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Contents |
THE SEVEN PURPOSES
Chapter III
SHORTLY before dinner that night I picked
up a pencil again, and "Mary Kendal" was
immediately written. It had become cus-
tomary for her to write her name both at the
beginning and at the end of her communica-
tion, probably to avoid confusion with Fred-
erick.
"Manse is in New York," she told us, re-
peating it several times. For some reason I
questioned this, and she said: "You must not
doubt. He is coming to-night."
"Are you happy, Mary?" Cass asked.
"Very, especially now, since I am with you.
You can reach Manzie."
Keenly sympathizing with her eagerness to
reach her husband, from whom no word had
come, he suggested telephoning to Mansfield
at his club, but I demurred, feeling that, if he
were there, he would receive my letters and
communicate with us, unless, as I began to
fear, he preferred not to approach the subject
in any way. Repeatedly, however, Mary in-
sisted, "Call him up," and Cass put in the [33]
long-distance call accordingly.
"He is there. . . . He will answer," she re-
iterated again and again, while we waited.
It is impossible to make a fully accurate re-
port of this interview. The messages were
confused and broken, and there were many
monosyllabic replies to questions not re-
corded.
At one time we asked about Anne Lowe,
and Mary said: "Anne is not here. She is a
lovely character. She works for children. . . .
Manse is not there. . . . Manse is out. . . . He
will answer. . . . He is not there."
Eventually the long-distance operator re-
ported that Mr. Kendal was not at his club
and was not expected.
I asked Mary why she had said that he was
there, telling her that this was making me
doubt my powers of correct transmission, to
which she replied that this was better than
too much credulity, adding: "Manse is there.
. . . He is out of the club. . . . He must be
there."
We called up the ____ Club a second time
and I talked to the clerk, who said Mansfield
Kendal was not registered there, nor had they
been notified that he was coming. Long after-
ward we learned that he had expected to be
there at that time, but had been detained in [34]
the Northwest by business.
Meanwhile, there was much confused writing
from Mary. "Manse is in the club. . . . He
is not there. . . . He must be there. . . . He is
out." Effort to write the name of a city was
followed by, "Minneapolis recently. . . .
Manse will be there soon."
It was Mansfield Kendal himself who ulti-
mately arrived at a possible explanation of some
of these apparent inaccuracies, Mary having ex-
plained others meanwhile. But at the time it
was all very contradictory and confusing, and
after dinner Cass demanded an explanation.
Mary Kendal came at once, admitting that
she had been wrong in saying that Mansfield
was at the club, and asserting that she "thought
he would be."
"Didn't you know?"
"No."
Again the messages are confused and frag-
mentary. "You must not doubt. . . . He will
be there soon . . ." are among those now de-
cipherable, each many times repeated. She
seemed profoundly distressed.
To ease the tension, Cass made a little joke,
eliciting no response from her, whereupon he
asked whether they retained a sense of humor
over there.
"Yes, but this is no time for humor. . . . I [35]
am so afraid of missing Manse."
Again she urged me to write to him, but I
refused, reminding her that I had made every
possible advance until some reply to my letters
should be received.
"Yes, I know, but it means so much! You
will help, won't you?"
Knowing nothing then of the tremendous
forces of attraction and repulsion unconsciously
put into operation by persons ignorant of their
existence, and assuming—not unnaturally—
that she must be able to learn at least as much
about Mansfield's whereabouts and condition
as both she and Frederick evidently knew
about ours, I was unable to understand, even
dimly, the contradictions of the present situa-
tion, and the cloud of it hung over me all that
evening and the next day. I was oppressed
by a sense of my responsibility in conveying
messages from sources seeming suddenly so
uncertain.
Following Mary, Frederick came again, his
buoyancy undiminished.
"Mother dearest," he began, without ques-
tion, "Mrs. Kendal is true. She is a fine
force." I rather held back on this, and the
writing was angular and unyielding. "There
are things we cannot explain."
"You have too little faith. Mary Kendal." [36]
This statement was made without pre-
liminary comment, and until she signed her
name I thought Frederick was writing. I
reminded her that she had made it impos-
sible for me to trust her wholly.
"I am sorry I shook your faith," she said.
"I welcome you to this relation, and want you
to believe."
"Mother dearest, you know I am here, don't
you?" Again Frederick made his own interro-
gation point. "Because I am, and you will
feel my presence more and more clearly as
time goes on."
"Do you know all that we want to know?"
Cass inquired.
