Ears. Necks. Fuzzy hair. Chests straining under jerseys, others heavy and limp, wobbling like jelly. Brick-colored faces, faces the color of turnips or potatoes, two cheeks stretched tight like red marble, a chin burgeoning as if in spring, a nose like a knife stuck into a pear. Breath, shouts, laughter, groans of strain, sighs of weariness, a vast smell of meat warmed by the sun that floated above this shambling jostle, big sudden eddies beginning to liquefy like turning mayonnaise, then just as suddenly thickening again, whisked together by the reflux. I felt stifled. Once again I was flooded by the same nauseous obsession of organic proliferation that I had fled from; I had merely exchanged one surfeit for another, and whether animal or vegetable it still was on the gorilla’s side against me. All I could see in this welter of human flesh was a blind, limp lurching toward obscene agglutinations, a bestial heel-kicking until four walls and nightfall would bring it carnal release in a vast fornication. I thought of an article I had read in The Times a few days previously, expressing alarm at the growing population of the globe, which had doubled in fifty years and would be tripled again before the end of the century. Meat, meat, apes, apes everywhere! There was nothing to look for in this swarming genesis; this human glut could not give me the answer I needed.
I felt so depressed, so disheartened, that I walked into the first public house I came to, sat myself down in the barroom in a deep leather armchair shiny with wear, and ordered a whisky, then another. I dimly felt that I was making a mistake somewhere, since in spite of everything the idea of leaving Sylva to her pithecanthrope left me with that feeling of betrayal which I could neither banish nor admit. How many whiskies did I drink? I do not know. Nor how much time I spent, sprawling in the armchair with closed eyelids, in the fumes of alcohol, subjected to an endless procession of lewd pictures which I did not even have the strength to dismiss.
How I came to be outside I have forgotten, except that it was dark. How I hired a cart (or how it was hired for me, and by whom), how it got me back to Richwick Manor, I have forgotten too. The first picture I can see, shaky and blurred, is the bulldog face of Mrs. Bumley. Or rather pieces of her face which I cannot manage to put together: a pair of eyes full of sorrow; two sagging cheeks quivering with disapproval; two thin, long lips opening on a gulf, in the depths of which quivers a lump of moist flesh whose crimson color fascinates me. And words reach me as if from another world: “Sylva is back. She is upstairs.”
I recollect an endless flight of stairs which rises and rolls with me, and starts over and over again. I must have fallen down several times, for next morning my knees were very sore. A door in a dark corridor resists malignantly. Even more malignantly it suddenly opens; I am sent sprawling and crawl across the carpet on all fours, I pull the bed sheets toward me, the blanket comes with them, what I now see sobers me suddenly-or rather, ah! my drunkenness amplifies strangely, breaks into an inspired paean, bursts out like a heavenly fanfare…
Faced with this sleeping body in the reclining grace of a Correggio, it seems to me that everything has at last become marvelously clear. No more mystery. A dazzling brightness floods me, I send up to heaven a Te Deum which, though somewhat profane, is nonetheless a thanksgiving-Halleluja! Halleluja! But what happened afterward I cannot say. I would set it down quite truthfully if my memory could conjure up the slightest picture, however dim. But there is nothing: what comes after this hosanna is a drop into a black hole. At most I retained on waking the very vague impression of having spent a restless night.
Chapter 17
NEXT morning when I woke, sobered, I was holding between my chest and my knees, as if in a pair of nutcrackers, a very small, frail Sylva, curled up, foxlike, in a ball, her hair caressing my chin. And I was amazed that, with my drunkenness gone, I did not feel at all ashamed, or at least embarrassed or perplexed, at holding the sweet creature in my arms. On the contrary, I felt lighthearted, happy. I remembered having thought, as in my drunken stupor I gazed at the sleeping sylph in her amber-colored indolence, that I had at last “understood everything.”
“No more mystery.” But I vainly tried to recapture that sense of sudden perspicacity and, with it, what it was that I had perceived so irrefutably in my drunkenness. I could recapture none of it. Nor, as a matter of fact, could I rediscover the source from which, the night before, had sprung the sort of shame or disgust that had impregnated me for so long: six glasses of whisky had swept it away, but logically it ought to have reappeared. The conditions, I reflected, are the same as they were yesterday, and the warm little animal I am holding ensconced like a sweet hazelnut in the crook of my body still has nothing feminine about her except her appearance. I am not trying to deceive myself. She is a vixen. And yet I feel no confusion, no regret, at imagining (quite mistakenly, perhaps) what may have happened last night. All my previous repugnance now seems to me silly and prejudiced. What has changed then? If Sylva hasn’t, have I?
