The fact was that Sylva was not content to chase and scare birds and rabbits. Now and then she would grab hold of one. She would suddenly swoop on a fowl with such force that anybody else would have had bruised elbows and knees. Her astonishing litheness spared her such consequences. For a few seconds there would be a turmoil of feathers, shrill squawks and flapping wings, then she would jump to her feet with her quarry clasped against her and dart off to some shed into which she would disappear. Later the corpse of her victim would be found there, showing the symbolic tooth marks of an animal that kills without hunger.
(In the end I found a remedy for these murders by forcing Sylva to eat the birds she had killed. I would wait until she had finished her ordinary meal, which was always very abundant, and under the threat of the stick and despite her heaving stomach she then had to devour her victim from head to tail. With the result that she quite soon stopped killing birds and rabbits and was content to keep them tightly clasped in her arms for a long moment. This produced an unexpected result: prompted by this gesture of motherly tenderness, she took an affectionate liking to these animals, and instead of killing them began to rock them as a child rocks its teddy bear.)
Now on that particular day, while the farmyard was echoing with frightened clucking, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose by shaking his chain. Sylva, seeing him rush up to her, mingled her shrieks with those of the fowl and tried to run away. Bumped into a rabbit as panic-stricken as herself. Stumbled and fell flat against a chopping block. Tried to retrieve herself by catching hold of an object that protruded over the rim of the block. This object was a long, two-pronged boring bit, used to drill holes in barrels. Sylva straightened up, holding it tight with all the strength that her terror gave her, as if seizing her last chance. Whereupon she saw the dog before her, yelping with fright, his tail between his legs, decamping so fast that the soles of his feet kept kicking his hindquarters. Sylva had not seen the volley of stones with which one of the farm boys had pelted the animal in order to scare it away from her, so a strange confusion must have occurred in her little head. A strange correlation between this reversal of the situation, the headlong flight and the object to which she had clung like a drowning man and which she was still clutching for dear life.
At all events when, after remaining trembling and rooted to the spot for quite a time, she saw the dog, who had first sheltered behind a barrel and was now, with his courage returning, coming back toward her, shyly wagging an anxious tail, Sylva stopped clutching the saving bit with both hands and, instead, brandished it in front of her. The dog stopped irresolutely. When he started moving again, it was with hanging head and sidling body, in the time-honored attitude of dogs uncertain of the welcome they will get. Sylva, hanging onto her bit, did not budge. The dog took the last steps almost on his belly. And stayed there at Sylva’s feet, waiting to be punished or fondled at her choice.
When she bent down he rolled over on his back, his legs limply bent, offering his defenseless underside to her blows. Sylva lowered the hand that was holding the bit and placed the prongs on the frail, disarmed belly, and thus they remained for a long moment, like St. George and his dragon, in the silence of the reassured farmyard, where rabbits and feathered fowl had distractedly returned to their occupations.
Sylva straightened up at last and the dog immediately got to his feet, licked her hand with a brief flick of his tongue as if hurriedly discharging a duty, and threw himself among the chickens and turkeys with joyous barks, turning around toward Sylva as if to say: “Coming?” And indeed Sylva ran after him and, between the two of them, they had soon transformed the yard once more into a flying merry-go-around, such as it had never been before. And suddenly, amidst the uproar, I saw Sylva laugh.
It was the first time, and it was a laugh if you cared to call it that, a yapping less close to laughter than to a cry. Her mouth was wide open, not so much in width as in height, and what came cascading out of it might just as well have been screams of fright. Yet there was no doubt that she was laughing, and even violently. So much so that (yielding once more to the deceptive ease of ingenious explanations) I could not help working out new theories on the nature of laughter.
According to a certain Irish philosopher whom the French have annexed and whose name is Bergson, laughter is supposed to be a social defense against the individual’s possible degradation to the level of an automaton: “Something mechanical clapped onto something alive.” I had always considered that this was indeed probable but insufficient, since it leaves out of account the very form of laughter, that strange eruption of spasmodic gasps. Another Frenchman who also had a great fancy for what are called “rational” systems and concepts, Monsieur Valery—a rather distinguished gentleman with the face of an old woman furrowed with a thousand wrinkles, who came to talk to us at the Athenaeum about the death of civilizations some two or three years ago—explains in one of his books that laughter is a refusal to think, that the soul gets rid of a picture which seems to it inferior to the dignity of its own function, just as the stomach gets rid of things for which it won’t bear the responsibility, and by the same means of a brutal convulsion.
This certainly accounts for the convulsion but is far from comprising all the occasions that make us laugh. Whereas, when I witnessed Sylva in the throes of her first outburst, still so close to fright, I could see very well that it had sprung from that very fright which had suddenly been transformed into joy: a needless alarm that frees itself in this reflex, in this brutal, jolting release from stress which, in a great burst of elation, puts the nerves, frozen with fear, back into service—as a dog warms himself by shivering when coming out of the water.
As a matter of fact I wrote on this point to Valery, who did not answer, and to Bergson, who was good enough to reply. He objected that in our civilized societies fright as a rule is absent from the causes that make us laugh. That did not seem convincing to me: we no longer have hair on our bodies either, but we still have goose flesh! Similarly, we continue to laugh in any situation which reminds us, if only symbolically or by dim recollection, of atavistic terrors that suddenly give way.
Bergson replied again, this time with a little sharpness in his terms, that according to my theory animals ought to laugh for the same reasons. This last objection impressed me all the more, as the very first laugh Sylva had given had also struck me as a definitely human manifestation. Fright, joy and “brutal convulsion” must therefore be components of a system—even though very primitive—of thought. I promised myself that I would think about it; but my natural mistrust of ideas (and of other people’s more especially) or my laziness in this respect often distracts me from keeping this kind of promise, and that is what happened in this case.
When Sylva and Baron (for that was the dog’s name) had turned the farmyard upside down together, I considered it time to step in. I called the mastiff, took him back to his chain, ordered him to be calm and silent. Sylva had followed us. I saw that she had not let go of the swallow-tailed bit. She sat down with crossed legs close to the dog, who in turn sat down near her. And for the rest of the morning they continued to watch together, untiringly, the hustle and bustle on the farm. From time to time, Baron turned toward Sylva and gave her face a big lick with his tongue; Sylva let him and, from that day onward, they became a pair of inseparable friends.
At dinner, Sylva persisted in keeping closely gripped in her right hand what must be called her lucky charm. This obstinacy put the dignity of her table manners to a severe test. She spilled her soup and, unable to cut her meat singlehanded, tried to seize it with her fingers. Nanny had to cut it for her as for a baby.