Some minutes were taken up by Professor Bey’s distress, the members of the committee being unable to agree whether to persuade the unfortunate gentleman to leave, or to allow him to stay, or to adjourn the séance for another time—this last being rather impractical, under the circumstances. He continued to address Deirdre of the Shadows in a high, forlorn voice, quite at odds with his wide smile. “Is my Saviour awaiting? Is He close by? Of a sudden I am so very, very frightened—I believe we are all frightened—as the dread year 1900 approaches—the dread and unimaginable year 1900—and I am visited by a sudden terror—that He has departed—and that we cannot even mock Him any longer! For what shall we mock, my colleagues, if not Him?”
“He is not jesting, he has gone quite mad,” Dr. Eglinton said. With a large white handkerchief this gentleman wiped at his brow, which was freely perspiring, despite the chill of the room.
“I see naught but a great, great expanse of water—serene and oily—all waves abated, all storms—thousands upon thousands of tons of sheer dead pressure—millions of tons—billions—”
Dr. Dodd, Dr. Stoughton, and Mr. Sinnett attempted to calm the o’erwrought man, and to lead him from the room: and were joined in their struggle by a youthful member of the Society, Professor Bey’s grandson, himself a physician. Seeing himself trapped, the old gentleman made a rush toward Deirdre, now crying in a loud aggrieved voice: “Why is He so rarely present—even when we abuse Him? You must tell me! You must cease this charade! For nothing, nothing, nothing matters save that Jesus Christ is a hoax, or is not a hoax—”
In the embarrassing contretemps a decanter of water was knocked to the floor, and Mr. Oakley-Hume was struck in the face by Professor Bey’s flailing arm. At this most inopportune moment the gas jets everywhere in the large room faltered, and grew bright again, and again faltered, as if about to go out: which, I hardly need to note, further alarmed Professor Bey, and disturbed everyone in the room.
During all this time the young medium remained immobile in her chair, her waxen hands clasped tightly in her lap, and her sightless gaze fixed in space. A voice sepulchral as hers, yet not hers (it was that of an elderly, weary man) sounded from the air:
“Jesus is you, and you are Jesus, and He is in you, and everywhere; and nowhere. Prepare for His coming.”
These grave words, however, far from calming Professor Bey, so greatly distressed him that it was deemed advisable, by all, that he be led out of the room, and home: and in this he gratefully concurred.
“I shall prepare—I shall prepare—ah, yes!—I shall prepare this very night,” he was heard to say, as his grandson escorted him out of the room, and along the corridor.
AFTER THIS UNFORTUNATE interlude there was a brief respite, as the committee members conferred with one another, in low tones. A gathering restiveness in the audience, however, suddenly manifested itself in an unauthorized question, put directly to the medium, by a stout veiled lady at the very rear of the room: “Is there hope? Is there hope? As the old gentleman asked, Is there hope?”—but this importunate individual was immediately hushed.
Now a great many voices sounded simultaneously, from out the very air: and were perceived as spirit-voices. And the gas jets flickered once more. The chandelier swayed; or, it might have been (so many attested afterward), the parlor swayed, rocking gently from side to side, whilst the chandelier remained fixed! One or two ladies exclaimed aloud, in voices that communicated both fear, and thrilled apprehension, and were answered by a series of raps—loud, sharp raps—which came also from the empty air.
(Rapping being a phenomenon commonplace in Spiritualist circles, these unpleasant noises had a salutary effect upon the gathering—imposing quiet, and, as it were, respect, upon the ladies and gentlemen.)
Yet the abrasive Dr. Eglinton could not resist observing, in a voice in which righteous anger and amusement were arrogantly blended: “My dear colleagues, do you see? This is standard séance claptrap. This above all. The Fox sisters invented it, to a credulous rural audience; the Davenports deviously patented it; and this industrious young lady merely peddles it—snapping her knee joints in secret—or her toe joints—and throwing the sound. So that it appears to the untrained ear to come out of nowhere—out of ‘Spirit World’!”
“Her knee joints?” Mr. Sinnett asked, astonished.
“Or her toe joints,” Dr. Eglinton said.
