fresh air and exercise or of the rustic pleasures that appealed to her nature. The farmyard is extremely large and surrounded by buildings on all sides, and Sylva would spend long hours there whenever the weather was fine, amidst the chickens, ducks, turkeys and rabbits.

The first few times she had been frightened of the dogs. Even though they were chained up, a bark or a growl was enough to put her to flight. She would go and cower behind some barrels or a cart, and stay there shaking for a long time. One day, however, she lost her fear in rather strange circumstances.

I have said that the two dogs—strong, brawny mastiffs—though tied up all day and ferocious-looking, were actually the most harmless creatures alive. I could not have borne to keep vicious ones about. They were only dangerous to nightly prowlers carrying a sack or a stick. Although they would shake their chains with alarming fervor, they were in fact merely impatient to play; and as soon as they were set free, whoever was about had to beware of one thing only, and that was the too exuberant tokens of their gratitude.

Whenever they saw Sylva playing and running around amid the poultry, they just could not keep still. She had a way of scaring the whole barnyard and transforming it into a deafening aviary of squawks and snowy down that made them marvel with excitement. Their delight knew no bounds. I can’t say the same of the farmer and his folk. They would glare at this daily pandemonium with every sign of a most sullen disapproval. They claimed that if it went on, Sylva would cause the hens to stop laying, make the turkeys succumb to blood pressure, and jeopardize the whole poultry breeding.

“She’ll turn all your fowl into walking skeletons, the poor thing will,” they said, for they blamed not the “backward” child but me—and my unjustifiable leniency which, in their eyes, was past comprehension.

The fact was that Sylva was not content to chase and scare birds and rabbits. Now and then she would grab hold of one. She would suddenly swoop on a fowl with such force that anybody else would have had bruised elbows and knees. Her astonishing litheness spared her such consequences. For a few seconds there would be a turmoil of feathers, shrill squawks and flapping wings, then she would jump to her feet with her quarry clasped against her and dart off to some shed into which she would disappear. Later the corpse of her victim would be found there, showing the symbolic tooth marks of an animal that kills without hunger.

(In the end I found a remedy for these murders by forcing Sylva to eat the birds she had killed. I would wait until she had finished her ordinary meal, which was always very abundant, and under the threat of the stick and despite her heaving stomach she then had to devour her victim from head to tail. With the result that she quite soon stopped killing birds and rabbits and was content to keep them tightly clasped in her arms for a long moment. This produced an unexpected result: prompted by this gesture of motherly tenderness, she took an affectionate liking to these animals, and instead of killing them began to rock them as a child rocks its teddy bear.)

Now on that particular day, while the farmyard was echoing with frightened clucking, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose by shaking his chain. Sylva, seeing him rush up to her, mingled her shrieks with those of the fowl and tried to run away. Bumped into a rabbit as panic-stricken as herself. Stumbled and fell flat against a chopping block. Tried to retrieve herself by catching hold of an object that protruded over the rim of the block. This object was a long, two-pronged boring bit, used to drill holes in barrels. Sylva straightened up, holding it tight with all the strength that her terror gave her, as if seizing her last chance. Whereupon she saw the dog before her, yelping with fright, his tail between his legs, decamping so fast that the soles of his feet kept kicking his hindquarters. Sylva had not seen the volley of stones with which one of the farm boys had pelted the animal in order to scare it away from her, so a strange confusion must have occurred in her little head. A strange correlation between this reversal of the situation, the headlong flight and the object to which she had clung like a drowning man and which she was still clutching for dear life.

At all events when, after remaining trembling and rooted to the spot for quite a time, she saw the dog, who had first sheltered behind a barrel and was now, with his courage returning, coming back toward her, shyly wagging an anxious tail, Sylva stopped clutching the saving bit with both hands and, instead, brandished it in front of her. The dog stopped irresolutely. When he started moving again, it was with hanging head and sidling body, in the time-honored attitude of dogs uncertain of the welcome they will get. Sylva, hanging onto her bit, did not budge. The dog took the last steps almost on his belly. And stayed there at Sylva’s feet, waiting to be punished or fondled at her choice.

When she bent down he rolled over on his back, his legs limply bent, offering his defenseless underside to her blows. Sylva lowered the hand that was holding the bit and placed the prongs on the frail, disarmed belly, and thus they remained for a long moment, like St. George and his dragon, in the silence of the reassured farmyard, where rabbits and feathered fowl had distractedly returned to their occupations.

Sylva straightened up at last and the dog immediately got to his feet, licked her hand with a brief flick of his tongue as if hurriedly discharging a duty, and threw himself among the chickens and turkeys with joyous barks, turning around toward Sylva as if to say: “Coming?” And indeed Sylva ran after him and, between the two of them, they had soon transformed the yard once more into a flying merry-go-around, such as it had never been before. And suddenly, amidst the uproar, I saw Sylva laugh.

It was the first time, and it was a laugh if you cared to call it that, a yapping less close to laughter than to a cry. Her mouth was wide open, not so much in width as in height, and what came cascading out of it might just as well have been screams of fright. Yet there was no doubt that she was laughing, and even violently. So much so that (yielding once more to the deceptive ease of ingenious explanations) I could not help working out new theories on the nature of laughter.

According to a certain Irish philosopher whom the French have annexed and whose name is Bergson, laughter is supposed to be a social defense against the individual’s possible degradation to the level of an automaton: “Something mechanical clapped onto something alive.” I had always considered that this was indeed probable but insufficient, since it leaves out of account the very form of laughter, that strange eruption of spasmodic gasps. Another Frenchman who also had a great fancy for what are called “rational” systems and concepts, Monsieur Valery—a rather distinguished gentleman with the face of an old woman furrowed with a thousand wrinkles, who came to talk to us at the Athenaeum about the death of civilizations some two or three years ago—explains in one of his books that laughter is a refusal to think, that the soul gets rid of a picture which seems to it inferior to the dignity of its own function, just as the stomach gets rid of things for which it won’t bear the responsibility, and by the same means of a brutal convulsion.

This certainly accounts for the convulsion but is far from comprising all the occasions that make us laugh. Whereas, when I witnessed Sylva in the throes of her first outburst, still so close to fright, I could see very well that it had sprung from that very fright which had suddenly been transformed into joy: a needless alarm that frees itself in this reflex, in this brutal, jolting release from stress which, in a great burst of elation, puts the nerves, frozen with fear, back into service—as a dog warms himself by shivering when coming out of the water.

As a matter of fact I wrote on this point to Valery, who did not answer, and to Bergson, who was good enough to reply. He objected that in our civilized societies fright as a rule is absent from the causes that make us laugh. That did not seem convincing to me: we no longer have hair on our bodies either, but we still have goose flesh! Similarly, we continue to laugh in any situation which reminds us, if only symbolically or by dim recollection, of atavistic terrors that suddenly give way.

Bergson replied again, this time with a little sharpness in his terms, that according to my theory animals ought to laugh for the same reasons. This last objection impressed me all the more, as the very first laugh Sylva had given had also struck me as a definitely human manifestation. Fright, joy and “brutal convulsion” must therefore be components of a system—even though very primitive—of thought. I promised myself that I would think about it; but my natural mistrust of ideas (and of other people’s more especially) or my laziness in this respect often distracts me from keeping this kind of promise, and that is what happened in this case.

When Sylva and Baron (for that was the dog’s name) had turned the farmyard upside down together, I considered it time to step in. I called the mastiff, took him back to his chain, ordered him to be calm and silent. Sylva had followed us. I saw that she had not let go of the swallow-tailed bit. She sat down with crossed legs close to the dog, who in turn sat down near her. And for the rest of the morning they continued to watch together, untiringly, the hustle and bustle on the farm. From time to time, Baron turned toward Sylva and gave her face a big lick with his tongue; Sylva let him and, from that day onward, they became a pair of inseparable friends.

At dinner, Sylva persisted in keeping closely gripped in her right hand what must be called her lucky charm. This obstinacy put the dignity of her table manners to a severe test. She spilled her soup and, unable to cut her meat singlehanded, tried to seize it with her fingers. Nanny had to cut it for her as for a baby.

That night we noticed that she had gone to bed with her talisman half stuffed under the pillow. Mrs. Bumley, who is a Papist, suggested replacing it by a crucifix of the same size. If she wants to believe in the power of objects, she said, let us at least encourage her to believe in a worthy symbol which might later come to mean something to her. But in the morning Sylva flung the crucifix away in a temper; and we had to restore to her an object that was no doubt ludicrous but all the more irreplaceable for having been invested by herself with those imaginary powers.

Chapter 25

EVEN if I wished to weary the reader by recounting every day in detail, I should not be able to do so. Few indeed were the days that were marked by a novelty sufficiently striking to be remembered, such as the discovery of an apple on a painting, the magic power of an iron bit. These were rare islands scattered on an ocean of uniform habits, and as a rule nothing heralded them from afar although I patiently kept my field glass fixed.

Of course each day brought some imperceptible progress, the sum total of which after a certain while might seem appreciable; but bedmaking, shoe shining, mashing potatoes or shaking out the salad continued to form part of her training rather than of education proper. The only kinds of progress that mattered were those subtler ones that left a mark on her nature, those that made her more human, removed her further from animality, and this type of progress always occurred in the form of an unforeseen leap, a leap which, seen from the outside, sometimes seemed quite dazzling.

What most surprised me was that this leap did not appear to happen in the very field where it seemed to me one would have been entitled to expect it first: that of speech. For though her vocabulary increased, and even quite considerably, it only increased in quantity. There would sometimes be a running fire of questions and answers, but only if they kept to an absolutely practical and down-to-earth level. Any abstract idea still seemed to be quite inaccessible to her. As soon as one overstepped these limits, she fell silent, grew indifferent, staring straight in front of her with those curious, almond-shaped eyes that assumed their catlike fixity.

There was only one domain in which a certain capacity for abstract thought seemed to develop in her mind, and that was the visual one. It had already been the sight of herself in the mirror that had given her the first shock, the first fatal wrench: the one that severs us from the rest of things and makes of every human being a solitary monad. Later she had recognized various fruits in a still life. Since then she had taken pleasure in searching for them all over the place: in front of anything round—a ball, a skein of wool, even a curtain ring or an egg—and also before a shadow, a stain on the wall. She would say, “An apple!” or else, “A cherry!” (according to the size) and point at the stain or the object with obvious satisfaction.

Nanny gave proof of untiring patience and showed her all kinds of pictures, although she failed most of the time. Sylva recognized only a few objects, the most usual ones or those of the simplest shape, such as a chair, a saucepan. She never recognized a living being.

And when she did recognize the picture of an animal for the first time, her reaction was so surprising that we were hesitant at first to guess its true origin. It was only a word, a phrase of Sylva’s, which I shall relate presently, that put us on the right track and made us realize that what had so far prevented her from identifying a man or a beast in a picture was their immobility. For a fox, a living creature is not an object but movement accompanied by smell. With the result that when she did recognize a dog’s likeness that lacked both one and the other, it was due, quite paradoxically, to its very immobility; and that is why this recognition produced a shock of such violence in her that she almost had a nervous breakdown. For the dog looked like Baron, and Baron meanwhile had died.

