Part 36

The members present nestled into their chairs with looks of satisfaction, and Mrs. Cameron said: "Don't leave anything out. Tell it all."

"It is hardly necessary to say that every precaution was taken. Photographs of the cabinet were made before the sittings and afterward, in order that all displacements might be recorded. Provision was made for registering the action of 'John King's' spectral hands. Some of these devices were concealed in an adjoining room and watched by other attendants. One little touch early in Bottazzi's account impressed me deeply. A little electric motor was used to furnish power for the lamps and other apparatus, and Bottazzi, in speaking of it, says: 'At the moment when the phenomena to be registered began to manifest, the circuit was closed, and suddenly in the complete silence of the night the feeble murmur of the motor was heard.' I thrill to the action of that faithful little material watch-dog. Ghosts and hobgoblins could not silence or affright it. After all, matter is both persistent and bold."

"But not sovereign," defiantly called out Brierly; "the psychic dominates it."

"We shall see. Bottazzi declares in italics that Paladino neither put her hand into the cabinet nor knew the contents of it. 'Rarely has she been surrounded by such an assembly of unprejudiced minds, by such strict and attentive intellects,' he declares. And when you consider the absence of women, the mystery of the machinery, together with the stern character of the sitters, the medium's courage becomes marvellous. Perfect honesty alone can sustain a medium in such an ordeal. I am ready to agree that a new era began for spiritism when Eusapia entered that room, April 17, 1907."

"Poor Paladino!" sighed Mrs. Cameron. "I tremble for her."

"Bottazzi grimly says: 'We began by restraining her inexhaustible mediumistic activity. We obliged her to do things she had never done before. We limited the field of her manifestations.... I was convinced that it was much easier for her to drag out of the cabinet a heavy table than to press an electric knob or displace the rod of a metronome.' And this theory he set himself to prove. It was beautiful to see the way he went about it."

Howard was also impressed. "I see Eusapia's finish. She won't do a thing. The influences will criss-cross. Bottazzi's cabinet is her Waterloo."

"Observe that Bottazzi was not perverse. He met the psychic half-way by forming the usual chain about the table, placing Eusapia before the curtains of the little cabinet, which was a recess in the wall. Bottazzi himself and his assistants had constructed this cabinet and placed everything in position before Eusapia entered the room at all, and throughout the sitting she was controlled by at least two of the investigators so that she could not so much as put a hand inside the curtains. She was very uneasy, as though finding the conditions hard. Nevertheless, even at this first sitting, everything movable in the cabinet was thrown about. The table was violently shaken and the metronome set going. Bottazzi ends his first report by saying: 'The seance yielded very small results, but this is always the case at first seances. Nevertheless, how many "knowing people and savans" have formed a judgment on phenomena after seances such as this one?'"

"That's a slant at you, Miller," remarked Harris.

"Yes," I agreed, "it's a slant at all commissions and committees who think they can jump in and settle this spiritistic controversy in the course of half an hour. Bottazzi, like Lombroso and Richet, was aware that he had entered upon a long road. He knew that a tired or worried medium was helpless. He called the same circle together for the 20th, willing to try patiently for developments. All came but Lombardi, whose place was taken by M. Jona, an engineer. The second sitting was a wonder. Warned by his first experience, Bottazzi nailed or screwed every movable thing fast to the walls of the cabinet. He was resolute to force 'John,' the supposed 'guide,' to touch the electric button and press the ball of India-rubber that connected with a mercury manometer. He intended to teach the spirit hand to register its actions on a revolving cylinder of smoked tin. He wanted graven records, so that no wiseacre like Harris, here, could say: 'Oh, the thing never moved. You were all hypnotized!' In effect, he said: 'They tell us that a cold wind blows from the cabinet. I will put a self-registering thermometer in the cabinet and see. They say tables weighing forty pounds have been lifted. All I ask is that the bulb of a self-registering manometer be pressed. They say a Morse telegraphic key has been sounded by spirit hands. Very well; I will arrange a connection so that every pressure of the key will be registered on a sheet of smoked paper, so that the fact of the sound of the key shall be recorded by an infallible instrument.'"

"Did he get the records?" asked Harris.

"Wait and see!" commanded Cameron.

"These indicate the methods which Bottazzi and his assistants brought to bear on the medium. No more worship here, no awe, no hesitation, no superstition. Among other things, he put into the cabinet a small table weighing about fifteen pounds, and on top of it arranged a hair-brush, a hen's feather, a bottle full of water, and a very thick glass. These articles and the table were the only objects that could be moved. His aim was to limit the spirit hands to a few movables--to see whether they could not be taught to do what was required of them. Well, that little table came out of the cabinet of its own accord in a light that made it perfectly visible, at the precise time when three of the inexorable professors were rigidly clasping the psychic. But that is not the most remarkable thing. The psychic's feet were held by the engineer, and he observed that at the exact moment when Paladino pushed against his knee the table moved. 'Each advance of the table corresponded,' says Bottazzi, 'with the most perfect synchronism, to the push of Eusapia's legs against Jona's knees'; in other words, she really executed movements identical with those that she would have made had she been pushing the table out of the cabinet with her visible limbs."

As I paused for effect, Fowler said: "You say that as if you considered it very significant."

