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“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 brain,” 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 Not only so, but he had withdrawn himself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.
“The house was furnished, just as he had lived in it. It was a
rather gloomy dwelling for one who was neither a recluse nor a
student, and I think it gave something of its character to me -
perhaps some of its former occupant’s character; for always I felt
in it a certain melancholy that was not in my natural disposition,
nor, I think, due to loneliness. I had no servants that slept in the
house, but I have always been, as you know, rather fond of my own
society, being much addicted to reading, though little to study.
Whatever was the cause, the effect was dejection and a sense of
impending evil; this was especially so in Dr. Mannering’s study,
although that room was the lightest and most airy in the house. The
doctor’s life-size portrait in oil hung in that room, and seemed
completely to dominate it. There was nothing unusual in the picture;
the man was evidently rather good looking, about fifty years old,
with iron-gray hair, a smooth-shaven face and dark, serious eyes.
Something in the picture always drew and held my attention. The
man’s appearance became familiar to me, and rather ‘haunted’ me.
“One evening I was passing through this room to my bedroom, with a
lamp - there is no gas in Meridian. I stopped as usual before the
portrait, which seemed in the lamplight to have a new expression,
not easily named, but distinctly uncanny. It interested but did not
disturb me. I moved the lamp from one side to the other and observed
the effects of the altered light. While so engaged I felt an impulse
to turn round. As I did so I saw a man moving across the room
directly toward me! As soon as he came near enough for the lamplight
to illuminate the face I saw that it was Dr. Mannering himself; it
was as if the portrait were walking!
“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat coldly, ‘but if you knocked I
did not hear.’
“He passed me, within an arm’s length, lifted his right forefinger,
as in warning, and without a word went on out of the room, though I
observed his exit no more than I had observed his entrance.
“Of course, I need not tell you that this was what you will call an
hallucination and I call an apparition. That room had only two
doors, of which one was locked; the other led into a bedroom, from
which there was no exit. My feeling on realizing this is not an
important part of the incident.
“Doubtless this seems to you a very commonplace ‘ghost story’ - one
constructed on the regular lines laid down by the old masters of the
art. If that were so I should not have related it, even if it were
true. The man was not dead; I met him to-day in Union street. He
passed me in a crowd.”
Hawver had finished his story and both men were silent. Dr. Frayley
absently drummed on the table with his fingers.
“Did he say anything to-day?” he asked - “anything from which you
inferred that he was not dead?”
Hawver stared and did not reply.
“Perhaps,” continued Frayley, “he made a sign, a gesture - lifted a
finger, as in warning. It’s a trick he had - a habit when saying
something serious - announcing the result of a diagnosis, for
example.”
“Yes, he did - just as his apparition had done. But, good God! did
you ever know him?”
Hawver was apparently growing nervous.
“I knew him. I have read his book, as will every physician some day.
It is one of the most striking and important of the century’s
contributions to medical science. Yes, I knew him; I attended him in
an illness three years ago. He died.”
Hawver sprang from his chair, manifestly disturbed. He strode
forward and back across the room; then approached his friend, and in
a voice not altogether steady, said: “Doctor, have you anything to
say to me - as a physician?”
“No, Hawver; you are the healthiest man I ever knew. As a friend I
advise you to go to your room. You play the violin like an angel.
Play it; play something light and lively. Get this cursed bad
business off your mind.”
The next day Hawver was found dead in his room, the violin at his
neck, the bow upon the strings, his music open before him at
Chopin’s funeral march.
A Diagnosis of Death
A Classic Horror Story
by
Ambrose Bierce |
