Among the trophies on the mantel—whose inscriptions always amazed a visiting colleague, marvelling at his distinguished host’s diversity of proficiencies—there was a tarnished triple-handled aquatic prize won by Doctor Hudson when, in the early days of his internship, he had taken a First in a mile swim.
“Still swim?”
“Regularly.”
“Enjoy it?”
“Well—it’s good for me.”
“Keeps your weight down?”
“Perhaps. But, in any event, it’s good for me.”
Some time in the course of his visit, the visitor would rag his athletic host upon the excess of his prudence; for the most conspicuous article of furniture in the “gun room” was an elaborate but not very decorative inhalator of the super-type used by lifesavers at busy wharves and crowded beaches, equipped with nickelled oxygen tanks and a complication of mechanical mysteries.
“What’s that thing?”
Hudson would tell him, briefly, brusquely.
“What do you want with it?”
“Oh, somebody might fall in. The water’s deep out here.”
It was clear enough to the guest, if he ventured to press his queries, that Doctor Hudson did not enjoy any talk about aquatics. The guest found himself wondering why. Perry Ruggles could have explained, had he been disposed. There had once been a very anxious hour at Flintridge, down on the narrow pier. Not even Martha knew. The next time he had come out, Doctor Hudson had brought the inhalator, and had explained its use to the terrified Perry who thereafter stood in dread of the thing. It became a grim spectre that haunted his life. Some day, he suspected, he would be obliged to experiment with it. The responsibility constituted a steady, remorseless threat that tortured him and kept him awake nights. Some sharp, man-to-man candour had been handed to the surgeon, that afternoon, by his uncouth caretaker. It had been a long time since anybody had called Wayne Hudson a fool to his face. He accepted the degree with dignity.
“Perhaps I am, Perry,” he replied soberly. “You probably wouldn’t know. But, however that may be, the thing you’re to keep in mind is that this top valve controls the oxygen; and if you have occasion to use it, don’t get excited and forget.”
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 speedboat 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 doglike devotion as old Perry’s. I suppose he went in after him, clothes and all; bad leg too.”
Robert Merrick, the paper
