Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (34 page)

During this period, Olcott persisted in agitating for a meeting between Wilder and Madame, and although the editor hesitated, eventually he succumbed.

Having heard about the Madame’s habit of receiving guests in her night-clothes, Wilder was disappointed to find her fully dressed. “In no respect was she coarse, awkward or ill-bred,” and in fact he was obliged to admit that he found her courteous, cultured and extremely intelligent. “She expressed her opinions with boldness and decision, but not obtrusively.” As for the miracles over which Olcott had raved, Wilder recalled quite vividly that she “never made any such claim to me.” Of course she did mention her communications with mysterious persons whom she called “the Brothers,” but Wilder, who assumed she was talking about telepathy, was inclined to attach little significance to these claims. From what he knew of such matters, an important condition for telepathy was absence from artificial stimulants such as meat, alcohol and narcotics of any kind, “but Madame Blavatsky displayed no such asceticism.” It was obvious that she ate well and drugged herself with tobacco. Still, with Helena’s talent for instant intimacy, she put him at ease so that afterward it seemed they had “become acquainted at once.” She praised his abridgments, declared that what he had excised was “flapdoodle,” and set about assiduously cultivating his friendship.
¹⁷⁸

By fall, 1876, the Theosophical Society had slowly withered and died, and after November even Henry no longer bothered to keep up the pretense. He canceled further meetings, suspended dues, and gave up the room in Mott Memorial Hall. Actually, the Society, despite its lofty objectives, had accomplished nothing, and its meetings had grown tiresome and silly. At one session, for example, Helena had announced that she now understood the process by which it was possible to rise from the earth and fly, and she was prepared to demonstrate. “With an electrical battery and powerful current we first ascertained by a well-known process what sort of magnetism there was in the carpet of the room; we electrified a cat, and it rose up several inches.” Unfortunately, someone turned up the power “and of course the poor cat suddenly expired.”
¹⁷⁹

This sort of experiment had been instrumental in driving away members. For R. B. Westbrook, one of the founders, the final straw turned out to be even more embarrassing. One evening he and his wife invited to their home a small party including Helena, Olcott, Emma Britten, and Reverend W. R. Alger, an eminent Unitarian minister from Boston, who was visiting New York and wanted to meet H.P.B. The evening began well, even though Helena was not on her absolutely best behavior and insisted upon making sniping remarks about Emma’s mediumship. Toward the Reverend Alger, however, she was all charm. By 9 p.m. Emma’s patience had exhausted itself and she excused herself, saying that she had to look after her aging mother. After her departure, Helena could not have been more bewitching as a conversationalist, to Alger’s delight and the Westbrooks’ inward rejoicing “that we had been successful in engineering this wonderful meeting of these wonderful people.”

Not an hour later, however, the evening’s amiability was abruptly shattered by the frantic ringing of the doorbell. Into the parlor dashed an outlandish figure draped from head to foot in rags and lengths of cloth and so disguised that Westbrook could not be certain whether a male or female lurked underneath; Alger likened the apparition to “the man in the iron mask.” Mrs. Westbrook, alarmed that some mad laundress had wandered into the house by mistake, tried to shove the figure toward the door but, like a whirling dervish, it bounded over to Madame Blavatsky, saluted, and delivered a letter. Mission evidently accomplished, he, she or it stalked from the room and slammed the street door, leaving the assembled company gaping.

In the silence that followed, Olcott whispered gravely, “An elementary.”

Helena, having torn open the envelope, expressed mild indignation that the Brothers should have troubled to send a special messenger on what she considered unimportant business; when Olcott asked what it all meant, she announced melodramatically that Dr. Seth Pancoast had just been refused admission to the Secret Brotherhood in India.

Throughout the commotion, Dr. Alger had managed to preserve his clerical dignity but now, understandably offended, he hurried to take his leave. At the door, he was heard to mumble contemptuously, “A put up job!”
¹⁸⁰
Afterwards, Westbrook said, Madame Blavatsky professed to be hurt that Alger should have regarded her as a fraud.

