“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.
“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?”