Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (27 page)

The club lasted only a few weeks, mainly because H.P.B. quarreled with David Dana, who, despite his distinguished family, demanded payment for his services. As the loyal Olcott put it delicately, “the wretch failed utterly not only as a medium, but was also reported to us as having spread calumnies against the one who had done him kindness.”
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The failure of the Miracle Club hardly mattered to H.P.B., who was feeling increasingly unwell. John had cured her leg and ordered three days of complete rest, but she had failed to follow his instructions, the leg felt “worse than ever” and she had caught a nasty head cold.
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No doubt John’s medical advice was echoed by her human physician, Dr. Seth Pancoast, a student of the Cabbala, whose advice she customarily ignored. As if these ailments were not enough, she awoke one morning at 3 a.m. dreaming of Nikifor Blavatsky, a phenomenon she took as “a premeditated insult on the part of Providence.”
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On April 26, despite her physical discomfort, she made her way to Riverhead, Long Island, where her case against Clementine Gerebko, the woman who had absconded with Helena’s thousand dollars, finally had come to trial. For reasons known only to herself, Helena insisted upon giving her testimony in French so that an interpreter had to be rounded up, by no means an easy matter in rural Long Island. Since she planned to act as her own principal witness, her two attorneys, William Ivins and William Fales, carefully briefed her on the crucial points to make during her testimony. To their consternation, she ignored their advice once she took the witness stand, and proceeded in direct opposition to their instructions.

When the attorneys took her to task, H.P.B. casually replied that John King had been standing at her side the entire time dictating her testimony. To this, Ivins and Fales could only shake their heads.

Still, a month later, Judge Calvin E. Pratt decided in Helena’s favor and ordered Gerebko to pay her $1146 plus the costs of the legal action.

In New York sometime in early May, Henry Olcott received his first letter from the Brotherhood of Luxor. Although postmarked Philadelphia, the envelope appeared to be of foreign origin, possibly Egyptian. The Brotherhood seemed to communicate only in English and French, for the black-glazed envelope inscribed in gold ink and sealed with red wax was addressed to “Etats-Unis d’Amerique” and also included the words “Pour Messager Special.” Opening this exotic missive, Olcott found a thick sheet of green paper inscribed with the same gold ink:

FROM THE BROTHERHOOD OF LUXOR, Section the Vth to Henry S. Olcott.

Brother Neophyte, we greet thee.

He who seeks us find
us.
Rest thy mind—banish all foul doubt. We keep watch over our faithful soldiers. Sister Helen is a valiant, trustworthy servant. Open thy Spirit to conviction, have faith and she will lead thee to the Golden Gate of truth. She neither fears sword nor fire but her soul is sensitive to dishonour and she hath reason to mistrust the future. Our good brother “John” hath verily acted rashly, but he meant well. Son of the
World,
if thou dost hear them both. TRY.

The Brotherhood strong urged Henry to “effect an opprobrious punishment” on Dr. Henry Child who had exposed the Holmeses (by what means they did not specify) and to do his best to keep the Miracle Club afloat. The communication was signed:

TUITIT BEY 

Observatory of Luxor

Tuesday Morning. 

Day of Mars.
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Subsequent letters arrived from Serapis Bey, who exhorted Henry to “Be courageous and hopeful,” to “Try,”
⁸⁴
and to work on Gerry Brown who suddenly had grown balky about turning his paper into Helena’s and Henry’s mouthpiece. According to Serapis, Brown had a sensitive nature “not unlike the Thibet Lotus—it shrinks and withdraws from the hand which tries to force open its tender petals.” He advised Olcott to see him alone, to “try to make him open his heart to you,”
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and to convince Brown to increase the paper to sixteen pages. Naturally, Helena was also growing disgusted with Brown and later she voiced her opinion with characteristic bluntness: “The man might have become a POWER, he preferred to remain an Ass.”
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Apart from needing an outlet for her work, Helena had her reasons for boosting the
Scientist.
To her dismay, Spiritualism was falling so quickly out of vogue with the public that major papers would no longer touch the subject. Olcott blamed it on the Katie King scandal but he may simply have mistaken for a trend what was actually a fad. Even Helena had to admit that “it seems to be all over.”
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Crying disaster, she keened to Alexander Aksakov:

