Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (49 page)

Having covered herself for the coming storm with this prophetic warning, H.P.B. allowed herself to be sidetracked, this time into the antique furniture and art business. As a result of her Simla letter to Prince Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff, the two of them had started a flirtatious correspondence, even exchanging photographs. Giving way to nostalgia that she usually managed to hide, possibly because she knew that she would never see Alexander again, Helena retraced for him the largely fictional story of her life since she had fled Russia. Then she went on to describe her present circumstances in terms that Olcott and the other residents of the “Crow’s Nest” would not have recognized. She told Alexander that she lived in a Chinese pagoda equipped with “halls for meetings, libraries, laboratories for chemical and psychological experiments, etc.” The reception hall of her personal quarters was usually thronged with “some fifty fools of all races”
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waiting to speak with her. In spite of this hectic schedule, she was delighted to put herself at Alexander’s service and when he asked for Indian furniture and curios, she promptly replied: “Write to me exactly what you want, what kind of furniture, and for what price,”
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and proceeded to compose a two-page description of her own bookcases and tables, including the prices she had paid.

Filling Alexander’s shopping list occupied some of Helena’s spare time that year, but she soon came to regret her commitment, for he was exceedingly slow in reimbursing her. Still, the Prince was the tie to a lost past so precious, she would overlook even his scorn for the contact. When she came across a nasty item about herself in a St. Petersburg paper and realized the source had to be Alexander, she corrected him without rancor. She had not invented a new religion, as the paper claimed; on the contrary, she took credit for inventing nothing. “My belief is a complete lack of belief, even in myself... I believe ONLY in human stupidity.”
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But, in fact, human stupidity often failed her, witness Henry, whom she had come to regard as the most gullible of all. By now she must have intuited his changed feelings toward her because he was spending as little time as possible at the “Crow’s Nest” and, when he was home, their relationship seemed strained. On February 17, he set out on a tour of North India and his fully-detailed memoirs describe lectures, meetings, and assorted dignitaries whom he had inducted into the Society. Helena had usually been content to leave this sort of tiresome barnstorming to him but now must have needed a change of scenery. At the end of March she temporarily assuaged her restlessness with a short excursion to Allahabad where she persuaded Djual Khool to “precipitate” a portrait of Master Koot Hoomi. Alfred Sinnett, marveling, had no way of knowing how closely K.H. physically resembled Madame’s old spirit friend John King.

A week later she joined Olcott in Calcutta where Henry described them “busy as working bees, writing, receiving visitors, holding discussions with outsiders, and meetings of the new local Branch.”
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On the fourteenth of April he recorded in his diary the election of new officers for the Bengal Theosophical Society; at the bottom of the page, Mohini Mohun Chatterji is listed as Assistant Secretary. At the time, Mohini was a twenty-four-year-old Brahmin attorney and poet, a descendant of the Hindu reformer Raja Rammohun Roy and a relation of Debendra Nath Tagore, father of the celebrated poet. He was a slender youth with thick blue-black hair falling in waves to his shoulders and magnificent velvety eyes that normally held a gentle expression. There was no mistaking his intelligence, nor overlooking the almost perfect beauty that two years hence would set aflutter the smart young women of Paris and London.

H.P.B. had always collected promising young men as her disciples; some, like Ross Scott, failed her, but when she exercised her judgment carefully and selected more serious types like Damodar, she was amply rewarded. Nevertheless, at Calcutta she seems to have taken small note of Mohini Chatterji, no doubt because she was in hot pursuit of another young man whom she needed far more. For several months she had been eying a high-caste Telugu Brahmin, T. Subba Row, who had exhibited a lively initial interest in the Theosophical Society. In due course, they were corresponding regularly.

