Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  He had heard, he said, stories of her pulling teapots from under her chair and brooches out of flower beds and he wanted to know if such things had truly occurred; and, if so, “What does it all mean?”

  Leaning back in her chair, Helena smiled. “I will tell you,” she said with deliberation, “because you are a public teacher and you ought to know the truth: it is all glamour—people think they see what they do not see—that is the whole of it.”

  At seven they trooped down to an excellent non-vegetarian meal. Conway thought it impossible not to admire the artistry of Madame Blavatsky’s confession, in that she had made it without witnesses.245

  Helena, immensely pleased with the way she had handled Conway, gave a glowing report of his visit in the next issue of the Theosophist: “A more charming, intellectual and pleasant afternoon we have rarely passed.”246 Two weeks later, replying to a letter of Alfred’s in which he proposed that she write the story of her life, she replied sharply, “Do not speak nonsense. My Memoirs will NEVER appear.”247

  Since the summer H.P.B. had known that Henry was planning a visit to London. Far from a pleasure trip, its purpose was to present the religious and political grievances of the Ceylon Buddhists to the British Foreign Office.

  While sacred Christian celebrations like Christmas and Easter were official government holidays, the chief festival of the Buddhists, the Full Moon Day of Wesak, was not recognized and riots had broken out over this inequity. The Cingalese had delegated Olcott, all expenses paid, to present their case to the colonial secretary, Lord Derby, and he planned to take as his secretary the young attorney Mohini Chatterji. He did not propose to take H.P.B., nor did she bother to bring it up, for he would simply have said they could not afford it.

  It is not surprising that toward the end of 1883 Helena began to feel ill with a mysterious ailment; her physician seemed unable to diagnose any specific disease and apparently did not believe it connected with her previous kidney disorder. However, she complained of excruciating pain and was clearly much too weak to walk. Morphine was injected and crutches ordered, but when his patient told him she felt deathly sick, the doctor could only nod helplessly. In a letter to Judge Khandalavala on February 14, Helena described her affliction as “simply life ebbing away, complete nervous prostration, weakness daily increasing, etc. Played out!”248 and added that her doctor had frightened Olcott by stating that without an immediate change of climate and several months complete rest, Helena had no more than three months to live.

  Naturally Helena insisted that she hated the idea of dying in some secluded village on the Riviera or in the Alps. If she had to go, she wanted it to be at Adyar. In the end it was the Mahatmas who settled the argument by declaring they wanted her to stay alive. But, objected Helena, they had cured her two summers earlier in Sikkim; why couldn’t they give her relief now without sending her all the way to southern France? As luck would have it, the Mahatmas happened to be on a particularly heavy schedule that allowed no time to bother with Helena. In any case, her body required a certain type of air unavailable in India, and so, reluctantly, she agreed.

  Her plans, she told Sinnett, remained vague. She thought that she might stop at Marseilles for a fortnight, see some cousins of hers in Paris, then head for some secluded spot in the mountains where “if I die, I will be put out of the way without fuss or scandal….”249 However vague her itinerary, she felt certain of one thing: “I must not, shall not, and will not, go to London. Do whatever you may. I will not approach it even. Had my Boss ordered it to me even—I think I would rather face his displeasure and— disobey him.” The very idea of London was “loathsome” and filled her with “inexpressible magnetic disgust.”250

  In truth, her chief reason for accompanying Olcott to Europe was to visit London. It was hardly the city that attracted her, for she had seen it before and left without regrets, nor was it a desire to see Patience and Alfred and her other friends. Rather, she planned to meet and demolish a woman whom she regarded as her chief rival, although she never admitted having rivals. The only means of doing battle with Anna Kingsford was to meet her on her home ground. Even the inconvenience of spending three months pretending to be an invalid was a small price to pay for the pleasure.

  Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford, the “divine Anna”251 as H.P.B. called her when she was not reviling her, was president of the London Theosophical Society and, incidentally, one of the most beautiful women in London. As the frustrated wife of a Shropshire vicar, she had become passionately involved in the spreading anti-vivisectionist movement and at the age of twenty-eight had gone to study medicine in Paris. Taking her M.D. degree six years later, she decided against a private practice in order to devote herself to the anti-vivisection cause. Since her husband could not, or would not, leave his parish, she traveled in the company of a man twenty-two years her senior, Edward Mait-land, her step-uncle by marriage who had agreed to act as her guardian and chaperon. The triangular arrangement occasioned a good deal of unpleasant gossip, particularly as little was ever seen of Reverend Kingsford.

  Over the next fifteen years Edward Maitland rarely left Anna’s side, content to function as her partner, admirer, collaborator and amanuensis. During her student days in Paris, both of them had become preoccupied with mysticism; soon, Anna began to experience macabre doomsday visions, and to conceive of herself as having been given a divine mission. Her visions, probably not unlike Helena’s hashish hallucinations, owed something to her addiction to ether, which she had begun taking to relieve her asthma.

  Since Anna Kingsford was basically a Christian mystic, it seems odd that she should have become involved with the Theosophical Society; in fact Maitland openly admitted in his biography of Anna that both of them initially distrusted H.P.B.’s organization and disdained her Eastern doctrines. It was Anna’s good friend Lady Marie Caithness who begged her to take over the foundering London branch, which would surely “fall to the ground”252 without her patronage. Finally Anna agreed on the condition that the name of the society be changed to the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Pledging that she would do her utmost to make the group “a really influential and scientific body,” she emphasized to Lady Caithness that from then on the London Lodge would not confine itself to Orientalism, “but to the study of all religions esoterically and especially to that of our Western Catholic Church.”253 Given H.P.B.’s aversion to Catholicism, she felt justified in regarding Anna with horror.

  At once resenting the younger woman’s takeover of the London branch and yet acknowledging the need for her, Helena had to admit that Anna was a real catch. A person of remarkable charm, both of mind and body, she always drew crowds who came to look as well as listen. Her friends liked to think of her as a reincarnation of a great sibyl, perhaps Egeria or Hypatia. Tall, graceful, pale, beautiful at thirty-seven, she had, in Isabelle de Steiger’s memory, “a goddess-like effect” on the lecture platform, “and as she had also a real gift for oratory both in style, choice and flow of words, she seemed to me the living type of what a goddess should and does look like! I felt that Olympus was a real abode.”254

  For more than a year, H.P.B. had been getting first-hand reports on Dr. Kingsford, mainly from Sinnett, who had danced with her and afterward could not restrain himself from describing the lush Anna’s charms in too vivid detail. Her hair, he wrote Helena, was “like a naming sunset, yellow gold.”255 H.P.B. was wild with jealousy. At first she merely harped on Anna’s appearance, demanding why “the mystic of the century” insisted on appearing in public “so undressed”; why did she wear a gown that resembled a zebra’s coat, long black gloves, and crescent-moon tinkling earrings? Even if she was, as Alfred claimed, a fascinating woman, how could she confabulate with the gods when she looked like a jeweler’s front window? In Helena’s opinion, Anna Kingsford had to be “a selfish, vain and”—the worst insult in H.P.B.’s vocabulary—”mediumistic creature, too fond of adulation and dress and tinkling jewelry to be of the right sort.”256 Even so,
anyone who loved animals could not be all bad to H.P.B., who might have overlooked the jewelry if Anna had believed wholeheartedly in the Mahatmas.

  Anna did not outrightly reject the concept of persons like the Mahatmas existing, but she saw no sufficient evidence that they did, and always placed Koot Hoomi’s name in quotation marks. Calling these men masters was ridiculous, she wrote a friend. Madame Blavatsky and Alfred Sinnett could do as they liked, but for her part, she would not apply that term to any earthly being whomsoever. For that matter, she marveled that “K.H.” or any “adepts” should have permitted a man like Sinnett to act as the bearer of their philosophy, since he was utterly wanting in the qualifications necessary for the study of God.

