Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not is a
pretty question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have seven
witnesses--to be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs of eyes,
and one undeniable fact; and on the other we have--what is it?--prejudice,
common-sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there seven more
honest-seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the
inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure, and--never was
there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell! The most
preposterous part of the story is the worthy Gottfried's contribution (for
I count him as one of the seven).
Heaven forbid that I should be led into
giving countenance to superstition by a passion for impartiality, and so
come to share the fate of Eusapia's patrons! Frankly, I believe there is
something crooked about this business of Gottfried Plattner; but what that
crooked factor is, I will admit as frankly, I do not know. I have been
surprised at the credit accorded to the story in the most unexpected and
authoritative quarters. The fairest way to the reader, however, will be
for me to tell it without further comment.
Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a freeborn Englishman. His
father was an Alsatian who came to England in the 'sixties, married a
respectable English girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died, after a
wholesome and uneventful life (devoted, I understand, chiefly to the
laying of parquet flooring), in 1887. Gottfried's age is seven-and-twenty.
He is, by virtue of his heritage of three languages, Modern Languages
Master in a small private school in the south of England. To the casual
observer he is singularly like any other Modern Languages Master in any
other small private school. His costume is neither very costly nor very
fashionable, but, on the other hand, it is not markedly cheap or shabby;
his complexion, like his height and his bearing, is inconspicuous. You
would notice, perhaps, that, like the majority of people, his face was not
absolutely symmetrical, his right eye a little larger than the left, and
his jaw a trifle heavier on the right side. If you, as an ordinary
careless person, were to bare his chest and feel his heart beating, you
would probably find it quite like the heart of anyone else. But here you
and the trained observer would part company. If you found his heart quite
ordinary, the trained observer would find it quite otherwise. And once the
thing was pointed out to you, you too would perceive the peculiarity
easily enough. It is that Gottfried's heart beats on the right side of his
body.
Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried's structure, although
it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful
sounding of Gottfried's internal arrangements by a well-known surgeon
seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his
body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver is on the left
side, the left on his right; while his lungs, too, are similarly
contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is a consummate
actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently become his left.
Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as impartially as
possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in writing, except from
right to left across the paper with his left hand. He cannot throw with
his right hand, he is perplexed at meal-times between knife and fork, and
his ideas of the rule of the road--he is a cyclist--are still a dangerous
confusion. And there is not a scrap of evidence to show that before these
occurrences Gottfried was at all left-handed.
There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.
Gottfried produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the age
of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock, and
scowling. In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than his
right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This is the
reverse of his present living condition. The photograph of Gottfried at
fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is because it is one of
those cheap "Gem" photographs that were then in vogue, taken direct upon
metal, and therefore reversing things just as a looking-glass would. The
third photograph represents him at one-and-twenty, and confirms the record
of the others. There seems here evidence of the strongest confirmatory
character that Gottfried has exchanged his left side for his right. Yet
how a human being can be so changed, short of a fantastic and pointless
miracle, it is exceedingly hard to suggest.
In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition
that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength
of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness
imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself to any such
theory. He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane, from the
Nordau standpoint. He likes beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking
exercise daily, and has a healthily high estimate of the value of his
teaching. He has a good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in
singing airs of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not
morbidly fond, of reading,--chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious
optimism,--sleeps well, and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very last
person to evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story
upon the world, he has been singularly reticent on the matter. He meets
enquirers with a certain engaging--bashfulness is almost the word, that
disarms the most suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed that anything so
unusual has occurred to him.
It is to be regretted that Plattner's aversion to the idea of post-mortem
dissection may postpone, perhaps for ever, the positive proof that his
entire body has had its left and right sides transposed. Upon that fact
mainly the credibility of his story hangs. There is no way of taking a man
and moving him about in space as ordinary people understand space, that
will result in our changing his sides. Whatever you do, his right is still
his right, his left his left. You can do that with a perfectly thin and
flat thing, of course. If you were to cut a figure out of paper, any
figure with a right and left side, you could change its sides simply by
lifting it up and turning it over. But with a solid it is different.
