Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (22 page)

There is a slight possibility that Helena may have known him in Tiflis because he would claim to be acquainted with members of the Witte family, but more likely they met for the first time in New York at a sentimental gathering of Russian emigrees, and after discovering they had mutual acquaintances back home, they fell into each other’s arms. Essentially Michael and Helena shared a common desire to make their marks in America, and at the very least, they shared a wish for a decent standard of living. It is obvious that there was some physical attraction, but just how deep an intimacy they formed at this time is not clear. Since the death of Agardi Metrovitch three years earlier, there had apparently been no men in her life, and at forty-three she still must have had a vigorous libido. She responded favorably to the handsome Michael Betanelly, and the fact that he was so much younger than she must have been tremendously flattering. For obvious reasons, she did not reveal her real age.

She still spent much of her time reading voraciously: books, newspapers and periodicals, and also in the leading Spiritualist journals: the
Banner of Light, Religio -Philosophical Journal
and the
Spiritual Scientist.
Since June all of these papers had been carrying stories about the Eddy brothers, some by enthusiastic tourists such as J. H. Randall of Clyde, Ohio, who rhapsodized, “Readers, you who can not believe my statements, go and see these things for yourself,”
¹⁹
others by more discriminating observers who wondered why the Indian spirits did not speak but responded only by raps. Undoubtedly Helena read these articles, and she may also have seen Olcott’s piece in the
Sun,
but the possibilities had not yet jelled in her mind.

In the September 26 issue of the
Religio-Philosophical Journal,
however, there appeared an article so eye-catching that she could not possibly have overlooked it. The entire front page, plus part of an inside page, was devoted to a euphoric report headlined astounding wonders that stagger belief and bylined by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Sounding like a publicity agent for the Eddys, Olcott described the seances in terms generally reserved for the births of messiahs and other world-shaking events and he, too, encouraged visitors by printing travel directions to Vermont. All one had to do was take the New Haven, Hartford and Springfield Railroad to Springfield, Massachusetts, then the Connecticut River and Vermont Railroad to Rutland where the rest of the trip to Chittenden could be made by wagon. The rail fare from New York to Rutland cost eight dollars, the wagon ride two.

If Helena somehow missed the
Religio-Philosophical Journal’s
article, which is unlikely, she certainly saw Olcott’s
Daily Graphic
pieces that began to appear the same week. Suddenly Colonel Olcott, whoever he was, seemed to be the man of the hour.

There was something about the writer that intrigued Helena, a karmic tug some might say, certainly a sixth sense whispering that this was the man for whom she had waited forty-four years, Michael Betanelly notwithstanding. So potent was this sensation that she would later maintain a higher power had instructed her to make the trip to Chittenden
²⁰
for the express purpose of meeting Henry Steel Olcott. Accordingly, she packed her tobacco, a scarlet shirt such as the ones worn by Garibaldi’s soldiers, and, as we shall see, several other items that might prove useful at a country séance. On Tuesday, October 13, in the company of Madame Magnon, she set out for Chittenden to meet her destiny.

At noon the next day, Henry Olcott and the
Graphic
artist Kappes stood in the doorway of the Eddys’ dining hall and surveyed the luncheon crowd. A lover of good food and wine, Henry had suffered through a month of the Eddys’ bad cooking, not to mention having put up with the constant stream of cranks who descended on the farmhouse. Sweeping his eyes critically along the tables, he was jolted by the sight of an unusual-looking woman. “Her hair was then a thick blond mop, worn shorter than the shoulders, and it stood out from her head, silken-soft and crinkled to the roots, like the fleece of a Cotswold ewe. This and the red shirt were what struck my attention.” Both the Garibaldi shirt and the hairstyle were so outrageously anti-fashion that Olcott immediately pigeonholed her as an eccentric.

“Good gracious!” he remembered whispering to Kappes. “Look at
that
specimen, will you.” Boldly settling himself opposite H.P.B. and Madame Magnon, who were talking French, he proceeded to stare.

