Mrs. Gaylord spoke of her feeling of his presence, of his characteristic
personality, saying that he seemed “just the same.”
“Plus, Mother dear. You’d like me better now. I don’t mean that I am
perfect, you know. I’ve got more to learn than I ever knew existed, but I
can see ahead now. And you _would_ like me better.... I didn’t say love
me better,” he added.
We talked about the force moving the pencil, which on this occasion was
very strongly applied, though I was greatly fatigued by the efforts of
the past few days, and I asked Frederick whether he could move it without
my co-operation. But he said, “Only as you hold it.” To a suggestion that
he expressed himself not through the pencil, but through me, he replied,
“She is like the battery.”
From the first Mrs. Gaylord had been experimenting with planchette
and pencil, hoping to establish direct communication with Frederick.
While placing more emphasis on a possible communion of thought, without
material aid, he had encouraged these efforts. “Mother, you can do it,
I am sure,” he said once, “but don’t expect much fluency for some time.
I have not written except through Margaret yet, but they tell me she is
exceptionally sensitive as a messenger.”
Referring to this, he was asked whether others, not known to me
personally, had desired to communicate through me, and replied: “No, but
they have watched her, this last week.” Ten days later, when the most
amazing of all the communications began to come, we remembered this.
After enumerating some of the qualifications of a good messenger, he
said: “When that combination is found we are all interested, if we want
to reach our own people.”
“Are you over there especially interested in reaching your own families
and friends, or in reaching persons who might be interested in the
possibility of these communications?”
“Both. But if you have ever been unable to communicate with those you
love, for months and years, and have known they were suffering, then you
know which interest is keenest. The one is immediate and urgent, the
other more or less a matter of evolution.”
“Shall I try to talk to some of you occasionally?” I asked. “Or shall I
wait for a call?”
“You are over the top. We shall be glad to come.”
“Can you let me know, if you have something to say through me?”
“Not always. Sometimes we can suggest the thought to you.”
Since that time, however, a more perfect connection has been established
and I am often conscious of a definite summons. On these occasions the
pencil starts at once, generally with great vigor, and almost always
writes some message not conveyed to my consciousness except as I spell it
out after the pencil.
Toward the end of the evening, when Mrs. Gaylord had suggested going back
to her hotel, the pencil made a little circle and some apparently aimless
marks inside it.
“Is this Frederick?” I asked, wondering at indecision from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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