He had died in a stupid way: by strangling himself with his chain. I suppose that during the night he must have caught a rat between his paws and, turning around in circles to prevent it from escaping, had suddenly found himself choking and by dint of struggling had strangled himself in the end. He had probably not even been able to bark, for nobody had heard him. And the other dog must have been asleep. It was Sylva, come to greet her friend as she did every morning, who had found him stiff against the wall, with lolling tongue, and dead for several hours.

She had not called out, but Fanny saw her from her window trying over and over again to put the dog upright on his legs. Fanny gave us the warning and we arrived at a run. I uncoiled the chain and sounded the dog’s chest to see if there was anything still to be done. But the dog unfortunately was rigid and spread a sickly smell which was not yet the smell of putrefaction but a mixture of cold, stale fur and flesh.

Nanny wanted to pull Sylva away, but she resisted obdurately—no visible sign of emotion or grief, but simply a kind of vegetable stubbornness, an obstinate inertia. She wanted to stay there, it seemed, and that was all. I went to fetch a farm hand, and together we carried Baron away in a piece of canvas to bury him. And as was to be feared, Sylva followed us in silence, close on our heels.

Were we going to dig the grave in front of her? In the ensuing indecision I did what one usually does: put it off till a later moment. We left Baron at the foot of a tree. I was hoping that Sylva, so easily distracted, might eventually forget about him. But for more than an hour she kept up her pathetic efforts to put him on his legs again. In the end I made up my mind. I went back with the farm boy and dug the hole. We put Baron in the bottom of it. Sylva looked on without saying anything.

Her eyes were slit and fixed.

I wondered what she would do when we threw in the earth. She did not protest. She remained there, motionless, during the whole operation and when it was over, she let herself be taken away, this time unresistingly. She lunched as usual and with a healthy appetite.

But in the afternoon, giving the watchful Nanny the slip, she disappeared; and we found her where we went without the least hesitation: at the dog’s grave. She had already removed almost all the earth. She did nothing to prevent my putting it back, while Nanny clasped her to her breast and kissed her. She watched me finish with a kind of motionless and absorbed attention.

Once again she let herself be taken away quietly, and at home she played as usual, bolted down her dinner and, no sooner put to bed, went to sleep. In the morning, she went to fetch the dog where she normally found it, tied up in the yard. We had followed her. At first she seemed surprised at finding the chain abandoned, sadly sprawling on the ground. We then saw her move toward the spinney behind the outhouses, where we had buried her friend. Nanny wanted to run there, but I held her back. It seemed to me that we ought to let Sylva go to the very end of her discoveries.

When we joined her a little later, she had indeed unearthed the dog but had not touched it. After a day underground, it looked rather atrocious; attacked by ants, moles and carrion beetles, it already resembled an old, worn, moth-eaten goatskin, stained moreover with bloody excretions. The smell was beginning to be almost unbearable. Sylva looked at the carrion with impressive immobility. I walked up to her, put my arm around her, said gently:

“You see, he is dead.”

Since I had let her go so far, I thought I must also teach her the word. I did not clearly think at that moment that the experience of death is essential to the formation of the human mind; let us say that I had a more or less conscious inkling of it. Sylva did not take her eyes off her unfortunate playmate. She began to tremble, very faintly but incessantly. It was rather like a long, interminable shiver. I hugged her closely against me. At last she asked, with a sort of difficulty, as if she found it hard to make use of speech:

“No more… play…?”

I said with as much gentleness as I could command, “No, my little Sylva. Poor Baron no more play.”

Sylva shuddered even more intensely. And then she wrenched her eyes from the pitiful body and rested them on me. It was not a questioning look. It was more like a keen, curiously sharp scrutiny. Like a deep meditation on the meaning of the human face. I let her look at me, without saying anything, not daring either quite to smile or to show too grave, too sad a face. I returned her gaze with tenderness, but she wasn’t looking at my eyes. It was my nose, my lips, my chin. And in the end she asked, but her voice was flat and toneless:

“Bonny too, no more play?”

I burst into subdued laughter, soft rather than loud, a laugh just meant to banish this quaint fear.

“Why no, Bonny will still play. Bonny isn’t dead! He is very well. He will play with Sylva every day!”

Most unexpectedly, this answer seemed to make her cross. She jerked out of my arms as if to stand aloof. She repeated, more imperatively:

“Bonny too, no more play?”

I believed at first, however astonishing it may seem, that she meant to order me to mourn for her friend. Yes, for a moment I thought that the idea of playing when Baron was dead seemed to her revolting. It was obviously a stupid thought, when applied to a little soul still so close to an animal. But on the spur of the moment I answered:

“Not at once, of course. You are right.”

With even greater surprise I saw her stamping her foot with a movement of childish impatience—the exasperated movement of a child whom the grownups refuse to understand. And her whole face twisted with irritation but at the same time was marked with such anguish, such torment, perhaps such terror, that when for the third time she almost shouted, and her voice broke: “Bonny too, no more play?” I understood at last, understood with poignant certainty that what she wanted to know was whether some day, some day like Baron, some day “Bonny too” would play no more, nevermore.

At the stage we had reached, I could hardly back out. Nanny was making frantic signs, her eyes imploring, for she had understood as well as I, and her sagging cheeks were quivering with distress. But I shook my head. Come on, I thought, some courage! And I said as quietly as possible, as untragically and unemotionally as possible:

“Yes, Bonny too, some day… but a long, long time ahead! So long it’s not worth thinking about,” I added quickly as I saw Sylva’s eyes widen.

I was not having any illusions about the effectiveness of this “long time” which there was so little chance she could understand. And besides, there can be no possible softening for a revelation like this. It has to be received, accepted and digested in its cruel totality.

Sylva opened her mouth at first. She opened it wider and wider and suddenly, nervously, she laughed—but with that laugh which I have already described as more like fright. And then the laughter disappeared and only the fright remained. And even so great a fright that for a moment she gasped for breath, like a newborn baby.

When at last she recovered her breath, I thought that—still like a baby—she would start to scream. And she did scream, but she was screaming words, an incessant “Don’t want! Don’t want!” with such agonized grimaces that her sweet, fresh, triangular face assumed a simian ugliness, all crinkled and crimson. She was screaming and stamping—and then abruptly she stopped. She passed her forearm upward over her face, which had suddenly too gone limp and pale—so limp and colorless that for a moment I was afraid she might swoon. She passed her arm twice or three times, sweeping her delicate, blenching fox-face and brushing back the red locks that were falling over her eyes—eyes alive with panic, fixing me intently as if I too was going to die there, at her feet, like a dog.

That at least was what I thought—what I thought she dreaded at that moment. But her thoughts, what must henceforth be called her thoughts, now that they were on the move, were ravaging her little fox-brain with such speed that they had already reached the conclusions when I still thought they were all mixed up, when I still supposed them to be just about to be born in rending pain. So she brushed back the rebellious red wisp with her arm for the last time and in an indescribable voice, a murmuring, broken, hardly intelligible voice, she said as if in a sigh, while her eyes at the same time grew dim, “And Sylva… ?”

Chapter 26

I CANNOT continue this story without a certain emotion. Even if, at the second when Sylva uttered her name, and in uttering it understood, realized that she must die; even if in that cruel, fascinating second I had not been seized by the indubitable, coruscating feeling that she had just undergone a second metamorphosis, less miraculous perhaps on the face of it than her physical transformation, but so much more fraught with consequences, with deep-scarring stigmata; even if I had not told myself that at that moment, at that very second, there before me, she stood transfigured for the second time, that she was shedding forever her unconscious, carefree and happy foxish nature to take the first frightened steps into the shadowy sphere, the tragic, doomed, nocturnal, boundless, cursed and sublime sphere of man’s revolted questioning of his gods; even if this illumination had not burst upon my brain at the very second when that of her own perishable and incomprehensible condition burst upon hers—even if I had thaught of none of this on the spur of the moment, Sylva’s behavior would have forced these thoughts upon me without delay. For I may really say that at that second, from that second onward, everything changed forever.

She had murmured, “And Sylva… ?” and I had not dared reply.

Did she even expect an answer? Wasn’t her question an answer in itself? She said, “And Sylva… ?” and looked at Nanny. Looking at her rather than at me, she sensed, she guessed that she would encounter a weaker defense.

And indeed, before that look in her eyes poor Nanny weakened; she could not hide her commotion and her pain. She held out her arms to Sylva with dismayed pity and affection. But far from running to her, the young girl jumped backward. She stared from one to the other of us with something like hatred. Her mouth opened, but she did not know any words of abuse. So she spun around and fled.

She did not go far. She stopped abruptly as if dazed, as if she had come up so hard against the sky, the horizon, that she had almost bumped her head against them. She passed her forearm over her brow, turned away, ran off again, through the orchard; this time she really collided with a young apple tree and slumped down like a bird stunned by a windowpane, got up again almost immediately, darted off in a third direction where thick dogwood shrubs hedged in the orchard, ran straight into them head on, dived into them like a ball, swung around among the twigs and once more collapsed in a heap. She gathered herself up slowly, without rising to her feet. And at last renouncing these aimless escapes, she remained in her shelter, huddled and motionless, like a sick hare.

Nanny wanted to run to her but once more I restrained her. The ordeal through which Sylva was passing was not of those that another can share. On the contrary, I motioned her to follow me and we walked away. From the upper story of the manor one could see the hedge down below where Sylva cowered. We ourselves stayed behind a window, in the linen room, keeping an anxious watch on her. Nanny kept blowing her nose, although with such studied discretion that it would have made me laugh at any other time. But I did not feel at all like laughing. Night was falling lazily. I began to be afraid: such immobility! Considering how long it lasted, might it not be that she had fainted? Just then—due to the cold, perhaps—we saw Sylva stir. She dragged herself out of the bush, got up, seemed to waver for a long time. Then, to our relief—Nanny was squeezing my arm till it hurt—she came tottering back toward the house, in the misty twilight.

We ran down to the living room to welcome her. Had we been wrong to switch on the light? She did not come in. We saw her figure pass outside the window and turn toward the farm. I motioned to Nanny to stay where she was and crossed the hall. When I got outside, Sylva was standing before the shadowy archway that leads to the inner courtyard; she seemed to be waiting, as if she found herself facing not an archway but an impassable wall. Did she see me? Or was it some noise, the chain shaken by the surviving mastiff, a cackling goose, the cluck of a hen? Was this familiar sound more than she could bear in the state she was in? I saw the motionless figure come to life, glide suddenly toward the front of the building, streak like a silent ghost along the wall with its shaky shutters and, just as soundlessly, disappear all of a sudden, as if swallowed up. The stable door, no doubt!

I dashed through it after her. The two horses and the donkey stirred nervously in the solid darkness. It took me a few seconds to accustom my eyes. In the corner formed by one wall and the tool shed I thought I could make out a squatting shape. From close by it turned out to be a saddle on a block. I searched for Sylva in vain; she must have slipped out by the front. Where could I trace her now?