I first tried to assume with Christian humility that since I had not raised Sylva to a human level I myself might consequently have sunk to the level of a fox. Was that not highly probable, alas? Had I not experienced a bestial carnal obsession among the crowd in the market? Was this not the ominous portent of a degradation? But I was clasping my sleeping vixen in my arms, I felt her breathing gently swell and relax the young body coiled against mine, and I felt no shame, not even a stirring of the senses. I merely smiled with great tenderness, convinced there was nothing brutish in this gentleness, in the quiet calm that pervaded me.
For better proof of the peace in my soul and to make quite sure of these new thoughts, I woke Sylva and softly caressed her spine, as one does to a cat to make it purr. And as this murmur of pleasure rose in her throat I realized with a sort of exaltation that I was sure, profoundly sure, that some day, under my guidance, the purring would cease to be the solitary noise of unconscious flesh; that some day it would become the love song of a being who no longer submits but gives herself, who dedicates herself body and soul to the ineffable communion of human love. I realized that if I had wrested my vixen from her ape man, from the innocent but blind debauchery of mindless creatures, it was (even before I knew it) because of this-today luminous-certainty that she would later become capable of this communion under my guidance; that to abandon her to her instincts forever, even if to her it meant happiness and-quite literally-a fool’s paradise, it was yet a betrayal; that true loyalty and courage demanded on the contrary that I help this peaceful little animal to blossom slowly into a woman in love, into a lover-even if she had to suffer for it; and that I would henceforth live in this hope, or, more exactly, in this determination.
While this mental avalanche swept all before it, I did not once think, I confess it with shame, of Dorothy.
But when, early in the morning, Mrs. Bumley discovered me in Sylva’s bed (wasn’t that the shortest way of introducing her to my new disposition?) it would be putting it mildly to say that she was indignant. She gasped for breath and almost fainted. I made her drink a glass of rum, put on my dressing gown and pulled her into the living room.
She was too agitated to be capable of listening to me. Words poured from her quite incoherently, as if the shock had released a talking machine of which she had lost control. Like a tune ground out by a barrel organ, certain words recurred over and over again to express her disapprovaclass="underline" “Taking advantage of the poor creature!” It was hard to make out from her vehemence whether she felt more ashamed for me or more fearful for “the poor child.” I eventually grasped that while her imagination was outraged by what seemed to her (as it had to me only the day before) an abominable depravity, she feared above all that it might jeopardize the evolution of the retarded child entrusted to her care.
“Won’t she soon be needing you as a father?” she repeated with an excessive gush of pity. “Just think what it will be like for her when…”
I vainly tried to interrupt the torrent and explain to her the discovery I had made: how in the course of time I hoped to bring the darling child to look upon me in a quite different light. But she just would not listen. More than ten times I started my explanations, but she obstinately shook her head and continued inveighing against me.
In the end, she exasperated me to such an extent that I jumped up and lost my temper. “Damn you for a pigheaded old fool! If you don’t like it…”
She promptly jumped to her feet in turn, ran toward the door. I caught her by the arm and forced her to sit down. And for the eleventh time I was about to resume my arguments when there was a knock, and the French window leading from the garden opened.
It was the wretched Jeremy. Visibly, he had scrubbed himself from head to foot; he had put on his Sunday best, and his metallic blond hair, which a thorough wash had restored to its natural fuzz, surrounded his brutish face like the petals of a dandelion. But I was much too angry to be alive to humor or pathos. I thrust Nanny back into her armchair, spun around furiously and, as that grotesque clown came in, strode toward him with such a resolute and probably menacing air that he shrank back to the terrace. I was shaking with fury.
“Get out!” I yelled. “Be off and don’t let me see you again, or I’ll set the dogs on you!”
I would have been hard put to carry out the threat, for my two mastiffs, though ferocious-looking, were incapable of harming a fly. Jeremy fortunately did not know this; he shrank back even farther and I slammed the French window in his face, turning the key in the lock. With clenched fists and still shaking, I turned back toward Nanny, who was staring at me, pale and gaping, her chin a-tremble-perhaps she was afraid I would strangle her? Come, come, I told myself, pull yourself together. I approached her, trying to smile.