A Rendezvous at the Grave
A Tryst with Death
By Edgar White
"I do not know, but somehow I feel if you would venture there some time after the ‘turn of the night,’ I would know that you were there, and that good would come of it. If there is any way to make my presence known to you I will do it. We may be quite near—you and I—to the Great Revelation: Who knows?”
The man who penned those lines stood closer to the Great Revelation than he perhaps suspected. A few days later Dr. Robert St. Clair contracted a malady from one of his patients and his death swiftly followed, as his constitution had been weakened from over-work. His remains now rested in Oakland cemetery, overlooking the Mississippi. By his request they were brought to the old home town for interment—he wanted to hear the ripple of the great river that had been the playground of our youth. The quotation was from the last letter he had written me.
In some respects Dr. St. Clair was odd. He had never become a convert to spirit communication, but he sought the answer to the riddle as diligently as some men seek gold in the mountains. He wanted to know. From the coal miners he had learned there was a short of inner movement of the earth along about midnight. At that hour rock would fall in the pit and the cross timbers would groan under their weight. It was a period when all the hidden forces of nature were in action. The doctor held the theory that if those on the farther shore could deliver a message, or make their presence known here, it would be along about that period. In his letter he spoke rather wistfully of wishing I would try the experiment with him in case he was called first, and I conjectured that when he learned his malady would end in his death, he stipulated that his remains be brought to our cemetery, where the matter would be convenient, if any place could be "convenient" for a man to go out to a graveyard after midnight and there await the appearance of a shadowy form from the other side.
By nature I’m intensely practical. Being a newspaper man, I’m rather cynical about ghosts, spirit communication, ouija boards and fortune-tellers. But I recalled with a rather queer sensation that the day before I received the telegram announcing the doctor’s death I labored under a queer fit of depression. It seemed as if something was going to happen. The doctor had spoken of these things, and cited several startling instances.
I didn’t relish that experiment in the graveyard; not that I expected to see or hear anything, but I had the apprehension that one often feels, no matter how case-hardened, that something unusual might happen. The doctor and I had been very close friends until he left to go to the city, since which time we had corresponded occasionally. He never married—too busy, I suppose.
