A dead man's diary

by Coulson Kernahan

I have little left to tell of my death, for nothing else occurred of any moment, and I am resolved to confine myself strictly to facts. I remember that immediately after I had seen my mother, and while I was wondering who the child she held by the hand could be, there came over me a strange and sudden sense of loss—of physical loss, I think it was, as though some life-element had gone out from me. Of pain there was none, nor was I disturbed by any mental anxiety. I recollect only an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of soul-emancipation and peace—a sense of soul-emancipation such as one might feel were he to awaken on a sunny morning to find that all sorrow and sin were gone from the world for ever; a peace ample and restful as the hallowed hush and awe of summer twilight, without the twilight's tender pain.

Then I seemed to be sinking slowly and steadily through still depths of sun-steeped, light-filled waters that sang in my ears with a sound like a sweet-sad sobbing and soaring of music, and through which there swam up to me, in watered vistas of light, scenes of sunny seas and shining shores where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar. And so life ebbed and ebbed away, until at last there came a time—the moment of death, I believe—when the outward and deathward setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of that larger life into which I had died.

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."