Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (45 page)

Newspaper mistreatment was nothing new to her, but after the splash at Simla, expecting more respect from the world, she was bitterly disappointed to find it not forthcoming. With a good deal of effort, she finally calmed down enough to concentrate on giving Sinnett unassailable proof of Koot Hoomi’s existence. She now worked out an ingenious scheme whereby the Mahatma would send Sinnett a telegram thanking him for his letter; the hook would be that the telegram was to be dispatched at Jhelum, a hundred thirty-five miles from Amritsar, and dated two hours after receipt of Sinnett’s letter in Amrit-sar. On October 27, after receiving an expected letter from Sinnett to the Mahatma, she telegraphed a confederate previously dispatched to Jhelum with a message in Koot Hoomi’s handwriting, to send it to Sinnett. To her annoyance Sinnett failed to understand what had been done and had to have the timetable explained to him. As the Mahatma told it, H.P.B. had forwarded Sinnett’s letter by mental telepathy at 2:05 p.m. and he had answered at 4. Unless Madame had flown from Amritsar to Jhelum, Koot Hoomi pointed out, “how could she have written for me the dispatch in my own handwriting at Jhelum hardly two hours after your letter was received by her at Amritsar?”
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The preparation for this feat was taxing to say the least, as was the hiring of a man to impersonate a Mahatma and present Olcott with a rose as they toured the Golden Temple. By the time they reached Lahore on November 3, Helena announced she was not feeling well. Olcott, as usual, spent most of his time hobnobbing with local dignitaries and lecturing, which gave H.P.B. the privacy to compose further Mahatma letters to Sinnett and to Allan Hume, who had been writing to Koot Hoomi. To keep both men interested in her philosophy yet also at arm’s distance, meant treading a fine line. No, the Brotherhood could not send a private tutor to Allahabad for Hume and Sinnett because the laws of the order would not permit it; and no, it was not true that the Brotherhood had left no mark upon the history of the world and was therefore a failure. Sinnett’s questions were often childish, but Hume’s were sharp and positively devastating, yet in formulating replies H.P.B. was obliged to exercise tact, at which she never excelled. “Give to your fellow creatures half the attention you have bestowed on your ‘little birds,’ “ she had Koot Hoomi gently advise Hume, “and you will round off a useful life with a grand and noble work.”
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Two weeks later she came down with Punjab fever. She did not want a doctor but Olcott insisted, and she was dosed with quinine and digitalis. Once recovered H.P.B. bought a hundred rupees’ worth of shawls and embroidery from a door-to-door peddler, which Olcott thought excessive. Possibly she had not fully recovered her strength because a few days later she suffered a relapse. For the next six weeks they were on the road almost constantly in the Northwest Province: Umballa, and Benares, where the maharajah graciously allowed the Theosophical Society to borrow his family motto: “There is no religion higher than truth,”
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and twice they visited the Sinnetts at Allahabad.

Helena was happy to be away from Bombay at this particular time because during their absence Emma had been instructed to look for a new house. From Simla, she had made clear to Madame Coulomb exactly what she expected of her: “I beg you to take care of everything in the removal. Choose a good house.
Let it be useful.”
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Primarily, she needed a place adaptable for phenomena; lesser factors, such as size and location, did not much interest her. House-hunting and moving were among the disagreeable chores she left to Emma, who had little else to do anyway.

Meanwhile Helena had her hands full writing Koot Hoomi’s letters. One surmises she alternated between excitement over her Mahatmic invention and extreme weariness at the demands of the task she had undertaken. There were times when she ran out of ideas and, in a pinch, would grab the nearest book or magazine, sometimes copying an item word for word. Just such an instance occurred in early December at the Sinnetts when she transcribed a passage from a speech made at Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, on August 15, and reported in the
Banner of Light.
The speaker, Henry A. Kiddle, was unknown to her, but some of his points seemed reasonable, and she copied them into her K. H. letter without thinking twice. About this time, an excruciating pain that had begun to develop in her left wrist was diagnosed as
dengue,
a type of rheumatic fever, and with lightning speed her arm swelled to the shoulder, despite the ministrations of Sinnett’s physician. By Christmas, after a week of agony, she had recovered and Henry, to celebrate, took her to the biggest store in Allahabad where she went on a buying spree.

