Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  This argument—let’s take each world in its turn—had been a rejoinder since the dawn of spiritualism. As a practical matter, spiritualism involved so much time and effort—for what reward? Horace Greeley was at the end of his life agnostic on the whole matter but wrote in his autobiography, “Those who discharge promptly and faithfully all their duties to those who ‘still live’ in the flesh can have little time for poking and peering into the life beyond the grave. Better attend to each world in its proper order.” He wrote this in 1868, a few years after Henry David Thoreau’s famous reply on his deathbed when asked if he was ready to meet his Maker in the next world: “One world at a time.” In the twentieth century, this attitude gained in popularity as a more secular world offered more distractions (from motorcars to Mae West) and then more pressing perils. Later, Conan Doyle would say it himself, although ruefully: “When the whole world is living vividly here and now there is no room for the hereafter.”

  How did Conan Doyle reply to forty minutes of McCabe? By brandishing a notebook. “I have in this little book … the names of 160 people of high distinction … people who, to their own great loss, have announced themselves as Spiritualists.… These are folk who have taken real pains and care to get to the bottom of the subject. They have not been to one séance … or two or three, like Mr. McCabe. Many have studied for twenty or thirty years, and been to hundreds of séances.” Yes, Doyle admitted, there are fraudulent mediums; he called them “hyenas” and said, “I think that to deceive the living by imitating the dead is the most horrible crime a man could commit.” But many, many other mediums are honest people who suffer for their gifts. You don’t hear about them, said Doyle: “The trouble is that you never hear of mediums unless they get into trouble.” To which the audience shouted, “Hear, hear!”

  He then launched into a defense of the mediums McCabe had mocked, and told stories of respected people he knew and their visits with mediums who established contact with dead relatives. Doyle claimed he knew “more than a hundred” such cases personally. “If I have had more than a hundred,” he continued, “how many thousands and tens of thousands there must be in the country,” a flourish that drew cheers from the crowd. “That is what our opponents will never admit—the enormous cumulative evidence of all these cases.”

  Then he got personal. He told of a séance in Wales in which he was visited by the spirit of his younger brother, who had died in the great flu epidemic of 1918.

  Four spirits came to me in succession, each of them making their identity perfectly clear. The fourth was my brother. When I asked for a name he gave “Innes.” The name published in his obituaries was John Francis, and Innes was his third name, used only by intimates. Besides my wife and myself, I do not think there was a person in Wales who could have known this. I at once began talking family matters with him, exactly as if he were alive. His widow is in ill health in Copenhagen, and we discussed her condition. I asked him if he thought psychic or magnetic treatment could avail. He answered by the two words, “Sigurd Frier,” or “Trier.” I could not catch it, and he repeated it twice. Mr. Southey, an ex-J.P. of Merthyr, with his daughter, was on my left, and my wife was on my right. They all made note of the words. Next day I wrote to a young Danish friend in London, and asked him if they had any meaning. He replied that it was the name of a well-known psychic in Copenhagen. Now I will swear to you that I did not know that there was a Spiritualistic Society in the whole of Denmark. As to the Welsh people who formed the circle, they could not have known that the conversation was going to Copenhagen. Now, if that entity, who stood in front of me in the dark, who talked in my brother’s manner, who discussed family matters intimately, and who knew more about the surroundings of his widow than I did, was not my brother, I ask you, who was it?

  Half the audience knew the answer. The other half didn’t care.

  The two men spent the next hour bickering over the details of their early remarks. McCabe got in one last plea for his one-world-at-a-time argument: “This movement is one vast, mischievous distraction of human energies from the human task that lies before us today.” (Prolonged cheers.) And Doyle, as ever, was the earnest defender of those who must suffer in silence: “I am sure [McCabe] would not have talked so lightly of this matter if he had known, as I know, the consolation it has brought to thousands and thousands of people.” (Prolonged cheers.)