I turned back to the house. Nanny was no longer in the drawing room. I called her. I could hear footsteps in the corridor upstairs. They fell into a run, so that I ran too, bounding up the stairs. The somewhat winding corridor branches off on either side. I stood and listened: no further sound. Instinctively I turned to the left where our rooms were. The door to Sylva’s stood open. Inside, Mrs. Bumley was standing all alone, before the bed, with a numbed look. The pillow was lying across the bed, its bottom corner a little uplifted, as if someone had been rummaging under it. As she heard me come in, Nanny turned her head.

“She has gone, with her two-pronged bit.”

While I was searching the stable Nanny had heard the front door open and close again. She had first thought that it was my return, but the lightly mounting steps on the stairs, their nimble swiftness, could not be mistaken. She had immediately hurried upstairs, but what with her old legs, you see, and her tired heart… On the upper floor in the corridor not a soul, nor in Sylva’s room. The pillow in disarray. Nanny had then run toward the back staircase, the one that leads down to the pantry, just in time to hear down there a soft, patter of steps, a door slamming. She had dashed to the small bull’s-eye window, and in the intermingled glow of the rising moon and the fading twilight she had seen a slender silhouette run away in the direction of the woods.

What was she to do? Nanny could not dream of pursuing her. She had slowly gone back to the room. And suddenly, goodness knows why, had thought of that precious bit. When I arrived she had just made sure it was not in its usual place, under the pillow.

What could I do? I wondered in my turn. I thought I understood the last attempt, the last hope of this quite new soul against the ominous destiny in which she found herself caught. Just as a despairing old man seeks in his childhood memories a vain remedy for his decrepitude, so my little vixen, with the help of her swallow-tailed sheet anchor, was fleeing from death toward her forest of the perennial present, toward the impossible refuge of her lost unconscious. What could I do? I kept repeating to myself.

At any rate, it was too late for an organized search. And where was one to look for her? In Jeremy’s shack? The thought struck me suddenly, brutally, in an upsurge of hate and fury. And for a moment I pictured myself and the farmer’s son saddling the two horses, riding through the forest by torchlight, trampling the gorilla under the stallion’s hoofs, and carrying my damsel off on my crupper with savage joy. This imaginary ride soothed my nerves, I overcame my fit of furious jealousy, and with returning calm recovered my feelings of tenderness. Jeremy? Oh, let her, I thought, let her for the last time, if she wants to and is still able to, find with him the candid young animal joys that have been spoiled forever. Grant her this last favor—a last feast for the little vixen in her state of innocence, a last blaze of sinless pleasure.

We went to bed early and I spent a very bad night.

As usual in the case of insomnia, I fell at daybreak into such a heavy sleep that I could not tear myself out of it. Yet somebody was trying to wake me. I felt that it was being done as gently as possible. But as is also usual with those belated slumbers, I could not manage to open an eye without at once closing it again, pulled down to the depths by an enormous, nauseous hand. Gradually, however, I extricated myself from this sticky slime. When I had at last recovered my wits completely, I found myself in Sylva’s arms. She had come back! Shock, joy, relief and gratitude made me sit up straight with a jerk.

A weight against my chest pushed me back toward the pillow. Sylva was holding me in her arms but her head weighed on my breast. She was not asleep. A hand was kneading my shoulder with a kind of nervous tenderness. I heard her sniff softly. I hoisted myself up as best I could. I took her head in my hands, lifted it, turned her pointed face toward mine.

The look in her eyes!

It was unrecognizable, and I experienced such surprise, such a commotion rather, such deep and almost rapturous excitement that it can only be called a revelation. Hitherto I had seen quite well that Sylva’s gaze, her narrow, fixed eyes gleaming with mineral brilliance, had always hovered on the surface, never had any background. The eyes fastened on things with a kind of sharp grip which yet remained vague and distant, and they would detach themselves in the same way, without having really weighed them, questioned them.

Where have I read that there are two kinds of women’s eyes: those that look at you and those that let themselves be looked at? There is a third kind: the look of the feline’s eye, which does not offer itself but takes, never touching, never lingering, never caressing. Two attentive emeralds glowing with an icy fire. I realized that in her most affectionate, intimate moments, those most laden with warm curiosity, Sylva had never ceased to have those eyes, eyes behind which things might perhaps happen, but in deep darkness, without ever reaching the surface.

Whereas now—whereas the eyes now resting on mine! They were no longer eyes that only saw, they penetrated, bored into mine, as if they, in turn, would have liked to discover an answer, a secret. I had actually seen that look in them once before, two months ago, when she had recognized herself in the mirror, but it was a look of such short duration, so quickly averted, forgetful, forgotten… And even then it had not reached this intensity, the deep concentration, the pathetic introspection that it presented at this moment as it rested on me with such rapt attention, brimming over with feelings of such heaviness.

I was pressing her face between my hands. I was saying, “You’ve come back.” I do not know whether she could understand what lay behind those softly spoken words, if she could guess or feel all the tenderness, the gratitude, the sadness, joy and sweetness that they contained. She did not answer. She simply kept her eyes on my lips which had spoken.

I repeated, “You’ve come back,” and then I began to kiss her gently on her forehead, her eyes, all over her face. She let me. I kissed her as one kisses a tenderly loved woman, and she let herself be kissed like a woman, her head thrown back a little, dangling, abandoned, and as I thus kissed her like a woman I felt an upsurge of emotion close to the tears of a mother for her cured but still fragile child, of a lover for his mistress on the eve of a long separation. Not for an instant did I think of a vixen or even wonder if there did not, after all, remain something of a fox under my lips. No, I never thought of it, I only thought, She’s come back, with an immense tenderness, a poignant gratitude, and I kissed her with the infinitely gentle warmth of a wistful gladness.

I said, “You were not cold last night?” and she shook her head without ceasing to look at me.

“Not cold,” she said after a moment.

I hesitated for a long time before I asked her, “Where were you?” But perhaps she did not understand or else she did not want to answer. She simply looked at me, with that meditative insistence which, since my awakening, had pierced my heart with an almost painful delight.

And then she murmured, “Bonny.” She uttered that ridiculous nickname, nothing else, but in a voice that was so new to me, with a tone of such anxious trust, like a lost child or one that had been found again, that I pressed her face more tightly, nodding as if to say: “Yes, yes, darling, I am here…”

She leaned her forehead against the palms of my hands, pressing heavily against them to part them, and rested it again on my chest—yes, rested it for repose, whether more weary or more trusting I do not know. She said nothing more. Nor did I. We remained like this for a very long time and I believe in the end we fell asleep from sheer peace and serenity.

We went downstairs to have breakfast in the dining room. Nanny must have known before me that Sylva was back, for she smiled at us without surprise. She waited on us. Sylva did not throw herself on her kippers with her usual voracity. She ate and drank absent-mindedly. Perhaps because she was ceaselessly observing the two of us as if, back from the Americas after many long years, she was comparing our well-loved but so aged faces with those she held in her memory. The features of her own face marked a kind of slipping, a subtle sagging which seemed to me, like her avid curiosity, expressive of a fierce but anxious affection.

My heart was stirred by a strange happiness, made up of compassion, pride, and hope. The love Sylva bore us henceforth, I thought to myself, would no longer be that of a little domestic animal, hungering for protection. It would now be the love of a creature who had become one of us, who had discovered our common misery and so communed with us in this mortal frailness, with all her being. I thought also that human love differs from that of the beasts in that it has death for a background, and that Sylva could now at last love me with this kind of love.

As for me, I knew very well that I had loved her for a long time.

I had no longer been able to hide the fact from myself ever since Dorothy had flung at me: “I’m not the one you love!” I had tried to protest, but she had no trouble in making me swallow my protests. I could thus measure their lack of conviction. Then Dorothy had run away to London. And I remembered with what glee I had welcomed the prospect of being alone with Sylva…

All this was clear but did not leave my mind at rest. Dorothy was yielding to her passion, but wasn’t I yielding to mine? Were we not, in fact, each in his own fashion, yielding to the same temptation, shirking the austere constraints of our human estate? Let her go back to her drugs and me to my Sylva—wasn’t that what I had thought with a morbid attraction that was not without some resemblance to the lure of narcotics? For though Sylva was certainly humanizing herself by leaps and bounds, wasn’t that which I loved most in her, that which attached me to her so strongly, all that still remained of animality in her nature? There was no doubt that she had now passed another stage, and a most decisive one, but to use this as a pretext for loving her henceforth without remorse, wasn’t that just an alibi?

Despite Dorothy’s addiction, what a distance there still was between Sylva and her! However much Dorothy might drug herself to escape her torments, those very torments were, in the first place, the tragic evidence of the quality of her mind, of her painful self-interrogation. She had given up, it was true, but her very defeat was proof of the violence, the grandeur, of the preceding battle. Where lay the roots of Dorothy’s drama if not in the rich soil of a long civilization? Her inner drama was the poisoned fruit of it, but also its undeniable mark. Whereas what had poor Sylva to offer, still entangled in the shadows of her origin, other than the first human stammerings? Any comparison between her and Dorothy remained sacrilegious, and my choice was actually degrading.

Those were my thoughts while the last days of summer were passing. Having reached these conclusions, I was left with no alternative. If I still laid claim to any character at all I must go to London. I had no right to let Dorothy complete her own destruction (the news her father gave me continued to be catastrophic) without having first tried everything. The hay was in the barns, the corn was threshed, the autumn plowing would not start for several weeks. Nothing was holding me back at the manor, except Sylva. I would wrest myself from this tempting link, I would leave.

I informed Nanny of my imminent departure but, rather strangely, did not give her my true reasons. As if I were afraid that she might not approve them. That she might criticize the preference I was giving Dorothy. And might therefore call into question a decision I had taken not without qualms. I simply said that I had to go to town on business and would be back as soon as it was settled.

On the eve of my departure I naturally paid a last call on Dr. Sullivan. I found him tired, aged. He was just back from London himself. When I acquainted him with my decision, he raised a weary, uncertain hand.

“Ah! Is it still worth the trouble?” he sighed.

He turned his long face toward me. His full-lipped mouth curved in a sort of bitter surprise.

“I’ll tell you the worst: she seems happy.”

Chapter 27

AS I remember, almost the first thing that struck me was the Turkish delight.

There was a piece in her mouth, which she munched with absent-minded slowness. Others were on a small table next to the divan, in a china bowl sticky with sugar. There were more in cardboard boxes lying about on various pieces of furniture. One of the sweets had fallen on the carpet. Someone must have stepped on it and it spread there like pink spittle, like a shapeless hybrid between a jellyfish and a starfish. Actually, all over the carpet there were stains of a doubtful nature. The same was true of the bedcover, made of imitation panther skin, under which Dorothy was lazily stretched out.

