Chapter III: Part I (2)

“Now were really getting down to business,” he remarked, presently. “I had to convince Margaret before she would loosen up.” Cass began to explain that it had not been necessary to convince me, but before he was fairly started the pencil ran on: “Yes, it was. She didn’t quite believe I was running this show. Now she’s nice and amenable.” Verily, all resistance had been taken out of me! Thereafter he had his own way with the pencil.

Cass began another question, but broke off, saying that it was not fair to keep Frederick answering impersonal inquiries when he wanted to talk to his mother.

“That’s what it’s all for,” was the candid admission. “The L——s are all right, but it’s for Mother dearest and the Family that I’m here.... This isn’t exactly what religious people call heaven, but it is life eternal in the biggest sense. But I can’t be quite happy in it unless you whom I love so much are happy, too. Don’t you backslide! Only let me have a chance, and I’ll keep you convinced; but doubt is the hardest thing to combat because it destroys the very proof we are trying to bring against it. Believe every suggestion of me until it is proved false.”

One of us asked whether their greatest difficulties in communicating with us were caused by doubt or by dishonest messengers.

“Both. It is hard to find a good messenger, but, having found one, doubt is apt to destroy all his work.”

“All four points of the compass, Mother dearest.” This we took to be an allusion to his writing along the four edges of the table, earlier in the evening. “You see, we have not much time left, and you must go home fortified and happy, and glad for yourself and me.... It will mean a lot to Dad. He has thought I was in some remote and far-off heaven, and he will like to know that we are working more nearly shoulder to shoulder than ever before, as we are in some ways.... I want to talk to him straight.” Long afterward one of his sisters told me that “shoulder to shoulder” was a characteristic phrase of Frederick’s.

Again sliding over to the lower right-hand corner, he wrote quickly, in big swinging script, upside down to me: “Mother dearest, don’t forget the four points of the compass. I want you to remember that I am your boy come back. Not lost at all. Please remember that.”

When a fresh surface offered and the pencil was placed at my left, as usual, he said, “No,” and swung once more down to the right, writing quickly and firmly toward the left and upside down to me.

“I am going to write a little letter to Dad and the girls. I love them just as well as ever, and it hurts me to have them think I am not alive and loving them, because I know they still love me.

“FREDERICK.”

Although the movement in this reversed writing is rapid and definite, as if great energy were exerted to accomplish it, it is extremely difficult to follow, perhaps because the muscles of the hand are accustomed to move from left to right in writing, or because the mind instinctively resists a movement it cannot readily understand.

V

The next day (Monday, March 11th) we all returned to New York together, Mrs. Gaylord rejoining us in the evening, after dining with other friends.

Before her arrival, we talked a little to Mary Kendal, who was still uneasy about the failure to reach her husband, from whom no word had come. We asked if she knew David Bruce, and she replied: “No, but he is here, and most of us know what he does. He is a sweet force.”

When Mrs. Gaylord came, we told her of this characterization, after some personal talk with Frederick, and at once he took up the suggestion.

“Mother dearest, you are a sweet force, too. Help me build a structure of strength, which is Dad, sweetness, which is you, and illumination, which is my part.”

We remembered then his asking her to “clear away the débris of things outlived and begin the new structure with me,” but not until greater revelations followed did we understand fully what he meant.

A little later he said of his father: “He will discover that I am more a force than ever, and then he will be as proud as men who have sons ‘over there.’ ... Should you prefer a son in the trenches or in the place of accomplished peace?... I am nearer you now than I have ever been before, but the price of that is apparent separation. Your life knows no such companionship as ours can be now, but that is possible only at the cost of apparent and visible contact. This is gain, not loss. You are questioning that, but trust me. I know. You can’t even guess what this means to all of us, Sis and Babe and Dad and you and

“FREDERICK.”

His name was dropped a line, like a signature.

It was coming slowly, with hesitations and false starts, and I asked: “Are you tired, Frederick? Or am I?”

“Both,” he said. “This is not the simplest thing I ever did.... I am not tired, as you understand weariness, but it is easier sometimes to get things through than others.”

The next evening—the last we had with Frederick at that time—his first messages were personal, expressing his desire to “talk straight” to other members of the family.

“But there’s no hurry,” he went on. “We’ve all eternity together now.... Only one thing can separate us. If you doubt my existence, I shall still exist, but your doubt will destroy the thread that links us like a telegraph-wire, only more closely and warmly. So you must not backslide, for my sake as well as your own.”

“Why don’t you stay on?” he asked presently. “I can reach you, but not so definitely for a while to your sense, and actual speech with you is keen joy. Tell ~Dad~ ...”—the erasure is his own—“... the family I want to talk to them, too. Let’s have a reunion. One that won’t leave me out. I want to _be in_.” Rapidly and strongly, he underlined the last words three times.

His mother promised that the family festivals should be held again, in the full consciousness that he was there with them.

