Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  On the nineteenth, Henry Olcott arrived to put things right, but it seemed too late. “Black care was enthroned at Adyar when I got back from Rangoon,” he wrote, “the very moral atmosphere was dark and heavy; H.P.B. was struggling for life and as vehement as an enmeshed lioness.”19 Despite his picture of Helena as a lioness in its death throes, she finally summoned sufficient strength to descend the stairs to meet with Hodgson, who was about to return to England. He frankly told her that he had no choice but to find her phenomena false and went on to explain his reasons. Helena listened stoically, and when Hodgson had finished, she told him that the Brotherhood did not want the world to believe in its existence, that he had in fact been guided by the Mahatmas during his investigation to the verdict of fraud. She acknowledged freely that he had done the best he could. “With me personally, face to face,” Hodgson would later recall, “she was courageous unto the last.”20

  Olcott, still trying to get his bearings, paid a last-minute call on Hodgson in Madras. Henry had always respected Hodgson, he had even gone out of his way to be helpful by donating to him half-a-dozen undershirts and insisting he not bother with reimbursement until he reached England. How could a man to whom he had given his underwear suddenly turn on him? It was, to Henry, as inconceivable as Hodgson’s condemnation of H.P.B. In Olcott’s view the case against Helena was not proved because, as he would write Francesca Arundale, “no one, at least no credible witness, saw her write to [sic] C. letters...”21 Whether he offered this feeble defense to Hodgson is unknown; probably not, since he suspected that H.P.B. had been guilty of bogus phenomena in moments of mental instability. However, the conversation took a brutal turn when Hodgson told him about Chintamon’s letters and Helena’s flippant boasting of her ability to control Olcott by merely looking into his face.

  Henry crumpled. “In my whole experience in the movement,” he wrote, “nothing ever affected me so much as this. It made me desperate, and for twenty-four hours almost ready to go down to the beach and drown myself in the sea.”22 When he was finally able to confront Helena, she replied only that she must have been joking.

  Feeling that all was lost, Henry lived in hourly dread of fresh revelations. “If you had had the hell to pass through that I have had,” he wrote Francesca, “I think you would be nearly crazy.”23 As it happened, he had no time to dwell on his sorrows because on March 28 the Theosophists were thwacked by still another blow. For six months Emma Coulomb and her missionary advisers had been awaiting H.P.B.’s lawsuit, not merely in response to the articles but also to a pamphlet Emma had published in December, “Some Account of My Intercourse with Madame Blavatsky,” in which she had supplied further details on H.P.B.’s activities and additional extracts from their correspondence. As time passed and H.P.B. made no move, Emma looked for other means of luring her into court. Thus when Maj.-Gen. Henry Rhodes Morgan issued a fiery defense of H.P.B. and called Madame Coulomb a forger, Emma shifted gears at once and merrily sued Morgan for libel.

  At Adyar an already volatile atmosphere was about to explode. Helena, “saying wild things,”24 tramped up and down her room as she denounced Emma, the missionaries and Colonel Olcott. Henry recalled that “it was awful to see her, with her face empurpled by the blood that rushed to her head, her eyes almost standing out from their orbits and dead-looking.”25 An all-night conference ensued, in which it was agreed that the Society would certainly go under if Helena were called as a witness in the Morgan case. Girding himself for action, Henry insisted she be kept out of sight either until the trouble died down or Emma withdrew her suit. Personally, he thought that Helena had got all of them in serious trouble. Still, he had to extricate them if he could, but this time, Madame would obey him. First she must resign her office as Corresponding Secretary, and second, leave the country without delay.26

  Helena listened to his ultimatums without sacrificing her equilibrium. She was willing to resign her office, but leaving India was quite another matter. Did he expect a seriously ill person to run away? Had he forgotten she could barely walk without assistance?

