“I doubt she wants to take credit for that,” I said. “Do you really mean to say that none of the séances you’ve been to were genuine, in your opinion?”
“I reckon that depends on what you mean by genuine,” Mr. Clemens drawled. “I won’t go so far as to claim that all mediums are deliberate frauds. I couldn’t prove that, even if I believed it. Hell, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that McPhee and his wife were trying to pull the wool over our eyes, but until Lestrade found those trick bellpulls, I couldn’t have told you how they were doing what they did.”
“That was rather disappointing.” I conceded. “I had a hope that Martha really had found some sort of inner gift, though I suppose I should know better than to place much faith in anything McPhee is involved with.”
“You’re learning, Wentworth,” said Mr. Clemens, with a wry smile. “If Slippery Ed told me the sun was going to rise in the east tomorrow morning, I’d check with Greenwich Observatory to make sure he didn’t have an eclipse up his sleeve somewhere. So when his wife claimed to be setting up as a medium, I figured it was bogus from the start. Gave me a good bit of satisfaction to find out I was right.”
“I suppose it would,” I said. “But surely you don’t take the McPhee’s séance as the typical case. By now, there must be hundreds of reports of mediums, many of them observed by very reputable witnesses . . .”
He waved away my protestations. “Sure, though a reputable witness ain’t necessarily a smart one. That’s what’s wrong with the Society for Psychical Research that’s been looking into these questions over here. They’ve had some of the best-known men in the nation as members over the last decade or so—Tennyson was one, and so’s Ruskin, fine upstanding folks. But I wouldn’t give either one of ’em an even chance to spot Slippery Ed palming a card in broad daylight, with advance notice. And they’re miles smarter than this stupid Spiritualist Society with its cock and bull about an ectoplasmic pistol. What it boils down to is, a lot of these mediums are nothing more than glorified sleight-of-hand artists. Enough of ’em have been caught cheating to prove that.”
He gazed out the window a moment, then turned back to me and continued. “Still, maybe a few of ’em really do have some of the powers they claim. I’ve heard that Daniel Dunglas Home did things that have never been explained away, and if anybody ever caught him rigging any of his tricks, I haven’t heard about it. But Slippery Ed, or that Blavatsky woman, or the Fox sisters, who started the whole fad by learning how to crack their toe joints, are a lot closer to the run of the mill. Frauds from start to finish, though some are smoother at it than others.”
Just as I was about to answer, the train lurched, then plunged us into darkness for a moment as it entered a short tunnel under a block of buildings. When we emerged into the light again, I said, “Set the proven frauds aside—they’re not at issue here. What about Daniel Dunglas Home? You admit that his feats appear to have been genuine—levitation in front of large crowds, not on a stage but in private homes where he couldn’t set up apparatus or tricks in advance. What do you make of him?”
Mr. Clemens tapped his fingers on the window glass for a moment, then answered. “Home’s a tough case. Maybe he was smarter than the rest—or just luckier. There are supposed eyewitness accounts of him levitating, even lifting heavy furniture with him. He got run out of Italy when they got a hint that he was trafficking with spirits. So they took him seriously. But a lot of lot those witnesses wanted to believe, and that’s the first step to being fooled.
“I don’t think he ever got caught with his pants down, though. Browning saw him and thought he was a fake, and said so in a poem, but that’s no better proof than what his supporters put forward. My main objection to him is the same as to all the others: even if they’re real, they’re dull as dishwater. I wouldn’t walk across the street to see the best of ’em. Hell, I wouldn’t have gone to see Martha McPhee’s setup if Susy hadn’t asked to go see what it was about.”
“How can you call it dull? I’d think word from the world beyond would be the most exciting news we could have.”
“That’s what you’d think, ain’t it?” He rested his chin on his right fist, peering at me. “Remember what Horatio tells Hamlet: ‘There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this’? That describes every single thing I’ve heard of the spooks saying at a séance—or at least, every thing I’ve heard them say. It’s all drivel, not worth a minute of a grown man’s time.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” I said. “Isn’t the evidence of a life after this one a significant fact?”
“I guess it would be, if it were a fact,” said Mr. Clemens. “But as far as I can see, the jury’s still out—even if you ignore the obvious hoaxes. I went to a séance some years back, where the medium called up a fellow my friends and I had known pretty well, a real hell-raiser off the riverboats. We asked the medium all kinds of questions, and we kept getting the same kind of answers: ‘We are very content here,’ ‘We are at peace,’ ‘We want for nothing here.’ We knew damn well that the first thing our buddy would have asked for at the Pearly Gates was the way to the best saloon in the place. The spook didn’t cuss like him, it didn’t crack
