Party tricks

Wednesday, February 7th., Yacht Club, London.

Dined at Madame Van der Velde's, and sat at a spiritualistic seance with a clairvoyant named Peters who brought his son, a youth in the R.A.M.C. home for a few hours on leave. This son said there were 500 professed spiritualist soldiers at Aldershot. Theosophist. The clairvoyant a man of 45 or so. Short. Good forehead. Bald on top, dark hair at sides. Quick and nervous. Son of a barge owner. Present: Yeats the poet, Mr. and Mrs. Jowitt, Roger Fry, hostess and me. Mrs J. very beautiful, quite distractingly so. Jowitt is editor of the Daily Chronicle. 

We were all asked to put an object we had brought with us on a tray, unseen by Peters. Though not by his son I noticed. Peters then handled the objects with his eyes closed. His greatest success, quite startling, was with the glass stopper of a bottle brought by Jowitt. He decribed a man throwing himself out of something, down, with machinery behind him, and a big hotel or building behind him. Something to do with water, across water. He kept repeating these phrases with variations. Turns out the stopper had once belonged to a baronet (I forget his name) who threw himself off a launch in response to a challenge, at 3 a.m. into the Thames, after a party up river. He drowned. Drunk presumably.

He had some success with my toothpick, in getting me to the Potteries, and into the office of the Staffordshire Knot, or Sentinel, and described a man that might be either Goold or the editor of the Sentinel, and said that known or unknown to me, this man had greatly influenced me. He insisted on the word 'Zola'. He said there was a message to tell me, that I hadn't done my best work. I felt quite impressed at the time, but not so now. A professional would not have any difficulty finding out things about us, and offering fairly vague suggestions which we seize upon and mould to fit. Probably he and his son have some sort of code to indicate which item belongs to which person. 

What strikes me most is the banality of the whole thing. here we are in the middle of the greatest war the world has seen, people dying in their millions, and the spirits can only tell us who has fallen out of a boat or has a link with a newspaper! The fact is that people tend towards credulity and the mediums and clairvoyants make use of this tendency with their party tricks. I am glad I went. I made full notes.