No sooner were we alone than Dorothy snapped in a fierce whisper:
“Do you think you can fool me?”
I was so staggered by this brusque attack that I remained dumb. I could barely stammer:
“What do you mean?”
“That business with poor Jeremy.”
“Well? What of it?”
“You don’t care a rap for respectability!”
“What do you mean, I-”
“Tell me the truth: are you in love with her?”
“Now really, Dorothy…”
“I’m not a prude and if you want to go to bed with her I shan’t kick up a fuss about it. She won’t be your first mistress, as everyone knows. But I beg you not to forget who you are, where you come from. It would be an appalling scandal.”
“What would? Do you suppose I want to marry her?” I exclaimed.
“Who knows? I wonder.”
“I’ve never heard anything so ludicrous. Does one marry a fox? You know perfectly well she is nothing else yet.”
“Not yet, as you say yourself. But she’ll change. My father is probably quite right.”
“Well, then it’ll be time to think of it, won’t it?” I said sarcastically, for she had upset me.
“No, that’s just it. You must think of it now!”
She said this very insistently, in a tone of alarm, and gripped my hands with an expression of urgency.
“You are in great danger,” she said. “Remember Pygmalion.”
“What’s he got to do with it? Sylva isn’t made of marble.”
“I’m thinking of Shaw’s. What you are going to do goes even beyond Professor Higgins’s exploit. He merely transformed a flower girl into a lady. You’re going to transform a beast into a woman. You’ll love her. You already do.”
“I? But you’re raving mad! Besides, I’ll have you know that if there’s someone I love-”
“Shut up!” she shouted.
I can’t bear to be silenced. And yet I ought to have welcomed her violence. What a moment for making a declaration of love, when I was steeped in the most extreme sentimental confusion! But this “Shut up!” instead of curbing my rashness, made me lose my temper.
“Why should I shut up? I have kept my mouth shut for ten years! I let you slip once already, I’m not going to start again!”
I saw her turn pale. She lifted a warning hand to silence me. Her lips quivered but no word came. I seized her hand in both of mine.
“I am in danger, am I?” I cried. “Well, help me out of it! Provided, that is, that you love me,” I added, lifting her hand to my face.
But she tore it away and got up. She began to walk up and down, bending and unbending the fingers of her clasped hands.
“That’s what I should have cried to you ten years ago,” she said tonelessly. She gave a stricken sigh. “I’m too much of a wreck,” she murmured. “I can’t save anybody any more.”
“Look here, Dorothy…”
“No!” she cried, then added more softly, musingly: “If I love you? Can I still love? Shall I ever be able to again?” She bent and unbent her fingers. “I thought I loved that man,” she said in a very low, rather husky voice. “I would have given my life for him. In a way I have given it: he horrified me and yet I’d have stood up to the whole earth. His death came as a relief. It also made me desperate, it left me just like one of those jellyfish that one finds motionless on the beach: limp and without feeling. Just anybody can pick up a jellyfish-and for ten years I let myself be picked up by just anybody. I hardly even remember it.”
My heart had turned to ice while I listened to this sudden confession, but I could think of nothing to say. She looked at me thoughtfully.
“Whatever happens, whatever you may do, I want you to know that you’ll be forgiven,” she said strangely.
I got up, walked over to her, grasped her beautiful shoulders and forced her to turn toward me.
“Dorothy,” I said to her calmly, “suppose Sylva could hear us now, do you think she would understand a single word of what we are saying?”
Was it the beginning of a smile or only color returning to her cheeks? She repeated like an echo:
“No, she would not understand a single word.”
“Can you seriously imagine that I could think of marrying so rudimentary a being, even on some very distant day, when you are about, right here, close to me? Doesn’t it strike you as completely absurd?”
She shook her head. This time she was really smiling. But joylessly.
“I’m not a woman one marries, either,” she murmured, and hung her head. “I have nothing to offer. I’m a dried-out crab: a carapace with nothing inside.” She raised her head. “Life doesn’t return to an empty shell. Sylva too is empty-for the time being. But in her something some day may come to life. That’s just what makes me afraid for you.”
She must have seen from my blank look that I did not understand. She took my hands, removed them from her shoulders.