Look at poor A. J. Davis; he can barely keep body and soul together, his books are not selling at all. The
Banner
has fallen from 25,000 subscribers to 12,000. Olcott is sitting on heaps of his
People from the Other World,
like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, and thinking bitter things. Not a thousand copies of his book have been sold in five months.
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The American economy had not yet pulled itself out of the slump of 1873, and even H.P.B. could observe the effects of depression on her own life and on Betanelly’s foundering business. “There is terrible panic,” she wrote. “Those who have got money hide it, and those who have not are dying of hunger.” She told Aksakov that the previous year she had earned six thousand dollars by her writings, but the figure seems wildly high for a time when established writers rarely made five hundred. She went on to explain that she had spent it all on the Cause and once again faced hunger. Since she had Michael, she was being less than candid, but she still was not mentioning a husband to Aksakov. “Here, you see, is my trouble, tomorrow there will be nothing to eat. Something quite out of the way must be invented.”
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Critical biographers of Madame Blavatsky have pounced upon those last words as evidence of crass commercialism, but this judgment seems overly harsh. Her devotion to Spiritualism had never gone much beyond lip service, and her private plans lay in a different direction. Her constant insecurity about money reflected less a preoccupation with wealth than with the assurance of subsistence. Her basic wants were restricted to food, books, travel; fashion did not interest her. What she needed more than money, however, was a new cause to sustain her, now that the prop of Spiritualism had been pulled from beneath her.

That she had gone out of fashion as swiftly as she had come in thoroughly shook Helena’s confidence. In addition, her physical condition continued to deteriorate until, toward the middle of May, periostitis and partial mortification of the leg set in. When Dr. Pancoast told her the limb could not be saved, Helena consulted a clairvoyant, Mrs. Michener, who promised that amputation need not be necessary “if I do as
she
tells me.”
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Despite Mrs. Michener’s treatment, Helena, in excruciating pain, saw her leg, swollen to twice its normal size, begin to turn black.

On May twenty-sixth, she again summoned Dr. Pancoast who urged amputation. Terrified and enraged, Helena began to scream that she didn’t care if the leg was mortified; she would not let him cut it off. Michael’s long face infuriated her further, and she insisted that he leave the house. He could come back, she shouted, “when I write that I am better or when somebody else writes him that I am gone
home,
or kicked the bucket....”

Once Michael and Pancoast had left, she sent for Mrs. Michener “and had a talk with her. In short I had prepared myself to die—didn’t care—but decided to die with both legs.” For the next two days she cursed Michael for “a soft ninny” and the doctor as an “unclean goblin” as her maid applied cold water poultices to reduce the swelling. Unbelievably, within forty-eight hours the swollen area looked considerably better, and the person most surprised was Helena herself. Of course, she immediately invented a somewhat repellent miracle to account for it, writing to General Lippitt that “a white
pup,
a dog by night laid across the leg, cured all in no time.”

Two weeks later, she was still “very weak, cross, and generally feel
mad
from 12 a.m. to 12 p.m.,” but apparently had enough energy to write an entertaining letter to Lippitt: “Fancy my father’s daughter—on a wooden leg; fancy my leg going in the spirit land before me...” Her dramatic recovery she now attributed to her own willpower or “because I am not wanted yet in the bosom of Abraham.”
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With Michael still barred from the house, she was being cared for by Madame Magnon, who had come in from New York, and by David Dana, with whom she must again have been on good terms. Her third companion, John King, had finally begun to get on her nerves. “He has his vices and considerably vicious vices, too,”
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she complained breezily to Lippitt, rambling on to describe every occasion on which John had behaved spitefully, lied, stole, and forged people’s handwritings. Obviously she was feeling better because she told Lippitt that in two or three weeks she planned to visit Hiram Corson, a Cornell professor and well-known Spiritualist with whom she had been corresponding, and after leaving Ithaca she proposed she might go to the seashore until October.

