So what could I relate other than the type of progress which a child could make in the hands of efficient educators? Dr. Sullivan had warned me at the time: “She will start putting questions, you’ll have your work cut out!” She had not started immediately-it had required a more formidable motive power than her self-recognition in a mirror. But now, good Lord! Everyone has known the kind of children who daze you with questions about everything and nothing. They are angels of self-restraint compared with what Sylva was during that time. With the aggravating difference that she had an adult brain and that one could not fob her off with the vague replies which seem to satisfy children. Yet her questions were of a thorny type and most embarrassing: “Why does one live? Why die?” Poor Baron’s death was still dimly reverberating on the direction her mind was taking, since her mind itself had in a way been “hatched out” by this shock. What Sylva wanted to know was nothing less than the beginning and end of things.

For all that had left her untroubled, unintrigued, as long as she still had a vixen’s mind, now filled her with a frightened awareness: Why the day, why the night? What is the sun? The moon? The stars? Where does the sky end? Until the day when she asked, “And why does one exist, all of this?”

Frankly, at the time, this decisive question struck me with its form rather than with its meaning: for the “one” certainly referred to Sylva herself, but so did just as certainly the “all of this” that followed. “One” and “All of this,” Sylva and the universe, thus still seemed confusedly mixed up in her mind; the schism was not yet very clearly marked. Besides, the tone of the question had not gone beyond a certain perplexity, or rather a sort of bewilderment in a strange new region full of disconcerting mazes, alarming horizons-it did not yet betray excitement, the first quiver of indignation, the foreboding of a boundless outrage. She did not yet suspect (how could she?) that she would not receive, would never receive, an answer to her question.

What finally severed her last links with her former nature and made the schism final and complete, was her hearing me admit that “why we exist, my poor sweet, is something I would gladly tell you, but unfortunately nobody knows.” And hearing me say it not once but ten times, because she refused to believe in spite of my explanations that to such a simple and obvious question there existed no enlightenment; because she thought for a long time that, for some inexplicable reason, I was hiding the truth from her. But then, oh, I remember her amazed little face, her mouth opening in incredulous suffocation, her eyes flashing with growing anger, I remember how violently she stamped her foot and snapped in an accusing voice that broke with a little sob:

“But then, why, one knows nothing!”

I had to agree that men indeed know nothing, that they are born, live and die in a profound mystery and that it is precisely the greatness of science to try and pierce it… She interrupted me with even greater violence:

“Why, what greatness? Why must one seek? Since one lives, one ought to know why. Why doesn’t one know? Is it on purpose? Are we prevented?”

I remained dumfounded, a little ashamed. It would be an understatement to say that I was startled by the shrewdness of this remark: it was a positive eye-opener. I am not one of those people who get bogged down in metaphysics; I have always accepted things as they are, with a matter-of-fact turn of mind that suits a man who lives close to the soil. And I told myself that this quaint thought which had come to my little human vixen, despite its air of obviousness, had never occurred to me. And I wondered whether there were many people who had put it so clearly-if there were even many scientists who would notice how primitive and cardinal it is at one and the same time: “Why doesn’t one know?” indeed? And why “are we prevented”? By Jove, wasn’t Sylva’s surprise, her anger, the keystone of everything-of all that makes up the nobility of the mind of man? But men have wandered astray amid the trees of innumerable questions and lost sight of the forest of interrogation that encompasses them all: why, for what end, has our brain been created so accomplished that it is able to grasp everything, and yet so weak that it knows nothing-neither what it is itself, nor the body which it controls, nor this universe from which they both emanate? And because my vixen had a perfectly new brain, one which had not had the time to become cluttered up with trees, she had knocked directly against the forest of this “why” which we hardly ever think of, though it is the most stupendous, the most inexplicable inconsistency of the human condition…

… And one which, if men had the least common sense, ought to guide all their deeds and all their thoughts. And which, from that day onward, did indeed guide Sylva’s efforts. She brought a constant, burning ardor to her endeavors to understand the meaning of the things that surrounded her. Nanny taught her to read in the Scriptures. Sylva plunged into them with passionate eagerness and curiosity. She made me think of a gaping gourd, parched with questions no less urgent for being often inarticulate, which suddenly receives a great stream of thirst-slaking water. It even made me squirm a little. I am a reasonably good Christian, but all the same I had an uneasy feeling that this smacked a little of sharp practice, of trickery. I could not help telling myself that starved for enlightenment as she was, she would have devoured with the same greed whatever food one offered her. I could see for myself, in its most primitive state, the violence of this fundamental craving and the consequent power of the priests who assuage it. I thought to myself that these priests, from time immemorial and in all persuasions, have actually had it all their own way. I felt shaken in my own beliefs, although it is true that they had never been very vigorous.

