Sylva

I HAD opened a book but I was not reading. Through the carriage window I watched the English countryside pass by. How lovely it can be in September! The pastures are green again and have the mellow softness of velvet. The ancient oaks, standing all alone in the middle of the fields like tortured sentinels, are only just beginning to turn brown, while the birches on the banks of soft-spoken brooks are already blazing with a million gold coins stirred by the wind. I had lowered the window a little so that I too might be lashed by the cold air, and I felt the process of rebirth. Viola and Dorothy, the padded room, all the sensual details of the past days-how quickly it all receded! A bad dream. The good thing about a nightmare is the awakening and its concurrent lighthearted feeling. And best of all was my joyous impatience to see Sylva again.

For now I knew, I knew that I was justified, that I was right to love her. I kept repeating to myself, with gladness, the truth that had flashed upon me once before but which I had later tried to forget: the dazzling intuition that the quality of a soul is not measured by what it is but by what it becomes. I amused myself by applying this new yardstick to my fellow travelers in order to check its accuracy. First that child sitting opposite me. Yes, where does it spring from, this poignant interest we take in childhood, even the tenderest one, if not from the mysterious future it bears within itself, from which we expect so much hidden wealth? Why would I otherwise show such benevolent curiosity for the stupid puerile pranks of that little boy in his school cap with the fading colors of King’s Lynn College, who doesn’t stop fidgeting, kicks my shin every now and then and keeps sniffling all the time? What he is is still an uncouth harum-scarum, a handful of scrubby ignorance. But what he will become-what promise! Whereas his grandfather, next to him, absorbed in his study of The Times, his head no doubt stuffed with noble thoughts and all sorts of knowledge, has stopped “becoming.” He is forever what he is today, congealed in his past-present until his death.

Yes, isn’t that the true curse of old age, that it is this petrifying fountain? From which only a few genuises escape-a Moses, a Leonardo? And how many men, alas, though still young and full of strength, have already reached the same point? Solidified, sclerosed-when they have not slowly been reduced to less than themselves by the drugged lethargy of habit? That chap in the corner, for instance. His briefcase announces his activeness in the world, but his torpid, indifferent eyes, flaccid lips and sagging jaw confess that his soul stagnates at a low altitude. Plainly there is little chance that it will ever rise any higher. He may, for all I know, be a good father, a good husband, a good citizen: is he a man at all? Yes, but made of wax-a dummy.

Whereas Sylva!

Whereas you, my sweet and exquisite Sylva, though you may still be closer to a fox than to a woman, it is yet a fact that ever since the death of your friend Baron and the poignant self-discipline you then displayed, you have been striving to climb, sometimes in torment, almost a rung a day.

The train had just sent a family of hares scampering away into the stubble, thus recalling to my mind a walk we had taken after the dog’s death. Sylva did not skip about as usual. On the contrary, she was walking demurely between Nanny and me, hanging on our arms, every now and then rubbing her cheek, with an almost melancholy tenderness, against my shoulder or her nurse’s. She often made us stop (which she never used to do) to observe, with a strange intensity, a tree, a stook, the flowers in the fields. She did not ask any questions, and Nanny or I would say, “This is a walnut tree, this is hay, these are thistles”- but was she listening? We never knew, and she would set off again, gently pulling us along but not answering.

We had taken a small, stony path between two freshly mown fields. Suddenly, and almost under our feet, a hare flushed and streaked along a furrow, straight as an arrow. I felt Sylva, quite close to me, give a violent start, and already I could see her galloping after the hare as she would have done only a few days ago; but her impulse seemed to collapse there and then or, more exactly, to melt and dissolve. She just gazed musingly after the disappearing hare, then turned her head away, and we continued our walk as if nothing had happened.

I was intrigued and said, “Why didn’t you run after him? He was a beautiful, big hare.”

She turned her head once more toward the clover field in which the animal had vanished, seemed to search it for an answer.

“Dunno,” she said at last. “Why run?”

“To catch it,” I said laughingly. “Wouldn’t you have liked that?”