Sylvia & Michael Part 13

"I've got a book somewhere about pictures," Sylvia said. "You must read it."

Queenie hid her face in her arms; when she looked up again she was crimson as a carnation.

"I can't read," she whispered.

"Not read?" Sylvia echoed.

"I can't read or write," she went on. "_Ach!_ Now you hate me, yes?

Because I was being so stupid."

"But when you went to the school in Dantzig, didn't they teach you anything?"

"They taught me ballet dancing and acrobatic dancing and step dancing.

Now I must go to have my hair washed, yes?"

Queenie got off the bed and hurried away, leaving Sylvia in a state of bewilderment before the magnitude of the responsibility that she represented.

"It's like giving birth to a grown-up baby," she said to herself; on a sudden irresistible impulse, she knelt down upon the floor and began to pray, with that most intense prayer of which a human being is capable, that prayer which transcends all words, all s.p.a.ce, all time, all thought, that prayer which subst.i.tutes itself for the poor creature who makes it. The moment of prayer pa.s.sed, and Sylvia, rising from her knees, dressed herself and went in search of a priest.

When she reached the door of the little Catholic mission church to which the proprietor of the hotel had directed her, she paused upon the inner threshold before a baize door and asked herself if she were not acting in a dream. She had not been long enough in Bucharest for the city to be rea.s.suringly familiar; by letting her fancy play around the unreality of her present state of mind she was easily able to transform Bucharest to a city dimly apprehended in a tranced voyage of the spirit and to imagine all the pa.s.sers-by as the fantastic denizens of another world.

She stood upon the threshold and yielded a moment to what seemed like a fainting of reason, while all natural existence swayed round her mind and while the baize door stuck thick with pious notices, funereal objurgations, and the petty gossip, as it were, of a new habitation at which she was looking with strange eyes, seemed to attend her next step with a conscious expectancy. She pushed it open and entered the church; a bearded priest, escaping the importunities of an aged paris.h.i.+oner with a voluble grievance, was coming toward her; perceiving that Sylvia was looking round in bewilderment, he took the occasion to get rid of the old woman by asking her in French if he could do anything to help.

"I want to see a priest," she replied.

Although she knew that he was a priest, in an attempt to cheat the force that was impelling her she s.n.a.t.c.hed at his lack of resemblance to the conventional priestly figure of her memory and deluded herself with vain hesitations.

"Do you want to make your confession?" he asked.

Sylvia nodded, and looked over her shoulder in affright; it seemed that the voice of a wraith had whispered "Yes." The priest pointed to the confessional, and Sylvia, with a final effort to postpone her surrender, asked, with a glance at the old woman, if he were not too busy now. He shook his head quickly and spoke sharply in Italian to the paris.h.i.+oner, who retired, grumbling; Sylvia smiled to see with what an ostentation of injured dignity she took the holy water and crossed herself before pa.s.sing out through the baize door. The old woman's challenging humanity restored to Sylvia her sense of reality; emotion died away like a falling gale at eve, and she walked to the confessional imbued with an intention as practical as if she had been walking up-stairs to tidy her hair. The priest composed himself into a non-committal att.i.tude and waited for Sylvia, who, now that she was kneeling, felt as if she were going to play an unrehea.r.s.ed part.

"I ought to say before I begin that, though I was brought up a Catholic, I've not been inside a church for any religious duties since I was nine years old. I'm now thirty-one. I know that there is some set form of words, but I've forgotten it."

Sylvia half expected that he would tell her to go away and come back when she had learned how to behave in the confessional; now that she was here, she felt that this would be a pity, and she was relieved when he began the _Confiteor_ in an impersonal voice, waiting for her to repeat every sentence after him. His patience seemed to her almost miraculous in the way it smoothed her difficulties.

"I shall have to give you a short history of my life," Sylvia began. "I can't just say baldly that I've done this or not done that, because nearly all the sins I've committed weren't committed in their usual cla.s.sification."

As she said this, she had a moment of acute self-consciousness and wondered if the priest were smiling, but he merely said in that far-away, impersonal voice:

"I am listening, my daughter."

