“Frederick,” he announced, when we invited communication, his bold signature stretching across the whole width of the paper. “Hello, Sis! This is too good not to be true! Hello, Dick!” This to Mr. Wylie, whose marriage to his sister had taken place during the last weeks of his illness. “Welcome home to the family! We’re all in it now, for good and all. This is the thing we’ve all needed, I almost as much as the rest of you, but I did know that sooner or later it must come, so I could bear it better than you could.”
It must not be understood that all these communications came as consecutively as they are presented here. There were frequent pauses; sometimes because of our preoccupation in conversation; sometimes, apparently, because of difficulties of transmission not explained. Occasionally I stopped to verify a word or a phrase, asking if it had been correctly taken, and with increasing frequency the pencil returned without suggestion from me, to cross out false starts. Some of the latter, which seemed significant, will be indicated from time to time. The following message, however, came rapidly, without pause.
“We are all of kindred purposes. That’s the reason we cling to each other so. Family hasn’t a thing to do with it. It was our good fortune to have no forces of disintegration in our immediate group. We are all builders, in one way or another. Not all in the same way, but all for the great purpose. This is one of the things I have wanted to say to you. Don’t be misled by transient relationships of that life. Respect them, but don’t be eternally influenced by them, because when you get over here you’ll find that some of the people you’ve thought you were most fond of have simply dropped out. You don’t need them, nor they you. Find your purposes clearly, and stick to them. We all have purpose, but not all of you there have found out just what yours is. Find it, and follow it fearlessly. There, that’s off my chest!”
Mr. Wylie spoke of the “upside-down stunt,” of which some one had written him, and I said it had been done chiefly to convince me—to show me, in Frederick’s phrase, “who was running it.”
“You know now who is running it,” he contributed, “but you’re certainly formal with strangers!”
In the midst of some talk of ours, the pencil swung off with vigor, writing, “Sis!” in huge script, like a joyous exclamation, ending in strong circles. “Just wait till I catch Dad!” he went on. “And Babe, too! All of us together! Margaret will have to forget her formality then, I tell you!”
Mrs. Wylie mentioned the common impression that personality must be transmuted by death into something remote and strange—that only the soul survived. “Of course, we love the soul of any one dear to us,” she said. “But, after all, the thing we know best, and therefore love best, is the habit of thought—the characteristic mental attitude, and it is so wonderful to find Frederick unchanged—just like himself.”
“Sure! Why not?” he returned. “You people must learn that this isn’t ‘like himself.’ It is himself. Right here on the job.”
“Those words!” His mother and sister exchanged startled glances. Then they told me that just before his long struggle for life on this plane ended, when during six months his powers of recuperation had repeatedly astonished surgeons and nurses, he opened his eyes, to find his father bending over him, and whispered for the last time: “On the job.”