THAT THURSDAY AFTERNOON, THEODATE POPE AND Edwin Friend sat in their deck chairs enjoying the fine weather and blue vista. They were not lovers, but Theodate spent most of her time in Friend’s company. While on deck, Friend read aloud to her from a book, Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire, or Matter and Memory, published in 1896. Broadly, it dealt with the relationship between mind and body. Bergson, a past president of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, was sympathetic to the idea that some element of an individual persisted after death.
Theodate too was a member of the society, an organization founded in London in 1882, not by crackpots or would-be mediums, but by philosophers, writers, scientists, and journalists who sought to bring the principles of scientific rigor to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. Its membership included dozens of scientific and literary notables, among them H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, William James, and Oliver Lodge, a leading British physicist who would lose his own son to the war in September 1915 and spend the rest of his life trying to reach him beyond the veil. From time to time Theodate had assisted Lodge and James in an investigation of Mrs. Piper, the medium, for which James convened seventy-five séances. The medium’s apparent talents so resisted his attempts to debunk her skills that James came to believe she might be legitimate. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, famously, “you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.”
Theodate also participated in séances independently of William James and in an unpublished memoir described a 1909 sitting with another famed medium, Eusapia Palladino, during which Theodate claimed her own turban levitated from her scalp and settled on the table in front of her. Palladino was subsequently proven to be a very talented fraud.
Theodate began serious study of the powers of the mind and the occult in her thirties. In 1900, at thirty-three, she read her first issues of Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which included investigations of supposed hauntings and incidences of “survival,” the society’s preferred term for life after death; the Proceedings were also where Sigmund Freud in 1912 published his first detailed articulation of his theory of subconscious thought. Theodate joined the society in 1904 and soon afterward began helping William James with his investigation of Mrs. Piper. (James’s brother Henry, though the author of ten ghost stories including Turn of the Screw, scorned spiritualism and paranormal dabbling.) In 1907, the year Theodate turned forty, she helped found a new institute for psychical research in New York and contributed $25,000, over $600,000 today. Her traveling companion, Edwin Friend, had been editor of the institute’s journal until a decidedly non-astral conflict over what sorts of articles to publish led to his removal. Though only in his twenties, Friend had already received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard and had taught classics at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. Theodate, angered by his removal, resigned from the institute’s board. Her reason for traveling with him now on the Lusitania was to visit Oliver Lodge and others in London to seek support for the founding of a wholly new American society.
Bergson’s book was in French, but Friend translated as he read. This was no mean feat. Matter and Memory was a stupefying read in any language. Yet there they sat, contentedly filling the warm afternoon air with murmured language and knowing smiles, grasping the ungraspable.
“There were passages that illustrated so wonderfully some of the common difficulties in communication,” Theodate wrote—and by communication she meant contact with the dead. “They were most illuminating and I could see the vividness of the inspiration they were to Mr. Friend; and as we sat side by side in our deck chairs I marveled to myself that such a man as Mr. Friend had been found to carry on the investigations. I felt very deeply the quality of my respect and admiration for him. He was endowed so richly in heart and mind.”
She saw Friend as an intellectual helpmate and believed that in coming years he would be an important, albeit platonic, presence in her life.
AMONG THE younger crowd, shipboard life gained a new intensity with the end of the voyage so near. New-made friends asked each other to sign memento books. Flirtations became more flirty; the ongoing sporting competitions more zesty, with prizes offered at the ship’s barbershop. The boundaries between families began to blur. Children roamed the deck in packs, led by stewardesses. One stewardess had charge of twenty-two children, whom she watched while their parents dined. Ethel Moore Lamping Lines, thirty-four, traveling with her husband, Stanley, befriended a young couple from Toronto who were on their way home to Scotland with their three children: a toddler and a pair of one-and-a-half-year-old twins. “All around us were nice little growing families,” Mrs. Lines wrote, “and all so happy.”
She and a friend joked about what to do if the ship were attacked. “Our stewardess laughed,” Mrs. Lines recalled, “and said we would not go down, but up, as we were well loaded with munitions.”