  Henry refused to listen. It was not, as she claimed, his testimony to the S.P.R. or his Buddha on wheels that had brought this misery on them; it was she who had insisted on going to Europe and stirring up trouble with phenomena he had suspected all along of being phony. It was she, he cried, who suffered from “mental aberrations” and behaved like an “insane lunatic.”27 Now it had fallen to him “to get the ship through the breakers,”28 and he had not the smallest doubt that if Helena remained in India, she would end in prison. She must leave quietly and swiftly, for if the missionaries heard of her departure they might take legal action to detain her. As for her inability to travel, he suggested that she take with her Mary Flynn, the suicidal girl from Bombay who had spent a year at Headquarters.

  Helena watched Henry strut and sputter. He was, she thought to herself, “a perfect bag of conceit and silliness. Il pose pour le martyr! The—poor man.”29 He had been her devoted friend for ten years, her “chum,” but she pitied him for failing to comprehend “that if we were theosophical twins during our days of glory, in such times of universal persecution, of false charges and public accusations, the ‘twins’ have to fall together as they have risen together, and that if I am called... a fraud by him, then must he be one also?”30 When he had finished railing, she ordered Babula to begin packing her bags.

  The next day Olcott went into Madras and bought second-class tickets on the next ship scheduled to sail whose destination happened to be Naples. At the last moment, Franz Hartmann offered to accompany Madame because he felt she should be traveling with a physician, then Helena insisted on bringing Babaji.

  On the morning of March 31, virtually unable to stand, “I was carried from my sickbed in an invalid chair, lowered into the boat, and then transferred to the steamer, like a bale of goods, hardly conscious of what was going on.”31

  Madame Blavatsky’s life in the land of the Mahatmas had come to an end.

  By the time the SS Pehio docked at Naples on the twenty-third of April, 1885, Helena had almost completely shifted her rage from the Coulombs and Hodgson to Henry Olcott. Olcott was the ogre who knew that “I have not a brass farthing in my pocket” but who had nonetheless “sent off this servant of God, with three others, and 700 rupees in our pocket,”32 apparently expecting them to live on it. Equally infuriatingly, he had entrusted the money to Hartmann, whom she had grown to despise, and to Babaji who had never been out of India, had no business sense in the first place and was slow-witted in the second. Choosing to ignore the fact that Olcott had struggled to scrape up the seven hundred rupees, Helena could only remember bitterly his admonitions that she find cheap lodgings in Italy and settle down to wait out her exile as best she could. In trivial matters, he had offended her too; for example, he had canceled the fifteen pounds’ worth of books she had ordered from London through Francesca Arundale, writing himself to Francesca that he could not afford books that Helena might not live to read, and more to the point, that he did not have fifteen pounds in his London bank account.

  Once in Naples, it took Hartmann and Babaji days to find a sufficiently inexpensive pension for them; it was not in the city or in any of the pretty little resort towns along the coast, but in a wretched village some ten miles south of Naples, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Today Torre del Greco is an industrial suburb boasting a few coral factories, where guided tour buses to Pompeii stop so that passengers may purchase coral and cameo knickknacks. In 1885 Torre del Greco offered even smaller interest to the average tourist, which explains its bargain rates. The Hotel del Vesuvio agreed to let the party occupy four furnished rooms for ninety francs a week, board included, but demanded three months’ rent in advance. When H.P.B., who had taken no part in these negotiations, learned that Babaji had parted with a considerable portion of their funds, she could only splutter helplessly. Now she must stay there whether she liked it or not.

  Initially she found Torre del Greco perversely su
ited to her mood and felt that “here in loneliness and quiet on the slopes of Vesuvius I must either recover—or die.”33 On the day of her arrival, she sent a dramatic letter to Vsevolod Solovyov in Paris urging him to come quickly as she was sure to die any day and she had many things to tell him “before I go off.” Besides, he would like the town for “the view is marvellous, the air healthy, and the living ‘cheaper than stewed turnips.’”34

  At the same time, she sent a report of her new home to Henry, whom she addressed icily as “My dear Colonel Olcott”: she was sitting in a damp room on the side of Vesuvius with her feet resting on an uncarpeted stone floor, in a country where stoves were apparently unknown and arctic air whistled under doors and through windows. While she understood perfectly that he had sent her away to die and that he had no money for better accommodations or for frivolities such as carpets, would he please ship her the old carpet from Bombay so that she might cut it into two pieces. Otherwise she could see no way of avoiding another attack of gout.

