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 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 conditions. 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 fudged, 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 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, book-keeping, 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
enquiring 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 classroom 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 enquiries 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 well-nigh 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 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 distinctly under the impression that he was still in the
classroom. 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 extraordinarily 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 classroom, 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 classroom, 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 hillside. 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.