a diagnosis of death
'I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians - men of
science, as you are pleased to be called,' said Hawver, replying
to an accusation that had not been made. 'Some of you - only a few,
I confess - believe in the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions
which you have not the honesty to call ghosts. I go no further than
a conviction that the living are sometimes seen where they are not,
but have been - where they have lived so long, perhaps so intensely,
as to have left their impress on everything about them. I know,
indeed, that one's environment may be so affected by one's personality
as to yield, long afterward, an image of one's self to the eyes
of another. Doubtless the impressing personality has to be the right
kind of personality as the perceiving eyes have to be the right
kind of eyes - mine, for example.'
'Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to the wrong
kind of brains,' said Dr. Frayley, smiling.
'Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified; that is
about the reply that I supposed you would have the civility to make.'
'Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is a good deal to say,
don't you think? Perhaps you will not mind the trouble of saying
how you learned.'
'You will call it an hallucination,' Hawver said, 'but that does
not matter.' And he told the story.
'Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the hot weather term
in the town of Meridian. The relative at whose house I had intended
to stay was ill, so I sought other quarters. After some difficulty
I succeeded in renting a vacant dwelling that had been occupied
by an eccentric doctor of the name of Mannering, who had gone away
years before, no one knew where, not even his agent. He had built
the house himself and had lived in it with an old servant for about
ten years. His practice, never very extensive, had after a few years
been given up entirely. Not only so, but he had withdrawn himself
almost altogether from social life and become a recluse. I was told
by the village doctor, about the only person with whom he held any
relations, that during his retirement he had devoted himself to
a single line of study, the result of which he had expounded in
a book that did not commend itself to the approval of his professional
brethren, who, indeed, considered him not entirely sane. I have
not seen the book and cannot now recall the title of it, but I am
told that it expounded a rather startling theory. He held that it
was possible in the case of many a person in good health to forecast
his death with precision, several months in advance of the event.
The limit, I think, was eighteen months. There were local tales
of his having exerted his powers of prognosis, or perhaps you would
say diagnosis; and it was said that in every instance the person
whose friends he had warned had died suddenly at the appointed time,
and from no assignable cause. All this, however, has nothing to
do with what I have to tell; I thought it might amuse a physician.
|
