Her eyes were slit and fixed.

I wondered what she would do when we threw in the earth. She did not protest. She remained there, motionless, during the whole operation and when it was over, she let herself be taken away, this time unresistingly. She lunched as usual and with a healthy appetite.

But in the afternoon, giving the watchful Nanny the slip, she disappeared; and we found her where we went without the least hesitation: at the dog’s grave. She had already removed almost all the earth. She did nothing to prevent my putting it back, while Nanny clasped her to her breast and kissed her. She watched me finish with a kind of motionless and absorbed attention.

Once again she let herself be taken away quietly, and at home she played as usual, bolted down her dinner and, no sooner put to bed, went to sleep. In the morning, she went to fetch the dog where she normally found it, tied up in the yard. We had followed her. At first she seemed surprised at finding the chain abandoned, sadly sprawling on the ground. We then saw her move toward the spinney behind the outhouses, where we had buried her friend. Nanny wanted to run there, but I held her back. It seemed to me that we ought to let Sylva go to the very end of her discoveries.

When we joined her a little later, she had indeed unearthed the dog but had not touched it. After a day underground, it looked rather atrocious; attacked by ants, moles and carrion beetles, it already resembled an old, worn, moth-eaten goatskin, stained moreover with bloody excretions. The smell was beginning to be almost unbearable. Sylva looked at the carrion with impressive immobility. I walked up to her, put my arm around her, said gently:

“You see, he is dead.”

Since I had let her go so far, I thought I must also teach her the word. I did not clearly think at that moment that the experience of death is essential to the formation of the human mind; let us say that I had a more or less conscious inkling of it. Sylva did not take her eyes off her unfortunate playmate. She began to tremble, very faintly but incessantly. It was rather like a long, interminable shiver. I hugged her closely against me. At last she asked, with a sort of difficulty, as if she found it hard to make use of speech:

“No more… play…?”

I said with as much gentleness as I could command, “No, my little Sylva. Poor Baron no more play.”

Sylva shuddered even more intensely. And then she wrenched her eyes from the pitiful body and rested them on me. It was not a questioning look. It was more like a keen, curiously sharp scrutiny. Like a deep meditation on the meaning of the human face. I let her look at me, without saying anything, not daring either quite to smile or to show too grave, too sad a face. I returned her gaze with tenderness, but she wasn’t looking at my eyes. It was my nose, my lips, my chin. And in the end she asked, but her voice was flat and toneless:

“Bonny too, no more play?”

I burst into subdued laughter, soft rather than loud, a laugh just meant to banish this quaint fear.

“Why no, Bonny will still play. Bonny isn’t dead! He is very well. He will play with Sylva every day!”

Most unexpectedly, this answer seemed to make her cross. She jerked out of my arms as if to stand aloof. She repeated, more imperatively:

“Bonny too, no more play?”

I believed at first, however astonishing it may seem, that she meant to order me to mourn for her friend. Yes, for a moment I thought that the idea of playing when Baron was dead seemed to her revolting. It was obviously a stupid thought, when applied to a little soul still so close to an animal. But on the spur of the moment I answered:

“Not at once, of course. You are right.”

With even greater surprise I saw her stamping her foot with a movement of childish impatience—the exasperated movement of a child whom the grownups refuse to understand. And her whole face twisted with irritation but at the same time was marked with such anguish, such torment, perhaps such terror, that when for the third time she almost shouted, and her voice broke: “Bonny too, no more play?” I understood at last, understood with poignant certainty that what she wanted to know was whether some day, some day like Baron, some day “Bonny too” would play no more, nevermore.

At the stage we had reached, I could hardly back out. Nanny was making frantic signs, her eyes imploring, for she had understood as well as I, and her sagging cheeks were quivering with distress. But I shook my head. Come on, I thought, some courage! And I said as quietly as possible, as untragically and unemotionally as possible:

“Yes, Bonny too, some day… but a long, long time ahead! So long it’s not worth thinking about,” I added quickly as I saw Sylva’s eyes widen.

I was not having any illusions about the effectiveness of this “long time” which there was so little chance she could understand. And besides, there can be no possible softening for a revelation like this. It has to be received, accepted and digested in its cruel totality.

Sylva opened her mouth at first. She opened it wider and wider and suddenly, nervously, she laughed—but with that laugh which I have already described as more like fright. And then the laughter disappeared and only the fright remained. And even so great a fright that for a moment she gasped for breath, like a newborn baby.

When at last she recovered her breath, I thought that—still like a baby—she would start to scream. And she did scream, but she was screaming words, an incessant “Don’t want! Don’t want!” with such agonized grimaces that her sweet, fresh, triangular face assumed a simian ugliness, all crinkled and crimson. She was screaming and stamping—and then abruptly she stopped. She passed her forearm upward over her face, which had suddenly too gone limp and pale—so limp and colorless that for a moment I was afraid she might swoon. She passed her arm twice or three times, sweeping her delicate, blenching fox-face and brushing back the red locks that were falling over her eyes—eyes alive with panic, fixing me intently as if I too was going to die there, at her feet, like a dog.

That at least was what I thought—what I thought she dreaded at that moment. But her thoughts, what must henceforth be called her thoughts, now that they were on the move, were ravaging her little fox-brain with such speed that they had already reached the conclusions when I still thought they were all mixed up, when I still supposed them to be just about to be born in rending pain. So she brushed back the rebellious red wisp with her arm for the last time and in an indescribable voice, a murmuring, broken, hardly intelligible voice, she said as if in a sigh, while her eyes at the same time grew dim, “And Sylva… ?”

Chapter 26

I CANNOT continue this story without a certain emotion. Even if, at the second when Sylva uttered her name, and in uttering it understood, realized that she must die; even if in that cruel, fascinating second I had not been seized by the indubitable, coruscating feeling that she had just undergone a second metamorphosis, less miraculous perhaps on the face of it than her physical transformation, but so much more fraught with consequences, with deep-scarring stigmata; even if I had not told myself that at that moment, at that very second, there before me, she stood transfigured for the second time, that she was shedding forever her unconscious, carefree and happy foxish nature to take the first frightened steps into the shadowy sphere, the tragic, doomed, nocturnal, boundless, cursed and sublime sphere of man’s revolted questioning of his gods; even if this illumination had not burst upon my brain at the very second when that of her own perishable and incomprehensible condition burst upon hers—even if I had thaught of none of this on the spur of the moment, Sylva’s behavior would have forced these thoughts upon me without delay. For I may really say that at that second, from that second onward, everything changed forever.