Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  The next day when Helena arrived at her new home, her mood continued to be gloomy, because as she entered the house she was heard to remark, “I shall not live long in this house—it does not bear my lucky number seven.” And she added very quietly, “I shall leave here only to be cremated.”179

  On July 3 when the new headquarters was officially opened to the public, H.P.B. attended the dedication ceremony. She was still clinging to her depression. An armchair had been set up for her near the platform “and I sat as if enthroned.” Still, she was “hardly able to keep myself together, so ill was I,” and Dr. Mennell hovered nearby in case she should feel faint. An estimated 250 people jammed the hall, fifty over capacity, while many more watched the proceedings through the windows; others had to be turned away. The press had various comments to make on the event; the Vanity Fair reporter described the audience as mainly “human curiosities” and the Star provided more specific details on stern-faced young women with short hair and the suspicion of a mustache, and haggard young men with abundant locks and colorful neckties. While none of the reporters noticed Mrs. Edward Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting in the front row, Helena spotted her at once. “Imagine my astonishment,”180 she later reported to Vera. “What are we coming to!”

  Perhaps the startling sight of Mrs. Benson aroused her, for during the rest of the dedication, H.P.B. pepped up and listened to the speeches with great pleasure. As president of the Blavatsky Lodge, Annie delivered one of her eloquent speeches, after which she turned over the podium to Alfred Sinnett, president of the London Lodge, who gave an enthusiastic address on the future of Theosophy. Next came short speeches by Bertram Keightley and a Mrs. Woolf, who represented the American Section, then Mrs. Besant officially threw open the hall and the ceremony ended. H.P.B., as always, did not speak, but no doubt every eye in the hall was on her at one time or another.

  This was the first time Helena had seen Sinnett in nearly two years for there had been, in his words, “a complete extinction of our former intimate relations.”181 Occasionally when a member of the rival group would stray into H.P.B.’s camp, she did not give the person a welcome that would encourage a second visit. The previous year, after five years in Ceylon, Charles W. Leadbeater had returned to London and came to pay his respects to the Madame— once. Helena had almost forgotten the existence of the bearded curate whom she had carried off to India and left there in 1884. Not only had he done anything he was told, from sweeping floors to clerical work, but he had offered no protest when Olcott had shuffled him off to Ceylon for Theosophical field work and supervision of the Society-sponsored schools for Buddhist children. Indeed not a meow had been heard from him until 1889 when, understandably, he grew restless and began to write Sinnett that he had developed psychic powers by which he communicated regularly with the Mahatmas.

  Even though Sinnett professed to be in close touch with Koot Hoomi through various mediums, the truth was that none of them had proved entirely satisfactory. Cautiously perking up his ears at this news, he suggested that C.W. might like to return to England as tutor to his son Denny, and Francesca Arundale’s nephew George. Leadbeater must have realized he had captured Sinnett’s interest because he felt confident enough to demand a condition for his return; he wanted to bring with him a fourteen-year-old Cingalese boy, C. Jinarajadasa, whom he described as his protege, but who, as he would later confide to Annie, was actually his reincarnated younger brother Gerald, who had been murdered by bandits in South America in 1862. It was rumored that Leadbeater practically kidnapped the boy, whose father had pursued him to the steamer, took him home at gun point, then relented and allowed him to sail. Although Jinarajadasa himself described the story as ridiculous and implausible, the rumor persisted.

  In London, Leadbeater stayed at the Sinnetts’, which was only a ten-minute walk from 17 Lansdowne Road, and one day he took Jinarajadasa to call on Madame Blavatsky. Looking back forty years later, Jinarajadasa would retain a vague impression of her as “a large lady in a large chair”182 who ignored him. After that visit, Leadbeater associated exclusively with the London Lodge where Sinnett praised his “wonderful clairvoyant faculties”183 and appointed him secretary. Later, after Miss Arundale learned of his reputation with young boys and removed George from his care, Sinnett found him a position in the London office of the Pioneer. No doubt this last scandal, as well as news of his tete-a-tetes with Mahatma K.H., made Helena more leery of him than ever, and she did not bother to hide her disdain. Very possibly remembering the chamber-pot trials that she had put him through during their 1884 voyage, or maybe referring to the European connotation of his initials, she took delight in calling him “W.C.” Leadbeater. Surely she never dreamed that within four years the despised “W.C.” would become the most important influence in Annie Besant’s life, greater even than her own, and that within fifteen, he would achieve enough power in the Society to be very nearly capable of destroying it.

