Sylva

She was just a vixen becoming more and more domesticated, to an exceptional degree no doubt, but to believe anything else for the time being would have been sheer wishful thinking. That is at least what we kept telling ourselves.

With the result that while I was prepared for fresh progress, even for great changes, while I was even watching out for them with a confused mixture of fear and hope, I did not expect to see them crop up so soon or so suddenly. Perhaps it is a general rule with human beings that they are always caught unawares by events, even those they have watched for most closely.

I might say in my defense that I had, moreover, some reason to be absent-minded. Dorothy had returned only once, with her father, since the poignant scene in which she had reduced me to silence in order not to hear me. To tell the truth, I had not been able to efface the painful impression left by her exclamation concerning herself: “An empty shell!” She seemed to me to have lost weight and her complexion was dull. She avoided my eyes. It also seemed to me that the doctor was below par. I said to Dorothy, “Come and help me make tea,” hoping thereby to have a chance of talking to her alone. But she eluded the suggestion.

“I’ll go and make it with Mrs. Bumley,” she said, and we were left standing there, her father and I.

“I have the impression,” I said to him, “that Dorothy isn’t looking very well. Anything wrong?”

Upon my word, the old man too was avoiding my eyes!

“ London has tired her,” he said vaguely. “She must pick up again. That takes time.”

“Nothing pathological?” I asked, worried.

“No, no. Just an upset of the neuro-vegetative system. Quiet life and country air will put it right in time. And your little vixen?” he inquired without transition, as if he was in a hurry to change the subject. “Anything new?”

“Pah!” I said. “Pretty little. She is marking time. Just two or three new words caught here and there. But hardly anything as far as essentials go.”

“What do you call essentials?”

“Well, I mean, for instance, that the only way to oblige her to resist her instinctive urges and behave in a bearable manner is still punishment. Nothing else. The fear of being punished stands her in stead of reason or, if you like, of second nature.”

“Well,” the doctor said, laughing, “isn’t that actually the beginning of ethics?”

“Yes, the ethics of an animal trainer,” I said ironically. “You see, this tends to confirm in me some age-old certainties. I’ve always thought that prison, capital punishment as a deterrent, are just survivals of the Stone Age; they solve nothing, prevent nothing. There are no fewer thefts or murders in our era than there were at the time of the Visigoths or the Vandals. The human conscience must have sprung from altogether different sources. But which ones? You can’t imagine the number of books poor Nanny has been poring over these last weeks: on primitive psychology, the metaphysics of manners or the immediate data of consciousness… without finding anything remotely applicable to the case of a fox-woman.”

“The mind of man,” said the doctor, “is born with the individual. That’s the clue to everything. When he discovered that he existed, separately from the rest of things, and from the rest of his pack. Obviously, the pack served him as a mirror for this discovery, but at the same time it retarded it. We are now faced with the same dialectic. Your vixen must learn in the first place that she exists. Nanny and you are helping her and retarding her at the same time. That’s why I thought of those mirrors. Nothing new in that respect?”

He had not mentioned them for a long time.

“No. Actually, I’ve even removed the cheval glass from her room and put it up in mine, where it is more useful.”

“Quite, quite,” he said, suddenly abstracted. “Did it really strike you so much that she wasn’t looking well?”

It took me quite two seconds to realize that he was talking of Dorothy again.

“Well, she seems to have lost weight,” I said, “and her complexion isn’t as clear as it was. Are you more worried about her health than you care to admit?”

“If it only were her health!” he muttered.

“You’re hiding the truth from me, Doctor… Am I to blame for something?” I asked courageously.

“You, my poor boy?” he exclaimed, and I never knew whether or not he had been on the verge of telling me more, for Dorothy appeared with a well-laden tray. Nanny had gone to fetch Sylva from her room.