XII
THE PLASTER HAND

 

DURING those weeks of February and March, when Joan and Mrs. K. were keeping the post so busy, there was no thought on the part of either that they might meet. Yet they did. Unexpectedly Mrs. K. was called upon to make a trip to the West. On her way home she would be within a hundred miles of the city where Joan and I lived. Joan asked her to spend a week-end with us. And so we met her on the morning of March 29th. She was with us that day and part of the next.

 

Seating herself at Joan's desk the morning of March 29th, Mrs. K. fell to reading a record I had made of mental communication received on the 23d.

 

This communication had been invited with the thought that Stephen might be able to clear up some of the earlier Mrs. K. messages, for the ultimate veridicality of which Joan and I, in view of the daffodil development, had begun to hope. I quote a portion of the record:

 

QUESTION BY DARBY: What about the "woman who sat in the barn" and "any husband to any wife"?

STEPHEN: Both of these messages were from David to his wife.

DARBY: And yet she doesn't recognize them.

STEPHEN: In the second message[" any husband to any wife"] call "hand" to her attention. [Then came another than Stephen. Let us assume it was Mr. K.]

MR. K.: Cast—cast—plaster.—Over a grocery-store with outside steps built after the fire.

STEPHEN (interrupting): Now, Joan! Don't take that last down, Darby. Yes, take it down. It will show you again what the subconscious mind does.

DARBY (recognizing that the grocery-store, etc., was possibly an outcropping of Joan's subliminal): Well, what about this dormer-window business?

MR. K. (apparently): A great window divided into three parts—fancy at the top—bookshelves—many books, many books. My hand.

 

And then Joan had begun a conversation of her own with the communicator. One can overhear but one side of a telephone conversation, so I could take notes only on what Joan said.

 

"Well, I told your wife about the barn.

 

She said there wasn't any barn." (Apparent difficulty of understanding on Joan's part.) "But what hills?… Oh, back from the river. Yes, and the river lies so. River comes down here." (Joan pointed her finger.) "Empties. Coast. Three towns. One back of river…. Mack-port harbor here." (More pointing.) "Hills. Barn."

 

Then the communicator spoke. He said: "My yacht had red sails. Florence. Florence."

 

From time to time as she read the record, Mrs. K. exclaimed under her breath. What caused the exclamations? Several things. There were, for instance, the Mackeysport details. Granted Joan had seen the name of this town in the dedication of some book or other of Mrs. K.'s, where had her further knowledge come from? The Mackeysport community, Mrs. K. informed us, did consist of three settlements; there were hills and a river, and the latter did "empty." The description manifestly was confused, yet it offered definite facts. And note the "barn." Could this be the barn in which "the woman sat"?

 

"My yacht had red sails. Florence. Florence." These words Mrs. K. read aloud.

"Yes," she said, "his boat did have red sails."

 

So here were the yellow sails, possibly yellow, become red sails. Yellow sails had been with out meaning to Mrs. K. But red sails? Why, of course! Yet what could Florence mean? Or what, if anything, did "Venice" of the original "yellow sail" message mean? "Venice, no," just as it had been "yellow, no." What was the meaning of Florence?

 

Later in the day Mrs. K. suddenly cried:

 

“I have it. The name of Mr. K.'s boat was Tessa."

"But what has that to do with Florence?” I asked.

"Don't you remember!" Mrs. K. answered. "The scene of George Eliot's Romola is Florence. Tessa, you recall, is one of the novel's characters. Mr. K. was very fond of Romola and I remember that he named the boat after Tessa. The connection between the word 'Florence' in the communication and the actual name of Mr. K.'s boat is obvious."

