The community dances never went over really big, that you could mention; by the time the second fox trot had reached the place where the record was scratched the men had all gathered in one corner and were arguing about how long you ought to let it stand before you put it in the still; and the women were settled along the other side of the room, telling each other how you could reduce without exercising or dieting. Those evenings were apt to cause hard feeling between husband and wife, and one word frequently led to another on the way home.
Then there was the time that we went in rather heavily for bridge. The bridge hounds were unleashed on Tuesday evenings, and at eleven o’clock chicken salad and lettuce sandwiches would be served and the one who had the highest score could choose between a blue glass candy jar with a glass crab apple on its top, and a hive-shaped honey pot of yellow china with china bees that you’d swear were just about to sting you swarming all over it; in either case what was left went without any argument to the holder of the next highest score.
On the next Tuesday the club would meet again, and play till eleven o’clock, at which time chicken salad and cream cheese and olive sandwiches would be provided, and the winner had to make up his mind between one of those handy little skating girls made of painted wood with a ball of colored twine instead of a bodice, and a limp-leather copy of Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore, the well-known hyphenated Indian.
The bridge club would doubtless have still been tearing things wide open every Tuesday, but the ouija board came in, and the hostesses’ imagination in the selection of prizes gave out, at about the same time.
Mrs. Both, who is awfully good at all that kind of thing, tried to inaugurate a series of Sunday evening intellectual festivals, but they were never what you could really call a riot. The idea was that everyone should meet at her house, and the more gifted among us should entertain and at the same time elevate the majority. But Mrs. Both could never get enough backing from the rest of the home talent. She herself read several papers that she had written on such subjects as “The New Russia, and Why”; and “Modern Poetry—What of Its Tomorrow?”
HENRY G. TAKES TO VERSE
And Mrs. Curley, who is always so agreeable about doing anything like that, did some of her original child impersonations, in her favorite selections, “Don’t Tell the Daisies I Tolded You, ’Cause I Pwomised Them Not to Tell”; and “Little Girls Must Always Be Dwessed up Clean—Wisht I Was a Little Boy.” As an encore she always used to give, by request, that slightly rough one about “Where Did Baby Bruvver Tum Fwom, That’s What Me Wants to Know,” in which so many people think she is at her best. Mrs. Curley never makes the slightest change in costume for her specialty—she doesn’t even remove her chain-drive eyeglasses—yet if you closed your eyes you’d really almost think that a little child was talking. She has often been told that she should have gone on the stage. Then Mr. Bliss used to sing “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” and would gladly have done more, except that it was so hard to find songs that suited his voice.
Those were about the only numbers that the program ever comprised. Mr. Smalley volunteered to make shadow pictures and give an imitation of a man sawing wood, including knots, but Mrs. Both somehow did not quite feel that this would have been in the spirit of the thing. So the intellectual Sunday evenings broke up, and the local mental strain went down to normal again.
Mrs. Both is now one of the leaders in the home-research movement. She has been accomplishing perfect wonders on the ouija board; she swung a wicked planchette right from the start. Of course she has been pretty lucky about it. She got right in touch with one spirit, and she works entirely with him. Henry G. Thompson, his name is, and he used to live a long time ago, up round Cape Cod way, when he was undeniably a good fellow when he had it. It seems that he was interested in farming in a small way, while he was on earth, but now that he has a lot of time on his hands he has taken up poetry. Mrs. Both has a whole collection of poems that were dictated to her by this spirit. From those that I have seen I gather that they were dictated but not read.
But then, of course, she has not shown me all of them.
Anyway, they are going to be brought out in book form in the fall, under the title Heart Throbs From the Hereafter. The publishers are confident of a big sale, and are urging Mrs. Both to get the book out sooner, while the public is still in the right mood. But she has been having some sort of trouble with Henry, over the ouija board. I don’t know if I have it quite straight, but it seems that Henry is behaving in a pretty unreasonable way about the percentage of royalties that he insists must go to the Thompson estate.
But aside from this little hitch—and I dare say that she and Henry will patch it up between them somehow—Mrs. Both has got a great deal out of spiritualism. She went about it in the really practical way. She did not waste her own time and the spirits’ asking the ouija board questions about who is going to be the next President, and whether it will rain tomorrow, and what the chances are for a repeal of the Vol stead Act. Instead she sat right down and got acquainted with one particular spirit, and let him do the rest. That is really the best way to go about it; get your control, and make him work your ouija board for you, and like it. Some of our most experienced mediums agree that that is the only way to get anywhere in parlor spiritualism.
But when you come right down to it there are few who can get more out of a ouija board than our own Aunt Bertha. Her work is not so highly systematized as that of Mrs. Both, but it is pretty fairly spectacular, in its way.
