Sylva

Poor Nanny would ask her ten times a day, “Do you love me, my little Sylva?” and Sylva would answer docilely, “Love you,” but it was obvious that the word meant nothing to her and that the affection she bore us, though genuine and even violent, did not in any way correspond to what that word expresses for us. It was a simple wild attachment, an organic fidelity, the hollow mold of her fear of loneliness, her immense need of protection since she had found herself a stranger in the forest, clumsy and spurned, a hunted outcast.

Perhaps there mingled in her inclination toward me something else, which I should have been hard put to define: a certain sensitivity to my mood, a more sedulous attention to my words and deeds, and that primitive jealousy when I was talking to Dorothy or even to Nanny and seemed to be forgetting her presence. She would draw closer at such moments and, as she had done under Dorothy’s caresses, would plant her incisors into my ear lobe just enough to hurt without wounding me. I would rap her fingers and she would go and sulk in a corner, her eyes fixed on me.

Her progress in practical life was of the same type: pertaining to the training of an animal rather than to education. She could wash and dress herself (as long as there were no buttons or shoelaces-she never bothered about them), she ate at table, but with her fingers, and licked her plate clean of the last trace of gravy. She later learned to clean it with a piece of bread instead, a habit she never lost.

As the days passed, I saw Dr. Sullivan increase the rhythm of his visits. Had he finally accepted in his own mind that Sylva was indeed a former fox? He had never said anything to the contrary and, at all events, it was evident that he was beginning to be passionately interested.

“It is a unique experiment!” he said, shaking his foamy hair. “Actually this creature takes us back five hundred thousand years: when the very first men, with their brains fully constituted but still, like this one, void of experience and of knowledge, had sprung brand-new from animality! What is going to happen to this brain is of fantastic interest-supposing, of course, that anything does happen,” he added with cautious reserve. But he seemed to have shed, for some time already, part of his pessimism.

I observed that the experiment would be completely falsified by the mere fact that we, who surrounded my little fox, were equipped with twentieth-century brains.

He shook his head. “No, no, the experiment will be accelerated no doubt-happily for us. If we had to wait for two or three hundred thousand years… but it won’t be falsified. Even supposing the impossible-that her intelligence might some day catch up with ours-it will necessarily have to pass through all the various stages first. For instance, does Sylva know something that seems quite simple to us: that she exists? Certainly not: no more than a fox, a horse, or a monkey does, no more than the first men could have known it, steeped as they were in their dark instincts. Now that is the very first and absolutely indispensable stage. In what form did it present itself, how was it passed, what wouldn’t we give to be present at this first awakening of consciousness in our earliest forefathers! And here, perhaps, with your Sylva, it may happen under our very eyes! She will need our help, of course. We must push her toward it with all our might. I still do not know how. Let me think it over.”

Was I myself very set on the success of these “experiments”? To see Sylva actually pass these “stages”? On the one hand, of course, I ardently wished it; on the other I was dimly afraid of it. However, when Herbert Sullivan talked to me of mirrors, I did not dream of opposing his projects. Actually, I was a little mortified to see Sylva still behaving, in front of mirrors, just as a fox would have done: she never looked at herself in them.

“Fine! Fine!” said Dr. Sullivan. “So we’re really starting from scratch. The thing to do is to produce a shock,” he explained, and we set out on a search for a large-sized looking glass.

We wandered together through the innumerable empty rooms of this too-vast mansion and eventually discovered an enormous cheval glass under the dust of the linen room. After cleaning it thoroughly we carried it into the young girl’s room. We were all there: the doctor, Dorothy, Mrs. Bumley and myself. But my vixen did not glance at it, any more than at the other mirrors in the house.