“What she’ll have in her brain cells will have been put there by you. What the Pygmalions of this world love is precisely their own likeness. How can they resist it? And on that day there’ll be nothing I can put in the balance. My presence would soon weigh on you like a cumbersome piece of furniture. But if you marry that creature it’ll be the end of you, Albert. I’m not jealous-nor prudish, I repeat. I’ve less right than anyone, alas, to sermonize you! But I’m afraid that once she has a mind, a physical affaire won’t be enough for you.”
“Well then, marry me,” I said gently.
But she shook her head obstinately.
“I’d be your mistress if you like,” she said, very simply. “It would be more honest but I’m afraid that it wouldn’t make any difference when the day comes-it would merely make me a little more miserable.”
“Let’s try anyhow,” I said just as simply; but I was deeply moved.
She took my head between her hands and kissed me lightly on the lips.
“Not now,” she breathed. “When you really want me.”
Chapter 19
AFTER Dorothy’s departure, I was back in a state of extreme confusion. Yet I am not a fickle-hearted Latin, a Frenchman for whom every girl he meets is immediately the prettiest one, a Sicilian who swears eternal love to three different women on the same day. I had been quite sincere with Dorothy. But when she was gone and I found myself alone with Sylva again, all I had said seemed to me rash madness. It was not as though my feelings for Sylva were more certain, less ambiguous than before. I had not lied to Dorothy when, some little time ago, I had compared this attachment to hers for her Siamese kitten. But on the other hand hadn’t I, if not confessing it outright, at least stopped denying the strong attraction that Sylva exercised on my senses? Above all, I had concealed even more dangerous thoughts from Dorothy; and though she had divined the gist of them this did not alter the fact that I had hidden them. I had not breathed a word of the exultant joy that had gripped me at the idea that love might change Sylva into a real woman. It was true that I had since told myself, with returning composure, that I was indulging in pipe dreams, that I had turned the order of things upside down and that, in actual fact, it was only provided I could first make a woman of her that Sylva might subsequently be able to feel human love. But that was just it: finding Sylva again as she still was, pretty as a picture but sunk to the very soul in the dark maze of her animal mentality, I could not fool myself. I was quite determined to lift her out of it, to do all that lay in my power to awaken a human intelligence in her. Dorothy had warned me that by doing so I ran the risk of falling in love for good with a woman who, to a considerable extent at least, would be my own creation. But I knew I would do it all the same. And thus, by nevertheless offering my heart to Dorothy, I was becoming perilously guilty toward her.
At the same time I told myself that I was quite as guilty, for that matter, toward Sylva. If Dorothy had been less shrewd or less honest, what would I have done in the long run? At best, I would have abandoned Sylva to the care of Mrs. Bumley-but what would have become of her afterward? At worst, I would have followed the Sullivans’ sound advice and entrusted her at once to some institution. That might have meant arresting her development. Well, wouldn’t that be wiser? Wasn’t it better, after all, that she should remain a vixen? Wouldn’t the woman she might become in the best hypothesis still be full of gaps and deficiencies, incapable of adapting herself to our modern world? Wouldn’t I make her unhappy by vowing her to so doubtful a destiny? But a powerful voice within me protested against these pessimistic views, assured me that to abandon her now in her present state might smack of criminal desertion.
For there were numerous signs which convinced me that the doctor was right, that the time was approaching when “things would begin to happen.” I did not imagine, however, that the time was so close at hand.
I don’t want to pretend that those precursory signs always struck us clearly, Nanny and me. Many of them escaped us (one cannot always be on the watch); others were fallacious. Like all primates, Sylva was naturally gifted with a great talent for imitation. By regularly repeating our words and acts she eventually linked the acts to the words with apparent logic. But how difficult it was to know when the appearance was deceptive and when it was not! More than once we looked at each other, her governess and I, seized with emotion, in the belief that we had witnessed in our pupil a great step from her condition of an unthinking creature; and then we had to admit that it was only a sham without substance, a mere aping, a parody without reality. Such, it will be remembered, was the episode of the dressing table, of the rose in her hair. But at other times, on the contrary, an act that should have intrigued us, captured our attention, passed us by and we thoughtlessly paid it no heed.
I remember, for instance, the following little incident. One evening when Fanny had prepared some chocolate ice for us Sylva, after tasting it, began to blow on it in her plate. We laughed about it without realizing at once how much this mistake on her part already represented an association between cause and effect. Only later did we recall it to distinguish a posteriori its faintly precursory indication. It’s so much easier to be wise after the event!