The problem of how to pass the rest of the day weighed upon her. She did not want to meet any of the girls at the Trianon; she did not want to meet anybody she knew until she could meet him with money in her pocket. To-night she would stay at their old hotel in Bucharest; she would say that she had missed the train back to Avereshti, if they wondered at the absence of luggage. Oh, but what did it matter if they did wonder? It was her sensitiveness to such trifles as these that brought home to Sylvia how much the strain of the last week had told upon her. Walking aimlessly along, she found herself near the little mission church and turned aside to enter it. At such an early hour of the afternoon the church was empty, and the incense of the morning Mass was still pungent. There was the same sort of atmosphere that exists in a theater between a matinée and an evening performance; the emotion of the departed worshipers was mingled with the expectation of more worshipers to come. Sylvia sat contemplating the images and wondering about the appeal they could make. She tried to put herself in the position of the humble and faithful soul that could derive consolation and help from praying before that tawdry image of the Sacred Heart. She wished that she could be given the mentality of a poor Italian girl whose sense of awe was so easily satisfied and who could behold those flames of cheap gold paint around the Heart burning like the eyes of Seraphim.
"Yet, after all," she thought, "are we superior people, who suppose that such representations hurt the majesty of God, any nearer to Him with our equally pretentious theories of His manifestation? What in the ultimate sum of this world's history, when the world itself hangs in the sky like a poor burned-out moon, will mark the difference between the great philosopher with his words and the most degraded savage with his idols? And am I with my perception of God's love in a golden bag less hopelessly material than the poor Italian girl who bows before that painted heart?"
The influence of the church began to penetrate Sylvia's mind with a tranquilizing assurance of continuity, or rather with the assurance of silent and universal forces undisturbed by war. The sense of the individual's extinction in the strife of herd with herd had been bound to affect her very deeply, coming, as it did, at a time when she had once again challenged life as an individual by refusing any co-operation with the past.
"The worst of feeling regenerated," she thought, "is that such an emotion or condition of mind implies the destruction of all former experience. Of course, former experience must still produce its effect unconsciously; but one is too sensible of trying to bring the past into positively the same purified state as the present. When I was thinking about Philip this morning and reliving bygone moments, I was all the time applying to them standards which I have only possessed for about a year. Certainly I perceive that what I call my regeneration must be the fruit of past experience—otherwise the description would be meaningless—but it is the fruit of individual experience ripening at the very moment when individual experience counts for less than it has ever counted since the beginning of the world. Had I always been a social and political animal the idea of the war would not have preyed on my mind as it does; I should have been educated up to the point of expecting it. I remember when I was first told in the Petrograd hospital that a war had broken out, what a trifling impression the news made compared with my own discovery of the change in myself. Gradually during this past year I have found at every turn my new progress barred by the war. My individual efforts perpetually shrink into insignificance before the war, and I am beginning to perceive, unless I can in some way fall into step with the rest of mankind, that what I considered progress is really the retreat of my personality along a disused bypath where I am expending my energy in cutting away briers that were better left alone, at any rate, at such a moment in history. Certainly one of the effects of an ordered religion is to restore the individual to the broad paths along which mankind is marching. An ordered religion is equally opposed either to short cuts or to cul-de-sacs, or to what by their impenetrability to the individual are equivalent to cul-de-sacs. My first instinct about Queenie was certainly right when I was anxious to intrust her to religion rather than to rely upon my personal influence. I think I must have lacked conviction in the way I approached the subject. I must have been timid and self-conscious; and the skeptical side of me that has just been wondering about the appeal of that image of the Sacred Heart may have defeated my purpose without my noticing its intrusion. I was all the time like a grown-up person who plays with children in order to get pleasure from their enjoyment rather than from his own.
"Yes, sitting here in this tawdry little church, I am beginning to make a few discoveries. I must positively lose the slightest consciousness of being superior to Queenie in any way whatsoever. Equally, I must get over the slightest consciousness of being superior to any of the worshipers in this church. I must get over the habit of being injured by the monstrousness of this war until I have been personally injured by it in the course of sharing its woes with the rest of mankind. I have got to find an individualism that while it abates nothing of its unwillingness to be injured by the state is simultaneously always careful in its turn never to injure or impede the state, which from the individual's point of view must be regarded not as a state, but as another individual. Presumably the chief function of an ordered religion is by acting through the individual to apply the sum of mankind's faith, hope, and love under the guidance of the Holy Ghost to the fulfilment of the divine purpose. In such a way the self-perfection of the individual will create the self-perfection of the state, and, oh, what a long time it will take! God is a great conservative; yet when He was incarnate He was a great radical. I wonder if I had ever had a real logical training, or indeed any formal education at all, whether I should be tossed about, as I am, from one paradox to another. The Church was, significantly enough, built upon Peter, not upon John nor upon Thomas; it was founded upon the most human of the apostles. If one might admit in God what in men would be called an afterthought, it might be permissible to look upon Paul as an afterthought to leaven some of the ponderousness of Peter's humanity. Anyway, the point is that the paradoxes began in the very beginning, and it's quite obvious that I'm not going to help myself or anybody else by exposing myself to them rather than to the mighty moral, intellectual, and spiritual fabric into which they have all been absorbed or by which they have all been rejected."
During Sylvia's meditation the church had gradually filled with worshipers to receive the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Generally, that strangely wistful concession to the pathetic side of human nature had not made a deep appeal to Sylvia's instinct for worship; but this afternoon the bravery of self had fallen from her. For the first time she felt in all its force—not merely apprehending it as a vague discomfort—the utter desolation of the soul without God. In such a state of mind faith shrank to infatuate speculation, hope swelled to arrogance, and even love shivered in a chill and viewless futility, until the mystical sympathy of other souls, the humblest of whom was a secret only known to God, led her to identify herself with them and to cry with them:
"O salutaris Hostia,
Quæ cœli pandis ostium:
Bella premunt hostilia,
Da robur, fer, auxilium."
They were very poor people, these Albanians and Italians who knelt round her in this church; and Sylvia bowed before the thought that all over the world in all the warring nations somewhere about this hour poor people were crying out to God the same words in the same grave Latin. The helplessness of humanity raged through her like a strong wind, and her self-reliance became as the dust that was scattered before it. When the priest held the monstrance aloft, and gave the Benediction it seemed that the wind died away; upon her soul the company of God was shed like a gentle rain, which left behind it faith blossoming like a flower, and hope singing like a bird, and above them both love shining like a sun.
Sylvia went out of the church that afternoon with a sense of having been personally comforted; she was intensely aware of having made more spiritual progress in the last hour than in all the years that had gone by since the first revelation of God.
"Without Him I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing," she murmured.