“This is a pretty kettle of fish, anyhow! I wonder how you’ll get out of it in the long run.”
That was just the kind of reflection I needed! As if I hadn’t realized myself, and for some time already, what a hornets’ nest I had brought about my ears!
“Still, you aren’t suggesting, are you,” I said, “that I should call in the vet and have her put to sleep?”
This was so obviously out of the question that he rubbed his skull even harder. Suddenly he gave a funny laugh.
“Shall I tell you? The only way you’ll get out of this scrape is by marrying her!”
This last remark was so obviously meant as a silly joke that I did not even reply.
Chapter 9
ONLY after he had gone did I belatedly realize that he had not believed me, after all. It is bad form to show openly a wounding incredulity, whatever the circumstances. Moreover, it is an old English habit, I suppose, to concede that everything is possible in this world—whence our timeworn belief in ghosts. Dr. Sullivan had behaved toward me like a man of breeding: he had not doubted my words although he did not put the slightest faith in my story. How could I blame him?
But what had he tried to insinuate with that last remark? When you considered it closely, it hardly disguised what he thought: I was hiding in my house—for reasons of my own—a young person who was certainly weird but rather too pretty. I told some people that she was my niece, when in fact I had no sister; and to others I tried to account for her presence by an improbable miracle which nobody in his senses could believe. In the long run it could only result in one thing: a public scandal—unless I scotched it by marrying the girl.
And that, I thought with an unpleasant twinge, is what he’ll tell his daughter on his return! I could not doubt that he had lately nursed the hope that I might represent a possible future for Dorothy. Nor, in consequence, that he must have been rather unfavorably impressed by my story of a vixen turned into a woman, and by the pres-ence—more or less surreptitious or mendaciously explained—of that young person in my house. I could certainly be sure of his discretion and even, if need be, of his public support, but assuredly not of his private approval. Was I to lose then, if not a friendship, at least an esteem by which I set great store? And with his esteem, that of Dorothy’s?
The blow this dealt me made me realize how much I still needed the young woman’s affectionate respect. No, I won’t lose it without a struggle, I told myself. After all, I am not guilty! It is a miracle! Sylva is really only a fox in human guise! I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, I have no need to prevaricate. The old doctor hadn’t believed me, had he? Well, he’ll just have to believe me, and so will Dorothy!
This was my state of mind at the end of the nerve-racking Sunday that followed the doctor’s visit. I promptly wrote the Sullivans a note saying I would come to see them the Sunday after. But by the end of the week I had become less cocksure. What proof could I offer them? It is the mark of such a phenomenon that it contains no proof. What I would have to obtain, on the strength of my testimony alone, was an act of faith.
As bad luck would have it, on the Tuesday of that week Mrs. Bumley received an urgent telegram from one of her sisters; her mother had just had a stroke and was at death’s door. This spoiled everything. I had more or less planned to take her along to the Sullivans and make her talk: she would explain to them the differences between Sylva and a “retarded child,” and there was a chance that the opinion of a professional nurse might be accepted by them as supporting evidence. That chance was now washed away. I could obviously not detain her. She took the train that very evening, leaving me alone with Sylva.
I then decided, in the absence of Mrs. Bumley, to take my vixen herself along to Dunstan’s Cottage. Wasn’t she the most convincing proof of the truth of my story? Of course, the difficulties of such a project soon became apparent to me. First of all, elementary common sense obliged me to foresee her behavior, or rather misbehavior, in a strange house, and the resultant wreckage. To chase after her amid a hundred precious knickknacks might provide a film sequence worthy of Mack Sennett, but was unthinkable in respectable real life. Furthermore, if Nanny had acquired the knack of dressing her almost decently, I myself only succeeded at the cost of disheartening difficulties which, on some days, even proved insuperable. And neither I nor the nurse was as yet able to force her to have a bath. With the result that when the doors and windows were kept shut her room was very soon impregnated with a rather powerful animal odor. This was the case once more in Nanny’s absence, since I was busy on the farm and unable to keep watch on her all day. When I returned in the evening, the smell almost choked me.
I could not ask Fanny to replace me: she dared not come close to “my poor niece” who, she confessed scared the life out of her. “I haven’t much brains as it is,” she said, “and to see some who have none at all gives me the creeps! I’d ever so much rather run away,” she added, and did as she said.
To get rid of this unbearable odor I would have to throw the room open to wholesome drafts, spread the rugs and blankets out in the garden. But how could I, all by myself, leave a window open without running the risk that Sylva would jump out? A six- or eight-foot leap would not scare her, I thought, and nothing allowed me to suppose that she had lost her desire to run away, to return to the alluring forest. I would therefore have to tie her up. But that was easier said than done. To put a buckle on one of my belts, a chain to the buckle, and fix the chain to the bedpost presented no problem; but there remained the problem of finding a means of slipping the belt onto Sylva. It was rather like putting a pinch of salt on a bird’s tail.
Take advantage of her sleep? Her slumber was too light and tense, too wary to ensure success. She still slept like a fox; anything would wake her. I eventually decided that I had only one chance to succeed: during our games. For Sylva loved to play with Nanny or me whenever we were willing.
And we found we had to be willing, if only to keep her awake. For whenever we did not busy ourselves with her, the time that was not occupied by eating or trying to get out of the room—trotting, sniffing, whining, despite our efforts to make her drop this habit—was spent by her almost entirely in sleeping. The most painful ordeal that besets an animal in idleness is boredom. As if, as soon as it is unoccupied, the living being becomes aware of its condition as an inexplicable, unexplained creature whose existence seems void of all usefulness as well as of any reasonable motive. The animal’s boredom, even more than ours, takes on a meaning of utter futility, and against so vast a tedium the animal has but one remedy: sleep.
Twenty times a day Sylva would yawn her head off, like a dog who has been shut up, and with the same long, plaintive whine. Like a dog, she would curl up and fall asleep for ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. No sooner did she wake than she would start to prowl about, seeking to play. If Nanny and I were engaged elsewhere, she would hunt: her favorite plaything was an upholstered stool. Small and round, it rolled between her hands like a ball of wool worried by a cat. She would amuse herself chasing it, then tire of it, have a go at a chair for a change, and had thus broken two or three. I marveled that she never hurt herself in the course of these games, however much she fell with her prey. She would break the chair but never incur so much as a bruise herself.
When I was about and in a mood to join in, she preferred to play with me. I was more amusing than a chair although the game did not vary: a sham fight. I was much stronger than she, but she was much nimbler, and it was not always deliberately that I let her get the better of me. She would then playfully snap at my ear, my throat. I could not let the game go on for too long: to grapple with a pretty girl in light attire is not the best way to keep one’s self-control, even if one knows she is only a fox. I would push her back a little roughly; she did not take it amiss but simply remained motionless, gazing at me out of her cold and fixed onyx eyes, then she would yawn, whine, and go to sleep.