“Thank you, Mother dearest. You don’t know how we hate being left out.” When she explained that they were “left out” ignorantly, rather than intentionally, he continued: “No, we know you don’t mean to leave us out. But you—and we, too—would be so much happier if you knew we were there and we could know you were not grieving. You see, we are really nearer to you than you are to each other, and only memory tells us why you grieve. There is no reason for grief in what you call death and we call knowledge.”

“Why hasn’t all this been told to us before?” she demanded. “It was cruel not to let us know it!”

“As I wrote you the other day, not everybody has been prepared for the knowledge. It is known only to the few—those first over the top I spoke of. But it will be the next great revelation. As well say it was cruel not to have known chloroform in the Middle Ages, when it was sorely needed, or wireless telegraphy in the Napoleonic wars. There is an evolution of soul, as well as of biology and chemistry. Many fine souls have still lacked this peculiar preparation.”

This started a little discussion between us. One said that many persons had lost faith in the orthodox religions, thus making the need of a new revelation great. Another spoke disparagingly of the modern theory of a pervasive and impersonal energy, from which we come and to which we return, losing individuality. At this point Frederick took the lead again.

“Don’t you let them fool you! There is no such thing as Bergson’s stream of energy, unless every individual of us is a well-defined drop in the stream. That is all a philosopher’s dream, coated with poetry and tinctured with science.”

Mrs. Gaylord said she had never heard of Frederick’s reading Bergson, and I mentioned that I had read nothing of his, except one article in a review.

“I never read Bergson, either, but you could not live in the world, or pick up a Sunday supplement, some years ago, without encountering that stream of energy.”

“There speaks the newspaper man!” his mother said, laughing.

During all these talks with Frederick he had frequently made the little retraced circle, which we had been told meant joy. He made it again now, with vigor, and some one suggested that he seemed excited.

“Wouldn’t it excite you to get into actual touch with your family, after long doubt and pain? I am no angel, you know, and thank God I am not above being excited. When I am I _will_ be dead!” Again he underscored a word.

Mrs. Gaylord spoke of her feeling of his presence, of his characteristic personality, saying that he seemed “just the same.”

“Plus, Mother dear. You’d like me better now. I don’t mean that I am perfect, you know. I’ve got more to learn than I ever knew existed, but I can see ahead now. And you _would_ like me better.... I didn’t say love me better,” he added.

We talked about the force moving the pencil, which on this occasion was very strongly applied, though I was greatly fatigued by the efforts of the past few days, and I asked Frederick whether he could move it without my co-operation. But he said, “Only as you hold it.” To a suggestion that he expressed himself not through the pencil, but through me, he replied, “She is like the battery.”

From the first Mrs. Gaylord had been experimenting with planchette and pencil, hoping to establish direct communication with Frederick. While placing more emphasis on a possible communion of thought, without material aid, he had encouraged these efforts. “Mother, you can do it, I am sure,” he said once, “but don’t expect much fluency for some time. I have not written except through Margaret yet, but they tell me she is exceptionally sensitive as a messenger.”

Referring to this, he was asked whether others, not known to me personally, had desired to communicate through me, and replied: “No, but they have watched her, this last week.” Ten days later, when the most amazing of all the communications began to come, we remembered this. After enumerating some of the qualifications of a good messenger, he said: “When that combination is found we are all interested, if we want to reach our own people.”

“Are you over there especially interested in reaching your own families and friends, or in reaching persons who might be interested in the possibility of these communications?”

“Both. But if you have ever been unable to communicate with those you love, for months and years, and have known they were suffering, then you know which interest is keenest. The one is immediate and urgent, the other more or less a matter of evolution.”

“Shall I try to talk to some of you occasionally?” I asked. “Or shall I wait for a call?”

“You are over the top. We shall be glad to come.”

“Can you let me know, if you have something to say through me?”

“Not always. Sometimes we can suggest the thought to you.”

Since that time, however, a more perfect connection has been established and I am often conscious of a definite summons. On these occasions the pencil starts at once, generally with great vigor, and almost always writes some message not conveyed to my consciousness except as I spell it out after the pencil.

Toward the end of the evening, when Mrs. Gaylord had suggested going back to her hotel, the pencil made a little circle and some apparently aimless marks inside it.

“Is this Frederick?” I asked, wondering at indecision from him.

“Yes. I want to do something Mother can’t forget.... You don’t need any more fancy stunts, do you?”

She said she did not, but that she was very tired and could stay no longer.

“Oh, don’t go!” he begged. “I’ll go with you, but I like gassing this way.” Another characteristic phrase, she said.

After some further assurances of his frequent presence and constant watchfulness, she said she really must go. Frederick then moved the pencil down to the right corner again, and wrote, very clearly and carefully, one more “upside-down” message—a touching little message of love to “dear Dad and the girls,” which he signed, “Your boy, Frederick.”

The next day Mrs. Gaylord went home, where she immediately destroyed all her black-bordered cards and stationery and similar symbols of mourning. She wrote me that she felt it was false and wicked to mourn for a son as vitally alive and happy as she now knew Frederick to be.

