I said, “You were not cold last night?” and she shook her head without ceasing to look at me.
“Not cold,” she said after a moment.
I hesitated for a long time before I asked her, “Where were you?” But perhaps she did not understand or else she did not want to answer. She simply looked at me, with that meditative insistence which, since my awakening, had pierced my heart with an almost painful delight.
And then she murmured, “Bonny.” She uttered that ridiculous nickname, nothing else, but in a voice that was so new to me, with a tone of such anxious trust, like a lost child or one that had been found again, that I pressed her face more tightly, nodding as if to say: “Yes, yes, darling, I am here…”
She leaned her forehead against the palms of my hands, pressing heavily against them to part them, and rested it again on my chest—yes, rested it for repose, whether more weary or more trusting I do not know. She said nothing more. Nor did I. We remained like this for a very long time and I believe in the end we fell asleep from sheer peace and serenity.
We went downstairs to have breakfast in the dining room. Nanny must have known before me that Sylva was back, for she smiled at us without surprise. She waited on us. Sylva did not throw herself on her kippers with her usual voracity. She ate and drank absent-mindedly. Perhaps because she was ceaselessly observing the two of us as if, back from the Americas after many long years, she was comparing our well-loved but so aged faces with those she held in her memory. The features of her own face marked a kind of slipping, a subtle sagging which seemed to me, like her avid curiosity, expressive of a fierce but anxious affection.
My heart was stirred by a strange happiness, made up of compassion, pride, and hope. The love Sylva bore us henceforth, I thought to myself, would no longer be that of a little domestic animal, hungering for protection. It would now be the love of a creature who had become one of us, who had discovered our common misery and so communed with us in this mortal frailness, with all her being. I thought also that human love differs from that of the beasts in that it has death for a background, and that Sylva could now at last love me with this kind of love.
As for me, I knew very well that I had loved her for a long time.
I had no longer been able to hide the fact from myself ever since Dorothy had flung at me: “I’m not the one you love!” I had tried to protest, but she had no trouble in making me swallow my protests. I could thus measure their lack of conviction. Then Dorothy had run away to London. And I remembered with what glee I had welcomed the prospect of being alone with Sylva…
All this was clear but did not leave my mind at rest. Dorothy was yielding to her passion, but wasn’t I yielding to mine? Were we not, in fact, each in his own fashion, yielding to the same temptation, shirking the austere constraints of our human estate? Let her go back to her drugs and me to my Sylva—wasn’t that what I had thought with a morbid attraction that was not without some resemblance to the lure of narcotics? For though Sylva was certainly humanizing herself by leaps and bounds, wasn’t that which I loved most in her, that which attached me to her so strongly, all that still remained of animality in her nature? There was no doubt that she had now passed another stage, and a most decisive one, but to use this as a pretext for loving her henceforth without remorse, wasn’t that just an alibi?
Despite Dorothy’s addiction, what a distance there still was between Sylva and her! However much Dorothy might drug herself to escape her torments, those very torments were, in the first place, the tragic evidence of the quality of her mind, of her painful self-interrogation. She had given up, it was true, but her very defeat was proof of the violence, the grandeur, of the preceding battle. Where lay the roots of Dorothy’s drama if not in the rich soil of a long civilization? Her inner drama was the poisoned fruit of it, but also its undeniable mark. Whereas what had poor Sylva to offer, still entangled in the shadows of her origin, other than the first human stammerings? Any comparison between her and Dorothy remained sacrilegious, and my choice was actually degrading.
Those were my thoughts while the last days of summer were passing. Having reached these conclusions, I was left with no alternative. If I still laid claim to any character at all I must go to London. I had no right to let Dorothy complete her own destruction (the news her father gave me continued to be catastrophic) without having first tried everything. The hay was in the barns, the corn was threshed, the autumn plowing would not start for several weeks. Nothing was holding me back at the manor, except Sylva. I would wrest myself from this tempting link, I would leave.
I informed Nanny of my imminent departure but, rather strangely, did not give her my true reasons. As if I were afraid that she might not approve them. That she might criticize the preference I was giving Dorothy. And might therefore call into question a decision I had taken not without qualms. I simply said that I had to go to town on business and would be back as soon as it was settled.
On the eve of my departure I naturally paid a last call on Dr. Sullivan. I found him tired, aged. He was just back from London himself. When I acquainted him with my decision, he raised a weary, uncertain hand.
“Ah! Is it still worth the trouble?” he sighed.
He turned his long face toward me. His full-lipped mouth curved in a sort of bitter surprise.
“I’ll tell you the worst: she seems happy.”
Chapter 27
AS I remember, almost the first thing that struck me was the Turkish delight.
There was a piece in her mouth, which she munched with absent-minded slowness. Others were on a small table next to the divan, in a china bowl sticky with sugar. There were more in cardboard boxes lying about on various pieces of furniture. One of the sweets had fallen on the carpet. Someone must have stepped on it and it spread there like pink spittle, like a shapeless hybrid between a jellyfish and a starfish. Actually, all over the carpet there were stains of a doubtful nature. The same was true of the bedcover, made of imitation panther skin, under which Dorothy was lazily stretched out.
I had not found the remote lodging at the bottom of Galveston Lane without some trouble. In the narrow, dark staircase smelling of cold fried fish, a clergyman in a threadbare coat, who seemed drunk to me, had flattened himself against the wall to let me pass; he must have missed a couple of steps on resuming his descent, for I heard him swear. It was not quite a boardinghouse nor exactly a block of furnished small flats. The brickwork outside had been painted white, which made the façade look almost smart with its little black, brass-plated front door, surmounted by a triangular pediment. But the inside seemed to have lain asleep for a century under a shroud of dust.
Dorothy held out to me a casual hand, neither getting up nor interrupting her chewing of the sugary paste. She did not look any thinner. On the contrary, she seemed to have put on weight, but beneath the make-up which she must have spread on her cheeks with careless haste after my telephone call, the skin was white, almost transparent. The swollen eyelids were edged with a too-rosy, almost red line. The face as a whole resembled certain water-lily blooms just when they are about to rot. She smiled without pleasure—the fixed smile of a tired saleswoman.