X
FROM A RESEARCH VIEWPOINT

 

IT was the woman who was searching for her lost husband that finally awakened in Joan and me appreciation of what evidential tests mean to the researchers.

 

Margaret Cameron had written Mrs. K. and told her how Joan, upon reading less than two pages of The Seven Purposes, had spoken Frederick Gaylord's true name. Thereupon Mrs. K. wrote Joan. Commenting first on the evidential importance of the Fred Q. incident, and then speaking of her interest in psychical research, Mrs. K. said:

 

"At first, I suppose, I had no belief in survival; it was to me an unthinkable hypothesis. But little by little I have built up, like a coral insect, a reef of hope—just grains of evidence, mounting and mounting, until sometimes for a moment the reef shows above the dark waters…. Then the waters close over again and the reef is hidden. But still I hunt for proof—to build my reef quite up into the sunshine."

 

Mrs. K., on the death of her husband, had plunged into study of psychical research; then, as she phrased it, she began "knocking at doors." Thus, unacquainted with Margaret Cameron, she had, upon reading The Seven Purposes, put herself in touch with its author. So, too, she rapped now at Joan's door. In answering her knock, Joan and I did not set ourselves the task of convincing her that her husband really had survived death. We would simply lay our facts before her.

 

For all her hope, Mrs. K. was, we were to find, strongly under the influence of those theories which, while they admit the genuineness of psychic phenomena, seek to explain them on some non-spiritistic basis—subconsciousness—telepathy, and that most speculative, yet to the modern scientific mind enticing, abstraction, cosmic consciousness. Cosmic consciousness—the vast reservoir of the whole, in which, it has been conceived, all personal experience survives, not as such, but as part of the impersonal life of the universe!

 

Only the motive of Mrs. K.'s search was emotional; the manner of its conduct was the reverse. No communication, so called, would be accepted by her as emanating from the dead until such time as she had definitely failed to explain it on some other basis. Evidence was the biggest word in her vocabulary, just as it had been the smallest in Joan's and mine.

 

Mrs. K.'s letter requested that we send her any messages we received that might even by remote chance be intended for her. We agreed to do so. No word, though, had ever been intrusted to us for third persons, not even for friends. There seemed little likelihood that we would be asked to deliver a message to a woman we had never seen, one whom several hundred miles separated from us.

 

Joan, in replying to Mrs. K.'s letter, took the position that all tests could be explained away, even the vision of Fred Q. Hallucination, one might say; and there, in a way, was an end to the vision's evidence! She told Mrs. K. of the existence of Stephen's philosophy, and ventured the opinion that the case for survival likely to prove most acceptable to present-day men and women would be found in some such statement of survival's reasonableness.

 

"We must hope to be fortified," wrote Joan, "not only with evidential tests, but with conclusions any man can reach once he has grasped the premises."

 

I quote now at some length from a letter Mrs. K. wrote Joan on March 8, 1919, controverting this idea of ours and insisting there must be tests before there can be proof.

"Suppose," said Mrs. K., "Darby is called up some day on the long-distance telephone, and the telephone operator says, 'South America wants to speak to you, Darby—top of the Andes.'

"Darby, surprised, says, 'Well, who on earth wants to speak to me from the top of the Andes?'

"'John Smith,' answers the telephone operator. 'He says he has a message from God for you.'

"Darby says: 'A message from God? John Smith? But John Smith disappeared ten years ago!'

"The telephone operator replies, 'Maybe he did, but he's here on the line now, and he has a message for you from the Eternal.'

"Darby, listening in the receiver, says, 'Hello!' And a voice comes through, saying: 'Hello, Darby! I've got a message from God for you!'

"To which Darby, very much startled, replies: 'But hold on! Who are you?'

"'Why, I'm John Smith, and I'm going to give you a message from God: He says—'

"'Hold on, hold on! How do I know you are John Smith? I don't recognize your voice.'

"'Well, I am. Now listen to what I am going to say. God says—'

"'Yes, but how do I know you are John Smith?'

"'Oh, confound you! Because—because—well, don't you remember walking down Fifth Avenue with me, and we stopped at Forty-second Street, and my umbrella blew wrong side out?'

