Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (18 page)

Following Kardec’s rule manual, Helena emphasized that her society would be a serious study group. Curiosity seekers, skeptics and potential troublemakers would not be admitted to membership. At the séances, during which concentration and respectful silence were mandatory, the spirits were questioned on the subjects of history, philosophy and science. Notes were taken. The proceedings were orderly and high-toned, at least they would have been if she had been able to follow Kardec’s instructions. As it was, she had no decent mediums, which Kardec had listed as an essential, and trouble was not long in following.

In the meantime, however, Helena had widened her circle of acquaintances. She renewed her contacts with the Coptic magician Paulos Mentamon, and she also struck up a warm friendship with Lydia Paschkoff, the Russian explorer and traveler who would one day make explorations in the regions of the Upper Nile and become St. Petersburg correspondent for
Le Figaro.
Eccentric and worldly, Madame Paschkoff was an ardent feminist and, like Helena, a lover of the weird and fantastical. A decidedly less vivid personality was Emma Cutting, a young Levantine woman of English extraction, who until recently had been working as a nursery governess in an Egyptian family. Dismissed, she had found a menial position at the Hotel d’Orient. She spoke Italian and French and knew some English, but was otherwise of limited intellectuality, at least she was not the type of sophisticated woman whom H.P.B. ordinarily found compatible.

Emma met Madame Blavatsky accidentally. While walking one day along the Street of the Red Mosque, she was almost knocked over “by something that brushed by me very swiftly” and upon inquiry learned that she was “that Russian Spiritist who calls the dead and makes them answer your questions.” At that time Emma was feeling depressed over the death of her only brother who had killed himself. While she was an orthodox Christian who had never so much as dabbled along the shores of Spiritualism, “the idea of being able to hear his voice was for me heavenly delight,” she thought. In any case, she had heard of H.P.B.’s
Societe Spirite [sic]
from a Greek acquaintance who happened to be its secretary, and she asked for an introduction to the Madame.

Dazzled, Emma decided that Madame Blavatsky was “very interesting and very clever,” but the séance she attended at Helena’s apartment in Abdeen Street turned out to be a disappointment. Expecting her brother’s voice, she got only a few raps. The secretary told her that the spirits preferred to appear in a room that had been especially purified and set aside for them; the Madame was now preparing such a séance chamber and if Emma returned in a few days, she would see wonders.

I called again when the closet was ready, but what was my surprise when, instead of finding the kind spirits there to answer our questions, I found a room full of people,
all alive,
and using most offensive language towards the founder of the Society, saying that she had taken their money and had left them only with this, pointing at the space between the wall and the cloth, where several pieces of twine were still hanging which had served to pull through the ceiling a long glove stuffed with cotton, which was to represent the materialized hand and arm of some spirit. I went away, leaving the crowd red as fire, ready to knock her down when she came back.

Soon afterward Emma ran into Madame Blavatsky and asked why she had pulled such a lousy trick. Helena, looking “very unhappy,”
⁹⁶
blamed it on Madame Sebir.

Writing to Nadyezhda, she castigated the Society’s amateur mediums who stole her money, drank too much “and now I caught them cheating most shamefully our members who come to investigate the phenomena by bogus manifestations. I had very disagreeable scenes with several persons who held me alone responsible for all this.”
⁹⁷
During one of these episodes, it seems that a Greek man, “possessed, I suppose, by some vile spook,” rushed into her apartment with a revolver, “and finding me in the breakfast room, declared that he had come to shoot me but would wait till I had done with my meal.” Fortunately, she assured Nadyezhda, she had been able to wrest away the pistol and “he is now shut up in a lunatic asylum.” Despite the jocular tone of the letter, she was upset enough to swear off séances. “They are too dangerous and I am not practised and strong enough to control the wicked spooks that may approach my friends during such sittings.”
⁹⁸

She was, in fact, extremely discouraged. News of the fraudulent séance must have spread because attendance at the Society’s meetings dropped off sharply. So did her only source of income. Emma, evidently harboring no ill feelings, dropped around to see her. “On hearing that she was really in want I gave her pecuniary help, and continued doing so for some time.”
⁹⁹

