Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (62 page)

“I had seen his portrait several times before,” Mohini replied.

“Had you ever seen him in the flesh?”
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Stack persisted.

Unwilling to admit that he had not, Mohini hemmed and hawed and announced he was not permitted to answer that question. When questioned about the purported Tibetan letters, he also had to confess that he had no idea what a real Tibetan letter looked like, never having received one for the simple reason that no postal service existed between India and Tibet.

Poor Mohini had been subjected to nothing but suffering since he had come to Europe: in Paris he had lost his way every time he left the apartment, then had to bear with gaping Parisians; in London, Sinnett had given him an unheated room where it was too cold to sleep. At one of the Sinnetts’ receptions, a man in black velvet knee breeches and white stockings, whose name he later learned was Oscar Wilde, had come up to be introduced and then whispered audibly to Patience, “I never realized before what a mistake we make in being white.”
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Now Mohini had to face cross-examination by this panel of smirking Englishmen. Somehow, he managed to retain his dignity.

Olcott felt quite pleased with the way Mohini had conducted himself and was confident that he, too, had made a good impression on the Committee. Therefore, it was disillusioning, to say the least, when H.P.B. suddenly popped up in London and started to criticize him. According to her sources, Olcott had given some extremely silly information to the Committee and she strongly advised him to stop feeding the S.P.R. “cock and bull stories.”
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Henry promised to be more discreet and even offered to escort her to an S.P.R. meeting: to H.P.B.’s consternation and disgust, he brought the meeting to a standstill by launching into a trite, rambling narrative about his experiences with the Mahatmas and then, to demonstrate a point, pulled from his pocket a little tin Buddha on wheels. At the sight of the toy the S.P.R. broke into riotous laughter.

Helena blanched, struck dumb with rage. Francesca Arundale, ringside, retained a vivid memory of “our journey home in the cab, the tense stern quietude of H.P.B. holding herself in till she got into the house, and then the fury with which she lashed Colonel Olcott with her words, her reproaches for having brought the names of the Masters into ridicule.”
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Henry reluctantly admitted that he had made a mistake by showing the toy Buddha, but H.P.B. was not to be mollified.

“What do you want me to do?” he flared. “Do you want me to commit suicide?”
⁶⁸

At this, Helena grew even wilder. He should resign from the Society, she screamed; she refused to be associated with a fool like him.

Gathering up the remaining shreds of his dignity, Henry replied gravely, “I do not care what you say. I am in the Society and I shall remain and work for it until the Master turns me out.”
⁶⁹
The verbal bloodbath continued until 3 a.m., when Helena abruptly stomped off to bed.

One did not have to be a psychic to intuit that the S.P.R. investigation would end unpleasantly. Nevertheless, H.P.B. was obliged to assume an attitude of cooperation. When Frederic Myers paid her a social call one afternoon and asked to see proof of her occult powers, she gave him a benign grin: “What would be the good? Even if you saw and heard, you would not be convinced.”

“Try me,” Myers countered.

Finally H.P.B. asked Francesca to bring a finger bowl full of water and place it before Myers. After a few moments of silence, the astral bell tinkled four or five times. Myers, who had been told of the bell, complimented her and wondered how the sound was produced.

Again Helena smiled. “Nothing very wonderful, only a little knowledge of how to direct some of the forces of nature.”
⁷⁰
Myers left on a wave of praise, but when Helena predicted it would last no more than a day or two, she was quite correct.

On the surface, however, the Theosophical Society’s relationship with the S.P.R. continued to be chummy, and a few weeks later, when Helena was invited to Cambridge to meet informally with Eleanor and Henry Sidgwick, Richard Hodgson, and other members, she readily accepted, hoping to eradicate from their minds Henry’s toy Buddha. Accompanied by Mohini and Francesca, she stopped for several days at a small hotel near the Union Society. At her meetings with the S.P.R. she went out of her way to be helpful; declining to perform phenomena, she disarmed her interrogators by stating that the Society’s purpose was to promulgate religious doctrines, not to prove she possessed supernormal powers. Eleanor Sidgwick found her “reassuring and pleasant, in spite of having cigarette ashes in the flounces of her skirt,”
⁷¹
a generous assessment considering that Mrs. Sidgwick had once written to her husband that she believed “the Mahatmas are ordinary magicians and know no more of the universe than we do.”
⁷²

