Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (92 page)

Once again she insisted that none of the teachings in her books had been invented, but simply had been given out as she had received them, and she repeated the quotation from Montaigne used in
The Secret Doctrine:
“I have here made only a nosegay of culled [Eastern] flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.” Could anyone, she wondered, dare to say “that I have not paid the full price for the string?”
²¹¹

On Thursday evening, April 23, she decided to attend a Lodge meeting and showed before her followers a flash of her old gregariousness, remaining after the conclusion to chat with friends; she invited several members of the staff in for coffee. The next day and all day Saturday as well she was unusually bright, visiting with Dr. Mennell when he called to check on her and then staying up with Isabel Cooper-Oakley and her sister Laura until 11 p.m., when she retired with a cheerful “Good night all.”
²¹²
Early Sunday morning, however, H.P.B.’s maid knocked on Laura’s door and said that Madame had passed a restless night owing to fits of shivering. Late in the afternoon Dr. Mennell arrived to find her with a one-hundred-and-five-degree temperature and a serious case of influenza. Fearing complications from the Bright’s disease, he stressed the importance of her taking both medicine and food punctually, and asked that some member of the household remain with her during the nights. Since the countess and Isabel both had duties that had to be conducted during the day, night-nursing fell on Laura Cooper.

Over the next two days, flu began to rip through Headquarters; a hospital regime was established with those who had escaped the infection doing double duty as nurses and staff workers. Though still extremely ill, H.P.B. continually inquired about the other invalids; by Tuesday morning her fever broke and no further complications appeared. Luckily, she was able to take plenty of nourishment, but when she tried to smoke a cigarette, her first since taking ill the previous weekend, she found that she lacked all taste for tobacco and gave up after several attempts.

Two days later, just as she seemed firmly on the road to recovery, she began to complain that her throat hurt and that she was having trouble swallowing; it was clear, too, that her cough had worsened and her breathing had become somewhat labored. Dr. Mennell found an inflammation on the right side of her throat and ordered the application of hot poultices. This remedy was successful, but the next day an abscess formed on the bronchial tube. This too was promptly medicated and disappeared. Now, however, because swallowing remained painful, she managed to eat very little and began to lose strength. Her bronchial congestion continued.

Still, on Wednesday, May 6, Helena insisted on crawling out of bed and walking into her office where she ate lunch and afterward lay on the sofa to rest. When Dr. Mennell stopped by that evening, she told him several times that she was dying and did not see how she could keep up the struggle much longer. In reply, Mennell reminded her of the illnesses she had conquered in the past and said that he had every hope of her pulling through this one as well. After a bad night, during which she had no perceptible pulse, she rallied during the day and about 3 p.m. dressed completely and lurched into the office. Propping herself against her desk, she asked that the armchair be swiveled around and a card table set up so that she could “make a patience.” It was, Mead thought, “a last and supreme effort of will, for she was so weak that she could hardly speak or hold up her head.”
²¹³
When Mennell arrived at five, he was surprised to find her sitting up and praised her courage.

H.P.B. whispered, “I do my best, Doctor,”
²¹⁴
but to utter even those few words was a strain. She handed him a cigarette that she had managed, with difficulty, to roll for him.

That evening, Mennell brought in his partner, a Dr. Miller, for consultation, and afterward the two physicians told Laura and Isabel that Madame’s condition was very serious; they advised a tablespoonful of brandy every two hours, the quantity to be increased if necessary. In spite of Helena’s aversion to alcohol, she began sipping the brandy at once and found that it seemed to alleviate her congestion, at least for a while. That night Laura and a professional nurse watched over Helena, who was unable to sleep. There was no position in which she could find comfort and finally, seated in a chair and propped with pillows, she managed to doze off about 4 a.m. By then the cough had almost stopped, due to her exhaustion.

