The World's Greatest Books - Volume 5 Part 36

And what is pa.s.sing meanwhile on the ownerless island?

Forty years have pa.s.sed since Timar's disappearance from Komorn, and the island is now a complete model farm. Recently, a friend of mine, an ardent naturalist, took me to the island. I had heard as a child of Timar and his wealth.

Every inch of ground is utilised or serves to beautify the place. The tobacco grown here has the most exquisite aroma, and the beehives look from a distance like a small town with many-shaped roofs.

It is easy to see that the owner of the island understands luxury, and yet that owner never has a farthing to call his own; no money ever enters the island. Those however, who need the exports know also the requirements of the islanders, and bring them for barter.

The whole colony consisted of one family, and each was called only by his Christian name. The six sons of the first settler had married women of the district, and the numbers of grandchildren and great-grandchildren already exceeded forty, but the island maintained them all. Poverty was unknown; they lived in luxury; each knew some trade, and if they had been ten times as many, their labour would have supported them.

When we arrived on the island, the nominal head of the family, a well-built man of forty, received us cordially, and in the evening presented us to his parents.

When my name was mentioned to the old man he looked long at me, and a visible colour rose in his cheeks. I began to tell him of what was going on in the world, that Hungary was now united to Austria, and that the taxes were very heavy.

He blew a cloud from his pipe, and the smoke said, "My island has nothing to do with that, we have no taxes here."

I told him of wars, financial panics, the strife of religion and politics, and the smoke seemed to say, "We wage war with no one here.

Thank G.o.d, we have no money here and no elections or ministers."

Presently the old man asked me where I was born, and what my profession was? And when I told him that I wrote romances, he said, "Guess my story. There was once a man who left a world in which he was admired and respected, and created a second world in which he was loved."

"May I venture to ask your name?" I said.

The old man seemed to grow a head taller; then, raising his trembling hands, he laid them on my head. And it seemed to me as if once, long, long before those same hands had rested on my head when childish curls covered it, and that I had seen that n.o.ble face before.

"My name is n.o.body," he replied to my question; and after that night I saw him no more during our stay on the island.

The privileges granted by two governments to the owner of the island will last for fifty years more. And who knows what may happen to the world in fifty years?

COULSON KERNAHAN

A Dead Man's Diary

Coulson Kernahan, born at Ilfracombe, England, Aug. 1, 1858, is a son of Dr. James Kernahan, M.A. He has contributed largely to periodicals, and has written in many veins, alternating serious and religious works with sensational novels, and literary criticism with humour and sport. It is by his imaginative booklets--now collected in one volume under the t.i.tle of "Visions"--that he is best known. These booklets have circulated literally "by the million," and have been translated into no fewer than sixteen languages, including Chinese. "A Dead Man's Diary" appeared anonymously in 1890, and attracted unusual attention, the authorship being attributed, among others, to Harold Frederic and Robert Buchanan. Since then "A Dead Man's Diary"--of which Mr. J.M.

Barrie, in reviewing it, said, "The vigour of the book is great, and the author has such a gift of intensity that upon many readers it will have mesmeric effect"--has gone through innumerable editions, in England and in America.

_I.--The Ghost of the Past_

Some years ago I became so seriously ill that I was p.r.o.nounced dying, and, finally, dead. Dead to all intents and purposes I remained for two days, when, to the astonishment of the physicians, I exhibited symptoms of returning vitality, and in a week was convalescent.

Of the moments preceding my pa.s.sing I recollect only that there came over me a strange and sudden sense of loss, as though some life-element had gone out from me. Of pain there was none, nor any mental anxiety.

I recollect only an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of soul-emanc.i.p.ation and peace, a sense of soul-emanc.i.p.ation such as one might feel were he to awaken on a sunny summer morning to find that sorrow and sin were gone from the world for ever, a peace ample and restful as the hallowed hush and awe of 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 sh.o.r.es where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar.

And so life ebbed away, until there came a time when the outward and deathward-setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept sh.o.r.eward and lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of that larger life into which I had died.

My next recollection is that the events of my past life were rising before me. The hands on the dial of time went back a score of years, and I was a young man of twenty-one, living in chambers off Holborn. One evening there burst over London a fearful thunderstorm, and hearing a knock at my door, I opened it, to find a beautiful girl named Dorothy, the daughter of the housekeeper, standing there. Terrified by the lightning, and finding herself alone, she begged to be allowed to remain until her mother's return.

The words had scarcely pa.s.sed her lips before there came another blinding flash of lightning, followed almost instantaneously by a terrific crash of thunder. With a cry of pa.s.sion and fear, she flung her arms around me, and the next moment I found myself pressing her to my heart and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses, that I loved her.

