The point of interest to us is to find how the medium concealed her trappings. No medium was ever more rigorously controlled, yet the fraud is obvious. The answer shows that you can almost never be sure of your medium. She was stripped naked before every sitting and sewn into black tights. Her mouth and hair were always examined. Occasionally her sex-cavity was examined. South African detectives have told me how this receptacle is used for smuggling diamonds, and, as Marthe was rarely examined there by a competent and reliable witness, she probably often used it. Dr. Schrenck admits that the outlet of her intestinal tube was scarcely ever examined until very late in the inquiry, and an independent doctor gave positive reason to suspect that she used this. There is only one photograph in the book that shows a ghost which, tightly wrapped up (and nearly all show plain marks of folding, as Baron Schrenck admits), might be too large for such concealment; and the careful reader will find that on these occasions there was no control at all! They were impromptu sittings, suddenly decided upon by Marthe herself.
There is strong reason to believe that usually she swallowed her material and brought it up at will from her gullet or stomach. More than a hundred cases of this power are known, and there is much positive evidence that Marthe was a "ruminant." She sometimes bled copiously from the mouth and gullet, and she used the mouth much to manipulate the gauzy stuff. When I mentioned this well-known theory of Marthe Beraud Sir Arthur laughed. He said that he doubted if I had read the book I professed to have read, because Marthe had a net sewn round her head, which "disproved" my theory. He summoned me to retract. He said I had "slipped up pretty badly."
Well, the theory was not mine, but that of a doctor who had studied Marthe, and who has little difficulty in dealing with the net. Had it not been the end of the debate, however, our audience would have heard a surprising reply. They would have learned that the net was used only in seven sittings out of hundreds, and that the medium then compelled them to abandon it. They would have learned that the net, instead of "not making the slightest difference to the experiments," as Sir A. C. Doyle says, made four out of these seven sittings completely barren of results! And they would have further learned that when the net was on, and Marthe could not use her mouth, she stipulated that the back of her clothing should be left open.
Just one further detail of this sordid imposture. I said that on one occasion Marthe allowed the very title of the paper out of which she cut her portraits, Le Miroir, to appear in the photograph, and gave it a spiritual meaning. Now, that is Mme. Bisson's version. But Baron Schrenck's version is in flagrant contradiction, and an examination of the photographs proves that he is right. The words were caught, accidentally, by a camera placed in the cabinet, and the excuse was concocted the next day!
Enough of these miserable "materializations." They are always dishonest. Every materializing medium has been found out. Almost since the birth of the movement there have been, and are to-day, hundreds of these men and women, paid and unpaid, who have masqueraded as ghosts, or duped their sitters in a dull red light with muslin and butter-cloth and phosphorized paper, with dolls and masks and stuffed gloves and stockings and rubber arms. If Spiritualists would persuade us that they are scrupulously honest, they must drive the last of these people out of their fold, and they must expunge every reference to these materializations from their literature. When we get such phenomena with a medium who has been searched by competent and independent witnesses, whose body-openings have been sealed and clothing changed, in a cabinet set up by independent inquirers, with each hand and foot controlled by a separate man, or in a good light, we may begin to talk. Never yet has the faintest suggestion of a phenomenon been secured under such circumstances.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] I take this from the German psychic journal, Psychische Studien Nov., 1909.