Sylva

As usual, Sylva flung herself on me with puppylike manifestations, snapping at my ear, licking the hand with which I was trying to protect myself. Whenever she had been kept locked up by herself for too long she would fall back into these old habits and recover her manners only after the first joy of reunion had been calmed. I pushed her back as best I could, and now it was the doctor’s turn. She had grown accustomed to the black frock coat and for a long time now had been great friends with the old man. Good-naturedly he let himself be kissed and snapped at, then gently pushed her away too.

“What about me?” asked Dorothy.

Sylva went up to her, with less enthusiasm but still with some eagerness. As they were about to kiss, Sylva suddenly gave a start, or rather a shudder. She jumped back, slipped out of Dorothy’s already outstretched hands and took shelter behind Mrs. Bumley’s armchair. From there she gazed at the young woman, her cat’s eyes aglow with a watchful attention. Something had alarmed her-but what?

Dorothy had remained with her hands in mid-air. She slowly lowered them under our surprised stare. She herself seemed not so much surprised as the prey of a strange ccmmotion. Her features seemed to decompose. She almost frightened me for a few seconds. And I realized that what had stirred her father when he had talked of her a moment ago was also some sort of fear. “A dead crab”-it was as if someone had just whispered those words into my ear. I perceived that I did not know her, that she was a mystery to me. That, actually, I did not know anything of her life, nor of the reasons for her return.

All these thoughts occurred to me in less than an instant. The moment after, Dorothy was smiling again, her face had resumed its calm, slightly banal beauty under the coiled plaits of her blond hair. I could believe that it had all been just a dream.

“Well,” she said quietly, “so you don’t love me any more?”

And with an amused expression, she held out to Sylva a slice of toast spread with liver paste, for she knew that Sylva still had not the least liking for sweets.

Sylva took the toast, Nanny poured the tea, and there was no further incident.

Chapter 20

IT was toward the middle of the following week, a little before midnight, that the event occurred.

I cannot recollect the scene without being gripped once again by emotion. Did I realize at the time that it was really my vixen’s first big step in the direction of a human consciousness-the first step out of the dark ramparts in which the animal is imprisoned? Judging by the excitement which overcame me, I think I can claim I did, even though I was not as categorically certain as Doctor Sullivan when I told him about it.

Yet nothing had happened in the way he had foreseen. He had hoped, it will be remembered, that Sylva might eventually recognize herself in the cheval glass by constantly seeing herself in it but that, after weeks during which her indifference for this object and her inattention bordered on purblindness, I had decided to move the glass into my bedroom. There, at least, somebody wrould be making use of it. Most of all, this permanent failure was getting on my nerves. I did not, therefore, expect any more from this direction. And if the very first stage in the awakening of my vixen must be, as Dr. Sullivan said, the discovery of her own existence, I had given up hope that a looking glass might be instrumental to it.

Nor was I altogether wrong. For Sylva awoke to this revelation not by recognizing herself at last but because, on the contrary, she suddenly no longer found her image in it. Nanny’s persistence had been greater than mine, and despite the recurrent failure she would make her pupil sit down, every day, morning and evening, in front of her own reflection. This made me think of Trotty, my parents’ fox terrier. When I was a child, I used to hold him up to the wardrobe mirror so that he should see himself; and he too, after sniffing it, would become annoyed and wriggle in my arms until I let him go. Sylva, as the little fox she was, acted just like him: she would tear herself impatiently out of Nanny’s arms, and curl up on the floor by the bed, yawn, close her eyes and fall asleep. It seemed, oddly enough, that far from increasing her familiarity with mirrors, these daily attempts increasingly irritated her.

“Leave her alone,” I would say to Nanny, myself exasperated by my discouragement. But Nanny was as obdurate as her pupil.