Helena, recognizing him at once, chose to pay no attention. After the meal, she and Magnon rose and went outside, where Helena began to roll a cigarette. Olcott followed them into the yard but Helena continued to ignore him, and it was not until she fumbled for a match that he saw his opening.

“Permettez moi, Madame,” he said, and lit her cigarette.

Since his remark had been made in French, Helena mistakenly assumed that he was fluent in the language, which he was not, and answered in kind. She asked him how long he had been there and what he thought of the phenomena. She described herself as “greatly interested in such things” and confided that she had read about the Eddys in the
Daily Graphic,
which had been swept off the newsstands within an hour of publication; she had been obliged to pay $1 for a copy.

From flattery she made a swift detour to archness. “I hesitated before coming here, because I was afraid of meeting that Colonel Olcott.”

“Why should you be afraid of him, Madame?” Olcott asked.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and one may be sure she was enjoying every minute of the game, “because I fear he might write about me in his paper.”

She needn’t worry, Henry replied, because he felt quite certain that Colonel Olcott would not mention her in his articles unless she wished it, “and I introduced myself.” Twenty years later, writing his memoirs, it seemed ironic to him that their first meeting should have been so “very prosaic,” but he added that even though “our acquaintance began in smoke... it stirred up a great and permanent fire.”

That afternoon, as H.P.B. and Henry strolled about the farm getting acquainted, she spoke of her travels, hinted at occult marvels she had witnessed, and complained mildly about the tendency of American Spiritualists to emphasize materialistic phenomena at the expense of spiritual philosophy. “She did not give me any hint as to the existence of Himalayan Sages or of her own powers,” Henry recalled. Of course it was scarcely likely that she would have mentioned Tibetan gurus, since they had not yet occurred to her. What she did do was undertake to charm Henry Olcott and, despite her sartorial nonconformity, this was accomplished in no time. As Henry related:

Her manner was gracious and captivating, her criticisms upon men and things original and witty. She was particularly interested in drawing me out as to my own ideas about spiritual things and expressed pleasure in finding that I had instinctively thought along the occult lines which she herself had pursued. It was not as an Eastern mystic, but rather as a refined Spiritualist that she talked. For my part I knew nothing then, or next to nothing, about Eastern philosophy, and at first she kept silent on that subject.
²¹

While the chemistry on both sides was immediate, Olcott failed to respond to her as a woman, indeed would claim that he found her androgynous. “Neither then, at the commencement, nor ever afterwards had either of us the sense of the other being of the opposite sex.” Of course, “some base people from time to time dared to suggest that a closer tie bound us together” but these were unimaginative folks who could not understand that there might be “the attraction of soul to soul, not that of sex to sex.” Another of Olcott’s remarks about Helena, that “her every look, word and action proclaimed her sexlessness,”
²²
seems to defy rational interpretation. She may have been overweight at the time, but she was far from unattractive, and possessed a lush femininity, a sort of earthy sensuality, that was remarked upon by others who encountered her. That she herself was still interested in sex is evident from her relationship with Michael Betanelly and perhaps it was because of this involvement that she felt no need to project her womanly side with Olcott— suspected, in fact, that it might threaten their budding friendship.

It was one of H.P.B.’s less admirable qualities that she used men (and women to a lesser degree) to gain her objectives, and already she had become adept at manipulation. Meeting Henry she understood at once—may have, actually, sensed it from his articles—that here was an ideal candidate for management if one knew how to go about it properly. At Chittenden, moving cautiously, she carefully refrained from scaring off a person who was, as far as she knew, a married family man. It may be asked what she wanted from Olcott that Helena had to tread so gingerly, and the answer seems to be that she herself was not completely sure. On the most mundane level, she wanted to get her name mentioned in the
Daily Graphic
because she understood the value of publicity and knew this would be a route to recognition in the Spiritualist movement. Earlier she had tried something similar with Hannah Wolff and the spirit paintings of Helena’s old photographs, but the effort had failed to result in newspaper coverage. To want her name before the public was not such a despicable ambition; on the contrary, it was a means of establishing herself as an authority so that she might get her writings published and thereby support herself. Later it would be hard for some to realize that Madame Blavatsky, despite her insistence that she lived under the protection of august beings, still had to eat like everyone else.