"I was brought up a Catholic. I was baptized and confirmed and I made my first communion. It was the only communion I ever made, because somehow or other at home there was always work to be done in the house instead of going to Ma.s.s. My mother was French and she married an Englishman much younger than herself. Of this marriage I was the only child. My mother had six other daughters, two by a lover who died, and four by her first husband, who was a Frenchman. My mother was illegitimate; her father was also an Englishman. I only knew this after she died. The man who married my grandmother always acknowledged her as his own daughter.

My mother was very strict and, though she was not at all religious, she was very good. I don't want to give the idea that she was responsible for anything I did. The only thing is, perhaps, that, being pa.s.sionately in love with my father, she was very demonstrative in front of me, which made the idea of pa.s.sion shocking to me when I was still young.

Therefore, for whatever sins of the flesh I have committed I cannot plead a natural propensity. I don't know whether this would be considered to make them worse or not. My father was a weak man; when my mother died, he robbed his employers and had to leave France, taking me with him. I was twelve at the time. I suppose if I wanted to justify myself, I could say that no child could have spent a more demoralizing childhood from that moment. But though, when I look back at it now and realize some of the horrible actions that my father and a friend of his who lived with us committed, I can't think that at the time they influenced me toward evil. I suppose that any kind of moral callousness _is_ a bad example, and certainly I had no conception that swindling people out of money was anything but a perfectly right and normal procedure for anybody who was without money. My mother was angry with me once because by accident I spent some money of hers, but she was angry with me because it was a serious loss to the household accounts: there was no suggestion of my having spent money that did not belong to me.

Other things that my father and his friend did I never understood at the time, and so I can't pretend that they set me a bad example. My father took a woman to live with him, and I was angry because it upset what had hitherto seemed a comfortable existence, but the revelation of the pa.s.sionate side of it disgusted me still more with the flesh. I was a mixture of precocity and innocence. Looking back at myself as a child, I am amazed at the amount I knew and the little I understood--the amount I understood and the little I knew. I read all sorts of books and accepted everything I read as the truth; I read dozens of novels, for instance, before I understood the meaning of fiction. I should say that no child was ever exposed so naturally to the full tide of human existence, and why or how I managed to escape degradation and d.a.m.nation I've never been able to explain until now. As a matter of fact, it's not true really to say that I did escape degradation, but I will come to that presently.

"Well, my father killed himself on account of this woman, and I was left with his friend when I was fifteen. Once I happened to be left altogether alone when this man was away turning a dishonest penny somewhere, and I suppose I fell mildly in love with a youth two years older than myself. This made my father's friend jealous, and one night he tried to make love to me. I was as much disgusted by this as if I had really been the innocent child I might have been. I ran away with the youth, and nothing happened. I ran away from him and lived with a young Jew, but nothing happened. I met the woman who had lived with my father, and--which shows how utterly unmoral I was--I made great friends with her and even went to live with her. She used to have all sorts of men, and I just accepted her behavior as a personal taste of her own which I could neither understand nor share. Then I met a gentleman, a man fifteen years older than myself, who was attracted by my unusualness and sent me to school with the idea of marrying me. Well, I married him, and I think that was the first sin I committed. I was seventeen at the time.

I think if my husband had understood how stunted my emotional development was in proportion to my mental acquisitiveness he would have behaved differently. But he was fascinated by my capacity for cynicism and encouraged me to think as I liked, with himself for audience; at the same time he tried to make me for outsiders' eyes a conventional young miss whom he had rather apologetically married. He demanded from me the emotional wisdom to sustain this part, and of course I could see nothing in his solicitude but a sort of sn.o.bbish egotism. He was delighted by my complete indifference to any kind of religion, supernatural or natural, and when I made friends with an English priest--not a Catholic--but half a Catholic--it's impossible to explain to a foreigner--I don't think anybody would understand the Church of England out of England, and very few people can there--he was afraid of my turning religious. I don't know--perhaps I might have done; but somebody sent an anonymous letter to my husband suggesting that this priest and I were having a love-affair, and my husband forbade me to see him again. So I ran away.

