“Laughter is a constructive force, children,” she told us, when things were going smoothly again. “Remember that when you fight fiends.... If we keep our touch close, and laugh like that, with real mirth, they can’t get in.”
Later that evening, Anne Lowe came for a moment, just to tell us, she said, that we had made a step in learning what laughter that is from the heart will do. “It is protective, constructive, curative, and the devil for devils. They can’t get over, or around, or through it. That’s your best weapon and your best protection, aside from fundamental purposes. Use it, and more power to your—what is it you laugh with? Diaphragm, or what?”
The next night, when conditions were normal from the first, we asked Mary Kendal about this incident, and she said: “It was just a massed attack, which will occur from time to time. They will fight as long as they exist, but the virulence and violence of their present efforts is due to our united attack on them.”
An interesting and illuminating variation of these occasional sorties occurred during an interview between a man of whose personal relations and interests I have only the most casual knowledge, and a personality on the next plane whom I knew not at all.
The first messages to him, as to most of the others, concerned purpose and its unity. Apparently not convinced of the authenticity of their source, he repeatedly asked for an intimate, characteristic, personal message. Not receiving it, he asked a question relating to an entirely imaginary situation—“just to see,” as he afterward explained.
The question was answered in detail, immediately followed by the statement, “Phil fears too much.”
Suspecting interference, from the peculiar movement of the pencil, I asked him who Phil was, and when he replied that he knew no such person, I demanded to know who was writing.
“M. A.” This signature was not complete, but the reply to a question in this connection, purporting to come from Mary K., was followed by a vigorous repetition of M. A.’s initials, inclosed in two reversed circles—his characteristic signature when in full control of the pencil.
My visitor then admitted that he had asked a fictitious question, but attempts to learn who had answered it resulted in contradictory assertions from various sources, and knowing the difficulty of re-establishing a connection once effectually broken, I refused to continue the interview.