V
UNCLE MICHAEL

 

JOAN had promised F. W. he would find us waiting for him. Instead, when we reached home the next night, F. W. was waiting for us, with knowing mien.

 

"I tried to get you on the 'phone last night," I said. "I telephoned everywhere."

"Everywhere," he answered, "except the Public Library. I was doing a little reading, sort of sizing up this psychic stuff."

 

He found his own way to the coat-closet.

 

"I know the answer to that," he announced with assurance, as he caught sight of the ouija-board resting on the top of the trunk.

"Take me into your confidence," said I.

"Simple enough!" he replied. "It's subconscious mind. That ouija-board didn't spell a word night before last that wasn't either in your mind or Joan's or both."

"I don't believe either of us knew that Mrs. Jevon's first name was Jennie," said Joan. "We made inquiry, and Jennie it is."

 

"Well, you probably did know," answered F. W. "You forgot it—that's all. Right there's the point of the subconscious mind. We think we forget a lot of things that later we discover tucked away in our memory. I'll tell you what, though—the way you two ran the ouija-board blind-folded was remarkable."

 

"Does the subconscious mind explain that?" I asked.

 

"I wouldn't be surprised if it does," F. W. replied. "Think of the sleep-walker. The sleep-walker strolls safely through the most dangerous places. He climbs ladders, walks along the edge of cliffs, and all that sort of thing, guided not by sight, but by subliminal memories."

 

The sanity of F. W.'s attitude was contagious—would have been had not Joan and I sat night after night and seen an attention arresting system of philosophic thought build itself up out of what seemed to be nothing, each succeeding thought coherent with that which had gone before, each new development resting on a previously laid foundation. Subconscious mind? Perhaps. But when had Joan and I stored in our subconsciousness the material out of which, without effort, we were now building this structure of thought? And then there was Stephen of the ouija-board, who seemingly had proved to be Stephen L——!

 

Telepathy, F. W. might have said, had he known how Stephen had identified himself. I do not think he would have charged Stephen's identification up to subconscious mind. For F. W.'s daily work and training, like Joan's and mine, fits one to remember dramatic facts and the names they involve. He would have appreciated the likelihood of our remembering a story such as Stephen L——'s, once it came to our notice, the certainty we could not have forgotten such a story so completely that even the unusualness of its bobbing up on a ouija-board failed, wholly failed, to refresh our memories.

 

Suppose F. W. had said, telepathy. Thereby he would have asserted that on the night of December 7, 1916, some person— just who this person was Joan and I might never be able to ascertain—had turned over in his mind certain facts of Stephen L——'s existence and death, and Joan and I—from a distance how great we might never be able to ascertain—had intercepted that person's thought in great detail and with exact accuracy. All this F. W. would have asserted despite the fact that he could not have cited from his own experience, or observation, a single other instance of telepathy, however sketchy.

 

Well, Joan and I took our positions at the ouija-board, F. W. again undertaking to make the record. Almost immediately this came, without hesitancy, but slowly:

 

"F. W., I am here. Recognize by personality. The day was cold. A country road. Two teams. We met your mother at the station. She came to spend the holidays and take you back. Who am I?"

"I don't recall any such incident," said F. W. "I don't know who you are."

"Runaway," spelled the ouija-board.

"Did the runaway have anything to do with an embankment?" asked F. W.

"River-bridge," spelled the ouija-board.

"Hello there!" exclaimed F. W. "Is this Uncle Michael?" "Mouth-organ," replied the ouija-board.

 

"Now you are absurd," said F. W., nettled at the triviality of the ouija-board's last word. "Uncle Michael, the family never believed your horses ran away. They always thought you were the victim of foul play, robbers, maybe."

 

"No foul play," spelled the ouija-board. "Another team from the opposite curve. It was already running away. It ran into my off horse. The driver was drunk. When he saw the result he was so frightened he went on and kept silence."

 

"What had you hauled to market in your wagon?" asked F. W.

 

"Lumber," replied the ouija-board, then added: "I am not sure, but I think grain."

"You contradict yourself," said F. W. "Elderberry whistle," replied the ouija-board.

 

The tripod stopped, and, much as F. W. insisted, there was no further word from Uncle Michael.

 

The facts of Uncle Michael's death, as F. W. told them to Joan and me, were these. He had lived in a distant state, on the farm where he and his sister, F. W.'s mother, had been reared. One day—F. W. at the time was a young boy—Uncle Michael started to market, driving a team of trusted horses. Night failed to bring him home. The next day his body was found at the foot of an embankment, the approach to a bridge a few miles from the farm. The team, trailing the wagon with broken harness, browsed in a fence-corner.