Mathematical theorists tell us that the only way in which the right and
left sides of a solid body can be changed is by taking that body clean out
of space as we know it,--taking it out of ordinary existence, that is, and
turning it somewhere outside space. This is a little abstruse, no doubt,
but anyone with any knowledge of mathematical theory will assure the
reader of its truth. To put the thing in technical language, the curious
inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved
out of our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has
returned again to our world. Unless we choose to consider ourselves the
victims of an elaborate and motiveless fabrication, we are almost bound to
believe that this has occurred.
So much for the tangible facts. We come now to the account of the
phenomena that attended his temporary disappearance from the world. It
appears that in the Sussexville Proprietary School, Plattner not only
discharged the duties of Modern Languages Master, but also taught
chemistry, commercial geography, bookkeeping, shorthand, drawing, and any
other additional subject to which the changing fancies of the boys'
parents might direct attention. He knew little or nothing of these various
subjects, but in secondary as distinguished from Board or elementary
schools, knowledge in the teacher is, very properly, by no means so
necessary as high moral character and gentlemanly tone. In chemistry he
was particularly deficient, knowing, he says, nothing beyond the Three
Gases (whatever the three gases may be). As, however, his pupils began by
knowing nothing, and derived all their information from him, this caused
him (or anyone) but little inconvenience for several terms. Then a little
boy named Whibble joined the school, who had been educated (it seems) by
some mischievous relative into an inquiring habit of mind. This little boy
followed Plattner's lessons with marked and sustained interest, and in
order to exhibit his zeal on the subject, brought, at various times,
substances for Plattner to analyse. Plattner, flattered by this evidence
of his power of awakening interest, and trusting to the boy's ignorance,
analysed these, and even, made general statements as to their composition.
Indeed, he was so far stimulated by his pupil as to obtain a work upon
analytical chemistry, and study it during his supervision of the evening's
preparation. He was surprised to find chemistry quite an interesting
subject.
So far the story is absolutely commonplace. But now the greenish powder
comes upon the scene. The source of that greenish powder seems,
unfortunately, lost. Master Whibble tells a tortuous story of finding it
done up in a packet in a disused limekiln near the Downs. It would have
been an excellent thing for Plattner, and possibly for Master Whibble's
family, if a match could have been applied to that powder there and then.
The young gentleman certainly did not bring it to school in a packet, but
in a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle, plugged with masticated
newspaper. He gave it to Plattner at the end of the afternoon school. Four
boys had been detained after school prayers in order to complete some
neglected tasks, and Plattner was supervising these in the small class-room
in which the chemical teaching was conducted. The appliances for the
practical teaching of chemistry in the Sussexville Proprietary School, as
in most small schools in this country, are characterised by a severe
simplicity. They are kept in a small cupboard standing in a recess, and
having about the same capacity as a common travelling trunk. Plattner,
being bored with his passive superintendence, seems to have welcomed the
intervention of Whibble with his green powder as an agreeable diversion,
and, unlocking this cupboard, proceeded at once with his analytical
experiments. Whibble sat, luckily for himself, at a safe distance,
regarding him. The four malefactors, feigning a profound absorption in
their work, watched him furtively with the keenest interest. For even
within the limits of the Three Gases, Plattner's practical chemistry was,
I understand, temerarious.
They are practically unanimous in their account of Plattner's proceedings.
He poured a little of the green powder into a test-tube, and tried the
substance with water, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid
in succession. Getting no result, he emptied out a little heap--nearly
half the bottleful, in fact--upon a slate and tried a match. He held the
medicine bottle in his left hand. The stuff began to smoke and melt, and
then exploded with deafening violence and a blinding flash.