Almost immediately afterwards, we heard the opening of doors, which indicated her mother's home-coming; but, before leaving, Dorothy told me that the room immediately above mine was her own. Of the h.e.l.l-born thought which rose in my mind as I listened she, I am sure, had no suspicion. Need I tell the remainder of my story? I think not.

You may wonder, perhaps, why I recall circ.u.mstances that happened so many years ago. You would cease to wonder had you seen the ghost of the past rise up to call upon G.o.d and His Christ for judgment upon the betrayer. For this was my first glimpse of h.e.l.l; this was my day of judgment. The recording angel of my awakened conscience showed me my sin, and the ruin my sin had wrought, as G.o.d sees, and I realised that--But no! I am sick, I am fainting! I cannot--I cannot write more.

_II.--The Secret of Man's Destiny_

"When anyone dies," I had been told in childhood, "he goes either to heaven or to h.e.l.l, according to whether he has been a good or bad man,"

and I recollect being not a little troubled as to what became of the people whose virtues were about equally matched with their vices. When I opened my eyes in that ante-chamber of the spirit-world into which I have had admittance I discovered that heaven and h.e.l.l as separate places have no existence, for the good, the bad, and the indifferent exist together exactly as they exist here. I do not say that there will be no day of harvesting in which the tares shall finally be separated from the wheat. On that point, as on many others, I am ignorant. Men and women whom I know on earth speak of the dead--"the changed"--as being perfected in knowledge and as having solved for ever "the great secret."

That is not my experience.

So far from "the great secret," the secret of man's destiny and G.o.d's Being, becoming known at death, the facts as I found them are that these remain almost as great a mystery after death as before.

Even in h.e.l.l (I use the word as indicating mental or physical suffering--in my case, the former--not with any local significance) there are moments when the anguish-stricken spirit is mercifully allowed a temporary reprieve. Such a moment occurred after the first awful paroxysm of self-loathing and torture which I experienced when my past life was made known to me in its true colours, and it was in this saner and comparatively painless interval that I met one whom I had known on earth as a woman of the purest life and character. Being still under the impression that I was in h.e.l.l in the sense in which I had been accustomed to think of that place, I started back upon seeing her, and cried out in astonishment, "You here! _You_! And in Hades!"

"Where else should I be except where Arthur is?" she answered quietly, and I then remembered a worthless brother of that name to whom she was pa.s.sionately attached. "Even Dives in the parable," she went on, "was unable to forget the five brethren he had left behind him, and cried out amid the flames, asking that Lazarus be sent to warn them, lest they, too, came to that place of torment. Is it likely, then, that any wife, mother, or sister, worthy the name, would be content to remain idle in heaven, knowing that a loved one was in h.e.l.l and in agony? We are told that after His death Christ preached to the spirits in prison, and I believe that He came here to h.e.l.l in search of the so-called lost."

"Tell me," I said, "you who are in heaven, if you are perfectly happy."

"You are not altogether wrong in calling this heaven," she replied, "although it is little more than the antechamber between earth and heaven. It is my heaven at present, but it will not be my heaven always, any more than it will be always your h.e.l.l, and although it is heaven, it is not _the_ heaven. When I was on earth, I longed for heaven, _not that I might be delivered from sorrow, but from sinfulness_; and I think I may say that I am as happy here as my failures will let me be."

"Your failures!" I exclaimed. "I thought we had done with failures."

"You remember the text in the Koran," she said. "'Paradise is under the shadow of swords.' Here, as on earth, there is no progress without effort, and here, too, there are difficulties to be overcome. Yet even on earth there was one element in the strife which lent dignity even to our failures. Sin and shame are, after all, only human; the effort and determination to overcome them are divine. Ceasing to be an angel, Satan became a devil. Man falls, and even in his fall retains something of G.o.d."

After a time we fell to talking of the past, and, mentioning the name of the very n.o.blest man I have ever known, a man who made possible the purity of Sir Galahad, made possible the courage of Coeur de Lion--I had almost said made possible the sinfulness of Christ--I inquired whether she had seen him in Paradise.

"As yet," she answered, "I know only one of the many circles into which the spirit-world seems naturally to resolve it. But I suspect that if you and I could see where he is, we should find him infinitely nearer to the Father-heart of the universe than I at least can for countless ages hope to attain!"

"What do you mean by 'circles'?" I said. "Is each human soul on its arrival here a.s.signed a fitting place and level among his or her spiritual fellows?"

"There is some such gathering of like to like as that of which you speak," she answered. "The majority begin in a lower circle, and remain there until they are fitted to move onward to a higher sphere. Others take a place in that higher sphere immediately, and some few are led into the Holy Presence straightway."

And then her voice seemed to sound to me like the voice of one in the far distance; I felt the darkness closing in upon me on every side, and knew that my hour of punishment was again at hand.