Sylva

It must have shown so clearly on my face that she began to chuckle silently while a thin line of moisture shone on the rim of her eyelids. She waved her hand feebly as if to say: “It’ll pass, don’t mind me,” and blew her nose loudly, then folded her handkerchief and smoothed it with the flat of her hand on a thigh as thick and large as a table.

“That poor child, I keep forgetting,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”

She shook her head wistfully, regretfully, while I wondered what she was forgetting.

“I never knew her as a fox, did I? That’s my excuse. I did not see her metamorphosis as you did. I keep forgetting that she is not a backward child, that she is still a young female animal, with all her instincts. She has got to satisfy them, poor thing. Even in the arms of a monster like that… that… And what would become of her?” she cried. “Oh, do forgive the scene I made just now,” she said with eager contrition. “I didn’t understand. But now… now that I have seen him… How right you were! And what a blessing that you… that you…”

She blushed crimson, like a very young girl.

“She will love you one day,” she said with a kind of fervor. “Oh yes, she must! You’ll make a woman of her through love!”

These were, almost word for word, the arguments she had refused to listen to three minutes ago. Yet coming back to me from Nanny’s lips like an echo they seemed to me so preposterous and out of season, they made me feel so ill at ease, that I found nothing else to do but laugh sarcastically. The bulldog face, however, seeing me sneer, took on an expression of such grieved astonishment that I rebuked myself for my childish cruelty.

Chapter 18

THE village tom-toms operate quite as effectively in Somerset as in Zambezi. Soon the whole neighborhood knew of the affair of the backward young girl from Richwick Manor and the forest idiot. Tongues wagged ceaselessly. Some praised me for having put a stop to it, others criticized me for having wrecked the only possible happiness for those hapless creatures. Fortunately nobody seemed to suspect that I might have done it for any other motive than the strictest respectability. All this came to my ears via old Walburton, who would tell me this gossip with a hint of irony, not to say a slight sarcasm. I wondered what he was thinking deep down. Overtly, he was one of those who approved my having put an end to that “grotesque union,” as he called it. But he had a funny way of adding “I hope she has consoled herself?” which I didn’t like. Perhaps I was imagining things.

It was the same with Dorothy, and even with her father. They both came to see me shortly after. Despite the sultry heat that brooded over the countryside, the doctor wore his perennial black frock coat and the waistcoat that rose right to his collar. His daughter, more sensibly, wore a light dress which disclosed her beautiful shoulders. The doctor made me relate in detail the walk in the forest and Sylva’s flight, the discovery of her presence in Jeremy’s hut, her attitude and second flight, and finally her return to the fold, brought back by the gorilla who had fortunately been scared by Walburton’s threats.

“All you have told me would apply perfectly well,” he said when I had finished, “to a clever young bitch. A springtime escapade. Odd, that. For if I am to believe what Dorothy has told me after each one of her visits here, our young lady is making rather sensational progress in other ways.”

I replied that she had indeed made some progress; but sensational seemed a rather big word for it. To me, on the contrary (but of course I was always about), it seemed slow and doubtful. It was a fact that she had made various kinds of progress which might appear “human” in all sorts of domains: cleanliness; speech, using a vocabulary which, though still exceedingly poor, was definitely increasing every day; the use of objects too, very simple tools: combs, spoons, forks, dusters, brooms. She had learned without much difficulty to sweep her own room, make her bed, yet in most essential matters she remained subject, just as in the first days of her training, to her appetites, her fears, her impulses; she obeyed them implicitly and without even a second’s reflection, seeming unable even to conceive the possibility of a refusal, still less of choice or consideration or even hesitation. Yes, she did behave like a “clever young bitch,” and even like a very clever one, to whom one could teach all sorts of tricks-save one: reasoning.

“Nothing new as regards the looking glass?” asked the doctor.