II
SUBCONSCIOUS MINDS

 

AT the word "immortality" the tripod stopped. For a space Joan sat staring in bewilderment at the foolish bits of wood, while I finished my notes. With the striking of a clock she jerked her hands from the tripod. Not until we reached home did we venture discussion of the evening's happening.

 

"What do you suppose does it?" I asked.

 

"The easy explanation," my wife answered, "would be— you. Have you all that story down?"

 

"Another easy explanation," said I, "would be—you. Yes, I think I have that story down."

 

From out one pocket I took my newspaper, its margins covered with Stephen's words. From another I hauled a heterogeneous mass of old envelops, likewise scribbled over with the ouija-board's spellings. Then I fished up a dozen or so of Joan's cards, which I had gleaned from her purse to eke out my paper supply.

 

"There is no use trying to unravel this jumble to-night," I decided. "I'll piece the stuff together to-morrow and type it at the office."

 

This on the morrow I did. And that evening, in our own familiar living-room, Joan and I studied the detail of the ouija­board's strange spellings.

 

I looked up from reading Stephen's death story aloud, and saw Joan searching out, with shifting, sidewise glance, a shadowy corner of the room, whither the light of our lamp scarcely penetrated; and I knew the eery feeling that was in her soul. For, with Stephen spelling himself out of and then back into existence, the far corners had assumed for me, too, an uncomfortable fascination. It seemed that our ghost who spelled so well might also walk.

 

"Darby," said Joan, "you must have made that story up." "Joan," I said, "you made it up yourself."

 

Thus we had it back and forth that evening and for several days. I knew that Stephen's name had never entered my thought until I read it from the ouija-board, and I knew I had never heard or seen anything similar to Stephen's story of his passing out. So I said to Joan, "You did it," sure in my heart she had done no such thing. And she, wishing, like myself, to skirt the supernatural, said, "No, Darby, you did it," though she knew I had not.

 

In the end, of course, we, whose custom it is to tell each other the truth, admitted the easy explanation would not suffice. Together we faced the fact of a something unexplained. Not for a moment, however, did we accept Stephen for what he purported to be.

 

"The phenomenon doubtless is genuine," I said. "Because it is genuine, it's explainable, and that without the aid of a dead man willing to spend his immortality writing on a childish toy. But why should you and I bother? Would it not be best for us just to forget this Stephen and his dying?"

 

"Let's," Joan answered. "The thing's creepy.

 

"I suppose," I went on, "that if there ever was such a person as Stephen, I could run the facts of him down."

 

"I wouldn't," said Joan. "Let's just do as you said—forget him."

 

And yet before another day passed Joan had bought a ouija­board.

 

When I came home from the office she led me into a closet off the living-room, where stood a trunk. Behind the trunk she had secreted her purchase. And there, when our toy was not in use, we would hide it. Often of evenings, if the door-bell rang, we would get the ouija-board back into its hiding-place just in time for us to welcome the caller with uncompromised faces.

 

"There were two sizes," said Joan, as she exhibited her purchase. "I bought the big one.

 

"But why did you buy any? I thought we agreed to forget Stephen."

 

"And we shall," she answered. "I don't care anything about Stephen. But I do want to know what 'quality of consciousness' means. I can't get the phrase out of my head."

 

That night, for the second time, Joan and I placed our fingers on a ouija-board's pointer. Again came Stephen; and immediately he began a system of thought so foreign to either of us that I could not accuse Joan even in pretense, nor she me, of its production. Before a week had passed such conversations as the following were ordinary.

 

"The world is ready for the truth," spells Stephen. "There are many who will be rejoiced to believe, if you but tell them. The time is ripe for the revelation."

 

"And why ripe now?" I ask.

 

"Because," Stephen answers, "never before, since man's own scientific knowledge has been developed to a point enabling him to understand the revelation now planned, has it been possible for the higher degrees of consciousness here to communicate with correspondingly high degrees on your side. Such communication is possible now because, owing to the vast slaughter of the war, so much of consciousness still close to earth is on my plane. As a result our potentiality here for the purpose of communication is strengthened, while earth's collected consciousness, strained by the upheaval of a world war, is rendered unusually sensitive.

