The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [131]
“UPON MY WORD, dear Flournoy, you have done a bigger thing here than you know; and I think that your volume has probably made the decisive step in converting psychical research into a respectable science,” James wrote shortly before leaving for the south of France. He hoped that more such case studies could be done and that Hodgson’s work with Mrs. Piper could be expanded to include some of the analysis that made Flournoy’s account so insightful. “Your book has only one defect, and that is that you don’t dedicate it to me,” James joked, adding somewhat gloomily that in his current state of health he would “very likely die with my great Philosophy of Religion buried inside me and never seeing the light, it would have been pleasant to have my name preserved for ever in the early pages of your immortal work.”
But at Richet’s chateau, washed in light, soothed by the salt-tinged breeze, James felt his spirits lifting, and with them his health. He began spending less time in bed, more time on the chateau’s terraces, wrapped in blankets, tucked into an oversized rocker, letting the day glimmer around him. At Richet’s chateau, James ate fish, artichokes, and the stewed lettuce that was considered a health enhancer. On the veranda, he soaked up the sunshine and admired the surrounding fields of hyacinths and violets (grown for export), and his health improved, “tho with extreme slowness.”
“I have got to this splendid sunshine and out of door life and everything has taken an upward turn,” he wrote to Hodgson. James looked forward to sharing Richet’s “noble country house” with Myers and his newly discovered medium. And he was eager, already, to feel well enough that he could go home and pick up his discussions with Hodgson about Leonora Piper. “I believe the good days are to come again.”
Myers proved enjoyable company, although James found the pretty Evie “rather a spoilt child.” He liked Mrs. Thompson, though; she had a quiet dignity that reminded him a little of his favorite Boston medium. In the evenings, he and Myers would disappear with Mrs. Thompson into a small study and test her trance effects.
“The most unfortunate circumstance is that with Mrs. Thompson as with Mrs. Piper, the most striking evidence of her powers is too private for publication,” James wrote to a friend. The rest of it was the usual tumbled mix of aphorisms and trivia. She had provided a flood of information about a recently deceased friend, but his “spirit” seemed to dwell inordinately on his walking stick and fur collar and his failing mind before death. James again had to wonder why a returning spirit would be so obsessed with such minutiae as collars and canes.
“We are having the D—l’s own time with Mrs. Thompson, Myers’ medium here, who is the greatest puzzle out,” James wrote to his son, Harry. She induced in him the familiar sense of bafflement, the usual mixture of hope and of doubt. His wife thought he wasn’t well enough for the experiments anyway, that spending hours with a medium—and the usual assortment of complications that entailed—was far too stressful for him.
It was almost a relief when the group broke up in March. The Myerses left for Paris. Mrs. Thompson happily returned to her London home. The Jameses, too, were preparing to move on, first to visit Theodore Flournoy in Geneva and then to the German spa for William to be “examined and sentenced” by the doctors. “Your mother is extremely rosy and well,” he wrote to his daughter. “She has no complications now that the Myerses and the medium are gone.”
FOR JAMES HYSLOP, the hard work was just