_The Insanity of Jones_

(A Study in Reincarnation)


Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the
way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for
them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar,
thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the
great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them
and the world of causes behind.

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance
by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament
bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome,
that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a
chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the
shifting frontier.

Some, however, are born with this awful certainty in their hearts, and
are called to no apprenticeship, and to this select company Jones
undoubtedly belonged.

All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a
more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men
measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it
in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that
all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of _real_
things behind the curtain--things he was for ever trying to get at, and
that sometimes he actually did get at.