The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [102]
The professor had brought a single circle of gold, one that once belonged to his dead mother. The ring had been one of two, a set that he and his mother had exchanged one Christmas.
Each ring had been engraved with the first word of the recipient’s favorite proverb. Long ago, he’d lost the one she’d given him. But the previous year, when his mother died, the ring he’d given to her had been returned to him.
The professor was holding that ring in his hand during the sitting, hiding the word as he inquired, “What was written in Mamma’s ring?”
“I had hardly got the words from my mouth till she slapped down the word on the other ring—the one Mamma had given me, and which had been lost years ago.
“As the word was a peculiar one, doubtfully ever written in any ring before, and as she wrote it in such a flash—it was surely curious.”
As an educated man, a scientist, no believer in the silly afterlife ideas of the spiritualists, the professor would admit only to being curious, as he explained carefully to James.
FRED MYERS AND OLIVER LODGE were coming to America. They were to present the latest SPR research at the Congress of Psychical Research. Both were looking forward to visiting Chicago in August 1893, especially because the city was hosting the newly opened World’s Columbian Exposition. Myers’s only disappointment was that, despite his pleas, James refused to cut short his sabbatical to join them, even with the added lure of the new World’s Fair.
“Your letter rec’d, bristling as usual with ‘points’ and applications,” James wrote back to Myers, from Italy where the James family had happily settled for the summer. He was unmoved by Myers’s persuasions. He had no new evidence to present. Further, as he warned Myers, in the case of their controversial line of work, James worried about making too vigorous a push too soon. “What we want is facts, not popular papers, it seems to me, and until the facts thicken, papers may do more harm than good.”
As a compromise, though, James had asked Hodgson to give a brief report on his Piper results at the convention. There were so few good mediums—at least, he and his fellow investigators tended to eliminate most as fraudulent—that Mrs. Piper now stood out like the only flower left in a denuded garden. That was one of the issues Hodgson wanted to raise—the need to find mediums before they sold out to the demands of the profession.
As it turned out, Myers and Lodge were so fascinated by the World’s Columbian Exposition that Hodgson—after making his speech—ound himself dragged across the white-marbled landscape of the fair, from the huge, glass-walled Fisheries Building to the tiny Chinese pavilion, with its heavy furniture carved with the shapes of lazy, coiling dragons, to the glittering technology exhibits. Hodgson felt that he’d seen “nearly all of the World’s Fair that I care to,” as he wrote to Mrs. Piper.
He missed her, he said. He also missed being in the thick of work. He’d been hearing from his associates that the G.P sittings were still going astonishingly well. They were much more interesting to him than the marvels of the exposition. He couldn’t wait to get back.
THE JAMES FAMILY returned to Boston in early September 1893, newly invigorated by their lingering summer in Italy. The very air of Cambridge, the brick and stone of Harvard, seemed “surcharged with vitality,” James declared enthusiastically.
It didn’t take long for that sense of euphoria to wash away. Despite the sizzling pace of technological advances—kinetoscope movies were playing in New York, Henry Ford had just built his first car—America was stumbling through an economic recession. Five hundred banks and thousands of businesses had failed over the summer. James was forced to sell stock to meet living expenses. He and Alice talked of selling their big house on Irving Street in Cambridge.
In Italy, he’d started dreaming of early retirement. He