  The debate was a draw, but McCabe had gotten under his skin. Three months later, in June 1920, Doyle sat down and wrote “A Drastic Examination of Mr. Joseph McCabe,” in which he meticulously answered all the objections that McCabe tossed about. But Doyle went beyond proofs: McCabe was an arrogant killjoy who told outright lies and who did so “in short snip-snap sentences,” as if that were the final word on the matter. “Everyone who differs from him is a fraud, a fool or a drunkard,” Doyle noted of the man’s debating style. As for the one-world-at-a-time argument, that’s fine for a healthy man on a fine summer day, “but how about the poor wretch who lives in a garret in a London winter with cancer of the bowels!”

  Strangely, that’s just how Joseph McCabe died thirty-five years later: broke and alone in London. The cause of death was pneumonia following prostate cancer. It was winter.

  * * *

  SHORTLY AFTER the McCabe debate, Sir Arthur and Jean decided to say yes to the requests of spiritualist groups in Australia to bring their missionary work to the island continent. They both felt obliged to go. “God had given us wonderful signs,” he wrote, “and they were surely not for ourselves alone.” In his leadership role, he had access to the best mediums in the world, and by that point he and Jean had been in séances where they spoke face-to-face with a total of eleven friends and relatives “who had passed over, their direct voices being in each case audible, and their conversation characteristic and evidential—in some cases marvellously so.” He would spread the word. So on August 13, 1920, the seven of them—he, Jean, the three kids, a nanny, and a secretary—got on the Naldera, a slow boat to Australia. They wouldn’t see the Australian coastline until the morning of September 17, more than a month later. On the return voyage in February, he would put the month of travel time to good use: He sat on deck with a writing pad on his knee composing his memoir of the trip, The Wanderings of a Spiritualist.

  Years of practice had turned Conan Doyle into a masterful public speaker, so the large audiences turning out for him were not disappointed. A newspaper in Adelaide, the Register, described him as having a “big arresting presence” at the podium, with a clear delivery that was plain, humble, and sincere, rather than theatrical. At times, he would jab a finger in the air for emphasis or twirl his glasses “during moments of descriptive ease.” It added, “He did not dictate, but reasoned and pleaded, taking the people into his confidence with strong conviction and a consoling faith.” He could improvise when heckled. At the start of his first speech in Sydney, one protester near the door shouted “Anti-Christ” several times before being put out. Doyle went on to describe how his son Kingsley had come back to him during a séance, and challenged anyone to say that it was a devil who visited him. Someone in the audience yelled, “It was!” Conan Doyle only laughed and replied that if the devil went around imploring people to practice unselfishness as the true way to make spiritual progress, then the devil didn’t know his job.

  In between lectures, the Doyles attended séances with local spiritualists. One of these, in Melbourne, was a “rescue circle.” These séances attempt to help dead people’s souls who are still earthbound and who don’t know where they are or how to make progress in the next life. Here is Doyle’s description of a typical rescue séance:

  A wise spirit control dominates the proceedings. The medium goes into trance. The spirit control then explains what it is about to do, and who the spirit is who is about to be reformed. The next scene is often very violent, the medium having to be held down and using rough language. This comes from some low spirit who has suddenly found this means of expressing himself. At other time
s the language is not violent but only melancholy, the spirit declaring that he is abandoned and has not a friend in the universe. Some do not realize that they are dead, but only that they wander all alone, under conditions they could not understand, in a cloud of darkness.

  Then comes the work of regeneration. They are reasoned with and consoled. Gradually they become more gentle. Finally they accept the fact that they are spirits, that their condition is their own making, and that by aspiration and repentance they can win their way to the light.

  At the rescue circle attended by the Doyles, there appeared a dead cleric who didn’t understand why he wasn’t in the sort of heaven he’d preached about, a sailor who’d gone down on the Monmouth (“We never had a chance. It was just hell”), and a Gurkha who thought he was still in the war and charged about the circle, upsetting the medium’s chair. Then came the apostolic gift of tongues as two of the ladies broke out into a conversation in the Maori language.