The five boys, seeing the flash and being prepared for catastrophes,
ducked below their desks, and were none of them seriously hurt. The window
was blown out into the playground, and the blackboard on its easel was
upset. The slate was smashed to atoms. Some plaster fell from the ceiling.
No other damage was done to the school edifice or appliances, and the boys
at first, seeing nothing of Plattner, fancied he was knocked down and
lying out of their sight below the desks. They jumped out of their places
to go to his assistance, and were amazed to find the space empty. Being
still confused by the sudden violence of the report, they hurried to the
open door, under the impression that he must have been hurt, and have
rushed out of the room. But Carson, the foremost, nearly collided in the
doorway with the principal, Mr. Lidgett.
Mr. Lidgett is a corpulent, excitable man with one eye. The boys describe
him as stumbling into the room mouthing some of those tempered expletives
irritable schoolmasters accustom themselves to use--lest worse befall.
"Wretched mumchancer!" he said. "Where's Mr. Plattner?" The boys are
agreed on the very words. ("Wobbler," "snivelling puppy," and "mumchancer"
are, it seems, among the ordinary small change of Mr. Lidgett's scholastic
commerce.)
Where's Mr. Plattner? That was a question that was to be repeated many
times in the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic
hyperbole, "blown to atoms," had for once realised itself. There was not a
visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch
of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of
existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would cover a
sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence of his
absolute disappearance as a consequence of that explosion is indubitable.
It is not necessary to enlarge here upon the commotion excited in the
Sussexville Proprietary School, and in Sussexville and elsewhere, by this
event. It is quite possible, indeed, that some of the readers of these
pages may recall the hearing of some remote and dying version of that
excitement during the last summer holidays. Lidgett, it would seem, did
everything in his power to suppress and minimise the story. He instituted
a penalty of twenty-five lines for any mention of Plattner's name among
the boys, and stated in the schoolroom that he was clearly aware of his
assistant's whereabouts. He was afraid, he explains, that the possibility
of an explosion happening, in spite of the elaborate precautions taken to
minimise the practical teaching of chemistry, might injure the reputation
of the school; and so might any mysterious quality in Plattner's
departure. Indeed, he did everything in his power to make the occurrence
seem as ordinary as possible. In particular, he cross-examined the five
eye-witnesses of the occurrence so searchingly that they began to doubt
the plain evidence of their senses. But, in spite of these efforts, the
tale, in a magnified and distorted state, made a nine days' wonder in the
district, and several parents withdrew their sons on colourable pretexts.
Not the least remarkable point in the matter is the fact that a large
number of people in the neighbourhood dreamed singularly vivid dreams of
Plattner during the period of excitement before his return, and that these
dreams had a curious uniformity. In almost all of them Plattner was seen,
sometimes singly, sometimes in company, wandering about through a
coruscating iridescence. In all cases his face was pale and distressed,
and in some he gesticulated towards the dreamer. One or two of the boys,
evidently under the influence of nightmare, fancied that Plattner
approached them with remarkable swiftness, and seemed to look closely into
their very eyes. Others fled with Plattner from the pursuit of vague and
extraordinary creatures of a globular shape. But all these fancies were
forgotten in inquiries and speculations when on the Wednesday next but one
after the Monday of the explosion, Plattner returned.
The circumstances of his return were as singular as those of his
departure. So far as Mr. Lidgett's somewhat choleric outline can be filled
in from Plattner's hesitating statements, it would appear that on
Wednesday evening, towards the hour of sunset, the former gentleman,
having dismissed evening preparation, was engaged in his garden, picking
and eating strawberries, a fruit of which he is inordinately fond. It is a
large old-fashioned garden, secured from observation, fortunately, by a
high and ivy-covered red-brick wall. Just as he was stooping over a
particularly prolific plant, there was a flash in the air and a heavy
thud, and before he could look round, some heavy body struck him violently
from behind. He was pitched forward, crushing the strawberries he held in
his hand, and that so roughly, that his silk hat--Mr. Lidgett adheres to
the older ideas of scholastic costume--was driven violently down upon his
forehead, and almost over one eye. This heavy missile, which slid over him
sideways and collapsed into a sitting posture among the strawberry plants,
proved to be our long-lost Mr. Gottfried Plattner, in an extremely
dishevelled condition. He was collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty,
and there was blood upon his hands. Mr. Lidgett was so indignant and
surprised that he remained on all-fours, and with his hat jammed down on
his eye, while he expostulated vehemently with Plattner for his
disrespectful and unaccountable conduct.
