The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories Read online

  He read through his manuscript, and then sat thinking and gnawing his knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He must beat Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the slip he had had was after all quite accidental, forced upon him by chance, a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair advantage. It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it was of Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for a first-class. ‘Five minutes more,’ said the demonstrator, folding up his paper and becoming observant. Hill watched the clock hands until two minutes remained; then he opened the book of answers, and, with hot ears and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.

  When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green, who knew the demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human), said that in the result of the two examinations taken together Hill had the advantage of a mark – 167 to 166 out of a possible 200. Everyone admired Hill in a way, though the suspicion of ‘mugging’ clung to him. But Hill was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman’s enhanced opinion of him, and even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn, tainted by an unhappy memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the note of a democracy marching to triumph returned to his debating society speeches; he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and effect, and he went on with his aesthetic education. But through it all, a vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind’s eye – of a sneakish person manipulating a slide.

  No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no higher power existed to see it; but for all that it worried him. Memories are not dead things, but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on his memory became confused about it, until at last he was not sure – although he assured himself that he was sure – whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary. Then it is possible that Hill’s dietary was conducive to morbid conscientiousness; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun, and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as his means determined, usually in a chop-house in a back street off the Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics,23 and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops. It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this influence on the feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am convinced; they may be – they usually are – fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen. And, moreover, this memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she now so evidently preferred him to Wedderburn that he felt sure he cared for her, and began reciprocating her attentions by timid marks of personal regard; at one time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in his pocket, and produced it with a stumbling explanation, withered and dead, in the gallery of old iron. It poisoned, too, the denunciation of capitalist dishonesty that had been one of his life’s pleasures. And, lastly, it poisoned his triumph in Wedderburn. Previously he had been Wedderburn’s superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of positive inferiority. He fancied he found justifications for his position in Browning, but they vanished on analysis. At last – moved, curiously enough, by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his dishonesty – he went to Professor Bindon, and made a clean breast of the whole affair. As Hill was a paid student, Professor Bindon did not ask him to sit down, and he stood before the professor’s desk as he made his confession.

  ‘It’s a curious story,’ said Professor Bindon, slowly realizing how the thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise, – ‘A most remarkable story. I can’t understand your doing it, and I can’t understand this avowal. You’re a type of student – Cambridge men would never dream – I suppose I ought to have thought – Why did you cheat?’

  ‘I didn’t cheat,’ said Hill.

  ‘But you have just been telling me you did.’

  ‘I thought I explained –’

  ‘Either you cheated or you did not cheat.’ –

  ‘I said my motion was involuntary.’

  ‘I am not a metaphysician, I am a servant of science – of fact. You were told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not cheating –’

  ‘If I was a cheat,’ said Hill, with the note of hysterics in his voice, ‘should I come here and tell you?’

  ‘Your repentance, of course, does you credit,’ said Professor Bindon, ‘but it does not alter the original facts.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Hill, giving in in utter self-abasement.

  ‘Even now you cause an enormous amount of trouble. The examination list will have to be revised.’

  ‘I suppose so, sir.’

  ‘Suppose so? Of course it must be revised. And I don’t see how I can conscientiously pass you.’

  ‘Not pass me?’ said Hill. ‘Fail me?’

  ‘It’s the rule in all examinations. Or where should we be? What else did you expect? You don’t want to shirk the consequences of your own acts?’

  ‘I thought, perhaps’ – said Hill. And then, ‘Fail me? I thought, as I told you, you would simply deduct the marks given for that slip.’

  ‘Impossible!’ said Bindon. ‘Besides, it would still leave you above Wedderburn. Deduct only the marks – Preposterous! The Departmental Regulations distinctly say –’

  ‘But it’s my own admission, sir.’

  ‘The Regulations say nothing whatever of the manner in which the matter comes to light. They simply provide –’

  ‘It will ruin me. If I fail this examination, they won’t renew my scholarship.’

  ‘You should have thought of that before.’

  ‘But, sir, consider all my circumstances –’

  ‘I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines. The Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for appointments. I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do –’

  ‘It’s very hard, sir.’

  ‘Possibly it is.’

  ‘If I am to be failed this examination, I might as well go home at once.’

