Sylva

She was too agitated to be capable of listening to me. Words poured from her quite incoherently, as if the shock had released a talking machine of which she had lost control. Like a tune ground out by a barrel organ, certain words recurred over and over again to express her disapproval: “Taking advantage of the poor creature!” It was hard to make out from her vehemence whether she felt more ashamed for me or more fearful for “the poor child.” I eventually grasped that while her imagination was outraged by what seemed to her (as it had to me only the day before) an abominable depravity, she feared above all that it might jeopardize the evolution of the retarded child entrusted to her care.

“Won’t she soon be needing you as a father?” she repeated with an excessive gush of pity. “Just think what it will be like for her when…”

I vainly tried to interrupt the torrent and explain to her the discovery I had made: how in the course of time I hoped to bring the darling child to look upon me in a quite different light. But she just would not listen. More than ten times I started my explanations, but she obstinately shook her head and continued inveighing against me.

In the end, she exasperated me to such an extent that I jumped up and lost my temper. “Damn you for a pigheaded old fool! If you don’t like it…”

She promptly jumped to her feet in turn, ran toward the door. I caught her by the arm and forced her to sit down. And for the eleventh time I was about to resume my arguments when there was a knock, and the French window leading from the garden opened.

It was the wretched Jeremy. Visibly, he had scrubbed himself from head to foot; he had put on his Sunday best, and his metallic blond hair, which a thorough wash had restored to its natural fuzz, surrounded his brutish face like the petals of a dandelion. But I was much too angry to be alive to humor or pathos. I thrust Nanny back into her armchair, spun around furiously and, as that grotesque clown came in, strode toward him with such a resolute and probably menacing air that he shrank back to the terrace. I was shaking with fury.

“Get out!” I yelled. “Be off and don’t let me see you again, or I’ll set the dogs on you!”

I would have been hard put to carry out the threat, for my two mastiffs, though ferocious-looking, were incapable of harming a fly. Jeremy fortunately did not know this; he shrank back even farther and I slammed the French window in his face, turning the key in the lock. With clenched fists and still shaking, I turned back toward Nanny, who was staring at me, pale and gaping, her chin a-tremble-perhaps she was afraid I would strangle her? Come, come, I told myself, pull yourself together. I approached her, trying to smile.

A windowpane crashed in pieces.

Then another, then a third. A stone fell at my feet. Was I to let this brute smash all my windows? But by the time I reached the garden Jeremy was no more than a distant figure fleeing toward the woods-as Sylva had fled not long ago. At this memory my rage subsided. Poor chap! I understood his despair all too well. And for the last time I asked myself whether, by tearing my little vixen from her native forest and from the savage love of this Lord Utan, I was not being very selfish and very cruel.

In a pensive mood I walked back into the living room, and found there a very pensive Nanny too. We exchanged a long look, this time without impatience or anger on either side.

“You think I’m wrong of course.” I sighed, and as indeed she did not answer, I went on: “She’d be happier with this man in the forest. Much happier. Yes, that’s certain.”

Nanny gazed at me without a word. “She’s a young vixen,” I admitted sadly, “and she’ll probably remain one. Our plans for her future are just wishful thinking, it may be quite absurd to persist.”

I fell silent and sat down, stirring the dying embers in the fireplace; and for a minute or so there was silence in the room.

Nanny sat motionless as a tree stump. The stillness was becoming unbearable. I shouted without looking at her:

“Say something, for God’s sake! I know what’s in your mind: it’s Dorothy, isn’t it? I’m behaving like a cad toward her, that’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you? Well, say so, damn it! Spill it out!”

“Miss Dorothy is old enough to look after herself,” Nanny said at last, and she rapped out the name in a curiously rough, almost aggressive voice. “No, I wasn’t thinking of her,” she went on, and added: “When you haven’t seen someone with your own eyes…”

“But you’ve seen her almost every week!” I cried.

“I’m not talking of her,” said Nanny, “but of him. That monster! That gorilla. I never imagined…”

She fidgeted in her armchair, the wood creaked.

“That monstrous ape… What a blessing!” she cried, and this time I was completely at sea.