When at last I could no longer hear a sound, I relaxed my grip. The creature did not move. It remained stretched out on its flank, exhausted.
I got up and looked at it.
It was a woman.
Chapter 2
AS I have said, I have no witness to this singular occurrence. I can only affirm that I was at least as doubtful as my most skeptical readers of what had just occurred before my very eyes. Even later, when there was no longer room for doubt, I relived over and over again in my memory each second, each sequence, in the course of which a hunted fox, within sight of my eyes, had suddenly changed into a woman. All I can say is that a faked substitution-to trick whom? for what purpose?-would be even more incredible, would require the invisible presence, right among the pack of hounds, of a prodigious conjurer. In any case, the subsequent course of events would render such an assumption even more absurd.
Not that it matters, anyway. What I intend to relate is not the phenomenon itself. I have said all there is to say about it; there is nothing I can add to my account. And if what went before was not a miracle, what followed happened nonetheless. The rest, after all, is of no great importance except to minds obsessed by metaphysics. Let them plague themselves with questions if that is what they enjoy.
In any event, there I stood on the lawn that occupies most of my garden, under the darkened sky in which the first stars glittered. I gazed down at the young creature, swooning and naked at my feet, who, though she might be only a fox, bore henceforth all the outward appearance of a young girl.
She was naked but covered with mud and bruises, stained with blood. I picked her up in my arms. She was slim and light. Her eyes were hidden under silky eyelids, tinted blue by fatigue and perhaps the cold. When I raised her she gave a start and drew back her chops-her lips- over small but very sharp teeth, with an instinctively threatening growl. That was all. She was panting, her breathing short and labored.
Holding her in my arms, I found myself exceedingly embarrassed. My first thought was to carry my prey up to the farm and entrust it to the farmer’s wife. But nobody had been present at the metamorphosis. What explanation could I give? Imagine my walking into the farmer’s house, bringing them a stark-naked girl, half dead with exhaustion, striped with blows and covered with bruises. What would they have thought? No, it was impossible. I must carry her into the house and hope that not a soul, near or far, would see me with my singular burden. Fortunately I reached the front door without impediment.
I climbed to the second floor, laid the girl down on my bed, and ran the water for a bath, seeking to confine my thoughts only to my actions, to wonder as little as possible. Meanwhile, a contrite voice within me paid tribute to David Garnett. I reproached myself, in petto, for my so-called common sense, my vulgar incredulity. There are more things, Horatio… There you go! Right away the great Will on your lips! Isn’t that like you, you bookish monkey! Try and think for yourself once in a while… I watched the hot water run into the tub and began to envisage the consequences of my adventure. Here you are with a woman on your bed as naked as on Judgment Day, but one who does not descend from Eve or Adam, with no birth certificate, without the merest beginning of a passport, the least scrap of an identity. What are you going to do with her? Who can you show her to? What can you tell the Home Office, the Immigration Department? Who’d believe a word of what you would say? It was much more awkward than a murder, I realized with a kind of terror. A man or a woman too few is reasonably easy to justify, especially a foreigner: he might have gone back to his country. But one too many! How can you explain that? I could see myself grappling with an enormous felony which, though the very opposite of a murder, was nonetheless an act of the same ilk, equally out of conformity with the law.
And a woman too many who was, moreover, in actual fact no more than a vixen. For she was nothing else, as she showed me without delay. When the bath was ready, I went to fetch her from my bed. She opened her eyes for a split second-her narrow, brilliant eyes. But she let herself be borne away. Extreme fatigue or a budding confidence? I was almost moved to tenderness, but as soon as she felt the water, her whole body gave a frenzied jerk, she slipped from my arms and struggled to get out of the tub. I was determined to keep her there. A battle ensued which I am not likely to forget. Within three seconds I was soaked from head to foot, and as I was dressed for autumn in corduroy and suede, I became as clumsy as a bear. She caught hold of my tie with her little jaws and would not let go of it. Fortunately I must have been roughly twice her weight and this, added to her great exhaustion, finally compelled her to give in. Perhaps, too, the warmth of the bath gradually filled her with its soothing gentleness. Whatever the cause, in the end she kept still. With a thousand precautions, I began to sponge her poor scratched body (so pitiful in aspect, truly, as to disarm all sensuality) and she lay quiescent. She only moaned faintly when the sponge touched her wounds. Her eyes were open but she was not looking at me. An occasional tremor hinted at an urge to flee; but I needed only to press her shoulder to restrain her. In the end, she must have felt such a sense of well-being that she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.