Although Subba Row belonged to a family of distinction, his uncle being prime minister to the Rajah of Pithapuram, he had showed no unusual intelligence or a bent for mysticism as a child. After studying law at Madras Presidency College, he joined the legal firm of Grant and Laing and became a pleader in the Baroda High Court. By the time he met H.P.B. his practice had grown lucrative and he was on the threshold of becoming a prominent attorney, perhaps, in time, a statesman. Slowly his interests were being diverted to philosophy, and he now began to feel that a storehouse of occult knowledge and Sanskrit literature were suddenly opening to him; he felt that his familiarity with the
Gita
and
Upanishads
was perhaps a karmic carryover from a previous life. Hence by twenty-five, Subba Row had become a brilliant classical scholar, but how this had happened was a mystery even to his own mother. To her questions, he only answered that he dare not discuss these secret matters with her.

Despite his reticence, H.P.B. managed to learn that he was a disciple of Shankaracharya, a south Indian sage. Subba Row was the perfect person to consult on the Mahatma letters, and she began to envision the youth as the gateway to deep secrets and genuine adepts she had not yet reached. Subba Row, however, was an extremely reserved young man and when she had pressed him for introductions, he backed off. “It is
almost impossible,
Madame, to induce any of these mystics to come before the public and clear the doubts which skeptics entertain as regards the reality of Yoga Vidya and the existence of Adepts.”
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H.P.B. rejoiced in finding someone to corroborate her stories of Indian adepts, and when Subba Row expressed a desire to meet her, she could hardly wait to take him on. For some time now, Henry had been intending to visit Madras Presidency and suddenly he found H.P.B., who had never shown much interest in organizing tours, most anxious to accompany him.

They were to embark on the nineteenth of April from Calcutta, but the SS
India,
Olcott wrote, “lay at the wharf all night taking in cargo and what with this awful din, the scorching heat of the cabins and the mosquitoes, one may imagine the kind of night we spent and the kind of temper H.P.B. was in the next morning!”
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By this time Henry much preferred to travel without Helena, and for good reason.

Subba Row could not have been more gracious, delegating himself to bring out to the ship a party of Madras dignitaries and a large crowd of sightseers. Then they drove along the beach road to the suburb of Mylapore, where H.P.B. and Olcott were grandly installed in a private house. To Henry the visit seemed nothing less than a total success: some of the city’s leading men rushed to join the Society on “a wave of enthusiasm,”
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as he called it. Unfortunately H.P.B. had less success, even though she presented her most charming side to Subba Row, to the extent of having him initiated into membership in a private ceremony. Still, he did not reveal anything useful. Toward the end of the week, feeling more than a little exasperated, Helena invited him and sixteen other newly admitted members on a jaunt to the nearby holy city of Tiruvellum, the site of one of Southern India’s oldest temples. It was said that great sages had once dwelled in the town and perhaps some still did, and possibly H.P.B. counted on meeting one of them lurking around. Her party was greeted at the station with music and flowers, but H.P.B. could barely restrain herself and rushed off to see the temple. She got as far as the inner sanctuary only to be stopped by Brahmin priests who demanded a surcharge of twenty-five rupees per head. “We felt so disgusted,” said Olcott, “that we refused to go into the polluted shrine, and returned the same day to Madras.”
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On May 3, Helena and Henry left Madras and embarked on an idyllic four-week journey by houseboat up the Buckingham Canal to Nellore and Guntur. For the first time in years they were alone together, with only Babula and the boat crew for company, and Henry remembered that they “had never been so closely drawn together.” For Helena it was a time of comfortable seclusion, when the chaos of her ordinary existence could be put aside; K.H. did not pick up his pen, nor did Master M., and blessedly she was beyond the reach of her enemies. It did not matter that the boat was cramped or that in the tiny cabin there was barely room for their camp cots, two lockers, a lavatory, and a portable table that folded up and hung from the ceiling. At night as they glided along, the only sounds they heard were the occasional yelp of a jackal and the lapping of the water, and they smelled nothing but the wet rice fields. In the mornings when they scudded up to the bank, the coolies would build a fire to cook curry and rice, while Babula prepared “a capital breakfast” for Helena and Henry, after which Henry would go for a swim.