 

This, I think, is very intriguing. The name "Tessa," it is evident, would be difficult to communicate, possibly for something of the same reason that it would be a hard word to convey to a partially deaf person or to a friend over the telephone; it is unusual. The word "Florence," on the other hand, is familiar to every one. Let us suppose Mr. K. actually was trying to communicate the name of his boat. Unable to get "Tessa" through, he decided to communicate the word "Florence," thinking

 

Mrs. K. would be able to put two and two together, just as, in fact, she seems to have done. His first effort failed. Instead of Joan speaking the word "Florence," she spoke the word

 

Venice." Why?

 

Suppose a yacht was under discussion between two friends and the name of an Italian city was mentioned by one of them in connection with the yacht. Suppose that the second person had been unable clearly to distinguish the name of the city. What Italian city might he infer was meant? Venice, of course—Venice with its canals and boats.

 

Whatever evidence is offered by the yacht with the red sails is strengthened, I feel, by the fact that the original message gave the yacht yellow sails. I regard the mistake of the first message, apparent at the time, as testimony that Joan was reaching out for a new fact rather than seeking to revive knowledge dormant in her subconsciousness. And yet, if the evidential quality of a communication is vitiated by its subject­matter having received publicity, then the evidence offered by the boat with the red sails vanishes, no matter how certain Joan may be that she never before heard of Mr. K's boat.

 

Mrs. K.'s sifting resulted finally in this statement: "Florence and the red sails seem to me important. Back in the '90's Mr. K. had a little boat with a lateen rig. The sail was dyed a russet red. But it is a fact that this little boat figured in occasional newspaper paragraphs, because the rig was unusual and the sail, on account of its color, striking."

 

The next comment made by Mrs. K., as she sat reading my notes on the communication of March 23d, was upon the words: "A great window divided into three parts—fancy at the top—bookshelves—many, many books."

 

This seems to hark back to the "dormer window," which was not a dormer window, but rather simply a big window. The big window, appearing in an early message, had been one of the things Mrs. K. had been loath to let go of. Had not Mr. K. been an admirer of spacious windows? And here the window was again, this time with detail. The detail was accurate. In a house in which the K.'s lived for many years there was a long window, "divided into three parts, fancy at the top."

 

"The description," Mrs. K. said, "seems to me extraordinarily accurate." Then she added: "Architecturally the arrangement of the window was so unusual that a picture of it was reproduced in a magazine interested in interior decoration."

 

But Joan had no recollection of ever having seen that magazine. As for "the woman who sat in the barn"—had there been any barn pictures? That woman, in fact, was—Mrs. K. The incident was of so long ago that Mrs. K. had practically forgotten it. The first message that mentioned the barn failed to recall the facts of the case to her memory, seemingly because the description of the grounds did not tally with the yard in which the barn actually stood. For clearness I again quote the "woman who sat in the barn" message:

 

"There is a cottage in the midst of a garden. A sandy road. There are tall flowers. A pathway from the garden beds to the barn. A woman sat in the barn."

 

The attempt that was made to revise this message was not, it will be remembered, especially successful, though it did add this detail: "An upper window that overlooked the garden between the cliffs, at which you used to sit and write." We finally showed this new detail to Mrs. K., and it, together with the appearance of the word "barn" in the Mackeysport portion of the communication of March 23d, set her thinking. Here are the facts of the barn as she finally gave them to us:

 

"In 1891 or 1892 my husband rented a cottage at the seashore, and connected with it was a little barn. I used to write in the loft of this barn. Looking from one of the windows of this loft, across a little inlet of water, I could see some low banks or cliffs." (It will be recalled that the communicator had indicated dissatisfaction with the word "cliffs.") "There was, however, no garden connected with this place. But in the case of the Mackeysport house, which Mr. K. finally bought, and in which we lived, in the summer, for many years, there is a garden, but there is no barn. The message, as added to, seems to offer a composite description of the two localities."

