The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [79]
Alone in his study he admitted to “painful doubts.” If his friend had been unhappy, wouldn’t he have taken note? Wouldn’t Nora have? “We saw him last on Tuesday 19th; he seemed to us well and in good spirits.”
“THEY SAY THERE is little doubt that Mr. Edmund Gurney committed suicide,” William James’s sister, Alice, then living in London, noted in her own diary.
Friends were now talking about Gurney’s mercurial nature, his tendency to drive himself to exhaustion, his unpredictable highs and lows. There were stories that he’d been driven to despair by psychical research, his morale destroyed by all the criticisms of his work. That he’d been demoralized by the amount of fraud they had encountered, such as the discovery of cheating by the Creery sisters; that he’d been depressed by the response to Phantasms of the Living. The editor of the British philosophy journal Mind told William James that he had worried that Gurney was taking his cause far too seriously, expressing concern about the “fury of this hunt after ghosts and the like, which is positively wasting him, the very body of him, I mean!”
There were slyer whispers, too, about his marriage. Kate Gurney had spent many hours without her husband’s company while the ghost hunt possessed him. All her friends knew that she’d felt abandoned by Gurney; now his friends began to wonder if he’d felt abandoned by his wife. As president of the SPR, Sidgwick sent Kate a formal sympathy letter in which his sorrow yet leaked through—“nothing that can be said in public will really express our sense of loss.” He promised her that they would continue with Gurney’s work, not only because it was important; they “owed it to the memory of our friend and colleague that the results of our previous labor should not fail for faint-heartedness.”
She answered their condolences politely; her warmest reply went to William James, who she thought the most “akin” of Gurney’s friends: “I have a strong certainty that he is happier & still achieving.... I feel that if I had never heard of the Immortality of the Soul—I should think he was going on.” But when the Society for Psychical Research established a memorial in his honor, the Edmund Gurney Library, she declined to contribute. And as soon as the socially required year’s mourning ended, she remarried. The following year, Henry James saw Kate Gurney at a smart little hotel in Paris. She was dressed in the latest style, the newer small bustle under her draped skirts, the little polished boots with their fancy buttons, the nicely tilted hat. She was no longer Kate Gurney, though; she’d married a politician and publicist, Archibald Grove.
The couple was stopping in Paris for a few days on their way to a vacation in Tangiers. “How the drama of life rushes on,” Henry wrote to William. “And how out of it all poor chloroformed Edmund Gurney seemed.”
CHARLES RICHET’S HANDS flew like startled birds when he was excited, which was much of the time. Slight and intensely energetic, with a thin face, high cheekbones, and an enormous, wonderfully drooping mustache, the Paris physiologist was infectious in all his enthusiasms: the immune system, a complicated treatment he was trying against tuberculosis, an analysis of the mechanisms of fever—and, more recently, a growing interest in psychical research. He’d collaborated with the SPR on several telepathy experiments, impressing the members with his thorough methods and exuberant friendliness.
With Edmund Gurney gone, approachable scientists such as Richet had become more valuable than ever in the psychical research movement. Their numbers were perilously small to start, and if the movement was to survive, the interest and friendship of such people must be cultivated. Sidgwick moved to strengthen the connection with