Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (37 page)

When the reporter noted mildly that she appeared to be leaving America after all, she interrupted defensively, “You have liberty but that is all, and of that you have too much, too much!” Still in her nightgown, she rolled a cigarette and began an angry discourse on Americans in general and their press in particular:

Do you wonder I am anxious to leave when you know how I was received and the treatment I have met?

They said I was a Spiritualist, a heathen, a believer in all manner of impossible things; that I was an adventuress and had neither title nor family; that I was a felon and forger; that I had been married seven times and murdered six of my husbands; that I was a free lover and had never been married... Think of it all! Then the reporters came and asked me how much I was worth and wanted to see inside my mouth to count my teeth and see whether they were genuine or not.
²²⁶

Dazed, the reporter tried to change the subject. “When shall you leave?” he faltered.

Although it seemed like an innocuous question, Madame had no intention of cooperating. She gazed at him haughtily and said, “I never know. I do not know what I shall do an hour beforehand.”

Could she please furnish some information about her sailing plans? She could not. “I know neither the time nor the vessel, but it will be very soon and very secretly.” On the receipt of a telegram, she would be gone in three hours.

By this point the
Graphic
man was reduced to pleading for scraps. Helena relented slightly by admitting that she planned to visit London, Paris and Bombay before “going to Northeastern India, where the head of the order is and where I shall obey whatever orders they may give and go where I am told.” She sighed impatiently, “Oh! how glad I shall be to see my dear Indian home again.”
²²⁷
Not once did she mention that the colonel was accompanying her.

Those final days in the now empty Lamasery passed in a blur of visitors, scarcely any sleep, food snatched on the run, and last-minute errands. On the twelfth, apparently fearful that India lacked dentists, H.P.B. took the precaution of having several teeth extracted, and the next day noted in the diary that she felt ill, perhaps with a swollen mouth. In any case, she did not feel well enough to accompany Henry to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he borrowed a phonograph from Thomas Edison so that they could make tinfoil recordings of their voices. Even though the machine weighed nearly a hundred pounds, it was worth hauling back to the city. That night at the farewell party, tea was served in rotation as there were only three cups left in the apartment. Edison’s phonograph was placed on a barrel, and a cluster of friends, including the Theosophical cat Charles, took turns shouting and purring into the “voice-receiver.”
²²⁸
Despite the conviviality of the evening, there were some New Yorkers who felt, sadly, that an era was ending. One of them was David Curtis, a New York
Times
writer and the only journalist H.P.B. regarded as a real friend. “Her apartment,” he wrote, “was a meeting ground for as strange a group of original thinkers as New York had seen, individuals who affirmed little and denied nothing.”
²²⁹
After knowing the Madame two years, Curtis did not believe her either a charlatan or a self-deluded crackpot, as many said, but simply an enigma whom he would never forget nor figure out.

On the morning of December 17, H.P.B.’s last day on American soil, she exclaimed in Henry’s diary, “Great day! Olcott packed up,” and then she added fretfully, “What next? All dark—but tranquil.” It was not until seven in the evening that Henry returned with three tickets for the British steamer
Canada
and then she triumphantly scrawled in large letters across the page: “CONSUMMATUM EST.”
²³⁰
At midnight she took a last look at the brass chandelier with its flickering gas jets, closed the door on the Lamasery and drove to the steamer with Olcott. They spent a tormented night on the
Canada
because the ship’s heating apparatus was not working and the weather had turned bitterly cold. “Got frozen, sleeping in wet blankets,” Helena wrote, “and passed a sleepless night.” In the morning, exhausted, she continued to suffer “trances of fear”
²³¹
that Mary Olcott would suddenly appear at the dock to snatch back her ex-husband from the quest for truth.

