The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [31]
Since then the baron, working from a laboratory at Cambridge, had been running calculations on the concentration of atmospheric gases, trying to bring some order to all that shifting color and energy swirling around the planet. He’d recruited the talented Nora to help him. On a family vacation to Egypt, while the others went shopping and touring, Nora and her brother-in-law spent every morning happily doing math together, with the shades drawn against the glowing Egyptian sunlight.
Like Rayleigh, Henry Sidgwick admired smart women. But Nora was so outwardly self-contained that Sidgwick had no idea of her affections. From her countenance, she might be politely indifferent, mildly friendly, or—he could only dream—simmering with hidden passion.
“It is not as if the human heart was only capable of the one or the other definite emotion,” he complained. One could make analogy to colors—call affection blue, he said, and call love red. If there were only such distinct colors to emotions—“blue or red: then it would be comparatively easy to distinguish what was proffered. But, on the contrary, there are all sorts of purples which run into one another....”
Fortunately, his spirit studies gave him a reason for frequent visits. The Balfours, as a family, approached the investigations much as Sidgwick did—with a belief in the importance of the work and an acknowledgment that it had barely begun. Rayleigh himself best summarized the consensus: he found the few good experiments, notably William Crookes’s work with D. D. Home, compelling enough that he was “prepared to be converted.” But, Rayleigh added, he had not yet seen the evidence that would effect such a conversion. He needed more.
As the summer of 1875 deepened into autumn, over discussions of ghosts and morals, work and life, Sidgwick discovered that he could detect the color of Nora Balfour’s feelings and that they were, after all, a strong and joyful red. In a private letter, she assured him of her love. In December, she accepted his proposal of marriage. “Everything is always better than it is expected to be,” Sidgwick wrote to Myers. As in a romantic ballad, the croakiest bird sounded of golden song; the few remaining, weedy flowers spilled perfume into the air, ever since “my happiness began.”
Rayleigh had sent him a note of congratulations: “You lucky dog!” it read.
The course of spiritual research, though, was running a little less happily. For all the insistence of Wallace and Crookes that only scientists could do the work dispassionately, neither man seemed unusually objective to the Sidgwick group. They seemed, rather, to be as human as anyone else.
Wallace had once told Darwin that he never could resist “an uphill fight in an unpopular cause.” He now appeared determined to push the limits of unpopularity, defending practices that even the poetry-loving philosopher Sidgwick thought dubious at best. Among these practices was the new fad of “apports,” objects that mediums claimed to be able to materialize with the help of friendly spirits. An apport might consist of an apple, a pile of pink shrimp, a fluttering dove, or, in Wallace’s case, a veritable shower of fresh flowers.
In one sitting, held in midwinter in Wallace’s home, a wild bouquet suddenly appeared on a bare table: anemones, tulips, chrysanthemums, Chinese primroses, and ferns. “All were absolutely fresh as if just gathered from a conservatory. They were covered with a fine cold dew. Not a petal was crumpled or broken, not the most delicate point or pinnule of the ferns was out of place.” And their scent was so strong in the warm, gaslit room, Wallace added, that it would have been impossible to have concealed them there in advance. He did not attempt to explain why spirits would want to strew a room with blossoms, except perhaps as a demonstration of their powers. But he challenged his fellow researchers to prove such events fraudulent.