VIII
FRED Q. AGAIN
ON the afternoon of January 22, 1919,
Joan went shopping. Toward
dinnertime I picked her up, and as we drove homeward
she told me she had purchased a book,
lately published, called
The Seven Purposes,
a record of psychic communications
received by Margaret Cameron.
"Who's Margaret Cameron?" I asked.
"All I know about Margaret Cameron,"
Joan answered, "is that she writes short stories for the magazines. I've
read a number of them."
"What's the book like?" I asked.
"It's subtitled 'An Experience in
Psychic Phenomena,'" was Joan's reply. "I didn't take time to look
through it. We'll try reading it aloud after dinner."
By eight o'clock we were settled,
Joan at one side of the reading-table and I at the other, with an
electric lamp of two
forty-watt bulbs between us. In addition, a wall lamp was
burning. Every corner of the room was
well lighted. I unwrapped The Seven Purposes.
Joan said she would read a
chapter and I the next. She read to the fifth line from the bottom of
the second page of the introduction then stopped, an exclamation on her
lips.
Briefly, what she had read was a
statement by the author of The Seven Purposes
that twenty-five years
prior to the experiences related in her book she had found amusing
possibilities in a planchette, had "played" with it, "like other young
persons," at intervals, for several years, but had regarded the
assumption that the planchette's assertions emanated from disembodied
personalities as rather absurd. Next she told how some time in 1917 she
had been influenced by the war's revival of psychical interest to buy a
planchette, how for close to a year it remained untouched in its box,
how then she made an unsuccessful effort to operate it, and how
finally, two weeks later, two friends
of hers—a Mrs. Wylie and a
Miss Gaylord, sisters—had told her they had been trying "to get into
touch with their brother Frederick."
I now quote an entire sentence from
the book:
A day or two later we [Frederick's
sisters and Margaret Cameron] tried planchette together, with some
success. It moved briskly, wrote,
"Frederick… mother… love… happy…" and other detached words.
Joan, reading the above sentence
aloud, reached the word "Frederick," then stopped abruptly. She raised
her eyes from the page and, with a surprised look, glanced across the
room, then exclaimed:
"Why, this is Fred Q.'s book!"
"You mean the Frederick
The Seven Purposes
mentions is our Fred Q.? That's
a weird notion. What makes you think so?"
"I just saw Fred Q. standing there,
at my desk, and he told me," she answered.
"Saw him!" I said, staring into the
empty air in front of Joan's
desk. "How did he tell you? Did he speak to you?"
"I don't think so. At least I heard
nothing. But he told me just the same."
When she regained her composure, Joan
added: "As I reached the name 'Frederick' something prompted me to raise
my eyes. I did so, and saw Fred Q. I wasn't frightened. The thing became
startling only when it was all over and I began telling you about it.
Fred Q. was standing by the end of the desk with the dark mahogany of
the closet door as a background. I knew him instantly. He looked perfectly natural,
save that there was a brilliancy
about him. His face shone. His head was bent a little to one side, and
down a bit. He looked at me sort of from under his brows, with
quizzical, half-mischievous eyes. His mouth smiled."
I was struck by Joan's description of
a pose characteristic of Fred Q. She had known him but slightly.
Fred Q., he who had helped himself to
my shirts, was the best man at Joan's and my wedding. Before that
splendid occasion Joan had met him only once. Shortly after Joan and I
were married he spent a Sunday afternoon in our home.
Following that afternoon the meetings of Joan and Fred Q. had
been limited to chance encounters.
From late in 1910 to 1915, when he died, Joan did not exchange with him
two-score words.
My own conversations with Fred Q.
from 1910 on were almost as meager as Joan's. Our ways drifted so far
apart that, though I knew of his illness, I did not realize its
seriousness. Indeed, I had taken his recovery for granted, and was,
therefore, greatly shocked when I learned of his death. Then gradually
he passed from my mind, so that when in 1917 I had asked to talk with
some departed soul I had known here, and Fred Q. came, I was surprised.
Why Fred Q.? There were others gone on whom I had known quite as well. He had
served me faithfully the night Joan
and I were married, but, after all, this was the result of circumstances
rather than long acquaintance.
Joan and I did not go on with our
out-loud reading of The Seven Purposes. A bit upset, she turned
to a magazine, leaving me to examine the book alone.
The author of The Seven Purposes
had been most careful, I found, not to identify Frederick Gaylord;
the name "Frederick Gaylord" was fictitious. I found, though, as I read
on in the book, circumstances that might be regarded as pointing to our
Fred Q., yet nothing definite. On the other hand, I found references
that were meaningless to me, details concerning Frederick Gaylord's home
associations that might have been true of Fred Q.; if so, I knew nothing
of them. I did not, for example, know in what city, or even in what part
of the country, his parents lived. Indeed, some of the more personal
detail was contradictory to what I thought I knew relative to Fred Q.'s
family.
If my own knowledge of Fred Q.'s
connections was limited, Joan's was zero. But, for that matter, she
could have known much, and
the fact would have remained that, after reading less
than two pages of The Seven
Purposes, offering no hint of the identity of
Frederick Gaylord except that he had two
sisters, one married and one single, she had announced: "This is Fred Q.'s book."
But was it?
The next day Joan wrote to Margaret
Cameron—in care of her
publishers, for want of a better address. Joan stated she had
received a communication that
asserted Frederick Gaylord was
So-and-so; she begged to know if such
was really the case. The letter was not mailed until the day following; we debated seriously
whether to send it at all.
On January 31st Joan received a reply
from Margaret Cameron, beginning as follows:
Your interesting, not to say
startling, letter reached me last night… and I wish you would tell me
more about your experience with Fred Q. From one of his sisters I have
obtained permission to tell you that your Fred Q. is the man
whose communication forms rather a
large part of The Seven Purposes.
And so once more, after months of
limiting our interest in Stephen to his philosophy, Joan and I were
bowled over by socalled evidence. We suffered something of the same
shock we underwent when we
discovered that Stephen of the ouija-board
had told the true story of Stephen
L——.
"Darby," said Joan, "you know more
about the verbal messages we have had than
I. Though they come through me, I understand nothing, really, of the
part I play in their transmission. Whatever conviction they carry to me
rests on ground similar to that of your own conviction. But this vision
of Fred Q. is different. It was something I
saw,
outside of me, just as I now see
you."
Is there any light thrown on Joan's
vision her first and only experience of the sort—by the
subconscious-mind theory, by telepathy and the rest?
Personally I am convinced that Joan
did, as a matter of fact, see
an external something resembling Fred Q. This experience,
as she says, is different.
Manifestly telepathy did not cause that vision. Joan's subconscious mind
may have—but how, by what manner of thought projection?
And this speaking of Frederick
Gaylord's correct name— was it the result of mere guess? The two pages
of The Seven Purposes that Joan had read
gave no data that would have aided the guess. Joan did not know Margaret
Cameron or any one knowing her. Could guess be the solution of the
mystery? If so, how did it happen that simultaneously with Joan's making
the guess she saw Fred Q.? Hallucination? But why
was the guess accompanied by the
hallucination?
