"And let no one ever tell me again that presentiments don't exist," murmured Sylvia, falling asleep for the first time in forty-eight hours.
CHAPTER IV
CONCETTA'S history—or rather Queenie's, for it was by this name that she begged Sylvia to call her now—had been a mixture of splendor, misery, and violence during the six years that, almost to a day, had elapsed since they met for the first time at Granada. She told it in the creeping light of a wet dawn while the train was passing through a flat, colorless country, and while in a corner of the compartment Lottie's snores rose above the noise, told it in the breathless, disjointed style that was so poignantly familiar to the one who listened. There was something ghostly for Sylvia in this experience; it was as if she sat opposite a Galatea of her own creation, a doubleganger from her own brain, a dream prolonged into the cold reality of the morning. All the time that she was listening she had a sensation of being told about events that she ought to know already, as if in a trance she herself had lived this history through before; and so vivid was the sensation that when there were unexplained gaps in Queenie's narrative she found herself puzzling her own brain to fill them in from experience of her own, the recollection of which had been clouded by some accident.
When Queenie told how she was carried away by Zozo from Mrs. Gainsborough at the railway station of Granada, she gave the impression of having yielded to a magical and irresistible influence, and it was evident that for a long while the personality of the juggler had swayed her destiny by a hypnotic power that was only broken when he wounded her with the pistol-shot. Even now, after three years of freedom, his influence, when she began to talk of him, seemed to regather its volume and to be about to pour itself once more over her mind. Sylvia perceived this danger, and forbade her to talk any more about Zozo. This injunction was evidently a relief to the child—she must be twenty-one by now, though she seemed still a child—but it was tantalizing to Sylvia, who could not penetrate beyond her own impression of the juggler as an incredible figure, incredible because only drawn with a kind of immature or tired fancy. He passed into the category of the Svengalis, and became one of a long line of romantic impossibilities with whom their creators had failed to do much more than can be done by a practical joker with a turnip, a sheet, and some phosphorus. Zozo had always been the weakest part of Sylvia's improvisation of Concetta, a melodramatic climax that for her had spoiled the more simple horror of the childhood; she determined that later on she would try to extract from Queenie, bit by bit, enough to complete her performance.
Although Queenie had managed to break away from the man himself, she had paid in full for his direction of her life, and Sylvia rebelled against the whim of destiny which at the critical moment in this child's career had snatched her from herself and handed her over to the possession of a Zozo. What could have been the intention of fate in pointing a way to safety and then immediately afterward barring it against her progress? The old argument of free will could not apply in her case, because it was the lack of that, and of that alone, which had caused her ruin. What but a savage and undiscerning fate could be held accountable for this tale that had for fit background the profitable and ugly fields through which on this tristful Rumanian day the train was sweeping? Queenie seemed to have had no lovers apart from the purchasers of youth, and to be able to look back with pride and pleasure at nothing except the furs and dresses and jewelry with which she had been purchased. In the rage that Sylvia felt for this wanton corruption of a soul, she suddenly remembered how, long ago, she had watched with a hopeless equanimity and a cynical tolerance the progress of Lily along the same road as Queenie; and this memory of herself as she once was and felt revived the torments of self-reproach that had haunted her delirium in Petrograd. Then, as Queenie's tale went on, there gradually emerged from all the purposeless confusion of it one clear ambition in the girl's mind, which was a passion to be English—a passion feverish, intense, absorbing.
When in France Sylvia had first encountered continental music-hall artistes, she had found among them a universal prejudice against English girls; later on, when she met in cabarets the expatriated and cosmopolitan mountebanks that were the slaves rather than the servants of the public, she had often been envied for her English nationality: Lottie sleeping over there in the corner was an instance in point. But she had never found this fleeting envy crystallized to such a passionate ambition as it was become for Queenie. The circumstances of her birth in Germany from an Italian father of a Flemish mother, her flight from a cruel stepmother, her life with the juggler whose nationality seemed as indeterminate as her own, her speech compounded of English, French, German, and Italian each spoken with a foreign accent, her absence of any kind of papers, her lack of any sort of home, had all combined to give her a positive belief that she was without nationality, which she coveted as some Undine might covet a soul.
"But why do you want to be English so particularly?" Sylvia asked.
"Don't you know? Why, yes, of course you know. It was you was first making me to want. You were so sweet, the sweetest person I was ever meeting, and when I lost you I was always wanting to be English."
So, after all, her own swift passage through Queenie's life had not been without consequence.
"People were always saying that I looked like an English girl," Queenie went on. "And I was always talking English. I will never speak other languages again. I will not know other languages. Until this war came it was easy; but when they asked me for my passport I had only a billet de séjour given to me by the Russian police, and after six months I was expelled. When I was coming to Rumania, there was a merchant on the train who was kind to me, but he made me promise that if he helped me I was never to leave him until he was wanting. He was very kind. He gave me these furs. They are so nice, yes. But I was always going to the station at Jassy to see if some English girl would be my sister. There was once in Constantinople an English girl who would be my sister—but Zozo was jealous. If I was becoming her sister, I would be having a passport now, and England is so sweet!"