Читать книгу Magnificent Obsession - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 8

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Not a few men of importance to the surgical world resident in widely-spaced cities, recalled having had brief and somewhat disquieting conversations about swimming, while guests at Flintridge, when, one Sunday morning in early August, they read the front-page dispatch which reported that Doctor Wayne Hudson, widely known brain surgeon of Detroit, had drowned, the late afternoon before, near his summer place on Lake Saginack.

At their breakfast table in Seattle, Doctor Herman Bliss read the shocking headlines to his wife, and when she had commented sympathetically, he added:

"Not only very sad, my dear, but very strange!"

Pressed for explanation, he reviewed for her the incidents of a visit he had paid to his friend at the lake cottage, and the heavy constraint which had fallen upon their conversation when he had made some inquiries about his host's enjoyment of the water.

"Do you suppose," conjectured Mrs. Bliss, "that there could have lurked in his mind some vague mirage of the fate that waited for him?"

Her husband pursed his lips and shook his head. "I don't take much stock in such theories," he declared, almost too vehemently to be convincing.

"But you told me once that Doctor Hudson was 'prescient'!"

"Only a form of speech, Grace. Nobody is prescient. However, Hudson was extraordinarily sentient; psychic to an uncommon degree."

"But why did he persist in swimming," inquired Mrs. Bliss, "if he was afraid of it?"

"For that very reason, unquestionably. I never knew a man so impatient of normal people's timidities, or more passionately eager to make himself independent of fear. Doubtless this was the one thing that gave him anxiety, and he was resolved to master it."

"But—by the same logic," objected Mrs. Bliss, "he might have jumped off a precipice, if he found himself afraid of that."

"Not quite the same thing! Here was something he had been able to do with ease, skill and safety. Now, for some reason, he had suddenly become afraid of it. An experience of cramp, perhaps...Might happen again. The fear filtered through his thinking...Had prided himself on living in complete mental liberty...Knew now that he was housing a dread! So long as he gave that phobia the hospitality of his mind, he would be, by that much, no longer his own man; so he decided to go to the mat with his antagonist. I fancy that explains."

The newspaper account further detailed that by a singular coincidence the inhalator which Doctor Hudson owned, and kept at his cottage, was in use on the other side of the little lake at the exact moment of his own tragic need of it.

A few hundred yards off shore, near his grandfather's estate, "Windymere," young Robert Merrick, alone in his sailboat, had been knocked unconscious by a jibbing boom and pushed into the water.

"Must have been drunk," indignantly commented Doctor Bliss. "Things like that don't often happen to sober people."

Excited bathers, informed that there was an inhalator at the Hudson cottage, had rushed a speed-boat across for it, and after an hour's heroic exertion, were successful in restoring the young man to partial consciousness. It was said that he would undoubtedly recover.

"Unquestionably! He would!" growled Bliss.

It was believed, said the dispatch, that had the inhalator been immediately available and promptly applied, Doctor Hudson's life might have been saved. The caretaker, Perry Ruggles, observing the evident distress of his employer, had rowed quickly to the spot, dived for him, dragged his limp body into the boat. Desperately, Ruggles had set forth with his unconscious passenger towards the Windymere beach, and had rowed until his strength failed. Small craft, attracted by his signals, hurried to him; found him huddled over the lifeless body of Doctor Hudson, weeping hysterically, while the little boat drifted in the middle of the lake.

"Never saw such dog-like devotion as old Perry's. I suppose he went in after him, clothes and all; bad leg too."

Robert Merrick, the paper continued to explain, was the only son of the late Clifford Merrick and Mrs. Maxine Merrick, now resident in Paris. He had only that day returned from an extended visit with his mother, having gone abroad immediately after finishing at the State University in the mid-year senior class. He was further identified as the grandson of Nicholas J. Merrick, retired founder and large stockholder of the Axion Motor Corporation, with whom he made his home at Windymere.

"Hope this youngster will be able to realize how valuable a person he is," said Doctor Bliss, putting down the paper, "now that he has had his life handed back to him at such a price!"

There was still another coincidence connected with this event. The village physician, suspecting that Merrick's head injury might be in need of more skilful examination than he could give it, had sent him in a swift ambulance to Brightwood Hospital. At that moment he did not know that the man who had made Brightwood famous for its brain surgery would be unable to see his young patient.

"What do you suppose the boy said," speculated Mrs. Bliss, "when he learned what it had cost to save his life?"

"Well," reflected the doctor glumly, "from my own observation of the type of young cub whose father is dead, whose mother lives in Paris, whose doting grandfather is a retired millionaire, and who gets himself bumped off his boat by a boom in broad daylight, I should suppose he just scratched a match on the head of his bed and mumbled, 'Whadda yuh know about that!'"