"I do. In my judgment, it is the most valuable fact developed by these most searching experiments. Flammarion noted this same significant relation between the movements of the psychic and the spirit hands, and so did Maxwell. Maxwell proved it by experiments on his own person, and now Bottazzi is proving it in a larger way. 'A few moments later,' he says, 'a glass was flung from the cabinet by these invisible agencies, and this fling coincided exactly with a kick which Paladino gave to Jona, as if the same will governed both movements.'"

Miller was thinking very hard. "That certainly is very strange," he said, "but I observed nothing of it in Mrs. Smiley's case; on the contrary, it seemed to me that our strongest manifestations came when she was perfectly still."

"Hasten!" urged Fowler. "Come to the phantoms. I perceive his theory, but it will all be upset later by the materialized forms."

"On the contrary, Bottazzi declares the phantoms also conformed to this same law. He was determined upon educating 'John King,' and kept insisting that the invisible hands press the rubber ball, or lower the registry balance, or set the metronome going, and Eusapia repeatedly moaned: 'I can't find,' 'I can't see,' or 'I don't know how.' Once she complained that the objects were too far off--that she could not reach them!--all of which sustained Bottazzi in his belief that these activities were absolutely under her psychic control, just as the synchronism of movements convinced him that she was 'the physiologic factor in the case.' All of this is very exciting to me, for I have had the same feeling with regard to the several mediums whose activities I have closely studied. Bottazzi says, with regard to the results of the first two sittings: 'These first seances show that Eusapia needed to learn how to make these movements with which her invisible hands were unfamiliar, just as she would have had to learn to make them with her visible hands. You will all observe that he did not permit awe or superstitious reverence for the medium or her phantoms to balk his experiments.' A convinced spiritist who attended one of the seances was scandalized by the tone and character of the tests. These professors were continually bobbing up to see what was going on, disturbing conditions, stirring things up as with a spoon to see how it was all going on. They broke the chain of hands whenever they wanted to see what 'the spirits' were doing. In other words, these scientists were students, not devotees. They were experimenting, not communing with the dead."

"Others have tried that," said Fowler. "But they succeeded in preventing any manifestations whatsoever."

"It didn't work out so in this instance. Bottazzi says that during the first seance Professor Scarpa irritated Eusapia greatly by his impertinent curiosity, but Bottazzi himself quieted her by saying: 'You see, dear Eusapia, we are not here only to admire the marvellous phenomena you are able to produce, but also, and chiefly, to observe and verify and criticise. We do not doubt you or suspect any fraud, but we want to see clearly, and to follow the development of the phenomena. That is why M. Scarpa surveys the cabinet between the curtains, illuminating it occasionally with an electric pocket-lamp. Which do you prefer, passive admiration, of which you must have had more than enough already, or the calm affirmation of physicists who are accustomed to extort from Nature secrets which she hides from physical eyes? 'In this way,' adds the master, 'Eusapia's irritation was softened; she rebelled no further, but yielded with docility to the sharp, attentive scrutiny of the observer, who finally declared himself beaten, not having been able to discover at any point a shadow of fraud.'"

"Hurrah for Eusapia!" shouted Howard. "She must be a wonder!"

"A spiritist would say that her guides were insisting on the most rigid test. The account goes on to say that the psychic, when entranced, was not satisfied with the grasp of two of the spies; she frequently asked, in a faint voice, for a third or even a fourth hand in order that there could be no question of her freedom from connection with the phenomena. As in the case of our own psychic, Mrs. Smiley co-operated to the utmost with us. She never refused to permit any test."

Miller here remarked: "I can't but think that our control of Mrs. Smiley was complete, and yet I could not (under the conditions) assert that she was not the author of the acts we witnessed in my library. I cannot bring myself to entertain, even for an instant, the spirit hypothesis, but in Bottazzi's theory I glimpse an alternative."

"Yes, Bottazzi plainly hints at his conclusions by saying: 'The invisible limbs of the psychic explored the cabinet.' He repeats, 'I am convinced that these "mediumistic limbs" are capable of being taught unfamiliar duties, like pressing an electric button of squeezing a rubber ball,' and this he proceeded patiently to exemplify. At the third sitting Madame Bottazzi was present (Lombardi and Jona being absent), and the 'force' was much greater and more active than before, probably because of the psychic's growing confidence. A small table floated in the air 'while we watched it in amazement,' he says. One levitation lasted long enough to count fifty. 'We all had time to observe that the piece of furniture was quite isolated,' he adds. Furthermore, a big black hand came from the curtain and touched Madame Bottazzi on the cheek, and frightened her from her place beside the medium."

"I can understand that," said Mrs. Cameron. "Think of being touched by even one's own dead!"

"Professor de Amicis was not only touched on the arm but forcibly pulled, as if by an invisible hand. The curtain of the cabinet then enveloped him as if to embrace him, and he felt the contact of another face against his, and a mouth kissing him--"

The women cried out at the thought, but I hurried on to make Bottazzi's point: "'At the same time Eusapia's lips moved as if to kiss, and she made the sound of kissing, which we all distinctly heard.' Here again, you see, is that astounding synchronism which Maxwell and Morselli observed between the movement of objects and the contraction of the muscles in the medium's arms and legs. Bottazzi pauses to generalize: 'Whatever may be the mediumistic phenomena produced, there is almost always at the same time movement of one or several parts of the medium's body.'"

"What does he mean? Does he mean that Eusapia performed all these movements with her 'astral hands'?" asked Mrs. Quigg.