Already, in our conversation, this had come to me; it increased
from minute to minute as our atmospheres combined and mingled.
The suggestion of what I must call great exterior Activities that
always accompanied the presence of Julius made themselves felt also
through the being of this simple and uneducated girl. Winds, cool and
refreshing, from some elemental region blew soundlessly about her. I
was aware of their invigorating currents. And this came to me with my
first emotions, and was not due to subsequent reflection. For, in my
own case, too, while resenting the admission, I felt something more
generously scaled than my normal self, scientifically moulded, trying
to urge up as with great arms and hands that thrust into my mind. What
hitherto had seemed my complete Self opened, as though it were but a
surface tract, revealing depths of consciousness unguessed before.
And this, I think, was the disquieting sensation that perplexed
me chiefly with a sense of unstable equilibrium. The idea of
pre-existence, with its huge weight of memory lost and actions
undischarged, pressed upon a portion of my soul that was trying to
awake. The foundations of my known personality appeared suddenly
insecure, and what the brain denied, this other part accepted, even
half remembered. The change of consciousness in me was growing. While
observing Mrs. LeVallon, listening to the spontaneous laughter that ran
between her sentences, meeting her quick eyes that took in everything
about them, these varied and contradictory judgments of my own worked
their inevitable effect upon me. The quasi-memory, with its elusive
fragrance of far-off, forgotten things; the promised reconstruction of
passionate emotions that had burned the tissues of our earlier bodies
before even the foundations of these “eternal” hills were laid; the
sense of being again among ancient friends, netted by deathless forces
of spiritual adventure and desire--Julius, his wife, myself, mutually
involved in the intricate pattern of our souls’ development:--all this,
while I strove to regard it as mere telepathic reflection from his own
beliefs, yet made something in me, deeper than any ratiocination, stand
up and laugh in my face with the authoritative command that it was
absolutely--true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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