I had not found the remote lodging at the bottom of Galveston Lane without some trouble. In the narrow, dark staircase smelling of cold fried fish, a clergyman in a threadbare coat, who seemed drunk to me, had flattened himself against the wall to let me pass; he must have missed a couple of steps on resuming his descent, for I heard him swear. It was not quite a boardinghouse nor exactly a block of furnished small flats. The brickwork outside had been painted white, which made the façade look almost smart with its little black, brass-plated front door, surmounted by a triangular pediment. But the inside seemed to have lain asleep for a century under a shroud of dust.

Dorothy held out to me a casual hand, neither getting up nor interrupting her chewing of the sugary paste. She did not look any thinner. On the contrary, she seemed to have put on weight, but beneath the make-up which she must have spread on her cheeks with careless haste after my telephone call, the skin was white, almost transparent. The swollen eyelids were edged with a too-rosy, almost red line. The face as a whole resembled certain water-lily blooms just when they are about to rot. She smiled without pleasure—the fixed smile of a tired saleswoman.

“Take a seat,” she mumbled as she chewed, “and help yourself.” She pushed the china bowl toward me. “Sweet of you to have forgiven me. What are you doing in London?”

“Nothing. I’ve come to see you.”

I pushed the bowl back with my hand.

“Sweet of you,” she repeated. “You don’t care for Turkish delight?”

“I loathe it.”

“I’ve always doted on it, ever since I was a little girl. They wouldn’t let me have it because it’s fattening. I’m getting my own back. Well,” she said, “now you’ve seen me. Anything you want?”

I disregarded the insolence.

“I have come to court you. The harvest is in, and I have time on my hands before the autumn plowing. I’m settling down a stone’s throw from here, at Bonington House. In this way I’ll only have a few yards to come to present my loving respects to you.”

There was a gleam in her eyes—the first I had seen since I was there. With two fingers she had just picked up a flabby chunk of sweet stuff from the sticky bowl, but she put it back. She wiped her sugary fingers on the panther skin.

“You’re not going to impose your presence on me every day, are you?” she asked.

“I’ve come to court you,” I repeated. “Those words have a definite meaning. Have you any other suitor?”

“I won’t open the door to you.”

“You’ll leave me out on the landing?”

“Yes. You don’t love me. You’re just working yourself up. You’re being a nuisance.”

“You’ll judge after our wedding if I love you or not.”

“I ask you to leave me at once.”

“Dorothy, tell me frankly, and once for all: would you talk like that if Sylva did not exist?”

“She does exist and you can’t do anything about it. However, set your mind at rest. I’d talk just like that.”

“Have you taken a dislike to me?”

“Heavens, no! I like you very much. As much as ever. But there’s somebody I like even better: that’s me.”

“But you’re destroying yourself!”

“One can destroy oneself out of self-love. Didn’t I give you a lecture on that subject, one rather awful evening? The lecture may have been grotesque, but what I said was true.”

“You’re just frightened of life because of that rotten marriage. I’ll make you forget it.”

“You’re talking nonsense. I’m not frightened of anything. Neither of life nor death. Nor of falling low in the esteem of fools.”

“Whom do you call fools?”

“People of your type who organize life as if it had a purpose. Which it hasn’t. It’s perfectly meaningless. Oh, all this is so trite! Must I repeat those commonplaces? I am tired, Albert.”

As if to show me that she really was tired, she let her head fall on the cushion and closed her eyes.

“Love,” I told her, “can give a meaning to the most senseless life. Suppose you made up your mind to love me?”

She opened her eyes without raising her head. Her gaze, glinting between her eyelids, reached me as through the narrow slats of a Venetian blind.

“I no longer feel at all inclined to love. And even less inclined to give my life an artificial aim. You don’t understand anything, Albert. I seem to… well, yes… to be killing myself slowly. Perhaps. But, as the saying goes, I’m in no hurry. Life has no meaning, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t plenty of pleasures to offer. And I like pleasures, especially those that don’t give too much trouble, because life also offers a lot of idiotic suffering, and that I’m against. I am all for pleasure and all against suffering, even ever so little. Is that so hard to understand? Love? To love you? I accept the pleasures of love, but refuse its ties. The least tie hurts as soon as you tug at it. No, don’t count on me. Never. But who’s forcing us to marry? What a funny idea, my sweet.”

She paused, then said with unexpected familiarity, “Do you want to go to bed with me?” And she sat up a little on the panther skin and narrowed her eyes. “Tell me, do you? Well, goodness, show me if you do instead of chattering. I hate words. Always words, words. All those ghastly inanities. You keep spouting of love and yet you know quite well that when one gets down to brass tacks it’s just a lot of filth. For heaven’s sake, let’s take it for what it is!” she cried, and one bare leg emerged from under the cover.

“Isn’t that good enough? Is that what you want of me? Would you like that?” she asked, and it seemed to me all of a sudden that her voice was shaking. “Tell me, is that what you want? For all I care! Here, take it, take it!” she said with growing excitement; she threw back the blanket altogether and with a suddenly feverish hand began to unbutton her blouse.

“Dorothy!” I started. I began to rise but the sight of her breast rooted me to the spot. I was seized with giddiness. With a jerk she bared both her breasts and presented them to me in triumph. Her head fell back as if under the weight of her hair, and the walls began to spin around me.

She was swaying, clasping her breasts with both hands. “Come!” she said. “Do come!” She raised her head, a little moisture sparkling at the corners of her lips. “Ah!” she moaned. “What are you waiting for? Do you think I don’t want it now too? I love pleasure, I tell you, I love it! Quick! Aren’t you a man?” She leaned toward me, stretched out a shameless hand.

I was at last able to wrench my feet from the ground and flee.

So, definitely, this was all I was ever able to do! But this fit of hysteria, just like her delirious rage when I had thrown away the snuffbox, this unexpected hurricane of raving eroticism, had quashed all my sensual desire under the same impact of horror, of annihilating repulsion. I returned to Bonington House utterly disturbed and flustered, unable to regain my calm. I could not get out of my mind the alluring beauty of her body, the thrill I had felt at her offering, or the disgust aroused in me by her brazen lasciviousness. At the same time, all sorts of disconcerting thoughts passed through my head. I could see once more the beautiful, half-naked Dorothy, magnificently offered up in that burst of animal desire. A libertine would have taken her, whereas I, imbued with an insular prudishness of almost atavistic power, had refused her. But in the same situation I had not refused Sylva.

Oh yes, you had, I told myself, for a long time. And with the same kind of horror. And then you gave yourself some good reasons for yielding to her charms. Isn’t that just what’s happening to you today? The drug has rotted Dorothy, it has ravaged her, decomposed her until she had become what you have seen today, a female stuffing herself with Turkish delight and suddenly gripped by the mating instinct like a bitch in spring. She abandons herself to her appetites, just as Sylva once did, she no longer strives to tame them but even rushes to gratify them. The only difference from Sylva is that she still pretends to justify her degradation with philosophical balderdash, as a last vestige of humanity—but for how much longer? The only difference? There is another, and so much more heartbreaking! For Sylva is painfully extracting herself from bestial unconsciousness, whereas Dorothy is sinking back into it, dissolving in it, seeking in it a cowardly oblivion…

This last thought shook me more than all the others. For it projected on the situation in which I found myself a new, garish and decisive light. I could no longer shut my eyes to the self-evident fact that the quality of a soul is not measured by what it is, but by what it is becoming. Was I not obliged, in this perspective, to re-examine all that I had lately told myself about my respective duties toward Sylva and Dorothy and reach the opposite conclusion?

However, I did not want to surrender to arguments that corresponded somewhat too nicely to my secret desires… No doubt, in their opposite evolution, Sylva was ennobling herself while Dorothy was rotting her soul in a foul degradation. But that was just the point. Whom should a man on the riverbank rescue: the bold swimmer who is about to win a 100-yard race, or the poor wretch who is on the point of drowning? An insistent voice within me did indeed suggest that to abandon Sylva in the midst of her effort might also be tantamount to letting her drown. But this suggestion again was a little too comforting for my desires. No, the one who stood in the gravest peril just now was Dorothy. I owed it to myself to save her. To overcome my repugnance. To plunge, if necessary, into the nauseous seas in which she was sinking so that I might at least support her until the day when I should be able to bring her safely back to the shore.

I would stay in London.

It was in this frame of mind that I presented myself again in Galveston Lane the very next morning. As I turned the doorknob outside Dorothy’s small flat, I was not so sure that the door would open, that it would not be locked as she had threatened. Especially after my flight. What woman could forgive such an insult? But the knob turned, the door opened. I passed through the vestibule. Dorothy seemed to be asleep on her divan, stretched out beneath her panther skin.

She was not asleep. She watched me approach with lusterless eyes under drooping eyelids. I am not a man of depraved tastes and have no perverse liking for morbid looks. But what man could remain insensitive to the touching signs of a languid sensuality? Personally, I have always felt dimly but undeniably drawn to Botticelli faces. And Dorothy, with her loose hair, her cheek gently resting on the velvet, her half-open lips, her pale, translucent complexion, evoked the lovely, doleful Pietà of the Uffizi in Florence. It moved me deeply. I stepped closer, uncertain whether she would not suddenly emerge from her torpor and throw me out. But she didn’t. She let me come up to her, never stirring except for one hand which she turned over in a gesture of abandon, so that I might place mine in it.

I knelt down and murmured: “Can you forgive me?”

She closed her eyes, her lips moved in the ghost of a smile, she pressed my hand in hers. Nothing else. She half drew up her eyelids, again rested that heavy gaze on me. She seemed to be waiting. I put my arms around her and said, “If you’d like to… I do, now.”

She shook her head very slowly, muttered “No,” and I lay down at her side. I wanted to clasp her in my arms again but she gently pushed me away.

“Let’s do whatever you wish,” I said. “Tell me what you would like.”

She took my face in her hands, gazed at it for a while, then whispered, “What I like—really?”

“Really,” I said, and smiled.

She scanned my face for some time more without speaking, then said, “Stretch your arm out behind you.”

I did.

“On the shelf,” she said, “there’s a powder box.”

I groped for it, found it, handed it to her. Her fingers trembled to open it.

“Take some with me,” she said under her breath, in a tone in which prayer and command mingled with an almost incredulous shyness. Had I expected this? Perhaps. In any case I hardly hesitated.

The powder box shook in her hands. She must have read in my eyes that I was willing. Her own eyes sparkled. She held a quivering palm close to my nostrils. I inhaled several times. Her pupils became unbelievably large. Soon my head was spinning exquisitely. I dropped my cheek on the velvet opposite her face. A vast sweetness pervaded me.

I felt a feverish breath on my lips, while someone was saying very low, with an avid curiosity, “Yes?” But I was already so wonderfully weary, carefree and happy that I could only acquiesce with a slight puckering of my eyelids. And later we remained for an immeasurable time without moving, commingling our exhausted breath.

