I would hold out my arms; she did not fling herself into them as a child would have done, but cuddled up, rubbing herself against me and, with a flick of her tongue, licked me under the chin. “Not like that!” I would chide her, and I would kiss her, in turn, in a highly educational manner. But she did not seem to grasp the difference and took a very long time to learn to put her lips to my cheek without damping me.
A few weeks passed in this way. Dorothy came to see us fairly frequently, her father accompanied her twice or three times and, little by little, Sylva thus grew accustomed to the presence of strangers and they alarmed her no longer. Never, though, to the point of letting herself be examined by the doctor, as I would have wished. Still, the latter was reasonably affirmative: there was no reason to suppose, he said, that her constitution was not in every way that of a human being. As for the progress she might make, he remained pessimistic on this count. And dear Nanny, who was impressed by the doctor and his opinions, would give way to laments: the progress indeed seemed very slow to her.
Yet there was no doubt that Sylva did progress, and even very much so. But her progress was always confined to mechanical achievements, like that of a trained monkey or a parrot rather than of a child who is beginning to understand and reason. She had many more words at her command now, and even a small number of sentences—though these were very short and formed by single syllables so that in fact they were less long than certain German words, less complicated than certain French ones; and they did not express any ideas but always an appetite or a very rudimentary feeling: fear, impatience, dislike.
Poor Nanny would ask her ten times a day, “Do you love me, my little Sylva?” and Sylva would answer docilely, “Love you,” but it was obvious that the word meant nothing to her and that the affection she bore us, though genuine and even violent, did not in any way correspond to what that word expresses for us. It was a simple wild attachment, an organic fidelity, the hollow mold of her fear of loneliness, her immense need of protection since she had found herself a stranger in the forest, clumsy and spurned, a hunted outcast.
Perhaps there mingled in her inclination toward me something else, which I should have been hard put to define: a certain sensitivity to my mood, a more sedulous attention to my words and deeds, and that primitive jealousy when I was talking to Dorothy or even to Nanny and seemed to be forgetting her presence. She would draw closer at such moments and, as she had done under Dorothy’s caresses, would plant her incisors into my ear lobe just enough to hurt without wounding me. I would rap her fingers and she would go and sulk in a corner, her eyes fixed on me.
Her progress in practical life was of the same type: pertaining to the training of an animal rather than to education. She could wash and dress herself (as long as there were no buttons or shoelaces—she never bothered about them), she ate at table, but with her fingers, and licked her plate clean of the last trace of gravy. She later learned to clean it with a piece of bread instead, a habit she never lost.
As the days passed, I saw Dr. Sullivan increase the rhythm of his visits. Had he finally accepted in his own mind that Sylva was indeed a former fox? He had never said anything to the contrary and, at all events, it was evident that he was beginning to be passionately interested.
“It is a unique experiment!” he said, shaking his foamy hair. “Actually this creature takes us back five hundred thousand years: when the very first men, with their brains fully constituted but still, like this one, void of experience and of knowledge, had sprung brand-new from animality! What is going to happen to this brain is of fantastic interest—supposing, of course, that anything does happen,” he added with cautious reserve. But he seemed to have shed, for some time already, part of his pessimism.
I observed that the experiment would be completely falsified by the mere fact that we, who surrounded my little fox, were equipped with twentieth-century brains.
He shook his head. “No, no, the experiment will be accelerated no doubt—happily for us. If we had to wait for two or three hundred thousand years… but it won’t be falsified. Even supposing the impossible—that her intelligence might some day catch up with ours—it will necessarily have to pass through all the various stages first. For instance, does Sylva know something that seems quite simple to us: that she exists? Certainly not: no more than a fox, a horse, or a monkey does, no more than the first men could have known it, steeped as they were in their dark instincts. Now that is the very first and absolutely indispensable stage. In what form did it present itself, how was it passed, what wouldn’t we give to be present at this first awakening of consciousness in our earliest forefathers! And here, perhaps, with your Sylva, it may happen under our very eyes! She will need our help, of course. We must push her toward it with all our might. I still do not know how. Let me think it over.”
Was I myself very set on the success of these “experiments”? To see Sylva actually pass these “stages”? On the one hand, of course, I ardently wished it; on the other I was dimly afraid of it. However, when Herbert Sullivan talked to me of mirrors, I did not dream of opposing his projects. Actually, I was a little mortified to see Sylva still behaving, in front of mirrors, just as a fox would have done: she never looked at herself in them.
“Fine! Fine!” said Dr. Sullivan. “So we’re really starting from scratch. The thing to do is to produce a shock,” he explained, and we set out on a search for a large-sized looking glass.
We wandered together through the innumerable empty rooms of this too-vast mansion and eventually discovered an enormous cheval glass under the dust of the linen room. After cleaning it thoroughly we carried it into the young girl’s room. We were all there: the doctor, Dorothy, Mrs. Bumley and myself. But my vixen did not glance at it, any more than at the other mirrors in the house.
After an hour’s vain waiting during which Sylva passed to and fro before the glass some twenty times without even noticing it, the doctor asked Nanny to take her pupil right to it and force her, if possible, to look at herself. Nanny did as she was told, and we could fancy that the experiment was going to succeed. Kept almost by force face to face with her own image, Sylva seemed at last to see, to discover herself. But—typical behavior—she immediately went to look behind the glass for the person whom she had seen in it; came back discomfited; found her reflection again, walked close up to it, sniffed it for a time; and perceiving no smell, lost all interest in it.
It was a rather smarting defeat for the doctor, but as a scientist he did not take it overmuch to heart. “Too soon,” he said. “Leave the mirror where it is. There’ll come a day, no doubt, when by dint of meeting her likeness, she’ll end up by recognizing herself. I only regret one thing, and that is that I won’t be present… You’ll tell me.”
But poor Nanny felt the sting of disappointment more sharply. “We’ll never get anywhere,” she wailed when we were alone again that evening. “Her poor little brain remains that of a fox. The doctor’s first view was the right one: we’ll turn her into a nice little trained animal, but not much more.”
I remembered that Dorothy had smiled mysteriously at this failure. But she had not given her own opinion. As for myself, I was more inclined to share Nanny’s pessimism, but what I felt without admitting it was a sort of relief which in many ways resembled a keen satisfaction. As long as my Sylva, so sweet and easy, remained a fox, we’d be avoiding a lot of complications, wouldn’t we? I could go on harboring my uncertain feelings for Dorothy, which were not too uncertain, however, to preclude dreams or plans. And I could at the same time keep near me a companion such as every man has caught himself wishing for more or less secretly: unobtrusive, faithful as a dog can be, and like a dog attached without any reticence—or any claims. The more Sylva stayed as she was, as she had been on the day of her metamorphosis, the happier and more contented I was, the better I could love her in peace. It is true that I have always strongly distrusted women: what little thought and reason they have lodged in their mysterious little skulls invariably tends to spoil everything. Dorothy did not entirely escape this distrust. Oh, if only my little Sylva, I thought, could remain for a long time to come the sweet vixen she still is …