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.
Then one evening, as I was sitting before the dressing-table in my room, filing my fingernails before going to bed, I saw Sylva come in, probably to kiss me good night after her fashion, as she did every night. I perceived her in the mirror, for my easy chair had its back to the door. Its back was tall and stood between Sylva and me so that she too could see only my reflection in the glass. The result was that she walked toward me, not where I really was, out of her sight, but where she saw me—the cheval glass. Thus she had first to pass close to my chair.
And so, for an instant, she saw us in the mirror, herself and me, side by side.
What did she think as she discovered this feminine shape next to “Bonny”? She stood motionless and began to snarl as she had done when she first saw me with Dorothy. She snarled for some time at her own immobile image next to mine, then she began to move. She walked to the looking glass, and her reflection, moving toward her, growled ever more strongly. And suddenly she pounced on the intruder. The result was a great racket of broken glass and Sylva, flabbergasted, sitting amid the splinters on the ground.
I saw at once that she was not hurt, but also that she was staring at all those pieces with the keenest surprise. She looked at her hand lying on a splinter of glass, withdrew it, put it back, withdrew it again, moving her fingers a little, must have seen her fingers move in the broken shards, rose quickly as if frightened, ran to where she thought she had seen me, stopped dead when she no longer saw me, turned back toward the cheval glass which was now merely an empty frame, gropingly touched (if one can say so) the emptiness inside with her hand, gave a start, ran behind it as if in a panic, suddenly saw me in the frame on the side where she was not expecting me, gave a cry, and fled into her room.
I had watched the whole scene without stirring or speaking, too curious to see what would happen. Nothing more did happen, as a matter of fact. Sylva did not reappear. I picked up the pieces and took them down to the dustbin, mounted the stairs again to go to bed, once more disappointed by this persistent lack of comprehension. I put out the light and tried to sleep.
I could not manage to fall asleep and my idle thoughts soon left my disappointing vixen to return to Dorothy. It was like that almost every night since her last visit. What was the matter with the young woman? What had happened between this last time and the one before? That wan complexion, those tired features. Had these changes something to do with me? But her father’s tone had been so startled and almost sarcastic when he said, “You, my poor boy!” Ought I to be relieved or offended by it? Did I love her or didn’t I? Everybody knows how one’s thoughts turn in circles in one’s half-sleep, and incessantly return to their point of departure. They prevent you from falling asleep but don’t progress an inch. That’s what happened this night too, and I was dozing fitfully.
And then, like a shock, I sensed a presence in the room. I heard nothing. Not a sound. But opening my eyes, I saw a shadow quite close to me, motionless at my bedside. The moon was shining into the room through the slatted shutters, shedding a milky, tiger-striped light, and the silhouette leaned slowly forward amid those bars of moving shadows. I pretended to be asleep but through my eyelashes I could see Sylva’s face approaching mine, and that face—there is no other word for it—was observing, scrutinizing mine. As she had never done before. As if she were trying to discover in it something unknown. With such an unwonted insistence that I hardly dared to breathe while, oddly enough, the doctor’s words came back to me, urging me to think of the invisible work which day after day was accomplished in this blank brain—what junctions, he said, what concatenations of frustrated impressions, forgotten emotions, lost visions, what dim associations, what sudden flashes… And then Sylva left my side, returned to the cheval glass, looked at it, doggedly groped in the empty space.
With a twinge of my heart, I thought I understood what was happening. I arose, took her in my arms. She allowed herself obediently to be led into the bathroom. Before the big wall mirror, I put on the light and for a moment—very brief or very long, I don’t know—she looked at herself at my side. Her eyes slowly widened. Was she going to recognize herself at last? But how could she, since she had never yet seen herself? And indeed, as always, she began to wriggle to escape me. I sought to hold her back, but then, in an upsurge of fear or rage, she bit my hand with a sort of dull bark, short as a cry, and I let her go, annoyed. But… what’s that? What’s she doing? For the first time for many a week, she huddled up between the wall and the little bow-fronted chest of drawers, where she remained trembling as she used to, her dilated eyes clinging to me.