Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (80 page)

In September all the pieces of H.P.B.’s new life fell into place. On the fifteenth, the first issue of
Lucifer
was premiered, and the countess arrived at “Maycot” with two Swedish servants. For unknown reasons, H.P.B. at once dubbed them “the Swedish virgins,” although a more accurate term would have been “the Swedish saints” because they proved patience personified in ministering to her wants and whims. “After three days of packing, planning and arranging everything,” Constance recalled, “we one morning got into a carriage and drove up to London, to 17, Lansdowne Road.”
²⁵
According to Arch, the move was not so horrific as the transfer from Ostend “for the books and papers could be arranged, packed and unpacked, and rearranged the same day.”
²⁶
And Helena had only lost one day’s work.

This time even Madame was hard put to complain. The house itself was a pleasant one in a quiet neighborhood: It backed a small private park and fronted on Holland Park. Helena’s ground-floor rooms, which consisted of a small bedroom leading into a large office plus a lavatory, could not have been more comfortable. Her desk faced a large bay window overlooking the luxuriant green of Holland Park; at her right and left were tables and book racks filled with the reference works she claimed not to need, and all around had been set out the Indian souvenirs she had been carting about for the past two-and-a-half years: Benares bronzes, Palghat mats, Adoni carpets, Moradabad platters, Kashmiri plaques, and Cingalese statues. On the wall she hung her Swiss cuckoo clock, still broken except on those unpredictable occasions when its little door would fly open and the bird would momentarily pop out. Visitors who witnessed this performance were dumbfounded, but H.P.B. would sternly glance up, utter a firm Damn you, and then go on with her conversation.

Everything about the Lansdowne Road establishment was designed to accommodate Madame Blavatsky: Mabel Collins was no longer the consummate annoyance that she had been when they shared a roof; in Mabel’s place was the saintly Countess Wachtmeister, who ran with efficiency a household that now included Bert and Arch. While the cuisine was not so strictly vegetarian as to prohibit fish and eggs, meat as a rule was not served. One wonders how Helena greeted this innovation, since only the previous year she had insisted that flesh food was necessary to her health, but apparently she went along with the new diet. She also instituted a rule of her own: everybody had to be in bed by twelve because she said, “Master goes His ‘rounds’ at midnight.”
²⁷
And if that were not sufficient reason for the curfew, she added that one hour’s sleep before midnight was worth four after, owing to magnetic changes that took place in the earth at that time. To carry the asceticism still further, she would soon recommend the even more controversial injunction: celibacy. While repression of the sexual urge would remain an option for Lodge members, it was nonetheless an ideal practiced by many, certainly by those who aspired to become one of Madame’s
chelas.
Celibacy, she told them, was merely basic training in the “occult hygiene of mind and body.”
²⁸

Now that Madame was more accessible, the Thursday evening meetings rapidly increased in popularity: admission for non-members was strictly by invitation and these cards of entry were always in hot demand. Alice Cleather, for whom Thursday was the most important day of the week, recalled that “some crank” once obtained admission, asked permission to speak, and immediately launched on a windy exposition of some philosophical theory. “H.P.B. stood it for a few minutes, and then, to the consternation of the chairman—a very conventional person—raised her voice in a stinging and sarcastic rebuke to the effect that people were invited to the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge to listen to
her
views—i.e., to Theosophical teaching—not to air their own.”
²⁹
The man slunk out of the room.

H.P.B.’s testiness did not fade as her confidence grew: some of her disciples had to remind themselves that Madame was in constant pain and on these grounds should be forgiven her outbursts. In the countess’s opinion, Helena’s abuse was calculated as a trial through which she deliberately put people to test their devotion to the Cause. Madame herself may have flogged her naturally mercurial nature in order to set herself outside the realm of civility and courtesy: after Alice Cleather had once spent weeks helping prepare the index for
The Secret Doctrine,
she brought her work to Madame who “flicked it contemptuously with her beautiful forefinger saying, ‘This is not in the least what I wanted, my dear; it won’t do at all,’ thereupon she tore the sheets across and flung them into the waste paper basket.” Alice burst into tears, but Helena paid no attention. To Alice, Madame’s response was perfectly justified; she had known nothing about indexing and must have completely botched the job. And Alice felt that spiritually H.P.B.’s rebuff was “extremely good for me at that early stage.”
³⁰

