Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (77 page)

These statements had definite purpose, indeed were essential “to show whether Masters are or
are not.
If not—then /
am
the Mahatma…,”
¹⁵⁹
Conversely, if she could write the book without references, she was not the Mahatma, and Richard Hodgson was a liar. It will be remembered that she made similar claims for the writing of
Isis,
but it will also be recalled that she was working with a library of perhaps a hundred books in New York. Olcott, her only witness, did not believe that she could possibly have written
Isis
from her own library, and he felt sure that she did no outside library research because she never left the house. No matter what Henry believed, the fact remains that it was entirely possible, virtually certain, that she did compose
Isis
from those books plus a few others borrowed from friends, and it is also probable that she left the apartment. There was no reason why she could not have, for she was in good health.

At Wurzburg and Ostend, however, immobilized as she was, it is unlikely that she went cavorting through book shops. That was one reason her friends believed she had no books; the other was that she brainwashed them so consistently on this point that even those closest to her, Countess Wachtmeister for one, would continue to insist that Madame spoke the truth. In fact, every person involved with Madame Blavatsky during the writing of
The Secret Doctrine
seems to have gone out of their way to mention the curious lack of reference works, until it sounds as if they were patterning their accounts on a central press release.

The truth is, H.P.B. did own an unspecified number of books and did use them as source material. No one understood this better than the countess, who had packed those nine bulky pieces of luggage upon leaving Wurzburg and probably knew the exact number of books in Madame’s traveling library. At the beginning of her association with H.P.B., she must have entertained suspicions about Helena’s work methods because once, when a page had to be rewritten twelve times, she asked why the Mahatmas made mistakes. It was not their error, H.P.B. explained; pictures and astral counter-parts of books were passed before her eyes but reading them correctly required concentration on her part. If she was upset or distracted, she naturally made mistakes. After that, Constance asked no further questions and accepted the role of witness to Madame’s lack of reference material, while at the same time assuming the responsibility for ordering the volumes H.P.B. needed. On December 13, 1885, for instance, Constance asked Sinnett to get them a copy of Hargrave Jennings’
Phallicism,
also to “beg Mohini to write out the esoteric meaning of some of Shakespeare’s
plays.
Madame wants it for the S.D. and will put it in Mohini’s name.”
¹⁶⁰
On October 13, 1886, she reminded Sinnett that H.P.B. wanted H. H. Wilson’s
Vishnu Purana,
the very work that William Coleman would find to be Helena’s chief source, but to make sure he bought the ten-shilling edition. As for the other book on Odin and Scandinavian mythology, he was to please cancel it because H.P.B. could not afford it. This particular letter is doubly interesting because it supplies a glimpse of the financial priorities in Helena’s life; instead of the mythology book, Sinnett was asked to stop at Mr. Wallace’s in Oxford Circus and purchase four bottles of No. 3 medicine.

Unfortunately for H.P.B. there was no one in whom she could confide her fears and frustrations. Naturally nobody expected her to need books, not even Constance, who may have convinced herself by this time that Madame used them only to verify quotations she had received in the astral light. So H.P.B. had to keep her problems to herself. The fact was, in October of 1886, she was stuck. With little difficulty she had completed a first volume, mainly her interpretation of the
Stanzas of Dzyan.
Now that she was set to tear into a second volume dealing with Hindu cosmogony and theogony, the source, to her, of the true archaic doctrine, she was compelled to admit to herself that her knowledge in this area was sketchy. All along she had been counting on the help of Subba Row, to whom she had already sent the first volume for reading and revision; but to her enormous distress, she learned from Henry that Subba Row wanted nothing to do with
The Secret Doctrine.
After reading the material, he commented that it was so full of mistakes that if he touched it, he should have to rewrite it altogether, and he did not even want to look at a second volume.

Forgetting that she was supposedly receiving help from the Mahatmas, she sent Henry an anguished reply. There were Sanskrit words and sentences she needed, not to mention the esoteric meanings of Hindu allegories. “Can you ask Srinavas Row and Bhavani Row to help me? Then I could send you the 2nd Vol. consisting of Books 1. 2. and 3. Unless someone helps me I do not know what to do. And who will make the glossary? I can’t and have no time, and Mohini hardly will. Please answer immediately.”
¹⁶¹

But Henry had no help to offer from his end.