I knew that Aunt Bertha was going to get in some snappy work on the ouija board; I could have told you that before I ever saw her in action. She has always been good at anything anywhere nearly like that. Now you take solitaire, for instance. I don’t think I ever saw a prettier game of solitaire than that which Aunt Bertha puts up. You may be looking over her shoulder while she deals out the cards for a game of Canfield, and from the layout before her you would swear that she had not a chance of getting more than one or two aces up, at most. In fact, it looks so hopeless that you lose interest in the game, and go over to the other end of the room to get a magazine. And when you come back Aunt Bertha will have all the cards in four stacks in front of her, and she will smile triumphantly and exclaim: “What do you think of that? I got it again!”
AUNT BERTHA’S SNAPPY WORK
I have known that to happen over and over again; I never saw such luck in my life. I would back Aunt Bertha against any living solitaire player for any amount of money you want, only providing that the judges leave the room during the contest.
It was no surprise to me to find that she had just the same knack with a ouija board. She can take a ouija board that would never show the least signs of life for anybody else and make it do practically everything but a tail spin. She can work it alone or she can make a duet of it—it makes no difference to her. She is always sure of results, either way. The spirits seem to recognize her touch on the board immediately. You never saw such a remarkable thing; it would convert anybody to spiritualism just to see her.
Aunt Bertha asks a question of the spirits, and the words are no more than out of her mouth when the planchette is flying about, spelling out the answer almost faster than you can read it. The service that she gets is perfectly wonderful. And, as she says herself, you can see that there is no deception about it, because she does not insist upon asking the question herself; anyone can ask whatever he can think of—there are no limits. Of course, the answers have occasionally turned out to be a trifle erratic, but then, to quote Aunt Bertha again, what does that prove? The spirits never claimed to be right all the time. It is only human of them to make a slip once in a while.
She can go deeper into the affairs of the Other Side than a mere game of questions and answers, if you want her to. Just say the word, and Aunt Bertha will get you in touch with anybody that you may name, regardless of how long ago he or she may have lived. Only the other night, for instance, someone suggested that Aunt Bertha summon Noah
Webster’s spirit, and in scarcely less time than it takes to tell it, there he was talking to her on the ouija board, as large as life. His spelling wasn’t all that it used to be, but otherwise he seemed to be getting along splendidly.
Again, just to show you what she can do when she sets her mind to it, she was asked to try her luck at getting connected with the spirit of Disraeli—we used up Napoleon and Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar and all the other stock characters the very first week that Aunt Bertha began to work the ouija board, and we had to go in pretty deep to think up new ones. The planchette started to move the minute that Aunt Bertha put her hands on it, if you will believe me, and when she asked, “Is this Disraeli?” it immediately spelled out, “This is him.” I tell you, I saw it with my own eyes. Uncanny, it really was.
There seems to be nobody whom Aunt Bertha cannot make answer her on the ouija board. There is even a pretty strong chance that she may be able to get Central, after she has had a little more practice.
Mrs. Crouch, too, has been having some pleasant chats with the spirits. And it is only natural that they should treat her as practically one of the family, for she has been doing propaganda work for the Other Side for years. I often think that one of the big undertaking corporations is overlooking a great little advance agent in Mrs. Crouch. She has a way of asking you how you feel that would make you swear you could smell lilies.
Mrs. Crouch frequently states that she takes but little interest in the things of this world, and she dresses the part. There is a quaint style about her which lends to everything that she wears an air of its having been bequeathed to her by some dear one who went over round 1889.
There is a certain snap to her conversation, too, for which she is noted among our set. Perhaps her favorite line is the one about in the midst of life, which she has been getting off for so long that she has come to take an author’s pride in it. You never saw anyone so clever as Mrs. Crouch is at tracing resemblances to close friends of hers who passed on at what she calls, in round numbers, an early age; you would be surprised at the number of persons with whom she comes in contact who have just that same look round the eyes. In fact, you might call Mrs. Crouch the original Glad Girl, and not be much out of the way.
So the ouija-board operations have been right along in her line. Scarcely a day passes, she tells me, that she does not receive a message from at least one of her large circle of spirit friends, saying that everything is fine, and how is she getting on, herself? It has really been just like Old Home Week for Mrs. Crouch ever since she got her ouija board.
Miss Thill is another of our girls who has made good with the spirits. Spiritualism is no novelty to her; she has been a follower of it, as she says, almost all her life, and by now she has fairly well caught up with it. In her case, also, it is no surprise to find her so talented with the ouija board. She has always been of a markedly mediumistic turn of mind—there are even strong indications of clairvoyant powers. Time and time again Miss Thill has had the experience of walking along the street thinking of some friend of hers, and whom will she meet, not two hours afterward, but that very same friend! As she says, you cannot explain such things away by calling them mere coincidence. Sometimes it really almost frightens Miss Thill to think about it.
You would know that Miss Thill was of a spiritualistic trend only to look at her. She has a way of suddenly becoming oblivious of all that is going on about her and of looking far off into space, with an intent expression, as of one seeking, seeking; materialists, at their first sight of her in this condition, are apt to think that she is trying to remember whether she really did turn off the hot water before leaving home. Her very attire is suggestive of the occult influence. What she saves on corsets she lavishes on necklaces of synthetic jade, carved with mystic signs, which I’ll wager have no good meaning behind them if the truth were known.