VI

One of my letters to Mr. Kendal had been marked “Urgent.” On the day of Mrs. Gaylord’s departure a telegram came from him, asking that a duplicate of this letter be sent to him at Chicago. It developed later that all my missives, after some delay, had been forwarded from his club to his business address in the South, where, owing to the uncertainty of his plans, his secretary had held them, notifying him by wire of the one evidently demanding immediate attention.

After some hesitation—reluctant to shock him by a bald and startling announcement unaccompanied by any explanation of a situation concerning which I was convinced he would be skeptical, if not wholly unsympathetic, and yet impelled by his wife’s distressed insistence to reach him before he should go South again—I telegraphed him that I had reason to believe I had been in direct communication for several days with Mary and others, and asked him to return _via_ New York, if possible.

Early that evening I took up a pencil, which moved at once.

“Manzie has your message.”

This could be no one but Mary Kendal. To my inquiry concerning his reception of my telegram she replied: “He is startled. He is wiring you.” An expression of her happiness followed, concluding, “He is thinking of me ... and I can help him.”

“Can’t you help him unless he is thinking of you?”

Apparently this presented difficulties, but after long effort and many false starts she achieved what I felt to be only a part of the answer she had intended. “On power I can.”

“You mean that you can influence his work? His strength, or accomplishment?”

“Yes, but not his heart and soul.” After assurances that he would come soon, she thanked me touchingly.

Later in the evening she said, “Manzie is so amazed!” When I asked whether he believed it, she returned: “He does now. He has thought....” Details personal to him followed.

Still later I asked whether Mr. Kendal had telegraphed me, and she said that he had not, though he had intended to do so. As a matter of fact, he had not at that time received my telegram, but he afterward told me that when it reached him, twelve hours later, his reactions were exactly as she had described them. Also, his intention of telegraphing me immediately was delayed several hours by business necessities. This is one of several instances when a difference of plane has seemed to enable them to look ahead for a limited space and foretell events.

The next morning, for the first time in ten days, the pencil was merely a piece of dead wood between my fingers, without impulse. After long delay it moved slowly, making light circles, but no words came.

I knew that Mrs. Gaylord had intended to make an effort that day to get into touch with Frederick through a semi-professional medium in her vicinity, and in the evening I took up a pencil, wondering whether we could learn what success had attended the attempt.

“Mary.”

Supposing this to be Mary Kendal, I made some allusion to Mansfield, and was immediately corrected.

“No. Mary K.”

This was surprising, as it was the first time she had responded since my initial effort to establish this intercourse. She said that Mary Kendal was not present, and that Frederick had met his mother at Mrs. Z——’s, with results only partially satisfactory—which letters from the Gaylord family afterward verified. We suggested that this might have been discouraging, and she replied: “Discouragement is not for Frederick.”

“How do you know so much about Frederick now?” I asked. “Ten days ago you said you did not know him.”

“Mrs. Kendal interested me in him. He is for justice, light, and progress. My work, too.”

To my expressed hope that she found life happier there than it had been for her here she returned, “Yes, I was glad to come,” following the statement with the little circle so often used by the others. She, too, said that it meant joy. We have since learned that it means much more, but apparently they were educating us by degrees. In this case the joy was not hers alone, for the renewed communion with her brought me great gladness.

Our friendship began long ago, in a Western city, whither she had come in search of health. Both were young, she a few years the elder. She was alone. I never saw any member of her family, and we had few friends in common, but between us, from the day we met, there was a strong bond of sympathy, which grew to deep affection, notwithstanding many differences between us. She was more widely read than I; I more actively in touch with life than she. She was a church woman; I was not. Her point of view was Eastern, mine at that time entirely Western. Our many disagreements were argued warmly and at length, but at bottom each knew that she could draw at will upon whatever strength or resource the other possessed, and the debt in the end was mine, when her death left a blank to which I could never be quite reconciled.

Her brief career seemed to contradict the law of compensation, upon which, until recently, my philosophy of life has been based. Meticulously truthful, scrupulous in all things, strong of purpose, giving of her best to life, life passed her by with a shrug. Keenly sensitive to beauty, whether spiritual, intellectual, or material, she was hampered in its pursuit by limited health and limited means. For years she struggled with uncongenial employment of one sort or another, denying herself the loaf she needed to procure the hyacinth she needed more. Longing for life at its fullest and richest, she scarcely touched its margin. Yearning for high peaks and wide outlook, she lived always on the plain. When, finally, the path seemed to be opening before her and she was pleasantly established, doing a healing and constructive work for which she was fitted, she died suddenly, still baffled, having given the last proof of her love for humanity by yielding her life for it, worn out by hard work, combating an epidemic in a college town.

Rejoiced to learn that at last she was happy, I asked whether she could tell us of her work, and she began, easily: “Yes, on the ... on ... on the....” After long difficulty she accomplished it. “On the perpetual tour.”

When she had verified this astonishing statement as correct, I suggested, “‘Off ag’in, on ag’in, gone ag’in’?”

“That’s it.” For an eager spirit like Mary K.’s no happier heaven could be imagined.

Replying to further questions, she said that it was not just luck that I had caught her that first night. No, neither had she come to me from the other side of the world. “I’ve been working on you for a month,” she said. “Ever since V—— was here.” It was considerably more than a month, but time and place seem to have little significance to those on her plane.