 

Discarding the evidential possibilities of the composite description, we have left the fact that nearly twenty years ago Mrs. K. did sit in a barn and write—certainly an unusual thing to do. And here is an incident that seems to have received no printed mention! Here is an event in Mrs. K.'s life, communicated by one purporting to be Mr. K., which, there is every reason to believe, was not in Joan's subconsciousness, and which, in view of the fact that very rarely does a woman sit in a barn and write, can scarcely be explained on the basis of guess or coincidence. The communicated statement of this event was marred only by being linked with other less convincing statements.

 

Consider now the reiteration, from time to time, of the word "hand," culminating in: "Cast—cast—plaster." This, it seems, is the ideal test—a statement of fact that we know could not have been in Joan's subliminal, a thing guess or coincidence cannot explain, a message untainted by surrounding inaccuracy. "Cast—cast—plaster" did stir Joan's own subconscious associations; but not until the words were safely through, making clear what hand, did subconsciousness inject its own associations. The whole offered a convincing piece of evidence, all the more convincing because, without the fact of the case being affected in the least, the color of Joan's subconscious memories was called forth. In other words, the test was not too good to be true.

 

"Cast—cast—plaster," ran my record. Instantly Mrs. K. saw the significance of "my hand"! She told us that many years ago, twenty, perhaps, or maybe twenty-five, her husband had had a plaster cast of his hand made for her.

 

"I very rarely see it now," she said. "I put it away, for fear it might be broken…. 'D-a-v-i' might have been the result of Joan's subconscious memory, of a name she had once seen and forgotten. So might 'Mack-port' and so might 'm-d-s-e.' Even the daffodils and the red sails and the big window may be such. But the plaster hand cannot be traced back to any normal explanation. Joan never could have known about it. Its appearance in the communication could not possibly have been the product of her subconscious memory."

And such, after time to think the matter over and permit interest to cool, remains Mrs. K.'s conviction. She has said, recently, "The plaster hand seems to me the one final, unquestionable test."

 

Of the four messages I asked you to carry in mind, three have proved evidential: "The woman who sat in the barn," "big window," and "yellow sail." What of the fourth message "any husband to any wife?"

 

This sentence, you will recall, was embedded in the husband's letter: "The image of my hand, which you see, is not so real as the hand I lay on your hair,—which you don't see."

 

To what hand and what image reference was here made is now apparent. But why was this original mention of the hand buried in "any husband to any wife" banalities? To one accepting Stephen's exposition of coloring, the answer would seem plain. The "image of my hand" was slipped through with a caution calculated to distract the mind of the receiving station from anticipation of a test. Note now what happened in the communication of March 23d, when Mrs. K.'s husband risked being more definite:

 

"Cast—cast—plaster. Over a grocery-store with outside steps built after the fire." Whereupon Stephen interrupted, saying: "Now, Joan! Don't take that last down, Darby.

 

Yes, take it down. It will show you again what the subconscious mind does."

 

When Joan was in college, one of the buildings was damaged by fire, and the class in art was housed temporarily in a room over a grocery-store. The room was reached by outside steps, built after the fire. To this improvised class-room were moved the plaster casts of the art department. And this set of facts, stored away in Joan's subconsciousness, was stirred to life by Mr. K.'s "cast—cast—plaster." Here, then, is constituted a most interesting example of coloring, interesting because so apparent and because it in no way affects the accuracy of the connotation which "cast—cast—plaster" gave to "band."

 

Is there anything to be gained by discussion of the part telepathy may have played in the "plaster hand" message or the "woman who sat in the barn" message or any of the others, if in view of all the facts related they seem not to have sprung from Joan's subliminal?

 

One can assert that the facts of all of these messages were in Mrs. K.'s mind, and that possibly they were transferred from her mind to Joan's. But after that assertion has been made, what further can be said? Anything may be possible—even the chance that Stephen is what he says he is, and that his philosophy came to Joan and me from real, though discarnate intelligence. And when we consider the world's limited experience with the phenomenon of telepathy, I am not so sure that the telepathic explanation is less forced than the thought that Mrs. K.'s search for her lost husband had to a degree proved successful.