Throughout the winter of 1872, Helena found herself in increasing difficulties. She and Madame Sebir moved to a cheaper apartment in Kantara el dick Street. A sympathetic Emma continued to lend her money, even though she herself had little to spare and H.P.B. warned her that she was in no position to repay the loans. One cannot escape the impression that Emma felt fond of Madame Blavatsky and that it was a reciprocated affection. Later Emma would make the mystifying remark that she had known Agardi Metrovitch in Cairo, but it was only talk. She and Helena were confidantes, and what she knew of Agardi was what the Madame had told her, no doubt with characteristic exaggeration: how they had been secretly married and performed together on the stage, how Yuri had died, in short the whole litany of her woes. And why should Helena have not poured out her troubles to Emma? She had nothing to hide, and she had, after all, lost her child, and her lover/ husband, the only family of her own that she would ever have.

“My famous Societe Spirite,” she wrote Nadyezhda, “has not lasted a fortnight—it is a heap of ruins,”
¹⁰⁰
but it was not so short-lived as she implied. When the American Spiritualist James M. Peebles visited Cairo the following year, he was heartened to learn that “Madame Blavatsky, assisted by other brave souls, formed a society of Spiritualists... with fine writing mediums and other forms of manifestations.”
¹⁰¹
Noting that even though Madame herself was no longer in Egypt, he reported that the Society continued to hold weekly séances during the winter months.

In April, 1872, Helena had returned to Odessa with Madame Sebir and the monkeys, but neither Russia nor her family restored her spirits. It was not merely a matter of feeling bored with her aunts—although she certainly must have been—but rather an inchoate longing for something that Russia did not provide. Away, she remembered her relatives with nostalgic craving; with them, there were quarrels because they did not understand her.

Restive and unhappy, Helena began to think of moving on, and in March or April, 1873, she visited an old friend, Madame Popesco, in Bucharest. From there she wandered on to Paris, where her brother and one of her von Hahn cousins had temporarily settled. It was her intention to make her home indefinitely with Nicholas von Hahn, the son of her Uncle Gustave, at 11 rue de l’Universite, but apparently this was not his intention because after two months she moved in with Leonid and his friend M. Lequeux in the rue de Palais. About this time she met an American physician, Dr. Lydia Marquette, who was in Paris studying hospitals and attending lectures. Dr. Marquette, who spent all her free time with Helena, gives a lonely and somewhat pathetic picture of H.P.B.: “She passed her time in painting and writing, seldom going out of her room. She had few acquaintances, but among the number were M. and Mme. Leymarie.”
¹⁰²

As followers of Allan Kardec, the Leymaries were active in Spiritualist circles and had all the current news on the movement. It was from them or their friends that H.P.B. must have heard about the popularity of Spiritualism in the United States. For anyone interested in psychic phenomena or even simple spirit-rapping, America was unquestionably the place to be, the Mecca of all that was exciting and avant-garde. In June, seemingly on impulse, Helena counted the last of her cash, headed for the port of Le Havre, and purchased a steamship ticket for New York.

What happened in Paris that brought her to this spur-of-the-moment decision? It was, she would say, “my mysterious Hindu” who ordered her “to embark for North America, which I did without protesting.”
¹⁰³
And if there was no mysterious Hindu, there were equally pressing reasons. In a few weeks she would be forty-two. Her youth behind her, she had yet done nothing with her life. She wanted to be world famous, but the world so far had failed to acknowledge her. The bitter irony was that in Russia she had become too well known; she was notorious. She knew that she had intelligence and ability, perhaps a service to render humanity, but that her past would pursue her “like the brand of the curse on Cain.”
¹⁰⁴

Desperation brought her to Le Havre. Nevertheless, she was fond of recounting how at the docks she had met a German peasant woman, weeping because she and her children had been sold bogus tickets in Hamburg. Jauntily, H.P.B. exchanged her deluxe passage for steerage berths for all of them.
¹⁰⁵
In reality, Madame Blavatsky traveled steerage because it was all she could afford. Like millions of other penniless emigrants, the rebellious aristocrat regarded the United States as a land of opportunity and hope, as a second chance. She meant to grab it.