Most people lacked the nerve to talk back to Helena, but Bert, after months of abuse, was growing angry. So one day when Helena viciously attacked him, “hitting just every one of my weakest and tenderest spots,” he rebelled and “suddenly felt a surge of red-hot anger rise within me.” One moment Madame had been squawking furiously, he recalled; the next she stopped dead and stared at him. Looking him up and down, she remarked coldly, “And you want to be an occultist.”

It was then, he said, that he “saw and knew, and went off deeply ashamed, having learnt no small lesson.”
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It seems remarkable that he failed to question how Madame had managed to become an occultist if she could not restrain herself; in the end, the fact that he and the other disciples took her mistreatment says more about them than about H.P.B. The only person exempt from her “training” was Archibald, and when Bert once asked her why she never scolded Arch, she replied that it was because he had a blue liver, and would not explain what that meant.

In 1887, the fantastics began to take over London. The century was gearing up for the “Yellow Nineties” with its
fin de siecle
daring, its tolerance of novelty in ideas and art, its Wildes and Beardsleys with their refined perversities. It was also working up to economic depression. Essentially, however, 1887 was the curtain-raiser to a decade of hope and action, when people believed anything might happen; for the young, anything that did happen had to be good so long as it was new. With the most cherished principles of the Victorian Age about to be dumped overboard, experiment became the watchword and people set about testing life for themselves. People of all ages convinced themselves that they were passing into a new social and moral system; still it was mainly the young men and women who especially felt they were stepping out of the caged past into a freedom full of limitless possibilities. There was so much to think about, so much to discuss, so much to see: aesthetics in art and literature; celebrity breakfast parties; anything Oriental from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Mikado
to mystics like Mohini Chatterji; Buffalo Bill; bright new restaurants and “tea shops”; and the only just invented safety bicycle that became a symbol of the new freedom.

Soon after Helena’s arrival in London, she had rather shyly told Vera that “it appears that your sister is getting to be the fashion in Europe,”
³²
and even though it had been an exaggeration at the time, by early 1888 it would be a fact. Séances were still a stylish pastime for fashionable London society, and the city’s clairvoyants continued doing a brisk business, but none of them had the foresight to predict the 1890s, nor did they divine that Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy would soon become a fashionable cult. As a matter of fact, H.P.B. herself did not foresee it.

From the time she moved to Lansdowne Road, more and more people were drawn into her orbit, not only the Thursday attendees at the Blavatsky Lodge, but visitors who just wanted to meet the famous Madame. “We were hardly settled in the house,” recalled the countess, “when people began to call on H.P.B. The visitors grew so numerous, and she was so constantly interrupted in her work, that it was considered advisable for her to have a day for reception.”
³³
Accordingly, H.P.B. had a calling card printed:

MADAME BLAVATSKY

AT HOME

Saturday, 4 to 10 o’clock.

17 Lansdowne Road 

Notting Hill, W.

The four to ten hours were totally ignored because, as Constance admitted, “from 2 p.m. till 11 or 12 at night there would be a succession of visitors and H.P.B. would frequently have a group around her asking questions, to which she would answer with unvarying patience.”
³⁴
At the same time Helena did not hesitate to ask questions of her guests, the most frequent to newcomers being, “Do you believe in a P.G.?”
³⁵
(Personal God).

Aside from the Saturday At-Homes, she welcomed a stream of guests every night of the week. Looking back, the artist Edmund Russell thought that he had never seen such hospitality. “With five or six in the family, the table was spread for twenty. Once-invited-always-invited. One took a vacant seat without ceremony, came in at any time, left in the middle of a meal, sat by some poor student for one course, moved over beside a princess for another, or, as special privilege finished the repast with The Old Lady herself.” The food was vegetarian but “no one would ever have known it, so rich and varied the magical dishes.”
³⁶
A platter of chicken fricassee, prepared for the compulsively carnivorous, was usually carried away untouched.

