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 unexceptional 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 any one 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
inquirers 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 any one 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 any one) 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 anæsthetics. 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
to 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 typewritten 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, gray 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 every one 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.