  ‘That is as you think proper.’ Bindon’s voice softened a little; he perceived he had been unjust, and, provided he did not contradict himself, he was disposed to amelioration. ‘As a private person,’ he said, ‘I think this confession of yours goes far to mitigate your offence. But you have set the machinery in motion, and now it must take its course. I – I am really sorry you gave way.’

  A wave of emotion prevented Hill from answering. Suddenly, very vividly, he saw the heavily-lined face of the old Landport cobbler, his father. ‘Good God! What a fool I have been!’ he said hotly and abruptly.

  ‘I hope,’ said Bindon, ‘that it will be a lesson to you.’

  But, curiously enough, they were not thinking of quite the same indiscretion.

  There was a pause.

  ‘I would like a day to think, sir, and then I will let you know – about going home, I mean,’ said Hill, moving towards the door.

  The next day Hill’s place was vacant. The spectacled girl in green was, as usual, first with the news. Wedderburn and Miss Haysman were talking of a performance of The Meistersingers24 when she came up to them.

  ‘Have you heard?’ she said.

  �
��Heard what?’

  ‘There was cheating in the examination.’

  ‘Cheating!’ said Wedderburn, with his face suddenly hot. ‘How?’

  ‘That slide’ –

  ‘Moved? Never!’

  ‘It was. That slide that we weren’t to move’ –

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Wedderburn. ‘Why! How could they find out? Who do they say –?’

  ‘It was Mr Hill.’

  ‘Hill!’

  ‘Mr Hill!’

  ‘Not – surely not the immaculate Hill?’ said Wedderburn, recovering.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Miss Haysman. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said the girl in spectacles. ‘But I know it now for a fact. Mr Hill went and confessed to Professor Bindon himself.’

  ‘By Jove!’ said Wedderburn. ‘Hill of all people. But I am always inclined to distrust these philanthropists-on-principle’ –

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ said Miss Haysman, with a catch in her breath.

  ‘Quite. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? But, you know, what can you expect? His father is a cobbler.’

  Then Miss Haysman astonished the girl in spectacles.

  ‘I don’t care. I will not believe it,’ she said, flushing darkly under her warm-tinted skin. ‘I will not believe it until he has told me so himself – face to face. I would scarcely believe it then,’ and abruptly she turned her back on the girl in spectacles, and walked to her own place.

  ‘It’s true, all the same,’ said the girl in spectacles, peering and smiling at Wedderburn.

  But Wedderburn did not answer her. She was indeed one of those people who seem destined to make unanswered remarks.

  THE PLATTNER STORY

  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’s1 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 Alsatian2 who came to England in the Sixties, married a respectable English girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died, after a wholesome and uneventful life (devoted, I understand, chiefly to the laying of parquet flooring), in 1887. Gottfried’s age is seven-and-twenty. He is, by virtue of his heritage of three languages, Modern Languages Master in a small private school in the South of England. To the casual observer he is singularly like any other Modern Languages Master in any other small private school. His costume is neither very costly nor very fashionable, but, on the other hand, it is not markedly cheap or shabby; his complexion, like his height and his bearing, is inconspicuous. You would notice perhaps that, like the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical, his right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier on the right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare his chest and feel his heart beating, you would probably find it quite like the heart of anyone else. But here you and the trained observer would part company. If you found his heart quite ordinary, the trained observer would find it quite otherwise. And once the thing was pointed out to you, you too would perceive the peculiarity easily enough. It is that Gottfried’s heart beats on the right side of his body.

  Now that is not the only singularity of Gottfried’s structure, although it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful sounding of Gottfried’s internal arrangements, by a well-known surgeon, seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver is on the left side, the left on his right; while his lungs, too, are similarly contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is a consummate actor we must believe that his right hand has recently become his left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as impartially as possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in writing except from right to left across the paper with his left hand. He cannot throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at meal times between knife and fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road – he is a cyclist3 – 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’ photographs4 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 Nordau5 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 anyone with a slight 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,6 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,7 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 Gases8 (whatever the three gases may be). As, however, his pupils began by knowing nothing, and derived all their information from him, this caused him (or anyone) but little inconvenience for several terms. Then a little boy named Whibble joined the school, who had been educated, it seems, by some mischievous relative into an inquiring habit of mind. This little boy followed Plattner’s lessons with marked and sustained interest, and in order to exhibit his zeal on the subject, brought at various times substances for Plattner to analyse. Plattner, flattered by this evidence of his power to awaken 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.