This scarcely idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior version
of the Plattner story--its exoteric aspect. It is quite unnecessary to
enter here into all the details of his dismissal by Mr. Lidgett. Such
details, with the full names and dates and references, will be found in
the larger report of these occurrences that was laid before the Society
for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena. The singular transposition of
Plattner's right and left sides was scarcely observed for the first day or
so, and then first in connection with his disposition to write from right
to left across the blackboard. He concealed rather than ostended this
curious confirmatory circumstance, as he considered it would unfavourably
affect his prospects in a new situation. The displacement of his heart was
discovered some months after, when he was having a tooth extracted under
anaesthetics. He then, very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical
examination to be made of himself, with a view to a brief account in the
_Journal of Anatomy_. That exhausts the statement of the material
facts; and we may now go on to consider Plattner's account of the matter.
But first let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion of
this story and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is established
by such evidence as even a criminal lawyer would approve. Every one of the
witnesses is still alive; the reader, if he have the leisure, may hunt the
lads out to-morrow, or even brave the terrors of the redoubtable Lidgett,
and cross-examine and trap and test to his heart's content; Gottfried
Plattner himself, and his twisted heart and his three photographs, are
producible. It may be taken as proved that he did disappear for nine days
as the consequence of an explosion; that he returned almost as violently,
under circumstances in their nature annoying to Mr. Lidgett, whatever the
details of those circumstances may be; and that he returned inverted, just
as a reflection returns from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have
already stated, it follows almost inevitably that Plattner, during those
nine days, must have been in some state of existence altogether out of
space. The evidence to these statements is, indeed, far stronger than that
upon which most murderers are hanged. But for his own particular account
of where he had been, with its confused explanations and wellnigh
self-contradictory details, we have only Mr. Gottfried Plattner's word. I
do not wish to discredit that, but I must point out--what so many writers
upon obscure psychic phenomena fail to do--that we are passing here from
the practically undeniable to that kind of matter which any reasonable man
is entitled to believe or reject as he thinks proper. The previous
statements render it plausible; its discordance with common experience
tilts it towards the incredible. I would prefer not to sway the beam of
the reader's judgment either way, but simply to tell the story as Plattner
told it me.
He gave me his narrative, I may state, at my house at Chislehurst, and so
soon as he had left me that evening, I went into my study and wrote down
everything as I remembered it. Subsequently he was good enough to read
over a type-written copy, so that its substantial correctness is
undeniable.
He states that at the moment of the explosion he distinctly thought he was
killed. He felt lifted off his feet and driven forcibly backward. It is a
curious fact for psychologists that he thought clearly during his backward
flight, and wondered whether he should hit the chemistry cupboard or the
blackboard easel. His heels struck ground, and he staggered and fell
heavily into a sitting position on something soft and firm. For a moment
the concussion stunned him. He became aware at once of a vivid scent of
singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice of Lidgett asking for him.
You will understand that for a time his mind was greatly confused.