NEW YORK 

1873-1878

I

Immigrant

Madame Blavatsky arrived in New York most probably on July 5, 1873, on the French steamer
St. Laurent
out of Le Havre. During the fifteen-day crossing, the
St. Laurent
experienced extremely heavy westerly gales and head seas, causing both damage to the engine and a four-day delay at sea.

On emigrant ships, steerage could only be reached by climbing down a ladder through a hole in the hatchway deck. These hatches provided almost no ventilation and, in rough weather when air was most needed, they were kept shut. Two weeks of airlessness, overcrowding, lack of sanitary facilities, contamination of food and water, as well as the ever-present possibility of shipwreck, added up to downright misery. Remembering H.P.B.’s traumatic experiences aboard the SS
Eumonia,
one can only assume that the Atlantic crossing was a nightmare.

Steaming past The Narrows, she must have pressed against the ship’s rail with the other passengers and scanned New York harbor: the surrounding rural landscape dotted with white cottages; the steeple of Trinity Church in the distance; and off the tip of Manhattan Island the circular stone structure, Castle Garden, once a music hall featuring Jenny Lind and Barnum’s midgets, now a landing depot, where passengers lined up to register with the Emigration Commission before being herded back to the dock to collect their baggage. If a person had friends or relatives, she was whisked away; if there was no one, she walked to one of the many boardinghouses in the vicinity of Greenwich Street while trying to get her bearings, or she consulted one of the immigrant-aid societies who provided housing information for English, Irish, French, German and Hebrew aliens. (None existed for the few Russians who had arrived.) For Helena, as for most new arrivals, it was a lonely and bewildering moment in a land of strangers and strange customs.

On Saturday the fifth, New Yorkers were recuperating from their Fourth of July celebrations. The holiday weekend had been marred for many sections of the country by hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, but New York escaped the storms, and at 4 p.m. on Saturday the thermometer at Dickinson’s Drug Store, 3 Park Row, read ninety degrees, ten above normal. Helena quickly discovered that New York was a difficult city in which to navigate if one was a single woman, even in the simple matter of finding a place to live. First-class hotels refused to admit unescorted women, and even the lesser hotels and boardinghouses tended to regard them with suspicion unless accompanied by a male relative. Of course all these types of accommodations were far beyond Helena’s means, a predicament in which she was not alone.

In 1873, New York had about forty thousand women who found it necessary to support themselves. As the typewriter had not yet been invented and women were generally few and far between in the business world, they were limited to working as shop clerks, telegraphers, teachers, governesses, seamstresses and factory workers, all positions offering poor wages and long hours. The fact that decent housing was virtually impossible to secure on their incomes had not gone unacknowledged; charitable organizations were making attempts to assist such women, and in a few rare cases the women had even organized to help themselves. Earlier in the year, forty women had banded together to experiment with cooperative living by renting a newly built tenement house at 222 Madison Street. What lucky tip steered Helena Petrovna to this unique women’s commune we do not know, but doubtless she herself must have regarded it as a lifesaver.

At that time Madison was a street of small two-story houses occupied by owners who were proud of their shade trees and kept their front and back gardens in good order. The owner of 222 was a Mr. Rinaldo, who did not live on the premises but took a paternal interest in his women tenants by visiting frequently and personally collecting the rent. H.P.B., installed in a private room on the second floor, found herself next door to a good-humored Scot-Irish woman, Miss Parker, who immediately came over to get acquainted. All the residents of the house thought themselves a family, and neighbors were constantly visiting. Downstairs next to the street door a room had been specially set aside as an office where mail and messages were kept and the women could congregate to talk. Naturally the arrival of an extravagant personality such as Helena Petrovna was an exciting event and the women regarded her with unabashed curiosity.