On the morning of Friday, May 8, Dr. Mennell came by about nine and appeared pleased with Madame’s progress; the brandy seemed to be having a good effect and her pulse was stronger. Believing there was no cause for immediate alarm, he advised Laura to get a few hours’ rest and told Isabel that she could leave to attend to her businesses. Two hours later, though, Claude Wright woke Laura to tell her there had been a turn for the worse and that H.P.B. could not live much longer. “She was sitting in her chair,” Laura said, “and I knelt in front of her and asked her to try and take the stimulant; though too weak to hold the glass herself she allowed me to hold it to her lips, and she managed to swallow the contents, but after that we could only give a little nourishment in a spoon.”

Very soon after, when Laura tried to moisten Helena’s lips, she realized that Madame’s eyes were growing dim. H.P.B. used to tap one foot when she was thinking intently “and she continued that movement almost to the moment she ceased to breathe,” Laura recalled.

Claude Wright and Walter Old knelt before Helena’s chair, each holding one of her hands, while Laura supported her head. Shortly after noon, her heart stopped beating. “We remained motionless for many minutes,” Laura said, “and so quietly did H.P.B. pass away that we hardly knew the second she ceased to breathe; a great sense of peace filled the room, and we knelt quietly there until, first my sister, then the countess arrived.”
²¹⁵

Shortly before 10 a.m. on the morning of May 11, the hearse moved quietly away from 19 Avenue Road with only three of the staff in attendance, H.P.B. having expressly forbade a cortege, and drove to Waterloo Station. Some twenty-five miles outside of London, at Woking, the coffin was transferred to another hearse for the trip to the Necropolis, where Madame would be cremated. Three months earlier the crematorium apparatus had been out of order and those who had wished to be burned, like Charles Bradlaugh, who had died in January, had to settle for burial instead. But now there was no problem.

It was a fine May day with blue skies and birds chirping, a chilling contrast to the red-brick crematorium that blended the worst features of a chapel, factory and tile-kiln. The hundred or so persons who gathered to pay their last respects to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky congregated in the mortuary chapel; beyond, through heavy oak folding doors, they could see an inner chamber, where an immense iron object resembling a locomotive boiler stood embedded in masonry. When some of the more curious mourners crowded into the furnace chamber, an attendant opened a door at one end and everyone took turns peeping in, but most gave no more than a quick glance before turning away with a shudder.

At the sound of the hearse on the gravel outside, people uncovered their heads and watched as the flower-laden coffin was borne into the chapel and laid on an oak trestle; then George Mead stepped forward to read a brief address that had been composed by the Headquarters staff. Finally the door to the cremation room creaked open and four men, who looked like stokers or butchers to eyewitnesses, advanced toward the coffin in a businesslike manner, lifted both coffin and trestle, and carried them inside. Four Theosophists followed this procession to the furnace but returned a moment later. Then the oak doors slammed and were bolted with a final thud like the fall of some macabre portcullis.

H.P.B.’s ashes were placed in an urn and brought back to her bedroom. Later they were divided into three portions: that destined for India was carried to Adyar by Henry Olcott and buried under a statue that he erected to her memory in the Hall. A second portion was taken to New York by William Judge and today is in the keeping of the Theosophical Society at Pasadena, California. The third, kept in London for a time, was eventually removed to India by Annie Besant and dropped into the Ganges.

EPITAPH

Madame Blavatsky’s death was front-page news in England and the United States. The
Pall Mall Gazette,
for instance, headed its rather satirical obituary “The Prophetess of the Buried Tea-Cup,” but nevertheless admitted that she had been “one of the most remarkable women of our generation,” a person sincerely “possessed” by the ideas she had successfully inculcated in her not unintelligent followers.

Although most New York papers took the sensational angle and rehashed the fraud charges, the
Tribune
said that while few women of the nineteenth century had been more persistently maligned, “there are abundant indications that her lifework will vindicate itself, that it will endure and that it will operate for good.” No one in the present generation, it thought, “has done more toward opening the long sealed treasures of Eastern thought, wisdom and philosophy.” The
Religio-Philosophical Journal
found it hard to believe that the announcement of H.P.B.’s death was not one of her schemes for attracting attention. “As a moral monstrosity she stands without peer among her sex in this century. The specious fake which she originated to gratify her love of deception and ambition, and to cover her real sins, has ended with her death.”