 

The obvious explanation was that the horses had run away; and the family had been unable to prove otherwise. But they had never accepted this explanation; Uncle Michael had known every inch of the road, and the horses he drove were reliable. His family believed he had been attacked by robbers, his body thrown over the embankment as a blind, and the horses deliberately frightened. The proceeds of his trip to market offered a motive for the crime.

 

It happened, though, that Uncle Michael, contrary to his custom, had banked the money.

 

When F. W. made ready to bid Joan and me good night, the hour, as on the previous evening, was late. His assurance had vanished; amazement repossessed him. For here again were facts unknown to Joan and me, yet spelled out on our ouija­board.

 

The picture of Uncle Michael taking F. W. on a cold ride over a country road to meet his mother could be dismissed; F. W. remembered no such ride. And what of the two teams? One would hardly suppose it required two teams to carry one small boy to meet his mother. Yet in the death story, unrelated as it was to F. W.'s ride., there were, curiously, two teams, just as there was a country road. One could but smile at Uncle Michael's failure to remember whether it was lumber or grain he had hauled to town the day of his death. F. W. himself did not know what his uncle's wagon had contained. The "mouth­organ" and "elderberry whistle" remarks, Joan and I agreed with F. W., were too trivial to mean anything.

 

Despite discrepancies, however, and despite trivialities, the fact remained that the ouija-board had suggested to F. W. the personality of his dead Uncle Michael. At the time, neither Joan nor I knew there had ever been such a person as Uncle Michael. We knew nothing of the family of F. W.'s mother, herself dead—who they were or where they lived. F. W. realized our complete ignorance. How, he demanded, was he to attribute Uncle Michael to Joan's or my subconscious mind?

 

"Might it not have been your subconscious mind?" I asked, loath to discount this summary explanation once I saw F. W. weakening.

"How could it have been mine?" he answered. "I wasn't at the ouija-board."

 

I replied that perhaps the explanation lay in a combination of subconsciousness and telepathy. Perhaps the subconscious thoughts of F. W. had been transferred telepathically to Joan's subconsciousness or mine.

 

"Far-fetched!" exclaimed F. W. "Anyway, there were things spelled out there that weren't in my thought at all—the drunken driver, for instance. I never heard of him until to-night. If there ever was a drunken driver, he is probably dead by this time, and if he's dead the chances are that thought of his connection with my uncle's death is in the mind of nobody."

 

Joan and I, as we walked home from church the next morning, sifted the evidence offered by the communications F. W. had called forth. Several things were apparent.

 

For example, if I had held any lingering suspicion that Joan consciously pushed the tripod from letter to letter, or if she had suspected me, these doubts must disappear. With both of us blindfolded the spellings had proceeded practically unhampered. F. W.'s blindfold experiment had made the entire question of our mutual honesty pointless. At least, it demonstrated that there was no necessity for dishonesty.

 

Another fact stood out boldly. It is possible there was publicity given the death of Stephen L——, especially in certain parts of the country. There was no special reason why the story should have been carried by the newspapers of the city in which Joan and I live, and I am quite sure it wasn't; yet, if news of Stephen's death was printed anywhere, there will be those inclined rather to believe that Joan or I read the item cursorily and forgot it, than that the fact of Stephen's existence and death should have come from out the nowhere to our ouija-board. But the Uncle Michael case was different.

 

Here was a farmer, killed in a remote community years ago. His obituary was printed in a country paper, with circulation limited to the immediate neighborhood. There isn't one chance in a million that Joan or I had ever heard of Uncle Michael.

 

This, then, stands out boldly: If the subconscious theory predicates a knowledge acquired normally, however completely the acquisition may have been forgotten by the conscious mind, it breaks down, in this instance at least. If for Uncle Michael to have been in our subconscious minds it was necessary that knowledge of him should have come to us in the past, whether near or distant, through the ordinary channels of the senses, then Uncle Michael simply was not in our subconscious minds.

 

I must anticipate my narrative. About three weeks after Uncle Michael appeared, F. W. called us up one evening and said he wanted to come and see us right away. He came, and brought with him this information: Uncle Michael had been extremely proficient at the mouth-organ and had been famous for his elderberry whistles.

 

"I swear to heavens," said F. W., "that when the ouija-board spelled those words they seemed to me the sheerest nonsense. I wrote the whole story to relatives back in the old home; and here's their answer; playing the mouth-organ and making elderberry whistles were real accomplishments with my Uncle Michael."

 

And thus was broken down the theory that perhaps Joan and I had simply been reading F. W.'s mind. Uncle Michael had told us facts, trivial facts, but true, that F. W. didn't know, any more than we did!