[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE.">[
And these cobwebs?
Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors, windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions, village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal" to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long dead and buried and forgotten!
Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in self-research many will succeed in reaching them—perhaps even more easily and completely than we have done.
It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former obtuseness, so distinct are they.
Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.
But let him become expectant of certain other notes; for instance, of the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.
By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim, latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience of this life.