That was wishful thinking. There was no question of the Society folding at H.P.B.’s death because she had taken care to ensure its continuation with Annie Besant. What was expected to end, however, were the messages from the Mahatmas. Both they and Madame had announced that when she was gone, there would be no more communications. These statements had been interpreted in two ways: by Theosophists to mean that when the Masters’ messenger died, they intended using no other to receive their messages; and by non-Theosophists to reflect the opinion that since Madame herself had written the letters, they would automatically cease.

So it was a matter of some wonder when, four months after Helena’s death, Annie Besant electrified a sold-out lecture audience at the Hall of Science by casually remarking that if Madame Blavatsky had been a fraud, so was she herself. “I tell you,” she went on, “that since Mdme. Blavatsky left I have had letters in the same handwriting as the letters which she received. Unless you think dead persons can write, surely that is a remarkable feat. You are surprised; I do not ask you to believe me, but I tell you it is so.”

The news reverberated around the world. Mostly the reaction consisted of jeers, satires, and speculation that Annie was deliberately trying to trigger a posthumous Blavatsky boom. More open-minded people raised the question of whether the Society for Psychical Research had possibly done Madame an injustice; and in any case they thought that Mrs. Besant should be given a chance to explain herself. Newspaper reporters descended on Avenue Road to quiz her for details on the controversial letters. Was this a case of postal communication from the world beyond, or had they arrived by ordinary mail? No, Annie replied, they had come by paranormal means, either falling from the ceiling or appearing suddenly in unexpected places when no other person was in sight. She refused to exhibit the letters to reporters nor, as she was urged, would she submit them to handwriting experts because, she said sharply, the purpose of Theosophy was not to play up the supernatural but to inaugurate a movement of international brotherhood. However, Isabel Cooper-Oakley was not quite so righteous because she wrote to several newspapers swearing that she had examined the letters; they were written in red or blue crayon on rice paper and the handwriting corresponded exactly with that in the communications H.P.B. had received from the Masters.

The furor went on for several months: scores of letters were printed daily in the papers; attendance at the Blavatsky Lodge skyrocketed, as did that at Annie’s public lectures; the Theosophical Press Bureau was deluged with hundreds of letters a day and could barely keep up with the avalanche of clippings waiting to be filed; Mabel Collins’ most current novel,
Morial the Mahatma,
was being serialized in the magazine
Short Cuts;
a stylish hatter announced its new Mahatma hat for only three shillings, eleven pence. Among smart society people, the new trendy greeting was to ask one’s friends, “How’s your karma today?”

Once again, however, the Theosophical miracles proved nothing of the kind; in this case, they were only part of a bitter struggle for power. Before H.P.B.’s death she had verbally invested Mrs. Besant with control of the Esoteric Section and had also informed William Judge that Annie would be “my successor when I shall be called to leave you.” As soon as news of her passing reached Judge, he cabled Annie: “Do nothing till I arrive” and took the next steamer for England; he proposed that the two of them share the Esoteric leadership, he in America and she in Europe. It was Judge who discovered Madame’s supply of rice paper and crayons, as well as the brass seal of the Mahatmas, and it was he who slipped a note into Annie’s drawer with the words, “Judge’s plan is right.” She accepted the message as genuine and the division of jurisdiction was made: the Mahatma messages continued.

Two years later, a number of Theosophists, Mrs. Besant included, were beginning to question the genuineness of the letters and some went so far as to speculate that they did not come from Tibet at all but had been written by Judge. Admitted Annie: “When I publicly said that I had received, after H.P.B.’s death, letters in the writing H. P. Blavatsky had been accused of forging, I referred to letters given to me by Mr. Judge, and, as they were in the well-known script, I never dreamed of challenging their source. I know now that they were not written or precipitated by the Master, and also that they were done by Mr. Judge.”