Shortly after this Annie Manning interrupted again. It was said that Mary K. knew Annie Manning and wished me to find her brother. Inquiry developed the fact that he was the brother mentioned the first night I used planchette. His name was given as James Manning, and his address, Albany, New York. “United States Ho....” We could not get beyond that. At one time the word seemed to be “Hotel.” Unable to find any United States Hotel listed in Albany, I suggested Saratoga, but this was not accepted. Repeatedly asked to write to him, I could obtain no address.

Afterward the address was given as Albany, but not New York. Long efforts to write the name of the state resulted in “I ...,” ending in wavy lines. Suggestions of Illinois and Iowa brought negatives, but the mention of Indiana was greeted with a quick, “Yes.” Vain and fatiguing efforts to get the rest of the address resulted in the indefinite “United States Ho ...” and at last I gave it up, disappointed.

An hour later Annie Manning came again, but I asked her to let me talk to Mary K.

“Here! Mary K.,” was the prompt response. “Do you remember all the good times?” I told her I did, and thought of them often. “All the many ae ... an....” There I lost it. She began it many times, in many ways, apparently trying to get a momentum that would carry her through. “All the many am ... I mean ae ... I meant to say anm....” Too tired to continue, again I abandoned the attempt.

Annie Manning came once more, making futile efforts to give me her brother’s address. She finally said it was “just United States Home.” Once she wrote, “just Home.” And once, “Honest, that’s all.”

I have never learned the whole truth about Annie Manning, who ceased, after the first fortnight, to manifest herself; whether because she lacked perseverance or because other influences were already at work, I do not know.

The next day I took up the pencil, expecting Mary Kendal, with news of her husband, but Mary K.’s strong, underlined signature greeted me instead. She said that Mr. Kendal was coming, adding: “On cen ... cent....”

“Century?” I suggested. “Twentieth Century Limited?”

“No ... cen ... ce ... cent....” Finally, she agreed to Century—compromised on it, I learned later. Within five minutes a telegram came from Mr. Kendall—the first word I had received from him—saying that he would arrive in New York Sunday or Monday.

When I told him of this experience he exclaimed: “Central! New York Central!” Which, for some reason, had not occurred to me. At the hour when Mary K. gave me this information he had ordered, at his club in Chicago, a ticket for the Lake Shore Limited—like the Twentieth Century, a New York Central train. Later, having the ticket actually in his possession, he telegraphed me that he would come by that train, reaching New York Sunday evening, but afterward changed to another road.

This second message arrived Saturday afternoon, and I at once inquired of Mary K. why she had said “Century.” Instead of her familiar signature, however, “Frederick” was written.

Having ascertained that this was Frederick himself, and not a message about him, I asked him to go on.

“The Family are happy.” At no time during this brief interview had I the slightest inkling of what was coming. As he had been always so courteous in acknowledgment, the first letters led me to think he was beginning his customary “Thank you.” Saying that their happiness added greatly to my own, I asked if he had anything else to say.

“Yes. At your service.... At the next large family reunion you both will be present, won’t you?”

I said we would try to be, and again he wrote his name, indicating that he had nothing more to say, whereupon I called Mary K., reproached her for inaccuracy, and asked why she had said Mansfield Kendal would come by the Century.

Apparently despairing of penetrating such density, she replied, merely: “He wanted to leave to-day.” Later in the afternoon she said, “He will be perfectly ready to believe,” which seemed to me highly improbable.

Some things written that afternoon came to my mind before they did to my fingers, and I asked whether she could not write the messages without first telling me what they were to be.

“Yes,” she returned, “but it is harder for us and more exhausting for you.” Weeks afterward, when this separate control of mind and pencil had been more fully demonstrated, it was more fully explained.

Remembering her statement that her work took her “on perpetual tour,” I asked how long she would be here.

“I shall be near you for months,” she said, and then began again her never wholly relinquished effort to write the message first attempted two days before. “Ao ... an ... aon ... aem ... aeons ago ...”—here she made a frantic little joy circle—“... we were lovers.”

This surprised me, for it seemed unlike her and was absolutely foreign to my thought, but when she had verified it, I asked: “Is reincarnation true, then?”

“No. Aeons ago ... I was a friend of yours in ——.” She mentioned a person whom I have known all my life. Again this seemed utter nonsense, but again she verified it. “We were concerned in being more and more curiously limited ... more and more animal.” Some of this came readily, some with halting and false starts, which—like Frederick—she crossed out herself.

At first this, too, seemed devoid of meaning, but after a little thought I asked whether she meant that we had been associated in some way as pure spirit.

“Everybody was pure spirit once, and will be again,” was the rapid reply.

“Is this life a punishment, then?”

“No, a beginning of individuality.”

“Does the individual continue to exist forever?”

“Yes.”

“As pure spirit?”

“Yes.”

“Then how were we associated as pure spirit?”

“We were the same purpose.”

Completely puzzled, I asked, “Why do you say we were friends in ——?”