Chapter 28

IF there is something more entrancing than a solitary vice, it is the same vice shared with another. Especially during the initiation when, elated by their secret complicity, master and disciple alike are gripped by a sort of all-consuming passion. One then feels that the slightest falling off in the partner’s pleasure, the briefest pause in his intoxication, is an unbearable letdown. Alone, one may possibly use moderation, exercise restraint; but when there are two, all self-restraint founders. No sooner did Dorothy and I surface from our euphoria than she plunged us into it again, with a kind of ferocious impatience, and I let myself be carried away unresistingly, completely given up to the intoxicating novelty of sensation. And seeing me abandon myself helplessly to her perverse desire must have given Dorothy a particularly intense delight, for I remember hearing her groan as if with sensual pleasure.

We abandoned ourselves to it all with frenzy: to ecstasy and unconsciousness, to the most oblivious indolence and to sudden fits of erotic rapture that would seize us both together. However, I can only recall confused images of all those hallucinating days. And perhaps even they are imaginary. They have no link with one another. Even when it comes to the rare moments of solitude and clearheadedness which I wrested from Dorothy’s grasp in order to assure myself that I was still in control of my will, I am unable to situate them in time and hardly even in space.

I can see myself at my hotel once, in the process of having a bath. But when? Another time, on Battersea Bridge, offering my face to the sea-born breeze as if trying to sober up. Still another time in the street market behind Paddington, but I am with Dorothy, and we are floating like sleepwalkers; we must have left Galveston Lane with our minds still cloudy with drugs.

Apart from that I have only foggy visions, half of which were probably mere dreams. Still, I can see the wallpaper representing parrots amid bamboo reeds—a paper which, though faded, suddenly takes on life and color, and I even hear the rustling of the birds’ wings. For a long time now there is neither day nor night in this room, for Dorothy has drawn the curtains and blinds, as if to enclose us in a warmer, more feverish intimacy. I remember the sour perfume that rises from the body next to me more distinctly than its vague outline under the dim light of the lamp shade. What I recall, however, with illusory precision is Dorothy clad in rags, sitting on the edge of a boat rather like a gondola and filled to the brim with strawberries, peaches, red currants; and also her falling backward and laughing amid the pungent fragrance of the crushed fruit.

But what is this insinuating sweetness that forces my teeth open, fills my mouth with a voluptuous paste which oddly enough I relish, while burning lips crush mine? A naked Dorothy, her hair in the wind, knee-deep in water and surrounded by foam, beckoning to me to join her—I can see her as if I were there; but to whom belongs this graceful, pearly body, shining with sweat and writhing on the divan to clamor for new pleasures? And whence comes, on the ceiling, that sort of lambent dragon or hippograph, at once motionless and dancing? It suddenly slithers silently down the corner of the room, pokes forward a hazy and hilarious head that almost touches me and melts away.

Where are we? No more parrots on the walls but green and blue stripes which quiver like the strings of a harp, a very vague memory of a staircase painfully mounted step by step, and here, on a heavy Smyrna carpet the same pearly body lies crucified on a jumble of fabrics; but flung across it there ripples another body, the color of hot sands, and I see a long heavy, black mane spread over two pale twitching legs. But I feel nothing, nothing but a divine lassitude and a universal benevolence which fills me with comprehension and a happy, infinitely quiet pity. Later I too rumple the same black mane that now spreads over my flanks while I submit to bold caresses, and Dorothy’s disheveled blondness covers both our faces and I hear gasping, meaningless words in my ear.

These are just rare visions among a hundred, but they are all so fluid and evanescent that they escape me as soon as I think I grasp them. Ah, and there are revolting ones too. Can one feel voluptuous pleasure in vomiting? Or is it a memory that has become strangely corrupted? Each spasm of my heaving stomach amplifies in a sensuous swoon and I lie in wait for the next with lascivious expectancy. I also remember a bite—an exchange of bites, I believe. I am digging my teeth into flesh and feel my own shoulder being mauled (I still have the mark). But there is no pain, or rather the pain vibrates deep inside me with the gentle suavity of a cello. Above all these scattered, inconsistent visions, however, there is an all-pervading darkness. A vast, restless obscurity, sometimes faintly melodious, more often pulsating with an endless, droning plaint to which all my flesh responds harmoniously to the very depths of my innermost night…

To be quite frank, when it still happens, at rare intervals, that I suddenly feel coursing through me a fleeting wave of vague nostalgia, it is always for that darkness and for nothing else. All the rest is only scum, the memory of which sickens me a little, the momentary froth formed by the eddies of that nocturnal, marvelously black and boundless ocean, in which I float for a long while in a weirdly conscious unconscious, an ineffable indifference. I know, unfortunately, that this is still so for Dorothy, that for her all things outside this ocean in which she seeks to lose herself are just foamy impurities, bubbles no sooner formed than burst. And I also know that this attraction is most certainly the worst, because at the bottom of that sweet, yawning darkness lurks the octopus of nothingness.

But since I myself am here at my desk, writing this story, I need hardly say that I was able to wrest myself in time from this mortal attraction. The tragedy is that I alone could do so, for I could not bring Dorothy back with me. I abandoned her, as a mountaineer on the verge of being carried away cuts the rope that ties him to his partner, thus saving his life but losing his honor. But now I am convinced that I did the right thing.

For Dorothy was not an inert body at the end of a rope, too dazed to help in her own rescue. On the contrary, she tugged with all her strength, in the wild hope of making me lose my grip, of pulling me down into the chasm with her. Did jealousy, Sylva’s existence, play some part in this ruthless passion, this frenzied and perverse attempt? I am not able to answer with certainty. But I no longer doubt that Dorothy loved me after her fashion, with honesty at first when she ran away, and then, when contrary to expectations I seemed to give myself up to her, with that fierce blaze in which she tried to consume me.

She almost succeeded. First, there was the shock of the drug: the intoxication with an oceanic unconscious, in which a riot of the senses alone subsists, stuns like a flash of lightning, and it takes all one’s will power to resist its dazzle. And then, this vertiginous absence meant total oblivion, and oblivion of Sylva first of all. I never thought nor dreamed of her a single time during that long illumination. And finally, the vacuum thus created cried out to be filled, and I imagined myself gorged with one love only—for Dorothy; for in my rapt state I confused the passing infatuation in which she engulfed me in her wake with a genuine passion.

Fortunately, this period during which we abandoned ourselves to our self-destructive fury—a period which, in my muddled memory, seems without beginning or end—did not actually last very long. A few days at most. We woke up from it for some quite earthly but forceful reasons; namely, that one cannot live without food or drink. As if in a half-sleep I recall Dorothy opening tins of sardines or pineapple—but such stopgaps cannot suffice in the long run. So if only to buy food or to cook it, we necessarily had to resume, now and then, a less overwrought, less radiantly befuddled life, and emerge into normal consciousness. For Dorothy, undermined by long intoxication, these periods of even very brief abstinence were a painful ordeal through which she hurried blindly until she could take the plunge into the drug and nepenthe. As for me who was still intact, those awakenings meant a coldly recording clear-sightedness: the stained divan, the dirty carpet, a foul-smelling disorder, not only in the room but about Dorothy herself, slouching wearily about in trodden-down slippers, unwashed, uncombed, heavy-lidded, and with flaccid, swollen lips.

At the same time I gradually became aware of the key fact of her life. I had wondered, at rare moments, what she was living on, since she no longer worked (and it seemed improbable to me that Dr. Sullivan could or would encourage her situation with financial support). The answer could be found upstairs, in the room with the blue and green striped wallpaper. I realized the part the dark-haired woman must have been playing in Dorothy’s life for a long time. She was the one who had found her the flat below her own, and she too had since been supplying her, perhaps with money, but certainly with drugs.

The first time I saw this woman clearly, I mean without being dazed with drugs myself, I was struck by her rather hideous beauty. She could not have been much older than Dorothy and I had firsthand knowledge of the slender youthfulness of her body; but her face was a field of ruins. I have never again seen such a face and I trembled at the idea that it prefigured what Dorothy would look like in a few years’ time. Not that the wrinkles that lined it were particularly deep, but they were flabby and shifting. As if a colony of worms had settled under the mortified skin. She was called Viola. I presume, from her Southern accent, that she came from Malta, Cyprus or Egypt. Perhaps she was a Copt. She worked in a film studio and came home around teatime, when Dorothy would make tea between two doses of the drug.

When we met again in a more or less normal state, she gave me a look of connivance above her full cup, a salacious wink which would have been enough to make me understand, had I not guessed it already, that I was a mere extra, an instrument of pleasure, that she tolerated my presence near Dorothy for this reason only, just as she must have tolerated a good many other lovers before me. The overheavy teapot having almost slipped out of Dorothy’s hands, I caught it by its long, banana-shaped spout.

“Fie, fie,” said Viola, with a ribald smirk, “what manners!” And stroking my cheek, she added: “But if that’s what you fancy, we’ll get you suited—the more, the merrier.” Whereupon Dorothy gave a nervous burst of laughter and tousled my hair.

Had I been in a completely normal state I believe that so much vulgarity and Dorothy’s laughter would have promptly driven me out of that room forever. But the powder box was, as usual, lying about on the table like a simple salt cellar, and indeed everybody helped himself almost absent-mindedly, as if to a pinch of salt, thus sustaining a blissful torpor in anticipation of more violent exploits. So that I too, I am afraid, gave a cowardly snicker in answer to Viola’s obscenities, and the one I have reported is just a specimen. All the same, her filth left an indelibly nauseous imprint on my mind, and heightened my disgust. Whereas Dorothy’s spineless submissiveness, the same no doubt that she had shown to her infamous husband, and for similar reasons, gradually made me lose all hope of ever being able to wrest her away. Perhaps it made me also lose all desire for her—and well before I even realized it.

In point of fact, I believe I soon realized (though maybe only confusedly at first) that the choice was no longer the one I had foreseen. It no longer lay in the pressing alternative of saving Dorothy or abandoning her, but in the no less pressing one of abandoning her or being shipwrecked with her. I continue to think, though, that she loved me—with the love of a praying mantis; only she too realized very soon that I would prove recalcitrant and not allow her to suck my brains. At all events, the frenzied ardor she showed in those first days, when I did not resist the drive to drag me down, was lazily abandoned as soon as she felt me draw back—or at least so I imagined. Why else did she begin to treat me with sly indignity—if the term still means anything in this context?

I well remember the last slights. Returning from one of the brief strolls I took to ventilate my mind as well as my lungs, like a frog coming up for air, I found the door closed. I mounted the stairs and there indeed were the two women, almost comatose, gorged with drugs. Dorothy raised a languid hand to show the powder box, clearly meaning: “Help yourself if you care to.” She could not have informed me more openly that I was merely being tolerated.

I left them and stayed away for two days. Dorothy called me upon the second evening. “What’s the matter? Please come!” When I arrived, she wept. It was a spark of hope and I thought my time had come. I implored her to leave this room, this house, and settle at the hotel with me. She did not answer but her tears had dried. She threw herself back on the bed and remained motionless for a long time, looking up at the ceiling. I did not speak either. I was waiting. At last she murmured, still without moving, “Come back tomorrow.” I left the room wordlessly and she let me go.

The next day was a Sunday. When I walked into the room, the other woman was there. I turned on my heels, but she caught my arm, made me sit down by force. “Come on! Come on!” she said, sitting down opposite me. “Let’s have it out.”

