A dead man's diary

by Coulson Kernahan

CHAPTER V.

IS OF AN EXPLANATORY NATURE ONLY.

When the first rough draft of this diary was lying on my study table, there called to see me, at a time when I chanced to be out, a certain novelist who is an old and intimate friend of mine. He was shown into the study to await my coming, and, on my return, I found him amusing himself with these papers. Of the reality of my death-experiences (which he persistently refused to regard as other than dreams) I had never been able to convince him, and I was not surprised therefore when, after the conversation turned upon the work each of us had in hand, he referred to my booklet in his usual sceptical tone.

"My dear fellow," he said, laying one hand upon the offending manuscript, "I haven't the slightest intention of disputing the truth of your statements, or of denying that your diary has a certain unwholesome interest of its own, but seriously, I don't think fiction is altogether in your line."

"Nor satire in yours," I replied; "but what have you to say against the thing now?"

"This," he answered, more evidently in earnest, "that you haven't scored as you might have done, but have let slip what opportunities you had for turning out something original. 'Letters from Hell' (which, by the bye, you must expect to be charged with imitating, though that needn't trouble you much) was confessedly a work of pure imagination, and I shouldn't be surprised if the fact helped somewhat to lessen the interest of the volume. Now your book has just enough shadow of probability or possibility to sustain the delusion, and all that will tell in its favour. The public likes—just as Dick Swiveller's Marchioness did—to 'make believe' in the reality of that which is meant to interest it; and books or plays can't be too life-like or realistic nowadays. You have 'made believe' until you have brought yourself to believe in the reality of something which I can't think ever happened; but that isn't my business. What I complain of is this:—that although you have a story to tell with sufficient shadow of probability or possibility, as I have said, to make it interesting, and to keep up the delusion, you have failed most lamentably to turn your opportunities to account. Take your death scene, for instance. Any practical writer of ordinary ability could imagine the sensations of dying, and could draw a far more powerful picture of them than you have done, who profess to have actually experienced those sensations personally. Then what you have to say about Heaven and Hell, and all the rest of it, is curious, and some may think it not uninteresting, but you haven't given us any idea of what the places are like, after all. Why didn't you draw on your imagination, man? Why didn't you go in for the grim, and grey, and ghastly? Why didn't you revel in the weird (never mind Mr. Lang's abuse of the word), or conjure up blissful dreams of the blest and of Paradise? I know a dozen men who could have made twice as much capital, and far more saleable copy, out of that idea of yours about a man dying, or nearly so, and then coming back to relate what he has seen, as it appears from the standpoint of frail mortality; and I tell you frankly that I don't think you have scored as you ought to have done."

"But what has all this," says the reader, "to do with your diary? We are willing to hear what you have to tell about your experiences, but we didn't bargain for an article setting forth the opinion of your friends on the subject, and we can't help thinking that the introduction of this chapter is somewhat uncalled for."

Well, perhaps it is so, but it is because the conversation given above touches upon some points concerning which I am anxious that the reader should come to a right understanding before he enters upon my after-death experience, that I have inserted it here, and if a very few minutes' indulgence be granted me, I will say what I have to say as briefly as possible. I could, I am sure, by drawing a little on my imagination, have written a far more striking description of the sensations of death, than that which I have given in the preceding chapter, for of such description, in the sense of "working-up a situation" there is absolutely none. All that I have tried to do is to relate my story with a resolute avoidance of anything akin to the sensational. If aught of the sensational there be in the narrative, it is because the thing is sensational in itself, and not because I have attempted to make it so. As George Eliot says, it is far easier to draw a griffin, with wings and claws filled in according to our own fancy, than to correctly limn the outlines of a lion; and to keep to the truth has been the hardest part of my task.

When the mental picture or impression left on my mind is but an imperfect one, I have not attempted, as I might easily and perhaps pardonably have done, to fill in the missing outline from my imagination, but have given the picture or impression for what it is worth, and have left it so. My memory is, generally speaking, excellent, and during the first few hours of consciousness after the return of vitality, the recollection of that which I had seen was as fresh as are the events of yesterday. Within a week, however, I found that the greater part of it had gone from me, and that all my efforts to recall the mental pictures were unavailing. I have sometimes wondered if it can be possible that when my presence was missed from the realms into which I had so untimely wandered, some angelic messenger was despatched with instructions to wipe out from the tablets of my memory the records of my experiences. Whether it be so, or not, I cannot say, but this I do know, that had I commenced my diary within a week of my return to life, the booklet would have been one such as it is not often given to man to write. The subject, however, seemed then, and for a long time after, too solemn to be turned to account for "copy," and each of the several years which have elapsed since I died, has taken with it some part of the recollections that remained to me; and now that I have all too tardily set about my task, I have but blurred and broken reminiscences to offer in place of a life-like picture.

These reminiscences, vague, disconnected, and fragmentary as they are, I have given for what they are worth. If any reader think that I have overrated the value of my experiences, and that I have failed to verify the promise with which I started, I can only assure him that the failure is due, not to the insufficiency of what is strange and striking in my experiences, but to my inability to recall what I have seen, and to my incompetency to do fitting justice to my singular subject.