I took this opportunity to get her out of the bath, wrap her in a big bathrobe, dry her and tuck her into bed. Then, while I was taking off my wet clothes and getting into a dressing gown, I got a glimpse of that famous duplicity, that Reynard cunning which I had so far known only from Aesop and other authors. As I suddenly turned around I saw that she was not asleep at all. On the contrary, she was looking at me with those narrow, overbrilliant eyes. A moment later she seemed once more sunk in a deep slumber. I concluded that she was waiting for the first opportunity to give me the slip.
It was at this moment that certain reactions, certain inexplicable feelings, began to stir in my mind. What more could I hope for than that she’d escape? She wanted to recover her freedom, her wild life? Well, do so, my girl! Go back to your forest! No more problems. Good riddance. That’s what should have been the normal effect produced on a reasonable man by this cunning, this transparent plan to regain her freedom. Yet that wasn’t what I was thinking, not at all. I told myself, on the contrary, that if she escaped I would never forgive myself. For if she tried to resume her wild life in the forest, I told myself, she would either die of cold or hunger, or would sooner or later be discovered by the gamekeepers, taken to the village and inevitably sent to some asylum where she would end her life in a strait jacket. I was the only witness to her birth as well as to her true nature; the only one, in consequence, able to understand her. This, then, I went on, dictates your duty, which is to keep her here, even against her will, to shelter her for as long as necessary.
But even as I experienced those exalted sentiments, something within me took a perverse pleasure in mocking them. Your duty? What duty? An asylum or this room, it’s all the same to her. For her this is a prison, for you a pack of trouble. And who appointed you her guardian? Your real duty, my good fellow, is to report her presence to the authorities. It is up to them to disentangle the affair, to decide what is to be done with such a creature. But I was looking down the while at her pointed face, so touching and tender in its feigned sleep, and I was thinking: Don’t go away… I was thinking it with a stupidly anxious, stupidly heavy heart, and I was forced to admit to myself that what I really dreaded was quite simply losing her again-that it was no longer just for her sake in fact that I feared her escape…
Amazed and quite upset by these surprising thoughts, I carefully closed the doors and windows and went downstairs to cook my dinner. While I was stewing some mushrooms, I tried to look at the situation in a sensible way. I was about to keep imprisoned a woman of whom nobody knew or could know anything. She was naked, I had not even a rag with which to clothe her and how could I ask the farmer’s wife for a dress or a shift without attracting undue attention? And how long could I keep this compromising presence secret? I received few visitors, but all the same, in the long run… And the day when, by chance-and the chance was bound to come-she was discovered locked away here, I would most certainly risk being prosecuted. Furthermore, as I would be unable to say anything about her or where she came from, there would be an additional charge of contempt of court-goodness knows what else. Madness. Sheer madness. Come now, go upstairs, wake her up and open the doors for her, you idiot!
But I went on stirring the sauce and knew that I would do nothing of the sort. What I need, I told myself, is someone to whom I can tell the whole story, a friendly soul to share my secret. All right, but who? Rack my brain as I might, I could not think of a confidant. Everyone would think I was crazy-just as they had thought of David Garnett’s poor hero.
Meanwhile my dinner was ready. I swallowed it absent-mindedly, hastily and without pleasure (yet I adore mushrooms). Then it entered my mind that she might be hungry. I found a young capon in the larder and took it upstairs with me. When I opened the door she jumped out of bed and dashed in a panic all around the room, trying to climb up the walls, the curtains. I sat down in an armchair and kept perfectly still, to let her terror abate. She had huddled in a corner of the room, between the wall and the small bow-fronted chest of drawers. She watched me with her bright eyes, not missing my smallest movement. Thus I in turn could examine her at leisure. Did she look like a fox? Yes, if one knew it. The finely chiseled nose, the very high Mongoloid cheekbones, the triangular cheeks and the pointed chin-all subtly recalled her origin. Her hair too, a beautiful red with a hint of tawny here and there. It wasn’t very long, just covering her shoulders. She had an adorable figure, but though her shapely curves revealed that she was a woman, she was so very dainty and frail that one would otherwise have taken her for a very young girl. Her small feet, so long and slender, were positively touching: the ankles were so delicate that one feared they might break like glass. The hands, even slimmer and longer than the feet, never stopped fidgeting, moving this way and that with a perpetual quivering of the fingers.