On that particular evening, when I reached the garden gate which opens straight onto the fields, it was already dark. The clamor of the hunt seemed to be drawing near. It is extremely rare for them to go on so late, and they must have been following a very experienced beast. If it could evade the hounds long enough, there was a good chance it might get away under cover of night. From the bottom of my heart I hoped it would. I don’t know why it occurred to me (could it be, after all, the unconscious memory of the last hunt that ends David Garnett’s story, when the heroine is mangled by the hounds in the very arms of her husband?) to leave the little gate open, in the faint and rather foolish hope that the hunted animal might run to me for shelter. But the noise faded, silence fell again. The quarry—stag or fox—must have fled elsewhere. I entered the house and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
I was just about to pour myself a cup of tea when I thought I heard muffled sounds of barking. I left my tea, went outside, and found that the hunt had come quite close. And I saw, running out of the woods toward me, a superb fox, tired out by the chase, the hounds almost upon him. Had he seen the open gate? He was making straight for it. But it was a mistake to have shown myself, for at the sight of me he suddenly swerved and began to race madly along the hedge. I was distressed and furious; the hounds would get him and only my stupidity would be to blame. Forgetting the danger of a pack in full cry, and at the risk of being knocked down, I rushed out of the house, gesturing wildly, hoping to scare the animal and drive it back toward the gate. But the fox fled before me, searching for a hole in the hedge, frantic with fear, the yelping dogs hard on its heels. I covered my eyes before the horror of the spectacle. The hounds’ baying pierced my ears.
And suddenly there was silence. Or rather, a vast sough of breath, gaping and gasping. The hounds were around me, their heads averted. They turned this way and that in foolish, awkward uncertainty.
There was no fox. But protruding from the hedge, on the ground, a pair of bare legs. They were kicking. The rest of the body, caught in the hedge and slashed by the thorns, was trying to push through. One or two of the hounds sniffed at the feet, then moved away silently, their tails between their legs. But the horsemen were arriving. I had no time to stop and think or even marvel. I dashed out again, plunged forward, pulled the creature out of the hedge. It struggled to escape me. I felt the cruel bite of sharp teeth in my hand, but I flung myself on it with all my weight and pinned it to the grass. I heard the thudding of hoofs, shouts and questions, exclamations of surprise. It seemed to me that these lasted a long time, because of my struggle on the ground in the now complete darkness. The creature wriggled beneath me, and I had the greatest trouble holding it down. Actually, only a brief moment could have passed. I heard orders being shouted, the crack of whips. The dogs whined. The horses’ hoofs stamped the ground close to the hedge, a few feet from my ears.
When at last I could no longer hear a sound, I relaxed my grip. The creature did not move. It remained stretched out on its flank, exhausted.
I got up and looked at it.
It was a woman.
Chapter 2
AS I have said, I have no witness to this singular occurrence. I can only affirm that I was at least as doubtful as my most skeptical readers of what had just occurred before my very eyes. Even later, when there was no longer room for doubt, I relived over and over again in my memory each second, each sequence, in the course of which a hunted fox, within sight of my eyes, had suddenly changed into a woman. All I can say is that a faked substitution—to trick whom? for what purpose?—would be even more incredible, would require the invisible presence, right among the pack of hounds, of a prodigious conjurer. In any case, the subsequent course of events would render such an assumption even more absurd.
Not that it matters, anyway. What I intend to relate is not the phenomenon itself. I have said all there is to say about it; there is nothing I can add to my account. And if what went before was not a miracle, what followed happened nonetheless. The rest, after all, is of no great importance except to minds obsessed by metaphysics. Let them plague themselves with questions if that is what they enjoy.
In any event, there I stood on the lawn that occupies most of my garden, under the darkened sky in which the first stars glittered. I gazed down at the young creature, swooning and naked at my feet, who, though she might be only a fox, bore henceforth all the outward appearance of a young girl.
She was naked but covered with mud and bruises, stained with blood. I picked her up in my arms. She was slim and light. Her eyes were hidden under silky eyelids, tinted blue by fatigue and perhaps the cold. When I raised her she gave a start and drew back her chops—her lips—over small but very sharp teeth, with an instinctively threatening growl. That was all. She was panting, her breathing short and labored.
Holding her in my arms, I found myself exceedingly embarrassed. My first thought was to carry my prey up to the farm and entrust it to the farmer’s wife. But nobody had been present at the metamorphosis. What explanation could I give? Imagine my walking into the farmer’s house, bringing them a stark-naked girl, half dead with exhaustion, striped with blows and covered with bruises. What would they have thought? No, it was impossible. I must carry her into the house and hope that not a soul, near or far, would see me with my singular burden. Fortunately I reached the front door without impediment.
I climbed to the second floor, laid the girl down on my bed, and ran the water for a bath, seeking to confine my thoughts only to my actions, to wonder as little as possible. Meanwhile, a contrite voice within me paid tribute to David Garnett. I reproached myself, in petto, for my so-called common sense, my vulgar incredulity. There are more things, Horatio… There you go! Right away the great Will on your lips! Isn’t that like you, you bookish monkey! Try and think for yourself once in a while… I watched the hot water run into the tub and began to envisage the consequences of my adventure. Here you are with a woman on your bed as naked as on Judgment Day, but one who does not descend from Eve or Adam, with no birth certificate, without the merest beginning of a passport, the least scrap of an identity. What are you going to do with her? Who can you show her to? What can you tell the Home Office, the Immigration Department? Who’d believe a word of what you would say? It was much more awkward than a murder, I realized with a kind of terror. A man or a woman too few is reasonably easy to justify, especially a foreigner: he might have gone back to his country. But one too many! How can you explain that? I could see myself grappling with an enormous felony which, though the very opposite of a murder, was nonetheless an act of the same ilk, equally out of conformity with the law.
And a woman too many who was, moreover, in actual fact no more than a vixen. For she was nothing else, as she showed me without delay. When the bath was ready, I went to fetch her from my bed. She opened her eyes for a split second—her narrow, brilliant eyes. But she let herself be borne away. Extreme fatigue or a budding confidence? I was almost moved to tenderness, but as soon as she felt the water, her whole body gave a frenzied jerk, she slipped from my arms and struggled to get out of the tub. I was determined to keep her there. A battle ensued which I am not likely to forget. Within three seconds I was soaked from head to foot, and as I was dressed for autumn in corduroy and suede, I became as clumsy as a bear. She caught hold of my tie with her little jaws and would not let go of it. Fortunately I must have been roughly twice her weight and this, added to her great exhaustion, finally compelled her to give in. Perhaps, too, the warmth of the bath gradually filled her with its soothing gentleness. Whatever the cause, in the end she kept still. With a thousand precautions, I began to sponge her poor scratched body (so pitiful in aspect, truly, as to disarm all sensuality) and she lay quiescent. She only moaned faintly when the sponge touched her wounds. Her eyes were open but she was not looking at me. An occasional tremor hinted at an urge to flee; but I needed only to press her shoulder to restrain her. In the end, she must have felt such a sense of well-being that she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.