Sylva

To be frank, this flight also brought me a grim deliverance. I was prevented, at least for the one season, from having to fulfill a painful, heavy duty. What better excuse than one’s helplessness? And by the same stroke I could devote myself once more to my little vixen, without feeling guilty, without accusing myself of neglect or ulterior motives…

Actually, I had not for a single day dropped my concern for her. We hoped, Nanny and I, that we were well rid of the gorilla. I had ordered the farmer to loose the dogs as soon as he showed up. They were not vicious but their physiognomy inspired respect. Jeremy Hull was seen prowling about two or three times more, but each time he must have fled instantly.

During those few weeks I had kept Sylva, I must confess, more or less locked up in the house. The forest stroll had turned out too badly to encourage me to try new experiments. Moreover, Sylva at home no longer showed the animal boredom that had once made her yawn to distraction. Her games were more varied. The objects no longer represented mere quarry, Sylva began to have some intelligent relationships with them. It amused her less to scatter the contents of the needlework box; instead she tried to add to it things that did not belong there—my tooth paste or my cigars, for instance—which incidentally did not improve Nanny’s mood. Sylva also began to rummage in the cupboards or the sideboard, not without causing many a catastrophe. Occasionally some utensil would intrigue her for a long while and she would seek to use it for all sorts of purposes. Nevertheless, we did not restrain her, for this increase in her curiosity for “things” which her mind was obviously beginning to grasp as “objects” (and such a sudden and swift increase, at that) seemed to us extremely promising.

And, indeed, she greatly surprised us one day in this connection: the fancy took her to fashion an object herself! Nanny and I had to admit it, Sylva had discovered the notion of the tool. Oh, I don’t want to exaggerate. It was still a very rudimentary, very imperfect tool, and put to a rather comical use. But the idea of a tool was there all right.

We had noticed for some time that she was collecting a kind of hoard, as is common with many children and a few animals—magpies, squirrels, polecats. A hoard made up of various rubbish such as corks, bits of bark, old nails, scraps of silver paper. One fine morning we caught her before the cheval glass combing her hair with a very peculiar-looking instrument. At a closer glance, it turned out to be the backbone of a lemon sole, probably pinched from the garbage can, and she had covered the half of it which she was holding in her fingers with a folded piece of cardboard. However silly and imperfect this implement was, it nevertheless testified to a convergence of observation and reflection that was very much above the mind of a fox or even an ape. The mere idea of converting a fishbone for use as a comb was an “invention” that required certain mental qualities, whose emergence in Sylva, as can be imagined, excited us to a high degree.

Nor did she stop there. After thus discovering the tool, she discovered the magic object. Here too I shall try not to exaggerate. According to Dr. Sullivan, it was an extraordinary jump, a jump of tens of thousands of years and, he said, its having happened without our help was due to a quite extraordinary chance. That may be so. Personally I consider that such a chance, in some form or other, was bound to happen some day, and it was unlikely that it should fail to bear fruit in a mind on the march such as Sylva’s. But let others be the judge.

We generally kept Sylva away from the garden, which was too vast to be easily and effectively fenced in; but we did not, for all that, deprive her of fresh air and exercise or of the rustic pleasures that appealed to her nature. The farmyard is extremely large and surrounded by buildings on all sides, and Sylva would spend long hours there whenever the weather was fine, amidst the chickens, ducks, turkeys and rabbits.

The first few times she had been frightened of the dogs. Even though they were chained up, a bark or a growl was enough to put her to flight. She would go and cower behind some barrels or a cart, and stay there shaking for a long time. One day, however, she lost her fear in rather strange circumstances.

I have said that the two dogs—strong, brawny mastiffs—though tied up all day and ferocious-looking, were actually the most harmless creatures alive. I could not have borne to keep vicious ones about. They were only dangerous to nightly prowlers carrying a sack or a stick. Although they would shake their chains with alarming fervor, they were in fact merely impatient to play; and as soon as they were set free, whoever was about had to beware of one thing only, and that was the too exuberant tokens of their gratitude.

Whenever they saw Sylva playing and running around amid the poultry, they just could not keep still. She had a way of scaring the whole barnyard and transforming it into a deafening aviary of squawks and snowy down that made them marvel with excitement. Their delight knew no bounds. I can’t say the same of the farmer and his folk. They would glare at this daily pandemonium with every sign of a most sullen disapproval. They claimed that if it went on, Sylva would cause the hens to stop laying, make the turkeys succumb to blood pressure, and jeopardize the whole poultry breeding.

“She’ll turn all your fowl into walking skeletons, the poor thing will,” they said, for they blamed not the “backward” child but me—and my unjustifiable leniency which, in their eyes, was past comprehension.

The fact was that Sylva was not content to chase and scare birds and rabbits. Now and then she would grab hold of one. She would suddenly swoop on a fowl with such force that anybody else would have had bruised elbows and knees. Her astonishing litheness spared her such consequences. For a few seconds there would be a turmoil of feathers, shrill squawks and flapping wings, then she would jump to her feet with her quarry clasped against her and dart off to some shed into which she would disappear. Later the corpse of her victim would be found there, showing the symbolic tooth marks of an animal that kills without hunger.

(In the end I found a remedy for these murders by forcing Sylva to eat the birds she had killed. I would wait until she had finished her ordinary meal, which was always very abundant, and under the threat of the stick and despite her heaving stomach she then had to devour her victim from head to tail. With the result that she quite soon stopped killing birds and rabbits and was content to keep them tightly clasped in her arms for a long moment. This produced an unexpected result: prompted by this gesture of motherly tenderness, she took an affectionate liking to these animals, and instead of killing them began to rock them as a child rocks its teddy bear.)

Now on that particular day, while the farmyard was echoing with frightened clucking, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose by shaking his chain. Sylva, seeing him rush up to her, mingled her shrieks with those of the fowl and tried to run away. Bumped into a rabbit as panic-stricken as herself. Stumbled and fell flat against a chopping block. Tried to retrieve herself by catching hold of an object that protruded over the rim of the block. This object was a long, two-pronged boring bit, used to drill holes in barrels. Sylva straightened up, holding it tight with all the strength that her terror gave her, as if seizing her last chance. Whereupon she saw the dog before her, yelping with fright, his tail between his legs, decamping so fast that the soles of his feet kept kicking his hindquarters. Sylva had not seen the volley of stones with which one of the farm boys had pelted the animal in order to scare it away from her, so a strange confusion must have occurred in her little head. A strange correlation between this reversal of the situation, the headlong flight and the object to which she had clung like a drowning man and which she was still clutching for dear life.