“Indeed,” Professor Crosby said sharply, “it is standard practice: every medium knows how to do it. And ventriloquism as well. They are all masters—mistresses!—of the nefarious skill.”
The rapping noises were now coming at the gentlemen from numerous directions, and were mixed with a more uniform drumming or droning sound, which, even to recall in tranquillity, is most chilling to this chronicler: not in its actual sound, so much as in the persistence and the pressure of it, which seemed to threaten madness. Several of the gentlemen believed that the drumming was in their own heads, and Mr. Oakley-Hume, who suffered a mild condition of the heart, believed that the sound was that of his own heartbeat, grotesquely magnified.
After some minutes this most distressing assault abated, and the gas jets ceased their flickering, and, some twelve or fifteen members of the audience having made their exit (in fact a wise decision, as we shall see), a modicum of order was restored; and Dr. Dodd insisted, in a voice gone shrill, that the investigation must proceed along traditional lines—or it would have to be terminated.
A faint titter of impish laughter attended his pronouncement, which he did not deign to hear.
Dr. Stoughton then noted, with some solicitude, that Deirdre of the Shadows was not only excessively pale, but sitting in her chair so rigidly, and in a posture of such extraordinary tension, that her slender body was quivering with strain. “I wonder, Dr. Dodd, whether it might be advisable to rouse her from her trance, before something unfortunate happens. Her eyes, you see, have rolled partway up into her head,” the young man observed.
“Not at all, not at all, it is standard practice, it is back-parlor charlatanry,” Professor Crosby said. “We shall proceed—we shall expose her! They can make thousands of dollars at a single sitting, these young ladies! Imposture and fraud! Impertinence!”
Whereupon the spirit Zachariah, invisible, caused the table at which the gentlemen were seated to heave itself upward, suddenly, and violently, at one end.
Again calm was restored, and Professor Crosby, unchastened, said: “Telekinesis.”
Mr. Sinnett asked in a tremulous voice: “What did you say? Tele—?”
“Telekinesis,” Professor Crosby said.
And now the chandelier swayed emphatically, and the air again hummed and droned, and Dr. Eglinton said in a queer changed voice: “I shall examine her—I shall penetrate to the heart of the mystery—an autopsy of her inner organs—the female parts, and the brain: I shall not rest otherwise! The upstart little trollop!”
“Dr. Dodd,” Dr. Stoughton repeated, in a voice that too seemed alter’d, “the young woman is under a tremendous amount of strain: why, I fear her very backbone might snap! Look how it arches, like a bow—”
“You can feel the vibrations in the air,” Mr. Oakley-Hume said, shivering. “That they emanate from the witch I cannot doubt—that they have naught to do with the dead, I firmly believe—and yet, and yet!—I am so very stricken, I fear I must leave— Ah, gentlemen, do you feel the intensity of the pressure? Will it not injure us?”
“It is the odylic force,” Professor Crosby said. “Telekinesis—mere animal magnetism.”
“Yet I fear for my heart,” Mr. Oakley-Hume murmured.
“Nonsense, sir! Sheer nonsense,” Professor Crosby said.
“I must excuse myself—I believe I am in danger—and yet, and yet—” the stricken man said, “I dare not move for fear of exciting the witch further!”
The voice of a mature man (doubtless Father Darien, the martyred Jesuit) sounded from directly overhead, protesting, “Gentlemen! beware!”—but was at once inte
rrupted by a shrill braying, as of an adolescent boy imitating a donkey; this in turn interrupted by the stern admonishings of a woman, whose words, in the din, were unintelligible.
Dr. Dodd rapped for order with his fist, grown greatly impatient, and sought to follow customary séance procedure, by addressing the spirits directly. In a quavering voice he asked them to identify themselves—to explain their presence—to speak one at a time, and as coherently as possible. The spirits quieted at once. Then an outburst of giggling occurred, and the woman’s voice arose, seemingly out of the floorboards beneath the carpet. Her tone was fondly scolding: “Willy!”
Dr. Dodd staggered to his feet, to stare blinking at the floor. For a long moment he did not speak; then he said in a faint voice: “Momma? Is it—Momma?”
