Sylva

The path narrowed amidst the fern and trees. We could not walk abreast. Sylva left my side, slipped in front to walk ahead. I noticed, to my great confusion, that it was my heart now that beat with emotion. What was I expecting, then? I do not know. Perhaps to see her turn into a fox again, before my eyes? I caught myself, if not precisely wishing it, at least contemplating the possibility with a sort of secret longing which left me half amazed, half troubled. Did I not love her any more? Did I (for Dorothy’s sake perhaps) want to lose her? At this thought my heart beat more violently and dictated to me a very different fantasy which filled my chest with the fragrance of the woods: the fantasy that we should both meet again as foxes.

Which of us has not wished some time to be a gazelle, a dolphin, a swallow? In other words, to regain Eden -innocence, joy and freedom-to cast off the burden of the human estate, the strictness of the state of a Christian, the glum duties of the condition of a British subject… Oh, to be able to gallop along the tracks with my vixen, leap over the ferns, pursue a hare, a stoat… These kinds of wish-dreams are never very serious, and this one hardly any more so, but if I did not really wish to become a fox, could I still long, then, for her to become one without me? Besides, wasn’t she a fox anyhow, despite her appearance?

I gradually realized that what I regretted was that she was in fact neither woman nor fox. Seeing her in this human shape so brutally “detached” from her natural setting, as a scissor cut is “detached,” a silhouette cut out amidst this vast organic element which we passed through but with which we could not merge, I realized intensely the extent to which her little soul must unconsciously feel wrenched and lonely. Before, she had breathed with the forest’s breath, mingling with it fiber by fiber; now she too could only watch it like a spectacle, enjoy it from outside like myself, however much we were inside it. What had been a communion of each moment, each look, each movement, was now no more than a foreign scrutiny, a face-reading, however fascinating it still might be. And seeing her move her head this way and that with the quickness of a squirrel; raise it to follow the flight of a wood pigeon, a linnet; leave the path with a doe’s leap to inspect an anthill; scratch in passing as if with claws the trunk of a dead tree to try and discover in it a little honey of wild bees; start up at the cracking of a bough, stop dead at the stifled complaint of a stone marten-seeing her thus repeat her foxy movements though they could no longer be those of a wild beast but only a vain imitation, a make-believe, my heart contracted with pity and tenderness.

And yet what a lovely sight she was in the forest, my Sylva! Her hair had the flamboyant hue of larches in autumn; her neck rose proud and straight, supple and nervous and strong like a horse’s leg; her slender back, molded in a sweater that was the color of autumn leaves too, rippled and quivered at the slightest noise, the softest breath; as for her legs, they were so noble and beautiful that one could have loved them for their own sake, a supple pair of salmon swimming a continuous minuet in the subaqueous light of the undergrowth…

Thus we strolled, she in front and perpetually in a buoyant rhythm halfway between walking and running, all her pores-or so it seemed-open to the thousand murmurs, the thousand scents, the thousand tremors of the springtime awakening; and I walking behind, forgotten, I told myself, so completely forgotten…

But though I may have thought it with a little melancholy, it did not really pain me; on the contrary, I was hoping, hoping with all my heart and all my strength at that moment, that she might recapture however little of that-but what can one call it? pulsation? rapture?- ah! a little of the bubbling delight that was hers before the transformation, a little of the ineffable fullness of her life as a fox subjected only to its nature-to Nature.

Three hours thus passed like a minute. Only when I noticed that I was dragging my legs did my sudden fatigue make me abruptly aware of the lapse of time. I looked at my wrist watch: half past twelve! I was not even very sure where we were, since Sylva had been pulling me along in all sorts of directions, on the spur of her impulses. But I figured that Richwick Manor must be quite a mile away. What would Nanny say! The Sunday dinner would be burned. Sylva continued to gambol with the same winged ease, impervious to tiredness. I called her.