  By mid-July H.P.B.’s resident staff of eleven workers was assembled under one roof. In addition to Helena and Annie, there were the Keightleys, Constance Wachtmeister, George Mead, and Isabel Cooper-Oakley, who had been restored to Madame’s favor; also the Irishman Claude Wright, Walter Old, and H.P.B.’s old friend Emily Kislingbury. Herbert Burrows and Isabel’s younger sister Laura Cooper184 were also part of this inner circle, although other obligations prevented them from living at Avenue Road. Later came an American, James Pryse, who would manage the Theosophical printing press. The rules of the house stressed regularity: breakfast at eight a.m., work until lunch at one, then more work until dinner at seven. Thursday evening was the regular Lodge meeting but attendance had mounted so rapidly that a new admission system had been introduced whereby visitors could attend only three meetings before declaring membership, and soon Tuesday evening conversaziones had to be added to the crowded schedule. On nights when no activity was taking place, the staff would gather in H.P.B.’s room to talk or receive instructions. By midnight all the lights had to be extinguished.

  During the remainder of the summer Helena’s health took a noticeable turn for the better. She had not regained the spryness of that golden summer at Fontainebleau, nor would she, but she did woo back some of that strength. One of Madame’s first orders of business in the new home was to decorate her rooms. Always inclined to be particular about her environment, her interest had intensified as she had grown increasingly unable to leave her quarters. Her office, papered in a dark color, was arranged so that the desk and armchair faced the garden window, but the room’s chief attraction were its ornaments, among them, busts of Plato and Socrates and a gold Buddha, and its gallery of photographs of Annie. On one wall hung an ancient Japanese screen that Olcott had sent her after a trip to Japan and near it she placed Henry’s photograph; she also had from the Lamasery days a small Japanese cabinet that had suffered a number of accidents during its travels but had always managed to be repaired. On the velvet-covered door leading to Mead’s office, she pinned more photos. A curtained archway led to her bedroom with its brass and iron bedstead, a dressing table where she liked to sit in the mornings and open her mail, and a large clothespress full of clothing she never wore. Still more snapshots festooned the bedroom, most conspicuously one of William Judge that she had placed at the head of her bed.

  As soon as her rooms were fixed to her liking, she turned her attention to a project she had been considering for some time. Having formed her Esoteric Section over Olcott’s objections, she now further fragmented that secret organization into what she called an Inner Group, six men and six women who had displayed the greatest potential for discipleship and occult training. Most of the select few were drawn from the resident staff: Isabel, Laura, Emily, Annie and the countess among the women; Arch, Mead, Old, and Wright among the men; curiously, Bertram Keightley was not chosen. The three “outsiders” were Alice Cleather, Herbert Coryn, and E. T. Sturdy. Meetings of the twelve disciples were held in the little blue-roofed Occult Room, which only
they were permitted to enter, and this secrecy led the less luminary members to imagine all kinds of mysteries, including séances and hypnotism. What actually happened does remain a mystery; the inner circle was sworn to secrecy, and even forty years later, after George Mead had left the Society, he felt honor bound by his oath never to reveal their rites and occult experiments. The only information on this cult within a cult was provided by Alice Cleather, who allowed only that each of the twelve had his or her own chair, and that during instructions they sat in a semicircle with the six men on Helena’s right and the six women on her left; sometimes a single student would sit alone “under special conditions and under observation.”185