Dorothy was sprawling on an armchair, munching her Turkish delight. She avoided my eyes.

For a few seconds, Viola observed each of us in turn, her eyes screwed up ironically. “Well?” she said. “A lover’s quarrel?” She must have seen me stiffen and went on in a less mocking tone: “Why do you complicate things? We were getting on so well, the three of us. Wouldn’t I have more reason than you to show jealousy? Everything would be all right if you’d do your bit. But don’t imagine that I’ll ever give up this adorable kitten—to anyone. You may as well give up hope. She is attached to me, and faithful too, like a kitten. Aren’t you, my little puss?” She held out one arm and Dorothy, letting herself slide down from the armchair, came and squatted at her knees, laid her cheek on one thigh, and from there gazed at me with placid eyes.

That is the last picture I have of Dorothy. More than all her slow, vile self-abasement, that spineless look of bestial cowardice confirmed that the battle was lost. Her father had told me, “The worst of it is that she seems happy.” Perhaps it wasn’t the right word. Rather than happy, I would say that she had contentedly sunk into a peaceful abdication, a definite renunciation of what little human freedom she had conserved until that day.

An hour later I was on the train taking me back to Wardley Station.

Chapter 29

I HAD opened a book but I was not reading. Through the carriage window I watched the English countryside pass by. How lovely it can be in September! The pastures are green again and have the mellow softness of velvet. The ancient oaks, standing all alone in the middle of the fields like tortured sentinels, are only just beginning to turn brown, while the birches on the banks of soft-spoken brooks are already blazing with a million gold coins stirred by the wind. I had lowered the window a little so that I too might be lashed by the cold air, and I felt the process of rebirth. Viola and Dorothy, the padded room, all the sensual details of the past days—how quickly it all receded! A bad dream. The good thing about a nightmare is the awakening and its concurrent lighthearted feeling. And best of all was my joyous impatience to see Sylva again.

For now I knew, I knew that I was justified, that I was right to love her. I kept repeating to myself, with gladness, the truth that had flashed upon me once before but which I had later tried to forget: the dazzling intuition that the quality of a soul is not measured by what it is but by what it becomes. I amused myself by applying this new yardstick to my fellow travelers in order to check its accuracy. First that child sitting opposite me. Yes, where does it spring from, this poignant interest we take in childhood, even the tenderest one, if not from the mysterious future it bears within itself, from which we expect so much hidden wealth? Why would I otherwise show such benevolent curiosity for the stupid puerile pranks of that little boy in his school cap with the fading colors of King’s Lynn College, who doesn’t stop fidgeting, kicks my shin every now and then and keeps sniffling all the time? What he is is still an uncouth harum-scarum, a handful of scrubby ignorance. But what he will become—what promise! Whereas his grandfather, next to him, absorbed in his study of The Times, his head no doubt stuffed with noble thoughts and all sorts of knowledge, has stopped “becoming.” He is forever what he is today, congealed in his past-present until his death.

Yes, isn’t that the true curse of old age, that it is this petrifying fountain? From which only a few genuises escape—a Moses, a Leonardo? And how many men, alas, though still young and full of strength, have already reached the same point? Solidified, sclerosed—when they have not slowly been reduced to less than themselves by the drugged lethargy of habit? That chap in the corner, for instance. His briefcase announces his activeness in the world, but his torpid, indifferent eyes, flaccid lips and sagging jaw confess that his soul stagnates at a low altitude. Plainly there is little chance that it will ever rise any higher. He may, for all I know, be a good father, a good husband, a good citizen: is he a man at all? Yes, but made of wax—a dummy.

Whereas Sylva!

Whereas you, my sweet and exquisite Sylva, though you may still be closer to a fox than to a woman, it is yet a fact that ever since the death of your friend Baron and the poignant self-discipline you then displayed, you have been striving to climb, sometimes in torment, almost a rung a day.

The train had just sent a family of hares scampering away into the stubble, thus recalling to my mind a walk we had taken after the dog’s death. Sylva did not skip about as usual. On the contrary, she was walking demurely between Nanny and me, hanging on our arms, every now and then rubbing her cheek, with an almost melancholy tenderness, against my shoulder or her nurse’s. She often made us stop (which she never used to do) to observe, with a strange intensity, a tree, a stook, the flowers in the fields. She did not ask any questions, and Nanny or I would say, “This is a walnut tree, this is hay, these are thistles”—but was she listening? We never knew, and she would set off again, gently pulling us along but not answering.

We had taken a small, stony path between two freshly mown fields. Suddenly, and almost under our feet, a hare flushed and streaked along a furrow, straight as an arrow. I felt Sylva, quite close to me, give a violent start, and already I could see her galloping after the hare as she would have done only a few days ago; but her impulse seemed to collapse there and then or, more exactly, to melt and dissolve. She just gazed musingly after the disappearing hare, then turned her head away, and we continued our walk as if nothing had happened.

I was intrigued and said, “Why didn’t you run after him? He was a beautiful, big hare.”

She turned her head once more toward the clover field in which the animal had vanished, seemed to search it for an answer.

“Dunno,” she said at last. “Why run?”

“To catch it,” I said laughingly. “Wouldn’t you have liked that?”

She answered, “Yes.” Then, in a lower tone, she corrected herself: “No.” She shrugged her shoulders and repeated, “Dunno.” And she stared at me, her forehead puckered with a worried line, as if I could perhaps explain to her the strange indecision that had overcome her. Naturally, on the spur of the moment, I was quite incapable of it and we had walked on without saying anything.

Suddenly, right there in the train, I was given the answer! (Life is so often like that. An insignificant fact which might otherwise have completely escaped notice, is pounced upon by the mind that has been waiting for it.) Three ladies were standing in the corridor, chattering, their backs turned to me. An express train rushed past us. It made the windows bang like an explosion, and its whistle blast pierced my ears so brutally that I jumped. But in front of me, at the sudden “bang!” the ladies’ three backsides jumped too, like three big balls. All the rest of their bodies remained impassive and they continued their chatter without having noticed anything, without even being aware that their backsides had jumped half a foot high, as if their skirts had enclosed a jack-in-the-box or a frightened animal. The effect was extraordinarily comical but, above all, I suddenly realized that what had happened to Sylva, faced with her hare, was directly related, except that it was the exact opposite.

For what those independent bottoms showed when, at the sudden roar of the express train, they had tried to flee without even informing their owners’ brains, was how close to the crust of civilization there still survived the reflexes of the animal. Whereas Sylva’s sudden inhibition, which had abruptly checked the hunter’s instinct and suspended the reflex of the chase in full play, wasn’t this inhibition due to the birth of something rather remarkable: the absolutely novel surrender of those instincts to a still uncertain but evident form of reasoning will? What had been in those ladies’ bottoms a survival of ancient tropisms, was it not in my vixen, on the contrary, the beginning of their decline?

To be quite sure of it, we would naturally have to wait for a sufficient number of similar acts from Sylva. In the days that followed my return, I was happy to notice that there was indeed no lack of them. It was as if all along the line, her instincts, after the death of the dog, had effected a sort of general retreat. This was startling to watch, for, like all retreats, this one too proceeded in great disorder. Faced with the simplest stimulus, to which the fox-like reflexes would previously have responded instantly without the least hesitation, Sylva now seemed unsure and bewildered; sometimes she obeyed them in the end as she used to do, sometimes she seemed to reject them; in either case, the outcome for a long time remained unpredictable. And so it became increasingly clear that what was happening inside that mysterious skull ever since her little brain, shocked into activity by the tragic discovery of the human condition, had begun to function at a manifestly accelerated rhythm, was actually a kind of transfer of powers. Instinct, abandoning the premiership, was handing the government over to reason.

As the days passed, it became progressively evident that Sylva was ceasing to act on impulse by virtue of her automatisms, and beginning to act by choice in accordance with her preferences. And by the same stroke I realized for the first time that choice and automatism are mutually contradictory by definition. Any possibility of choice obviously excludes automatism (and farewell to instinct!) just as automatism necessarily excludes any possibility of choice (and farewell to reason!). A relentless dilemma! Was it conceivable that I had for so long been ignorant of such a self-evident truth? That’s the threshold, I told myself, the frontier that separates instinct from intelligence. Previously, like many animal-loving people, I had denied the existence of a definite borderline. What scatterbrains we are! The borderline is cut with a knife.

And so I discovered that, from the day of the hare onward, Sylva could never again obey all her impulses like a blind mechanism. Henceforth, I thought to myself, she would have to make up her mind herself. And in so doing she would lose one by one the automaton’s powers and precision, just as the human race has lost them. She would become hesitant, clumsy, she would take a hundred wrong turnings for one right one. With an almost anguished giddiness I realized in a flash of insight that this was a fatal, inevitable necessity; that it was part of the very essence of the human being. That to hope that one might acquire understanding and at the same time preserve one’s instinct was an absurd wish. That every conquest made by reason or by the will involves as a corollary the surrender of an innate but unconscious knowledge. And this relinquishment, I told myself, is the price we pay for our freedom.

As was indeed inevitable, Sylva’s indecision assumed greater proportions every day. Everything aroused in her an intense and absorbed attention. In many circumstances she behaved as she had when faced with the hare: a first instinctive movement, promptly checked as if to examine if that was really what she wanted to do. Of course she no longer knew what she really wanted, and more and more often she would mope in a kind of dreamy apathy. While this latter state aroused some anxiety in me, Nanny was delighted. At last, she said, she was on her home ground again, that of educating backward children. The sudden interest Sylva nowadays showed for all creatures and things around her, she also seemed to show, though still silently as a rule, for Nanny’s explanations. She would not say a word but some time later we would discover that she had grasped the gist. Nanny taught her to count on her fingers. Sylva watched her stretching them out one after the other, but she did not repeat the figures. Yet, while in the first days when we told her at lunch, “Go and fetch three apples,” she would bring us two or five at random, she eventually brought back the right number one day and never made a mistake again, whatever figure we mentioned.

I have said before that for a long time we were stumped by her inability to understand pictures, at least insofar as they represented animate beings, until she thought she recognized that of a motionless dog—the dead Baron. This revelation, as I have said, shook her violently (screams, gasps and sobs interspersed with the dog’s name) but simultaneously it seemed to have opened a door in this brain full of locks and bolts, onto a field with vast prospects; for on the next day all pictures had become intelligible for her and produced cries of pleasure.

Nanny gave her paper and pencil, showed her how to make use of them. To begin with, of course, her pupil only managed to scrawl at random, like a very small child. But the mere fact that she scribbled was already a remarkable novelty, and whenever some flourish happened to form a circle, she would exclaim, “An apple!” and laugh.

Indeed she now laughed more and more, thus confirming my own modest theories: it was death, I was certain of it, that had led her to laughter. It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace. An atavistic fear lies within us from our childhood, more or less unconscious and lurking in our depths, and when something delivers us from it for a fleeting second, it produces suddenly such a relief, lifts such a weight, that our body shakes with “brutal convulsions.” In laughter, in comedy, we seek a second’s respite, a short moment of organic oblivion from our condition. During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal.