I suppose my running away was the direct result of my bringing up, because whenever I had been brought face to face with a difficult situation I ran away. However, this time I was determined from some perverted pride to make myself more utterly myself than I had ever done.

It's hard to explain how my mind worked. You must remember I was only nineteen, and already at thirty-one I am as far from understanding all my motives then as if I were trying to understand somebody who was not myself at all. Anyhow, I simply went on the streets. For three months I mortified my flesh by being a harlot. Can you understand that? Can you possibly understand the deliberate infliction of such a discipline, not to humiliate one's pride, but to exalt it? Can you understand that I emerged from that three months of incredible horror with a complete personality? I was defiled: I was degraded: I was embittered: I hated mankind: I vowed to revenge myself on the world: I scoffed at love: and yet now, when I feel that I have at last brushed from myself the last speck of mud that was still clinging to me, I feel that somehow all that mud has preserved me against a more destructive corruption. This does not mean that I do not repent of what I did, but can you understand how without a pride that could lead me to such depths I could not have come through humility to a sight of G.o.d?"

Sylvia did not wait for the priest to answer this question, partly because she did not want to be disillusioned by finding so soon that he had not comprehended anything of her emotions or actions, partly because there seemed more important revelations of herself still to be made.

"I stayed a common harlot until I was offered by chance an opportunity to rescue myself by going on the stage. Then I sent my husband as much money as I had saved and the evidences of my infidelity, so that he might divorce me, which he did. Now comes an important event in my life.

I met a girl--a very beautiful girl doomed from the creation of the universe to be a plaything of man."

The priest held up his hand to protest.

"Ah, I know you'll say that no one can possibly be so foredoomed, and indeed I know the same myself now, or rather I'm trying hard to believe it, because predestination without free will seems to me a doctrine of devils. At the time, however, I could see nothing that would save this girl, and with a perverted idealism I determined that she should step gracefully downhill. I think the hardest thing to do is to go downhill gracefully. We can climb uphill, and a certain awkwardness is immaterial, because the visible effort lends a dignity to our progress, and the air of success blows freshly at the summit. We can walk along the level road of mediocrity with an acquired gracefulness that is taught us by our masters of the golden mean--particularly in England, where it's particularly easy to walk gracefully along the flat. Very well, instead of using my influence to prevent this girl descending at all, I was entirely occupied with the esthetic aspects of her descent.

I'm not going to pretend that I could have stopped her--a better person than I tried and failed--but that doesn't excuse my att.i.tude. And there's worse to my account. When this other person wanted to marry her, I did all I could to stop the marriage at first, and it was not until the engagement between them was broken off that I discovered that my true reasons for hating it sprang entirely from my own jealousy. I felt that if this man had loved me, I could have regained myself, the self that was myself before those three months of prost.i.tution. I should say here that I had nothing to do directly with the destruction of the other marriage, but I hold myself to blame ultimately, because, if from the beginning I had bent my whole will to its being carried through, it _would_ have been carried through. Looking back at the business now, I am convinced that what happened happened for the best, and that such a marriage would have been fatal to the happiness of the man and useless to the girl, but that does not excuse my own share in the smash.

"Well, the man left this girl in my charge, and finally she threw me over and married a foreigner, since when I have never heard that she even still lives. I had the good fortune to be given enough money by somebody to enable me to be independent, and for two or three years I looked at life from the outside. I had nothing to do with men, and as a result I began to be afraid that youth would pa.s.s without my ever knowing what it was to love. Friends of mine married and were happy.

Only I seemed fated to be always alone.