I myself gave her natural history books to read and watched her-with some satisfaction, I confess-if not prefer these books to the Gospels proposed by Mrs. Bumley (all I held against her, in fact, was that she was a rather too rabid Papist), at least gradually devote more time to them. I also noticed that she too was subject to the phenomenon I have already mentioned, whereby she indirectly revealed to me how it operated with most people: progressively as her mind enriched itself, which means as it began to cope in detail with her ignorance, her fantastically diverse ignorance, she grew more remote from it in bulk, she lost sight of the outrage which had revolted her in the first place-men’s ignorance as such. And not only did she lose sight of it but, little by little, when I talked about it, it seemed to irritate her. As if for her too the trees were beginning to hide the wood, making her lose interest in it.

As fresh acquisitions made her discover ever new gaps in her knowledge, her curiosity was fired with zeal to fill them, but as these gaps concerned ever smaller details, her curiosity too operated within ever narrower limits. By a natural progression she became almost completely detached from the great ontological problem and devoted herself to ever more realistic and practical matters. For by discovering the tangible world abounding in acquired knowledge, defined objects, specified feelings, interpreted sensations, explained relationships, she lost her unease, her disquiet and, with disquiet, the feeling of that total ignorance which had so frightened her at first. In short, her mind passed, in next to no time, from the anguished fears of the Stone Age to the calm certainties of our modern British civilization.

This sudden aptitude of hers for rushing nonstop through the stages of man was one of my major surprises. I remembered how much time it had taken my sweet little vixen in human shape to pass from her animal night to the first feeble light of dawn. It had taken her many months, almost a year. Whereas since that still quite recent day when she had discovered herself as being both existent and mortal, a few weeks had been enough to throw her mind wide open to a wealth of knowledge, and some of it remarkably subtle. Just as the water in a reservoir will undermine a rock for years, though nothing shows, nothing stirs, until there is a tiny landslip, a few inches only, then the dam bursts and the water rushes forth irresistibly.

“Aha!” Dr. Sullivan exclaimed triumphantly. “What did I tell you? Didn’t I say that your little vixen, by becoming human, would give us a résumé of the history of man? Five thousand centuries of utter darkness to crawl painfully out of the abyss of savage unconsciousness, and hardly twenty for Plato, Newton, Einstein to burst upon us in a blaze of light. The proportions are the same. What are you going to do with her now? She seems to have a head for study.”

He was probably indulging in overoptimism. However, I seriously thought of finding a suitable establishment for her when Nanny discreetly drew my attention to certain singularities. They left no room for doubt, and we had to face the appalling fact that Sylva was expecting a child.

A new quandary! If I had been able to consider Sylva still as a vixen, I might perhaps have attached less importance to the event. But she was no longer one, nor had been for ages. Whether I liked it or not, she was henceforth, for me as for everybody else, a young girl whose existence would necessarily be governed by our social environment. Neither she nor I could escape from it. What, then, were my obligations in these circumstances? What ought I to decide for her future-and for mine?

If I could at least have harbored some hope of being the child’s father! This was not entirely excluded perhaps, but there was no point in deluding myself: the chances that it was the wretched Jeremy’s were incomparably greater. And it was even possible that some bounder prowling in the woods had stolen a march on the damned gorilla. It would be useless to question Sylva: she would know nothing, remember nothing. When she conceived she had still been mentally a vixen, but by the time she gave birth, she would be a woman.

I still could not clearly discern whether my love for her was a lover’s or a father’s. To be sure, the idea of giving the girl up to Jeremy still made me mad with jealousy, but there also mingled in it the respectable fury of an outraged father at a dreadful misalliance. Now look, I told myself, trying to be cool and detached, supposing it is the gorilla’s child after all? Are you entitled to deprive him of it? Yet what sort of an upbringing will it get, between a brute and a dunce? Should you let them turn the child into a third imbecile, as the tactless Walburton suggested? All right, you’ll be there to keep a close watch on it. Provided, that is, the parents are willing to give you a free hand-which would surprise me on the part of the gorilla. Moreover, aren’t you about to dispose of Sylva, old chap, as if she were a thing, a cupboard or a mare? But she isn’t a fox any more! She has given you plenty of proof, on the contrary, that she is now as human as you! With just as much right to dispose of herself. Who says she would still want to live with that savage? Ah, what you dare not yet quite confess to yourself is that she too seems to love you, like a woman, you can no longer ignore it, she has proved it… But the child? Yes, but what does she know about it? Should the person she is today be held responsible for the acts of the vixen she was? If only, I complained, she had given birth before, when she still had an animal’s unconsciousness! She would have been delivered of the child in the blessed ignorance of a beast which is unmoved by questions or surprise. Whereas she now bombarded us at all occasions with the most staggering, at times the most incongruous, questions. When they became too awkward, we had hitherto escaped with the time-honored answer: “You’ll understand later,” and she would not persist, just cast a furious look at us that left us in no doubt about the hubbub going on inside her young brain. What were we going to say when she saw herself getting bigger? And when the child was born?