  It was unseasonably chilly for April, and she proved accurate in predicting a worsening of the gout; by the end of May, when the weather was still freezing, her right hand had swollen until she had trouble holding a pen. Not only was she physically uncomfortable but she shivered from the chill of a crushing emotional abandonment. Increasingly obsessed with Henry’s treachery, she knew she could never forgive his cruel taunts at Adyar; as for the rest of them, the Cooper-Oakleys and Subba Row and Hartmann, they made her churn with disgust. “My heart is broken—physically and morally,” not by her enemies whose persecutions she could have borne, but by selfish, weak-hearted friends who believed in her guilt yet were eager to lie on her behalf “since I was a convenient step to rise upon.” Human nature, for which she had no high regard anyway, had never seemed so obscene. Nevertheless, “with most of them, I shall remain on good terms to my dying day. Nor shall I allow them to suspect I read through them from the first.”35 She would not give them the pleasure of revealing how much she hated them, but asked only “to be left to die like a mangy dog, quietly and alone in my corner.”36

  She continued to shoot off a stream of angry letters to Henry, accusing him of cowardice and demanding that he remove her name from the Theosophist. When he replied that her letters hurt him, she responded with a half-hearted apology. Looking back only a year to the days when Theosophy had become almost fashionable, she mourned for lost fame and absent friends. Even Solovyov, her “little father,”37 had written that, although he would like to see her again, his liver had been acting up, and he simply was in no shape for a journey. Hartmann had gone, but that had been a relief, because she knew him for a cunning, vindictive liar; suddenly, she felt cut off and surrounded by tiresome people. Babaji, simply an extra mouth to feed, was of no use to her whatsoever. Mary Flynn meant well but was also “an arrant fool, spoilt at home, and does not even know how to boil water in a coffee pot. One cannot talk to her about anything but dress.”38 Besides, she longed for “something to eat besides the eternal macaroni.”39

  Having no one to talk to and no energy for writing, Helena, suddenly seeing Torre del Greco as more isolated than Siberia, decided on a change of scene. In April, Michael Katkov had published the final installment of the Blue Mountains and, while she did not know exactly how much he owed her, she was sure it could not be less than several thousand francs, enough to leave Italy. Dead set against settling in London, Paris or any other large European city, she considered Wurzburg, Germany; at least the Germans had warm stoves and double windows and knew the meaning of comfort. She liked Wurzburg because “it is near Heidelberg and Nuremberg and all the centres one of the Masters lived in.”40 It is reasonable to assume that she was familiar with this section of Germany, probably from the days when she lived with Agardi Metrovitch, and that she retained fond memories of it. Another consideration was that Wiirzburg seemed closer to Odessa than did France or England, and the likelihood of Nadyezhda’s visiting her was greatest there.

  The prospect of a cozy German apartment, where she could set up her samovar and feel comfortable, brightened her mood a little. Upon her arrival at Torre del Greco, she had felt like hiding, had in fact warned Solovyov not to reveal her whereabouts; now, however, she began to reestablish contact with people. Neither she nor Koot Hoomi had written to Alfred Sinnett in months, and she had not heard from him; she must make an immediate effort to win him back. From Mohini, who was now living in London, she learned that Alfred had lost nearly all his life savings in an unfortunate business venture. Hard pressed to support his family, he had recently written an occult novel, Karma. Even Patience had turned out a manual called “The Purpose of Theosophy.” Helena had deliberately neglected to read Karma, in which she appeared as a main character, since she could well imagine what Sinnett had done to her; she had read Rosa Praed’s Affinities, in which Mohini figured prominently. She had thought it simply dreadful, and it had made her wonder about Mohini, who had become fashionable as London’s resident Indian mystic.

