Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Helena had taken no more notice of the men than she did of many other young people who, initially thrilled to be part of her court, had quickly drifted away, especially after the release of the S.P.R. Report. Interestingly enough, the names of neither Bertram nor Archibald occur in any of her voluminous letters, ordinarily crammed with personality stories, until the spring of 1887 when she mentioned Archibald rather blandly to Vera.

  For several months prior to their visit to Ostend, the Keightleys had been writing Madame about the sorry state of London Theosophy; there were few active members left, maybe five or six, who met once a week for discussion, but could do little else since Sinnett refused to activate the Society. It was only out of desperation that they were turning to Madame herself to ask how they might work for the Masters and revive Theosophy. Would it be possible, they wondered, for her to move to London to teach occultism?

  As Helena later explained to a correspondent, she had little to say about their proposal. “Be off with you! I thought to myself, let me alone to write my book quietly.”166 What she did not tell the Keightleys was that she had been secretly contemplating just such a move since the previous fall when the trouble with Miss Leonard had been settled. As always, money held her back; because of her incapacity, she needed a flat on the ground floor, but could pay no more than seven pounds a month. Since a furnished flat could not be had for that price, it would be necessary to buy furniture on a monthly installment plan. At the time, the very thought of undertaking such a move wearied her.

  The Keightleys’ plan, however, had appealed to Helena, for it would guarantee her financial independence from the miserly Henry Olcott. If she would agree to come, a beautiful house with a garden was hers, free of charge. Everything would be arranged for her personal convenience, and furthermore they would personally transport her and her belongings across the Channel in their arms if need be, they insisted. Hiding a purr beneath the famous grumble, Helena finally consented but refused to set a definite date for the move.

  At the end of March, despite the fact that she had not been out of the house or opened a window since November, Madame caught a cold that quickly turned into bronchitis. When the Old Lady began falling asleep in the middle of the day, Constance first suspected something more serious than a cold was bothering her and summoned the doctor. He diagnosed a kidney infection, but his prescriptions did little good, and H.P.B. continued to get worse. Seriously alarmed, the countess cabled Mary Gebhard to come at once, but, meanwhile, exhausted herself with round-the-clock nursing duties. The only person she could find to relieve her was a Catholic soeur de chariti “whom I soon discovered was worse than useless; for whenever my back was turned she would hold up her crucifix before H.P.B. and entreat her to come into the fold of the only church before it was too late. This nearly drove H.P.B. wild.”

  Meanwhile Helena lay in a state of lethargy bordering on coma, from which she could not be roused. Since the Belgian doctor’s treatment had failed, Constance took the liberty of cabling an eminent London doctor who was also a Theosophist, Ashton Ellis. At 3 a.m. one morning, Ellis arrived at their door. After listening to Mary Gebhard and Constance describe H.P.B.’s symptoms and examining the prescriptions ordered by the local physician, Ellis dosed Madame with his special medicine, then caught a few hours’ rest. The next morning he consulted with Helena’s regular doctor, who held out little hope for their patient’s recovery. Although Ellis did not disagree, he decided to try stimulating the kidneys by massage.

  For the next two days he sat at Helena’s bedside, administering hourly massages until he himself was exhausted. Still she continued to fail. On March 31, Mary suggested that H.P.B. make a will, for, if she died intestate in a foreign country, the confusion over her property would never end. Helena had no property to speak of, but she feared that if she failed to make a will, Constance would not be permitted to have her cremated. She was “struck with horror at the thought of being buried, of lying here with catholics, and not in Adyar,” and told Mary to go ahead and contact a lawyer. Taking the watch that night, Constance “began to detect the peculiar faint odor of death which sometimes precedes dissolution.” Once Helena opened her eyes and said she was glad to die; finally they both fell asleep. When Constance shook herself awake the next morning, terrified that Madame had died in the night, she saw H.P.B. sitting up in bed watching her. The Master had been there, she said, and when he had offered her the choice either of ending her life or of finishing The Secret Doctrine, she had accepted the extension. The countess would please fetch her coffee and breakfast, and bring her tobacco box since she was dying for a cigarette.

