QUESTION ANSWERED.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 279, 24 November 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

QUESTION ANSWERED.

LIFE AFTER DEATH. AMERICAN DRAMA. Last June, Cyril A. Plant;, 27 years old, a bakery salesman with a fondness • for profound literature, was divorced by his wife, Dorothy, 31 years old, a nurse, who after seven years of wedded life found him a matrimonial failure. Plank, out of his §50 salary, contributed $15 weekly to the ■support of his two children, 2 and 4 years old, living alone while his wife found employment in the West Suburban Chicago Hospital and maintained an apartment at 5950, West Lake Street.

Plank tired ,of a bauhelor,'s life and married Lillian Len, with whom he set up housekeeping at 6021, Normal Avenue. Lillian apparently proved an unsatisfactory substitute for the first Mrs. Plank, for Plank telephoned the mother of his children and asked her to meet him at the Morrison Hotel.

The couple dined together and Plank complained of his now wife, regretting he had no grounds for divorcing her and remarrying Dorothy. When they parted, Plank was in a depressed mood. Dorothy had just reached home and tucked her children in bed when her former husband telephoned again, from a room he had taken in the Palmer house, asking her to come down and remain with him that night to banish his loneliness and depression. Mrs. Plank agreed. When she entered his room at the hotel, he was asleep, .but a reading light burned at the head of his bed and an open book lay on his lap. He awoke, kissed her, and began reading aloud from the volume—Essays on Pessimism, by Schopenhauer—and showed a morose satisfaction over the first chapter, "The Sufferings of the World." When Plank finally fell asleep, his former wife, fearing he would attempt suicide, examined an unlabelled tin on the bureau which, when she shook it, rattled as if it contained bullets. Without opening the tin, she searched the room and, when she found no gun went to sleep.

Plank again delved into the essays. When his wife left to look after the children he was well forward in chapter two, entitled "The Vanity of Existence." Late in the afternoon, after several telephone calls to Plank went unanswered, a house detective entered his room with a pass key.

Plank was Bitting on a chair, his head hanging as in sleep. _ The detective picked up the volume on his lap, opened at page 64 in chapter-three, which was entitled "On Suicide." The first paragraph, scored in pencil, read as follows:

"Suicide may be regarded as an experiment—a question which men put to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things?" For Plank, the question as propounded by the German philosopher, has been answered. When the detective jogged his arm the volume fell from his rigid knees to the floor. He was dead, a physician said later, from the effects of cyanic chloride capsules, which had rattled in the tin when Mrs. Plank shook it.