"'Oh, Lord, Yes! Of course! John Smith! Well, well, well! Awfully glad to hear your voice. Where have you been all this time? Go ahead, John. What have you got to say from God?'

"Now the umbrella," Mrs. K. continued, "is, I admit, frivolous. But it authenticates the whole message from the top of the Andes."

 

It does, certainly. Still, if John Smith's message from God, once listened to, proved of such a nature that it must be true in view of one's already possessed knowledge, John Smith's identification would have been unnecessary. The message would be the important thing, and not whether it really was John Smith who delivered it.

 

Yet Mrs. K.'s little fiction could not be simply waved aside. It represented at least a viewpoint; hers, and that, doubtless, of many others.

 

Then, too, Mrs. K. was groping out in the darkness, not for a principle, but for a familiar hand. By comparison Joan and I were of the academy. To Mrs. K. the personal, even the trivial, if characteristic of him whom she sought, meant more than any principle—provided, of course, knowledge of the triviality could not possibly have been in the receiving station's own mind….

 

A strange thing had happened, strange to Joan and me. For months Stephen's communications, and those of the others with whom we were accustomed to talk, had been most fluent. Not often did we seek communication, but when we did the words came with easy naturalness. And for months no personality new to us had appeared. Then, without warning, the words of Stephen were broken in on one night—shortly after receipt of Mrs. K.'s first letter—by one whom I did not recognize. The really curious thing was that the new personality spoke no actual words; instead, the long­abandoned practice of spelling was revived. The few letters that came seemed meaningless.

 

The first letters spelled were "d-a-v-i." Then, after a pause, came the single letter "f." Then the combination was repeated, except that for the "i" there was substituted a "y."

 

Could these letters, puzzling to Joan and me, be intended for Mrs. K.?

 

An evening or two later two words, or what seemed to be two words, were spoken, very uncertainly. They were repeated several times, sometimes one word being spoken first, sometimes the other. They were "mack" and "port."

 

In sending these words and the letters to Mrs. K., Joan wrote: "I do not know whether they will mean anything to you; certainly they mean nothing to Darby and me."

 

Imagine our interest when, in a few days, Joan received a letter from Mrs. K. stating that her husband's first name and middle initial had been David F., and that their summer home had been in a little town called Mackeysport. Neither "David F." nor "Mackeysport" had come through accurately, though there was no mistaking the connection between them and the letters and syllables the unknown communicator had spoken. Joan and I had not known the name of Mrs. K.'s husband or that of the town in which the K.'s had had their summer home. Mrs. K.'s correspondence did not question the sincerity of our ignorance. Yet here again was the old question as to what Joan does and does not know subconsciously. Mrs. K. wrote Joan:

 

"You say you have read things I have written. Some of them were dedicated to my husband, 'David F.' Also the word 'Mackeysport' appears in some of these dedications. Now, of course, if your eye should have fallen on these words, 'David F.' and 'Mackeysport,' you would not have remembered them one minute afterward. But somewhere in your subliminal they remained; and they might have emerged in communication…. If you had never read anything I had written, then the evidence of 'd-a-v-i f' would have been most important."

 

There was no refuting this argument. Joan had read certain of Mrs. K.'s writings. Therefore, she might have seen the name of Mrs. K.'s husband and that of the summer-home town.

 

In the mean time four more letters had interrupted Stephen, apparently delivered by the same unknown. They were repeated over and over again, as though being greatly insisted on. They were "m-d-s-e." It was evident these letters might be an abbreviation of the word "merchandise." We forwarded them to Mrs. K.

 

"The appearance of 'm-d-s-e' is interesting," Mrs. K. wrote in reply, "because my husband was a merchant. But that, too, must be somewhat discounted by the fact that Darby's is a related profession, and it is not impossible—though it is to a very high degree improbable—that he has noticed references, which used to appear more or less frequently in trade journals, to Mr. K.'s business."