That evening, filing upstairs to the shadowy seance hall, Helena must have felt that she had to do something startling to attract attention, much less a mention in the
Daily Graphic,
because among the twenty-five visitors were some prominent people: the Spiritualist writer and lecturer James Peebles, a Hartford music professor named Lenzburg who was with his medium wife, the Michigan medium Mr. H. A. Phillips, and a Chicago medium Mrs. M. B. Carey, who was preparing an article on the Eddys for the
Religio -Philosophical Journal.

The room was dimly lit by a shaded kerosene lamp in the back; on the platform at the front end of the hall stood a curtained cabinet. Everyone took a seat on one of the uncomfortable straight chairs and waited until William Eddy shambled up to the platform, settled on a chair inside the cabinet and pulled a blanket across the doorway. The first thing Helena heard were sounds—faint music and a low babble of voices. Then, in the dimness, luminous hands began to flutter slowly, the disembodied fingers extending and retreating with clutching movements and seeming to reach out to touch the hair of a woman in the first row. After the hands had vanished, the shrouded figure of a crone-like woman next slithered from the cabinet and began muttering incoherently before suddenly warbling a folk ballad in a cracked voice. Backing toward the cabinet, she began to dissolve, and in her place there strutted a tiny Indian maiden who unbraided her hair and shook it over her shoulders.

As the lineup of American Indians continued, Mrs. Phillips identified one of the forms as her spirit guide Awanola, and Mrs. Carey, not to be outdone, confided aloud that she could see
her
guide, Wassa. The next person to speak up was H.P.B.’s traveling companion Madame Magnon, who pointed to what she said was her father, Zephrin Boudreau from Three Rivers, Canada. He had been about sixty when he died, she said. “Is that you, Papa?” she called out.

“Oui,” the figure squeaked.
²³

When Madame Magnon began asking questions in French, the phantom would respond by rapping its hand against the frame of the cabinet. “This gentleman,” Olcott remembered, “stood so that I saw him in profile against the white wall. He had an aquiline nose, rather hollow cheeks, prominent cheek-bones and an iron-gray beard upon his chin.” Certain that Boudreau must be “a gentleman,”
²⁴
Olcott could not quite make up his mind if the spirit was merely rapping or if it were replying in French. Before he could reach a conclusion, Magnon’s father had disappeared, upstaged by a phantom woman holding a child and Mrs. Dunbar in the front row began to shriek, “Oh, my baby! My Charlie!”
²⁵
The child was held over the railing so that the sobbing Mrs. Dunbar could get a better look.

So far, the spectacle had been relatively routine—American Indians and babies—and Olcott who had been watching them for the past month was feeling a bit bored with the whole business. But the next visitor made him sit up and gasp in amazement.

He was a person of middle height, well-shaped, dressed in a Georgian (Caucasian) jacket, with loose sleeves and long pointed oversleeves, an outer long coat, baggy trousers, leggings of yellow leather, and white skull-cap, or fez, with tassel.

To Olcott, who had never seen such a strange costume, here was a potentially newsworthy spook whom he hoped someone would identify. Naturally it was Helena who obliged. “She recognized him at once as Michalko Guegidze, late of Kutais, Georgia, a servant of Madame Witte, a relative, and who waited upon Mme. de Blavatsky in Kutais.”
²⁶

Kutais, it will be remembered, was a town through which Helena passed in 1861 or 1862 when she was extremely ill after the birth of Yuri and had to be transported back to Tiflis. It is curious that images from this traumatic episode should suddenly emerge in a Vermont farmhouse among strangers (and what is more curious was that some time later she would discover Michalko to be alive).
²⁷
Still, that evening she felt sure that the spirit must be her Aunt Katherine’s servant.