My preliminary investigations along the Diavolo trail extended over considerable time, and were intertwined with various other matters of more or less interest, but I shall condense the account here, so as to get on to the more intricate affairs that followed.
To begin with, I wrote to the theatrical manager of each and every town that had been listed in Barker\'s note-book, asking if "Diavolo" had appeared there, under what management he had come, what his real name was, how he could be reached, and whether they had any letter, contract, or other writing of his. Then I wrote to the metropolitan agencies, and to various Bureaux of Information in the larger cities, and to all the public and private societies and persons whom I knew to have an interest in the occult, asking, in a word, if they knew who "Diavolo" was, and how and where one might come into communication with him. I threw out these baited lines in every direction that I could think of.
Very soon the first answers came in. After I had received three or four I began to make bets with myself on the contents of the next one, though it soon became obviously unsportsmanlike to wager on what was so near a certainty. They were all alike. The man who had been placarded as "Diavolo" had never been seen anywhere until he had come to the theatre in the evening for the performance. All business matters had been handled by his agent, Alfred Barker. Barker had made the arrangements beforehand, sometimes by letter, sometimes in person, and he had always accompanied Diavolo at the time of the performance and looked after everything.
"Barker looked out for Diavolo as carefully as though he were a prima donna with a $10,000 throat," wrote one imaginative manager. "Shouldn\'t wonder but what he was a woman, come to think of it. He had a squeaky kind of voice on the stage, and he kept himself to himself in a very noticeable way. He wore a beard, but it may have grown in a store. I know his hair came out of a shop all right."
Most of the answers were less imaginative, but equally unsatisfactory. Barker had stood in front of Diavolo and shielded him from observation so effectively that no one but Barker really knew what he looked like. And Barker could not now be consulted!
Before long I began to receive answers to the inquiries I had flung farther afield as to the reputation of Diavolo among those who might be supposed to know all professional hypnotists. These replies were also of a surprising and disappointing uniformity. No one working under that name was known. Most of my correspondents contented themselves with this bald assertion, but some of them made suggestions which led me on to further inquiry. One man suggested that "Diavolo" might possibly be one Jacob Hahnen, who had disappeared from the professional field some two years before, following his arrest on account of the death on the stage of one of his hypnotized victims, while in a state of trance. That looked like a plausible suggestion, and I at once engaged a detective to trace Jacob Hahnen. I may say here, (not to mislead you as far as I was misled,) that Hahnen established a perfect alibi, so that pursuit went for nothing. I did not waste time or money on another suggestion, which was to the effect that a famous hypnotist who was supposed to have died in California some years ago, might have gone into retirement for reasons of his own, and have come out of it temporarily under an alias. It might of course be possible, but there was nothing tangible to work upon.
One thing became clear to me in the course of this investigation. There were more professional hypnotists in the country than I had had any idea of, and their ways were dark and devious. They were accustomed to work under assumed names, and more or less to cover their tracks and hide in burrows. I came across some quite amazing literature on the subject,--circulars issued by Schools of Hypnotism, offering to teach, in a course of so many lessons, for so much money, the art of controlling people by occult power.
"A knowledge of this wonderful faculty," one announcement claimed, "will enable you to control the will of the person to whom you are talking, without his consent or even his knowledge. Think of the advantage this will give you in your business! All taught in twenty lessons, mailed in plain cover."
"Lies and nonsense," I said to myself. But something within me bristled uneasily, as at the approach of an evil spirit. It had not been nonsense to poor old William Jordan.
I took to reading scientific books on hypnotism, to discover what powers or disabilities were actually admitted or claimed for this abnormal state. It was not quite so bad as the commercial exploitation of the subject, but it was disquieting enough. In general it seemed to be assumed that a normal person could not be hypnotized without his consent the first time, but that if he once yielded to the will of the hypnotizer, his own will would be so weakened thereby that afterwards he might find it quite impossible to resist. It was a moot question whether a person could be compelled to commit a crime while in a hypnotized state. Some writers insisted that a person\'s moral principles would guide him, even though his mind and will were paralyzed. I confess it looked to me to be open to question. Morality is generally more of a surface matter than mind, and would therefore be more easil............