 

"Listen! The time is ripe. The world is waiting for a reasonable peg on which to hang its faith."

 

It was engrossing—the Stephen philosophy. That which Stephen had to say seemed so much more important than the question of who or what Stephen might be, that in a way we did just what Joan said we would: We forgot him. The "quality of consciousness" quite overshadowed its expositor.

 

Then gradually the personality of this thing claiming to be a living dead man began to assert itself, built out of modesty, kindliness, droll wit, and piercing directness of understanding. From a vague unknown, Stephen became a well-recognized friend, a sort of correspondent we had never seen, whose letters nonetheless envisaged him. He was not really

 

Stephen, of course. Impossible that he should be a discarnate intelligence! Even if he were, how could the fact be proved— by what evidence? Supported by the professor, by this time an occasional visitor at the board, Stephen himself echoed our question: How, by what evidence?

 

Said the professor: "If I should appear to your Physical eye, if I sat down and talked to your physical ear, you would call me an hallucination."

 

Said Stephen: "If I told you facts, dates, names, and places you did not know, and subsequently you ascertained their truth, you would have tested nothing. You would say you had learned them long ago and forgotten them. If they concerned events happening as I spoke, you would say you received them telepathically from unknown, yet definite, earth personalities. As for prophecy, we here, rightly apprehended, are not soothsayers."

 

I think, though, that, in spite of Stephen and the professor, we would have sought to verify the soldier's name the ouija­board had given us, and the death story, had it not been for an odd, yet human, mental quirk; Joan and I did not want to catch this Stephen of the ouija-board, this friend of ours, up in an untruth. Investigation, we believed, would result in just that.

 

But it was one thing to regard Stephen simply as a phenomenon, dismissing the question of who or what might be the antecedent of that phenomenon. It was a more difficult thing so to regard Stephen's philosophy, once we realized the wonder of it. We could not avoid asking ourselves this question: Where did Stephen's elaborate system of thought originate?

 

It was not my conscious mind that was evolving the philosophy, nor was it Joan's. Of this we were certain. Was it, then, our subconscious minds—mine, Joan's, or a blending of the two?

 

Here was a plausible solution, one which, though it seemed forced, fortified us against the supernatural. And, so fortified, we dared finally to consider the possibility that Stephen, after all, might be quite what he said he was.

 

There were times—at night when the lights were low and the shadows many—when I said to Joan: "Stephen is real. He is an intelligence outside our own. Once he lived here; now he lives there; and he returns to help us, perhaps through us to help others." And Joan would nod and say, "It is a comprehensive explanation."

 

Morning! The world is awake, with men going sanely about their all-important tasks. I say to Joan: "It's as plain as sunlight that

 

Stephen is our subconscious minds. Men in their sleep have solved mathematical problems that for days baffled their conscious minds. The ouija-board is that little distraction of the conscious needed to set the subconscious free. It is the watch­charm with which the lecturer must toy if his hour is to go smoothly. Stephen's words are the creation of that part of our thought which operates outside the focus of concentration."

 

Then, quite sure of the mystery's solution, we would take the ouija-board upon our laps, and I would say: "Stephen, you are my subconscious mind."

 

Stephen's answer would be: "The subconscious self and the quality of consciousness are closely related. Because of that close relation I can communicate with you. But they are not the same."

 

And so Joan and I vacillated—sure only of one thing, that we were both averagely normal-minded.

 

Day by day we had been accustomed to go about our work with healthy enjoyment in its successful performance—work far removed from participation or even interest in transcendental mysteries. To be sure, we took it for granted that modern living had progressed far beyond the generally accepted standards of conventionalized thought; yet as between time-tested teachings and the "isms" that infest the day, we preferred the former. With the "isms" we had had no contact.