“He was the larger purpose, of which we were a part.”

“The original purpose is not all the same, then?”

“No, there are many purposes in the beginning, but only one in the end.”

“Does Frederick know all this?”

“All of it.”

When she said good night, she added, “God bless you,” and I asked: “Mary K., how do you see God? Frederick sees Him as light in dark places.”

“Justice, light, progress.”

“Is that God, or God’s work?”

“Tested.”

“You mean that you have tested it?”

“Yes.”

The next day, Sunday—two weeks from the day she had first talked to me through planchette—she returned to this theme, which still seemed somewhat fantastic to my practical and pragmatical mind, with further allusions to our long association.

During the days of confusion and uncertainty before Mr. Kendal replied to my telegram, when his wife constantly implored me to write to him again, and I as constantly refused, insisting that she first show cause why she had misled me about his movements and whereabouts, I wrung from her an admission that in some way he had put her so far from him that she neither knew nor could learn anything about him, except that he suffered and needed her, which both Mary K. and Frederick verified. I said once to Mary K. that it was incredible that this could be, to which she laconically returned, “It can.” After his actual receipt of my telegram, Mary Kendal never returned to me until she came with him, and the character of her earlier banishment, and consequent inability to perceive his movements, was still unexplained.

As the hour of his arrival approached I grew uneasy, and asked Mary K. whether he came happily or in dread.

“Certainly with o”—the joy circle, and as we have since learned, the circle of completion.

When I asked her to write it out in full to reassure me, the pencil ran back, underscoring “certainly.” She said further that Mary Kendal was with him, and very happy.

“Has Mary Kendal been very unhappy?” I asked.

“No. Aeons ago they were one purpose.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“She knew that he must answer if she could reach him.”

“Does that hold good of evil purpose, too?”

“Yes.”

VII

It seemed to me that if Mr. Kendal had not received my letters, and was in possession only of the meager information contained in my telegram, it was best that he should read the record of the earlier interviews with his wife before coming to communicate with her, and to that end the book containing the whole story was to be sent to his club before his arrival. Having decided this, it occurred to me to consult Mary K., who emphatically negatived the plan.

“No. Mary Kendal is most anxious to tell him herself now.” She told us to make brief explanations, adding: “All he needs now is Mary Kendal.”

Shortly afterward Mary K.’s now familiar summons—an indescribable sensation in the arm or hand—recalled me to the pencil, and she wrote, quickly and firmly: “Mary Kendal wants you to change your record.”

Surprised, I asked what change she wished, and was told to take out everything relating to her banishment from Mansfield’s life, because she preferred to tell him that in her own way.

“Shall I show him the record at all?” I asked.

“Yes, but take that out first.” Fortunately, the record is kept in a loose-leaf, typewritten book, so this was not difficult.

As the day wore on I grew more and more nervous. Suppose he should be more hurt than helped? Suppose we should fail? Rarely in my life have I dreaded anything so much, or felt so little confidence in anything I had deliberately undertaken to do. By nine o’clock I was in a nervous chill. Meanwhile Mr. Kendal telephoned that he had found my letters, which had been returned to his club, and that he would join us presently.

Upon his arrival he told us that he had been one of the early members of the Society for Psychical Research in this country, and had spent several years investigating phenomena of this nature, together with various other young men, under the general supervision of Prof. William James, Dr. Minot Savage, and others of that group. He mentioned some of the frauds and self-deceptions uncovered at that time, but said he believed the ultimate conclusion to have been that there were certain well-authenticated phenomena for which no logical or scientific explanation had been found.

Nothing that he said, however, indicated to the slightest degree his attitude toward the question in hand, and I received an impression that his mood was critical, which steadied me. The disappointment, should we fail, would be less hideous. In the end, he suggested a trial, and after preparing the table, Cass left us alone.

The pencil started almost immediately, with a strange, jerkily rhythmical movement—due possibly to Mary’s agitation, possibly to mine, but wrote very distinctly, without pause or faltering. It was evident at once that the message conveyed more to him than its words suggested.

Much later in the evening he told me that for some time after Mary left him he had believed that if she still existed anywhere in the universe she would contrive somehow to let him know; but as months had passed into years, with no sign from her, while never entirely losing faith in the continued integrity of the individual after death, his despair had deepened with his growing conviction that “the drop that was Mary” had been swept on in the stream and forever lost to him. Widely read in philosophies and unable to forget them, steeped—despite his practical occupation—in scientific and intellectual theory, he had feared to rely upon a reunion in a future of which no proof had been given him, lest he be grounding his faith in the sands of his own hope.

It was to this unhappy conviction—a conviction so strong in its negation that for a time she had been unable to penetrate in any way the psychic atmosphere it created—that she addressed herself in those first written lines. She used, also, her intimate name for him, which I had never heard, and his for her, which I knew, although I supposed the peculiar spelling used on this occasion to be an error, until he told me otherwise.

He asked one or two questions about personal matters, which I assumed to be in the nature of tests, which she answered briefly, though not very specifically, concluding: “I cannot tell you anything to-night, except that I am so happy. I had lost you, and you are found again. Let me talk to you to-morrow.”