"Not all you want to know. We know more
than you do, and will tell you all we can, as
soon as you are ready for it." We were un-
certain whether this meant mentally and
spiritually ready, or that we must learn the
conditions through which they can best reach
us, and he explained. "We can tell you any-
thing you are prepared to understand, and the
more you learn there the better you will do
your work here."
"Are you still interested in politics here?"
he was asked, a little later.
"Oh yes. But they are in a state of transi-
tion that is fearfully difficult to understand or [37]
to influence now. The seed has been sown,
but the harvest is not yet garnered. Nobody
knows what will come of it in this country."
"Are you conscious there of what people
here call God?" his mother asked.
"We are conscious of a great purpose.
Some of us call it God. I see it as light in
dark places. Others see it as power. Others
as love. But we all recognize it as a purpose."
At luncheon that day we had spoken of
Prof. William James and Sir Frederick Myers,
and later in the evening Mrs. Gaylord asked
Frederick whether he knew Professor James.
"I know him, but I am not sure he knows
me. He is a great force, and many of us go
to him for help and instruction. Only one
other man has the same sort of power. That
is Sir Frederick."
"Are you with people from this world only?"
some one asked. "And does everybody go
there, or only a certain element?"
"There are people from this world only, but
it is as with you, not all people are equally
prepared. Growth is easier here if one has
earned it there. But not all have earned it,
and the penalty for laziness is long struggle.
. . . . Purgatory is not a bad definition of it.
The right to do big work must be earned.
Some people have a terrible struggle of it. [38]
flabby."
"Do you agree with Mary Kendal that there
is humor there, but that this is no time for
it?"
"Oh, she didn't mean that! She meant that
this particular crisis is not humorous to her.
She is deeply concerned to get into touch with
him. . . . Good night, Mother dearest. I'll be
with you all night."
"Good night," said Mary Kendal. "I'm
sorry I upset you."
Chapter IV
THE more I thought about the Kendal af-
fair the more perplexing it seemed, and since
I could neither question that Mary Kendal
and Frederick had actually communicated
through me nor believe that she would will-
fully deceive me, there seemed no possible
explanation of the episode Saturday night,
except some unconscious influence of my own
mind. By the next afternoon I had almost
persuaded myself that the repeated erroneous
statements about Mr. Kendal had been in-
duced, in some way not traceable, by my in-
creasing anxiety concerning his reception of
the letters I had sent to his club.
After luncheon, we took up the communi-
cation again, and immediately, without inter-
rogation, the pencil wrote, " You are a good
messenger. "
"Who is writing?" I asked.
"Frederick."
"How much of this do I do, and how much
is yours?"
"You do very little. Mostly, you lend a [40]
hand." This is so literally what I do that
we laughed. "You are by nature skeptical,"
he continued. "Mother dearest, you must not
let her make you doubt that I have said all
these things."
"It unsettles me when I know what the
message is to be before it is written," I per-
sisted. "Do you suggest it to me, or I to
you?"
"Sometimes you suggest things to me and
I say them," he returned. "Sometimes I
don't." This reassured me somewhat, for I
had frequently noticed that a thought strongly
in my mind seemed to delay the pencil, yet
was not written.
Returning for a moment to the discussion of
politics, Cass asked: "By reason of our dif-
ferent environment, am I not more interested
in large details, and you in large movements?"
"There can be no real movement without
a mass of detail. Here we are interested
equally in both. They are inseparable."
"You said yesterday that the seed had been
sown and the harvest not yet garnered. Has
the seed generally been good seed?"
"There is no telling how much of it will
come up. There has been seed, good, bad,
and indifferent, sown in all sorts of soil.
The crop is not foreordained. We work and [40]
hope."
"Is there anything in this life to any degree
a counterpart of what you have there?" his
mother inquired. " Or is it something so
wholly new that we can't even imagine it?"
"It is so much more expansive, so much
more beautiful and free, that we can give you
no conception of it."
"Perhaps it's better that we shouldn't
know," it was suggested; and Frederick's reply
seems to hold a hint of humor.
"It might make you envious."
When I wondered what became of suicides,
Cass said, "They probably get the purgatory
he mentioned yesterday."
"That's what they get; and it's a long, hard
road back to mental . . ." The pencil hesi-
tated. After some efforts to write a word
beginning with p or f—we were uncertain
which—Mrs. Gaylord suggested, "Poise?"
". . . poise. Yes."
"Is there unconsciousness at first, when you
go over?" she asked.
"It depends on circumstances and persons.
