“Great gifts can also be handed up to the new body from the sub-conscious ego. A born musician is one who, having become a great musician before by means of long study and practice, is re-born rich in the possession of the gift of musical expression. A born orator has been a practised speaker in a former life, and now, without knowing that he does so, draws freely on his sub-conciousness for inspiration.
“Genius is the natural intellect so attuned to the sub-conscious mind that its fount of inspiration flows through it unhindered.
“Madness is the sub-conscious mind gaining undue control, bursting the dams of reason and restraint, and carrying all before it into mental chaos. A writer who, discovering that he can do more vividly imaginative work when his sub-consciousness is in the ascendency, puts himself under the influence of drugs in order to obtain this mental condition, may, for a time, produce work which will astonish the world; but, before long, there will come the inevitable fiasco—loss of will power, loss of mental and moral perspective; nerve and brain irritation; insanity!
“Ah, how crudely and disjointedly I am repeating all this! It was your favourite subject, and I might give you essays of your own to read, with chapter and verse, and carefully worked out illustration. I have them all here. I almost know them by heart. But this hurried outline must serve to remind us of all you held and believed.
“Well—to take up the thread of the happenings of those sad days—first, your letter; secondly, Madame de Villebois’ remark; thirdly, my recollection of all you had taught and told me, awakened in me the passionate desire that your rebirth into the world should take place at once. In my awful loss and loneliness it seemed to me that such unspeakable comfort would come from the knowledge that my belovèd was actually on earth again; even if, at first, he were but a little, helpless babe.
“I had always loved the photographs of my baby Nigel so tenderly—I seemed to have known and loved you at every age. At times I saw each age in you and adored it as I saw it.
“And the years would pass, and you would grow up. After all, when you were a man of twenty, I should only be forty-eight. We should certainly have found each other by then, and my darling would know me, and would not think me old, for had he not written: ‘Wherever I may be I am loving you still, with my whole being. I am all your own, and I hold you mine for ever.... We may meet again on earth, if it be God’s will for us.’ I knew you meant by this, a fresh incarnation for both; but I could not see why I must wait during long, lonely years, or why death must come first.
“I began to pray with desperate, frantic energy that my darling might come back without delay.
“A wild, sweet joy and comfort came to soothe my agony.
“I walked along the shore and prayed aloud. I roamed the moors in paroxysms of petition. I prayed all night. I thought of the many little bodies there must be, prepared and ready, just waiting for a splendid, eager spirit to enter them at the moment of birth. Could not my darling be sent to one of these and, growing up in it to his full beauty and stature, come and find his wife again?