  The parties concerned with preparing the will arrived to find H.P.B. dressed and seated in the dining room. A lawyer and the American consul entered with long serious faces, expecting to encounter a dead or dying woman, and instead found the corpse offering them a smoke. The countess remembered animated and amusing conversation before the meeting was called to order and the lawyer began asking questions. Did Madame have any relations? Did she have a husband?

  By this time H.P.B. was in fine fettle and snapped that for all she knew, old Blavatsky was dead long ago, and if they wanted to know more, they could go to Russia to find out; she had summoned them to write her will, not Blavatsky’s. Once this hurdle had been passed, it took only a few minutes to complete the transaction. There was no mention in the will about her possessions or cremation, only that she wished the countess to take her body to London and to make all necessary arrangements. Coffee was served and the men lingered three hours talking. Finally the American consul rose and said,

  “Well, I think this is enough fatigue for a dying woman,”167 and the will-signing broke up amidst peals of laughter. When Constance and Mary tried to put Madame to bed, she objected vigorously and sat up late playing cards.

  Although Madame recovered rapidly, the brush with death had frightened her more than she cared to admit. Still, it proved a boost to her psychic well-being, since it had shown her that people still cherished her. Why, she asked herself, should the countess be so devoted if she did not love her? Why did Mary remain with her, nursing her like a baby, instead of spending Easter with her family? And Ashton Ellis, a stranger, had left his job at Westminster Dispensary without permission and been dismissed as a result; moreover, he refused to accept any money from her. “I really do not know what to think!” she wrote Vera. “What am I to them?”

  What struck her as curious was that, apart from gratitude, she could muster no real feeling for the people who had made personal sacrifices to save her. As she confessed to her sister, “I cannot love anyone personally, but you of my own blood.”168 Perhaps, thought Helena, it was her karma to inspire devotion she could not reciprocate; perhaps it had become impossible for her to love anyone who was not Russian. On Easter Sunday, still brooding about this puzzle, she turned as she always did when overcome with bittersweet nostalgia, to Nadyezhda.

  My old comrade and friend, You ask whether you should send me something, whether I want something? I do not want anything, darling, except yourself. Send me yourself. We have not seen each other for a year and a half, and when shall we meet again? Maybe, never.169

  The household at Ostend began to disperse: the frazzled countess, for once acknowledging her physical and mental exhaustion, longed for a complete rest and, after promising to join H.P.B. in London in the fall, departed for Sweden. Mary Gebhard agreed to remain with H.P.B. When the Keightleys arrived in the last week of April, some of the packing had already been completed under Mary’s supervision, but the bulk of it, H.P.B.’s books and papers, still remained to be done. This job was, Bertram recalled, “a truly terrible undertaking, for she went on writing until the very last moment, and as sure as any book, paper or portion of manuscript had been carefully packed away at the bottom of some box, so surely would she need it, and insist upon its being disinterred at all costs.”170 Nevertheless, the Keightleys were full of enthusiasm as they told Madame about “Maycot,” her futur
e home, a little cottage in Norwood, and about its owner, Mabel Collins, a ferociously dedicated Theosophist, who felt honored to be sharing her home with H.P.B. If Helena had doubts about the paradisiacal aspects of the new arrangement, she kept them to herself.

  The morning of May 1 dawned cold and foggy. The forty-degree temperature worried Helena, who had not been outside for the past six months, and she fussed so furiously, Archibald began to worry that she would never survive the Channel crossing. But somehow, between the two men and Louise, the boxes and trunks were toted down to the steamer and H.P.B. was carried aboard. Despite everyone’s apprehensions, not to mention a rough crossing and a slippery pier at Dover, the move proceeded largely without incident: they finally reached “Maycot” where, Bertram noted with amazement, “before we had been two hours in the house, H.P.B. had her writing materials out and was hard at work again.”171

  LONDON

  1887-1891

  I

  Priestess of Lansdowne Road

  In the spring of 1887 London was at its grimy best. Under a canopy of pale green leaves, the squares and gardens of Norwood were scented with grape-clusters of lilac and the yellow tendrils of laburnum. Towering above the labyrinth of cottages and villas, each with its smoke wreath trailing away to the east, loomed the twin towers of the Crystal Palace, which had been dismantled after the Great Exhibition of 1851 and transplanted in this quiet south London suburb. If the sight of the glass palace stirred up three-decade-old memories, Helena did not acknowledge them to anyone, nor did she comment on the fact that living in Norwood was Allan Octavian Hume, who was said to have decorated the walls of his Kingswood Road villa with heads and horns of Indian big game. These painful reminders of her past did little to endear Norwood to Helena.