Miss Thill is a pretty logical candidate for the head of the local branch of the Ouija Board Workers of the World. She has an appreciable edge on the other contestants in that she once attended a lecture given by Sir Oliver Lodge himself. Unfortunately she chose rather an off day; Sir Oliver was setting them right as to the family life of the atom, and it went right on over Miss Thill’s head; she couldn’t even jump for it. There were none of those little homy touches about Sir Oliver’s intimacies with the spirits which Miss Thill had been so eager to hear, and I believe that there was quite a little bitterness on her part about it. She has never felt really the same toward Sir Oliver since. So far as she is concerned he can turn right round and go back to England—back to his old haunts, as you might put it.
HARDENED HUSBANDS
By means of her ouija board Miss Thill, as might have been expected, has worked her way right into the highest intellectual circles of spirit society. As if recognizing an equal some of the greatest celebrities of the Great Beyond have taken her up. It seems that it is no uncommon occurrence for her to talk to such people as Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott on the ouija board; she has come to think scarcely anything of it. I hear that she has been receiving several messages from Shakspere only lately. His spirit is not what a person could call really chatty, as I understand it; he doesn’t seem to be one to do much talking about himself. Miss Thill has to help him out a good deal. She asks him one of her typically intellectual questions, such as what he thinks of the modern drama, and all he has to do to answer her is to guide the planchette to either “Yes” or “No”; or, at most, both. Still, his spirit is almost an entire stranger to her, when you stop to think of it, so you really cannot expect anything of a more inside nature just yet, anyway.
Unfortunately several of the husbands among our little circle have been markedly out of sympathy with the spirit movement. They have adopted a humorous attitude toward it which has seemed to be almost coarse to the more enthusiastic of the women workers. They use the ouija board only to ask it such frivolous questions as “Where is the nearest place where you can still get it?”—which is particularly trying to those who realize the true seriousness of the thing. It is small wonder that they get no answer from the spirits when they go about it that way; no spirit is going to stand for that sort of stuff. There are too many demands on the spirits’ time for them to bother about calls which are not absolutely necessary.
Attempts to convince the more hardened husbands of the supernatural powers of the ouija board have ended in nothing. Some of them when told, by way of positive proof, of the amazing messages which their own wives have received from the board, have even made open accusations of pushing, which have almost led to an even division of the children, and a parting of the ways. Not since the dance craze came in has there been so much really notable matrimonial friction as there is over this matter of spirit communication. The ouija board is not without—or, in fact, is with, if you do not mind plain speaking—its somber side.
TOO MUCH IS ENOUGH
Personally I find that I am rather out of things at the neighborhood social festivals. When the others gather round to exchange bright sayings of their ouija boards I am left nowhere as regards adding anything to the general revelry. The spirits have not done the right thing by me; I can never get any action on the ouija board. It isn’t as if I had not given the spirits a fair chance. No one was any readier than I to be one of the boys; the flesh was willing, but the spirits weakened, if you could put it that way. There I was, so anxious to make friends with them, and find out how all the folks were, and if they were still with the same people, and how they liked their work. And they would never even say so much as “Haven’t we had a poisonous winter?” to me. So if that is the way they are going to be about it—why, all right. I can take a hint as well as the next one.
As for the community ouija boards, any time the research workers want to store them away in the spare bedrooms with the rest of the bird’s-eye-maple furniture it will be quite all right for me. I am willing to call it a day and give the spirits a rest any time that the others are. I am not fanatical about the ouija board; I am p
erfectly able to take it or let it alone. In fact, I think that a reasonable amount of daily exercise on it is a good thing. It is not the actual manual labor that I object to—it is the unexpurgated accounts of all the messages received and their meanings, if any.
Sometimes I even feel that I could moil along through life if I never had to hear another discourse on the quaint things that some local ouija board has said. To put it in so many words—at a rough estimate—I am just about all through.
In fact, if I thought that you would stand for it I would even go so far as to say that I am ouija bored.
The Saturday Evening Post, May 22, 1920
A Dinner Party Anthology
MRS. CHARLES FRISBIE
As hostess, Mrs. Frisbie is present at the dinner table in body only; her spirit wings afar to the unseen realms of kitchen and pantry, where she fain would be. For, as she sadly explains, only if she were there to supervise could she be assured that things would go smoothly. Un-watched by a stern eye, the cook is apt to serve the fish after the roast or, whimsically, to omit the salad altogether. True, Mrs. Frisbie’s cook, during their four years’ cooperation, has always faithfully followed the old traditions in such matters, but that, according to Mrs. Frisbie, is no proof of what she might do. It would not be the slightest surprise to Mrs. Frisbie to have her break out into the wildest unconventionalities at any moment. Servants, she avers, would do anything; they cannot be trusted to do the simplest task correctly unless you stand right over them while they are doing it.
Complete Stories Page 49