Mr. Judge must see that between the mere human fallibility to which he confesses, and the felony of which no one has accused him, it does not need a sensitive ear to distinguish whole octaves of intervening notes. Thanks to Mrs. Besant, he has not yet been obliged to locate himself at any one point of the gamut. But, for all I know, he may now come forward and twit his associates with deficient humour for not seeing that the whole thing was just a rollicking hoax. Throwing off the rôle of an interpreter of Tibet, he may appear as William Q. Judge, the American Humorist. He might fairly claim that many have performed under a like title much less divertingly. He might say that the joke was so obvious that it never struck him his colleagues would take it seriously; that their evident determination not to spoil sport was an invitation no joker could have resisted; and that he only kept it up so long for the fun of seeing, through a graduated scale of absurdity, how much they really would stand. Of course, to carry through a big practical joke one may be excused a few taradiddles, to which the moralist might apply a harsher name. No doubt some might question the taste of making a friend’s funeral the starting-point of even the most innocent mauvaise plaisanterie. But American humour has never spared the cemetery.
From my own position, then, and Mr. Judge’s position, I now pass to Mrs. Besant’s. This is interesting from its bearing on the curious psychological puzzle offered by Mrs. Besant’s own mind, to the study of which she herself continually invites the public. Let us accept the invitation for a moment.
I take Mrs. Besant’s statement at the so-called “Enquiry,” that she believed now that Judge wrote with his own hand the missives which he had induced her, and she had induced the public, to regard as precipitations from Tibet of the kind which “some people would call miraculous.”
Apparently Mrs. Besant considers that this avowal sufficed to clear her honour towards her colleagues and the public whom she had “misled.” To me it appears admirably calculated to mislead them again. Remember, even those whom Mrs. Besant was addressing—much more the outside public—were ignorant of the facts. Mrs. Besant had taken good care of that.
They did not know, as the reader does, the circumstances which surrounded these various missives: The “Master Agrees” missive, the Telegram missive, the Cabinet missive, the “Note the Seal,” the “Judge’s Plan is Right,” the “Judge is the Friend,” the Envelope Trick, the “Withold,” the “Master will Provide,” the Bank-note, the Inner Group, the “Grave Danger Olcott,” the “Judge is not the Forger,” the “Follow Judge and Stick,” and the Poison Threat missive—as I have severally named them.
Referring to those circumstances, as the reader now knows them, I ask of what did and does Mrs. Besant mean to convict Mr. Judge?
If Judge “wrote with his own hand” the answers got from the cabinet oracle (May 23, 1891), did he also use sleight-of-hand or some similar artifice to make her accept the answers as precipitated in a sealed envelope in a closed drawer?
If Judge “wrote,” &c., the slip “Judge’s plan is right,” the sudden appearance of which among Mrs. Besant’s papers made her and him joint officials on May 27, 1891—did he also place it among those papers on purpose to be so discovered?
If Judge “wrote” &c., Mrs. Besant’s message of July 12, 1891, which was across the inside flaps of a closed envelope—did he also insert the writing by the trick described in the chapter which I entitled “Every Man his Own Mahatma”?