The spirit-voice began to speak, in an admixture of scolding and crooning, no more than babble to other ears; yet producing a remarkable effect upon Dr. Dodd. Professor Crosby tugged at his sleeve, saying quietly, “Ventriloquism, William, sheer parlor ventriloquism,” but the agitated Dr. Dodd, a white-haired gentleman well into his seventies, knelt on the floor and pawed frantically at the carpet, saying in a piteous voice: “Momma? Is it you? Momma? Momma! O dear belovèd soul—Momma—”
The voice then sounded from out the ceiling, so that the elderly gentleman was obliged to get to his feet, and, turning awkwardly about, staring overhead, continued to address his mother: a most heartrending sight. And tho’ Professor Crosby, aided now by Dr. Eglinton, laid restraining hands upon him, and insisted that the “spirit-voice” was merely that of the medium, projected by skillful magic across the room, Dr. Dodd paid them no heed—in fact, he urged them away, and shook himself free.
This pathetic spectacle continued for some minutes, Dr. Dodd turning in wild circles, crying, “Momma! Momma!” while the other gentlemen made every effort to calm him, and to explain the phenomenon by plausible rationalist terms: telepathy, hypnosis, and ventriloquism. Dr. Eglinton insisted that one could very nearly see the medium’s lips moving, if one observed closely; Sir Patrick Koones noted that he had been present at a similar incident, in London, during the investigation of the notorious Florence Cook, a trance medium whose tricks had never been fully exposed.
A vague spectral emanation appeared in a corner of the parlor, near the ceiling, naturally exciting much comment; and this, I am unhappy to say, so excited Dr. Dodd that he staggered and lost consciousness, falling to the floor in a dead faint. His colleagues immediately ministered unto him, but to no avail—the poor man could not be aroused: and so it was thought best to carry him from the room, and to attempt to continue with the séance, as quickly as order was restored.
“A very clever trick, Miss!” Dr. Eglinton said, shaking his fist at the insensible medium (who had not moved for some minutes, and gave no indication even of breathing), so trembling with rage that his jowls and chins quivered, and his eyes fairly started out of his head. “A very clever trick, but one, as you shall see, that can only be played on an old fool who has already lost half his wits!”
(That this peculiar voice, and the ectoplasmic manifestation that appeared to accompany it, belonged to the spirit of Deirdre’s Mrs. Dodd—and that Mrs. Dodd was in actual fact Dr. William Dodd’s mother—I simply cannot verify, having no way of knowing. In any case the unfortunate gentleman so fiercely believed his mother had appeared to him, that his reason was to be permanently unhinged; and, after a number of embarrassing episodes involving him in his position as President of the Society for Psychical Research, in Spiritualist circles of the lowest and most suspect nature, he was to be not only divested of his office, but, by a judicious action of his sons and heirs, declared non compos mentis and hospitalized in a private sanitarium in Newport, where he died not soon after. These sorrowful events lying still in the future, and no one guessing at them on the evening of the investigation, the séance continued, with Dr. Stoughton uneasily assuming command.)
As if even the spirits had grown sober, after the spectacle of so distinguished a gentleman being o’ercome, and carried bodily out of the room, there was an interlude of some time—upward of an hour, by most estimates—when the séance, skillfully and yet courteously guided by the young physician, assumed the contours of a more traditional session, in which the spirits of certain deceased relatives of members of the audience spoke forth, moderated by Father Darien (who introduced himself briefly and modestly, choosing not to dwell, as he ofttimes did, upon the grisly nature of the Iroquois’s methods of torture). The great-grandfather of Dr. Phineas O’Shea, a Society member of many years’ standing, who had always prided himself on his ability to sympathize with both the Rationalists, and the Spiritualists, among his wide circle of acquaintances, addressed him in a hearty, jubilant voice, alluding to such private information as regards the O’Sheas in general, and Dr. Phineas in particular, as to leave the respected gentleman “in no doubt whatsoever” concerning the authenticity of the spirit, and the miraculous gifts of the medium. The husband of Mrs. Minnie Cunningham addressed her, in a voice in which concern and amused impatience were intermixed, at first greatly startling the lady, and then consoling her, when he spoke to her “pressing concern”—the vexations she was suffering in her home, as a consequence of an old housekeeper who had acquired loose and clacking dentures, and who, Mrs. Cunningham