At rarish intervals comes my Soul to visit me.
My Soul is light sheer Being.
My Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long
cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something
like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a
loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles.
My Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling,
as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëry-ish contempt,
as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary
understanding and is like a caress.
In the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me--a dusk of a deep
beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was
gentian blue.
I leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her
Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is
_mine_, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold!
We talk on many topics, of many things: I in worldly nervous
ignorance and with a wishfulness to reach and compass and know: the
Soul with poise and surety of attitude, a wearied patience and the
chill sweet contempt.
She answers me from her cool old tranquil viewpoint, which is near
me yet remote.
We talked last of some bygone persons I have been, some shapes she
wore.
Said the Soul: ‘Early in the sixteenth century you were a ragged
Russian peasant girl living in ignorance and filth in a hut
by a swamp-edge. You had parents both of whom beat your body
black-and-blue from your babyhood. And at eighteen you were a
coarsened hardy wench tending a drove of pigs and goats on the sunny
steppe. I was there with you as presently as now--as sentient, as
perceptive. But it is a question whether you or the little beasts you
drove were the more beastly stupid. You and they were equal in outer
quality, equal in uncleanliness, equally covered with vermin.’
I have no ghost-memory of that time, but as the Soul told of it a
nascent feeling came on me, as if some part of my Mind felt its way
back to that. I warmed to the thought of the Peasant Girl. I was
quiescent to her filth and ignorance.
Said I: ‘Was she brave and fairly honest?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were a ready liar--you lied your way out of many
a beating. But you were brave enough. You faced the roughnesses of
your life uncringing, and you died game.’
Said I: ‘How did I die?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were run neatly through the body by the short
sword of a soldier whose lust-desire you had had the hardihood to
refuse--and I fled away upon the instant.’
Said I: ‘I half-knew it--she died a violent death. You--were you glad
to be quit of her filthy flesh, her surroundings, her ignorance?’
Said the Soul: ‘Glad? Such things mean nothing to me. Your
body, be it sweet or foul, has no bearing on my long journey.
Motives--motif--back of your human acts make me glad or sorry at
leaving you.’
Said I: ‘Tell me about a time when I seemed someway fine, humanly
fine.’
Said the Soul: ‘In London, near the end of the seventeenth century,
before and during the period of the Gordon Riots, you lived in a way
of peace. From when you were fourteen until you were twenty-nine you
lived alone with your little lame half-sister whom you cared for very
devotedly, very tenderly.’
My little half-sister-- Until the Soul spoke of her there was no
vision, no image like her. Then something of me remembered.
Said I: ‘What was she like? Who were our parents?’
Said the Soul: ‘Your mother died at your birth, hers at her birth.
Your father was hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The sister was pale,
large-eyed, long-haired, crippled from a dislocated shoulder and
hip. When you were twenty-five she was eleven, a beautiful frail
child. You lived in two rooms above a linen-draper’s and you
supported the two of you by weaving and calendering cloths for the
shop-keeper, and by illuminating missals and manuscripts when you
could get that work. For a very poor wage, but living was cheap. All
the time you took zealous care of your sister. Your heart was bound
up in her--you adored her.’
Said I: ‘I know that. Tell me what we did--how we lived--how we loved
each other.’
Said the Soul: ‘In the summer evenings you often walked out along
quiet London streets--the sister sometimes with a crutch and your arm
about her, sometimes in a rolling chair, whilst you walked beside
her pushing it. Your father had educated you in an erratic fashion.
You had a deal of desultory knowledge--what is called knowledge--and
you educated the young sister in the same manner. Often it was of
the poets--Latin, English, Italian, and of histories and sciences
and arts--what odd comprehensive bits you knew--that you two talked
as you sauntered in the bright late English sunlight. Or you
talked of the little details of your joint life. Sometimes you sat
together--you holding her close in your arms--by a window in your
darkening front room, and watched the children at play in the common
opposite, and conversed and were quietly happy. You were maternal and
the child was a mature old-fashioned yet childish innocent child.’
My little sister--sweet--long gone-- Would that I had her now!
Said I: ‘Tell me what we said.’
Said the Soul: ‘You said to her, “Our poverty and even our
deprivations, dearest, which for your sake I feel deeply would not
matter, not the least, to me if I could see you well and strong.”
And the child replied, “Sweet, just to rest like this in your arms
each twilight makes me rich, rich--as rich as the smartest ladies
in Piccadilly.” And you said, “Rich reminds me, Darling, we shall
have four extra shillings--four bright silver shillings--at the end
of this week from the book-seller. So what shall we purchase for a
treat? There’ll be, if you like, prawns and crumpets for tea, for
days to come--or if my Child prefers oranges or pineapples once--”
And the child replied with her cheeks quite pink at the thought,
“O Sister-love, let us have the pines, just one day, and let us
make-believe to be ladies that day, and comport ourselves like
ladies, and take our tea--all like ladies.” And you pressed her close
to your breast--you both wore caps and kerchiefs and stuff-gowns in
the fashion of the lower-middle artisan class--and showered gentle
kisses on her cheeks and eyelids, and promised her the pineapples
and the tea like ladies.’
