"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 God; unfortunately, thousands of lonely souls are destitute of the sense of God 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 passionate relationship, 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 pass 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 circumstances 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 prostitution, differs only in degree from the complete sale of the body.
"Scarcely a month had passed when I became seriously ill, and in the dreadful delirium of my fever I imagined that I was damned. 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 God 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 shies at such a thought and partly because I think it is presumptuous to suppose that God 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 God?" 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 God, but I was afraid that my feeling was simply the natural result of weakness after a severe illness. I almost rejected God 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 God 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 God, 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 circumstances brought me here. On the way, at Jassy, 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 God. 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 God's infinite mercy—any poor words of mine can add anything. It is the grace of God: let that suffice. But, wonderful as has been God'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, succumb 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.