Cameron's Amateur Psychic Club, which had so nearly disintegrated by
reason of the long series of barren sittings, was drawn together again
by the news of my startling success at Fowler's house. Cameron at once
decided that the members should hear my report, and I was notified to be
ready to relate my experiences in full. We met, as before, at Cameron's
table, and even before the soup-plates were removed the interrogation
began, and by the time the company was in full possession of the facts
the coffee and cigars had appeared.
"Why didn't these wonders take place in our presence?" asked Mrs. Quigg,
who had returned to something like her original truculence of doubt.
"Why should you and Brierly be so favored?"
"In this business everything comes to him who waits," I replied, a tinge
of malice in my voice. "You obtained a few results, Miller a few more;
but Fowler and I, for our pains, reaped the rich reward. By remaining
long on the watch-tower we saw the armies pass. Harmony and patience
are essentials in the production of these marvels. With people yawning
or shuffling about uneasily, results are necessarily unimportant."
Miller continued firm in his agnosticism. "Although puzzling, I cannot
grant so much as even one of the phenomena. Belief in the smallest of
those manifestations at my house would be uprooting to all established
theories of matter--not to mention time and space."
"Were not the notions of Galileo and Darwin also subverting?" asked
Fowler. "Is there anything sacred in error? If we are wrong in our
theories about the universe, let's correct them. You do not stand out
against wireless telegraphy or the Roentgen ray?"
Miller fired at this. "I'm not going to take instruction from a tipping
table or a flying hair-brush!" he fiercely retorted.
"I'll take illumination from any source whatsoever," responded Fowler.
Here I interposed: "The only question that concerns me at this stage is:
Does the table tip and the brush really fly? No physical fact is
trivial, for it stands related to mountains and the clouds."
Fowler's eyes gleamed with contempt. "That's the way of you so-called
scientists: you narrow the mighty fund of occult phenomena down to a
floating feather. As a matter of fact, there is a sea of evidence
accumulated by the investigations of men quite as scientific as Miller,
testimony that is neither petty nor ignoble. It is because you and your
associates are so trifling in methods that the tables and the chair play
leading parts in your drama."
"Good for you!" cheered Brierly. "You're quite right. When these
materialistic investigators get done with trying to prove that
independent slate-writing exists, they'll begin to give some attention
to the fundamental truths of the messages which the slates set forth.
Going after small things, they get small things. If Miller and his like
went forth seeking the essentials of the faith, they would find them
instead of being amazed with foolish tricks of hand."
"Essentials such as what?" interrupted Harris, with snappy suddenness.
"Such as--as--direct spirit communication, a knowledge of the astral,
the reincarnation of souls, and--and--faith in the upward progression of
the self," stammered Brierly, much disturbed.
Here again I interposed a quieting word: "I confess that it begins to
look as though the theosophist's theory of the astral (at which some of
us have smiled) were in a fair way to be scientifically demonstrated.
Since our last meeting I have been studying the bound volumes of _The
Annals of Psychic Science_, and I have found them full of comfort. They
sustain Mrs. Smiley at every point. To my mind, the most important event
in the history of spiritism is the entrance of Eusapia Paladino into the
clinical laboratory of Cesare Lombroso. Nothing since Crookes's
experiments has had such value for the scientist."
"We have heard of Lombroso, but who is Paladino?" asked Mrs. Quigg. "Is
she a psychic?"
"She is the most renowned now living. Though only an illiterate peasant
woman, she has been able for more than twenty years to baffle every
scientist who has studied her. Her organism remains the most potent
mystery on this earth."
"Tell us about her! Who is she? Where does she live?"
"She was born at Minerva-murge, a mountain village near Bari, in Italy.
According to Lombroso's daughter, who has written a sketch of her, she
is about fifty-three years of age. Her parents were peasants. She is
quite uneducated, but is intelligent and rather good-looking. Her hands
are pretty and her feet small--facts which are of value when studying
her manifestations, as you will see later on. Her mother died while
Eusapia was a babe, and her father 'passed over' when she was twelve,
leaving her at large in the world 'like a wild animal,' as she herself
says. A native family of her village took her to Naples, and her own
story is that she was adopted soon after by some foreigners 'who wished
to make me an educated and learned girl. They wanted me to take a bath
every day and comb my hair every day,' she explains, with some humor.
