I saw LeVallon smiling as he left my side. He disappeared in the
way already described. The stream of turbulent boys separated us
physically, just as, in his belief, the centuries had carried us apart
spiritually--he--myself--and this other. I saw a veil drop down upon
his face. The lamps in his splendid eyes were shrouded. At supper we
sat far apart, and the bedroom I shared with two other youngsters of my
own age and form, of course, did not include LeVallon.
CHAPTER III
“_Souls without a past behind them, springing suddenly into
existence, out of nothing, with marked mental and moral
peculiarities, are a conception as monstrous as would be the
corresponding conception of babies suddenly appearing from
nowhere, unrelated to anybody, but showing marked racial and
family types._”--“The Ancient Wisdom” (A. Besant).
As the terms passed and I ceased to be a new boy, it cannot be said
that I got to know Julius LeVallon any better, because our intimacy had
been established, or “resumed” as he called it, from the beginning;
but the chances of being together increased, we became members of the
same form, our desks were side by side, and we shared at length the
same bedroom with another Fifth Form boy named Goldingham. And since
Goldingham, studious, fat, good-natured, slept soundly from the moment
his head touched the pillow till the seven o’clock bell rang--and
sometimes after it in order to escape his cold bath--we practically had
the room to ourselves.
Moreover, from the beginning, it all seemed curiously true. It was
not Julius who invented, but I who in my stupidity had forgotten.
Long, detailed dreams, too, came to me about this time, which I
recognised as a continuation of these of “Other Places” his presence
near me in the daytime would revive. They existed, apparently, in
some layer deeper than my daily consciousness, recoverable in sleep.
In the daytime something sceptical in me that denied, rendered them
inaccessible, but once reason slept and the will was in abeyance, they
poured through me in a continuous, uninterrupted flow. A word from
Julius, a touch, a glance from his eyes perhaps, would evoke them
instantly, and I would _see_. Yet he made no potent suggestions that
could have caused them; there was no effort; I did not imagine at his
bidding; and often, indeed, his descriptions differed materially from
my own, which makes me hesitate to ascribe the results to telepathy
alone. It was his presence, his atmosphere that revived them. To-day,
of course, immediately after our schooldays in fact, they ceased to
exist for me--to my regret, I think, on the whole, for they were very
entertaining, and sometimes very exquisite. I still retain, however,
the vivid recollection of blazing summer landscapes; of people,
sometimes barbaric and always picturesque, moving in brilliant colours;
of plains, and slopes of wooded mountains that dipped, all blue and
thirsty, into quiet seas--scenes and people, too, utterly unlike any
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