Some time later he wanted to know why he could not read her mind direct, and she replied: “You can, in time, if you will let me in, and learn. We can have such communion as we never had before, because one veil is now removed. But that will take time to learn. It is true. It can be.... Take me into your heart and soul joyfully, without resentment or grief, and you will soon learn to read my thoughts as I have read yours since I seemed to leave you.

“Then I can tell you things that I cannot say through any messenger.... You can learn.... All I want now is to convince you that I am alive and longing to be with you and to have communication directly with you. It is impossible for me to do that alone. But I had to reach you somehow, and Margaret was the first way I found.”

We talked a little of the possibility of his establishing direct communication with her. I asked whether he could use a pencil in this way, and she returned: “Yes, if he will try every day, he could in time, I think. There is always a way for us to reach our dearest ones, if they only persevere.”

During a pause, with the pencil-point still resting on the paper, I told him of Mary K.’s assertion that eons ago some of us had been one and that we still continue one in purpose. Mary Kendal took it up immediately.

“Manzie, you and I are the same purpose. That is the reason that, once reunited, we cannot be separated, except by our deliberate yielding to a different and disintegrating purpose. That is the eternal battle—between the purposes of progress and building and the purposes of disintegration. It goes on in your life, and it goes on less bitterly in ours. Help me build, as we began, toward the great unity.... All of us here are working against those forces of disintegration so rife in your life now, and every bit of retention of unity that is for upbuilding helps us and helps the great purpose for which we work.... You and I began working for that long ago, and each of us will always continue to work for it. But we shall be happier if we do it consciously together.... Don’t think of me as far away.... We will welcome to our unity anything or anybody who strengthens the purpose, but let us always hold fast to each other.”

Here was the first actual statement, however brief and incomplete, of that theory of life which seems—to us who received it first, at least—so rational, and so full of inspiration and hope.

Referring to her phrase, “all of us here,” he asked: “Is ‘here’ a place, or a state, or both?”

“Both,” she answered, quickly. “It is the beginning of eternal life.” After a moment, she added: “The state is fluid; the place is ephemeral.”

“I believe it!” he exclaimed. “That’s more nearly an explanation than anything I ever heard before.”

“This is more nearly the truth than anything you ever heard before. That’s why.... Truth in your life is comparative. Here it is absolute, but not dogmatic.”

He said that she had not been given to the use of a philosophic vocabulary in this life, and must have acquired it there, to which, at the moment, she made no response.

Some time after Cass rejoined us Mr. Kendal asked how much farther, or how much more clearly, they could see about purely business or political matters than we.

“We can see much farther, but we are not permitted to tell you, except by ethical suggestion. Part of your development comes through your struggle to decide, and while we see your struggle, we can help only by giving you as much of our strength and light as you can take. It _is_ a moral universe, Manzie.” The underscoring is hers.

Out of his wide experience with psychic phenomena, he gave me much comfort regarding the inaccuracies and misleading statements that had so greatly disquieted me. He argued that these discrepancies might easily be caused by some factor or factors unknown to us, operating on another plane, and was entirely untroubled by them. In this connection, Mary K. said to me the next day: “We regard things successfully started as accomplished.”

[Some weeks later Mr. Kendal suggested another possible reason for these apparent inaccuracies, using as a comparison a familiar experiment in physics. He reminded us that if a rod be projected in a straight line between the eye and a coin at the bottom of a bowl of water, its tip will miss the coin by a distance varying with the angle of vision and the depth of the water. Assuming that the difference between this plane and the next must be vastly greater than that between air and water, he argued that there might be a factor comparable to this deflection of ray influencing their perception of material, specific details of this plane—a simile which Mary K. subsequently characterized as “almost perfect.”]

It was three o’clock in the morning when Mr. Kendal left us to return to his club—but he went convinced. Like Mrs. Gaylord, his confidence was inspired not only by the temper and tenor of the messages he had received, but by the accompanying consciousness of a familiar personality, akin to the certainty of identity one feels in talking to a friend by telephone or in reading a characteristic letter. Like her, too, he said that in several instances his unspoken thought had been directly answered.

The next day we resumed our conversation—for it amounted to that—with Mary.

“There will be hours, and sometimes days, when you cannot feel me, just at first,” she warned him. “But I beg of you, do not let the doubts prevail. I shall be there, unless that disintegrating force drives me away. That’s a power we here cannot fight alone. Faith is not the desire to believe, as some men have said. It is the thread that connects your life and ours, and when it is broken we are powerless to reach you.”

We spoke again of inaccuracies concerning mundane activities, and he elaborated somewhat his theory that it is unwise to ask and unsafe to rely upon answers about concrete, specific things, because in translating them into terms of our plane we are apt to overlook some transforming, unknown factor, and so go wrong.

“Besides that,” Mary took up the discussion, “you must work out your problem yourself. We can only help you definitely and directly in the larger things that pertain to the life of our purpose. Your present problem may be solved in any of several ways, and will perhaps affect the ephemeral part of your life. Your greater concern, and my only concern, is with the fluid part, which we shall share together always, now.”

