Sylva

“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 Na

“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 Na

A windowpane crashed in pieces.

Then another, then a third. A stone fell at my feet. Was I to let this brute smash all my windows? But by the time I reached the garden Jeremy was no more than a distant figure fleeing toward the woods—as Sylva had fled not long ago. At this memory my rage subsided. Poor chap! I understood his despair all too well. And for the last time I asked myself whether, by tearing my little vixen from her native forest and from the savage love of this Lord Utan, I was not being very selfish and very cruel.

In a pensive mood I walked back into the living room, and found there a very pensive Na

“You think I’m wrong of course.” I sighed, and as indeed she did not answer, I went on: “She’d be happier with this man in the forest. Much happier. Yes, that’s certain.”

Na

I fell silent and sat down, stirring the dying embers in the fireplace; and for a minute or so there was silence in the room.

Na

“Say something, for God’s sake! I know what’s in your mind: it’s Dorothy, isn’t it? I’m behaving like a cad toward her, that’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you? Well, say so, damn it! Spill it out!”

“Miss Dorothy is old enough to look after herself,” Na

“But you’ve seen her almost every week!” I cried.

“I’m not talking of her,” said Na

She fidgeted in her armchair, the wood creaked.

“That monstrous ape… What a blessing!” she cried, and this time I was completely at sea.

It must have shown so clearly on my face that she began to chuckle silently while a thin line of moisture shone on the rim of her eyelids. She waved her hand feebly as if to say: “It’ll pass, don’t mind me,” and blew her nose loudly, then folded her handkerchief and smoothed it with the flat of her hand on a thigh as thick and large as a table.

“That poor child, I keep forgetting,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”

She shook her head wistfully, regretfully, while I wondered what she was forgetting.

“I never knew her as a fox, did I? That’s my excuse. I did not see her metamorphosis as you did. I keep forgetting that she is not a backward child, that she is still a young female animal, with all her instincts. She has got to satisfy them, poor thing. Even in the arms of a monster like that… that… And what would become of her?” she cried. “Oh, do forgive the scene I made just now,” she said with eager contrition. “I didn’t understand. But now… now that I have seen him… How right you were! And what a blessing that you… that you…”

She blushed crimson, like a very young girl.

“She will love you one day,” she said with a kind of fervor. “Oh yes, she must! You’ll make a woman of her through love!”

These were, almost word for word, the arguments she had refused to listen to three minutes ago. Yet coming back to me from Na

Chapter 18

THE village tom-toms operate quite as effectively in Somerset as in Zambezi. Soon the whole neighborhood knew of the affair of the backward young girl from Richwick Manor and the forest idiot. Tongues wagged ceaselessly. Some praised me for having put a stop to it, others criticized me for having wrecked the only possible happiness for those hapless creatures. Fortunately nobody seemed to suspect that I might have done it for any other motive than the strictest respectability. All this came to my ears via old Walburton, who would tell me this gossip with a hint of irony, not to say a slight sarcasm. I wondered what he was thinking deep down. Overtly, he was one of those who approved my having put an end to that “grotesque union,” as he called it. But he had a fu

It was the same with Dorothy, and even with her father. They both came to see me shortly after. Despite the sultry heat that brooded over the countryside, the doctor wore his pere

“All you have told me would apply perfectly well,” he said when I had finished, “to a clever young bitch. A springtime escapade. Odd, that. For if I am to believe what Dorothy has told me after each one of her visits here, our young lady is making rather sensational progress in other ways.”

I replied that she had indeed made some progress; but sensational seemed a rather big word for it. To me, on the contrary (but of course I was always about), it seemed slow and doubtful. It was a fact that she had made various kinds of progress which might appear “human” in all sorts of domains: cleanliness; speech, using a vocabulary which, though still exceedingly poor, was definitely increasing every day; the use of objects too, very simple tools: combs, spoons, forks, dusters, brooms. She had learned without much difficulty to sweep her own room, make her bed, yet in most essential matters she remained subject, just as in the first days of her training, to her appetites, her fears, her impulses; she obeyed them implicitly and without even a second’s reflection, seeming unable even to conceive the possibility of a refusal, still less of choice or consideration or even hesitation. Yes, she did behave like a “clever young bitch,” and even like a very clever one, to whom one could teach all sorts of tricks—save one: reasoning.