I listened to this with vivid still pleasure. It felt like endearing
fulfilling life--a day of tenderness--. And oddly familiar.
Said I: ‘What were we in the habit of having for our tea--that prawns
and crumpets would make us a treat?’
Said the Soul: ‘Your tea was chiefly bran-bread and cress or perhaps
lettuce, with a stone mug of milk for the child when you could afford
it. The London of that day had no luxuries for the poor. And having
had none you missed none. But the populace lived in starveling
misery. The rabble rose and rallied to the Gordon as it would have to
anyone who urged it to rioting. You were Protestants but you regarded
him as a weakling visionary. You watched the rioting in the streets
with little fear, but the linen-draper and all other shop-keepers
kept barred doors. You two were venturesome and were yourselves of
the masses, and when the mob stormed Newgate prison you both stood
watching with many other householders on the outskirts of the crowd,
in terror but secretly half in sympathy. You were safe enough from
the rioters who were intent on wrecking the gaol and freeing the
inmates. It was characteristic of you as you were then to be out
looking on at a murderous night scene with interest, carefully
protecting the child from contact with the throngs.’
Said I: ‘How long did that life last?’
Said the Soul: ‘Four years after that your sister changed from her
bare little bed to a coffin and you went on alone achingly suffering
her loss for long years. You lived to be seventy, a thin old woman,
working latterly as one of the night nurses in a public hospital. You
lived an abstemious outwardly self-sacrificing life and died alone,
from hardened arteries, one autumn night.’
Said I: ‘And was there an informing beauty for you, for you and for
me, in my life then?’
Coldly said the Soul: ‘You were self-centered, for all your
self-sacrifice. You reckoned it your duty to care for your sister.
It was also your irresistible delight. And after her death you took
self-satisfaction in self-sacrifice: smug--smug. For me there was a
laming distortion in it all.’
Said I: ‘Tell me some other life.’
Said the Soul: ‘You were once a little thief in the streets of a
later London. You picked pockets, you stole bits of food in Covent
Garden market, you pilfered shop-tills, you systematically worked the
wealthy throngs as they came from the Opera at midnight. You were
known to the police as the cleverest child-thief in London.’
It warmed my vanity to think of myself as clever in so theatric a
rôle as thief.
Said I: ‘How did that life like you?’
Said the Soul, with a shrug of her delicate shoulders: ‘I had little
to do with it and that in a negative way. My part in you was to keep
up your heart in hungry hunted days. You were neither a good thing
nor a bad thing: perishingly passive. And you were dead in a potter’s
field before your sixteenth birthday.’
Said I: ‘How did the little Thief look?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were sufficiently ugly--an undersized form, a
gamin face, bastard features.’
Said I: ‘And I daresay ignorant?’
Said the Soul: ‘Ignorant of everything rated useful, but wise to the
under-sides of human nature and in the sordid viciousness of London
slums. And singularly shrewd--what is called philosophical.’
Said I: ‘Pray tell me another life.’
Said the Soul: ‘An earlier time--Paris, some century before the
Terror saw you a slim _fille-du-pavè_, a prostitute of a low cheap
type, but with more brain, more of what is termed character than you
have ever possessed. You had wit, will, _esprit_, determination.
From having been at seventeen most obscenely of the streets you
were at thirty a wonderfully grand courtesan: no better in what are
called morals but possessed of very much inner and outer strength and
luster. You were _chère-aimèe_ to men of brain, men of importance
to the state, whose acts were shaded by your influence. And you
achieved unusual wealth chiefly by the powers and strategies of
your character. You lived in the extreme of luxury of that time and
of your type--a delicate luxury, almost high-bred. You were wanton
in amour, being physically extremely passionate, but admirably
straightforward and strong in each matter and aspect of your life.’
Said I: ‘You admired her?’
Said the Soul: ‘I was serene and vividly alive within you. You were
in all ways, simply and completely, an honest woman, and for the only
time.’
Said I: ‘How could she be honest, since she lived by exchanging
treasure of much personal economic value for cheap cheapest gold,
trash, and a besmirched name: and all through two sorts of greed?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were honest since you made no pretense of any
kind to yourself. You took no gold that you did not logically,
humanly or shamefully earn. You were consciously and unconsciously
above all subterfuge. You wrought no ruin nor error nor darkness
upon your own spirit or any other. You deceived neither yourself nor
anyone about you. The tone of your life was of sun-shining simplicity
and cleanness. There was no greed in you. You saw your way of life
before you and lived it without degradation, with a positiveness of
strength.’