INDIA

1878-1884

I

Bombay

The voyage to India was a nightmare. It had taken the
Canada
two days just to leave American waters because it lost the tide. “Fits of fear lasted till 11,” she wrote in Olcott’s diary on December 19. “The body is difficult to manage.” They had three days of good weather before being struck by rain and gale winds that tracked them all the way to the entrance of the English Channel. Excruciating seasickness afflicted all ten passengers, with the exception of Helena who, thinking of the
Eumonia
and Petri’s prophecies, was merely terrified, although she dared not reveal it. Occasionally Henry would stagger from his bunk and try to cheer her up with a comic song, and one evening the captain regaled them with “fearful stories of shipwreck and drowning,” to which Helena listened deadpan. “Oh for India and HOME!” she wrote, but she could not shake the feeling that she would never reach England, much less India. She proceeded to feed her anxiety by eating “like three hogs” and baring her teeth toward an Anglican clergyman whose profession she reviled, Olcott recalled, “with expressions fit to curdle the blood.”
¹
But apparently the clergyman took her ranting good-naturedly, because when the
Canada
finally docked at Gravesend on the morning of January 3, 1879, he begged her for a photograph.

H.P.B. and Henry were guests of the American medium Mary Hollis Billing and her physician husband in suburban Norwood. From almost the moment Madame stepped into the Billing home, she started performing phenomena in a fevered way that suggests extreme nervousness. Fearful that Henry might still develop cold feet and slink back to New York, desperate to impress Charles Massey and the other London Spiritualists, she felt compelled to attempt a few miracles. Convincing Mary Billing of the reality of the Indian Brothers did not prove difficult, and the flattering suggestion that her spirit guide “Ski” was probably one of their messengers was readily accepted; indeed both Mary and “Ski” were all too eager to believe and render services. Thus one foggy evening, when Henry, Massey and Dr. Billing returned to the house, Mary told them that a tall, handsome Hindu had been there conferring with Madame on occult business and that he had happened to mention passing the three men earlier on the street. That was true, Henry exclaimed at once, because he recalled glimpsing over his shoulder a man with the unmistakably transcendent face of an adept. His companions, more cautious, allowed that it might have happened but in the dense fog they certainly could not swear to it. After dinner, at Mary’s instigation, Helena fished around under the table and “materialized” a Japanese teapot and later, as Massey was preparing to depart, she told him to reach into his overcoat pocket. To his amazed delight, he withdrew an inlaid Indian cardcase containing a slip of paper that bore Hurrychund Chintamon’s autograph.

There was more to come. During a séance on the evening of January 6, “Ski” directed Olcott to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum where he would find a note from a Brother under the left foot of Figure 158. The next morning, accompanied by Billing and Wimbridge, Olcott hurried around to Tussaud’s, where of course he found the note. Even he had to admit there was no hard evidence for this phenomenon because Helena and Mary had visited the British Museum on the morning of the sixth and could easily have ducked into Madame Tussaud’s to plant the note; still, in his opinion, it was genuine. All told, these miraculous events had their desired effect on Massey too because, by his moral code, no woman as high-born and frank as Madame Blavatsky could be capable of willfully stooping to trickery.

On January 14, Helena mailed her sister a packet of photographs of herself, and judging by the brief enclosure it is clear that she continued to be frightened. “I start for India. Providence alone knows what the future has in store for us.” The pictures might be the last sight Vera would have of her; if she should perish, she hoped that her family would not forget her. “I shall write from Bombay
if I ever reach it.”
Four days later she went up to Liverpool with Olcott, Wimbridge and Bates, spent the day killing time at the Great Western Hotel, and at 5 p.m., in a driving rainstorm, boarded the
Speke Hall.
Helena’s heart sank at her first sight of the decrepit ship with its filthy cabins and carpets stinking of mold and dampness, and even Henry thought it “a wretched omen.”
²
No food was served during the first twenty-four hours on-board and had it not been for the bread and butter they unearthed from a bon voyage basket, they would have gone hungry.

One of the first things Helena noticed was that the vessel had been loaded almost to the water’s edge with what she learned was railway iron. She expressed her displeasure so vituperatively that, according to Olcott, she was “unanimously voted... a nuisance.”
³
Two days out she badly bruised her knee when rough seas flung her against a table leg in the dining salon, and after that she remained in her cabin bellowing at the stewardess, a Mrs. Yates. Olcott remembered that her cries of “Meeses Yetz” could be heard over half the ship.