Sometimes there is a period of unconscious-
ness. I was conscious from the first moment,
and so happy to be here." When Cass inter-
preted this to mean that he greatly preferred
being there, he corrected: "No, to be free. [42]
But for the first weeks I was dazed by the
bigness of it."
Later in the afternoon Frederick discussed
with his mother various personal matters, with
a good deal of humor. Afterward, more seri-
ously, he continued: "You'll do better work,
and be more open to suggestion from me, if
you don't dull yourself by too constant harp-
ing on one chord. Play a little, you and
Dad."
She told him they had not been happy
enough to play.
"You will be happier now. Tell Dad few
men are as near their sons as he is to me.
He and all of you have only to learn to recog-
nize me, when I am trying to tell you I am
there."
We spoke of her desire to receive his com-
munications through her own pencil and he said
that if she would "keep on trying and believ-
ing," he could talk directly to her before long,
as he has since demonstrated.
"It is difficult for us to overcome doubt in
a messenger," he said. "Faith is a positive
force. It helps us reach you. Doubt, being
negative, hampers us."
This reminded me of Mary Kendal's first
personal message to me, "Believe."
"Are you hampered by my doubt to-day?" [43]
I asked.
"No. That is not doubt of us, but of your-
self. It is a safeguard."
At this point we went to dinner. Later in
the evening, when we had returned to the
pencil, Cass said:
"You were facetious last night, Frederick,
so perhaps I may ask if you have dined?"
"I've had a feast of reason, thank you,"
was the instant retort.
Asked whether the different races were repre-
sented where he was, he replied: "We have
groups. People naturally divide themselves. But
not actual race distinction." When Cass ex-
plained that he had wondered whether peoples of
widely differing religious beliefs, Christians, Con-
fucians, Mohammedans, and so on, would be
together there, Frederick continued: "Certainly.
Each group does its work more or less in its
own way, but all to the same purpose." Here
again is a clear reference to conditions and forces
of which we had then no knowledge and con-
cerning which, apparently, he had at that time
no authority to speak in detail.
Mrs. Gaylord was sitting in silence, at a
little distance from the table. After a pause,
Frederick began again, as if in answer to some
unspoken thought:
"Mother dearest, you will get what you are [44]
asking from me when we are all more accus-
tomed. Margaret is afraid to let me handle
her." I said that the Kendal episode the
night before had disturbed me, and that I had
been careful all day not to yield to any im-
pulse in the pencil unless it were very definite,
to which he returned: "That's all right. You
be as careful as you like, as long as you don't
deny us."
Cass asked whether he could put us in touch
with a friend on his plane, one David Bruce.
"Mary Kendal can. That is part of her
work. Mother dearest, you won't backslide?"
Mrs. Gaylord turned astonished eyes on
me, asking: "Is 'backslide' a part of your
ordinary vocabulary ?" When I assured her
that it was not, she laughed, saying that it
was "a Gaylord word." "I'm not sure that
I won't backslide when I get home again, away
from these daily messages," she said.
"Then you come to us—Margaret and me.
We'll fix you!" He drew a circle around this,
as if to emphasize it. When she wondered
whether she might not find a messenger nearer
home to give her occasional help, he added:
"You can get help, but you can't trust every-
body."
The pencil was moving slowly, with many
false starts and delays. I asked whether he [45]
would prefer planchette, and he said he would,
so his mother went to her room to get it, while
Mary Kendal talked to us about Manse. As
soon as planchette was placed on the tablet
however, Frederick took possession again, mov-
ing it briskly back and forth, in a space of
about six inches, as if warming it up. Mrs.
Gaylord was then sitting opposite me, and Cass
to the right, some distance away.
Suddenly planchette swung sharply down to
the lower right-hand corner of the table, from my
position, and addressing Mrs. Gaylord directly—
that is, writing from right to left and upside
down from my viewpoint, so that his mother
sitting opposite me read it as it came—Fred-
erick wrote rapidly and strongly:
"Mother dearest, this is your boy, come
back to stay."
We were astounded. Given a fresh surface,
planchette raced allover the sheet, in energetic
circles and flourishes. It ran toward met
point first, as if it would leap off the table,
paused, wheeled, crossed toward Mrs. Gaylord,
retreated, darted to where her hand lay on the
papers, followed as she moved it, and then re-
sumed its apparently meaningless tracing of
angles and circles. When I said that I did
not understand this performance, the reply
came with a whirl, followed by one of his big [46]
flourishes.
"I am trying to show you that I am running
this myself!" Then, very rapidly, upside down
again to me: "You can't doubt this. Even
Margaret can't doubt this."
