VII
TRIVIALITIES

 

WITH the tedious ouija-board abandoned Joan and I soon lost what slender interest we had in tests and evidence. Before the advent of direct mental communication we were knee-deep in Stephen's philosophy; now we found ourselves immersed in it, so absorbed that the question of who or what Stephen might be seemed to us more and more definitely a pointless query. Here was being offered a new argument for the survival of personality after death. The terms of that argument made it possible for us reasonably to conceive Stephen as a personality that had survived death. The reasonableness of this conception might not be conclusive. But was it not of greater evidential worth than all the testings we might contrive?

 

Compared with Stephen's philosophy, how trivial the evidential messages seemed! Stephen's identification of himself had not been

trivial. But that bit of evidence had come to us unsought. We had not sought the Uncle Michael tests; even so, his method of making himself known to F. W. had seemed rather trashy. Why had he not spoken out plainly, giving the simple facts? Why, instead of saying, "I am your Uncle Michael," had he chosen to ejaculate, "Mouth-organ," and followed it up with "Elderberry whistle"? The Fred Q. test we had sought, to the extent that I had asked to speak with some one I knew in this life; surely the identification data offered by Fred Q. were trivial enough. "Gunboats!" The more one sought evidence the more trivial were the messages received.

 

Our decision that tests led nowhere was reached during the brief period between the typewriter experiment and the first mental communication; that is, on one of the last evenings we spent at the ouija-board. On this evening I told Stephen I wanted to talk with some one other than himself, some one of whom I knew nothing, but who could give me facts that later I might verify.

 

"Testing, always testing!" spelled Stephen, in disgust.

 

The tripod lay idle awhile, then began to move with an annoying uncertainty.

 

"Armand Dupont," it spelled, after many tentative moments.

 "And who are you?" I asked.

 

For two or three minutes the pointer oscillated from one side of the board to the other and finally spelled, with difficulty, the following:

 

"I was an artist, a Frenchman. I was killed at Ypres."

 

Joan knows no French. I said to Armand, If you are a Frenchman, tell me what the French word for child is."

 

I had expected Armand, if he answered at all, to spell "enfant." Instead the tripod spelled "bebe," a word belonging to my reading, not my thinking, vocabulary. Whether this French word had somehow been assimilated by Joan she cannot say; she believes it not impossible. Therefore, there is probably nothing evidential in Armand's answer, though at the time it impressed us.

 

I cannot explain the uneasiness that possessed Joan and me during the brief conversation Armand and I had carried on. The uncanny, by this time, had disappeared from our meetings with Stephen and the professor. Yet Armand somehow was ghostly.

 

Stephen came. We were heartily glad to have him back. Without reference to Armand, he plunged into philosophic byways, and before long Joan and I had forgotten all about the terrifying Frenchman. Stephen talked for almost an hour, when of a sudden the tripod wabbled and again spelled, "Armand Dupont," following the name up with this, "The Marne was once my home."

 

"We don't want to talk with you," said Joan.

"But I want to talk," answered Armand.

“I was an artist in Paris. My picture, top floor, Rue de la

Chapelle. My studio was there with Jack."

 

Then there was an incoherent spelling or two; and then came Stephen again. Again we welcomed him; Armand in his second appearance had proved more uncanny than in his first.

 

"What about Armand?" I said.

"You mustn't mind him," Stephen replied. "His body was blown into a million pieces. The shock lost him a part of his intelligence. He will be all right in a short time. You wanted a test; you have had it. Write and find out if there ever was an Armand Dupont."

 

We did no such thing. Instead, Joan and I agreed then and there that Stephen's philosophy was, as the professor had said, its own best test. Granted we instituted inquiry and found that Armand Dupont had in truth been killed at Ypres, that "Jack" was his friend, etc., would we not immediately be confronted with puzzling questions regarding the subconscious mind, telepathy, and what-not? Premeditated testings resulted only in "mouth organs" and "stolen shirts" and in uncanny things like the coming to our ouija-board of a personality that had "lost part of his intelligence."

 

"Tests that are worth while," I said to Joan, "must come unsought!"

 

"And even then," she answered, "one can always find some plausible theory by which they can be explained away. Also, one test creates an appetite for another. The thing becomes an endless search."

 

It required, then, only the development of direct mental communication, and the wide philosophic interest it stimulated, to drive all wish for evidential messages from us.

 

At the time, I should add, Joan and I did not realize that grief for a dear, vanished friend causes men and women to long for little personal manifestations of the friend's continued life. We did not realize that in such a case the trivial message is often the most convincing. Joan and I, while not young, are youngish. Dear friends have left us, my father and mother and Joan's father. But up to this time we had not wished to talk with them; the thought repelled us. I used to wonder why. The reason was, I think, that, profoundly impressed as we were with Stephen's philosophy, we did not really believe in Stephen himself. Even so, I know now we would have cried out for communication with our dead, if memory of them had been gripping our emotions as memory of the dead husband grips the wife left here to plod the road alone. Joan and I, impersonal in our contact with Stephen and the others, were mere students of philosophy.