Sylva always laughed after being afraid. She also laughed—not always—after some unforeseen effect of her acts. To have drawn an apple unintentionally was one of those effects. In order to experience this pleasure, she began to draw them on purpose. Then she learned from Nanny that one could put into a circle two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and she started to draw funny figures endlessly with childish fervor. But she would draw them lying down.

“Why lying down?” Nanny asked her eventually, intrigued. “Bonny, no more play,” said my vixen, and she laughed and jumped at me jocosely, kissing and biting me to manifest her joy at my being alive.

I did not start writing this story to describe Mrs. Bumley’s methods of re-education. They were excellent and proved quick and effective. Sylva was soon able to recognize not only pictures but sounds. I mean printed vowels, then consonants, then groups of letters. When she understood that a cry, a word, could be represented, a new door opened onto a new domain, and through it abstract ideas rushed in. Notions such as time and space began to mean something to her. So the “but not for a long, long time” which a short while ago had been unable to soften the terrifying revelation that Baron’s death meant mine and hers as well—for in her mind which was still impervious to duration, still like a fox’s living in a perpetual present, this death in fact made us at once alive and dead—this “very long time” became comprehensible to her, the sinister prospect ceased to be imminent and even withdrew so far that she hardly ever referred to it. All that it left on her mind in process of formation was an indelible mark, a half-unconscious imprint, rarely expressed but which became the inner driving force of the mind’s progress just like the secret presence of the engines, silent and invisible, in the heart of a ship.

Chapter 30

IS there any need to go on? My aim, in starting this notebook, was to write the story of a metamorphosis. It is done. Reliable authors assure us that the human species is a schism: a piece of nature in revolt, vainly struggling from the time of its origin to lift the mask behind which is hidden all raison d’être. Had not my little vixen now taken the decisive step beyond which there is no return, had she not passed over entirely to the schismatics? What remained of her earlier state? Hardly a memory. She was henceforth human, to the very depths of her soul. Certainly it was up to us now to educate her, to “raise” her in every sense of the word—but from now on this would be above and beyond the transformation. The metamorphosis was accomplished.

So what could I relate other than the type of progress which a child could make in the hands of efficient educators? Dr. Sullivan had warned me at the time: “She will start putting questions, you’ll have your work cut out!” She had not started immediately—it had required a more formidable motive power than her self-recognition in a mirror. But now, good Lord! Everyone has known the kind of children who daze you with questions about everything and nothing. They are angels of self-restraint compared with what Sylva was during that time. With the aggravating difference that she had an adult brain and that one could not fob her off with the vague replies which seem to satisfy children. Yet her questions were of a thorny type and most embarrassing: “Why does one live? Why die?” Poor Baron’s death was still dimly reverberating on the direction her mind was taking, since her mind itself had in a way been “hatched out” by this shock. What Sylva wanted to know was nothing less than the beginning and end of things.

For all that had left her untroubled, unintrigued, as long as she still had a vixen’s mind, now filled her with a frightened awareness: Why the day, why the night? What is the sun? The moon? The stars? Where does the sky end? Until the day when she asked, “And why does one exist, all of this?”

Frankly, at the time, this decisive question struck me with its form rather than with its meaning: for the “one” certainly referred to Sylva herself, but so did just as certainly the “all of this” that followed. “One” and “All of this,” Sylva and the universe, thus still seemed confusedly mixed up in her mind; the schism was not yet very clearly marked. Besides, the tone of the question had not gone beyond a certain perplexity, or rather a sort of bewilderment in a strange new region full of disconcerting mazes, alarming horizons—it did not yet betray excitement, the first quiver of indignation, the foreboding of a boundless outrage. She did not yet suspect (how could she?) that she would not receive, would never receive, an answer to her question.

What finally severed her last links with her former nature and made the schism final and complete, was her hearing me admit that “why we exist, my poor sweet, is something I would gladly tell you, but unfortunately nobody knows.” And hearing me say it not once but ten times, because she refused to believe in spite of my explanations that to such a simple and obvious question there existed no enlightenment; because she thought for a long time that, for some inexplicable reason, I was hiding the truth from her. But then, oh, I remember her amazed little face, her mouth opening in incredulous suffocation, her eyes flashing with growing anger, I remember how violently she stamped her foot and snapped in an accusing voice that broke with a little sob:

“But then, why, one knows nothing!”

I had to agree that men indeed know nothing, that they are born, live and die in a profound mystery and that it is precisely the greatness of science to try and pierce it… She interrupted me with even greater violence:

“Why, what greatness? Why must one seek? Since one lives, one ought to know why. Why doesn’t one know? Is it on purpose? Are we prevented?”

I remained dumfounded, a little ashamed. It would be an understatement to say that I was startled by the shrewdness of this remark: it was a positive eye-opener. I am not one of those people who get bogged down in metaphysics; I have always accepted things as they are, with a matter-of-fact turn of mind that suits a man who lives close to the soil. And I told myself that this quaint thought which had come to my little human vixen, despite its air of obviousness, had never occurred to me. And I wondered whether there were many people who had put it so clearly—if there were even many scientists who would notice how primitive and cardinal it is at one and the same time: “Why doesn’t one know?” indeed? And why “are we prevented”? By Jove, wasn’t Sylva’s surprise, her anger, the keystone of everything—of all that makes up the nobility of the mind of man? But men have wandered astray amid the trees of innumerable questions and lost sight of the forest of interrogation that encompasses them all: why, for what end, has our brain been created so accomplished that it is able to grasp everything, and yet so weak that it knows nothing—neither what it is itself, nor the body which it controls, nor this universe from which they both emanate? And because my vixen had a perfectly new brain, one which had not had the time to become cluttered up with trees, she had knocked directly against the forest of this “why” which we hardly ever think of, though it is the most stupendous, the most inexplicable inconsistency of the human condition…

… And one which, if men had the least common sense, ought to guide all their deeds and all their thoughts. And which, from that day onward, did indeed guide Sylva’s efforts. She brought a constant, burning ardor to her endeavors to understand the meaning of the things that surrounded her. Nanny taught her to read in the Scriptures. Sylva plunged into them with passionate eagerness and curiosity. She made me think of a gaping gourd, parched with questions no less urgent for being often inarticulate, which suddenly receives a great stream of thirst-slaking water. It even made me squirm a little. I am a reasonably good Christian, but all the same I had an uneasy feeling that this smacked a little of sharp practice, of trickery. I could not help telling myself that starved for enlightenment as she was, she would have devoured with the same greed whatever food one offered her. I could see for myself, in its most primitive state, the violence of this fundamental craving and the consequent power of the priests who assuage it. I thought to myself that these priests, from time immemorial and in all persuasions, have actually had it all their own way. I felt shaken in my own beliefs, although it is true that they had never been very vigorous.

I myself gave her natural history books to read and watched her—with some satisfaction, I confess—if not prefer these books to the Gospels proposed by Mrs. Bumley (all I held against her, in fact, was that she was a rather too rabid Papist), at least gradually devote more time to them. I also noticed that she too was subject to the phenomenon I have already mentioned, whereby she indirectly revealed to me how it operated with most people: progressively as her mind enriched itself, which means as it began to cope in detail with her ignorance, her fantastically diverse ignorance, she grew more remote from it in bulk, she lost sight of the outrage which had revolted her in the first place—men’s ignorance as such. And not only did she lose sight of it but, little by little, when I talked about it, it seemed to irritate her. As if for her too the trees were beginning to hide the wood, making her lose interest in it.

As fresh acquisitions made her discover ever new gaps in her knowledge, her curiosity was fired with zeal to fill them, but as these gaps concerned ever smaller details, her curiosity too operated within ever narrower limits. By a natural progression she became almost completely detached from the great ontological problem and devoted herself to ever more realistic and practical matters. For by discovering the tangible world abounding in acquired knowledge, defined objects, specified feelings, interpreted sensations, explained relationships, she lost her unease, her disquiet and, with disquiet, the feeling of that total ignorance which had so frightened her at first. In short, her mind passed, in next to no time, from the anguished fears of the Stone Age to the calm certainties of our modern British civilization.

This sudden aptitude of hers for rushing nonstop through the stages of man was one of my major surprises. I remembered how much time it had taken my sweet little vixen in human shape to pass from her animal night to the first feeble light of dawn. It had taken her many months, almost a year. Whereas since that still quite recent day when she had discovered herself as being both existent and mortal, a few weeks had been enough to throw her mind wide open to a wealth of knowledge, and some of it remarkably subtle. Just as the water in a reservoir will undermine a rock for years, though nothing shows, nothing stirs, until there is a tiny landslip, a few inches only, then the dam bursts and the water rushes forth irresistibly.

“Aha!” Dr. Sullivan exclaimed triumphantly. “What did I tell you? Didn’t I say that your little vixen, by becoming human, would give us a résumé of the history of man? Five thousand centuries of utter darkness to crawl painfully out of the abyss of savage unconsciousness, and hardly twenty for Plato, Newton, Einstein to burst upon us in a blaze of light. The proportions are the same. What are you going to do with her now? She seems to have a head for study.”

He was probably indulging in overoptimism. However, I seriously thought of finding a suitable establishment for her when Nanny discreetly drew my attention to certain singularities. They left no room for doubt, and we had to face the appalling fact that Sylva was expecting a child.

A new quandary! If I had been able to consider Sylva still as a vixen, I might perhaps have attached less importance to the event. But she was no longer one, nor had been for ages. Whether I liked it or not, she was henceforth, for me as for everybody else, a young girl whose existence would necessarily be governed by our social environment. Neither she nor I could escape from it. What, then, were my obligations in these circumstances? What ought I to decide for her future—and for mine?

If I could at least have harbored some hope of being the child’s father! This was not entirely excluded perhaps, but there was no point in deluding myself: the chances that it was the wretched Jeremy’s were incomparably greater. And it was even possible that some bounder prowling in the woods had stolen a march on the damned gorilla. It would be useless to question Sylva: she would know nothing, remember nothing. When she conceived she had still been mentally a vixen, but by the time she gave birth, she would be a woman.

I still could not clearly discern whether my love for her was a lover’s or a father’s. To be sure, the idea of giving the girl up to Jeremy still made me mad with jealousy, but there also mingled in it the respectable fury of an outraged father at a dreadful misalliance. Now look, I told myself, trying to be cool and detached, supposing it is the gorilla’s child after all? Are you entitled to deprive him of it? Yet what sort of an upbringing will it get, between a brute and a dunce? Should you let them turn the child into a third imbecile, as the tactless Walburton suggested? All right, you’ll be there to keep a close watch on it. Provided, that is, the parents are willing to give you a free hand—which would surprise me on the part of the gorilla. Moreover, aren’t you about to dispose of Sylva, old chap, as if she were a thing, a cupboard or a mare? But she isn’t a fox any more! She has given you plenty of proof, on the contrary, that she is now as human as you! With just as much right to dispose of herself. Who says she would still want to live with that savage? Ah, what you dare not yet quite confess to yourself is that she too seems to love you, like a woman, you can no longer ignore it, she has proved it… But the child? Yes, but what does she know about it? Should the person she is today be held responsible for the acts of the vixen she was? If only, I complained, she had given birth before, when she still had an animal’s unconsciousness! She would have been delivered of the child in the blessed ignorance of a beast which is unmoved by questions or surprise. Whereas she now bombarded us at all occasions with the most staggering, at times the most incongruous, questions. When they became too awkward, we had hitherto escaped with the time-honored answer: “You’ll understand later,” and she would not persist, just cast a furious look at us that left us in no doubt about the hubbub going on inside her young brain. What were we going to say when she saw herself getting bigger? And when the child was born?

