Part I
“That is the eternal battle, between the purposes of progress and building, and the purposes of disintegration. It goes on in your life, and it goes on less bitterly in ours. Help me build as we began, toward the great unity.”
“This is the battle to which we call you and all who are for progress.”
I
My first serious attempt to establish communication through planchette with a person or persons in a life beyond ours was made Sunday morning, March 3, 1918. Not so very serious an attempt, either, for I anticipated no success, and was not without a humorous appreciation of my position, sitting with my hand on a toy, inviting communication with celestial powers. I remember laughing a little, as I pictured the sardonic glee with which certain of my friends would be likely to regard such a proceeding.
Perhaps this is as good a time as any to say that I was seeking a stranger. I never saw Frederick. When our friendship with his parents began they lived in one city, we in another, and he in a third and more distant one, where he was first a reporter and later a political and editorial writer on the staff of a leading newspaper. I knew that he was young, successful, a bachelor, and singularly devoted to his family, as they to him. But his habits of thought and speech had never been described to me, at first because it was expected that we would meet, and in the much closer intimacy of our later acquaintance, because the pain of his loss was so poignant that no member of the family could speak of him with composure. I had never seen a photograph of him, even.
After perhaps twenty minutes, during which planchette did not move, I left the paper—a roll of blank wall-paper, called lining-paper, which I found years ago to offer the most continuous and satisfactory surface for use with planchette—spread over the table, and went into another room, intending to return later. But I forgot it, and only when I was putting things in order for the night did I re-enter that room and remember my promise to Mrs. Gaylord. I decided to make one more attempt, that I might be able to tell her positively that I had been unsuccessful. All other members of the household were away—Cass at Atlantic City, recuperating from an illness—and I was entirely alone in the apartment.