Sylva

“Oh!” I said. “The other day I thought we’d got somewhere! After watching Nanny for a long time at her dressing table, she too sat down in front of it. She picked up a brush and went on brushing her hair for a long while. Unfortunately, it was only an illusion. Just enjoying the mimicry, like any monkey. But she did not see herself. We had proof of that pretty soon. Nanny stepped up to her silently and put a rose into her curls. Sylva reached out her arm and hit her fingers trying to seize the flower not on her own head but where she saw it: in the glass. She hurt herself and got a great fright and has since been sulking against all mirrors, even more than before if possible.”

“But this is interesting!” the doctor exclaimed to my surprise. “Damned interesting!”

Seeing my astonishment, he explained:

“You say this was only an illusion. Not at all. What you call an illusion is itself illusory. All you have gathered from a failure is its negative aspect. You are not thinking of the invisible work, caused by each one of these missed opportunites, which goes on day by day in a new brain: what junctions, what concatenations of frustrated impressions, unfinished acts, forgotten emotions, lost visions, what dim associations, what sudden flashes… You know nothing of them and cannot, of course, imagine them, but how do you think that reflection is built up in the brain of a young child? Already your vixen no longer behaves like a small wild mammal, but like a highly developed primate. That is a good stretch along the road of evolution, my boy! It proves that her gray matter does not remain inactive, as might have been feared. Patience, patience-you may be sure that things will begin to happen, perhaps quite soon.”

With his big fat nose, his bald pate fringed with white foam, the grandiose gestures of his long hands and skinny arms, he had, as he spoke, the somewhat odd look of an old ecclesiastic prophet out of a Rowlandson print. This gave his words a curious effect, halfway between the ridiculous and the inspired. At the time, I was particularly alive to the preposterous side of it and had to prevent myself from smiling. But what he said must have silently burrowed into my mind, for when the day came on which, in his words, “things began to happen,” I was not as surprised as I would probably otherwise have been. However, at the moment, as I said, I saw in his optimism only the doggedness of an old scientist who doesn’t like to have been wrong.

Nor was I the only one to think so: Dorothy did not restrain herself as she listened to her father, and laughed almost openly. She remarked that he did not seem to mind contradicting himself, for a few weeks earlier he had predicted that Sylva, on the contrary, would prove too old for intelligence still to be able to form.

“Yes, I said that,” Dr. Sullivan agreed. “That was my opinion, and I’d still hold to it if it were not for all these obvious signs that a certain form of intelligence is about to dawn. Actually, I had not considered the fact that her brain was just as blank as that of a newborn babe. The only difference is that it has the dimensions of an adult brain. That’s the whole point, and that’s what is so thrilling!”

Whereupon he gave a huge yawn and asked if he could have a little nap before driving home: the effect of a heavy lunch on an aged stomach, he said. Nanny led him into the living room and made him comfortable on the sofa with some blankets. Then she went upstairs to Sylva, who could be heard trotting up there with nervous impatience. She must have heard the sound of voices.

No sooner were we alone than Dorothy snapped in a fierce whisper:

“Do you think you can fool me?”

I was so staggered by this brusque attack that I remained dumb. I could barely stammer:

“What do you mean?”

“That business with poor Jeremy.”

“Well? What of it?”

“You don’t care a rap for respectability!”

“What do you mean, I-”

“Tell me the truth: are you in love with her?”

“Now really, Dorothy…”

“I’m not a prude and if you want to go to bed with her I shan’t kick up a fuss about it. She won’t be your first mistress, as everyone knows. But I beg you not to forget who you are, where you come from. It would be an appalling scandal.”

“What would? Do you suppose I want to marry her?” I exclaimed.

“Who knows? I wonder.”

“I’ve never heard anything so ludicrous. Does one marry a fox? You know perfectly well she is nothing else yet.”

“Not yet, as you say yourself. But she’ll change. My father is probably quite right.”

“Well, then it’ll be time to think of it, won’t it?” I said sarcastically, for she had upset me.

“No, that’s just it. You must think of it now!”

She said this very insistently, in a tone of alarm, and gripped my hands with an expression of urgency.

“You are in great danger,” she said. “Remember Pygmalion.”

“What’s he got to do with it? Sylva isn’t made of marble.”