  Also while in Melbourne, he had two séances with the medium Charles Bailey, who had the rare gift of producing apports at his sittings. (The word is French, “something brought.”) Such phenomena were uncommon, which may be just as well, because it’s so hard to believe that spirits can take physical objects from thousands of miles away, pass them through walls, and produce them in the middle of the séance table. Conan Doyle had himself witnessed apports at séances with General Drayson back in Southsea in the 1880s, but it put him off. “So amazing a phenomenon, and one so easily simulated, was too much for a beginner,” he wrote of his early reaction in The History of Spiritualism. “Even the Spiritualist can hardly credit it until examples actually come his way.” Often the séance goer is silently presented with a strange object not of his choosing, but the London medium Mrs. Guppy actually took requests. At one of her séances, the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace requested a sunflower, and a six-foot specimen—roots, dirt, and all—fell at his feet.

  Charles Bailey had a reputation for producing an amazing array of objects under amazingly rigid conditions. At one particular series of six sittings, the doors and windows were secured and the fireplace blocked; Bailey was stripped naked and placed inside a bag and then inside a cage of mosquito curtain. While in trance he produced a total of 138 articles, including 87 ancient coins, 8 live birds, 18 precious stones, 2 live turtles, a leopard skin, an Arabic newspaper, and 4 nests. On a different occasion, he produced a young live shark, tangled in wet seaweed, which flopped around on the séance table. This was a guy Doyle had to see.

  The first séance was so-so; the second proved better. Doyle and the others searched Mr. Bailey to be sure he carried nothing into the room with him. Then they placed him in a corner of the room, drew the curtain, lowered the lights, and waited.

  Almost at once he breathed very heavily, as one in trance, and soon said something in a foreign tongue which was unintelligible to me.… In English the voice then said that he was a Hindoo control who was used to bring apports for the medium, and that he would, he hoped, be able to bring one for us. “Here it is,” he said a moment later, and the medium’s hand was extended with something in it. The light was turned full on and we found it was a very perfect bird’s nest, beautifully constructed of some very fine fibre mixed with moss. It stood about two inches high and had no sign of any flattening which would have come with concealment. In it lay a small egg, white, with tiny brown speckles. The medium, or rather the Hindoo control acting through the medium, placed the egg on his palm and broke it, some fine albumen squirting out. There was no trace of yolk. “We are not allowed to interfere with life,” he said. “If it had been fertilized we could not have taken it.” These words were said before he broke it, so that he was aware of the condition of the egg, which certainly seems remarkable.

  “Where did it come from?” I asked.

  “From India.”

  “What bird is it?”

  “They call it the jungle sparrow.”

  Later in that same séance, Doyle asked another spirit control to explain apports and just how an object can be transported from thousands of miles away. The spirit gave a rough analogy of water turned into steam, and the invisible steam can be conducted elsewhere and condensed into water again. That’s the best explanation Doyle got; he took the nest and eggshell to a local museum and was told they weren’t native to Australia. If a supernatural explanation seemed far-fetched, so did the explanation of fraud. “I had an Indian nest. Does anyone import Indian nests?” Much less Indian nests with fresh eggs? “The matter is ventilated in papers, and no one comes forward to damn Bailey forever by proving that he supplied them.” So, as skeptical as Doyle still was about the subject, he couldn’t join the long line of Bailey’s doubters.

  If you don’t believe any of this, take a trip to Stanford University. There, in the archives, are twenty-six gray boxes filled with miscellaneous apports (papyrus, seeds, rocks, a Roman lamp, arrowheads, sharks’ teeth, a tortoise shell, a Chinese ink block, a human shoulder blade) and slates with spirit messages scrawled on them. One slate has a message from the spirit of the university’s namesake, Leland Stanford Jr., to his uncle Thomas Welton Stanford: “My dear uncle I am pleased to meet you here this morning.” Welton Stanford was the youngest brother of the founder, Leland Stanford; he immigrated to Melbourne in 1859 and got rich by selling real estate and importing Singer sewing machines. He married, was widowed, and became an active spiritualist, hosting countless séances with Charles Bailey. Welton Stanford left his collection of Bailey apports to the university upon his death in 1918, two years too soon to meet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They would have enjoyed each other’s company.

