Mr. Podmore, who, in spite of his high critical faculty, was taken in by this episode, thinks that telepathy alone can explain the wonderful things done. He does not believe in ghosts. Mrs. Piper's "subconscious self," he thinks, creates and impersonates these spirit beings, and draws the information telepathically from the sitters. But he says that the impersonation was so "dramatically true to life," so "consistently and dramatically sustained," that "some of G. P.'s most intimate friends were convinced that they were actually in communication with the deceased G. P."[12] It is true that when the dead G. P. was asked about a society he had helped to form in his youth he could give neither its aim nor its name, and Podmore admits that Mrs. Piper hedged very badly in trying to cover up her failure. But on other occasions the hits were so good that we have, if we do not admit the ghost theory, to take refuge in telepathy and the subconscious self.
There is no need even for this thin shade of mysticism. Podmore was misled by Hodgson's account. "G. P." meant, as everybody knew, George Pellew. Now a cousin of Pellew's wrote to Mr. Clodd to tell him that, if he cared to ask the family, he would learn that all the relatives of the dead man regarded Mrs. Piper's impersonation of him as "beneath contempt." Mr. Clodd wrote to Professor Pellew, George's brother, and found that this was the case. The family had been pestered for fifteen years with reports of the proceedings and requests to authenticate them and join the S. P. R. They said that they knew George, and they could not believe that, when freed from the burden of the flesh, he would talk such "utter drivel and inanity." As to "intimate friends," one of these was Professor Fiske, who had been described by Dr. Hodgson as "absolutely convinced" of the identity of "G. P." When Professor Pellew told Professor Fiske of this, he replied, roundly, that it was "a lie." Mrs. Piper had, he said, been "silent or entirely wrong" on all his test questions.[13]
I am, you see, not choosing "weak spots," as Sir A. C. Doyle said, and am not quite so ignorant of psychic matters, in comparison with himself, as he represented (Debate, p. 51). I am taking the greatest "clairvoyante" in the history of the movement, and in precisely those respects in which she was endorsed by Dr. Hodgson and the American S. P. R. and Sir O. Lodge and all the leading English Spiritualists. She failed at every crucial test. Phinuit, who knew so much, could not give a plausible account of his own life on earth, or how he came to forget medicine. When Sir O. Lodge presented to Mrs. Piper a sealed envelope containing a number of letters of the alphabet, she could not read one of them, and declined to try again. She could not answer simple tests about Pellew. She gave Professor James messages from Gurney after his death (1888), and James pronounced them "tiresome twaddle." When Myers died in 1901 and left a sealed envelope containing a message, she could not get a word of it. When Hodgson died in 1905 and left a large amount of manuscript in cipher, she could not get the least clue to it. When friends put test questions to the spirit of Hodgson about his early life in Australia, the answers were all wrong.
Mrs. Piper fished habitually and obviously for information from her sitters. She got at names by childishly repeating them with different letters (a very common trick of mediums), and often changed them. She made the ghost of Sir Walter Scott talk the most arrant nonsense about the sun and planets. She was completely baffled when a message was given to her in Latin, though she was supposed to be speaking in the name of the spirit of the learned Myers, and it took her three months to get the meaning (out of a dictionary?) of one or two easy words of it. She gave a man a long account of an uncle whom he had never had; and it turned out that this information was in the Encyclopædia, and related to another man of the same name. In no instance did she ever give details that it was impossible for her to learn in a normal way, and it is for her admirers to prove that she did not learn them in a normal way, and, on the other hand, to give a more plausible explanation of what Dr. Maxwell, their great authority, calls her "inaccuracies and falsehoods."
The truth is that the phenomenon known as "clairvoyance" rests just as plainly on trickery as the physical phenomena we have studied. Margaretta Fox explained decades ago how they used to watch minutely the faces of sitters and find their way by changes of expression. "I see a young man," says the medium dreamily, with half-closed but very watchful eyes. There is no response on the face of the sitter. "I see the form of a young woman—a child," the medium goes on. At the right shot the sitter's face lights up with joy and eagerness, and the fishing goes on. Probably in the end, or after a time, the sitter will tell people how the clairvoyant saw the form of her darling child "at once."
In some cases the medium is prepared in advance. Carrington tells us that he was one day strongly urged to give a man, who thought that he had abnormal powers, a sitting. He decided at least to give him a lesson, and made an appointment. The man came with friends at the appointed hour, and they were astonished and awed when Carrington, as a clairvoyant, told them their names and other details. He had simply sent a man to track his visitor to his hotel and learn all about him and his friends. Other cases are just as easy. When Sir O. Lodge and Sir A. C. Doyle lost their sons, the whole mediumistic world knew it and was ready. But mediums gather information about far less important sitters, because it is precisely these cases that are most impressive. It is quite easy to get information quietly about a certain man's dead relatives, and then find an intermediary who will casually recommend him to see Mrs. ——. I do not suggest that the intermediary knows the plot, though that may often be the case.
In other cases the medium tells very little at the first visit. The "spirit" is dazed in its new surroundings. It takes time to get adjusted and learn how to talk through a medium. And so on. You go again, and the details increase. You have, of course, left your name and address in making a fresh appointment. Some clever people go anonymously. Lady Lodge went thus and heard remarkable things; but Sir O. Lodge admits that her companion greatly helped the medium by forgetting herself and addressing her as "Lady Lodge." You may leave your coat in the hall, and it is searched. When Truesdell consulted Slade in New York, he wickedly left in his overcoat pocket a letter which gave the impression that his name was "Samuel Johnson." The first ghost that turned up was, of course, "Mary Johnson."
Still more ingenious was the "clairvoyance" of the famous American medium Foster, one of the impostors who duped Robert Dale Owen and for years held a high position in the movement. While he was out of the room you wrote on bits of paper the names of your dead relatives or friends, and you then screwed up the bits of paper into pellets. Foster then came in, and sat near you. He dreamily took the pellets in his hand, pressed them against his forehead, and then let them fall again upon the table. Slowly and gradually, as he puffed at his everlasting cigar, the spirits communicated all the names to him.
Such tricks can be fathomed only by an expert, and they ought to warn Spiritualists of the folly of thinking that "fraud was excluded." Truesdell, the great medium hunter, the terror of the American Spiritualist world in the seventies, had a sitting with Foster and paid the usual five dollars. He was puzzled, and consented to come again. On the second occasion Foster could tell him, clairvoyantly, the name of his hotel and other details. He had had Truesdell watched in the usual way. At last the detective got his clue. Foster's cigar was continually going out, and in constantly re-lighting it he sheltered the match in the hollow of his hands. Truesdell concluded that he was then reading the slips of paper, and the rest was easy. In pressing the pellets to his forehead Foster substituted blank pellets for them and kept the written papers in his hand. So the next time Truesdell went, and Foster had touched one of the six pellets and read it, Truesdell snatched up the other five pellets and found them blank. Foster genially acknowledged that it was conjuring, but he continued as a priest of the Spiritualist movement for a long time afterwards.
Another clairvoyant feat is to read the contents of a sealed envelope, provided the contents are not a folded letter. We shall see in the next chapter how the contents of a folded and sealed letter are learned. I speak here of the simple clairvoyant practice of taking a sealed envelope which contains only a strip of written paper, pressing it to the forehead and reading the contents. You need not pay half-a-guinea to a Bond Street clairvoyante for this. Sponge your envelope with alcohol (which will soon evaporate and leave no trace) and you can "see through it."