“No more… play…?”
I said with as much gentleness as I could command, “No, my little Sylva. Poor Baron no more play.”
Sylva shuddered even more intensely. And then she wrenched her eyes from the pitiful body and rested them on me. It was not a questioning look. It was more like a keen, curiously sharp scrutiny. Like a deep meditation on the meaning of the human face. I let her look at me, without saying anything, not daring either quite to smile or to show too grave, too sad a face. I returned her gaze with tenderness, but she wasn’t looking at my eyes. It was my nose, my lips, my chin. And in the end she asked, but her voice was flat and toneless:
“Bonny too, no more play?”
I burst into subdued laughter, soft rather than loud, a laugh just meant to banish this quaint fear.
“Why no, Bonny will still play. Bonny isn’t dead! He is very well. He will play with Sylva every day!”
Most unexpectedly, this answer seemed to make her cross. She jerked out of my arms as if to stand aloof. She repeated, more imperatively:
“Bonny too, no more play?”
I believed at first, however astonishing it may seem, that she meant to order me to mourn for her friend. Yes, for a moment I thought that the idea of playing when Baron was dead seemed to her revolting. It was obviously a stupid thought, when applied to a little soul still so close to an animal. But on the spur of the moment I answered:
“Not at once, of course. You are right.”
With even greater surprise I saw her stamping her foot with a movement of childish impatience—the exasperated movement of a child whom the grownups refuse to understand. And her whole face twisted with irritation but at the same time was marked with such anguish, such torment, perhaps such terror, that when for the third time she almost shouted, and her voice broke: “Bonny too, no more play?” I understood at last, understood with poignant certainty that what she wanted to know was whether some day, some day like Baron, some day “Bonny too” would play no more, nevermore.
At the stage we had reached, I could hardly back out. Nanny was making frantic signs, her eyes imploring, for she had understood as well as I, and her sagging cheeks were quivering with distress. But I shook my head. Come on, I thought, some courage! And I said as quietly as possible, as untragically and unemotionally as possible:
“Yes, Bonny too, some day… but a long, long time ahead! So long it’s not worth thinking about,” I added quickly as I saw Sylva’s eyes widen.
I was not having any illusions about the effectiveness of this “long time” which there was so little chance she could understand. And besides, there can be no possible softening for a revelation like this. It has to be received, accepted and digested in its cruel totality.
Sylva opened her mouth at first. She opened it wider and wider and suddenly, nervously, she laughed—but with that laugh which I have already described as more like fright. And then the laughter disappeared and only the fright remained. And even so great a fright that for a moment she gasped for breath, like a newborn baby.
When at last she recovered her breath, I thought that—still like a baby—she would start to scream. And she did scream, but she was screaming words, an incessant “Don’t want! Don’t want!” with such agonized grimaces that her sweet, fresh, triangular face assumed a simian ugliness, all crinkled and crimson. She was screaming and stamping—and then abruptly she stopped. She passed her forearm upward over her face, which had suddenly too gone limp and pale—so limp and colorless that for a moment I was afraid she might swoon. She passed her arm twice or three times, sweeping her delicate, blenching fox-face and brushing back the red locks that were falling over her eyes—eyes alive with panic, fixing me intently as if I too was going to die there, at her feet, like a dog.
That at least was what I thought—what I thought she dreaded at that moment. But her thoughts, what must henceforth be called her thoughts, now that they were on the move, were ravaging her little fox-brain with such speed that they had already reached the conclusions when I still thought they were all mixed up, when I still supposed them to be just about to be born in rending pain. So she brushed back the rebellious red wisp with her arm for the last time and in an indescribable voice, a murmuring, broken, hardly intelligible voice, she said as if in a sigh, while her eyes at the same time grew dim, “And Sylva… ?”
Chapter 26
I CANNOT continue this story without a certain emotion. Even if, at the second when Sylva uttered her name, and in uttering it understood, realized that she must die; even if in that cruel, fascinating second I had not been seized by the indubitable, coruscating feeling that she had just undergone a second metamorphosis, less miraculous perhaps on the face of it than her physical transformation, but so much more fraught with consequences, with deep-scarring stigmata; even if I had not told myself that at that moment, at that very second, there before me, she stood transfigured for the second time, that she was shedding forever her unconscious, carefree and happy foxish nature to take the first frightened steps into the shadowy sphere, the tragic, doomed, nocturnal, boundless, cursed and sublime sphere of man’s revolted questioning of his gods; even if this illumination had not burst upon my brain at the very second when that of her own perishable and incomprehensible condition burst upon hers—even if I had thaught of none of this on the spur of the moment, Sylva’s behavior would have forced these thoughts upon me without delay. For I may really say that at that second, from that second onward, everything changed forever.
She had murmured, “And Sylva… ?” and I had not dared reply.
Did she even expect an answer? Wasn’t her question an answer in itself? She said, “And Sylva… ?” and looked at Nanny. Looking at her rather than at me, she sensed, she guessed that she would encounter a weaker defense.
And indeed, before that look in her eyes poor Nanny weakened; she could not hide her commotion and her pain. She held out her arms to Sylva with dismayed pity and affection. But far from running to her, the young girl jumped backward. She stared from one to the other of us with something like hatred. Her mouth opened, but she did not know any words of abuse. So she spun around and fled.
She did not go far. She stopped abruptly as if dazed, as if she had come up so hard against the sky, the horizon, that she had almost bumped her head against them. She passed her forearm over her brow, turned away, ran off again, through the orchard; this time she really collided with a young apple tree and slumped down like a bird stunned by a windowpane, got up again almost immediately, darted off in a third direction where thick dogwood shrubs hedged in the orchard, ran straight into them head on, dived into them like a ball, swung around among the twigs and once more collapsed in a heap. She gathered herself up slowly, without rising to her feet. And at last renouncing these aimless escapes, she remained in her shelter, huddled and motionless, like a sick hare.
Nanny wanted to run to her but once more I restrained her. The ordeal through which Sylva was passing was not of those that another can share. On the contrary, I motioned her to follow me and we walked away. From the upper story of the manor one could see the hedge down below where Sylva cowered. We ourselves stayed behind a window, in the linen room, keeping an anxious watch on her. Nanny kept blowing her nose, although with such studied discretion that it would have made me laugh at any other time. But I did not feel at all like laughing. Night was falling lazily. I began to be afraid: such immobility! Considering how long it lasted, might it not be that she had fainted? Just then—due to the cold, perhaps—we saw Sylva stir. She dragged herself out of the bush, got up, seemed to waver for a long time. Then, to our relief—Nanny was squeezing my arm till it hurt—she came tottering back toward the house, in the misty twilight.