H.P.B. was surprised to find that Laura Holloway, the American medium praised by William Judge, was also a guest of the hotel. Out of courtesy and curiosity, Madame invited her to her room for a chat. Laura recalled that Madame Blavatsky looked depressed and when asked the reason, H.P.B. told her: “Ah! my child, you little know what is to follow this Cambridge trip.”
⁷³
This made no sense to Laura, who thought that the Madame’s visit had been an overwhelming success. It seems clear that Helena was preparing her followers for the S.P.R. denunciation she saw coming. Ironically, she was wrong, at least in the short run: six months later, the Committee would issue a preliminary report on its findings, and would not pronounce her a fake. To her astonishment, the overall tone of the report was favorable and seemed to accept the Mahatmas and their letters as genuine. This endorsement was deceptive, however, for the S.P.R. verdict had been decided on the basis of Olcott’s honesty and Mohini’s social standing; since the Committee was stumped by what either of them had to gain by cooperating in fraud, it found them honest by default.

July progressed in an exhausting round of visitors, dinners, meetings, and conversaziones, the drawing-room discussions that were the latest rage among London’s smart set. To the mercurial H.P.B., it seemed like “mad turmoil from morning till night.” Sinnett had arranged a reception for Madame at Prince’s Hall, to which nearly a thousand people showed up. The reception had occasioned her buying a “black velvet dress with tail three yards long (which I hate)” but she rather liked Sinnett’s windy tribute to her. Basking in the glory that had always made her happy, she still wished to go home without subjecting herself to the rigors of the reception line. “Just fancy,” she moaned happily to Vera, “smiling and shaking hands with three hundred ladies and gentlemen during two hours. Oof !!”
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Not a late sleeper, Helena spent her mornings in her room, generally at her desk. When Francesca came up to say good morning, H.P.B. ignored her clucking about the burnt matches littering the floor. Helena, possessed by a mystifying aversion to ash trays, habitually tossed matches away without bothering to extinguish them. Francesca, careful housekeeper that she was, worried less about cleanliness than about the house burning down. As a result, she kept a surreptitious watch on H.P.B. so she could snatch up the flaming matches before they hit her carpets. And there were more problems. Even though Madame had established 4 to 6 p.m. as visiting hours, she did not stick to it. Sometimes, for no reason palpable to Francesca, she would refuse to come down from her room, and the guests, often from considerable distances, had to be sent away with whatever lame excuses Francesca could invent; at other times, the open house lasted all day long. H.P.B.’s samovar would glisten on the table and Babula would bear cups of tea and sweet cakes to the guests while Helena sat smoking in a big arm chair. Without regard for Fran-cesca’s grocery bill, she would grandly invite a whole room of people to stay for dinner so that, Francesca recalled, “I never knew whether I should have one person or twenty.”
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Among the visitors not invited to dinner were Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. They arrived one afternoon just as Helena was setting out for a drive with Mohini and were invited to join her. Although Maitland recalled her as “very cordial and cheerful even to jocularity,”
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H.P.B. immediately laced into Anna for a critical article she had written about Sinnett’s latest work,
Esoteric Buddhism,
even quoting one particularly offensive sentence. Anna denied having written any such thing, but Helena insisted she had, and the exchange ended with both of them repairing to a confectioner’s shop for chocolate.

By this time Anna Kingsford had ceased to interest Helena, who encountered another woman far more threatening than Anna, the American psychic, Laura Holloway. Clairvoyant and clairaudient, as well as rich and very pretty, Laura had been instantly scooped up by Alfred Sinnett, who invited her to stay at his home. She had read
Occult World
and
Esoteric Buddhism
and conceived the notion of becoming a pupil of Koot Hoomi. Thinking for some reason that Sinnett could arrange an introduction, she had come to London expressly to meet him. For Sinnett’s part, he became enthralled with Laura after a seance she held in his drawing room on July 6; to his astonishment, once she had passed into trance, Koot Hoomi took possession of her body and spoke in the first person to Sinnett. After all these years, Alfred had found what he had long been seeking: the Mahatma without going through the Old Lady.