Investigating this mortifying incident, Westbrook learned that Dr. Pancoast knew nothing about any application to the Brotherhood and, more damning, that Madame had promised an Irish servantwoman five dollars if she would impersonate an “elementary,” but had failed to pay her. Furious over “this disgraceful attempt to impose upon the confidence of my distinguished clerical friend,” Westbrook disaffiliated himself from the Theosophical Society.

What Helena hoped to accomplish by this absurd charade is impossible to determine. At this stage in her career she was lucky only with the phenomena she staged for Olcott; either she misjudged the credulity of her audience or she lacked the money to hire experienced actors.

Still bristling over the failure of her “elementary” production, H.P.B. continued to work almost compulsively on her book, turning most frequently to Alexander Wilder for editorial advice. Wilder was in the habit of commuting into New York from Newark several times a week to deliver lectures at a medical college, so Helena encouraged him to drop by. One day in early December, having rung her bell in vain, he left a note and went away. H.P.B. wrote at once to say that he must have rung the wrong bell. “I do not go out of the house for the last two months, and the servant is always in the kitchen until half-past nine or ten.” Why hadn’t he pulled all the bells? “Well, you must come Monday—as you have to come to town and stop over till Tuesday. You can attend your College and sleep here the same, can’t you?”
¹⁸¹

Olcott, having finally arranged to cremate Baron de Palm, had gone to Washington, Pennsylvania. As this first cremation in the United States was thought to be an historic event, he had had no trouble inducing a large party of friends and journalists to accompany him, but Helena made excuses to remain behind. “I could
not
go,” she confessed to Wilder. “To tell you the truth, I do not see the fun of spending $40.00 or $50.00 for the pleasure of seeing a man burnt”; the reason, she insisted, had nothing to do with squeamishness but rather “I have seen burnings of dead and living bodies in India sufficiently.”

In all honesty, Palm’s corpse had ceased to interest her, and what is more to the point, she had better things to do. She may have applauded Wilder’s abridgments, but she wrote faster than he could cut. Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1877, even after the book had been set in type, she continued to make additions on the galleys and page proofs. Bouton complained to Henry that “the alterations have already cost $280.80, and at that rate, by the time the book appears it will be handicapped with such fearful expense”
¹⁸³
that he would make no profit.

H.P.B. took no notice of Bouton. By the time
Isis
appeared on September 29,1877, he would spend over six hundred dollars for corrections and the two volumes would mushroom to some twelve hundred and seventy pages. Still happily unaware of this, his correspondence with Madame centered on an appropriate title. The original title, probably Helena’s choice although Wilder later attributed it to Bouton, was
The Veil of Isis.
However, when Bouton learned of an English book with the same title, he suggested changing to
Isis Unveiled
and Helena readily consented. Actually, both titles were misleading in that they gave the unmistakable impression the book dealt with Egypt, when in fact a large part of her material was devoted to India. But to Bouton, who had probably not read the book and who, in any case, had once published a treatise on ancient Greek art and added illustrations from Hindu mythology, the main consideration was a catchy title that might recoup his pyramiding investment. Helena, who favored the Isis concept, must have believed that the subtitle, “A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology,” would sufficiently indicate the scope of its contents.

As
Isis
neared publication, Helena began to turn her attention back to old, unpleasant matters. For the past two years, Michael Betanelly had lurked in the background of her life as a potential threat, not only because of the bigamous marriage but also because the existence of any husband would have publicly embarrassed Helena. She must have been hoping he would divorce her, but this had not happened, and now she was obliged to bring up the subject. Her feelings about Michael had been intensely exacerbated by a report that, on a recent visit to Russia, Betanelly had contacted her relatives with the expressed purpose of slandering her. In fact, everywhere she turned, she heard nightmarish gossip about herself and her relationship with Olcott, and once again she suspected Michael to be the source. To her further embarrassment, Olcott told her that Michael had never bothered to repay the loan that he had arranged from Everman.

