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?’