By the time they anchored at Malta on January 28 to fill the coal bunkers, H.P.B.’s gloom had begun to lift and she went ashore with the others to tour the picturesque town and fortress. Five days later, reaching Port Said, the ship began to puff its way through the Suez Canal, at which time passengers discarded their heavy winter clothing and donned tropical outfits and pith hats. Henry, who did not own a pith hat, strutted on deck wearing the turban that Master M. had given him in New York, a bit of irreverent clowning that H.P.B. did not particularly appreciate. She was not amused when Henry played the fool. That night the
Speke Hall
tied up opposite the village of Khandara and the Theosophical party visited an Arab coffee house where they sipped black coffee and sampled the local tobacco. Helena was beginning to relax, but just as she teetered on the brink of belief that they would reach their destination, a flue in the boiler burst and this necessitated two more stops for repairs.

Helena remained on edge for the rest of the trip. Her terror of death at sea might seem a bit paranoid but, in fact, it was not entirely so. Perhaps she was picking up some kind of premonitory vibration, because six years later the
Speke Hall
would go down in the Indian Ocean without a single survivor.

The sun was shining gloriously in Bombay when they arrived in the early morning of the sixteenth of February, after having risen before dawn to glimpse the Elephanta Caves. Olcott’s friend Moolji Thackersey and two companions came out to the ship in a bunder boat but, contrary to expectations, there was no sign of Hurrychund Chintamon or of a group even vaguely resembling a welcoming party from the Arya Samaj. The glow of anticipation having slightly dimmed, the newcomers collected their baggage and clambered aboard a boat to head for land. Henry solemnly knelt and kissed the granite quay before stepping ashore, but Helena did not permit herself such extravagant gestures. Her disappointment palpable, she kept scanning the dock in hopes that a welcoming committee would materialize. The scene she visualized, in vain, she described in a letter to Vera:

We were met by a band of local, half-naked dancing girls, who surrounded us chanting their
mantra
and led us in state—all the time bombarding us with flowers—to a—maybe you think to a carriage? Not at all, to a white elephant! Good Lord, the effort it cost me to climb over the hands and backs of naked coolies to the top of this huge animal... The others were placed in palanquins, and lo! to the accompaniment of acclamations, tamborines, horns, with all sorts of theatrical pomp, singing and a general row, they carried us—humble slaves of God—to the house of the Arya Samaj.
⁴

In lieu of that, she stood uncertainly on the quay with Olcott, Wimbridge and Rosa Bates in the burning noonday sun, all four looking lost and wilted. After a while, they saw running toward them a breathless, moon-faced Hindu who introduced himself as Chintamon and offered a number of implausible excuses for his tardiness. Although everyone smiled and insisted it did not matter, Helena felt it was a poor omen. Clearly Chintamon had thought so little of their coming that he had not bothered to inform the Arya Samaj.

Driving through the vast commercial bustle of downtown Bombay, she felt her dismay receding, for spread before her was the world she had dreamed of. Staring out of the carriage, she was confronted by Arabs from Muscat jostling Malays and Chinese, Parsi in their sloping hats, Rajputs, Afghans from the Northern frontier, and many that she could not identify. Carts drawn by sleepy-eyed oxen threaded their creaking way between tram cars, buggies, victorias, palanquins and handsome English carriages. People were doing a thousand things in the streets and sidewalks, gutters and open shops: barbers shaved their customers, sitar players twanged their wires, worshipers stood with clasped palms before images of Rama, beggars squatted in the blinding sunlight and rocked themselves to and fro, bare-limbed Indian women glided along with baskets of chuppattis or cow dung on their heads and with naked babies astride their hips. And overhead, in every open space, the feathered date trees waved, the sacred fig sheltered squirrels and parrots, and the air was literally peopled with the wheeling and screaming of gray-necked crows.