Sylva

It had taken us all of a fortnight to reach that stage. In the meantime, the major complication was Fanny, the farmer’s daughter, whom I employed to attend to the household chores. I ordered her to confine her cleaning, polishing and sweeping to the ground floor because, I told her, I had started to repaint the second-floor rooms (which I proceeded to do for credibility). Yet I trembled. A noise, a cry, anything, might betray a presence; and although poor Fanny was too stupid to be really inquisitive, she was after all a woman and I had no doubt that the least carelessness on my part would prompt her to investigate. The next day the whole village would have known that the squire was hiding a stark-naked girl in his bedroom.

The first thing to do, at all costs, was to clothe her. Ever since she had let herself be approached, I had repeatedly tried to make her accept a dressing gown. To no avail, and worse: she grew frightened and it took me two or three days to regain the lost ground in her confidence. Moreover, if Fanny were to discover Sylva in one of my dressing gowns, it would hardly be better than finding her in the nude. I decided to go into town to buy her some clothes. But going into town meant being away for a whole day, and I could not overcome my apprehension of what might happen.

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.