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The Conscious Amanda
by
“She was a very active person, but she was not very strong; and when she was nearly forty years old something happened to her lungs, and her health gave way more and more, until at last there was no hope for her, and she knew she must die.”
“Oh, this is an awful way to begin a story!” said the captain. “I don’t like it. You ought not to kill your heroine just as you begin.”
“If you want to make any remarks about this story, papa,” said the Daughter of the House, “which shall be worth anything, you ought to wait until you hear more of it and begin to understand it. When Miss Amanda found she had a very little while to live, she composed herself comfortably, and began to repeat to herself the words, ‘Fifty years, fifty years, fifty years,’ over and over again. This she did until at last she died; and then there was her funeral; and she was buried; and there was a stone put up over her head with her name on it.”
John Gayther smiled with approbation. He felt sure he was going to hear a story to his liking. The captain smoked steadily. As he had been advised, he would wait until he felt firm ground beneath him before he made any further remarks. As for the Mistress of the House, she looked at her daughter, and wondered. The story continued:
“All this happened a few years before the middle of a century, and a few years before the end of a century Miss Amanda regained consciousness. That is to say, she woke up at the end of fifty years, exactly as she had been in the habit of waking up at seven o’clock in the morning. But although she was conscious she did not understand how it was possible she should be so. She did not see; she did not hear; she did not feel. She had no body; no hands or feet; no eyes or ears: she had nothing; and she knew she had nothing. She simply was conscious, and that was all there was about it. She was not surprised; she seemed to take her state and condition as a matter of course, and, to a certain degree, she comprehended it. She remembered perfectly well that she had lost consciousness as she was saying ‘Fifty years, fifty years, fifty years’ over and over again; and now she knew that, as she had regained consciousness, the fifty years must have passed; so, instead of wondering how things had come to be as they were, she, or rather her consciousness, set itself to work to observe everything around it and about it. This had always been Miss Amanda’s habit of mind.
“Now I want to explain,” said the young lady, “that in one way it will be troublesome for me to express myself exactly as I tell this story. Of course Miss Amanda did not exist; it was only her consciousness which observed things: but I think it will be a great deal less awkward for me if I speak of that consciousness as Miss Amanda. None of us really understands consciousnesses with their outsides all hulled off as John is doing with those seeds which he drops into the basin. Each one of those little seeds has within it a power which we do not understand. And that is the way with Miss Amanda’s consciousness.”
“There,” said the captain; “I agree with you. Nobody can object to that.”
“The first thing of which Miss Amanda became conscious was the smell of sweet peas. She had always been very fond of these flowers. The air was soft and warm, and that, too, was pleasant to her. She observed a good many other things, such as trees and grass; but she did not know where she was, and she did not see anything she could recognize. You must not forget that when I say she saw anything, I mean she became conscious of it. Presently, however, she did perceive something that was familiar, and if such a thing had been possible her face would have flushed with pleasure. This familiar object was a sun-dial in the middle of a wide grass-mound. The sun-dial was of brass. It was very old, and some of the figures on the round plate were nearly obliterated by time and weather; but Miss Amanda recognized it. It was the same sun-dial she had always known in the home where she had been born. But it was not mounted on a round brick pillar, as when she had known it: now it rested on a handsome stone pedestal; but it was the same sun-dial. She could see the place where the upright part had been mended after her nephew John, then only fourteen, had thrown a stone at it, being jealous of it because it would never do any work in bad weather, whereas he had to go to school, rain or shine.