May 17 Thursday – Sam’s notebook: Address: 6 Bickenhall Mansions Gloucester Place W.
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Dine with E. Russell Roberts as “a Bencher’s guest [”] in the hall of the Middle Temple. 6 p.m. He will meet me “at the entrance to the Hall at 5.50.[”] (His address is 3 Old, Lincoln’s Inn.) “Please arrive at the Middle Temple Hall, Middle Temple Lane, & ask to be shown to the Bencher’s room[”].
Balance in Mr. Rogers’s hands, $43,000 [NB 43 TS 11].
At 30 Wellington Court in London, England Sam wrote a short note to Andrew Carnegie, asking where he was, that he wished to call on him, his wife and daughter.
"At what hour are you findable?” [MTP].
Sam also began a reply to Samuel E. Moffett that he finished on May 19 (incoming not extant).
Your preliminary letter & a letter from Helmer have given us great satisfaction. When we elect to go home, now, we can go with confidence. In Dr. Helmer Jean would have competent help, I believe.
We shall probably not start homeward till October. The reason is, that about the time my letter reached you, or 3 or 4 days later, Jean apparently passed main the crisis & turned the corner—an event which we had been anxiously watching for for 6 or 7 months; several times thinking it had arrived, but Kellgren always said “No.” But, a fortnight or more ago he came to me, after treating her, & said she had unquestionably passed one crisis; there might be more—he could not tell—but she had scored one, anyway. Since then, she is quite another person—the change is very marked. To-morrow it will be 4 weeks since she had a convulsion.
By the signs & symptoms as set down in Chambers’s Encyclopedia, we recognise that hers is the worst form of the non-hereditary [MTP]. Note: See May 4 entry, Sam’s notebook.
Sam also wrote to H.H. Rogers that their “Program re-organized once more. We shall probably not start home until October.” Sam described the “turning point” for Jean and her change in personality. He thought they would stay now and return to Sanna in the summer. He then reported on “secrets of the Plasmon Syndicate.” After buying $3,000 of the stuff from Berlin at cost, and after donating half of it to the soldiers in hospitals in S. Africa, they sold the other half to London hospitals and doctors, netting an $11,500 profit—“it’s as good as railroading,” he wrote. All the work with Plasmon was yet privately done; the company would be publicly offered in October with a capital sum of £250,000 (about $1.2 million). Sam mentioned John Hays Hammond, who was a member of Henry A. Butters’ American Plasmon group. The Clemens family was eating “very little meat—Jean has tasted none for weeks,” and were taking ¼ lb. of Plasmon per day instead. Sam felt their health was better for it. He asked Rogers to meet with Samuel Bergheim, who was going to N.Y. in July (Bergheim was the manager of the London branch of the Plasmon Syndicate). He also asked if Rogers would notify the Lotos Club that his home-coming would be delayed until October [MTHHR 444-5].
Hill offers an account of Livy trying to contact her dead daughter Susy:
On May 17, 1900, Mrs. Clemens had taken a brooch of Susy’s to an English Medium, Mrs. Thompson, at 87 Sloane Street [the address of the London Society for Psychical Research]. In a trance, Mrs. Thompson “contacted” Susy and answered questions placed to her. She identified Susy as an American, a writer, and a world traveler. As the concluding message in the transcript that survives, Susy told her mother that she did not want her own manuscript, presumably her biography of her father, incorporated in a volume: “Someone belonging to her is writing a book, and I don’t want him to put it in.” Mrs. Meyers, who wrote the transcript of the session, was unconvinced that there was “recognition” but suggested another attempt [33-4]. Note: Mrs. Thompson appears in many of the journals and minutes of the Society.