In looking back upon my life it seems to have been a strange, contradictory mixture of sincerity and duplicity. I longed, passionately longed, for sincerity and openness, anything else tortured me; and yet I can see how influences seemed always at work to foster complexity and duplicity.
To begin with, I was always fond of playing a part. Beginning as children do, we played at ghosts. Wrapped in sheets at twilight, we peered into the neighbours’ windows to startle them. But I soon wanted something less crude. One day in my early ’teens, dressing as a beggar, I went to the houses in our street asking for “cold pieces.” At first it was a failure, as either I or the others would giggle and spoil it all. Finally, stipulating that the others keep out of sight, I went alone to the Widow Earle’s and told a pitiful tale, and the unsuspicious old soul gave me a slice of her new bread, just out of the oven. Blessing her, I hobbled away, munching the bread under my veil. Soon we all scampered back in great glee, confessing to the widow, who relished the joke far less than I did the bread—no woman likes to cut into her warm bread, then to find she has been hoodwinked! No wonder she was cross!
Each time I tried something harder. One day when visiting in the country, I dressed as a beggar, and going to a neighbour’s, while the good housewife was in the pantry getting me something to eat, stole her spectacles, took my food and went my way. Returning shortly after, with the other girls, I delivered the spectacles to the incredulous victim of my hoax. Then, in high feather I tackled a newly married elderly pair at the next farm, concocting my story on the spot and enjoying keenly their gullibility: I was destitute, was journeying afoot to my daughter in a distant town, naming a town on the spur of the moment. They asked my daughter’s name. Chancing to give the name of a new girl who had come to school that week, I myself met with a surprise, for the man said, “Why, I know the Godfreys of Groton!” Quickly I begged him for news of my daughter, and asked about her husband whom I had never seen, catechizing him awhile, so he would let up on me, as their questions were proving quite a tax on my ingenuity. As I sat there after having lunched on pears and a glass of milk, which the deluded couple had given me, the other girls, impatient at my long stay, came down the road. The sympathetic farmer by that time was partly hitched up to take me as far on my way as the next village. As the girls came tentatively into the yard, my unsuspecting victims called out to them to come and have their fortunes told, dilating on the wonderful things I had told them. (I had done this to pay for my luncheon.) I don’t recall how the revelation came about, but I soon stood confessed, a sham beggar, while the man and his wife looked sheepishly at me, and at each other, at the mocking girls and the half-harnessed horses.
Graver instances of duplicity I have to record concerning a planchette craze, rife in our neighbourhood when I was perhaps fifteen. Although we had had a planchette in the house for years, and I had heard how it was supposed to write, it had long lain neglected, none of us showing either curiosity or credulity concerning it. Our planchette was a heart-shaped piece of black walnut, large enough for the tips of the fingers of two hands to rest upon. Mounted upon two gutta-percha castors fastened to short brass legs, the third leg was formed by a lead-pencil stuck through a hole in the apex of the heart. When the right hands of two persons rest lightly on the planchette, the muscular tremor, I suppose, makes the machine move over the paper placed beneath. Some supernatural agency was supposed to make the thing reply to questions asked by someone present.
I can’t recall how we happened to start experimenting with it, but during one winter, night after night, neighbours and friends gathered at our house to watch the thing write. It was rather uncanny to see it travel, fast for some, slower for others, not at all for certain ones. After a time we detected crude attempts at words, but there were many trials before any satisfactory results were obtained.
I wish I could recall just how my part in it began, and how much of my conduct was conscious deception, how much self-deception. My impression now is that at first, especially, I was to a great extent self-deceived, although that I was by no means wholly so, I am well aware. At any rate, it gradually came about that the planchette would write the best for me and a certain boy in the neighbourhood, but, he being absent, almost as well if I was one of the operators.
We were closely watched to see that there was no guidance of the thing—that no perceptible movements of our hands or arms were made. Sometimes they even blindfolded us, for there were always incredulous ones in the company. These would take a turn at it, and would admit that I did not move it; they were sure I did not. But I did move it, whether consciously, with my muscles, or not, I’m not quite sure myself. I know I determined what the answers were to be, and willed that the thing should so answer; and, although there seemed to be little opportunity for actually directing the movements without my partner detecting it, I think I did do it, artfully and successfully; and, little hypocrite that I was! pretended to be surprised at the answers; or at a loss to make them out. Some of the others usually deciphered the scrawlings, I helping out, occasionally, on a pinch; and then we would all shout at the unexpectedness and aptness of the replies.
My parents never suspected me. As I think back on those times I see how deep within my nature must have been the tendency to deception: of all the crowd of young persons and adults that gathered around that mysterious little instrument, I believe I was the only one at all conscious of deceit being at work; and further, I believe I would have been the last one to be suspected. My parents and the other adults were intelligent persons, not prone to vulgar credulity; they did not pretend to understand the writing, yet knew there was no spiritualistic explanation—Mother would have burned the thing had any one said that seriously, though we used to jest about the “spooks” making it go. It was with living persons and issues that our questions dealt, and we found it a fascinating amusement.
I remember how they used to try to test it; how my parents would ask names and things about family history that they thought no one in the room but they themselves knew or remembered. One of these tests was to ask for my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. It was usually spoken of as Eunice Gear (her adopted name), but they forgot that I had noted and remembered her romantic story, and knew her real name (Albro) as well as I did my own. And here is where my double-dyed hypocrisy comes in: I willed the thing to write “Eunice Albro” and, whether consciously or unconsciously, I cannot now say, guided the movement of the machine in the formation of the letters; but, watching it, as “Albro” was being written, I cried out, feigning surprise, “Why, that isn’t right—it isn’t writing Grandma’s name!” Father and Mother, watching eagerly, hushed me up, and the thing wrote “Albro,” instead of “Gear.” Excited and mystified, Father explained to the onlookers about Grandma’s early abduction, adding that the children had probably always heard her spoken of by the name of her foster parents. This was often cited as the most signal triumph Planchette had to its credit. It was but one of my many conscious intrigues with the little machine. Often, of course, the answers were evasive or ambiguous, but I made them definite when I could, and then they were very convincing.
One night a young woman spectator asked a silent question. This disturbed, but did not nonplus me. I knew she was having a love affair whose course was not running smoothly, so made the oracle declare: