Sylva

by Jean Vercors

  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-wid
e, 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.