Helena spent New Year’s, 1887, by herself. It was the first time in her life that she had awoken on the first day of a new year and found herself alone, “as if in my tomb.”
¹⁶²
Shortly before Christmas the countess had gone to London on business and Helena missed her terribly. “Ever since you went away,” she wrote her, “I have felt as though either paralysis or a split in the heart would occur. I am as cold as ice and four doses of digitalis in one day could not quiet the heart.”
¹⁶³
She spent the first weeks of January scratching out passages of the manuscript, rewriting, and adding new material. With the exception of Louise, she did not talk to a single person for weeks, not even to her doctor, who was ill and could not pay his regular weekly calls.

Toward the middle of the month she had a letter from one of the few remaining members of the London Theosophical Society, a journalist and subassistant editor of the
Daily Telegraph
named Edward Douglass Fawcett. Born in Brighton, educated at the Westminster School where he was Queen’s Scholar, a student of philosophy and metaphysics, and a passionate sportsman, Fawcett was not yet twenty-two years old. He wondered if Madame needed editorial assistance on her book; if so, he would be happy to come over to Ostend and lend a hand. At the moment H.P.B. needed all the help she could get and besides, she felt “nearly half crazy with solitude.”
¹⁶⁴
When he arrived, however, she decided to play the grandam and kept him at arm’s length by locking her door during the days and granting him brief audiences in the evening. Shortly afterward, Fawcett was joined by two more loyal London Theosophists, Bertram and Archibald Keightley, who also tendered their services. The three young men were handed stacks of manuscript three feet high, asked to correct the English and punctuation, and urged to give their opinion of the contents. There was no doubt in their minds that
The Secret Doctrine
was destined to become the most important contribution of the century to the literature of occultism, but they also must have realized that the manuscript in its present form was a confused muddle. What Archibald saw was a mass of materials with no definite form; to Bertram, it was “another
Isis Unveiled,
only far worse, so far as absence of plan and consecutiveness were concerned.”
¹⁶⁵
Topics were started, dropped capriciously, taken up again, and dropped a second time. It was clear to both Keightleys that the manuscript needed drastic revision before it could be shaped into a publishable book.

Probably it was just as well they kept these feelings to themselves because it would have been a devastating blow to Madame’s ego. Instead, they spent the evenings sitting with both her and the countess, who had returned from London. Helena played patience while the Keightleys talked about the real reason for their visit: they hoped to persuade her to move to England.

Since Dr. Archibald Keightley and Bertram Keightley would soon undertake the responsibility of more or less supporting H.P.B., these two young men, who appeared almost as magically as Mahatmas from Tibet, are of special interest. Mohandas K. Gandhi, meeting them two years later, would take them for brothers. This was an easy mistake as they were about the same age and shared a physical resemblance. Archibald, a doctor, had a grave round face with full beard and glasses; Bertram, a lawyer who was more grave-looking, sported a mustache and wispy beard, and he too wore glasses. Actually, twenty-eight-year-old Archibald was the nephew of Bertram, his father’s youngest brother. To make the situation even more confusing, Bertram, while Archibald’s uncle, was a year younger than Archibald. They came from a wealthy Liverpool family in which the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg were greatly admired; both boys had their early education at Charterhouse and then went on to Cambridge where Bertram studied medieval mysticism and Archibald natural science before entering the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Attracted by Spiritualism and mystical philosophy in general, they saw an advertisement for Alfred Sinnett’s
Esoteric Buddhism
and, after reading it, obtained an introduction to the author. In early 1884, when H.P.B. was visiting Europe, the Keightleys joined the Theosophical Society around the same time as the Cooper-Oakleys, and during the remainder of Helena’s visit were among the entourage that Constance Wachtmeister mentioned as idolatrous flatterers. In the spring and summer, Bertram trailed Helena to Paris and Enghien, and later to Elberfeld; Archibald, busy with his medical studies, had no time for long trips but when H.P.B. returned to England in October, 1884, just prior to sailing for India, he accompanied her and the Cooper-Oakleys as far as Liverpool.

