Sylva

by Jean Bruller

  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 o
ver 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.