Sylva

Faced with this sleeping body in the reclining grace of a Correggio, it seems to me that everything has at last become marvelously clear. No more mystery. A dazzling brightness floods me, I send up to heaven a Te Deum which, though somewhat profane, is nonetheless a thanksgiving-Halleluja! Halleluja! But what happened afterward I cannot say. I would set it down quite truthfully if my memory could conjure up the slightest picture, however dim. But there is nothing: what comes after this hosanna is a drop into a black hole. At most I retained on waking the very vague impression of having spent a restless night.

Chapter 17

NEXT morning when I woke, sobered, I was holding between my chest and my knees, as if in a pair of nutcrackers, a very small, frail Sylva, curled up, foxlike, in a ball, her hair caressing my chin. And I was amazed that, with my drunkenness gone, I did not feel at all ashamed, or at least embarrassed or perplexed, at holding the sweet creature in my arms. On the contrary, I felt lighthearted, happy. I remembered having thought, as in my drunken stupor I gazed at the sleeping sylph in her amber-colored indolence, that I had at last “understood everything.”

“No more mystery.” But I vainly tried to recapture that sense of sudden perspicacity and, with it, what it was that I had perceived so irrefutably in my drunkenness. I could recapture none of it. Nor, as a matter of fact, could I rediscover the source from which, the night before, had sprung the sort of shame or disgust that had impregnated me for so long: six glasses of whisky had swept it away, but logically it ought to have reappeared. The conditions, I reflected, are the same as they were yesterday, and the warm little animal I am holding ensconced like a sweet hazelnut in the crook of my body still has nothing feminine about her except her appearance. I am not trying to deceive myself. She is a vixen. And yet I feel no confusion, no regret, at imagining (quite mistakenly, perhaps) what may have happened last night. All my previous repugnance now seems to me silly and prejudiced. What has changed then? If Sylva hasn’t, have I?

I first tried to assume with Christian humility that since I had not raised Sylva to a human level I myself might consequently have sunk to the level of a fox. Was that not highly probable, alas? Had I not experienced a bestial carnal obsession among the crowd in the market? Was this not the ominous portent of a degradation? But I was clasping my sleeping vixen in my arms, I felt her breathing gently swell and relax the young body coiled against mine, and I felt no shame, not even a stirring of the senses. I merely smiled with great tenderness, convinced there was nothing brutish in this gentleness, in the quiet calm that pervaded me.

For better proof of the peace in my soul and to make quite sure of these new thoughts, I woke Sylva and softly caressed her spine, as one does to a cat to make it purr. And as this murmur of pleasure rose in her throat I realized with a sort of exaltation that I was sure, profoundly sure, that some day, under my guidance, the purring would cease to be the solitary noise of unconscious flesh; that some day it would become the love song of a being who no longer submits but gives herself, who dedicates herself body and soul to the ineffable communion of human love. I realized that if I had wrested my vixen from her ape man, from the innocent but blind debauchery of mindless creatures, it was (even before I knew it) because of this-today luminous-certainty that she would later become capable of this communion under my guidance; that to abandon her to her instincts forever, even if to her it meant happiness and-quite literally-a fool’s paradise, it was yet a betrayal; that true loyalty and courage demanded on the contrary that I help this peaceful little animal to blossom slowly into a woman in love, into a lover-even if she had to suffer for it; and that I would henceforth live in this hope, or, more exactly, in this determination.

While this mental avalanche swept all before it, I did not once think, I confess it with shame, of Dorothy.

But when, early in the morning, Mrs. Bumley discovered me in Sylva’s bed (wasn’t that the shortest way of introducing her to my new disposition?) it would be putting it mildly to say that she was indignant. She gasped for breath and almost fainted. I made her drink a glass of rum, put on my dressing gown and pulled her into the living room.