At last Sylvia was able to persuade him that she was not to be regarded as an enemy of his matrimonial intentions, and after a final burst of rage directed against the negresses, whom he ejected from the room, as a housemaid turns a mattress, he made a speech:
“I am to marry Lily. We go to Portugal, where I am not to be a croupier, but a gentleman. I excuse my furage. You grant excusals, yes? It is a decomprehence.”
“He’s apologizing,” Lily explained in the kind of way one might call attention to the tricks of an intelligent puppy.
“She’s actually proud of him,” Sylvia thought. “But, of course, to her he represents gold and diamonds.”
The priest, who had grasped that the strain was being relaxed, began to exude smiles and to rub his hands; he sniffed the prospect of a fee so richly that one seemed to hear the notes crackle like pork. Camacho produced the wedding-ring that was even more outshone than wedding-rings usually are by the diamonds of betrothal.
“But I can’t be married in my dressing-gown,” Lily protested.
Sylvia felt inclined to say it was the most suitable garment, except a nightgown, that she could have chosen, but in the end, after another discussion, it was decided that the ecclesiastical ceremony should be performed to-morrow in church and that to-day should be devoted to the civil rite. Sylvia promised not to say a word about the departure to Europe.
Three days later Sylvia went on board the steamer to make her farewells. She gave Lily a delicate little pistol for a wedding-present; from Lily, in memory of her marriage, she received a box of chocolates.
It was impossible not to feel lonely, when Lily had gone: in three and a half years they had been much together. For a while Sylvia tried to content herself with the company of the girls in the pension d’artistes, to which she had been forced to go because the flat was too expensive for her to live in now. Her illness had swallowed up any money she had saved, and the manager took advantage of it to lower her salary. When she protested the manager told her he would be willing to pay the original salary, if she would go to São Paulo. Though Sylvia understood that the management was trying to get the best of a bargain, she was too listless to care much and she agreed to go. The voyage there was like a nightmare. The boat was full of gaudy negroes who sang endlessly their mysterious songs; the smell was vile; the food was worse; cockroaches swarmed. São Paulo was a squalid reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, and the women who sang in the cabaret were all seamed with ten years’ longer vagabondage than those at Rio. The men of São Paulo treated them with the insolence of the half-breeds they all seemed. On the third night a big man with teeth like an ancient fence and a diamond in his shirt-front like a crystal stopper leaned over from a box and shouted to Sylvia to come up and join him when she had finished her songs; he said other things that made her shake with anger. When she left the scene, the grand pimp, who was politely known as the manager, congratulated Sylvia upon her luck: she had caught the fancy of the richest patron.
“You don’t suppose I’m going to see that goujat in his box?” she growled.