The days passed in euphoric quiet, with H.P.B. in a shabby wrapper sitting on the locker opposite Henry, smoking and daydreaming. “She was in good health and spirits,” Olcott remembered, “and there was nothing to mar the charm of our companionship.” At Nellore they disembarked to organize a branch society, climbed back on the boat, and went on to Padaganjam where they had to abandon their floating haven and take
jampan
chairs for the thirty-five-mile trip through dense forests to Guntur. The journey was tedious, the thermometer read a blazing-hot ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and the coolies kept up a staccato refrain that eventually jarred the nerves. Fording a river, their bearers stripped naked to their breech cloths; the water turned out to be so deep that the chairs had to be held over the bearers’ heads. Henry recalled: “H.P.B. began shouting at me that these men would surely upset her. I shouted back that it didn’t matter, as she was too fat to sink and I should fish her out.”
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To take her mind off her predicament, she continuously cursed Olcott and the coolies who could not understand a word she said. Reaching the opposite bank at last, she puffed furiously on a succession of cigarettes until she had recovered her amiability. Life was good then.

At Guntur, where the whole town population greeted them, they plunged into a roistering welcome. It was one of the few times in her life when reality matched Helena’s fantasies. Writing to Prince Alexander, she could have described the scene unembroidered and it would have seemed extraordinary. But habit dies hard, and, with her customary exuberance, she transformed her
jampan
chair into “a golden palanquin,” and added a few nautch girls and banners reading “Welcome revered Madame Blavatsky.”
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Everyone loved her, but in the midst of her exhilaration she suffered from an acute spasm of depression and wondered, “What is the good of all these triumphs?” Suddenly, for no obvious reason, she was engulfed by homesickness and shared it with the Prince. “Oh, my dear Prince,” she lamented, “if I were 20 or 25 years younger... I would have made the conquest of India without spilling a drop of blood and I would have given it to the motherland.” The torchlight parades and the crowds of cheering Hindus meant, after all, little to her; it was Russia she longed for but would never see again. “I will die here and my sinful flesh and bones will be burned on a funeral pyre and my ashes scattered to the breadth of the Aryavartas.” Then, ashamed of her morbid self-pity, she added impishly, “Shall I send you a pinch?”
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For some time now, H.P.B. and Olcott had been talking about buying a permanent headquarters for the Theosophical Society at some place other than Bombay, whose heat and dampness Helena had come to dislike. Their Cingalese friends had made liberal offers of rent-free houses, but she agreed with Henry that Ceylon was too far removed from the mainstream and too backward for their purposes. Now, returning to Madras on May 30, she found several of their members urging her to come there. She could not have been more pleased, for it was of consummate importance to be within consulting distance of the elusive Subba Row. Still, she was guarded in her response and replied that she would only consider the idea if a suitable house could be found. Henry also reacted cautiously: they were low enough on money so that he was loathe to embark on the move without a financial commitment, by contribution or loan, from local members. Luckily, three members pledged two hundred and fifty rupees apiece.

Early the next day, in a whirlwind of enthusiasm, the two sons of Judge Muttuswamy Chetty began to scout available real estate and by afternoon had come up with a property that was going cheap in the suburb of Adyar. That very evening the brothers drove Helena and Henry out along the Bay of Bengal to Huddleston Gardens, a twenty-one-acre estate on the banks of the sluggish Adyar River. Entering the gate and starting up the long avenue of mango and banyan trees, H.P.B. was already enchanted. From a distance the graceful pillared mansion appeared to be made of white marble, and although it was really brick plastered white, its elegance could not be denied. In addition to the main house, the grounds also afforded two small riverside bungalows, a brick stable and coachhouse, storage buildings and a swimming pool. It was like a small village. Soobiah Chetty told her that the modest asking price of nine thousand rupees (about three thousand dollars at that time) was due to the recent opening of the railway between Madras and the foot of the Nilgiri Hills, which made the summer resort of Ootacamund only a day’s ride away. Fashionable people who had once made their homes at Adyar were migrating to Ooty, as it was nicknamed, and were throwing their opulent estates on a bidderless market.