He asked, after some further talk, whether there was danger of my being exploited or employed by malign influences—a suggestion entirely new to me—to which she replied in the negative, adding: “Trust us for that. Her own purpose is definite, and with that foundation, we can protect her fully.” Apparently she underestimated the strength of the enemy, or perhaps she merely disregarded the temporary confusion created by occasional sorties.

Thinking that he might know something about New Albany, Indiana, I told him of the Annie Manning episode and my failure to ascertain her brother’s address. Our conversation was interrupted by an unsigned statement that the brother was not in New Albany, Indiana, but in Albany, New Hampshire, flatly contradicting a previous statement. My impatient comment was answered by an assurance that Annie Manning had recently passed to the next plane and was confused. A suggestion that possibly Annie Manning was one of the malign forces mentioned brought no response, unless Mary Kendal’s next words constituted an indirect reply.

“Manzie dear, ... you will have entirely different forces working against you, from those trying to control Margaret, but we will truly and surely protect you both.”

Again, following a period of silence, she wrote a brisk reply to his unspoken thought, adding, when he commented upon it: “You see, I do know what is in your mind, and the time may not be far away when you can read mine as clearly. I don’t always answer your thought, because Margaret has still some fear of being deceived in her reception of my message, and it is hard, but as she works with us she will learn unconsciously to yield, just as you will learn to detect my presence.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you or your work?” he asked. “Or must it be all take and no give with us?”

I have no record of her reply. She began by saying that any actively constructive effort here helped them there, because it helped the great purpose. This was followed by a message so intimately and exquisitely his that I felt it almost a desecration to be the messenger through whom it necessarily came. He took that part of the roll away with him, and I am glad to say that twenty-four hours later no word of it remained in my memory. It was truly his.

The next night he came again, very happily. She, too, was in a lightsome mood, and while there was some serious talk, most of it was pure effervescence, frequently witty, sometimes brilliant. Unfortunately, little of this may be quoted, either because of its too personal character or because, like much amusing conversation, it was too essentially of the mood and the moment to bear translation into type.

Constantly he exclaimed at the characteristic quality of her repartee, to my great surprise. I said that I had never seen this merry side of her, and had not dreamed that it existed, to which she replied: “You never saw us when we were not in trouble—before.”

“Let me in and don’t chafe,” she told him, in one of her more serious moments, “and I can tell you much of what I see ahead. Grief, resentment, bitterness and doubt are our highest barriers. There is no cause for grief in a relation closer than your life there knows. There is no ground for resentment in the price we pay. There can be no bitterness in growth and development together—quicker growth, fuller development, than could be possible if one of us were not here. It is largely in the point of view, this thing that is called grief.”

In the course of their drifting talk he asked her how to go about starting persons who have no starting-point—“no peg to hang things on.”

“Sometimes a bomb is effective. But the fragments are not always efficient.” We laughed, and she added: “They just have to wait and grow up, Manzie dear. We learn here that our frantic haste there has been foolish. Growth must take its own time.... No, I didn’t!” I had called attention to her failure to cross a t, and she returned to it with a flourish. Several times thereafter she made a little joke by conspicuously dotting her i’s.

In the midst of one ecstatic whirl she paused to inquire: “Who ever started the foolish notion that there was no life beyond that one? Was he a philosopher, or a dyspeptic, or both?” And again, following some amusing nonsense, “You don’t think this would sound trivial to a scientific investigator, do you?”

“What’s the matter with the scientific type of mind?” he asked.

“Mostly it’s pure intellect—and life isn’t.”

During another moment of jesting he said: “I don’t think I’ll bother to walk home. I’ll just float.”

“Come on! We’ll float together,” she retorted. “Do you raise that, or call?”

Laughing, he returned: “I’ll pass the buck to Saint Peter,” whereupon she intimated that Saint Peter was not immediately available.

“Who hold the keys?”

“You hold your own—not transferable.”

“You are mostly pure idealist,” was another comment, a little later, replying to something he said about his own attitude toward life, “and got lost for a while in the dark.” He began to say that he should hardly have called himself an idealist, but already she was answering. “A true idealist is not a man who limits life to ideas, but a man who puts his ideals into life.”

One otherwise serious statement, concerning the influence of “hard-headed, intelligent men who are not afraid to testify to their faith” in these revelations, was given a humorous touch by the signature, “Missionary Mary.”

“Do you want me to go forth and testify, also?” I asked.

“No, you do it, and that involves too much,” she replied. “Let your converts testify. You go on playing hermit.”

“Have you seen William James?” he asked.

“He is instructing many of us. Some of my newly acquired vocabulary he taught me. He is more certain and less philosophical than he was. The will to believe has given way to the duty of faith. He has learned more quickly than most do, because he is truly sincere and had cultivated his ground well. Now he is still a leader of thought and accomplishment, but his instruction is dynamic.... He is a very fine force, Manzie, and is doing magnificent work here, but he no longer smothers it in language.”

Much of this parting interview must be omitted.

