On another occasion Craig wrote: “One big eye, with nothing else distinct—then lines or spikes came around it, or maybe these project from the head like stiff long hairs, or eye-lashes. Can’t tell what kind of head—but feel it must be a tropical something, tho the eye looks human,” etc. The book was Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, by H. G. Wells, and in this book is a chapter headed, “The Friendly Eye,” with the following sentences: “I became aware that an Eye observed me continually.... It was a reddish brown eye. It looked out from a system of bandages that also projected a huge shock of brown hair upward and a great chestnut beard ... the eye watched me with the illuminating but expressionless detachment of a head-lamp.... Polyhemus, for that was my private name for the man.”
A long string of such surprises! Craig picked up a book and wrote: “Black wings—a vampire flying by night.” The title of the book was The Devil’s Jest. She picked up one and wrote: “A Negro’s head with a light around it.” It is a German volume, called “Africa Singt,” and has a big startling design exactly as described. She picked up a book by Leon Trotsky, and wrote the word “Checkro”—which may not sound like Russian to Trotsky, but does to Craig! And a book with Mussolini on the cover, wearing a black coat and feeding a lion: she got the shape of the Duce’s figure, only she labeled him “Black Bird.” And here is a part of the jacket design of “wings” on the “Literary Guild” books—and below is what Craig made of it. She added the comment: “Motion—the thing is traveling, point first (Fig. [22], 22a).”
Fig. 22
Fig. 22a
Another volume was described as follows: “A pale blue book. Lonely prairie country, stretch of flat land against sky, and outlined against it a procession of people. Had feeling of moving—wheeled vehicle which seemed to be baby-carriage. This was strange, because country was covered with snow.” Upon examination, the book proved to be bound in mottled pale blue boards, title, “I’m Scairt,” with subtitle, “Childhood Days on the Prairies.” On the first page of the preface occurs the following: “It was in those days that a company of Swedes left their beloved homeland in the far North and came to make a home for themselves and their children on the Kansas prairie.”
Finally, I have obtained the publisher’s consent to reproduce the jacket design of a recent book, so that I may put Craig’s telepathy alongside it, and give you a laugh or two. Observe the jolly little tourists, and what they have turned into! And then the efforts of Craig’s subconscious mind at French. They taught it to her in a “finishing school” on Fifth Avenue, and you can see that it was finished before it began (Figs. [23], [23a]).
Yet another form of experiment invented itself under the pressure of necessity. Impossible to have such a witch-wife without trying to put her to use!