At first he was under the impression that he was still standing in the
class-room. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and the
entry of Mr. Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score. He did not
hear their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening effect of the
experiment. Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint, but his mind
explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the explosion had
engendered a huge volume of dark smoke. Through the dimness the figures of
Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint and silent as ghosts. Plattner's face
still tingled with the stinging heat of the flash. He, was, he says, "all
muddled." His first definite thoughts seem to have been of his personal
safety. He thought he was perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs
and face in a gingerly manner. Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he
was astonished to miss the old familiar desks and other schoolroom
furniture about him. Only dim, uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place
of these. Then came a thing that made him shout aloud, and awoke his
stunned faculties to instant activity. _Two of the boys, gesticulating,
walked one after the other clean through him_! Neither manifested the
slightest consciousness of his presence. It is difficult to imagine the
sensation he felt. They came against him, he says, with no more force than
a wisp of mist.
Plattner's first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been
brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however, he was a
little surprised to find his body still about him. His second conclusion
was that he was not dead, but that the others were: that the explosion had
destroyed the Sussexville Proprietary School and every soul in it except
himself. But that, too, was scarcely satisfactory. He was thrown back upon
astonished observation.
Everything about him was profoundly dark: at first it seemed to have an
altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The only touch
of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky in
one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating black
hills. This, I say, was his impression at first. As his eye grew
accustomed to the darkness, he began to distinguish a faint quality of
differentiating greenish colour in the circumambient night. Against this
background the furniture and occupants of the class-room, it seems, stood
out like phosphorescent spectres, faint and impalpable. He extended his
hand, and thrust it without an effort through the wall of the room by the
fireplace.
He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention. He
shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to and fro.
He only desisted from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom he (as an
Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room. He says the
sensation of being in the world, and yet not a part of it, was an
extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings, not inaptly,
to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window. Whenever he made a
motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about him, he found an
invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse.
He then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the
medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the
green powder therein. He put this in his pocket, and began to feel about
him. Apparently he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with a velvety
moss. The dark country about him he was unable to see, the faint, misty
picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a feeling (due
perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a hill, and that a
steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green glow along the edge of
the sky seemed to be growing in extent and intensity. He stood up, rubbing
his eyes.
It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply downhill, and then
stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of rock to
watch the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was absolutely
silent. It was as still as it was dark, and though there was a cold wind
blowing up the hill-face, the rustle of grass, the soughing of the boughs
that should have accompanied it, were absent. He could hear, therefore, if
he could not see, that the hillside upon which he stood was rocky and
desolate. The green grew brighter every moment, and as it did so a faint,
transparent blood-red mingled with, but did not mitigate, the blackness of
the sky overhead and the rocky desolations about him. Having regard to
what follows, I am inclined to think that that redness may have been an
optical effect due to contrast. Something black fluttered momentarily
against the livid yellow-green of the lower sky, and then the thin and
penetrating voice of a bell rose out of the black gulf below him. An
oppressive expectation grew with the growing light.
It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the
strange green light growing brighter every moment, and spreading slowly,
in flamboyant fingers, upward towards the zenith. As it grew, the spectral
vision of _our_ world became relatively or absolutely fainter.
Probably both, for the time must have been about that of our earthly
sunset. So far as his vision of our world went, Plattner, by his few steps
downhill, had passed through the floor of the class-room, and was now, it
seemed, sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom downstairs. He saw the
boarders distinctly, but much more faintly than he had seen Lidgett. They
were preparing their evening tasks, and he noticed with interest that
several were cheating with their Euclid riders by means of a crib, a
compilation whose existence he had hitherto never suspected. As the time
passed, they faded steadily, as steadily as the light of the green dawn
increased.
Looking down into the valley, he saw that the light had crept far down its
rocky sides, and that the profound blackness of the abyss was now broken
by a minute green glow, like the light of a glow-worm. And almost
immediately the limb of a huge heavenly body of blazing green rose over
the basaltic undulations of the distant hills, and the monstrous
hill-masses about him came out gaunt and desolate, in green light and
deep, ruddy black shadows. He became aware of a vast number of ball-shaped
objects drifting as thistledown drifts over the high ground. There were
none of these nearer to him than the opposite side of the gorge. The bell
below twanged quicker and quicker, with something like impatient
insistence, and several lights moved hither and thither. The boys at work
at their desks were now almost imperceptibly faint.
