This was curious enough, though not very convincing. It seemed as though the influence of this person who had given me the hair was stronger than that of the hair itself. With the second lock of hair we failed utterly. She said that also came from a sick person, but a person not sick with the same disease as the other. She was quite positive they came from different people, and asked me to feel the difference of texture. I am sorry, for Sibyl's sake, to say they both came from the same person, and were cut at the same time, though from different parts of the head, which made one look silkier than the other.
As a test of Sibyl's clairvoyance, this was not very satisfactory. She read the inscription on a card when her eyes were bandaged, pressing it to her forehead; but then olden experiences in the way of blindman's buff convince me that it is very difficult to say when a person is properly blinded.
Altogether, then, I never quite got over my previous disappointment at Sibyl's bulk. Had she been pretty and frizzle-headed like Miss Annie Eva Fay, or like Miss Showers or Miss Florence Cook, I might have been disposed to make more of her coincidences and to wink at her failures. We are so liable to be led away by our feelings in these matters. Sibyl was large, had eaten onions, and would have been improved if she had brushed her hair, and so I am afraid I rather grudged the somewhat exorbitant fee which the fat-handed man—not Sibyl—took and pocketed in an interval of his dental pursuit, and I passed out from that suburban lodging, none of us, I fancy, very well satisfied with one another. I have an idea I unconsciously expressed my inner feelings of disappointment with Sibyl and something stronger in reference to her male companion.
CHAPTER XLV.
SPIRITUALISTS AND CONJURERS.
"How it's done" is the question which, in the words of Dr. Lynn, we want to settle with reference to his own or kindred performances, and, still more, in the production of the phenomena known as spiritual. I have spent some years of my existence in a hitherto vain endeavour to solve the latter problem; and the farther I go, the more the mystery seems to deepen. Of late, the two opposed parties, the Spiritualists and the Conjurers, have definitely entered the arena, and declared war to the knife. Each claims to be Moses, and denounces the others as mere magicians. Mr. Maskelyne holds a dark séance, professing to expose the spiritualistic ones; Dr. Lynn brandishes against them his strong right arm upon which is written in letters all of blood the name of one's deceased grandmother, while, in return, Dr. Sexton exposes the conjurers, and spoils one's enjoyment of a hitherto enjoyable evening, by showing "how it's done"—how the name of one's departed relative is forged and painted early in the afternoon, instead of "coming out" on the spot—and in spots—like measles or nettle-rash (as we feel defunct relations ought to come) or walking in and out of the corded box at pleasure, and even going so far as to give the address of the clever mechanist down a by-street near Notting-hill Gate, who will make the mysterious packing case to order in return for a somewhat heavy "consideration."
I accepted Dr. Lynn's invitation to be present on his "opening night;" and wondered, in passing, why everybody should not make their cards of invitation such thorough works of art as his. Now I am going to do even-handed justice all the way round; and I must say that Dr. Lynn's experiment of fastening his attendant to a sort of penitential stool with copper wire, surrounded by scrutineers from the audience, and then making the man's coat come off, and a ring pass over his arm, behind a simple rug held in front of him, is quite as wonderful as anything I have ever witnessed at a séance. It has the great advantage of being done in the light, instead of, as in Mr. Fay's case, in darkness, and without a cabinet. In fact, I have no idea how it's done; though I have no doubt the first time I see Dr. Sexton he will point to something unsatisfactory in the bolts to which that doorkeeper is fastened, and give me the addresses of the ironmonger who will sell me some like them, or the tailor who will manufacture me a swallow tail coat with an imperceptible slit down the back. Then again, I have, as I said, seen young Mr. Sexton go in and out of the corded box, and I know how that's done; but Dr. Lynn's man goes into three, one inside the other. Well, I can understand that if Dr. Sexton's theory be correct, it may perhaps be as easy to get into a "nest" of three as into one box; but how, in the name of nature—or art—does the nautical gentleman get out of the double sack in which he is tied? I cannot bring myself to print what Dr. Sexton's theory of the box is, because it appears to be such a wanton cruelty to "expose" things when people go to the Egyptian Hall on purpose to be mystified. I remember how the fact of having seen Dr. Sexton do the trick of reading the names in the hat spoilt my enjoyment of Dr. Lynn's experiment. He really appeared quite bungling when I knew all he was about. He did not, on this occasion, produce the letters on his arm; but I saw he could quite easily have done so, though the doing it would have been no sort of reproduction of Mr. Forster's manifestation, who showed you the name of some relative when you had looked in on him quite unexpectedly. I can quite understand how it is that the spiritualists, who hold these matters to be sacred as revelation itself—in fact, to be revelation itself, are shocked at seeing their convictions denounced as trickery and "exposed" on a public platform; but I confess I do not quite see how they can adopt the tu quoque principle, and "expose" Dr. Lynn and Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke as tricksters, because they do not pretend to be anything else. It would have been fatal if the magicians had "found out" Moses, and they wisely refrained from trying; but it would have served no purpose for Moses to "find out" the magicians: and it strikes me Moses would have deemed it very infra dig. to make the attempt. The two things stand on quite different grounds; and I cannot help thinking that the spiritualists unwisely concede a point when they accept the challenge of the conjurers. I am quite aware that the theory of the spiritualists makes of many a conjurer a medium malgré lui, and says he ought to come out in his true colours. It was so Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke were originally introduced to a London public at the Crystal Palace under the auspices of an eminent spiritualist; but it really appears to me that such an assertion amounts to begging the question; for I doubt whether it would not "pay" quite as well to come out boldly in Mr. Williams's or Mr. Morse's line as in that of Dr. Lynn or Mr. Maskelyne.
In a lengthened confab which I once had with Mr. Maskelyne himself after one of his performances, he told me that by constant attendance at the séances of the Davenports he found out how that was all done; and, being a working watchmaker, was able soon to get the necessary apparatus constructed. I must again be just, and state that while the cabinet séance of Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke seems to me the exact counterpart of the Davenports', their dark séance fails to reproduce that of the spiritualists as the performances of Professor Pepper himself. True, this latter gentleman does all his exposés on a platform which is sacred against all intrusion, and Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke assume to allow as much examination as the spiritualists. But I myself, who have seen Mr. Home float around Mr. S. C. Hall's drawing-room, and handled him above and below in transitu, quite fail to discern any reproduction of that phenomenon in the heavy, lumbering levitation of the lady by means of the scissors-like apparatus behind her, which we are only privileged to behold from the stalls. The dancing walking-stick is as palpably made terpsichorean by a string as the chairs I have seen cross Mr. Hall's drawing-room in full light were not drawn by strings, for I was able to look closely at them; and I do not know how that was done.