 

To this Joan replied as follows: "To be outspoken, Darby and I don't agree with you about 'm-d-s-e.' As a matter of pure rationality we are willing to grant all you have said relative to 'd-a-v-i' and 'Mack-port.' The 'm-d-s-e' affair, however, is another matter. While both Darby and I are connected with the same general calling as that which was followed by your husband, ours is a wholly different branch of the work. There is not one chance in a thousand that we ever heard of your husband as a merchant."

 

In fact, Joan and I had known nothing whatever concerning Mrs. K.'s family relations. Up to the time Margaret Cameron wrote to us about her, she was a mere name, and the name bore no clue as to whether she was a married woman. And need I add that during the entire period of the Mrs. K. communications Joan and I refrained scrupulously from seeking any detail of her personal life?

 

Another strange thing now happened. On only rare occasions had Joan written automatically. One afternoon, as we sat discussing a matter wholly unrelated to psychical concerns, Joan said of a sudden, "Give me a pencil, quick!" I handed her a pencil, and on the back of a magazine, which she picked up from the table, she began hurriedly to scribble. When she had finished, she said, "I had a feeling that some one wanted to give a message and that I could write it down."

 

With difficulty I deciphered what she had written over the magazine's printed matter and pictures. It follows:

 

There is a cottage in the midst of a garden. A sandy road. There are tall flowers. A path among the flower beds to the barn. A woman sat in the barn.

 

On receipt of a copy of this communication Mrs. K. wrote that it was without meaning to her. It seemed later, however, that there was very definite meaning in it—for Mrs. K.

 

Before Mrs. K. had had time to write Joan that the message meant nothing, it was repeated in mental communication, being accompanied by an attempt to revise it. But much confusion resulted. Clear reference, however, was made to an "upper window that overlooked the garden between the cliffs, at which you used to sit and write," though there was apparent dissatisfaction with the word "cliffs." The attempt at revision seemed so unsuccessful that we put off sending Mrs. K. the additional matter.

 

The same evening the revision of the "woman who sat in a barn" message was attempted the following was received:

 

"Dormer window. No." (By which apparently was meant that the window in question was not a dormer window.) She (meaning Joan) "has never seen a big window such as this, and has not the word to describe it."

 

Mrs. K.'s comment was, "'Dormer window' has no real significance for me; and yet I find myself unwilling to let go of it, because Mr. K. was obsessed by building large windows."

 

The next message that came, a few nights later, was rather incoherent. Concerning it, Joan made to Mrs. K. the following report:

 

"There was apparently an effort on the part of some one, we don't know who, to give a message about a boat with bright­colored sails. The word 'yellow' came, then the word 'no,' then the word 'yellow' again, leaving Darby in doubt as to the entire message. The word 'Venice' also came, but it, too, was followed by 'no.'"

 

This impressed Mrs. K. apparently so little that her letters neglected to comment on it.

 

There came, about a week later, still another message which we felt might be intended for Mrs. K. It was in part as follows:

 

"Dear: This is just a note to tell you that I am quite well and happy. My only wish for you is to be happy and content, too. I wish you would think of me as having gone on to prepare a place for you. And yet I have not gone from you, because, though you cannot see me, I can see you…. Don't grieve so. The image of my hand that you see is not half so real as the hand I lay on your hair, that you don't see…. I love you, dearest."

 

I confess that the communication which says, "I am happy" and "I am with you," leaves me unimpressed. This particular communication failed to interest Mrs. K. She wrote, "The message might be from 'any husband to any wife.'" And yet embedded in it there proved to be a sentence of strikingly evidential quality.

 

Up to this point, with messages scattered over the latter part of February, 1919, and the early days of March, nothing seemed to have been accomplished. "D-a-v-i" and "Mackport" were ruled out. "M-d-s-e" was in dispute; nothing was to be gained by insisting on its evidential worth. None of the other messages seemed to carry meaning, except that concerning the dormer window, which wasn't a dormer window; and here the evidential possibility was slight, consisting of the mere fact that Mr. K. had been obsessed of building big windows.

 

And then a new series of messages began.

 

Before leaving the communications already mentioned, I shall ask the reader to fix in mind the last four, which for the sake of convenience can be labeled in this wise: The "woman who sat in the barn" message, including the attempted revision; the "big window" message; the "yellow sail" message, and the message of "any husband to any wife."