We decided on a halfway course: to forestall her questions, Nanny disclosed to her the mystery of birth, but not of conception. So that, if Sylva’s mind had been more fully formed, she would have been bound to believe that the child to be born would be the Holy Ghost’s. For the time being, however, this solved Sylva’s personal problems and indeed she began to show a childish impatience for her future baby. But it did not in any way solve her social problem. I decided to consult Dr. Sullivan.

“Didn’t I tell you the answer a long time ago?” he answered with kindly earnestness. “I told you so the first day: you can’t get away with it without marrying her.”

It was quite true, and to think that at the time I had taken those words for a joke in poor taste! Everything went to show today that he had been right, that any other solution would do Sylva, and later her child, an irreparable wrong. It followed, rather paradoxically, that it would be very much better for everybody if the child had been unquestionably mine; and much better, too, if I had shown less self-control as regards my vixen instead of straining her virtue to the point of compelling her to that springtime escapade when she had met her gorilla. But if so, what on earth are the laws of decency and propriety founded on? Could they have such shaky foundations that I had transgressed them when trying so hard to respect them?

All this opened once again most equivocal and dubious vistas on the merits of morality. It seemed to show that its principles were quite fortuitous, and that one should always be prepared to call them into question in changed circumstances. However this might be, in the present situation there was only one remedy: marriage. At heart, I rather rejoiced over this obligation which gratified my innermost wishes. Moreover, it was no longer open to doubt that given a reasonable lapse of time and a reasonable amount of patience Sylva would turn out to be a perfectly presentable, well-bred young person. She still spoke like a very young child, but so do quite a few respectable Englishwomen, don’t they? Their artlessness, their baby talk are even considered an added charm. I should be quite wrong to worry about it.

Still, though more than half decided, I remained passive and took no steps. I was well aware of the sole rather ticklish obstacle to our marriage and yet did nothing to overcome it: Sylva still had not the least scrap of a lawful existence. She was not born, not even of unknown parents, and I had not so far found a subterfuge to get over this lack of identity. The idea of resorting to forged papers was distasteful to me. I therefore waited for a brain wave, telling myself that there was no hurry. But the truth was, I am afraid, that I am not lionhearted. Deep inside me I was worried about what people would say. I was frightened of the difficult moments that were certainly in store for me in our milieu if I married this “native,” as Dorothy had said—and an unmarried mother to boot! I had a tendency to forget my stout new maxim about what constituted the quality of a being when I was faced with the effort that would be needed to impress others with its truth. I kept thinking more of myself than of Sylva.

In the meanwhile, Sylva was getting bigger. She also began to wonder what her baby would be like. Never having seen one, she had the most fantastic ideas about it. Nanny brought her my family album, on which a score of newborn babies could be seen lying flat on their tummies on a variety of rugs and cushions. Sylva wanted us to show her a picture of herself at that age. This led to extremely embroiled explanations to which she at first listened without batting an eyelid. But we saw her growing sad and sullen as the days went by, and there was a strained, drawn look on her face. We eventually realized, rather horrified, that she was consumed with grief at the idea that Nanny surely was her mother and I her father, and that we were hiding it from her. If we let her go on believing such rubbish, this would hardly facilitate our future marriage! I therefore deemed the time was ripe for Nanny to explain to Sylva that, far from being her father, I was the one who had fathered her child.

Nanny complied, with all the tact of which she was capable. We could not immediately gauge the effect of this revelation. Sylva had listened with that air of absent-minded attention which she often assumed when she felt something was beyond her grasp and wanted to ponder later and at leisure over what she had been told. She was very quiet till the evening, although slightly aloof, a little distraught, and she went to bed as usual. But next morning she had disappeared.

This was her fourth escapade within a few months, and I was beginning to get used to them. Probably I would not have worried very greatly if we had not discovered an entirely new fact: Sylva had gone away with a suitcase!

She had taken clothes, lingerie and toilet things with her. To go where? Certainly not very far; she was still too unsure of herself to travel alone, or to go up to town. Jeremy’s hut? I realized with a happy sigh of relief that I no longer feared she might have joined him. That period lay well in the past. I shall cut short the account of my searches and deductions, for in any case they did not have much time to operate. A message from the innkeeper told me that the runaway was at the Unicorn. He had not dared refuse her a room but was afraid there might be trouble and preferred to let me know. He did not add that Sylva had not a brass farthing on her.

After some thought I decided not to force her to come back at once. Instead I sent Mrs. Bumley to reconnoiter. They had a long talk together, necessarily difficult and confused, from which, however, Nanny was able to grasp the gist. For Sylva, I was “Bonny,” that is to say, her father, brother, protector, and according to what she had digested of the doctrines of the Church—the cardinal virtues, the links of parentage, sin, hell and all the rest—she could not admit that I might be the father of the child she was carrying. She simply denied it, with the most stubborn energy, and she was still dim-witted enough to believe with a fierce candor that what she denied did not exist. Roused to impatience by such pigheadedness, Nanny suddenly brushed aside the obstacles of various kinds that had hitherto restrained her, and launched out into a full explanation of love, pleasure, and the rest.

Sylva let her talk, her eyes fixed on her, and when Nanny caught her breath and her chin began to quiver between her sagging cheeks, the young girl simply said, “I know.” There was nothing more to be got out of her. Nanny came home most discomfited and exceedingly displeased with herself.

During the following days Sylva refused to see even Nanny. Then she changed her mind and received her. On the condition, however, that I should not come with her, she said. In the course of those days of waiting, I could measure the power of my love for Sylva. I remember few periods in my life when I reached such a degree of feverish bewilderment, hopeless distress, indecision and stupor. A hundred times I resolved to bring her back by force, a hundred times an inner voice warned me not to do anything of the kind. I had great misgivings of the danger she was in, all alone in that inn, amidst all those village bumpkins whose heads would be turned by her simplicity and beauty. But at the same time I guessed that if I compelled her to come back there was a risk of turning her against me for a long time. Moreover, Nanny calmed my fears a little.

“In the first place,” she said, “you can be sure that your little vixen loves you—even if her brand-new heart has not yet told her how.”

Besides, good old Nanny made friends with the innkeeper’s wife, who kept an eye on Sylva as if she were her own daughter. And finally, Nanny herself went to the Unicorn every day, to continue her role as an educator. She thus had an eye on the male patrons and their comings and goings. But she hesitated for a long while, she told me, before owning up to her worries for me on account of a very assiduous, new visitor at the inn: my friend J. F. Walburton’s younger son. I knew the boy well: a handsome lad. And the girl—quite ingenuously, according to Nanny, and without thinking of any harm—smilingly tolerated his advances.

If my candid Sylva had been a cunning woman of the world, she could not have chosen a shrewder course of action to sweep away my ultimate and cowardly hesitations. But perhaps she had become both worldly-wise and a woman? Perhaps her departure this time was one of those feminine ruses, in which women pretend they are running away from a man’s love when what they really want in secret, sometimes even without admitting it to themselves, is to exasperate him to his breaking point? However this may be, there I was, reluctantly deprived of her presence, worried, jealous, dependent for the least scrap of news on Nanny as an intermediary (and suspecting her of connivance).

If what Sylva wanted was to open my eyes to the power and true nature of my affection for her, she succeeded in this most marvelously, for I no longer slept and only thought of one thing: our marriage. I had plenty of leisure during those sleepless nights to realize with striking clarity what she would henceforth mean in my life. No longer only a woman (as for thinking of her as a vixen, a fox bitch still, I would have blushed with shame) , no longer only a human being, but at last a “person”; yes, Sylva was now quite simply the one person on earth I loved, the person I wanted to live with, whom I would never yield to another, whom I would marry against the whole world, for I simply could no longer live without her.

And I am convinced that in marrying her I have done the wisest thing I ever did in my life. Sylva’s gentleness, her joy of life, her bubbling tenderness, her eagerness to learn about everything, have never ceased, nor has she ever given me cause to be anything but proud of her, and her charm and grace have brought me honor on many occasions. That is why I find it hard today to remember that silly time when people’s opinion kept me back, when my own mind was still clogged with stupid old prejudices. And I sometimes tremble at the thought that, were it not for that revealing absence, I might perhaps still be hesitant. But once the scales had fallen from my eyes, I was frantic with impatience and shrugged off the rest. The child? What matter if it looked like the gorilla or anyone else, I would not be the first man to take charge of a natural child for love of its mother; and who cared if “they” turned up their noses?

But I am bragging a little. In actual fact, I believe I secretly kept hoping that there would be a miscarriage or a stillborn child. Or that, if it did survive, it would resemble me. Or if not me, at least not too obviously the gorilla. And if it did… ah well, I would just have to make advance arrangements, see to it that the confinement was as discreet as possible so that I might, as a last resort, entrust the baby to some faraway crêche…

But the first thing of all was to get Sylva’s consent. She must therefore be persuaded to come home. Nanny was not up to that task, for torn between Sylva and me, she no longer knew which way to turn. Sylva loved me too, I had every reason to be sure of it. I would shut myself up with her, I would convince her in the end. She must understand and follow me! I jumped on my horse and galloped down to the inn.

There I found everything at sixes and sevens. Where was Nanny? She appeared just as I was asking for her, carrying a basin of hot water. She simply said, “So there you are, are you?” and passed without stopping.

I followed her.

She said, “Stay where you are.”

“But what’s going on?” I cried.

And Nanny, over her shoulder: “She is in labor.”

This was much earlier than we had expected. And I had been planning a discreet confinement! I paced up and down in the corridor, chain-smoking as custom has it, until after half an hour, I heard Nanny call me in a voice that gave me goose flesh.

I ran up to her. She was carrying the first-born in her arms.

There could be no room for doubt: it was a fox cub.

Footnotes

1

I am wondering today, more than thirty years after, if I have not inverted the order in which I read these books. It is of no consequence, however. What is remarkable is that a prodigy of the same kind should be at the root of such widely different stories, one by a Czech, the other by an Englishman.

2

These remarks strike me today as rather tepid. But in those days the very word “racialism” had not yet been heard of, Hitler was an unknown prisoner of the Weimar Republic, and everyone in this respect thought more or less along Kipling’s lines. How things have changed since!

Content

Sylva
by Vercors (Jean Bruller)

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part Two

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Footnotes