Corpulent, unhealthy, and habitually untidy, Helena nevertheless struck most of her guests as captivating. To
Pall Mall Gazette
editor W. T. Stead, who was simultaneously delighted and repelled, Helena presented her portrait and declared that he might call himself what he liked but she knew he was a good Theosophist. Stead thought that she had the manners of a very unconventional man, but he liked her. Her repartee was marvelous of course: when someone called her the worst-dressed woman in the world, she retorted that was impossible, since she didn’t dress at all. When asked if the stories about her were apocryphal, she never bothered to affirm or deny. “Mud,” she would say, “has rained down on me for so long I no longer attempt to open an umbrella.”
³⁷

There was not a would-be mystic in London who sooner or later did not beat the path to Lansdowne Road. Among the first was William Butler Yeats, a tall, pale, angular youth of twenty-two, “all dreams and all gentleness,”
³⁸
as one of his friends described him. Despite his maiden speech at the Dublin Hermetic Society, it was neither Madame Blavatsky nor her Mahatmas who had initially drawn Yeats to Theosophy but Mohini Chatterji, whom he had met in Dublin in 1885.
³⁹
“He sat there beautiful,” Yeats recalled, “as only an Eastern is beautiful, making little gestures with his delicate hands, and to him alone among all the talks I have heard, oratory, and even the delight of ordered words, seemed nothing, and all thought a flight into the heart of truth.”
⁴⁰
In London, Yeats talked incessantly about Indian mysticism and the wonderful seer Mohini, and in Bedford Park, where he lived with his family, he painted the signs of the zodiac on the ceiling of his bedroom.

Soon after his friend Charley Johnston met H.P.B., Yeats armed himself with a letter of introduction from him and called upon Madame at Maycot, where he found “an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humor and audacious power.”
⁴¹
She also seemed to him “a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness.”
⁴²
Playing patience at a small table, she kept scribbling on the green baize with a stick of white chalk while she talked to Yeats, who saw at once that she had “more human nature than anybody else.”
⁴³
Unlike many of her other visitors, he had carefully read the S.P.R. Report and he was plagued by whether or not to believe Hodgson. His poet friend William Ernest Henley had shrugged off that question as irrelevant by saying that “she is a person of genius, but a person of genius must do something—Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin.”
⁴⁴
Yeats could not accept that explanation, nor could he reconcile the weight of Hodgson’s evidence with what he saw and heard of H.P.B. and so he kept waiting “with impatience for the explanation that never came.”
⁴⁵

When Helena moved into London, Yeats was still waiting, but by then had joined the Theosophical Society where he got an earful of dogma from her disciples. It must have been either Bert or Arch who told him “how he heard often her Master’s mystic ring in the middle of the night, and though the sound was faint and sweet the whole house was shaken,”
⁴⁶
and someone else whispered to him that “she is not a living woman at all, the body of the real Madame Blavatsky was discovered thirty years ago on the battlefield of —-.”
⁴⁷
Yeats could not remember the name, something Russian he thought, but doubtless he had encountered the most recent version of the Mentana story.

Helena herself had enough weird adventures to keep him intrigued and sometimes, when she was feeling tired or low, she would ramble on dreamily. “I go on writing as the Wandering Jew walks,” she sighed. “I once used to blame and pity the people who sell their souls to the Devil; I now only pity them—they do it to have somebody on their side.”
⁴⁸
And then she would switch to Alfred de Musset, whom she said that she had known and disliked, and Balzac whom she had met only once, and George Sand with whom she had dabbled in magic even though “neither of us knew anything about it.”
⁴⁹
That was fascinating to Yeats and thoroughly believable, but he had to lift his eyebrows at some of her more grisly stories. “Once my knee was very bad,” she confided to him, “and the doctor said I would be lame for life. But in the middle of the night the Master came in with a live dog split open in his hands, and he put the dog over my knee so that the entrails covered it, and in the morning I was well.”
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