Cord and Creese

by James De Mille

I did not speak to her, for she was to me a holy being, not to be addressed lightly. Yet she did not refuse nourishment, and grew stronger, until at last I was able to have her moved to Quebec. There I obtained proper accommodations for her and good nurses.

I have told you what she was before this. Subsequently there came a change. The nurses and the doctors called it a stupor.

There was something in her face which inspired awe among all who saw her. If it is the soul of man that gives expression to the features, then her soul must have been familiar with things unknown to us. How often have I seen her in walking across the room stop suddenly and stand fixed on the spot, musing and sad! She commonly moved about as though she saw nothing, as though she walked in a dream, with eyes half closed, and sometimes murmuring inaudible words. The nurses half loved and half feared her. Yet there were some little children in the house who felt all love and no fear, for I have seen her smiling on them with a smile so sweet that it seemed to me as if they stood in the presence of their guardian angel. Strange, sad spirit, what thoughts, what memories are these which make her life one long reverie, and have taken from her all power to enjoy the beautiful that dwells on earth! She fills all my thoughts with her loneliness, her tears, and her spiritual face, bearing the marks of scenes that can never be forgotten. She lives and moves amidst her recollections. What is it that so overwhelms all her thoughts? That face of hers appears as though it had bathed itself in the atmosphere of some diviner world than this: and her eyes seem as if they may have gazed upon the Infinite Mystery.

Now from the few words which she has casually dropped I gather this to be her own belief. That when she fell into the state of trance her soul was parted from her body, though still by an inexplicable sympathy she was aware of what was passing around her lifeless form. Yet her soul had gone forth into that spiritual world toward which we look from this earth with such eager wonder. It had mingled there with the souls of others. It had put forth new powers, and learned the use of new faculties. Then that soul was called back to its body.

This maiden—this wonder among mortals—is not a mortal, she is an exiled soul. I have seen her sit with tears streaming down her face, tears such as men shed in exile. For she is like a banished man who has only one feeling, a longing, yearning homesickness. She has been once in that radiant world for a time which we call three days in our human calculations, but which to her seems indefinite; for as she once said—and it is a pregnant thought, full of meaning—there is no time there, all is infinite duration. The soul has illimitable powers; in an instant it can live years, and she in those three days had the life of ages. Her former life on earth has now but a faint hold upon her memory in comparison with that life among the stars. The sorrow that her loved ones endured has become eclipsed by the knowledge of the blessedness in which she found them.

Alas! it is a blessing to die, and it is only a curse to rise from the dead. And now she endures this exile with an aching heart, with memories that are irrepressible, with longings unutterable, and yearnings that cannot be expressed for that starry world and that bright companionship from which she has been recalled. So she sometimes speaks. And little else can she say amidst her tears. Oh, sublime and mysterious exile, could I but know what you know, and have but a small part of that secret which you can not explain!

For she can not tell what she witnessed there. She sometimes wishes to do so, but can not. When asked directly, she sinks into herself and is lost in thought. She finds no words. It is as when we try to explain to a man who has been always blind the scenes before our eyes. We can not explain them to such a man. And so with her. She finds in her memory things which no human language has been made to express. These languages were made for the earth, not for heaven. In order to tell me what she knows, she would need the language of that world, and then she could not explain it, for I could not understand it.

Only once I saw her smile, and that was when one of the nurses casually mentioned, with horror, the death of some acquaintance. “Death!” she murmured, and her eyes lighted up with a kind of ecstasy. “Oh, that I might die!” She knows no blessing on earth except that which we consider a curse, and to her the object of all her wishes is this one thing—Death. I shall not soon forget that smile. It seemed of itself to give a new meaning to death.

Do I believe this, so wild a theory, the very mention of which has carried me beyond myself? I do not know. All my reason rebels. It scouts the monstrous idea. But here she stands before me, with her memories and thoughts, and her wonderful words, few, but full of deepest meaning—words which I shall never forget—and I recognize something before which Reason falters. Whence this deep longing of hers? Why when she thinks of death does her face grow thus radiant, and her eyes kindle with hope? Why does she so pine and grow sick with desire? Why does her heart thus ache as day succeeds to day, and she finds herself still under the sunlight, with the landscapes and the music of this fair earth still around her?

Once, in some speculations of mine, which I think I mentioned to you, Teresina, I thought that if a man could reach that spiritual world he would look with contempt upon the highest charms that belong to this. Here is one who believes that she has gone through this experience, and all this earth, with all its beauty, is now an object of indifference to her. Perhaps you may ask, Is she sane? Yes, dear, as sane as I am, but with a profounder experience and a diviner knowledge.