  “Maycot,” on Crown Hill in Upper Norwood, was invariably described as small, pretty and charming, which is not surprising because Mabel Collins was a woman with a taste for the precious; she liked tiny, old-fashioned houses, rustic verandas shaded by roses and canary creepers, and elaborate interior decoration. One of her later homes in the fashionable West End would be described in a newspaper article as “a perfect cage, delightfully appointed for the little bird it holds.”1 Unfortunately there was nothing birdlike about H.P.B., who expressed her opinion of “Maycot” with characteristic bluntness: “This house is a hole.”2 Since walking up and down stairs had become so excruciatingly painful that she no longer even attempted it, she was given two rooms on the ground floor but, she reported to Countess Wachtmeister, they were so tiny that when three people came in, “we tread uninterruptedly on each other’s corns; when there are four, we sit on each other’s heads.” She used one of the rooms for her office and the other as a bedroom, although the room was too small for a bed, and could only accommodate a sofa. Equally annoying, “there is no quiet here, for the slightest noise is heard all over the house.”3

  There was still another difficulty with “Maycot,” and that was Mabel Collins. H.P.B. had disliked her on sight when they had first met in 1884. At that time, Mabel had written a charming mystical story, The Idyll of the White Lotus, which she showed in manuscript to Colonel Olcott, claiming it had been dictated to her while in trance by some mysterious person. When H.P.B. had remarked matter-of-factly that the person sounded like an old friend of hers, a Greek adept named Hilarion, the suggestible Mabel had pounced on this and dedicated her book “To the True Author, the Inspirer of this work.” Evidently encouraged, she immediately plunged into a similar treatise on Eastern wisdom, Light on the Path, this one carrying the by-line “Sri Hilarion, written down by MC.” When H.P.B. finally got around to reading Light on the Path with its forty-two axioms for spiritual enlightenment that Mabel claimed she had found splashed on the walls of “a certain place to which I obtained admission,” some of it struck her as grossly unacceptable. Especially disturbing was the rule advising students to yield to their senses by “plunging into the mysterious and glorious depths of your own being.”4 To the puritanical Helena, this was dangerous advice smacking of Tantric black magic and what she called “occult venom.”5

  Mabel Collins was tall and willowy, a Titian beauty, with an exquisite oval face, ivory complexion, and gleaming auburn hair. Daughter of the well-known novelist Mortimer Collins, she was born in 1851 and educated at home, and at the age of twenty married Dr. Kenningale Robert Cook, scholar, poet and editor of the Dublin University Magazine. Isabelle de Steiger, who lived opposite them in Bedford Gardens when they were first married, remembered the newlyweds as a beautiful young couple living in an old-fashioned villa with a square garden full of apple and pear trees; Mabel, she said, was a “much-admired private medium and by no means regarded as an ordinary one,”6 who also contributed short stories to various magazines under her maiden name. By the time she met H.P.B. Mabel had published no less than nine novels and had also taken a brief fling at acting. Her most notable role had been a portrayal of Madame Helena Modjeska. Personally she had not fared so well since her childless marriage to Dr. Cook had gradually soured and she had already left him when he died in 1886.