  The high points of the summer of 1890 were another visit from Vera and the return of Charles and Vera Johnston from India. After expecting to make a successful career in the Bengal Civil Service, Johnston had soon had the misfortune of contracting jungle fever, and finally, two years later, had been invalided back to England. Although he would not recover his health for many years, he and his wife settled near Avenue Road and spent much of their time with H.P.B. With the two Veras at her side again, Helena was considerably buoyed: “We passed the evenings talking of old days, of her beloved country,” her sister Vera recalled, and added that another topic centered on “the injustice of the English press and its calumnies against Russia,” which to Helena “seemed always to amount to injuries against herself.”186

  During Vera’s stay at Avenue Road, Helena celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday, astonishing everyone by dressing up and traveling to East London for a public appearance. Actually, Madame would have made this particular jaunt even in ill-health: earlier in the year, a wealthy but anonymous Theosophist had given her one thousand pounds to use at her discretion for the benefit of the Society but, if possible, for the welfare of women. As Annie Besant recalled, there was a great deal of discussion about how the money might best be spent and when she suggested establishing a residence club for working women in the East End, H.P.B. leaped at the idea. Mrs. Besant attributed this enthusiasm to H.P.B.’s social consciousness and her compassion for the afflictions of women and children, but Madame must have been reminded of the New York days when she herself had found refuge in just such an establishment. At 193 Bow Street, Annie and Laura Cooper found a large, old-fashioned house with spacious rooms, oak beams, windowseats and enormous fireplaces, and in due course the renovations began.

  On August 15, when the Home for Working Women was officially opened, the house had been transformed into a bright and pretty place that was not in the least institutional. In the upstairs area, which slept a dozen, the beds were separated by gaily painted Japanese screens; downstairs were cheerful sitting rooms, a workroom, library and dining room that could serve more than a hundred fifty meals at a sitting, for the Home was to be a clubhouse as well as a residence. At the opening ceremony Madame Blavatsky smiled happily as she watched fifty young women singing and dancing. She ate cakes and tea, and listened to speeches by Annie Besant and Herbert Burrows. If the event brought back twenty-year-old memories from her impoverished days at 222 Madison Street, she did not mention them.

  Memories seemed compelled to hover around her, too many of them painful ones that she never would have recalled willingly: for many months now, the American press had been keeping up a running fire of personal attacks on her, all of them inspired or written by Elliott Coues; in the Washington Evening Star, under the headline blavatsky’s alleged tricks, she could have read an interview in which Coues referred to her Masters as “a Mahatmic myth which I sometime think she has lied about so long and so steadily that she half-believes it herself.”187 The New York Sun marveled to see that the Theosophical Society was still in business: “Mme. Blavatsky has the assurance to write to her American dupes that her charlatanism is prospering more than ever, financially and otherwise. She addresses them from a sick chamber, to which she is confined by a mortal disease, and yet she persists in her determination to keep the imposture going until the end.”188

  In the Religio-Philosophical Journal, where Madame’s doings were staple features sarcastically headlined with titles such as blavatskosophy, pope blavatsky, and Muscovite mesmerism, she could have read how, while preaching vegetarianism, she devoured plates of liver “without fork or knife but only with her fingers and her bad, unsteady, fang-like teeth”; how her personal habits were “filthy” and her language “vile”; how she had broken up several families, including Colonel Olcott’s; how she regularly consulted mediums from whom she “derived much information and direction”; how, according to one of the original founders of the Society, R. B. Westbrook, Madame was a “false pretender” and “ambitious adventuress” whose escapades in Philadelphia and New York were too spicy to describe in print; how her “universal brotherhood” was nothing more than “a universal school for scandal and a hotbed of dark and evil passions”; how William Judge told friends he had met one of the Mahatmas during his trip to India. In the same paper Helena could have found sarcastic jeers at everything she held precious: “Holy shrine at Adyar! Blessed Koot Hoomi! Blessed Master Morya! Blessed St. Henry! Blessed St. Helena Petrovna, ever Virgin!”189 Likewise she could have read personal letters that she had written to Coues, Judge, and several other American Theosophists. Included was correspondence of William Judge. “H.P.B.,” he wrote to an unnamed correspondent, “is rather disgusted with London, as she thought to get conditions right there for a good lot of tine phenomena, but chelas that fly in there fly right out holding their noses from the dreadful smell made by quarreling and folly.”190