  In October, 1883, Anna had seen fit to spell out her reservations to Helena by announcing her fear that the English branch was degenerating into idolatry “toward these good and kind Adepts instead of preserving towards them an attitude of reverence only”; surely, the Mahatmas themselves must be displeased. In any case, it was unwise of the Society to present itself to the world “in the guise of a Sect having chiefs accredited with super-human powers of greatness”;257 not only did it smack of Catholicism but it left the Society open to press jibes, the latest from the London Standard, which had called them “a society founded on the alleged feats of certain Indian jugglers.”258

  All this Anna felt obliged to share with Helena, as well as the fact that she had tried to communicate magnetically with the Mahatmas and had failed. She went on to ask Helena to “lay this letter before K.H. himself and ask his Counsel.” Thinking that K.H. might better understand her if he could see her face, she enclosed a photograph to “help him to a right analysis of my present personality.”259

  Having already made her analysis of “the sweet, fascinating creature,”260 Helena took out her best stationery and a new pen and dashed off an eight-page reply telling Anna what she thought of her. But, as she informed Sinnett, Master Morya tore it up and K.H. instructed her to humor Anna.

  Nursing second thoughts, Helena decided that Anna could be exploited to her advantage. But how?

  Helena’s obsession with Dr. Kingsford left her oblivious to changes taking place in a woman closer to home, Emma Coulomb. Over the past three years, but especially in recent months, she had come to take for granted Emma’s cooperation, and the days when she worried lest Emma betray her relationship with Agardi Metrovitch had dimmed into oblivion. Emma, she was now convinced, was her loving friend.

  By the same token, she could hardly have believed that Emma was entirely content at Adyar. Long ago she had accustomed herself to ignoring Emma’s fishing for sympathy and her constant lament that she had sunk from a life of luxury to a position of servitude as Madame’s housekeeper; this position she meant to escape, she repeatedly announced, once she saved enough money to buy a small hotel or boardinghouse. With visitors, she did not hesitate to insinuate that the Theosophical Society was a humbug, the phenomena produced by fraud, and that Colonel Olcott was a fool whom Madame led around by the nose. And she could reveal many more secrets if only she wanted to. When asked to elaborate, she would retort, “My mouth is shut up; I cannot talk against the people whose bread I eat.”261

  Emma was wrestling with a severe moral dilemma. After all the troubles life had dealt her, there was no denying that the temptation to remain in comfort at Adyar was enormous. In addition to courage, leaving Adyar required money, which she lacked. She and Alexis were paid only token salaries, and Madame’s generous gifts did little to compensate for that fact. Each month Emma was able to pocket some two hundred rupees from the household expense allotment and to obtain small “loans” from visitors to Headquarters, but none of this added up to the kind of nest egg she and Alexis would need to strike out on their own.

  Lately Emma was just beginning to suffer from belated pangs of conscience. In Bombay, she had not objected at all to Madame’s deceptions because, she said later, they were worked on Hindus who already believed in miracles. It was only when the frauds were imposed on Europeans that she began to get nervous. More accurately, she had viewed Helena’s early phenomena as small-time tricks, but in less than four years Madame had parlayed this trickery into an international reputation that attracted admirers from all over the world.

  Slowly Emma had come to view the operating of the astral postal service and the shrine with distaste. “I cannot express in words,” she wrote,

  how this way of going on displeased me—how very unhappy I was to be obliged to keep silent. Oh, heavens, what misery! Every day I grew more and more disgusted. I knew it to be a lying business and a deceit, and yet I could not speak out my mind.262

  Revulsion notwithstanding, her chief reason for not speaking up was that if she publicly accused Madame Blavatsky of fraud, she would be confessing to complicity. In betraying H.P.B. she would destroy herself as well, and while admittedly she had far less to lose than Madame, she did not care to be branded as a criminal; for all she knew, she might even wind up in prison.

  In a moment of childish remorse, Emma wished that she could “tear out of my life the page that concerns my life with Madame Blavatsky,”263 but since that was impossible she decided to take more practical steps. In December, at the annual Theosophical convention, she approached Prince Harisinghji Rupsinghji for a loan of two hundred rupies. The Prince, although he had just received a K.H. letter and a Tibetan coin from the shrine, was taken back at Emma’s request and answered evasively that perhaps he would help her someday. And with that vague promise Emma had to be content.