  * * *

  BARELY A year after their return to England, the Doyles were off again: this time to America. It would prove to be another record-breaking tour; he would lecture at Carnegie Hall for six nights. He would go up to Boston, down to Philadelphia and Washington, then take the train out to Buffalo, passing by Hydesville and musing about the Fox sisters as they chugged past. He would lecture in Detroit and Toledo and Chicago and attend séances with America’s best mediums along the way before returning to New York, meeting up with Houdini, playing a joke on the magicians’ club, and finally having a séance with Houdini in Atlantic City that began to convince Doyle that Houdini harbored a deep secret: He was, in actuality, one of the most powerful mediums of his day.

  “Who was the greatest medium-baiter of modern times?” Doyle would later write. “Undoubtedly Houdini. Who was the greatest physical medium of modern times? There are some who would be inclined to give the same answer.”

  On April 9, 1922, they reached New York harbor. Doyle was met by a dozen members of the press, who came on board the Baltic even before it docked. “They pinned me in a corner and were showering questions upon me,” he wrote. “They got to the heart of things at once.” He told them that the psychic movement, which he had come to America to champion, was “the most serious attempt ever made to place religion upon a basis of definite proof.” Okay, said the reporters, but what does all this séance stuff have to do with religion? As Doyle himself echoed their question in the early pages of his memoir Our American Adventure: “What religion could there be in a jumping table or a flying tambourine?”

  He’d been answering that question for a few years now, and his answer was always the same: All the physical phenomena of spiritualism—the flying tambourines, tilting tables, raps, bells, and apports—were nothing in themselves. They were simply calling attention to the existence of the afterlife. They were like “telephone bells,” he liked to say. It’s the message that matters. Don’t stand there wondering what makes the phone ring; answer the phone!

  It’s difficult for us to imagine the harrowing effect of World War I, but it was, to quote the opening line of Doyle’s 1919 tract The Vital Message, “the most frightful calamity that has ever befallen the world.” Many shrugged it off as being the latest chapter in the long, sad saga of man’s inhumanity to man. Not Sir Arthur. To him, ther
e was a lesson to be learned. “If our souls, wearied and tortured during these dreadful five years of self-sacrifice and suspense, can show no radical changes, then what souls will ever respond to a fresh influx of heavenly inspiration?”

  That fresh influx, he believed, came in the form of all the psychic phenomena of the last seventy years. God was giving us fresh proof that, yes, we will live forever. And the voices reaching us from the other side of the veil were telling us that life over there was infinitely happier for most souls; furthermore, all souls were involved together in an eternal spiritual refinement—it was truly a communion of the saints. “Unselfishness, that is the keynote to progress,” he wrote in The New Revelation. “Realize not as a belief or a faith, but as a fact which is as tangible as the streets of London, that we are moving on soon to another life, that all will be very happy there, and that the only possible way in which that happiness can be marred or deferred is by folly and selfishness in these few fleeting years.”

  The Doyles settled in at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue, and the next morning more members of the press came to visit. Promptly at 11:00 a.m., eighteen reporters marched into his sitting room, “about a third of them ladies,” he noted with surprise. As they fired questions at him, soon enough the topic got around to the afterlife. Would there be whiskey and cigars? Would there be marriage? Would there be golf? They were fishing for a funny angle, and he could just imagine their editors’ plans for a brassy headline the next day.

  In his memoir, Doyle repeated one exchange in particular that made the papers. “All ordinary decent people will find themselves in Paradise after death,” Sir Arthur insisted optimistically.

  “I believe everyone in this room will go there,” he added, indicating the eighteen reporters present.