thought, could be neither dismissed nor “spoken to,” considering the delicacy of the situation. (The deceased Mr. Cunningham promised his wife that, upon the morn, the problem would be resolved: for he would see to it that the offending creature was visited in the night by a spirit, doubtless a relative of hers, who would impart the much-needed information, that the dentures should be attended to at once.) An interlude of some tearful emotion occurred, when the spirit of Mrs. Jane Clemens was brought forward, in quivering luminous ectoplasmic form, calling out to her belovèd son Sam: with the result that, the disguised Samuel Clemens (our own “Mark Twain”) tore off his false beard of curly black whiskers, and, stammering, announced that he was present: and most eager to hear what his mother had to say. The deceased Jane Clemens informed her famous son that she spent nearly all of her time praying for him, and attempting to supervise his life, so far as she could, meeting with “some resistance,” of a kind he doubtless comprehended—for, in certain manuscripts of his, there were still egregious cuss words to be found, and unspeakable infelicities of idiom, having to do with clothing of a private nature (“bloomers,” “pantalets,” “breeches” being among the most offensive): all of which, I am relieved to say, the author promised to excise from his writings in the future. Mrs. Clemens chided him further for the improvidence of his ways—his penchant for the theater, rich food and alcohol, fancy dress, and billiards—and the repentant gentleman, tears streaming down his manly cheeks, hastened to kneel in the aisle to receive his mother’s blessing; and promised, from that day forward, to live his life more honorably. (Which, I am unhappy to say, “Mark Twain” failed to do!—for we know how the life of luxury drew him, and the spiritual sloth of sybaritism, and the even greater sloth of rank pessimism. Nor did he acknowledge Deirdre of the Shadows with anything approaching respect: it was, in fact, to Malvinia Morloch herself that the cynical man of letters would dismiss Spiritualism as “mental dyspepsia”—“spooks being a higher form of flatulence.”)
This interim passed, however, with increasing excitement, the proofs of the medium’s authenticity being such that, by common consensus among the membership, she would surely have gained a resounding majority vote in her favor: much of the credit to be attributed to the courtesy and efficiency of young Dr. Stoughton, who tempered his questions of the contact spirit Father Darien with a constant regard for the physical condition of the medium—who, it must be said, gave so ethereal an appearance, with her staring sightless eyes and waxen skin, as to seem hardly more than a spirit herself. Perhaps because the séance was progressing with so little difficulty, and the audience so clearly disposed in Deirdre’s favor, those gentlemen of the committee w
ho harbored a secret loathing for all things supernatural—Dr. Eglinton and Professor Crosby primarily—interrupted, insisting to Dr. Stoughton that control was too slipshod: it was often the case that an investigating committee monitor more closely the medium’s physical condition, by checking blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and so forth, and by determining whether the “spirits’ voices” were in fact ventriloquist tricks.
“I cannot, for my part, pass any judgment approaching the favorable,” Dr. Eglinton said, “if I am forbidden to examine the candidate more closely. This sort of thing, after all—highly entertaining as it is!—has hardly the rigorous control of the scientific laboratory, where truth is investigated without sentiment.”
“And I concur,” Professor Crosby said at once, half rising in his chair, to stare at the insensible medium. “It is all most unscientific. It is all most slipshod and sentimental.”
Dr. Stoughton quietly objected: the hour was late, Deirdre of the Shadows was clearly exhausted, and perhaps in danger of collapse; and even the audience, for all their rapt attention, doubtless suffered fatigue. Tho’ the youthful physician spoke with necessary deference to his elders, he did not draw back from suggesting that, a good deal having transpired that evening, which should deserve the contemplation of all witnesses, it might be best now to adjourn. “For I hardly believe that Dr. Dodd would countenance much further strain on the young lady’s powers,” he said.
“Nonsense,” Dr. Eglinton said. “The medium is always proud of her ‘trances’—she does not want to be awakened, and the carnival stopped.”
“I shall examine her,” Professor Crosby said, rising from his chair. “I have here—as you see—one or two pertinent instruments.”
“I shall examine her,” Dr. Eglinton said. “Dr. Dodd clearly indicated that I, as an internist and gynecologist of some modest reputation, should examine the young woman, under the auspices of the Society.”