We went to bed early and I spent a very bad night.
As usual in the case of insomnia, I fell at daybreak into such a heavy sleep that I could not tear myself out of it. Yet somebody was trying to wake me. I felt that it was being done as gently as possible. But as is also usual with those belated slumbers, I could not manage to open an eye without at once closing it again, pulled down to the depths by an enormous, nauseous hand. Gradually, however, I extricated myself from this sticky slime. When I had at last recovered my wits completely, I found myself in Sylva’s arms. She had come back! Shock, joy, relief and gratitude made me sit up straight with a jerk.
A weight against my chest pushed me back toward the pillow. Sylva was holding me in her arms but her head weighed on my breast. She was not asleep. A hand was kneading my shoulder with a kind of nervous tenderness. I heard her sniff softly. I hoisted myself up as best I could. I took her head in my hands, lifted it, turned her pointed face toward mine.
The look in her eyes!
It was unrecognizable, and I experienced such surprise, such a commotion rather, such deep and almost rapturous excitement that it can only be called a revelation. Hitherto I had seen quite well that Sylva’s gaze, her narrow, fixed eyes gleaming with mineral brilliance, had always hovered on the surface, never had any background. The eyes fastened on things with a kind of sharp grip which yet remained vague and distant, and they would detach themselves in the same way, without having really weighed them, questioned them.
Where have I read that there are two kinds of women’s eyes: those that look at you and those that let themselves be looked at? There is a third kind: the look of the feline’s eye, which does not offer itself but takes, never touching, never lingering, never caressing. Two attentive emeralds glowing with an icy fire. I realized that in her most affectionate, intimate moments, those most laden with warm curiosity, Sylva had never ceased to have those eyes, eyes behind which things might perhaps happen, but in deep darkness, without ever reaching the surface.
Whereas now-whereas the eyes now resting on mine! They were no longer eyes that only saw, they penetrated, bored into mine, as if they, in turn, would have liked to discover an answer, a secret. I had actually seen that look in them once before, two months ago, when she had recognized herself in the mirror, but it was a look of such short duration, so quickly averted, forgetful, forgotten… And even then it had not reached this intensity, the deep concentration, the pathetic introspection that it presented at this moment as it rested on me with such rapt attention, brimming over with feelings of such heaviness.
I was pressing her face between my hands. I was saying, “You’ve come back.” I do not know whether she could understand what lay behind those softly spoken words, if she could guess or feel all the tenderness, the gratitude, the sadness, joy and sweetness that they contained. She did not answer. She simply kept her eyes on my lips which had spoken.
I repeated, “You’ve come back,” and then I began to kiss her gently on her forehead, her eyes, all over her face. She let me. I kissed her as one kisses a tenderly loved woman, and she let herself be kissed like a woman, her head thrown back a little, dangling, abandoned, and as I thus kissed her like a woman I felt an upsurge of emotion close to the tears of a mother for her cured but still fragile child, of a lover for his mistress on the eve of a long separation. Not for an instant did I think of a vixen or even wonder if there did not, after all, remain something of a fox under my lips. No, I never thought of it, I only thought, She’s come back, with an immense tenderness, a poignant gratitude, and I kissed her with the infinitely gentle warmth of a wistful gladness.
I said, “You were not cold last night?” and she shook her head without ceasing to look at me.
“Not cold,” she said after a moment.
I hesitated for a long time before I asked her, “Where were you?” But perhaps she did not understand or else she did not want to answer. She simply looked at me, with that meditative insistence which, since my awakening, had pierced my heart with an almost painful delight.
And then she murmured, “Bonny.” She uttered that ridiculous nickname, nothing else, but in a voice that was so new to me, with a tone of such anxious trust, like a lost child or one that had been found again, that I pressed her face more tightly, nodding as if to say: “Yes, yes, darling, I am here…”
She leaned her forehead against the palms of my hands, pressing heavily against them to part them, and rested it again on my chest-yes, rested it for repose, whether more weary or more trusting I do not know. She said nothing more. Nor did I. We remained like this for a very long time and I believe in the end we fell asleep from sheer peace and serenity.
We went downstairs to have breakfast in the dining room. Nanny must have known before me that Sylva was back, for she smiled at us without surprise. She waited on us. Sylva did not throw herself on her kippers with her usual voracity. She ate and drank absent-mindedly. Perhaps because she was ceaselessly observing the two of us as if, back from the Americas after many long years, she was comparing our well-loved but so aged faces with those she held in her memory. The features of her own face marked a kind of slipping, a subtle sagging which seemed to me, like her avid curiosity, expressive of a fierce but anxious affection.
My heart was stirred by a strange happiness, made up of compassion, pride, and hope. The love Sylva bore us henceforth, I thought to myself, would no longer be that of a little domestic animal, hungering for protection. It would now be the love of a creature who had become one of us, who had discovered our common misery and so communed with us in this mortal frailness, with all her being. I thought also that human love differs from that of the beasts in that it has death for a background, and that Sylva could now at last love me with this kind of love.
As for me, I knew very well that I had loved her for a long time.
I had no longer been able to hide the fact from myself ever since Dorothy had flung at me: “I’m not the one you love!” I had tried to protest, but she had no trouble in making me swallow my protests. I could thus measure their lack of conviction. Then Dorothy had run away to London. And I remembered with what glee I had welcomed the prospect of being alone with Sylva…
All this was clear but did not leave my mind at rest. Dorothy was yielding to her passion, but wasn’t I yielding to mine? Were we not, in fact, each in his own fashion, yielding to the same temptation, shirking the austere constraints of our human estate? Let her go back to her drugs and me to my Sylva-wasn’t that what I had thought with a morbid attraction that was not without some resemblance to the lure of narcotics? For though Sylva was certainly humanizing herself by leaps and bounds, wasn’t that which I loved most in her, that which attached me to her so strongly, all that still remained of animality in her nature? There was no doubt that she had now passed another stage, and a most decisive one, but to use this as a pretext for loving her henceforth without remorse, wasn’t that just an alibi?
Despite Dorothy’s addiction, what a distance there still was between Sylva and her! However much Dorothy might drug herself to escape her torments, those very torments were, in the first place, the tragic evidence of the quality of her mind, of her painful self-interrogation. She had given up, it was true, but her very defeat was proof of the violence, the grandeur, of the preceding battle. Where lay the roots of Dorothy’s drama if not in the rich soil of a long civilization? Her inner drama was the poisoned fruit of it, but also its undeniable mark. Whereas what had poor Sylva to offer, still entangled in the shadows of her origin, other than the first human stammerings? Any comparison between her and Dorothy remained sacrilegious, and my choice was actually degrading.