Helena had taken no more notice of the men than she did of many other young people who, initially thrilled to be part of her court, had quickly drifted away, especially after the release of the S.P.R. Report. Interestingly enough, the names of neither Bertram nor Archibald occur in any of her voluminous letters, ordinarily crammed with personality stories, until the spring of 1887 when she mentioned Archibald rather blandly to Vera.

For several months prior to their visit to Ostend, the Keightleys had been writing Madame about the sorry state of London Theosophy; there were few active members left, maybe five or six, who met once a week for discussion, but could do little else since Sinnett refused to activate the Society. It was only out of desperation that they were turning to Madame herself to ask how they might work for the Masters and revive Theosophy. Would it be possible, they wondered, for her to move to London to teach occultism?

As Helena later explained to a correspondent, she had little to say about their proposal. “Be off with you! I thought to myself, let me alone to write my book quietly.”
¹⁶⁶
What she did not tell the Keightleys was that she had been secretly contemplating just such a move since the previous fall when the trouble with Miss Leonard had been settled. As always, money held her back; because of her incapacity, she needed a flat on the ground floor, but could pay no more than seven pounds a month. Since a furnished flat could not be had for that price, it would be necessary to buy furniture on a monthly installment plan. At the time, the very thought of undertaking such a move wearied her.

The Keightleys’ plan, however, had appealed to Helena, for it would guarantee her financial independence from the miserly Henry Olcott. If she would agree to come, a beautiful house with a garden was hers, free of charge. Everything would be arranged for her personal convenience, and furthermore they would personally transport her and her belongings across the Channel in their arms if need be, they insisted. Hiding a purr beneath the famous grumble, Helena finally consented but refused to set a definite date for the move.

At the end of March, despite the fact that she had not been out of the house or opened a window since November, Madame caught a cold that quickly turned into bronchitis. When the Old Lady began falling asleep in the middle of the day, Constance first suspected something more serious than a cold was bothering her and summoned the doctor. He diagnosed a kidney infection, but his prescriptions did little good, and H.P.B. continued to get worse. Seriously alarmed, the countess cabled Mary Gebhard to come at once, but, meanwhile, exhausted herself with round-the-clock nursing duties. The only person she could find to relieve her was a Catholic
soeur de chariti
“whom I soon discovered was worse than useless; for whenever my back was turned she would hold up her crucifix before H.P.B. and entreat her to come into the fold of the only church before it was too late. This nearly drove H.P.B. wild.”

Meanwhile Helena lay in a state of lethargy bordering on coma, from which she could not be roused. Since the Belgian doctor’s treatment had failed, Constance took the liberty of cabling an eminent London doctor who was also a Theosophist, Ashton Ellis. At 3 a.m. one morning, Ellis arrived at their door. After listening to Mary Gebhard and Constance describe H.P.B.’s symptoms and examining the prescriptions ordered by the local physician, Ellis dosed Madame with his special medicine, then caught a few hours’ rest. The next morning he consulted with Helena’s regular doctor, who held out little hope for their patient’s recovery. Although Ellis did not disagree, he decided to try stimulating the kidneys by massage.

For the next two days he sat at Helena’s bedside, administering hourly massages until he himself was exhausted. Still she continued to fail. On March 31, Mary suggested that H.P.B. make a will, for, if she died intestate in a foreign country, the confusion over her property would never end. Helena had no property to speak of, but she feared that if she failed to make a will, Constance would not be permitted to have her cremated. She was “struck with horror at the thought of being buried, of lying here with catholics, and not in Adyar,” and told Mary to go ahead and contact a lawyer. Taking the watch that night, Constance “began to detect the peculiar faint odor of death which sometimes precedes dissolution.” Once Helena opened her eyes and said she was glad to die; finally they both fell asleep. When Constance shook herself awake the next morning, terrified that Madame had died in the night, she saw H.P.B. sitting up in bed watching her. The Master had been there, she said, and when he had offered her the choice either of ending her life or of finishing
The Secret Doctrine,
she had accepted the extension. The countess would please fetch her coffee and breakfast, and bring her tobacco box since she was dying for a cigarette.