The most difficult part was our arrival at Paddington.
Though at this station taxis and cabs are allowed to come right alongside the train, I still had to drag Sylva along as hard as I could while she emitted inarticulate yells, panic-stricken by the stream of travelers, the lights, noise and movement. The sight of the cab horses intensified her panic, and I was very hard put to approach a taxi. People were turning toward us, the driver eyed us suspiciously. Fortunately, I look rather respectable and bear myself with a certain authority that never fails to make some impression. Sylva was squirming at my side, but she did not reach up to my shoulder and with the handcuffs I kept her pretty well in place.
I merely said to the driver with an air of dignified affliction, “Don’t mind her, the poor child,” and he opened the door of the cab himself when we arrived and helped us to get out. At the hotel I asked with the same air of superior self-denial for the help of a maid, who attended to Sylva with a mixture of pity and repulsion.
Next morning Mrs. Bumley presented herself. I was not disappointed. She was a tall, rather bulky woman, and her size reassured me: she would have to measure her strength against her charge more than once. Her face was of the bulldog type—a big, threatening-looking jaw between sagging jowls—but her eyes were moist with a bottomless tenderness. The enveloping look she gave Sylva when I introduced her removed any apprehensions I might still have harbored. She smiled broadly.
“But she is as pretty as a picture!” she said.
While we were talking, she never stopped observing Sylva with the same affectionate smile and finally declared:
“This child amazes me. She isn’t the least like any of the children I’ve had in my care. Probably it’s because she is so pretty. But above all, she is not at all clumsy or awkward in her movements!”
She asked me, of course, for all sorts of particulars of birth, childhood, first troubles and progress. I had rehearsed most of the answers beforehand and did not manage too badly. She expressed the wish to meet the girl’s mother, but I explained the fictitious situation and told her we would have to do without such a meeting, at least in the beginning.
“A pity,” she answered, and tried to approach Sylva. But Sylva gave a sideways jump, leaped onto the armchair and thence onto the wardrobe. The look that came over the kindly bulldog face was one of such utter surprise that I could not help bursting into laughter.
Mrs. Bumley looked from one to the other, as if wondering which of the two—Sylva up on her cupboard or her uncle convulsed with laughter—was the more crack-brained, and she said curtly, “Does she often behave like this?”
Unable to recover my seriousness I turned up my hands to signify ignorance and helplessness. I was still laughing as I answered, “I don’t know, I’m as surprised as you are.” Sylva did not take her eyes off the nurse. Mrs. Bumley meanwhile had recovered her spirits. Her expression softened, lit up.
“The look in her eyes!” she murmured at last. “So piercing and bright! There is something wide awake behind them.”
She turned her big, kind, doglike face toward me with an air that was both affirmative and questioning, and once again I could only raise my hands wordlessly, but I did not laugh.
“Something must have happened to her,” she said in the same tone of deep meditation. “I wonder what. I’d stake my life that her brain is not impaired organically. It will be thrilling to re-educate her,” she said and her eyes were sparkling. Then suddenly the sparkle went out of them. “But this agility—that’s not at all spastic! Are you sure,” she inquired with suspicion in her voice, “that she really is spastic? That she hasn’t… that she isn’t… perhaps… quite simply insane? I am quite incompetent to deal with madness,” she added apprehensively.
“No, no,” I reassured her. “The doctors are all agreed, it’s a nervous activity that has not developed properly. Or rather, developed abnormally. There’s been some progress, but not nearly enough.”
“But why is she afraid of me?” muttered Mrs. Bumley. “I never frighten children, not even the most timid ones.”
“She has lived in great isolation all her childhood. Her mother is a widow and lives in a very remote part of Scotland.”
“How old is the girl?”
“Getting on for eighteen, I believe.”
“How are we going to make her come down from that cupboard?” Mrs. Bumley asked, puzzled.
I went and got a hard-boiled egg and a kipper from my traveling bag; they were two delicacies Sylva was very fond of.
“Stay where you are,” I told the nurse. “Don’t move.”
I turned toward Sylva, approached her.
“Come on, get down,” I ordered, “don’t be afraid. Aren’t you hungry?”
I was standing between the two of them, and this protection reassured her. She let herself slip to the ground with great dexterity, seized the kipper with one hand, the egg with the other, and without taking her eyes off the newcomer, went off to munch them in the narrow gap behind the bed. Mrs. Bumley was resting the kindly gaze of a peaceful mastiff on her. Sylva stopped eating for a moment; something flashed in her eyes that might, at a pinch, be called a smile.
“As pretty as a picture,” Mrs. Bumley said again, with melting tenderness. “Those high cheekbones, those lovely almond-shaped slit eyes! And that pointed chin! A real little vixen!”
Chapter 6
SHE is one,” I said point-blank.
I had only wavered for a few seconds. Contrary to all I had foreseen and upsetting my carefully hatched plans, I had made up my mind on the spur of the moment. Though I could not yet say why exactly, I told myself that I must seize the occasion, that it would not come again.
“A what?” asked Mrs. Bumley.
“A vixen.”
“Is she so cunning?”
I shook my head, looked deep into her eyes.
“I’m saying that she is a fox,” I said slowly, stressing each word. “A real one. She has the appearance of a woman, but in fact she is only an animal. A young vixen, actually.”
She opened her gray eyes saucer-wide, and they filled with alarm, with anguish. I smiled.
“Don’t be upset, I have all my faculties. My mind isn’t wandering. Sit down and listen to me quietly.”
I made the inviting gesture of pushing an armchair forward. She sat down in it slowly, without taking her eyes off me.
“All I have told you is a pack of lies. This isn’t a backward child. And I haven’t any sister in Scotland.”
She had placed a big, gnarled hand on her bosom. Doubtless her heart was beating fast. I smiled as best I could to calm her, afraid of one thing only: that she might become frightened and call for help. It was essential that I reassure her.
“You’re the first person to whom I’ve dared talk about it. I would have to, sooner or later, anyhow. So far I have never ventured to confide this to anyone for fear they might take me for a madman. As they well might.”