At the beginning of May, H.P.B. wrote to Michael about these troublesome matters and brought up the subject of divorce. Several days later she received a bitter reply in which he complained of being almost destitute and revealed that “unless I pay Everman at least part of the money, he will take his revenge and have me arrested soon.” If this happened, it would be her fault and Olcott’s. He denied having gossiped about her by stating, “In the Caucasus I merely listened silently when you were scolded by your relatives and all who knew you.”
¹⁸⁴
He had never mentioned her name to Everman or to anyone else in America, and if people were talking about her, she had only herself to blame:

You created for yourself scandal and notoriety. First you practised Spiritualism—you did not succeed. Now you have turned to Buddhism—you will succeed still less. Here you cannot play with the public as easily as you think. And by these experiments you are ruining other people, just as you ruined me by your Spiritualistic operations. If you had only kept quiet in your old age—nobody would have said anything.

After several pages of recriminations and threats, he declared that he had no intention of contesting a divorce, which he wanted “by any means.” But that she must bear the expense because “I cannot pay; I have not money enough even to live. The cheaper you can arrange it the better. Only get it.”
¹⁸⁵
Finally, for unknown reasons, she dropped the idea. Scarcely an evening passed now that Helena and Henry did not entertain. Among the most frequent visitors to the “Lamasery,” as she now called the apartment, were William Quan Judge and his seventeen-year-old brother John, the latter having offered to copy
Isis
in a neat hand for the printer. Now that William Judge was sharing office space with Henry, he returned to H.P.B.’s life as abruptly as he had departed, spending more time at the Lamasery than at his own home. When Helena told him that she had been experimenting with astral travel and could leave her body at will, Judge, fascinated, kept pestering for her secrets. If he wanted to become a holy arhat, H.P.B. finally told him, he must fast and give up alcohol. This advice must have gone to Judge’s head, because a few days later he was experiencing visions and claimed that he left his body every night to roam in space. Helena, amused, wrote Aksakov on June 15 that she would ring a bell in her apartment and Judge, eight miles away in Brooklyn, “starts off at once and in two hours appears at my call.” Her last comment was: “See what fools they are, and how I lead them by the nose!”
¹⁸⁶

Her sister, however, proved less of a fool. When Helena offered to visit her in Tiflis “in the flash of an eye,” Vera told her to cancel the flight—it might be dangerous. There was nothing to fear, Helena replied. Her physical body would be lying in bed at New York “in the state of a harmless idiot,” while her astral body, attached by a thread, would be with Vera in Tiflis. Naturally, if Vera began to “shriek like mad,” the thread would probably tear and then of course “I should die instantly.”
¹⁸⁷
Vera, now with three daughters by her second husband, had named her youngest Helena but that was as far as family loyalty went. There was not much about Helena Petrovna that she really liked, less that she took seriously.

In August, Helena and Henry had a letter from Emily Kislingbury, the secretary of the British National Association of Spiritualists, who was spending her holiday in the United States and wanted to meet them. Her routine request is of less interest than the letter itself. Addressed to Olcott from Niagara Falls, it contained a brief postscript obviously not penned by Miss Kislingbury: “She is a sweet, truthful, sincere nature. Would the heavenly powers there were a few more like her in London. Teach her and take care of her.” The signature was written in a queer script Henry could not decipher until Helena explained that the message had been added phenomenally in transit by an adept whom she identified as “the old gentleman Narayan.”
¹⁸⁸
Narayan, she added, was one of the entities who had taken over her body during the writing of
Isis.
Olcott nodded solemnly, never suspecting that Helena herself might have intercepted the postman and steamed open the envelope.

Emily, as sweet and gentle as Narayan had promised, took to H.P.B. with a ferocity that amounted to worship and must obviously have hungered for a miracle. One day when the two of them were alone reading in the parlor, Helena obliged by causing the reflection in a wall mirror to move up and down.