I was all the less tempted to overcome this apprehension since her nakedness, to tell the truth, no longer bothered me personally. Apart from the fact that it is a charming sight, nakedness, by becoming habitual, ceases to draw the eye, loses its excitement, and even inspires satiety. One need only think of the beach at Brighton to understand how my propinquity with Sylva, constantly in Eve’s dress, left my heart and senses generally untroubled. And if only my feelings had been involved, I would gladly have let her stay in this attire as long as she felt like it. Her wounds had healed; her skin had the bloom and softness of satin; her muscles, slender and long, rippled gently under the skin. Why conceal those appealing charms with a barbarous fabric, a badly cut frock? I had no illusions about my talents in this field, and knew beforehand what a poor dress buyer I would make.
But downstairs, through the floor, I could hear Fanny whistling and humming appallingly out of tune as she dusted the furniture, polished the brass, shook out the rugs. It was really too risky. I definitely could not delay any longer. Wednesday being market day at Wardley, I mixed into Sylva’s breakfast a good dose of sleeping powder, had the gig harnessed, locked the whole house with the greatest care, and bade the farmer’s son drive me into town.
Chapter 4
I SENT the boy to the seed merchant and told him to meet me at Wardley Station, where I said I wanted to pick up a trunk I had left in the cloakroom on my last trip. I actually bought a large carryall, crammed it at Marks amp; Spencer’s with underwear and feminine attire of roughly the right size, and took a cab to the station where the gig, as arranged, picked me up twenty minutes later. We reached Richwick Manor just before nightfall.
I found the house in order-that is to say, safely locked just as I had left it. But upstairs in the bedroom there was an indescribable havoc. I was a little surprised that Sylva had waked up, though less surprised that she had flown into a rage. Waking to find herself all alone and locked in, she must have passed through successive fits of fear and anger. She had probably searched for me too: my wardrobe had been gutted as if by a hurricane and my clothes flung all about, sprawling one on top of the other like the dismembered victims of a massacre. She had treated the sheets and blankets in the same fashion. A pillow lay ripped open, the down scattered everywhere. And there, upright above the wreckage, stood Sylva looking at me.
I remained rooted to the threshold, in the grip not so much of anger or even amusement as, strangely enough, fascination-I would even say, if I dared to face the ridicule, of ecstasy. Caught like this, rising perfectly straight from amid the white, motionless froth of down and linen, naked like an aphrodite anadyomene, my Sylva, it is true, was beautiful; but what overwhelmed me was the shock of an illumination infinitely more breath-taking than her mere beauty. There was all that inanimate paraphernalia, with this admirable body rising above it, a living body and nothing more since it was still unlit by the least human spark, yet one whose palpitation, whose self-affirmation, whose innate will toward a lofty harmony triumphantly opposed the chaos. Never, perhaps, so strongly as in that minute have I realized, with spontaneous, sensuous evidence, the truth that is apparently beginning to impress itself on physicists: that inanimate matter is disorder and that the only order is life.
Towering above the inert rubbish that littered the floor, Sylva presented such a pure, proud figure, an outline of such grace, that if one could venture to apply to the sense of sight the term voluptuousness, I would like to say that what I experienced was a visual thrill so intense that it became voluptuous, an exalting feeling that life, just life, was the only miracle. What I mean to say is that at that minute Sylva was no longer a woman or a vixen in my eyes, that the miracle of her metamorphosis seemed to me paltry and insignificant, that the real, the sole miracle was this vital harmony, it was-in the midst of anarchy, of the slow universal disintegration-the noble, organized, living body and this beauty of a human form, all the more overpowering in its miraculous grace for being as yet uninhabited by a mind. So much so that I caught myself wishing that I might henceforth live always in chaos if only this grace would crown it forever.
And to think I was trailing those idiotic garments about in my suitcase! If I bundled up this living purity in their lifeless folds, would I not be pushing it back into incoherence? I felt strongly inclined to throw the whole lot out of the window. That divine body should stay radiant as it stood before me at that moment, naked and resplendent and victoriously imposing on disorder the order of its own beauty. Yes, it should stay like that, come what may!
Having attained these crystalline heights my thoughts, alas, began to waver. I felt, apart from some dim protests voiced by my common sense, that my exaltation was sprouting disturbing ramifications within me, was straying from the solemn gaze to less noble regions. A certain trembling of my hands signified the first alarm. The nature of my enthusiasm changed, while Sylva’s nature too seemed to evolve: I suddenly found her beauty, less pure, more desirable. I became aware that our attitudes, hers and mine, had altered ever so little. My knees were bent, my hands stretched out, but it was the sight of her knees, flexing as if on the verge of flight, that made me notice my own posture. It was a posture from which not only all dignity of bearing but even simple decency had so utterly disappeared that I was mortified to the bottom of my heart, to the very core of my self-respect. Besides, this evident intrusion of brutish lust had abruptly spoiled everything: within a moment my superb aphrodite had returned to the state of a frightened female, her grace had contracted into strained tension, and all I had before me now was a fox bitch on the alert, a beast that had sunk back into the disorder of things, the same disorder of which I myself felt shamefully captive.
With a sigh of bitter annoyance, and smarting with contrition, I pushed the suitcase under a table and began to tidy up the room.
I have forgotten to mention that ever since Sylva had come to stay with me, I had trained myself to think aloud. Or rather to express in words whatever I was doing: opening a door, a drawer, folding a sheet, shaking out a rug. If a talking bird can repeat what it hears, I said to myself, why not a fox which is, after all, more intelligent, if it happens to be gifted with articulate speech? And indeed, Sylva soon began to repeat what she heard me say; she repeated it very badly and with a comical acid twang which reminded me of the South of France. Have you ever heard Shakespeare recited with a Marseilles accent? It is irresistible. Whenever Sylva opened her mouth, I could not help laughing. She herself never laughed. She did not know how to, and only much later did I hear her laugh for the first time.
I laughed at her accent, her lisp, her mistakes, but at the same time I marveled that after a fairly short time she stopped repeating things at random, parrot-fashion. Before long I found that she roughly understood what she was saying, sometimes quite wrongly no doubt, but even then not lacking in sense. I hasten to add that this did not go beyond the most concrete terms, those most useful in obtaining some immediate satisfaction. I had so often asked, “Are you hungry?” before letting her have her food that I was scarcely surprised when for the first time, to cut short this tantalizing ordeal, she repeated, “Hungry… hungry…” wagging her little behind like a dog to whom you hold out a lump of sugar. And I was hardly more surprised on the occasion when, scratching at the door as she did every evening at the same time, instead of whimpering as usual she begged, “Go h’out! Go h’out!” until I cried “No!” in such a tone that she fell silent. But from that day onward she too would answer “No!” more often than I should have liked.