Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (53 page)

To Sinnett’s rather forlorn but insistent queries about the status of the
Phoenix,
she showed her impatience by replying airily, “You ask me, dear,... And how can I know!”
²¹⁶
Even Koot Hoomi, she added, had given up in disgust and despair. She knew that the paper would never become a reality and regretted ever mentioning the idea. In Ooty, she wanted to relax, banish cares and enjoy herself for a change.

It took Helena only a few days to settle into a routine. In the mornings, when puddles in the road were covered with thin ice, she wrapped herself in her fur coat, settled in near a blazing wood fire and began to write articles about the Blue Mountains and its native tribes. The series would appear in Russia first as a series of newspaper articles and later as the book
The People of the Blue Mountains;
it would be probably her finest descriptive writing. Later in the day, when it had warmed up, she would drive around the lake or up into the hills famous for their lilies, heliotrope, masses of forget-me-nots, and cabbage roses that climbed up to the roofs of the houses. “Lord, what flowers!” she wrote her family in Russia. “I have not seen anything like them in my life... And all the hills are covered with raspberries and strawberries, blackberries also, each as big as your cherries.” Everything about Ooty enchanted her; the mushrooms were “delicious” and even the boa constrictors “also are beautiful.”
²¹⁷

Each morning the European residents gathered at the post office for the daily ritual of mail distribution. “When the post has come in,” observed one sharp-tongued Englishwoman, “the excitement of the day is over for most people in Ootacamund.”
²¹⁸
For Helena, the suspense was just beginning, since it was by mail that she kept tabs on Emma and made sure the shrine continued to produce phenomena while she was three hundred seventy miles away. “It’s just post time my dear,” she scribbled to Madame Coulomb, “I have only an instant... Yes, let Srinavas Rao prostrate himself before the
shrine
and whether he asks anything or not I beg you to send him this reply by K.H. for he expects something. /
know what he wants”
Srinavas Rao was a judge of the Court of Small Causes in Madras.

When another gentleman was expected to call at Adyar bearing a letter for K.H., she made sure he would not leave without a suitable reply. “In case he should do so here is Christofolo’s answer. For God’s sake arrange this and we are triumphant. I embrace and salute you.” It was Emma she had come to trust and depend upon, but, naturally, the woman could not be expected to think of everything. H.P.B. is constantly reminding her of details: tell Damodar not to skimp on incense for the shrine because “it is very damp and it ought to be well-incensed”; try to see that phenomena occur before a larger audience “than our domestic imbeciles only.” Helena saw little point in wasting perfectly good phenomena on the already converted.

At the beginning of August, when General Morgan informed her he was going to Madras for a few days on business, H.P.B. urged him to stay at Adyar; he thought it too far from town but said he would certainly go out to see the famous shrine. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that the General would expect a phenomenon, “for he told me so,” she wrote Emma. Probably he would put a question in the shrine, although he might be content merely to look at it. Either way, she wanted to make sure he left satisfied and impressed upon Emma that he “is worth his weight in gold. For the love of God, or of any one you please,
do not miss
this opportunity for we shall never have another.”
²¹⁹
The opportunity was, of course, her absence from the scene of the phenomenon.

Arriving in Adyar on the thirteenth, General Morgan was ushered into the locked Occult Room by Madame Coulomb, who opened the double doors of the shrine so clumsily that a china saucer sitting inside crashed to the floor. He remembered Emma reacting with horror, murmuring that Madame would be angry, as it was one of her favorite pieces, then scooping up the shards into a cloth and placing them in the shrine in a silver bowl. When the general helpfully tried to suggest that the saucer might be glued back together, Alexis Coulomb went off to find mastic, and someone, probably Morgan himself, remarked that the Mahatma might be willing to repair the dish. “Hardly had I uttered this,” he recalled, “when Damodar said, There is a message.’ “ Inside the shrine, they found a letter from Koot Hoomi, reading “the mischief is easily repaired,”
²²⁰
accompanied by the broken saucer miraculously made whole. According to General Morgan, the entire episode took less than five minutes.

