Prophetess

Rondle* these ships of the air and these ships in the water, for the greatest war of the world is on the way. . . . One little island known to you will be a first prize of war. It will fall into the hands of the conquerors without a gun being fired in its defense. Treachery delivers it easily. From there they sweep on to islands whose beauty is known all over the world.

These prophetic lines were spoken on Thanksgiving Day, 1922, by Mrs. Irving T. Bush, third wife of Manhattan's Warehouse Magnate Irving T. Bush (Bush Terminal). Mrs. Bush is a substantial, auburn-haired woman of middle years whose vaticinal gifts extend from prose to painting. Last week her dramatic canvases were shown at Manhattan's Grand Central Galleries. Famine, painted ten years ago, was depicted by an enormous white bird hovering over a ghost town; sabotage was symbolized by a factory through which a serpent wove its way. In another picture plumbing the future, a dragon Hitler encountered God, whose hooked nose and long white beard projected from a cloud. Passing from fore to hindsight, Mrs. Bush exhibited her brilliant idyllic scenes of the island of Guam, painted in 1942 from memories of a 1921 visit.

They Do It. Mrs. Bush declares that her prophecies, in whatever form, are determined by what she calls "They." She has tried to paint without "Them" but has not been satisfied. Of her normal procedure she says: "They move my hand up and down and onward. . . . Then, all at once, They make a rudimentary sketch or perhaps They begin to paint without any sketch or outline at all. They work rapidly and never fail to reprove me when I do not respond readily or if I am in any way inattentive." Mrs. Bush confesses to a horror of the supernatural and a lack of interest in psychical research. But she has submitted her peculiar powers to tests by investigators in that field. Said the late Dr.Walter Franklin Prince, of the American Society for Psychical Research: "Her honesty and general character are beyond doubt. . . . That she is able to state facts provably unknown to her to a degree beyond the limits of chance has been absolutely proved to me. Here is a remarkable and perplexing case."

Mrs. Bush (nee Spore) was born near Bay City, Mich. She is a sister of the late U.S. Navy Commander James S. Spore, onetime Governor of Guam. In her time she has practiced dentistry, and as a lavish Manhattan charitarian she became known as "The Angel of the Bowery."

The Bushes have no hesitation in revealing that 18 months before the stock-market crash of 1929. Mrs. Bush predicted its coming, to the week. Mr. Bush took advantage of this information to unload 25% of his holdings -- wishes it had been more.

* The speaker defines rondle as "gather together."

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