At nine o’clock Sunday night Mr. Kendal had approached this experience in a state of high nervous tension. At midnight on Tuesday, fifty-one hours later, he left us to return home, imbued, like Mrs. Gaylord, with the vitalizing quality of this touch with the unseen and carrying with him the happy conviction that he did not go alone.

VIII

Up to this time the messages, while frequently impersonal in tenor, had seemed entirely personal in direction. It happened, fortunately, that both Mrs. Gaylord and Mr. Kendal were more interested in the wide meaning and purpose of life than in the narrow, individual details of its conduct, and to that interest chiefly those nearest them on the next plane had addressed themselves. The rapidity with which these communications came, and their surprising volume, was attributed to the fact that in both cases the time in which they could be given through me was limited.

Aside from the attendant nervous strain—which has been less, on the whole, than one would expect, probably because these efforts have been followed by such sound and refreshing sleep as I had not known before in years—the manual labor involved in taking these long messages, and in typewriting them afterward, has been excessive. Assuming, however, that this flood of disclosure would be diminished when the necessity for immediate expression passed, I looked forward to leisure and opportunity for some long talks with Mary K., which should be more detailed and personal than our somewhat fragmentary intercourse thus far had been.

This was briefly delayed by requests to establish interplane communication for one or two other friends, whose need was more imperative than my own, when significant and beautiful messages—not to be quoted here—were obtained. One of these slightly elaborated the now familiar idea of the close and intimate relation of certain persons to one another, because of their union in a common and eternal purpose. In a letter to Mr. Kendal I mentioned this, adding: “It begins to look like a gospel, doesn’t it?”

Finally, however, my own opportunity came, on Thursday, March 21st, but instead of permitting me to propound any of the many questions I had in mind, Mary K. delivered a detailed message of instruction that left me astounded and incredulous. Most of this is too personal to repeat, but some of it must be quoted, in view of what followed.

“...We have much to tell, and few through whom to tell it. You have the sensitiveness to receive and the power to convince. When you have fully grasped the meaning of what we have to tell, you must make it known, but not before we give you the whole of it. You will get the truth slowly, through helping many people, but keep the full knowledge frankly back until it is all told.... Let them know you are withholding it, but do not let them have it in fragments.”

“You mean they are not to be told of the division of original purpose into individual life?”

“No, they must have that to build on. But there will be more given to you in fragments. Piece it together for yourself, but do not give it to any one as long as you are still receiving it.... The light is breaking, and you are the ~aces~ ... accustomed ...”—later she returned, to write “accredited” over this word. I think neither was what she tried for. Perhaps accessible?—“... force to make the meaning clear.... It is what we have long sought and just found. That is the reason we are giving you things never told before. You are to pass them on when the time comes.... This is your work, your contribution to the great purpose, which will be revealed to you little by little. Keep clear of disturbing contacts, as you have done, and keep your purpose true. You have already recognized this as a gospel. It is more. It is a faith. Be true to it and it will save many from suffering. That is the reason I am here now and shall remain. I am the force used by greater forces to reach the world through you. We have always been the same purpose, and I can reach you freely.” After an allusion to mental purpose, she defined it thus: “Mental purpose is the force that convinces men. Moral purpose is that which persuades them. We prefer conviction. It lasts, where persuasion fades. Nothing more now, but this is only the beginning. Mary K.”

After the first phrase, save for one or two brief pauses, this long communication was so rapidly written that I could not follow it with my left hand, though I made several attempts, as my right arm became greatly fatigued. At no time had I the slightest impression of what was to be said, and during most of it I was too bewildered to think clearly, my mind being filled with blank wonder and vague questioning, scarcely formulated, yet immediately answered.

The next day she resumed her exhortation.

“... This is war work. It is going to make the war seem what it is, a reawakening of the souls of men. There is no higher duty than to make a man know his own soul and the souls of his fellows. The war will be justified only if this result is obtained. We work for that here, and we ask you to help us. There can be no victory unless this is accomplished.... Be true to your purpose and ours, and help us build for light and progress, against the forces of doubt and disintegration.”

To an inquiry about Germany, apropos of her mention of the war, she replied: “Germany is the united purpose of fear. It is her weapon and her weakness, and it is to defeat the force she symbolizes that we all work.... There you have the real war, the battle that has gone on from the beginning. This is one of the crises of eternity.”

Here I thought of certain past wars, when the victorious barbarians set civilization back.

“Sometimes the forces of disintegration have won, sometimes we. But their victory is never permanent, because they are negative and we are positive. They delay us, but we live and work. We shall win in the end, but that is far away. We call you to fight with the forces of life and light. You can do more with us than you can alone.”

The following day found me still incredulous, and she said:

“... Tell them that you are doing the people’s work, under secret orders, and that they will perhaps know presently what it is. They will all recognize it when it is given to them, except those souls not mentally free from fear.”

From this she passed immediately into the first of that remarkable series of communications which she has called Lessons. Again the writing was so rapid that my arm ached to the shoulder, long before she had finished, from the incessant movement to and fro across the table, and again my mind was filled with blank amazement.