What she desperately wanted was to sequester herself in “some
isolated spot
on this globe.”
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Instead, she had to face Michael. That same day, rebelling against being locked out of his own house, he returned to force a resolution. Helena, at best ambivalent about her husband, did not want him back but dreaded losing him. She must have been profoundly shocked when Michael, at the end of his rope, threatened to return to Russia. Since his business was virtually bankrupt and his wife no longer loved him, why should he remain?

Helena responded by withdrawing into what appeared to be a trance. She lay on her bed, Michael recalled, “as one dead for two or three hours at the time, pulse and heart stopped, cold and pale as dead.”
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The next morning his distress gave way to bewilderment when he found Helena sitting up in bed, writing letters and acting as if nothing had happened. This cheerfulness continued until the pettiest household disruption would propel her into a temper, after which she lapsed into trance, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings.

According to Magnon and Dana, there was no cause for alarm when Madame appeared to be comatose; it only meant her spirit was traveling. Perhaps, Michael retorted tartly, but to him she certainly looked dead. By this point he felt sufficiently suspicious to check with the maid, who told him that Madame rose during the night and walked around on her leg; it was only during the day that she became paralyzed.

Michael must have thought himself the only sane person in a madhouse, for the following Wednesday a package of money and a letter addressed to Gerry Brown dropped on his head, along with orders from John King to take them immediately to the telegraph office. Michael protested he didn’t have time to run the errand, but John refused to take no for an answer.

While the séances, materializations and deathlike trances continued as before, Helena grew increasingly morose. Racking her brain for a way to share her panic with someone, she arranged for Master Serapis to send Henry Olcott a grim letter describing Sister Helen’s “bitter hours of mental agony and sorrow” over “this
crafty
youth” whom she had married. While Serapis admitted to feeling pity for Betanelly, he had no compunction about calling him a “weak and silly wretch.” The letter continued:

His love for her is gone, the sacred flame has died out for want of fuel, he heeded not her warning voice; he hates
John
and worships the
Dweller
who holds with him communication. Finding himself on the brink of bankruptcy, his secret design is to sail for Europe, and leave her unprovided and alone. Unless we help him for the sake of her, our Sister, her life is doomed and for her her future will be poverty and sickness.
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The situation was hardly so black as Serapis painted because Helena knew that she would soon be receiving a substantial sum from the Gerebko judgment; surely Master Serapis, who seemed to know everything about her, must have been aware of her court victory. Nevertheless, he went on to inform Olcott that Michael’s business had unfilled orders from foreign governments and that were he able to ship them, “there are millions in the future in store for him.” Unfortunately, he added, the man “has no money and his brains are weak. Will my brother try to find him a partner?” Apparently distrusting Henry’s own powers of ingenuity, Serapis suggested that Olcott approach a distant relative of his ex-wife’s. “Let the transaction be executed at your discretion and pleasure. Does my good brother Henry understand me, does he realize what I mean?”
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Henry did. He was able to get Michael about fifteen hundred dollars from a man named Everman, but whether this person was a member of his former wife’s family is unknown. By this time, Olcott had become exceedingly suggestible. On the advice of a man he had never met, whose very existence was questionable, he arranged a loan for another man whom he disliked. Judging by the letters Serapis wrote over the next weeks, Olcott did not agree straight off, and Serapis was obliged to suggest that his failure to comply would result in the loss of future occult powers: “You must not part with Helena.... Try to help the poor broken-hearted woman.... Watch over her, Brother-mine—forgive her outburstings of passion, be
patient, merciful,
and charity bestowed on another will return to thee a hundred fold nobly.”
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