This second message arrived Saturday afternoon, and I at once inquired of
Mary K. why she had said “Century.” Instead of her familiar signature,
however, “Frederick” was written.
Having ascertained that this was Frederick himself, and not a message
about him, I asked him to go on.
“The Family are happy.” At no time during this brief interview had I the
slightest inkling of what was coming. As he had been always so courteous
in acknowledgment, the first letters led me to think he was beginning his
customary “Thank you.” Saying that their happiness added greatly to my
own, I asked if he had anything else to say.
“Yes. At your service.... At the next large family reunion you both will
be present, won’t you?”
I said we would try to be, and again he wrote his name, indicating that
he had nothing more to say, whereupon I called Mary K., reproached her
for inaccuracy, and asked why she had said Mansfield Kendal would come by
the Century.
Apparently despairing of penetrating such density, she replied, merely:
“He wanted to leave to-day.” Later in the afternoon she said, “He will be
perfectly ready to believe,” which seemed to me highly improbable.
Some things written that afternoon came to my mind before they did to my
fingers, and I asked whether she could not write the messages without
first telling me what they were to be.
“Yes,” she returned, “but it is harder for us and more exhausting for
you.” Weeks afterward, when this separate control of mind and pencil had
been more fully demonstrated, it was more fully explained.
Remembering her statement that her work took her “on perpetual tour,” I
asked how long she would be here.
“I shall be near you for months,” she said, and then began again her
never wholly relinquished effort to write the message first attempted two
days before. “Ao ... an ... aon ... aem ... aeons ago ...”—here she made
a frantic little joy circle—“... we were lovers.”
This surprised me, for it seemed unlike her and was absolutely foreign
to my thought, but when she had verified it, I asked: “Is reincarnation
true, then?”
“No. Aeons ago ... I was a friend of yours in ——.” She mentioned a
person whom I have known all my life. Again this seemed utter nonsense,
but again she verified it. “We were concerned in being more and more
curiously limited ... more and more animal.” Some of this came readily,
some with halting and false starts, which—like Frederick—she crossed out
herself.
At first this, too, seemed devoid of meaning, but after a little thought
I asked whether she meant that we had been associated in some way as pure
spirit.
“Everybody was pure spirit once, and will be again,” was the rapid reply.
“Is this life a punishment, then?”
“No, a beginning of individuality.”
“Does the individual continue to exist forever?”
“Yes.”
“As pure spirit?”
“Yes.”
“Then how were we associated as pure spirit?”
“We were the same purpose.”
Completely puzzled, I asked, “Why do you say we were friends in ——?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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