Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (56 page)

In a moment of childish remorse, Emma wished that she could “tear out of my life the page that concerns my life with Madame Blavatsky,”
²⁶³
but since that was impossible she decided to take more practical steps. In December, at the annual Theosophical convention, she approached Prince Harisinghji Rupsinghji for a loan of two hundred rupies. The Prince, although he had just received a K.H. letter and a Tibetan coin from the shrine, was taken back at Emma’s request and answered evasively that perhaps he would help her someday. And with that vague promise Emma had to be content.

As the day of departure approached, the pace of H.P.B.’s life quickened. They had decided to expand their traveling party to include the Parsi poet Sorab J. Padshah and Helena’s servant Babula. Since they would be absent for at least four months, Olcott, in order to be sure that Headquarters ran smoothly, appointed a management committee of seven Europeans and Hindus, among them Damodar, Dr. Franz Hartmann, and St. George Lane-Fox, a wealthy British electrical engineer and new recruit to the Theosophical ranks. Alexis Coulomb was included only at the last minute.

H.P.B. provided the Board of Control with a written list of instructions, concerned mainly with extensive alterations she wanted Alexis to make on the roof, including the construction of a new study and library, a new kitchen for the preparation of her meals, the addition of a servants’ staircase to the roof, and a partition for the Occult Room so that Damodar might use a section of it as his office. In strong terms she made a special point of informing the committee
“that no one shall bother and annoy M. Coulomb with unasked advice and meddling,
for he alone is responsible for the new studio and the occult room together with Madame Coulomb.”

Stuck casually in the middle of the list was the most important directive of all, the one that allowed her to close down the Adyar branch of the astral post office temporarily. Hence, her rooms could be safely unattended for several months: “I leave my rooms
entirely in the charge of Madame and M. Coulomb,
my dogs likewise; and want Madm. to take charge of the cleaning with my bearer under her orders.”
²⁶⁴
Leaving the keys with Emma, she had impressed upon her the importance of allowing no one to enter either her room or the Occult Room. This injunction mystified and annoyed Hartmann and Lane-Fox, who could not understand why Madame Blavatsky would entrust her personal quarters and the precious shrine to, as Hartmann remarked, “a weird witch-like creature”
²⁶⁵
who seemed to have nothing but malice for her. Even Damodar, who fully understood her reasoning, felt miffed at the arrangements.

The SS
Chandernagore
was due to sail from Bombay on February 20, but en route to the port of embarkation H.P.B. planned to stop a few days at Varel to see Prince Harisinghji and his cousin, the Thakur of Wudhwan. When Emma learned Helena would be seeing Harisinghji, she begged to come along, and knowing nothing of Emma’s attempts to borrow money from the Prince, H.P.B. readily agreed. About to depart for the exciting cities of Europe, she did not want to deny Emma the more modest indulgence of a holiday. Once at Varel, Emma immediately reminded the Prince of his promise and must have pursued him with such persistence that he finally complained to Madame Blavatsky.

Mortified, Helena promptly put Emma in her place, ordering her never again to hustle the Prince. When Emma burst into angry tears, H.P.B. hastened to ease her bruised feelings by promising to bring her a European watch and some real French coffee beans. Emma blew her nose, and said no more.

The day before sailing, Helena received news of the death of her beloved Uncle Rostislav. Although she revealed the contents of the cable to Emma, she pointedly said nothing to Olcott and the others. Later that day, either because she could not deal with her emotions or because she could never pass up the opportunity for a good phenomenon, she wrote one of the strangest letters ever to come from her pen. She was beginning her journey, she wrote Nadyezhda, “depressed by a terrible foreboding. Either Uncle is dead or I am off my head.” Five days earlier, in a railway carriage, Rostislav had appeared to her, first looking pale and thin, and had said, “Farewell to you, Helena Petrovna.” Shortly afterward she had seen him again, this time looking like a young man, and when she asked him if he was alive, he replied that he was more alive than ever: he was shielded from suffering and had seen his father and all the family. “Then I knew for certain,” Helena went on to Nadyezhda, “he was no more in the world... he chose to come personally and say good-bye to me. Not a single tear in my eyes, but a heavy stone in my heart. The worst of it is that I do not know anything for certain.”
²⁶⁶

Next morning, aboard the
Chandernagore,
goodbyes were said. Emma, after many tearful hugs, stepped into the boat going back to shore, waved somberly at Babula, and then said in a quite different tone: “I shall be revenged on your mistress for preventing me from getting my two thousand rupees.”
²⁶⁷
If Babula reported the threat to his mistress, and he certainly must have, it did not penetrate her deep and silent grief for Rostislav Fadeyev.

PHOTOS

The most well-known portrait of H.P.B., taken by Enrico Resta, January 8, 1889, in London. New York Public Library picture collection.

Henry Steel Olcott, co-founder and first president of the Theosophical Society. An expatriate American, he lived his last three decades in India. New York Library Picture Collection.

William Quan Judge, New York attorney and leading figure in Theosophy from its inception to 1875. After H.P.B.'s death, he broke with the parent society and founded the independent Theosophical Society in America. New York Public Library picture collection.

Daniel Dunglas Home, one of the most notable nineteenth-century mediums. His intense aversion to Madame Blavatsky resulted in a twenty-year feud. New York Public Library picture collection.

Artist's sketch of "Katie King," the spirit that supposedly materialized at a Philadelphia seance, August 1874. A few months later "Katie" was revealed to be a living woman. New York Public Library picture collection.

William Butler Yeats in 1903. After meeting Madame Blavatsky at the age of twenty-two, he became one of her students. American Weekly magazine.

Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, about 1898 when she was having an unconsum-mated "spiritual marriage" with William Butler Yeats. Her association with the Society, encouraged by Yeats, turned out to be brief. New York Public Library picture collection.