This extinction of our world, when the green sun of this other universe
rose, is a curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the
Other-World night it is difficult to move about, on account of the
vividness with which the things of this world are visible. It becomes a
riddle to explain why, if this is the case, we in this world catch no
glimpse of the Other-World. It is due, perhaps, to the comparatively
vivid illumination of this world of ours. Plattner describes the midday
of the Other-World, at its brightest, as not being nearly so bright as
this world at full moon, while its night is profoundly black.
Consequently, the amount of light, even in an ordinary dark room, is
sufficient to render the things of the Other-World invisible, on the
same principle that faint phosphorescence is only visible in the
profoundest darkness. I have tried, since he told me his story, to see
something of the Other-World by sitting for a long space in a
photographer's dark room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly
the form of greenish slopes and rocks, but only, I must admit, very
indistinctly indeed. The reader may possibly be more successful. Plattner
tells me that since his return he has dreamt and seen and recognised
places in the Other-World, but this is probably due to his memory
of these scenes. It seems quite possible that people with unusually
keen eyesight may occasionally catch a glimpse of this strange Other-World
about us.
However, this is a digression. As the green sun rose, a long street of
black buildings became perceptible, though only darkly and indistinctly,
in the gorge, and after some hesitation, Plattner began to clamber down
the precipitous descent towards them. The descent was long and exceedingly
tedious, being so not only by the extraordinary steepness, but also by
reason of the looseness of the boulders with which the whole face of the
hill was strewn. The noise of his descent--now and then his heels struck
fire from the rocks--seemed now the only sound in the universe, for the
beating of the bell had ceased. As he drew nearer, he perceived that the
various edifices had a singular resemblance to tombs and mausoleums and
monuments, saving only that they were all uniformly black instead of being
white, as most sepulchres are. And then he saw, crowding out of the
largest building, very much as people disperse from church, a number of
pallid, rounded, pale-green figures. These dispersed in several directions
about the broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and
reappearing upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the
small black buildings which lined the way.
At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped,
staring. They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had
the appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body swung. He
was too astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed, of strangeness,
to be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards him, in front of the
chill wind that was blowing uphill, much as soap-bubbles drive before a
draught. And as he looked at the nearest of those approaching, he saw it
was indeed a human head, albeit with singularly large eyes, and wearing
such an expression of distress and anguish as he had never seen before
upon mortal countenance. He was surprised to find that it did not turn to
regard him, but seemed to be watching and following some unseen moving
thing. For a moment he was puzzled, and then it occurred to him that this
creature was watching with its enormous eyes something that was happening
in the world he had just left. Nearer it came, and nearer, and he was too
astonished to cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound as it came
close to him. Then it struck his face with a gentle pat--its touch was
very cold--and drove past him, and upward towards the crest of the hill.
An extraordinary conviction flashed across Plattner's mind that this head
had a strong likeness to Lidgett. Then he turned his attention to the
other heads that were now swarming thickly up the hill-side. None made the
slightest sign of recognition. One or two, indeed, came close to his head
and almost followed the example of the first, but he dodged convulsively
out of the way. Upon most of them he saw the same expression of unavailing
regret he had seen upon the first, and heard the same faint sounds of
wretchedness from them. One or two wept, and one rolling swiftly uphill
wore an expression of diabolical rage. But others were cold, and several
had a look of gratified interest in their eyes. One, at least, was almost
in an ecstasy of happiness. Plattner does not remember that he recognised
any more likenesses in those he saw at this time.
For several hours, perhaps, Plattner watched these strange things
dispersing themselves over the hills, and not till long after they had
ceased to issue from the clustering black buildings in the gorge, did he
resume his downward climb. The darkness about him increased so much that
he had a difficulty in stepping true. Overhead the sky was now a bright,
pale green. He felt neither hunger nor thirst. Later, when he did, he
found a chilly stream running down the centre of the gorge, and the rare
moss upon the boulders, when he tried it at last in desperation, was good
to eat.