It is as if my Soul’s view and mine were infinitely separate from
being narrowly paralleled. The portrait was mystically familiar: but
not by her light.
Said I: ‘Was she beautiful to look at?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were beautiful in a pallid saintlike French
manner--an uncertain type of beauty which fatigue or depression
turns to plainness. You had but little light charm of prettiness.
But you had what counts for more than beauty: the nerve and verve
of attractiveness, the force and fascination of physical being, the
fragrance, the _flair_ of the deeply-sexed woman. In one phase you
were constantly preying and preyed upon, but with high valors of
attack and endurance.’
Said I: ‘Did she live in peace--had she no times of suffering?’
Said the Soul: ‘You had hours of violent bitter suffering. Paris
has always accepted without countenancing the properous cocotte.
And often you were infamously insulted at street-crossings by
soldiers and _sergeants-de-ville_ as you drove out in your small
bright-colored carriage. And you were hailed with opprobrious
appropriate names by the ragged populace as they picked up silver
pieces which you threw among them. Such things were stinging brands
and lashes to you. But you bore yourself with entire courage. You
gave much money to churches and charities but looked on such acts in
yourself rightly as some slight weakness which would, however, be of
benefit to the starving poor. I can not describe--so you could grasp
it--the peace, the expansion, the freedom for me in that life and in
that attitude.’
The exact outlook of the Soul throws over me a veil of wistfulness,
bewilderness, freedness, lostness which hides the material moorings
of my life and casts me adrift on broad clouded seas.
Said I: ‘What was the end of that--how did she die?’
Said the Soul: ‘You died exquisitely, of syphilitic disorders. You
were something past forty, badly broken--your looks were gone, your
friends were gone, your money was not gone but it was of little use
to you. But you smiled serenely and lived up personally and mentally
to your smile. A surgeon and a fat mustached old woman saw you die in
the beginning of that bodily rot--the just portion of the passionate
whore--one sweet Spring dawn, with birds twittering in green branches
outside your window and a great gold sun slowly breaking the mist.
Then for once I left you with reluctance. I clung to you. The kiss of
me was last on your fainting brain and your fast-cooling heart. For
I was leaving, in an agony of my own, an _honest_ person. And I knew
not what might be my next petty prison.’
Said I: ‘What was my next life?’
Said the Soul: ‘It was not so petty as were some others. You were
next--about seventeen-fifty--a quaint extremely common little person.
You were apprenticed as a child to a milliner in Liverpool, England.
You grew out of that and became a dancer in a dingy theatre--a cheap
bedraggled life. You were a cheap and bedraggled young woman. You
wore odd gay tawdry frocks, hideous little shoes, ragged raveled
silk hose, surprising bright bonnets. Your mind was a shallow pool
filled with tales from shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls in which
you believed implicitly. You were mentally degenerate, organically
a fool, a wonderful snob. You wanted only wealth and place bitterly
to deride and browbeat the low class to which you belonged--not
from lack of heart but because you believed it to be the proper
aristocratic manner. And what you wanted in mind you made up in
temper. You quarreled, you came to blows, with your fellow-dancers in
any of a half-score of small selfish daily disputes. Cleverness among
you consisted in gaining any possible advantage over the others and
in calling each other names. Also in maneuvering bits of money--as
much as might be--from unpleasing men who hung about the dingy
play-house. On holidays you were invariably half-drunk.’
Said I: ‘And wherein was she not petty?’
Said the Soul: ‘You believed in yourself. You had not a doubt you
belonged in worldly high places but were kept down by the malice and
depravity of human nature, people about you. And you lived up to your
vulgar ideal of ambition. There was a simplicity, an enlightening
pathos in you then which was lacking in the linen-draper’s lodger.’
In my flawed way I saw that, but objected to the bygone Liverpool
lady from many an angle.
Said I: ‘Had I no life of a sweetness and gentleness and with it
something that buoyed and bore you on?’
Said the Soul: ‘Never once. You were many centuries ago a Greek girl
of the aristocratic class, bred in an intellectual life. You read
the philosophers in the cool retreats of an olive grove. The mental
knowledge you have now compared to your learning then is a tangle
of ignorance. But the Greek girl had no heart, no human flame, no
active blood of personality. Those wanting I starved. The Liverpool
dancer in her warming virile vulgarness bore me vastly farther on
my way. You were a Greek woman in a still earlier time--of a type
which murders all simplicity. Your body and mind were haunted by
perfervid imagination and both ached with the weight of it. You were
made of twisted fires. I grew in _that_ day: grew burdenedly: grew
distortedly.’