  To this steady barrage of insults, Helena made no public reply, but merely simmered helplessly. It was not until the end of July, when the most sensational attack to date appeared, that she could tolerate no more: The lead editorial of the New York Sun for Sunday, July 20, began:

  THE HISTORY OF A HUMBUG

  We publish today a wonderfully interesting history of the invention of the humbug of Theosophy. It is related by Prof. Elliott Coues of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, an ornithologist of distinction, who at one time was deceived by Mme. Blavatsky’s pretensions, but since has discovered her for the imposter she is.191

  There followed a full-page, seven-column interview with Dr. Coues under an eye-catching headline: “Blavatsky unveiled? The tartar termagant tamed by Smithsonian scientist.” In his customary picturesque language, Coues unloosed every tidbit of rumor he had managed to collect, and he pictured H.P.B. as a charlatan, Olcott as a fool, their followers as dupes and simpletons, and the Society as a “theosophical cesspool.” Obviously his intention was to present the most damaging dossier possible of Madame, and clearly he had gone to a great deal of effort to do so. In addition to two fake Mahatma letters, there was private correspondence from Emma Coulomb, asserting that Madame had been married to Agardi Metrovitch; from the late D. D. Home to William Emmette Coleman about Helena’s life in Paris in the 1850s; from the American consul at Cairo saying that it was a well-known fact Madame had been expelled from that city in 1872 and he could probably supply a copy of the official expulsion order if he were authorized to do so by the State Department; from Richard Hodgson revealing that he had known of Madame’s relationship with Metrovitch but had been too much the gentleman to include it in his report; and finally from Olcott and H.P.B. themselves, in which they expressed uncomplimentary opinions of each other in an orgy of name-calling.

  Coues carefully reviewed all the Theosophical scandals, the Hodgson Report, Emma Coulomb’s charges and the Henry Kiddle plagiarism charge, but he was not content to stop there; he reiterated and elaborated the theory that H.P.B. was a Russian spy who might have been fired, and also repeated the story of Isis Unveiled having been written by Baron de Palm with help from Olcott and Judge. Then, reaching further back into the past, he brought out every piece of dirty linen he could grab: Olcott did not dare return to the United States for fear his ex-wife and sons would clap him in jail for unpaid back alimony; he and Helen
a indulged in “the usual monkey-parrot” business while living together in New York, even though she was married to Michael Betanelly. Of course such dalliance was nothing new to her because her life prior to New York had been a succession of adventures with men to whom she had not been married.

  The Sun expose was notable because, even though stories of Helena’s marriage to Betanelly as well as her involvement with Nicholas Meyendorff had been floating around for a half-dozen years, no newspaper had dared print the details of Madame Blavatsky’s early life. Not only did the Sun name names, it accused her of having been a member of the Paris demimonde during 1857-1858, and of having had “a liaison with the Prince Emile de Wittgenstein by whom she had a deformed son, who died in Kieff in 1868.”192 Here Coues went astray. When H.P.B. first came to New York she had showed around to private individuals and even newspaper reporters the old letters from her childhood friend Wittgenstein and also from Baron Meyendorff; Coues, trying to determine the paternity of her son, must have latched on to these two names as possible candidates. The correct answer might easily have been supplied by Vsevolod Solovyov or even by Meyendorff himself, but Coues took a wild guess and came up with the wrong name.

  Helena immediately instructed Judge to file suit for libel against the Sun. Unlike previous occasions when her litigiousness had been contained by Olcott and later Sinnett, she now asked no one’s advice. Ignoring all of the charges, she dismissed the demimonde accusation as “so ridiculous as to rouse laughter” and concentrated on the aspersion against Prince Wittgenstein “now dead... an old friend of my family whom I saw for the last time when I was 18 years old... He was a cousin of the late Empress of Russia and little thought that upon his grave would be thrown the filth of a modern New York newspaper. The insult to him and to me I am bound by all the dictates of my duty to reply.”193