He groped about among the tombs that ran down the gorge, seeking vaguely
for some clue to these inexplicable things. After a long time he came to
the entrance of the big mausoleum-like building from which the heads had
issued. In this he found a group of green lights burning upon a kind of
basaltic altar, and a bell-rope from a belfry overhead hanging down into
the centre of the place. Round the wall ran a lettering of fire in a
character unknown to him. While he was still wondering at the purport of
these things, he heard the receding tramp of heavy feet echoing far down
the street. He ran out into the darkness again, but he could see nothing.
He had a mind to pull the bell-rope, and finally decided to follow the
footsteps. But, although he ran far, he never overtook them; and his
shouting was of no avail. The gorge seemed to extend an interminable
distance. It was as dark as earthly starlight throughout its length, while
the ghastly green day lay along the upper edge of its precipices. There
were none of the heads, now, below. They were all, it seemed, busily
occupied along the upper slopes. Looking up, he saw them drifting hither
and thither, some hovering stationary, some flying swiftly through the
air. It reminded him, he said, of "big snowflakes"; only these were black
and pale green.
In pursuing the firm, undeviating footsteps that he never overtook, in
groping into new regions of this endless devil's dyke, in clambering up
and down the pitiless heights, in wandering about the summits, and in
watching the drifting faces, Plattner states that he spent the better part
of seven or eight days. He did not keep count, he says. Though once or
twice he found eyes watching him, he had word with no living soul. He
slept among the rocks on the hillside. In the gorge things earthly were
invisible, because, from the earthly standpoint, it was far underground.
On the altitudes, so soon as the earthly day began, the world became
visible to him. He found himself sometimes stumbling over the dark green
rocks, or arresting himself on a precipitous brink, while all about him
the green branches of the Sussexville lanes were swaying; or, again, he
seemed to be walking through the Sussexville streets, or watching unseen
the private business of some household. And then it was he discovered,
that to almost every human being in our world there pertained some of
these drifting heads; that everyone in the world is watched intermittently
by these helpless disembodiments.
What are they--these Watchers of the Living? Plattner never learned. But
two, that presently found and followed him, were like his childhood's
memory of his father and mother. Now and then other faces turned their
eyes upon him: eyes like those of dead people who had swayed him, or
injured him, or helped him in his youth and manhood. Whenever they looked
at him, Plattner was overcome with a strange sense of responsibility. To
his mother he ventured to speak; but she made no answer. She looked sadly,
steadfastly, and tenderly--a little reproachfully, too, it seemed--into
his eyes.
He simply tells this story: he does not endeavour to explain. We are left
to surmise who these Watchers of the Living may be, or, if they are indeed
the Dead, why they should so closely and passionately watch a world they
have left for ever. It may be--indeed to my mind it seems just--that, when
our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we
may still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we
have laid. If human souls continue after death, then surely human
interests continue after death. But that is merely my own guess at the
meaning of the things seen. Plattner offers no interpretation, for none
was given him. It is well the reader should understand this clearly. Day
after day, with his head reeling, he wandered about this strange lit world
outside the world, weary and, towards the end, weak and hungry. By day--by
our earthly day, that is--the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery
of Sussexville, all about him, irked and worried him. He could not see
where to put his feet, and ever and again with a chilly touch one of these
Watching Souls would come against his face. And after dark the multitude
of these Watchers about him, and their intent distress, confused his mind
beyond describing. A great longing to return to the earthly life that was
so near and yet so remote consumed him. The unearthliness of things about
him produced a positively painful mental distress. He was worried beyond
describing by his own particular followers. He would shout at them to
desist from staring at him, scold at them, hurry away from them. They were
always mute and intent. Run as he might over the uneven ground, they
followed his destinies.
