The following is a Gaslight etext.... |
A message to you about copyright and permissions |
|
from Thirty strange stories (1897, 1898 ed.)
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
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 free-born 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. A 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 realise 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 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 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 glowworm. 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 consume 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.
(End.)