Sylva

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.