Once H.P.B. heard of these unprecedented events, she moved fast. Koot Hoomi quickly dashed off a starchy note to Sinnett in which he informed him that he had never communicated with him or anyone else through Laura Holloway, who, while “an excellent but quite undeveloped clairvoyante,”
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was the unfortunate victim of evil spirits, or
dugpas.
Next, H.P.B. herself approached Laura: did she wish to become a
chelal
Laura swore she was ready to go to Tibet, if necessary, in search of the Masters.

At the Master’s order, Laura was promptly removed from the Sinnett home and installed at Francesca Arundale’s, where, to her delight, she began receiving letters from the great Mahatma. Admittedly some of them chided her for being young, ignorant and childish about occultism, but Koot Hoomi forgave her. “So far, you are not even one year old—and you would be treated like an adult! Try to learn to stand firm on your legs, child, before you venture walking.”
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Best of all, Laura was settled into an upstairs room with Mohini, the
chela
too pure to associate with women, and told that the two of them were to collaborate on a book. Through her control, “The Student,” Laura the medium was instructed to “bring through” sketches of ancient history, while Mohini, the genuine sage, would make his contribution with the aid of the Masters.

Laura Holloway, who seems to have been a sincere and pleasant person, tried her best to cooperate, but when she insisted on interjecting her own ideas into
Man, Fragments of a Forgotten History,
Helena bristled. Privately dismissing Laura’s insights as “flapdoodle,” she suspected the finished book would have as much meaning as “the jabbering of a schoolboy.”
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Later, when the book was duly published, most of Laura Holloway’s contributions would be deleted, although her name would remain as co-author.

All too soon, Laura Holloway’s refusal to take direction drove Helena to write two Mahatma letters, one of them from a disgusted Master Morya, ordering her to stop wasting K.H.’s time with trivia like the letters to Laura. “All of you women are ‘Zin Zin’ fools,” he grumbled.
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Although she supervised Laura’s literary efforts, H.P.B. seems to have been doing little writing herself. For more than a year she had been considering a major new work, a revision of
Isis Unveiled
called
The Secret Doctrine,
and had even announced it would be run serially in the
Theosophist.
But, although William Judge had helped her in Paris by making a few notes for the book, she had not yet sat down to write it. The descriptive pieces for Michael Katkov were still not finished, the manuscript needed major revisions, particularly in grammar, and she moaned to herself that she could no longer write good Russian. She now had no money of her own and was reduced to begging a pittance from the miserly Henry. She did not find it pleasant to be living at Miss Arundale’s expense, but her mental turmoil made work impossible and the extent of her productivity was a long fuzzy letter to
Light,
commenting on a pamphlet making the rounds of occult London. Arthur Lillie, the Buddhist scholar, had written an essay entitled
Koot Hoomi Unveiled,
in which he gleefully drew a bead on many of Madame’s myths and proceeded to shoot. Only H.P.B. had the ingenuity to explain away, for example, her attachment to Spiritualism and John King in New York and to deny Lillie’s charges that John was nothing but an alias for Koot Hoomi. She felt no obligation, she declared, to unbosom her private life to Arthur Lillie; whether or not he believed her, “I care very little.”
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Much of her energy that summer was channeled into her new avocation— art patronage. Among recent recruits to the Society was a fashionable German-born painter, Hermann Schmiechen, much in vogue for his head-and-shoulders portraits of London society beauties in
decollete”
evening dress. Hardly had the ink dried on Schmiechen’s Theosophical diploma than H.P.B. hastened to proclaim him a great artist. Ignoring the fluff, lace, and bare shoulders that normally characterized his work, she decided that he should be the one to paint her beloved Koot Hoomi. At the same time, she apparently commissioned Isabelle de Steiger to paint Morya and, as Isabelle put it, the work was to be done “of course, gratis.” One day H.P.B. visited Isabelle at her studio in Holland Park Road, and Isabelle recalled “how with great difficulty she got out of a hansom cab unhelped and laboured up my one flight of steep stairs.” Stopping before a life-size male head, Madame asked, “What do you call that picture?”