Sylva

Na

I had repulsed her by getting out of bed at once and, promptly distracted according to the normal habit of her little feather brain, she had forgotten me and set to play with one of her objects.

I had hastened to forget this bout of discomfiting heat but now, at the thoughts suggested by Na

I retained just enough self-control to be stupefied and appalled at having this thought: what was coming over me? Jealous of the past loves of a fox bitch? It was too fu

However, as I honestly questioned my heart I could no longer hide from myself that I was madly jealous. Jealousy in all its forms has always struck me as a most improper feeling. The French hold it up to ridicule and make fun of it in their theatre. (But as they make even more fun of deceived and complacent husbands, they contradict themselves in this respect as they do in all others.) As for me, I don’t think that jealousy is so much a laughing matter as a repulsive one. This is partly why for so many years I have hesitated to get married: against jealousy there is nothing more effective than celibacy… And here I was, racked by pain and hatred at the idea of rutting foxes around a vixen, and the favors she had granted them! Was I, then, forced to admit to myself that I could possibly be in love with her—and in the throes of the most common, vulgar sort of love at that?

I called to my rescue the memory of Dorothy, but this only exacerbated the confusion of my thoughts. To be sure, I had once been in love with Dorothy; perhaps I had never stopped completely; but never had I, in her respect, been stirred by thoughts like this. Not even at the time of her awful marriage—no, never had I sunk, even to mortify myself, to imagining her in the arms of her abominable husband. Such images would have disgusted me with myself for conjuring them up. And now they were submerging me, because they no longer applied lo a young lady of good family but to a female fox! I tried to persuade myself that these feelings could be better explained if they were not those of a lover, but a father. And for almost an hour I even managed to convince myself of it: yes, I felt for Sylva an anxious, authoritarian affection,

I was pained by her lapses from virtue, I worried about her future, I loathed her seducers. Nothing that was not very high-minded in all this. Unfortunately, this fiction could not be maintained for long, and the pain that griped my stomach at any too imaginative evocation was void of paternal feeling. So much so that after torturing myself in this way, I fell to wondering whether, for the sake of my moral health and self-respect, it would not be best never to see her again, to abandon her to her destiny in the forest. And to marry Dorothy as soon as possible.

But even supposing that I would have found sufficient strength in this wise resolution to put it into effect, was it still practicable? Could I openly abandon my “niece”—since I thought I had been so clever in passing her off as such? No, I told myself, it is too late for that. In the eyes of all, such an abandonment would be incomprehensible and criminal. Willy-nilly, I had to find Sylva again. And I realized without surprise that this necessity filled me at once with apprehension and a somber glee.

I had flung myself on the bed; these contradictory emotions had shaken me violently, and I eventually fell asleep. I woke up toward evening in a state of mind which seemed to me extremely lucid: A storm in a teacup, all this, old chap! Sylva is not a vixen any more, her past love affairs are like those of a Hindu princess before her metempsychosis, when she was still a sow: dissolved in Nirvana. She is not a woman either, and if you once, in a fleeting moment, felt for her an impious lust, you never allowed it to show more than the tip of its nose. Your dignity is unimpaired. You are jealous, are you? So what, if you surmount your jealousy? Come on, since you are fond of her, whether as a lover or a father, let her be happy according to her nature and not according to yours—by gratifying her instincts, by unconsciously carrying out the orders they subject her to.

I got up. I had completely recovered my composure, or so I thought. The nobility of those feelings, the high-mindedness of this self-denial, gave me an encouraging opinion of myself. I regained my strength and calm, and when I found poor Mrs. Bumley waiting for me at the di

She gazed at me wordlessly for a moment with her big kind, sorrowful eyes. She shook her head.

“She won’t come back at all,” she said.

Chapter 15

I ATTACHED little importance to this pessimistic forecast. Mothers and na

Sylva did not come back.

I jolly well had to make up my mind. Early one morning I went to the village to pay a visit to my friend John Filbert Walburton, who had been Mayor for the past ten years. As the owner of a stud farm famous all over Somerset (two or three of the top wi

I had no need to explain. Sylva had been found. Or rather, her whereabouts were known: she was at a wood-cutter’s shack. There had always been a fair number of them working in the forest. The man concerned was a young chap named Jeremy Hull, taciturn and—so they said—a bit half-witted. The other woodcutters were older than he and bullied him, only too happy to relieve their own misery by wreaking their malice on someone more wretched than themselves. He therefore lived apart, shy and suspicious, withdrawn in his solitude. On Monday evening, they had caught a glimpse of Jeremy coming back from his work in the company of a young lady. From a distance she seemed elegant, but she also appeared to be very tired. At first they had thought it was Walburton’s daughter, for she often rode to hounds with her father. They thought she might have got lost and spent the night in the thickets where Jeremy had probably found her, and after leading her to his hut for a meal and a rest he would take her back to the village.