Sylva

by Jean Bruller

  “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.

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  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!

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