"I wonder sometimes if when we judge the behavior of others we pay enough attention to this loneliness that haunts the lives of so many men and women. You will say that no one can be lonely with G.o.d; unfortunately, thousands of lonely souls are dest.i.tute of the sense of G.o.d from birth to death, and these lonely souls are far more exposed to temptation than the rest. Faith they have not: hope has died in their hearts: love slowly withers. All the vices of self-destruction surround their path. Pride flourishes in such soil, and jealousy and envy. I believe their only compensation is the fact that lies and self-deception find small nourishment in such spiritual wastes. I'm sure that if the pride of such people could be pierced, there would gush forth a cry of despair that ascribed everything in this life to a feeling of loneliness. In my own case, in addition to the inevitable loneliness fostered by such a childhood as mine--the natural loneliness caused by living with two men who were perpetually on the verge of imprisonment--there was the loneliness of my own temperament. I know that every human being claims for himself the right to be misunderstood and unappreciated; it's not that kind of loneliness of which I speak.

Mine was the loneliness of some one who is so masculine and so feminine simultaneously that reason is sapped by emotion and emotion is sterilized by reason. The only chance for such a temperament is self-expression either in love, art, or religion. I tried vaguely to express myself in art, but without success at first; and I was too proud and not vain enough to persevere. I then fell back on love. I let myself get into a condition of wanting to be in love, and at this moment of emotional collapse I met by accident the youth--now a man of thirty--with whom I had effected one of my childish elopements. With this man I lived for a year. I can't pretend that I did not take pleasure in the pa.s.sionate relations.h.i.+p, though I always felt it was a temporary surrender to the most feminine side of me that I despised. I think I can best explain my emotions by saying that all the time I was with him I was like a person under the influence of a sedative drug.

"Now there are people who pa.s.s from drug to drug with increase of pleasure, but there are others to whom the notion of being drugged becomes suddenly obnoxious and in whom the reaction creates an abnormal activity. Quite suddenly I abandoned my pleasure and became ambitious to express myself in art. I succeeded. I was, for one who begins so late in life, exceptionally successful, and then behold, my very success took on the aspect of yielding to another sedative drug. It never seemed anything but a temporary expedient to defeat the claims of existence.

Just as love had seemed a surrender to the exclusively feminine side of me, so art seemed a surrender to the exclusively masculine side. There was always an unsatisfied, unexpressed part of me that girded at the satisfied part. As a result of this, I made up my mind that a happy marriage with children and a household to look after was a better thing than artistic success. Here was obviously another experiment for the benefit of the feminine side. I knew perfectly well that if I had carried out my intention I should not have remained content when the sedative action of the new drug began to cease, and I am grateful now that circ.u.mstances interfered. I was jilted by the man who was going to marry me, and the fact that I had already lived with him and refused to marry him dozens of times made the injury to my pride intolerable. In a fit of rage I flung behind me everything--success, love, marriage, friends--and left England to take up again at the age of thirty-one a life I had forsaken for several years. And now I found that even the mere externals of such a life were horrible. I could not bear the idea of being for sale; while I had no intention of ever giving myself to a man again, I had to drink for my living and dance with drunkards for my cab fare, which, though it may not be a technical prost.i.tution, differs only in degree from the complete sale of the body.

"Scarcely a month had pa.s.sed when I became seriously ill, and in the dreadful delirium of my fever I imagined that I was d.a.m.ned. I do not think that anybody has the right to accept seriously the mental revelations that are made to a mind beside itself; I think, indeed, it would be a blasphemy to accuse G.o.d of taking such a method to rouse a soul to a sense of its being, its duties, and its dangers; and I dread to claim for myself any supernatural intervention at such a time, partly because my reason s.h.i.+es at such a thought and partly because I think it is presumptuous to suppose that G.o.d should interest Himself so peculiarly in an individual. It seems to me almost vulgarly anthropomorphic."

"Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before G.o.d?" the priest murmured.

"Yes, yes," Sylvia agreed. "I have expressed myself badly, and of course when I think of it I have been driven ever since the delirium really to accept just that. You can understand, can't you, the dread of presumption in my revolt against pride?

