A dead man's diary

by Coulson Kernahan

I DIE.

I pass on now to tell of my death moments. The room in which I died was the room in which I had been born. One half of it was my bedroom, and the other half—that near the window—was my study. There I had done all my work, and there were my books and papers. There, too, grouped around the walls, were portraits of the men and women who seem to me sometimes to be more myself, as Emerson puts it, than even I am, and who are nearer to me and dearer to me, many of them, than are some of those who sit daily with me in the household—I mean the portraits of my favourite writers.

I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any part—probably they had—in determining the current of my thought, but I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted, as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven.

Those of my readers who fail to appreciate in its fulness the saying of "Diana of the Crossways" that in poetry "those that have souls meet their fellows," or that of the Saturday Review, that "there is an incommunicable magic in poetry which is foolishness to the multitude,"—may think this an exaggeration. Ah well, they are of the "multitude,"—the more pity for them!—and can never understand how the soul is stirred by a simple sentence in the god-like language of Shakespeare, or is as irresistibly swayed as are trees in a whirlwind by a single stanza from Swinburne; how the magic witchery of a couplet by Keats can bring tears to the eyes; or how the tender grace of a line from Herrick can set the senses vibrating with an exquisite thrill of joy. Nay, I could indicate sentences in the diamond-pointed prose of George Meredith, pellucid sentences, crystal-clear and luminous as the scintillations of Sirius (and for all their judicial poise and calmness emitted like the Sirius scintillations at a white heat),—which affect me in a similar way. There are few other writers of whom I could affirm this with the like confidence; but Meredith's thoughts have crystallized into a brain-stimulating prose—every sentence of which is a satisfying mouthful to our intellectual hunger—which is sometimes pure poetry.

Poetry is to my diary, however, and in fact to all I think or say, what King Charles's head was to Mr. Dick's memorial, and it is time I returned to my narrative.

The possibility of a fatal ending to my illness had never occurred to myself or to my family, until that ending was nigh at hand, and so it was that death came upon me in every way unawares. I remember my father bending over me, and asking gently if I knew that I was dying, and I recollect looking up to whisper back, "No: is it so?" and receiving his sorrowful response. It was too late then for me to do more than recognise the fact as a fact, for my brain was so strangely affected that I was utterly incapable of following out that fact to its result. I knew that I was dying—knew it much as I might have known it of some other person—but felt no individual pang of terror or surprise. This state of indifferent acquiescence in that which was about to occur was followed by a sense of regret at having to leave a volume which I had in hand unfinished, and then, with the ruling passion strong in death, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe my sensations. It is so with me ever and always. Art and Poetry have become such realities, that I cannot take them up and lay them aside at pleasure, but must needs bear them with me whithersoever I go. I carry my poetry with me to bed and to breakfast; and I can sit and write, or carry on a conversation, with the consciousness of Mr. Lang's latest Ballade, or Mr. Theodore Watts's last sonnet, running like an undercurrent in my mind. I am perpetually striving to fix in language the fleeting colours of sea and sky. I can never listen to the trickle and purl of a brooklet tinkling over its pebbly bed, without making diligent search in my vocabulary for a word—the golden word—which seems most to babble and to blab of water. As surely as I find in Wordsworth's poems a background of sky and mountain, just as surely do I find in mountain and sky an echo of Wordsworth's song. To me, too, the sonnet which rises involuntarily to my lips, as I gaze out upon the deep, is as much a part of the scene before me, as is the sun or the sand upon the shore; and I have come to feel with Mr. Lowell, as if a sunset were "like a quotation from Dante or Milton," and that "if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean."

I was telling you that as I lay a-dying, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe my sensations. At this point, however, the train of my thoughts was disturbed—and I recollect a slight reawakening of my old characteristic irritability at the interruption—by the entrance of a sister who had come from a distance to see me. I remember slightly lifting my head to speak to her, and then glancing round the room to see if all were present. Yes, close beside me, and with his head bowed over his hands, sat my father, and round about the bed were gathered the remainder of the family. Nor were these all, for standing among them were three other figures—that of my brother Fred, whose grave as yet was hardly green, and of my mother and my little sister Comfort, both of whom had died when I was a child. If my conviction that I have indeed been dead be a delusion,—as I doubt not many of my readers will think,—is it not strange, I would ask, that these faces should have been with me at the end? Had there been any conjecture in my mind as to the probability of my meeting with my lost ones, I could readily believe that what I saw was the creation of my own brain. But there had been no such conjecture, for death had taken me, as I have already explained, entirely unawares, and no thought of the dead had as much as occurred to me. Their presence, however, so far from causing me any surprise, seemed perfectly natural, for the fact that they were dead did not dawn upon my consciousness.

This, I am ready to allow, strongly supports the theory that these experiences may be nothing more than dreams, for in dreams it not seldom happens that we re-live the past, and hold converse with our departed ones, all oblivious of the death which has come between us. It may be so, I admit, but in my heart of hearts I cannot think it; for if all that I have to tell be but a dream, then does it seem to me the strangest dream ever dreamed by man. Moreover, with these three figures was a fourth—a figure which at first had escaped my notice; and it is the presence of this figure in the room which is to me most unaccountable. My mother, when I first saw her, was standing at the foot of the bed, with my dead brother and sister looking over her shoulder, but at the sight of my father's grief, she went gently round to where he was sitting, and with a caress of infinite pity stooped down as if to whisper in his ear. It was then that I saw for the first time that she held by the hand a little child—a little child whom I had never seen before, but across whose face, as he looked up at me, there flitted the phantom of a resemblance I could not catch.

I remember that even then, brain-benumbed and dying as I was, I wondered who that little child could be; but there dawned upon me no shadowy suspicion of the truth, and I passed away with that wonder unremoved.

I think now—nay, I am sure—that I know who that child was. It was my brother James John, the eldest of the family, who had died before I was born, and whom, in this world, therefore, I had never seen.