Sylva

“No more… play…?”

I said with as much gentleness as I could command, “No, my little Sylva. Poor Baron no more play.”

Sylva shuddered even more intensely. And then she wrenched her eyes from the pitiful body and rested them on me. It was not a questioning look. It was more like a keen, curiously sharp scrutiny. Like a deep meditation on the meaning of the human face. I let her look at me, without saying anything, not daring either quite to smile or to show too grave, too sad a face. I returned her gaze with tenderness, but she wasn’t looking at my eyes. It was my nose, my lips, my chin. And in the end she asked, but her voice was flat and toneless:

“Bo

I burst into subdued laughter, soft rather than loud, a laugh just meant to banish this quaint fear.

“Why no, Bo

Most unexpectedly, this answer seemed to make her cross. She jerked out of my arms as if to stand aloof. She repeated, more imperatively:

“Bo

I believed at first, however astonishing it may seem, that she meant to order me to mourn for her friend. Yes, for a moment I thought that the idea of playing when Baron was dead seemed to her revolting. It was obviously a stupid thought, when applied to a little soul still so close to an animal. But on the spur of the moment I answered:

“Not at once, of course. You are right.”

With even greater surprise I saw her stamping her foot with a movement of childish impatience-the exasperated movement of a child whom the grownups refuse to understand. And her whole face twisted with irritation but at the same time was marked with such anguish, such torment, perhaps such terror, that when for the third time she almost shouted, and her voice broke: “Bo

At the stage we had reached, I could hardly back out. Na

“Yes, Bo

I was not having any illusions about the effectiveness of this “long time” which there was so little chance she could understand. And besides, there can be no possible softening for a revelation like this. It has to be received, accepted and digested in its cruel totality.

Sylva opened her mouth at first. She opened it wider and wider and suddenly, nervously, she laughed-but with that laugh which I have already described as more like fright. And then the laughter disappeared and only the fright remained. And even so great a fright that for a moment she gasped for breath, like a newborn baby.

When at last she recovered her breath, I thought that -still like a baby-she would start to scream. And she did scream, but she was screaming words, an incessant “Don’t want! Don’t want!” with such agonized grimaces that her sweet, fresh, triangular face assumed a simian ugliness, all crinkled and crimson. She was screaming and stamping- and then abruptly she stopped. She passed her forearm upward over her face, which had suddenly too gone limp and pale-so limp and colorless that for a moment I was afraid she might swoon. She passed her arm twice or three times, sweeping her delicate, blenching fox-face and brushing back the red locks that were falling over her eyes- eyes alive with panic, fixing me intently as if I too was going to die there, at her feet, like a dog.

That at least was what I thought-what I thought she dreaded at that moment. But her thoughts, what must henceforth be called her thoughts, now that they were on the move, were ravaging her little fox-brain with such speed that they had already reached the conclusions when I still thought they were all mixed up, when I still supposed them to be just about to be born in rending pain. So she brushed back the rebellious red wisp with her arm for the last time and in an indescribable voice, a murmuring, broken, hardly intelligible voice, she said as if in a sigh, while her eyes at the same time grew dim, “And Sylva…?”

Chapter 26

I CANNOT continue this story without a certain emotion. Even if, at the second when Sylva uttered her name, and in uttering it understood, realized that she must die; even if in that cruel, fascinating second I had not been seized by the indubitable, coruscating feeling that she had just undergone a second metamorphosis, less miraculous perhaps on the face of it than her physical transformation, but so much more fraught with consequences, with deep-scarring stigmata; even if I had not told myself that at that moment, at that very second, there before me, she stood transfigured for the second time, that she was shedding forever her unconscious, carefree and happy foxish nature to take the first frightened steps into the shadowy sphere, the tragic, doomed, nocturnal, boundless, cursed and sublime sphere of man’s revolted questioning of his gods; even if this illumination had not burst upon my brain at the very second when that of her own perishable and incomprehensible condition burst upon hers-even if I had thaught of none of this on the spur of the moment, Sylva’s behavior would have forced these thoughts upon me without delay. For I may really say that at that second, from that second onward, everything changed forever.

She had murmured, “And Sylva…?” and I had not dared reply.

Did she even expect an answer? Wasn’t her question an answer in itself? She said, “And Sylva…?” and looked at Na

And indeed, before that look in her eyes poor Na

She did not go far. She stopped abruptly as if dazed, as if she had come up so hard against the sky, the horizon, that she had almost bumped her head against them. She passed her forearm over her brow, turned away, ran off again, through the orchard; this time she really collided with a young apple tree and slumped down like a bird stu

Na

We ran down to the living room to welcome her. Had we been wrong to switch on the light? She did not come in. We saw her figure pass outside the window and turn toward the farm. I motioned to Na

I dashed through it after her. The two horses and the donkey stirred nervously in the solid darkness. It took me a few seconds to accustom my eyes. In the corner formed by one wall and the tool shed I thought I could make out a squatting shape. From close by it turned out to be a saddle on a block. I searched for Sylva in vain; she must have slipped out by the front. Where could I trace her now?

I turned back to the house. Na

“She has gone, with her two-pronged bit.”

While I was searching the stable Na