by Jean Bruller
“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 see
med 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…