On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible footsteps
approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering over the broad
crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this
strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge,
feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that
was happening in a room in a back street near the school. Both of the
people in the room he knew by sight. The windows were open, the blinds up,
and the setting sun shone clearly into it, so that it came out quite
brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying like a magic-lantern
picture upon the black landscape and the livid green dawn. In addition to
the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in the room.
On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the
tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little
table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and water,
and an empty glass. Every now and then the lank man's lips fell apart,
to indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman did not notice
that he wanted anything, because she was busy turning out papers from an
old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the room. At first the
picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn behind it grew
brighter and brighter, so it became fainter and more and more transparent.
As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps that
sound so loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this, Plattner
perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering together out
of the darkness and watching the two people in the room. Never before had
he seen so many of the Watchers of the Living. A multitude had eyes only
for the sufferer in the room, another multitude, in infinite anguish,
watched the woman as she hunted with greedy eyes for something she could
not find. They crowded about Plattner, they came across his sight and
buffeted his face, the noise of their unavailing regrets was all about
him. He saw clearly only now and then. At other times the picture quivered
dimly, through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the
room it must have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame
streamed up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each
footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces!
Two, more particularly near the woman's: one a woman's also, white and
clear-featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard, but which
was now softened by the touch of a wisdom strange to earth. The other
might have been the woman's father. Both were evidently absorbed in the
contemplation of some act of hateful meanness, so it seemed, which they
could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind were others, teachers,
it may be, who had taught ill, friends whose influence had failed. And
over the man, too--a multitude, but none that seemed to be parents or
teachers! Faces that might once have been coarse, now purged to strength
by sorrow! And in the forefront one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor
remorseful, but merely patient and weary, and, as it seemed to Plattner,
waiting for relief. His powers of description fail him at the memory of
this multitude of ghastly countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the
bell. He saw them all in the space of a second. It would seem that he was
so worked on by his excitement that, quite involuntarily, his restless
fingers took the bottle of green powder out of his pocket and held it
before him. But he does not remember that.
Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was
silence, and then suddenly, cutting through the unexpected stillness like
a keen, thin blade, came the first stroke of the bell. At that the
multitudinous faces swayed to and fro, and a louder crying began all about
him. The woman did not hear; she was burning something now in the candle
flame. At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of wind, icy
cold, blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about him like an
eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke something was
extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a beam of light. This
was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at it, Plattner saw that it
was a shadowy arm and hand.
The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon, and
the vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that the white
of the bed struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman looked round
over her shoulder at it, startled.
The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the
wind, and swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then
suddenly Plattner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that
stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare turn
his head to see the Shadow behind the arm. With a violent effort, and
covering his eyes, he set himself to run, made, perhaps, twenty strides,
then slipped on a boulder, and fell. He fell forward on his hands; and the
bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the ground.
In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face to
face with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.
* * * * *
There the story of Plattner's experiences ends. I have resisted, I believe
successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up
incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the
order in which Plattner told it to me. I have carefully avoided any
attempt at style, effect, or construction. It would have been easy, for
instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed into a kind of plot in
which Plattner might have been involved. But, quite apart from the
objectionableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such
trite devices would spoil, to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark
world, with its livid green illumination and its drifting Watchers of the
Living, which, unseen and unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.
It remains to add that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace, just
beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at the moment of
Plattner's return. Deceased was a rate-collector and insurance agent. His
widow, who was much younger than himself, married last month a Mr.
Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the portion of this story
given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussexville, she has
consented to my use of her name, on condition that I make it distinctly
known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Plattner's account
of her husband's last moments. She burnt no will, she says, although
Plattner never accused her of doing so; her husband made but one will, and
that just after their marriage. Certainly, from a man who had never seen
it, Plattner's account of the furniture of the room was curiously
accurate.
One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must insist
upon, lest I seem to favour the credulous, superstitious view. Plattner's
absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved. But that does
not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even outside space
hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the reader must bear
distinctly in mind.
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