"But by insisting upon what seemed to happen in my delirium I am giving you a wrong impression. It was when I came to myself again in the hospital that I felt changed. I longed then for knowledge of G.o.d, but I was afraid that my feeling was simply the natural result of weakness after a severe illness. I almost rejected G.o.d in my fear of supposing myself hysterical and egotistical. However, I did try hard to put myself into a state of resignation, and when I came out of the hospital I felt curiously awake to the sense of G.o.d and simultaneously an utter indifference to anything in my old life that might interrupt my quest by restoring me to what I was before this illness. While I was ill war had broken out, and I found myself utterly alone. Ordinarily I am sure that such a discovery would have terrified me; now I rejoiced in such loneliness. I deliberately turned my back on England and waited for something from my new life to fill this loneliness. I felt like some one who has swept and garnished a room that he may receive guests. My chief emotion was a tremendous love of the whole world and an illimitable desire to make up for all my cynicism in the past by the depth of this love. I went back to the _pension_ where I had lived before I was ill, and it seemed to me a coincidence that the woman who kept it should be a spiritualist and that for two months my mind should be continuously occupied by what I might call the magic side of things. The result was that, though I was often puzzled by inexplicable happenings, I conceived a distaste for all this meddling with the unknowable, this kind of keyhole peeping at infinity: it seemed to me vulgar and unpleasant.

Nevertheless, I was driven back all the time in my meditations on the only satisfactory revelation of G.o.d, the only rational manifestation, which was Jesus Christ. Every other explanation crumbled away in my brain except that one fact. Then, although I believe it was only some fortune-telling with cards that first put the notion into my head, I was obsessed with the idea that I must go south. On my way I met a soldier at Kieff who bought me a golden bag for no other reason than because it seemed to him that to give pleasure to somebody else was a better way of spending his money than in gambling or self-indulgence. In the state of mind I was in I accepted this as a sign that I was right to go south. So you see that I had really arrived at the point of view of accepting the theory of a divine intervention in my favor.

"After three months at Odessa--where I read Tolstoi and Dostoievski and found in them, ah, such profundities of the human soul lighted up--against my instinct I went north again; the Germans were advancing upon Warsaw, and circ.u.mstances brought me here. On the way, at Ja.s.sy, an extraordinary thing happened. I met a girl whom I had tried to adopt six years ago at Granada, but who was taken from me by a blackguard and who since then has what people call sunk very low. It seemed to me that in finding this child again, for she is still really a child, I was being given an opportunity of doing what I had failed to do for that first girl of whom I told you. Then suddenly I conceived the idea that she had never been baptized; when I began to think about her soul, I was driven by an unknown force to this church. When I came in I did not know what to do, and when you asked me if I wanted to make my confession the force seemed to say 'Yes.'"

Sylvia was silent, and the priest finished the _Confiteor_, which she repeated after him.

"My daughter," he said, "it is the grace of G.o.d. I do not feel that in this solemn moment--a moment that fills me as a priest with humility at being allowed to regard such a wonderful manifestation of G.o.d's infinite mercy--any poor words of mine can add anything. It is the grace of G.o.d: let that suffice. But, wonderful as has been G.o.d's mercy to a soul that was deaf so long to His voice, do not forget that your greatest danger, your greatest temptation, may be to rely too much upon yourself. Do not forget at this solemn moment that you can only enjoy this divine grace through the Sacraments. Do not forget that only in the Church can you preserve the new sense of security that you now feel. One who has been granted such mercy must expect harder struggles than less fortunate souls. Do not, by falling back into indifference and neglect of your religious duties, succ.u.mb to the sin of pride. By the height of your uplifting will be measured the depth of your fall, if in your pride you think to stand alone."

When the priest had given her absolution, Sylvia asked him about Queenie; and when he seemed a little doubtful of Queenie's willingness to be a catechumen, she wondered if he were deliberately trying to discourage her in order to mortify that pride he had seemed to fear so much.

"But if she wants to be baptized?" Sylvia persisted.

"Of course I will baptize her."

"You think that I'm too much occupied with her when I have still so much to learn myself?" she challenged.

They were walking down the church toward the door, and Sylvia felt rather like the importunate paris.h.i.+oner whom she had interrupted by her entrance.

"No, no, I think you are quite right. But I fear that you will expect miracles of G.o.d's grace all round you," said the priest. "What has happened to you may not happen to her."

"But it must," Sylvia declared. "It shall."