Later that same day, a weary Emma made a full report to Madame Blavatsky on the success of the saucer phenomenon, but a note of disgust had crept into her letter: “My Dear Friend, I verily believe I shall go silly if I stay with you.”
²²¹
The Adyar Saucer Incident, as it came to be known in Theosophical history, is chiefly notable for two reasons: it marked a subtle turn in Emma’s readiness to cooperate with H.P.B., and it is also the first indication that Damodar had crossed from Mahatmic dupe to confederate.

By late August, Henry Olcott had returned from a two-month visit in Ceylon sporting a newly grown beard “down to the seventh rib,”
²²²
H.P.B. noted, and flowing hair to match, and he joined her at Ootacamund for a short holiday. It was clear, however, that he did not take to Ooty social life so zestfully as did Helena, for he continually harped on the work to be done at Adyar; annoyed, she contemplated staying on without him and even warned Emma to bury the key for the Occult Room since she knew he would examine the shrine if he returned alone. At the last minute she decided to accompany him. The weather had turned chilly and she caught “a most fearful cold,”
²²³
necessitating hot water bottles for her feet at night and layers of shawls and blankets during the day. Probably she developed the infection as a result of the thirty-two-degree difference in temperature between Ooty and Coimbatore, their first stop on the way home, but it does not seem to have incapacitated her in any way. In a bubbly letter she announced that, unless she heard from Emma to the contrary, she was going to buy her a French silk dress at Pondicherry as well as a suit for Alexis. She also announced Alexis’s appointment as the Society’s Librarian. Emma was instructed to buy him a desk and bookcase at Faciole’s and, while she was there, to pick out two or three new sofas for the veranda, plus several other pieces of furniture. Altogether H.P.B. grandly authorized Emma to spend up to three hundred rupees; it was secondhand shopping binges like this that were dismaying Olcott.

To be sure, Helena’s idea of making Alexis librarian was absurd, although it was intended purely as a gesture. Always generous to her friends, she demonstrated her fondness by showering them with gifts and she ended the letter with a touching admission of her feelings for Emma: “Truly, I love you. You are a
true
friend.”
²²⁴

On Sunday, the twenty-third of September, she returned home to find Headquarters in a shambles. During her absence, Damodar had continued to put out the magazine but correspondence had gone unanswered and manuscripts submitted for publication lay unopened. Damodar, terribly overworked, was hardly to blame, but she felt disappointed that so little had been done. When Sinnett reproved her for poor management, she snapped self-righteously that, unlike some people she knew, Olcott and herself began their day “at
five
in the morning with candle light and end it sometimes at 2 a.m. We have no time for lawn tennis as you had, and clubs and theatres and social intercourse.”
²²⁵
As she had just returned from three months of whirligig living, this was harshly unfair as well as inaccurate, but it no doubt reflected her general distress. On her return to Adyar she had been confronted by the annoying obligation to defend Master Koot Hoomi on a charge of plagiarism.

While H.P.B. was being lionized at Ootacamund, the retired New York school superintendent named Henry Kiddle was deciding to pursue a matter that had been puzzling him for more than a year. The previous summer, while reading Alfred Sinnett’s
Occult World,
he had been greatly surprised to find in one of Koot Hoomi’s letters a passage taken almost verbatim from a speech he himself had made. The address was first presented at a Spiritualist camp meeting at Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, in August, 1880, and was published the same month in the
Banner of Light.
Kiddle immediately wrote to Sinnett through his publishers, but after receiving no response, he decided to tell all in a letter to the English Spiritualist paper,
Light.
While a fairly well-known Spiritualist and president of the American Spiritualist Alliance, Kiddle does not seem to have been in the least anti-Theosophist; he was merely bewildered: “As Mr. Sinnett’s book did not appear till a considerable time afterwards (about a year, I think) it is certain that I did not quote, consciously or unconsciously, from its pages. How, then, did it get into Koot Hoomi’s mysterious letter?”
²²⁶
How indeed.

