Sylva

AFTER Dorothy’s departure, I was back in a state of extreme confusion. Yet I am not a fickle-hearted Latin, a Frenchman for whom every girl he meets is immediately the prettiest one, a Sicilian who swears eternal love to three different women on the same day. I had been quite sincere with Dorothy. But when she was gone and I found myself alone with Sylva again, all I had said seemed to me rash madness. It was not as though my feelings for Sylva were more certain, less ambiguous than before. I had not lied to Dorothy when, some little time ago, I had compared this attachment to hers for her Siamese kitten. But on the other hand hadn’t I, if not confessing it outright, at least stopped denying the strong attraction that Sylva exercised on my senses? Above all, I had concealed even more dangerous thoughts from Dorothy; and though she had divined the gist of them this did not alter the fact that I had hidden them. I had not breathed a word of the exultant joy that had gripped me at the idea that love might change Sylva into a real woman. It was true that I had since told myself, with returning composure, that I was indulging in pipe dreams, that I had turned the order of things upside down and that, in actual fact, it was only provided I could first make a woman of her that Sylva might subsequently be able to feel human love. But that was just it: finding Sylva again as she still was, pretty as a picture but sunk to the very soul in the dark maze of her animal mentality, I could not fool myself. I was quite determined to lift her out of it, to do all that lay in my power to awaken a human intelligence in her. Dorothy had warned me that by doing so I ran the risk of falling in love for good with a woman who, to a considerable extent at least, would be my own creation. But I knew I would do it all the same. And thus, by nevertheless offering my heart to Dorothy, I was becoming perilously guilty toward her.

At the same time I told myself that I was quite as guilty, for that matter, toward Sylva. If Dorothy had been less shrewd or less honest, what would I have done in the long run? At best, I would have abandoned Sylva to the care of Mrs. Bumley-but what would have become of her afterward? At worst, I would have followed the Sullivans’ sound advice and entrusted her at once to some institution. That might have meant arresting her development. Well, wouldn’t that be wiser? Wasn’t it better, after all, that she should remain a vixen? Wouldn’t the woman she might become in the best hypothesis still be full of gaps and deficiencies, incapable of adapting herself to our modern world? Wouldn’t I make her unhappy by vowing her to so doubtful a destiny? But a powerful voice within me protested against these pessimistic views, assured me that to abandon her now in her present state might smack of criminal desertion.

For there were numerous signs which convinced me that the doctor was right, that the time was approaching when “things would begin to happen.” I did not imagine, however, that the time was so close at hand.

I don’t want to pretend that those precursory signs always struck us clearly, Nanny and me. Many of them escaped us (one cannot always be on the watch); others were fallacious. Like all primates, Sylva was naturally gifted with a great talent for imitation. By regularly repeating our words and acts she eventually linked the acts to the words with apparent logic. But how difficult it was to know when the appearance was deceptive and when it was not! More than once we looked at each other, her governess and I, seized with emotion, in the belief that we had witnessed in our pupil a great step from her condition of an unthinking creature; and then we had to admit that it was only a sham without substance, a mere aping, a parody without reality. Such, it will be remembered, was the episode of the dressing table, of the rose in her hair. But at other times, on the contrary, an act that should have intrigued us, captured our attention, passed us by and we thoughtlessly paid it no heed.

I remember, for instance, the following little incident. One evening when Fanny had prepared some chocolate ice for us Sylva, after tasting it, began to blow on it in her plate. We laughed about it without realizing at once how much this mistake on her part already represented an association between cause and effect. Only later did we recall it to distinguish a posteriori its faintly precursory indication. It’s so much easier to be wise after the event!

By and large, Sylva’s very slow and sporadic type of progress, broken by forward leaps and disquieting retrogressions, continued to present far less resemblance to the progress of a backward child than to that of an animal in training, and this bewildered Nanny as much as me. Nothing allowed us to affirm that Sylva’s nature was changing.