  Deciding to approach Sinnett in a roundabout fashion, she wrote Mohini and asked him to show her letter to Alfred; but if this was an attempt to recapture the old friendship, she had set about it in the worst possible way. In a typical counter-attack, she flung the blame for the Coulomb charges onto Sinnett. Were it not for his greediness for phenomena and his hotheaded rush to thrust two books of the Masters’ teachings before the unenlightened public, none of this would have happened. She had “never deceived him, never tried to mislead, never lied to him”41 but now she was dying; it was she who suffered the karmic results of his ill-timed and selfish zeal. For her part, she could no longer act as intermediary between him and the Masters. “Let him drop me out of his life like a bad penny,”42 and, if Sinnett wished, he should feel free to find other channels to Tibet. The latter was a realistic concession because after Laura Holloway had returned to the United States, Sinnett had tried reaching the Mahatmas through other mediums; H.P.B. knew there was no way to stop him. And at that point, she hardly cared.

  Sinnett did not reply to her, doubtless because of the Mahatmas’ letters, encouraging him to write Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism and expressing their utmost confidence in his judgment as to how the teachings should be presented. But Patience must have intuited the pain behind H.P.B.’s words and wrote gently that “[I] cannot imagine how anyone knowing you can believe you guilty.”43 Even were she convinced that Madame “had written those wretched letters, I should love you still.”44

  How Helena must have groaned to realize that even the saintly Patience seemed less than totally convinced of her innocence. Soothing reassurances of affection were not what she needed; nothing would do but to make everyone believe wholeheartedly in her innocence.

  All of Helena’s correspondence from this period fiercely proclaims that she had never deceived anyone and never written Emma incriminating letters; one almost senses she was hiding from herself the full extent of her guilt, or, even more incredibly, that she could not bear to face reality and had actually convinced herself that she had done nothing to warrant blame. Still, in her reply to Patience written on July 23, she peels away an important layer of her psyche to reveal complete awareness of her situation and the terrible price she was paying for a career built on deception.

  Had I written even one of those idiotic and at bottom infamous interpolations now made to appear in the said letters; had I been guilty only once—of a deliberate, purposely concocted fraud, especially when those deceived were my best, my truest friends—no “love” for such a one as I! At best—pity, or eternal contempt. Pity, if proved that I was an irresponsible lunatic, a hallucinated medium made to trick by my “guides” whom I was representing as Mahatmas; contempt—// a conscious fraud—but then where would be the Masters? Ah, dear child of my old heart, I was, I really was guilty, of but one crime…,45

  That single crime was concealment of certain secrets she was not permitted to divulge without betraying the Masters. “Never, never shall y
ou, or even could you, realize... all I had to suffer for the last ten years!”46 Then she insisted on enumerating the crimes with which she had been charged: “ambition,” “love of cheap fame,” “fraud and deceit,” “cunning and unscrupulousness,” “lying and cheating,” and “deliberately bogus phenomena.” These, she said, were part of the exterior carcass that the world perceived as Madame Blavatsky; they did not see “the interior wretched prisoner,”47 nor was she able to explain herself due to the pledge of secrecy she had made to the Brotherhood. Only in some future existence did she hope for justice.

  Clearly, this wishful thinking was an attempt to twist truth into a defense for defenseless actions, but it had a more serious purpose than merely assuaging her personal agony: if she were to salvage anything from the wreckage she had left behind in India, she firmly believed her one hope lay with the European Theosophists. Thus, during the summer at Torre del Greco, she made an important decision: to break secretly with Henry Olcott, to undermine his power quietly without jeopardizing her monthly allowance and to transfer the heart and soul of the Society from India to Europe. In Helena’s opinion, the Society, like herself, had outgrown Henry Olcott. The first clue to her thinking crops up in a letter to Francesca Arundale and her mother, Mary, odd confidantes considering that they were Henry’s closest friends in London.