Four Weird Tales | Page 2

blue; nor was he
conscious of the slightest wish to mix in with the revival of cheap occultism which
proves so attractive to weak minds of mystical tendencies and unleashed imaginations.
There were certain things he knew, but none he cared to argue about; and he shrank
instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents of this other region, knowing
well that such names could only limit and define things that, according to any standards
in use in the ordinary world, were simply undefinable and illusive.
So that, although this was the way his mind worked, there was clearly a very strong
leaven of common sense in Jones. In a word, the man the world and the office knew as
Jones was Jones. The name summed him up and labelled him correctly--John Enderby
Jones.
Among the things that he knew, and therefore never cared to speak or speculate about,
one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net
result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies
each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one. The present John Jones was the
last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier
bodies and in other centuries. He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished
ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to
have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for
ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask
questions. And one result of this belief was that his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather
than upon the future; that he read much history, and felt specially drawn to certain
periods whose spirit he understood instinctively as though he had lived in them; and that
he found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the
present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and
speculating why men have got here as they are.
In the insurance office he did his work exceedingly well, but without much personal
ambition. Men and women he regarded as the impersonal instruments for inflicting upon
him the pain or pleasure he had earned by his past workings, for chance had no place in
his scheme of things at all; and while he recognised that the practical world could not get
along unless every man did his work thoroughly and conscientiously, he took no interest
in the accumulation of fame or money for himself, and simply, therefore, did his plain

duty, with indifference as to results.
In common with others who lead a strictly impersonal life, he possessed the quality of
utter bravery, and was always ready to face any combination of circumstances, no matter
how terrible, because he saw in them the just working-out of past causes he had himself
set in motion which could not be dodged or modified. And whereas the majority of
people had little meaning for him, either by way of attraction or repulsion, the moment he
met some one with whom he felt his past had been vitally interwoven his whole inner
being leapt up instantly and shouted the fact in his face, and he regulated his life with the
utmost skill and caution, like a sentry on watch for an enemy whose feet could already be
heard approaching.
Thus, while the great majority of men and women left him uninfluenced--since he
regarded them as so many souls merely passing with him along the great stream of
evolution--there were, here and there, individuals with whom he recognised that his
smallest intercourse was of the gravest importance. These were persons with whom he
knew in every fibre of his being he had accounts to settle, pleasant or otherwise, arising
out of dealings in past lives; and into his relations with these few, therefore, he
concentrated as it were the efforts that most people spread over their intercourse with a
far greater number. By what means he picked out these few individuals only those
conversant with the startling processes of the subconscious memory may say, but the
point was that Jones believed the main purpose, if not quite the entire purpose, of his
present incarnation lay in his faithful and thorough settling of these accounts, and that if
he sought to evade the least detail of such settling, no matter how unpleasant, he would
have lived in vain, and would return to his next incarnation with this added duty to
perform. For according to his beliefs there was no Chance, and could be no ultimate
shirking, and to avoid a problem was merely to waste