"I haven't doubted that you were here,
Frederick," I said.
"No, but you've got to believe in me."
Again I placed the instrument at my left,
in readiness to write, as usual, across the sheet,
but he had not finished. Swinging down to
the right, and moving toward the left, once
more reversed from my point of view, he
wrote: "Mother dearest." Then he ran to the
upper right-hand corner and wrote along that
edge of the table: "Now I'll do it this way,
Mr. L____." In circles and flourishes he crossed,
to write along the left edge: "Now I'll do it
this way." Up then, to the edge opposite me.
"Now I'll do it this way."
By this time the paper was completely cov-
ered with interlacing lines and words, except
a narrow margin along the right edge. Sliding
over to this, he wrote, slowly, "Now are you
convinced?"
We were amazed, breathless, and all some-
what moved by his determination to demon-
strate his presence.
Circling again to the center, already so cov- [47]
ered with lines that we had to watch the
pencil-point to make out the message, he said:
"Now get the pencil."
"Did I show you then who is running this?"
he demanded, when I had complied with his
request. "Mother dearest, when you are in-
clined to backslide, remember that little ex-
hibition, and ask yourself how you can doubt
any manifestation of me that you perceive."
Mrs. Gaylord said that it was peculiarly
characteristic of Frederick to insist upon
making his point, and in one way or another
to succeed.
"Dad won't need to see that," Frederick
stated, when Cass wished that his father might
have witnessed this extraordinary performance,
"but if he does, I'll do it for him with trim-
mings. . . . He has not lost a son in any but
the most superficial sense. Tell Sis I'll do
stunts for her, too, if she'll come where Mar-
garet is, and Babe can have her own show,
too."
Again Mrs. Gaylord gasped, for he had used
his own intimate names for his sisters, neither
of which I had ever heard before.
"Now we're really getting down to busi-
ness," he remarked, presently. "I had to
convince Margaret before she would loosen
up." Cass began to explain that it had not [48]
been necessary to convince me, but before he
was fairly started the pencil ran on: "Yes,
it was. She didn't quite believe I was running
this show. Now she's nice and amenable."
Verily, all resistance had been taken out of
me! Thereafter he had his own way with the
pencil.
Cass began another question, but broke off,
saying that it was not fair to keep Frederick
answering impersonal inquiries when he wanted
to talk to his mother.
"That's what it's all for," was the candid
admission. "The L____s are all right, but it's
for Mother dearest and the Family that I'm
here. . . . This isn't exactly what religious peo-
ple call heaven, but it is life eternal in the
biggest sense. But I can't be quite happy in
it unless you whom I love so much are happy,
too. Don't you backslide! Only let me have
a chance, and I'll keep you convinced; but
doubt is the hardest thing to combat because
it destroys the very proof we are trying to
bring against it. Believe every suggestion of
me until it is proved false."
One of us asked whether their greatest diffi-
culties in communicating with us were caused
by doubt or by dishonest messengers.
"Both. It is hard to find a good messenger,
but, having found one, doubt is apt to destroy [49]
all his work."
"All four points of the compass, Mother
dearest." This we took to be an allusion to
his writing along the four edges of the table,
earlier in the evening. "You see, we have
not much time left, and you must go home
fortified and happy, and glad for yourself and
me. . . . It will mean a lot to Dad. He has
thought I was in some remote and far-off
heaven, and he will like to know that we are
working more nearly shoulder to shoulder than
ever before, as we are in some ways. . . . I
want to talk to him straight." Long afterward
one of his sisters told me that "shoulder to
shoulder" was a characteristic phrase of
Frederick's.
Again sliding over to the lower right-hand
corner, he wrote quickly, in big swinging
script, upside down to me: "Mother dearest,
don't forget the four points of the compass.
I want you to remember that I am your boy
come back. Not lost at all. Please remem-
ber that."
When a fresh surface offered and the pencil
was placed at my left, as usual, he said, "No,"
and swung once more down to the right,
writing quickly and firmly toward the left and
upside down to me.
"I am going to write a little letter to Dad [50]
and the girls. I love them just as well as
ever, and it hurts me to have them think I
am not alive and loving them, because I know
they still love me.
"FREDERICK."
Although the movement in this reversed
writing is rapid and definite, as if great energy
were exerted to accomplish it, it is extremely
difficult to follow, perhaps because the muscles
of the hand are accustomed to move from left
to right in writing, or because the mind in-
stinctively resists a movement it cannot readily
understand.
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