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.
It was during one of those sessions that I grasped the opportunity to slip my belt around her waist. It is not easy to close a buckle singlehanded, but I was just about to manage it all the same when she realized what was happening. She tried to escape but the buckle held fast. I thought she would kill herself, so much did she struggle, but the chain was solid, the bed heavy and, though at the end of this hurricane, frantic capers, somersaults and jerks fit to strangle her waist, the bed had landed all askew at the other end of the room, Sylva, for her part, found herself lying on the ground, exhausted and breathless as on the day of the hunt after the hounds had pursued her.
I turned this momentary calm to account by opening wide the door and windows, carrying the mattress and bedding out into the sunshine, spreading the carpet and counterpane on the lawn. Several times during this house-cleaning, Sylva renewed her struggle, but in vain. To undo the buckle was too difficult for her. When the odor was dispelled I closed the door and windows and released her: that is, I unbuckled the chain but left her with the belt, well aware that I would never be able to slip it on her a second time. Whereas to snap the hook on the buckle would only require speed and stealth.
Meanwhile, I had quite a fight merely to unfasten the chain, for she was still mad with fright and fury and completely beside herself. I was fiercely bitten. When at last I had managed it, she jerked away to escape and huddled in her favorite corner, as in the early days, between the wall and the small bow-fronted chest, where she stayed on the alert, watching me with the tense expression she used to have. I locked the chain away in a drawer, pulled the bed back into place, put everything in order and left the room to give my vixen time to calm down.
During the rest of the day she refused all nourishment. The next day she accepted it, but from afar, and went off to eat it under the bed. She seemed to have lost the few words she knew, and they came back to her only very slowly with her returning calm.
But though she was appeased, the presence of the belt continued to worry her. She constantly tugged at it, fiddled with the buckle-but always in vain-until finally she seemed to get used to it. However, the room once more began to smell like a menagerie, and when on the following Friday I found my gentle Sylva tamed at last, it was time to start all over again. I took advantage of a moment when she was busy sucking clean the carcass of a chicken, with her back turned to me, and quickly hooked the chain onto the belt without her even noticing it at first. But when she saw me open door and window, she jumped to her feet and, feeling herself held back, began to struggle as before, albeit a trifle less frantically and never ceasing to watch my every move. So much so that hearing me say soothingly over and over again, “Come now… come… keep still… you know I’ll unfasten you presently…” she eventually did keep quiet, just pulling obstinately at her belt with both hands. I aired the bedding and dragged the carpets outside. I was about to spread them out on the grass when I heard the thud of a soft fall behind me. And turning around, I saw Sylva, still on all fours, straightening up in the polyanthus bed at the foot of the house. She was no sooner on her feet than she reached the hedgerow in three bounds. I was paralyzed with surprise. She was wearing her woolen chemise, but the belt had gone: had she, by dint of fiddling with it and with the aid of chance, succeeded in undoing the buckle? It was a bit late in the day to worry about that. Before I had recovered my wits, she had jumped over the fence and was streaking toward the woods with the swiftness of a doe. I rushed after her, shouting her name, but I did not run half as fast as she. Like a wisp of smoke she had vanished in the forest before I was halfway across the field.
For a long time I called her name among the trees with a kind of despair, for I knew only too well that she would not answer and that trying to find her again in the undergrowth was a hopeless endeavor. Nevertheless I returned to the farm, saddled a horse, and set out on a one-man hunt through the woods, furiously keeping on till nightfall. I flushed a number of animals and among them a fox, but a bigger and older one than Sylva had been before her transformation; it was grayer, too, and I did not pursue it. However, the fact that the idea had occurred to me even for a moment showed that a miracle in reverse would not actually have surprised me, that I even expected perhaps to discover her in this guise. Simultaneously, I had to confess that my attachment for her was no less ambiguous than herself. In whatever shape I would have found her again-animal or human-I was prepared to give thanks to heaven with the same grateful heart.
I rode home only when the moon rose, deeply disheartened and deeply troubled, too. The room seemed lugubrious to me-cold and deserted. If I don’t find her again, I told myself, I’ll take a wife. I have forgotten how to live all alone. I’ll marry Dorothy. But now the idea of letting any creature other than my vixen into this room filled me with a sort of revolt and with the feeling, both strange and unbearable, of an impossible breach of faith. Like a widower who, with his wife hardly cold in her grave, was already toying with the unseemly idea of marrying again. And all this for a vixen! The thought left me aghast and distressed. The truth was, if at that moment I had been obliged to choose between marrying the most beautiful girl in Britain or finding my vixen again even in her original form, I believe I would not have wavered for an instant… One can gather from this the degree my obsession had reached at the end of an exhausting chase.
Chapter 10
THE next day was a Saturday, and there was a meet scheduled. I saddled my horse again and scoured the woods all day, trembling whenever I heard the distant clamor of hounds and horn. Toward evening I went all the way up to the inn to have a beer at the public bar where I hoped to gather news, yet dreaded to hear it. How could I have dared mention Sylva’s escape and my fear that she might have changed back into an animal of the chase? Fortunately they had been after a stag and left the foxes alone. Nor did anyone talk of a mysterious girl, whom I would have had some trouble to claim without first mentioning her escape… If I found her again, I vowed to myself I would introduce her to all my friends in the village, so as to prevent my getting caught another time in such an absurd predicament.