  There is a photograph of Mabel in ultrafashionable fur-trimmed hat and suit; it gives unmistakable proof of her glamour. What it fails to provide is the slightest indication of a woman willing to sit at the feet of a guru, especially one as irascible as Madame Blavatsky. Still, that seems to have been just what Mabel had in mind when she rashly offered H.P.B. her home. Never did she dream that a spiritual teacher would be capable of expressing her displeasure by screaming abuse that could be heard over half the neighborhood; and never never had she imagined that the abuse would be directed at her. Speedily disillusioned, Mabel would later remind herself that whatever else H.P.B. had done, she had taught her a valuable lesson. “I learned from her how foolish, how ‘gullible,’ how easily flattered human beings are, taken en masse.”7 She decided that Madame’s contempt for people was on the same gigantic scale as everything else about her. Except for her delicately-tapered fingers, Helena impressed her as excessive.

  She had a greater power over the weak and credulous, a greater capacity for making black appear white, a larger waist, a more voracious appetite, a more confirmed passion for tobacco, a more ceaseless and insatiable hatred of those whom she thought to be her enemies, a greater disrespect for les convenances, a worse temper, a greater command of bad language, and a greater contempt for the intelligence of her fellow-beings than I had ever supposed possible to be contained in one person. These I suppose, must be reckoned as her vices, though whether a creature so indifferent to all ordinary standards of right and wrong can be held to have virtues or vices I know not.8

  To be sure, these aggravations built over the course of time; in May of 1887, Mabel was still smiling and playing the hospitable hostess.

  It could not have been more distressing to both Mabel and the Keightleys that Madame was in a vile temper most of the time; Helena herself admitted as much in a letter to her sister: “I grumble at them, I drive them away, I shut myself off from all these mystical vampires, who suck all the moral strength out of me—no! all the same they rush to me like flies to honey.”9 A few days after her arrival, she demanded to know what they wanted of her; to revive the Theosophical movement and work for the Masters, they told her, as well as to teach them occultism. H.P.B. responded that she must disappoint them in the matter of lessons, at least for the present; her job now was to finish The Secret Doctrine, but in order to do it she required their help. Those present—Mabel, the two Keightleys, Ashton Ellis and Thomas Harbottle—assured her of their willingness to work.

  “All right then,” she replied. “Here you are—get to work right away.”10 She scooped up every scrap of paper she had written so far and handed the piles to Arch Keightley. As a first step, he and the rest of them were to read through the pages, then comment on what they each felt needed to be done.

  Over the following days, Arch, Bert and Mabel read every line; after comparing notes, they screwed up their courage to face Mada
me with the news that it was “a confused muddle and jumble,”11 which needed to be rearranged according to some workable structure. Helena sat as stiff as a board and listened without interruption, but when they had finished she burst forth with a fireworks display of profanity. Then she turned to Mabel and asked if she agreed with the Keightleys’ analysis. Entirely, Mabel replied; they were quite right.

  “Go to hell,”12 H.P.B. roared. So far as she was concerned, she was sick of The Secret Doctrine; she washed her hands of it and they could do with it as they liked.

  Her anger camouflaged despair and the discouraging realization that the Keightleys were telling the truth. She could not produce a coherent manuscript by herself, any more than she had been able to write Isis Unveiled alone; she especially smarted at their criticism of her awkward, amateurish English. That these people had willingly dropped their own activities to devote themselves to rescuing her produced no gratitude in Helena, only smoldering resentment that she vented in sarcasm, indifference and unadorned nastiness.

  When a young Theosophist named Alice Cleather asked Bert to arrange an introduction to Madame, he warned that it might be a trying encounter. Undeterred, Alice replied that she was facing an inner crisis and simply had to see Madame, and so an appointment was made. At that time Alice was living in Eastbourne with her husband and two children and, as they were not well-off, she had to scrimp to put money aside. Now she decided to use her savings for the pilgrimage to H.P.B. Met by Bert at the West Norwood station, she was told that Madame frequently argued with Mabel Collins and sometimes when the windows were open could be heard halfway down the road. This revelation turned out to be prophetic. “Sure enough,” Alice recalled, “when we got within a hundred yards of Maycot, I heard loud and apparently angry voices floating—or rather ricochetting—towards us down the road.” Already aghast, she was further distressed when Bert murmured that if the Old Lady was in “one of her tempers,”13 she would probably refuse to see Alice at all.