The “Crow’s Nest” was pasted on a rocky slope of Breach Candy in the northwest section of Bombay. Normally the bungalow rented for two hundred rupees a month, but Emma had bargained the owner down to sixty-five because it had a reputation for being haunted. Helena was charmed with the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, the wide verandas, but especially with its sea view and cool breezes. Better yet, the house was located a distance from the center of the city, which meant fewer unannounced visitors at odd hours. She could not have helped but recognize the effort that Emma and Alexis had made in getting the place ready; still, she did not bother to express her gratitude adequately to Emma, who understandably felt used. All day long she worked and cooked, she said, and sometimes was too exhausted to sleep, but Madame never seemed satisfied.

So she used to get cross, despise everything, and hate everybody; and as we could not understand what she really wanted, she vented her rage on us by forbidding that a sufficient quantity of bread be brought into the house, saying that if we wanted more we were to buy it with our own money—and this, after we had worked like slaves for her!
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During the winter and spring of 1881, Helena could not truly enjoy her new home, or her existence, which now focused exclusively on her writing table. Her output at this period included articles and a translation of passages from
The Brothers Karamazov
for the
Theosophist,
unsigned articles for the
Pioneer,
and most often, pieces for Russian newspapers. In addition to these enterprises, she continued to toil over Koot Hoomi’s lengthy letters. However strenuous her schedule, H.P.B. never missed an opportunity to counter the plentiful attacks from critics, not only from the general press but especially missionary publications. Despite her now professed indifference to journalistic condemnation, she was tremendously disturbed. Much of the criticism
was
personal, as well as malicious. The kinder slurs aimed at her included: “unscrupulous,” “untruthful,” “ridiculous,” and “discreditable”; her avowals of universal love and brotherhood were labeled pretentious and hypocritical. Helena always managed to get in a few licks of her own but was careful to take a lofty, even sardonic tone. “The Methodist organs are very fond of me,” she wrote the Bombay
Gazette.
“So foolishly fond, I am afraid, that rarely a month passes away but my Scytho-Sarmatian heathen name appears on their columns like a fly in a communion cup.”
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She excoriated the papers either as small barking curs or “so many Indian sewers” filled with filth and “public literary garbage.” By spring, she was reduced to falling back on her sex, branding the editors cowards who were “ever ready to attack defenceless women.”
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H.P.B. was going through a bad time in her personal relationships. Although Damodar’s father had presented her with a horse and carriage, the extent of her hold on his son was only now occurring to him. Damodar, still living at the “Crow’s Nest,” refused to go home to his wife and parents and even relinquished his share in the family estate. As a result of this unpleasant breach, Damodar’s brother joined Wimbridge and Bates in issuing a circular saying that the Theosophical Society picked the pockets of its members. In the end, the Society had to get an auditor’s verification of their receipts and disbursements, which showed, incidentally, that they were about twelve thousand rupees in the red.

Before this upheaval was over, Helena clashed furiously with Olcott. When the Ceylon Buddhists invited him to make a return visit, he happily consented, because he derived the most pleasure from lecturing and raising money for schools. Suddenly H.P.B. decided she could not edit the
Theosophist
alone and demanded that he cancel the trip. When Henry said no, she cloistered herself in her room for one solid week and refused to see him, occasionally using Damodar or Emma to deliver notes threatening that the Mahatmas would have nothing more to do with him if he insisted on going to Ceylon.

