Sylva

“What do you think can happen to her?” I said with the greatest calm (fortified by my earlier experience).

“How can I tell?” she wailed. “Anything can happen!”

“Such as?” I inquired with a hint of irony.

We were striding back toward the house. She stopped and glowered at me. When Nanny was in a temper, she looked even more like a bulldog. Between her flabby cheeks which shook with anger, under the truffle of a nose with flaring, quivering nostrils, her lips bared ferocious fangs. In this state she would have scared a tiger. Not being a tiger I smiled, and this smile brought her rage to a climax.

“What about the wood choppers?” she spluttered into my face. “The poachers? Tramps, hooligans, the woods are full of satyrs on Sundays! Don’t you know that?”

My smile faded. She was exaggerating, but good Lord, she was right! By thinking of the young creature as a fox all the time, I had totally forgotten that for a resolute fellow on the lookout for adventure she would be just a pretty wench like any other—prettier than any other. She would run away, I told myself to set my mind at rest. But was I so sure she would? And I recalled a scene which had occurred that very morning.

Nanny had accustomed her, when waking up, to go and “kiss Bonny good morning” at an hour when I was still in bed. She had been doing so for a long time now, of her own accord and very willingly. On this morning, after kissing me (always moistening my cheek, my nose a little), she had suddenly slipped between the sheets and rubbed herself against me with such ardor that I understood, amused and embarrassed, what was the matter: the awakening of spring, by Jove!… Her wild little animal nature remained subservient to the seasons.

I had repulsed her by getting out of bed at once and, promptly distracted according to the normal habit of her little feather brain, she had forgotten me and set to play with one of her objects.

I had hastened to forget this bout of discomfiting heat but now, at the thoughts suggested by Nanny, I felt gripped by fever. In an instant, icy perspiration broke out all over me. And why only one? Why not two, or ten? How many foxes, it suddenly flashed through my mind with a sharp and sudden pain, had already previously imposed their male ardor on her?

I retained just enough self-control to be stupefied and appalled at having this thought: what was coming over me? Jealous of the past loves of a fox bitch? It was too funny for words! And I tried to laugh about it. Alas, there was no room for doubt: I was not laughing, I was in agony. I had abruptly left Nanny and was stalking fast toward the house while she was calling after me: “Sir! Sir!” in a worried, rueful voice, not quite knowing, I suppose, what could have offended me in her words but guessing that she had somehow hurt me. I rushed up the stairs, locked myself in my room, and paced from one wall to the other, groaning and clenching my fists, while a voice inside me spoke up in revolt: Steady now! Steady! Have you gone mad?

However, as I honestly questioned my heart I could no longer hide from myself that I was madly jealous. Jealousy in all its forms has always struck me as a most improper feeling. The French hold it up to ridicule and make fun of it in their theatre. (But as they make even more fun of deceived and complacent husbands, they contradict themselves in this respect as they do in all others.) As for me, I don’t think that jealousy is so much a laughing matter as a repulsive one. This is partly why for so many years I have hesitated to get married: against jealousy there is nothing more effective than celibacy… And here I was, racked by pain and hatred at the idea of rutting foxes around a vixen, and the favors she had granted them! Was I, then, forced to admit to myself that I could possibly be in love with her—and in the throes of the most common, vulgar sort of love at that?

I called to my rescue the memory of Dorothy, but this only exacerbated the confusion of my thoughts. To be sure, I had once been in love with Dorothy; perhaps I had never stopped completely; but never had I, in her respect, been stirred by thoughts like this. Not even at the time of her awful marriage—no, never had I sunk, even to mortify myself, to imagining her in the arms of her abominable husband. Such images would have disgusted me with myself for conjuring them up. And now they were submerging me, because they no longer applied lo a young lady of good family but to a female fox! I tried to persuade myself that these feelings could be better explained if they were not those of a lover, but a father. And for almost an hour I even managed to convince myself of it: yes, I felt for Sylva an anxious, authoritarian affection,

I was pained by her lapses from virtue, I worried about her future, I loathed her seducers. Nothing that was not very high-minded in all this. Unfortunately, this fiction could not be maintained for long, and the pain that griped my stomach at any too imaginative evocation was void of paternal feeling. So much so that after torturing myself in this way, I fell to wondering whether, for the sake of my moral health and self-respect, it would not be best never to see her again, to abandon her to her destiny in the forest. And to marry Dorothy as soon as possible.

But even supposing that I would have found sufficient strength in this wise resolution to put it into effect, was it still practicable? Could I openly abandon my “niece”—since I thought I had been so clever in passing her off as such? No, I told myself, it is too late for that. In the eyes of all, such an abandonment would be incomprehensible and criminal. Willy-nilly, I had to find Sylva again. And I realized without surprise that this necessity filled me at once with apprehension and a somber glee.

I had flung myself on the bed; these contradictory emotions had shaken me violently, and I eventually fell asleep. I woke up toward evening in a state of mind which seemed to me extremely lucid: A storm in a teacup, all this, old chap! Sylva is not a vixen any more, her past love affairs are like those of a Hindu princess before her metempsychosis, when she was still a sow: dissolved in Nirvana. She is not a woman either, and if you once, in a fleeting moment, felt for her an impious lust, you never allowed it to show more than the tip of its nose. Your dignity is unimpaired. You are jealous, are you? So what, if you surmount your jealousy? Come on, since you are fond of her, whether as a lover or a father, let her be happy according to her nature and not according to yours—by gratifying her instincts, by unconsciously carrying out the orders they subject her to.

I got up. I had completely recovered my composure, or so I thought. The nobility of those feelings, the high-mindedness of this self-denial, gave me an encouraging opinion of myself. I regained my strength and calm, and when I found poor Mrs. Bumley waiting for me at the dinner table, looking so stricken that it made me smile, I said: “Come on, Nanny, this isn’t a tragedy! Just look at me; I slept soundly—she tired me out with that three hours’ sprint through the woods! Come on, come on, she’ll soon come back, and if she doesn’t we won’t have much trouble finding her.”

She gazed at me wordlessly for a moment with her big kind, sorrowful eyes. She shook her head.

“She won’t come back at all,” she said.

Chapter 15

I ATTACHED little importance to this pessimistic forecast. Mothers and nannies always take the blackest view of the least little upset: a touch of cold will turn to pneumonia, a child that is late has been run over. For three days we awaited the return of the runaway, with a certain calm as far as I was concerned, with a plaintive agitation on Nanny’s part.

Sylva did not come back.

I jolly well had to make up my mind. Early one morning I went to the village to pay a visit to my friend John Filbert Walburton, who had been Mayor for the past ten years. As the owner of a stud farm famous all over Somerset (two or three of the top winners of these last years were bred in his stables) he was also the Master of the local Fox Hounds. He was a sort of giant, with a ruddy face and a thick fair mustache that drooped into his mouth. When he saw me come in he cried: “I was just going to look you up!”