At that point in the séance there came a tap on the door, and Mrs. Gartz came in with one of her nephews. She had known nothing about the séance; being highly antagonistic, she had not been invited. Fletcher said, “There is a strong Catholic influence here, but there will be a divorce.”
That ended the affair, possibly because of Mrs. Gartz’s hostile attitude. The lights were turned up, and the various guests spoke in turn. Bob Irwin, Craig’s brother-in-law, said that his young brother had been killed by exactly such a runaway team; Rob Wagner said that his brother had been killed in the Navy in a gun accident. Theodore Dreiser had been a journalist, but he denied that he had ever known such a man or heard of any such events as had come out in the séance. Mrs. Gartz’s nephew said that he was a Catholic, but there would surely not be any divorce.
So ended the evening; but the day after the next there came to Craig a letter from Helen Dreiser saying that she was embarrassed to tell us that Theodore had been drinking and had slept through the séance and not heard a word. When she had repeated to him the various statements, he admitted that he knew such a man and that the events mentioned had occurred.
The predicted divorce did not occur until a month or two later, when the wife of the Gartz nephew divorced him.
And now all the skeptics can put their wits to work and find out how Arthur Ford got all those facts about people he had never met, and about whom we had made such efforts at secrecy. I don’t like to be fooled any more than the next man, but I agree with Professor McDougall and Professor Rhine that it is the duty of science to investigate such events and find out what are the forces by which they are brought about.
Just by way of fun, I will add that Professor McDougall established his department of parapsychology, and Professor Rhine has carried it on; one of the things they have proved is that when Negroes shooting craps snap their fingers and cry “Come seven! Come eleven!” they really are influencing the dice. Rhine’s investigators have caused millions of dice to be thrown mechanically, and observers have willed certain numbers to come, and the numbers have come. The chances for the successes having happened accidentally are up in the billions. Most embarrassing—but it happens!
II
Much of the story of my life is a story of the books I wrote. I read a great many, too, and among those I found interesting was a history of ancient Rome—because of the resemblance between the political and economic circumstances of two thousand years ago and those I knew so well in my native land. So I wrote Roman Holiday, the story of a rich young American who amuses himself driving a racing automobile. He meets with an accident and wakes up in the days when he had been driving horses in a chariot race in the arena of ancient Rome. Everything is familiar to him, and he goes back and forth between the two ages of history, equally at home in both. This novel was a foreshadowing of my tragic drama, Cicero—although, rather oddly, this realization did not come to me until just recently, when Cicero was produced.
III
My next book handled the problem of prohibition, of special interest to me ever since I had seen my father and two of my uncles die as alcoholics. The whole country was boiling with excitement over the struggle between the “wets” and the “drys,” so I put my youthful self into a long novel, with all the characters I had known and the battles I had fought against the saloon-keepers and the crooked politicians. The Wet Parade I called it. It was made into a very good motion picture, with an illustrious cast that included Robert Young, Walter Huston, Myrna Loy, Lewis Stone, and Jimmie Durante as the comic prohibition agent.