This time, Uncharacteristically, Henry did not kowtow; his tour had been approved by the Brothers and if they were so vacillating, he preferred to work without them. Moreover, he was dead set on going to Ceylon “even though I never saw the face of a Master again.”
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A few days later, her ire burned out, she made the conciliatory gesture of inviting him for a ride in her carriage. Henry made clear that he wanted to reconstruct the Society on a different basis, putting public service and universal brotherhood in the forefront and, he added, “keeping occultism in the background.”
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At Simla, he had suddenly begun to feel uncomfortable with the miracles. After all, they were H.P.B.’s show, and he now wanted no part of them, maintaining he could best serve the interests of the Society in an administrative capacity. Helena had no choice but to acquiesce.

H.P.B., nearing her fiftieth birthday, was probably going through menopause, which may account for some of her extreme emotional fluctuations at this time. After seven years Henry had grown accustomed to her choleric aspect; even on those days when she went off screaming that “there were no Mahatmas, no psychical powers, and that she had simply deceived us from first to last,”
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his deep affection for her had enabled him to take it. Emma Coulomb, however, was less understanding of Madame’s jags.

Some times when awake in bed, I used to torture my brain to find out what I could do to please her—for, bad as the place was, yet it was better than none; and although she was unjust, yet at times she used to have a good fit for two or three days, at which times she was more tractable, which made up for the past, and we pushed on.
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Helena paid little attention to Emma’s piddling grievances, and eventually that mistake would catch up with her. She felt ill again, this time with back pains, and her doctor recommended cauterization. “Oh God!” she wrote despondently to Vera, “what a misery it is to live and to feel. Oh, if it were only possible to plunge into Nirvana. What an irresistible fascination there is in the idea of eternal rest!”’
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Talk of suicide humiliated her, and she did not speak of it again to Vera; what she longed for was not death, but rest and release from pain. Even though she had written a scant twenty Mahatma letters between mid-October, 1880, and the end of February, 1881, the assignment was beginning to take its toll. She failed to link the letters to her physical maladies, and yet the corollary is unquestionably there.

By April, however, circumstances conspired to give her a few months’ sabbatical. Olcott had left for Ceylon, not to reappear for seven months. Alfred Sinnett and his pregnant Patience had gone to England for a holiday and were not due back until July. At last, H.P.B. was suddenly liberated from the necessity of impersonating a Mahatma and had an opportunity to catch her second wind. From Koot Hoomi, Sinnett had requested and received permission to publish extracts from the letters in a book that he planned to title
Occult World.
He completed the entire manuscript at sea, gave it to a publisher when he arrived, and the first edition was issued in June. If he had hoped for a respectful hearing, he must have been disappointed. While the English reviewers roasted not only him but Madame and the Theosophical Society, they reserved their most scathing jibes for Mahatma Koot Hoomi’s letters. “They are written,” the British publication
Saturday Review
announced scornfully, “in very choice American, and the Oriental lore which they contain is exclusively derived from a perusal of Lord Lytton’s novels and of a mystical jumble entitled
Isis Unveiled,
published some years ago by Madame Blavatsky.”
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Madame’s miracles at Simla, chronicled in detail in
Occult World,
were dismissed as dull, and Alfred Sinnett’s “mental faculties are so obscured that he cannot perceive the tricks of which he is the victim.”
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In late June, Sinnett returned to India alone; complications had arisen during Patience’s pregnancy, and on July 14 she would give birth to a stillborn child. Since his steamer had docked in Bombay, he spent a few days at the “Crow’s Nest” before continuing up-country to Allahabad. Helena did not spare herself in providing an enthusiastic reception, and even before his arrival, had asked Alexis Coulomb to prepare a trap in the attic floorboards above the room Sinnett would occupy. Just after breakfast on the morning following his arrival, Sinnett was sitting in his room when a letter dropped among the china and cutlery. Koot Hoomi, seemingly unaware of the miserable reception given
Occult World,
could not have been more solicitous or supportive:

Welcome good friend and brilliant author, welcome back! Your letter at hand, and I am happy to see your personal experiences with the “Elect” of London proved so successful.
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