  As the day of departure approached, the pace of H.P.B.’s life quickened. They had decided to expand their traveling party to include the Parsi poet Sorab J. Padshah and Helena’s servant Babula. Since they would be absent for at least four months, Olcott, in order to be sure that Headquarters ran smoothly, appointed a management committee of seven Europeans and Hindus, among them Damodar, Dr. Franz Hartmann, and St. George Lane-Fox, a wealthy British electrical engineer and new recruit to the Theosophical ranks. Alexis Coulomb was included only at the last minute.

  H.P.B. provided the Board of Control with a written list of instructions, concerned mainly with extensive alterations she wanted Alexis to make on the roof, including the construction of a new study and library, a new kitchen for the preparation of her meals, the addition of a servants’ staircase to the roof, and a partition for the Occult Room so that Damodar might use a section of it as his office. In strong terms she made a special point of informing the committee “that no one shall bother and annoy M. Coulomb with unasked advice and meddling, for he alone is responsible for the new studio and the occult room together with Madame Coulomb.”

  Stuck casually in the middle of the list was the most important directive of all, the one that allowed her to close down the Adyar branch of the astral post office temporarily. Hence, her rooms could be safely unattended for several months: “I leave my rooms entirely in the charge of Madame and M. Coulomb, my dogs likewise; and want Madm. to take charge of the cleaning with my bearer under her orders.”264 Leaving the keys with Emma, she had impressed upon her the importance of allowing no one to enter either her room or the Occult Room. This injunction mystified and annoyed Hartmann and Lane-Fox, who could not understand why Madame Blavatsky would entrust her personal quarters and the precious shrine to, as Hartmann remarked, “a weird witch-like creature”265 who seemed to have nothing but malice for her. Even Damodar, who fully understood her reasoning, felt miffed at the arrangements.

  The SS Chandernagore was due to sail from Bombay on February 20, but en route to the port of embarkation H.P.B. planned to stop a few days at Varel to see Prince Harisinghji and his cousin, the Thakur of Wudhwan. When Emma learned Helena would be seeing Harisinghji, she begged to come along, and knowing nothing of Emma’s attempts to borrow money from the Prince, H.P.B. readily agreed. About to depart for the exciting cities of Europe, she did not want to deny Emma the more modest indulgence of a holiday. Once at Varel, Emma immediately r
eminded the Prince of his promise and must have pursued him with such persistence that he finally complained to Madame Blavatsky.

  Mortified, Helena promptly put Emma in her place, ordering her never again to hustle the Prince. When Emma burst into angry tears, H.P.B. hastened to ease her bruised feelings by promising to bring her a European watch and some real French coffee beans. Emma blew her nose, and said no more.

  The day before sailing, Helena received news of the death of her beloved Uncle Rostislav. Although she revealed the contents of the cable to Emma, she pointedly said nothing to Olcott and the others. Later that day, either because she could not deal with her emotions or because she could never pass up the opportunity for a good phenomenon, she wrote one of the strangest letters ever to come from her pen. She was beginning her journey, she wrote Nadyezhda, “depressed by a terrible foreboding. Either Uncle is dead or I am off my head.” Five days earlier, in a railway carriage, Rostislav had appeared to her, first looking pale and thin, and had said, “Farewell to you, Helena Petrovna.” Shortly afterward she had seen him again, this time looking like a young man, and when she asked him if he was alive, he replied that he was more alive than ever: he was shielded from suffering and had seen his father and all the family. “Then I knew for certain,” Helena went on to Nadyezhda, “he was no more in the world... he chose to come personally and say good-bye to me. Not a single tear in my eyes, but a heavy stone in my heart. The worst of it is that I do not know anything for certain.”266

  Next morning, aboard the Chandernagore, goodbyes were said. Emma, after many tearful hugs, stepped into the boat going back to shore, waved somberly at Babula, and then said in a quite different tone: “I shall be revenged on your mistress for preventing me from getting my two thousand rupees.”267 If Babula reported the threat to his mistress, and he certainly must have, it did not penetrate her deep and silent grief for Rostislav Fadeyev.