“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.”
“I’ve always been on it since, too,” he rapidly assured them, “and
longing to tell you so. You never can know, until you try it, how we hate
to be left out. We’re on the job as you can’t even imagine, and it makes
us sort o’ sick that we can’t get it over to you of our own love and
purpose.”
He interrupted the talk following this with: “Trot along to lunch! I want
to start going and not stop. Get it over, do!”
So we trotted, and got it over as soon as possible, though throughout
the meal he insisted upon having a voice in the conversation, writing
messages on all the blank paper we had about us, and over the backs of
the available menu cards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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