"She didn't like the life nor the people, and she soon ran away back to
her friends, the Apulians, and it was while she was in their house and
at the precise moment when they were planning to put her in a convent
that her occult powers were discovered. Some friends came in to spend
the evening, and, in default of anything better to do, formed a circle
to make a table tip. No sooner were they all seated, as she herself
relates, than 'the table began to rise, the chairs to dance, the
curtains to swell, and the glasses and bottles to walk about, till
everybody was scared.' After testing every other person present, the
host came to the conclusion that the medium was his little ward,
Eusapia. This put an end to her going into a convent. She was proclaimed
a medium, much to her disgust, and made to sit whole evenings at the
table. 'I only did it,' she says, 'because it was a way of recompensing
my hosts, whose desire to keep me with them prevented their placing me
in a convent. Finally I took up laundress work, thinking I might render
myself independent and live as I liked without troubling about
spiritualistic seances.'"
"It is remarkable how many of these women psychics begin their career
when they are ten or twelve years old," said Miller. "Mrs. Smiley was
about that age, wasn't she?"
"Yes, and so was Mrs. Hartley, another psychic of my acquaintance. Mrs.
Smiley complained of the tedium of sitting. She tells me that her
father kept her at it steadily, just as Eusapia was not permitted to
escape her fate. One day an Englishwoman, wife of a certain Mr. Damiani,
came to a seance, and was so impressed by what took place that she
interested her husband in Eusapia's performances. Damiani then took up
the young medium's development along the good old well-worn lines of
American spiritualism, and she acquired all the tricks and all the
'patter.' Among other notions, she picked up the idea of an English
'control' known as 'John King,' who declared himself a brother of 'Kate
King,' of Crookes fame, and from that day Eusapia has been a
professional 'mejum.'"
"What does she do?" asked Cameron. "What is her 'phase,' as you call
it?"
"It must be confessed that most of her phases are of the poltergeist
variety, but they are astounding. She produces the movement of
mandolins, chairs, sofas, and small tables without contact (at least,
such is the consensus of opinion of nearly a score of the best-known
scientists of France and Italy), and also materializes hands and arms.
There is vastly more than the poltergeist in her, that is evident; for
she has conquered every critic with her miracles. Take, for instance,
Lombroso's conversion, a fairly typical case. He was not only sceptical
of spirit phenomena, but up to 1888 was openly contemptuous of those
who believed in them. However, in an article called 'The Influence of
Civilization upon Genius,' published in 1888, he made this admission:
'_Twenty or thirty years are enough to make the whole world admire a
discovery which was treated as madness at the moment when it was
made.... Who knows whether my friends and I who laugh at spiritualism
are not in error, just like hypnotized persons, or like lunatics; being
in the dark as regards the truth, we laugh at those who are not in the
same condition._'"
"True enough," said Fowler. "The man who has made no study of these
phenomena is like one color-blind: he has never seen a landscape."
"It was this candid statement by Lombroso that moved Professor Chiaia, a
friend of Eusapia's, to write the great alienist a letter which was in
effect a challenge. After recounting a score or two of the wonderful
doings of Paladino, whom he had studied carefully, he ended in this
amusing fashion: 'Now you see my challenge. If you have not written the
paragraph cited above simply for the fun of writing it, if you have the
true love for science, if you are without prejudices--you, the first
alienist of Italy--please take the field. When you can afford a week's
vacation, indicate a place where we can meet. Four gentlemen will be our
seconds: you will choose two, and I will bring the other two.... If the
experiment does not succeed, you will consider me but as a man suffering
from hallucination, who longs to be cured of his extravagances.... If
success crowns our efforts, your loyalty ... will attest the reality of
these mysterious phenomena and promise to investigate their causes.'"
"I hope Lombroso was man enough to accept the challenge," said Cameron.
"Nothing could be fairer than the spook-man's offer."
"He did not at once take up the gage. It was not, in fact, till
February, 1891, that he was able to go to Naples to meet Eusapia, who
had begun to interest some of his trusted scientific friends. He found
the great psychic quite normal in appearance and rather attractive in
manner. She was of medium size, with a broad and rather serious face lit
with brilliant dark eyes. The most notable thing about her physical self
was a depression in her skull caused by a fall in her infancy. This scar
figures largely in nearly all the reports of her."
"Why?" asked Harris.
"Because they all agree that a singular sort of current of force, like a
cool breeze, seems to come and go through this spot."