The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [110]
HODGSON ARRIVED AT Myers’s house with all the appearance of a born mark. Not a trace of the brusque and suspicious investigator was in evidence. Suddenly, he was a little clumsy, a little dumb, and uncharacteristically gullible.
Eyes wide, he shambled into the seances. He sat next to Eusapia, holding her hand, but not too tightly. He allowed himself to be distracted, jumping at shadows, watching others in the room.
It was open invitation to cheat—and she took it.
Within a single seance, he’d seen her wiggle a hand away, spread the other hand so that two hand-holders were each gripping an edge of that single hand, manipulate objects with her freed fingers. With her feet barely held, she used them as well, kicking the table, moving chairs. When her hands were securely held, Hodgson watched her drop her head onto a sitter’s shoulder, listened to the man’s startled exclamation that a hand had touched him in the dark.
As Hodgson had said before, and now said again, she was an obvious cheat. She was so easy to catch that she wasn’t worth any more of his time. He was going back to Boston, and he was done with the British SPR’s efforts to make something out of nothing. He didn’t want to hear anything more about bulging curtains, inexplicable winds, eerie white hands—or Eusapia Palladino.
As THE YEAR 1895 moved forward, civilized behavior—as James noted ruefully—seemed to be rapidly going in the opposition direction.
Italy was fighting in Abyssinia; the Chinese and Japanese were battling over the island of Formosa (later called Taiwan); in Cuba, citizens had risen in an attempt to shake off Spanish rule. The United States was quarreling with Britain over colonies in South America. The question of the precise border between Venezuela and British Guiana had become so heated that President Grover Cleveland threatened war against the United Kingdom.
“Well, our countries will soon be soaked in each other’s blood,” wrote James to Myers. “You will be disemboweling me, and Hodgson cleaving Lodge’s skull.” Joking aside, James loathed Cleveland, whom he considered a posturing hothead, a leader too impatient with diplomacy, too eager to spill someone else’s blood. “All true patriots here have had a hell of a time,” James complained, feeling that support of Cleveland’s warmongering didn’t really speak well of his countrymen either. “It has been a most instructive thing for a dispassionate student of history to see how near the surface in all of us the fighting instinct lies.”
The joke about Hodgson braining Lodge was also, unfortunately, rather too close to reality. The Cambridge sittings had fractured the usual sense of unity among psychical researchers, diluting their comfort in being a small band of Davids working to overcome an army of scientific Goliaths.
Henry Sidgwick had taken Hodgson’s position and refused to publish the few positive observations from the Eusapia sittings. With Nora’s support, Sidgwick declared that the woman was an obvious fake, and he was weary of giving her free publicity. “It has not been the practice of the SPR to direct attention to the performances of any so-called ‘medium’ who has been proved guilty of systematic fraud,” he wrote. “In accordance, therefore, with our established custom, I propose to ignore her performances for the future, as I ignore those of other persons engaged in the same mischievous trade.”
Myers and Lodge remained angry with Hodgson, who they thought had destroyed any chance of decent experimental work. They hadn’t in the least appreciated his gullible act. Hodgson had deliberately baited a trap, knowing that Eusapia always cheated if given the opportunity, Lodge said.
As far as Richet and Ochorowicz were concerned, the Cambridge sittings