For the convenience of its readers,
Light
published in parallel columns the two passages:
²²⁷

KIDDLE’S LECTURE, August 15, 1880. 

Ideas rule the world; and as man’s minds receive new ideas, laying aside the old and the effete, the world advances. Society rests upon them; mighty revolutions crumble before their onward march. It is just as impossible to resist their influx as to stay the progress of the tide, etc. 

MAHATMIC LETTER, December 10, 1880.

Ideas rule the world; and as man’s minds receive new ideas, laying aside the old and effete, the world will advance, mighty revolutions will spring up from them, creeds and even powers will crumble before their irresistible force. It will be just as impossible to resist their influence when the time comes as to stay the progress of the tide, etc.

This time Sinnett answered promptly with a letter to
Light,
explaining that Kiddle’s initial query had been lost during his move back to England. Aside from this flimsy excuse, he could contribute little to clarify the event except to promise to check back with Koot Hoomi. Of course, he remarked, “to obtain further explanation of this mystery from India will take time”
²²⁸
but he felt confident it could be straightened out.

H.P.B.’s first inclination was to ignore Kiddle, and in fact, she chose not to respond to
Light
personally, allowing Henry to write the paper that he did not think the accusation “of much consequence.”
²²⁹
This time, Helena concurred, for she was confident that few people would seriously believe a Mahatma could plagiarize from a nobody like Kiddle. The episode would surely be forgotten in a few weeks, and, meanwhile, the less said about it the better.

Unfortunately, neither H.P.B. nor Henry realized the excitement that Kiddle’s charge was causing in London occult circles. Arthur Lillie, a Buddhist scholar, recalled meeting the editor of
Light
in Jermyn Street one day.

“Have you heard the news?” Stainton Moses asked him excitedly. “The Blavatsky bubble has burst.”
²³⁰

The bubble had not actually burst, but it had received a pinprick. It would be another two months before H.P.B. accepted the fact that the Kiddle unpleasantness would not dissipate by itself; some explanation would be necessary. Writing to Sinnett on November 17, she sputtered, “K.H.
plagiarised
from Kiddle! Ye gods and little fishes.” If those “fools” and “Sadducees” in London knew what it took to dictate a precipitation at a distance of three hundred miles, they would not be so idiotic as to hurl accusations at an adept. “Plagiarise from the
Banner of Light!!
that sweet spirits’ slop-basin—the asses! K.H. blows me up for talking too much—says He needs no defence and that I need not trouble myself.” Several lines were erased and a comment “precipitated” in Koot Hoomi’s handwriting: “I WILL TELL YOU ALL MYSELF AS SOON AS I HAVE AN HOUR’S LEISURE.”
²³¹

Not until December did the Mahatma find the hour’s leisure, and then his explanation seemed remarkably glib. “The solution is so simple and the circumstances so amusing, that I confess I laughed when my attention was drawn to it...”
²³²
No doubt he had picked up the quotations from Mr. Kiddle’s speech in the astral light currents and stored them in his mind. As for the letter in question, he went on to say that it had been dictated just as he had returned from a forty-eight-hour journey on horseback, and he recalled being half-asleep at the time; moreover, he had mentally dictated it to a novice
chela
inexperienced in “psychic chemistry” and when the young man asked if K.H. would like to check it for accuracy, he had answered, “Anyhow will do, my boy—it is of no great importance if you skip a few words.”
²³³
Now, having investigated the matter thoroughly, Koot Hoomi was prepared to supply the true text of his dictation, which turned out to be precisely the opposite in meaning as Mr. Kiddle’s speech and his own original letter to Sinnett.

Although this was the best H.P.B. could do, it did not prove satisfactory to such important English Theosophists as Charles Massey and Stainton Moses, who submitted their resignations to the Society more in amusement than indignation.