The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [29]
Despite his affection for his friends, Gurney was wary of their new direction; even at a distance, he could see how consuming it might become. So when Sidgwick first invited him to help investigate the spirit world, Gurney merely wished him luck. “Gurney will give us his warmest sympathies but no more,” Sidgwick wrote to Myers in the spring of 1874.
Even Sidgwick’s companions tended to underestimate his ability to gently and thoroughly erode resistance. Sidgwick politely acknowledged Gurney’s rejection and continued sending information on the subject, which he knew his friend was too well mannered to ignore. Within weeks, Gurney’s desk was stacked with a pile of well-selected, recently published arguments. They included Crookes’s detailed accounting of his D. D. Home experiments and yet another plea from Alfred Russel Wallace for his fellow scientists to investigate “those grand mysterious phenomena of the mind, the investigation of which can alone conduct us to a knowledge of what we really are.”
When Myers next visited him, in the seductive days of a late golden fall, Gurney had changed his mind. Sometimes Myers worried, in retrospect, that he had bullied his gentler friend into joining this improbable crusade. But in that, he was mistaken. Gurney had awakened to the cause.
Two years earlier, Gurney had lost three younger sisters, drowned in a boating accident on the Nile River. The event had stirred a kind of inner rebellion. He was an educated man; he understood and even appreciated the arguments for a purely mechanical universe. Life lived as a cog in a cold, godless, indifferent machine, however, had come to seem to him unbearable.
As he would write to William James some years later, the “mystery of the Universe and the indefensibility of human suffering” were never far from Gurney’s thoughts. He had no idea if scientists were wrong in their precise definitions of life’s finite limits. But reading Wallace’s arguments, poring over Crookes’s deliberate experiments; Gurney realized that he wanted a chance to find out.
The three partners conducted their first serious investigation in early 1875, looking into claims that a pair of young mediums—teenage girls from Newcastle—could outdo D. D. Home in terms of materializations, summoning misty ghost children to appear from their cabinet.
As the investigators discovered, the Newcastle mediums and their regular audience of enthusiastic spiritualists clung to a certain routine. The mediums would retire to their cabinet, a curtained-off corner of a room, and allow their hands and feet to be tied while they reclined on couches. After the girls were settled, sitters would gather outside the cabinet. The mediums demanded a dark seance, with almost no illumination. The investigators sat in a dusky gloom with the gaslights turned down to a pale, blue glow. Myers complained that the gloom was so dense that he could barely see the curtains a few feet away.
And the Newcastle spiritualists insisted on singing. They began each seance with hymns, continuing for hours, whether or not a spirit arose out of the dusky murk of the room. Sidgwick finally begged them to allow him to quote poetry instead. It took two hours of Swinburne, beginning with the poet’s “Atalanta in Calydon”—“Love that endures for a breath,