Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (39 page)

Meanwhile there were the Karli Caves. The trek up was generally exhausting, since H.P.B., too winded to climb, had to be carried the last half of the way. At last they entered the largest of the caves, spread blankets on the rocky floor, and ate a picnic lunch. H.P.B. told Henry and Thackersey that in one of the smaller caves there was a secret door opening into a chamber in the heart of the mountain where a school of adepts made their home; Olcott promptly went around knocking on walls and trying vainly to locate the entrance. That evening, camping out in the hills near the caves, H.P.B. abruptly disappeared. Olcott, who had been puffing on his pipe and watching the scenery, heard the sound of a door slamming and then a burst of laughter, and when he searched for Helena, she could not be found. She returned a half hour later to explain casually that she had visited an adept in the secret chamber. The next day Helena passed on to Henry an order, telepathically received from her Masters, which summoned them to Rajputana in the Punjab. Olcott chose to ignore the summons, for he was too busy trying to make sense of the white-robed men who approached him and vanished, while he simultaneously calmed an hysterical Moolji, who had just watched Madame Blavatsky disappear before his eyes. Henry told him to “sit down and keep quiet, and not make such a fool of himself”
¹⁷
over hypnotism.

After four days of hallucination, they caught the mail train back to Bombay. Moolji stretched out on a bench and fell asleep. “I do wish,” Helena said wistfully to Henry, “that——[she named an adept] had not made me pass on verbally to you his message about Rajputana.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because Wimbridge and Miss Bates will think it all humbug, a trick to make you take me on a pleasant journey and leave them moping at home.”
¹⁸

Henry hastened to assure her that her word was enough for him, but Helena insisted that Wimbridge and Bates would object. Finally Henry agreed that it would have been better if the message had arrived more formally, in a letter.

Perking up, Helena smiled and said that perhaps it was not too late after all; she would ask her Masters for a note. From a small pocket notebook she tore out a sheet and wrote: “Ask Goolab Singh to telegraph to Olcott the orders given through me at the cave yesterday; let it be a test to others as well as to himself.”
¹⁹
After Olcott had inspected the note, she flung it from the train window. The time, Henry took care to note, was 12:45 p.m.

Back home that afternoon, Olcott ran out to do errands and when he returned an hour later, Rosa Bates handed him a telegram: “Letter received. Answer Rajputana. Start immediately. Gooiab Singh.”
²⁰
The telegram had been sent at 2 p.m. from Kurjeet, the station they had passed shortly after H.P.B.’s note had been tossed from the train. Since neither Helena nor Thackersey had left their seats at Kurjeet, Henry concluded that she could not possibly have sent the telegram herself; it had to be genuine. It did not occur to him that Helena might have planned the whole thing in advance by asking Babula, who was in a third-class coach, to send the message, or even that her confederate Baburao might have been on the same train.

Helena’s insistence on the Rajputana trip was far from a whim. Ever since the
Speke Hall
had steamed into Bombay harbor, she had been expecting to meet Swami Dayananda. By now she was forced to realize that he had no intention of making a special trip to Bombay to welcome her, so when she learned that he would be at Saharanpur in late April, she decided to go to him. Obviously she could have explained the situation to Olcott without bothering to drop notes from train windows, but such was not her way.

On Good Friday, April 11, again with Thackersey and Babula, she began a two-day train ride north to Allahabad. Indian railway stations were notoriously chaotic; whole families camped on the platform, cooking, sleeping and performing their ablutions until the train appeared. The cars themselves were filthy and primitive, offering no amenities such as food or bedding, and the lavatories and washbasins were appalling. Travelers carried their bedding with them; at the stations en route to their destinations they would get off to have a meal or, more often, open a picnic basket or have their servants cook in the carriage over a spirit lamp. Aside from these exotic inconveniences, Olcott remembered the trip to Allahabad as insufferably hot and dusty. When they finally chugged into Allahabad and secured rooms at the dak-bungalow in the railway station, “the heat was so terrific as to make even the Hindu Mooljee catch his breath when we ventured outside the house.”
²¹

Ignoring the heat, Madame spent the next two weeks hunting for holy men to teach her their secrets and, she hoped, lead her to her Masters. At Allahabad, she happened upon a blind Sikh ascetic, who had been squatting in meditation for fifty-two years, leaving his station only at midnight to bathe in the Jumna. When Helena, through an interpreter, asked him to show her phenomena, she was horrified to hear him call them “playthings of the ignorant.”
²²
The truth, the Sunyasi warned her, could only be perceived by keeping a calm mind and an unperturbed soul, two possessions that would always elude Madame Blavatsky. Moving on to Cawnpore, where they visited Ross Scott, they tracked down another Sunyasi, this one a nude, emaciated man who had been living outdoors for over a year and whose stomach had collapsed. When Helena asked him for phenomena, he responded with contemptuous disdain. At Jajmow, which they reached by elephant, she was denied her wish for wonders for the third time in three days, and by now was growing irritable. During the four-mile ride between Cawnpore and Jajmow, she had behaved unforgivably, hogging the entire elephant seat for herself while her companions clung to other sections of the animal’s, back. It had not been a pleasant journey. “She rolled about wildly,” Olcott recalled, “getting her fat shaken up and her breath squeezed out of her, until she grew furious.”
²³
On the return trip, disappointed over her lack of success with the Sunyasi, she chose to ride in a cart.

But she was having a grand time. Writing to Alexander Wilder, Helena exclaimed that his soul “would jump out in fits of rapture”
²⁴
if he were with her. Because of the heat, it seemed sensible to do their traveling early in the day, so they arose at 4 a.m. and went to bed at nine in the evening. For once, Helena did not object; she was, after all, seeing
“subterranean
India, not the upper one,”
²⁵
as she proudly informed Wilder, and it was only a small exaggeration. Like everyone else, she trudged around tourist attractions such as the ruined temples of Amber, the rose-red city of Jeypore enclosed within its seven-gated walls, and the ghats of Benares, where a monkey snatched Olcott’s spectacles. At Agra, a dirty town of half-ruined huts made of dried cow dung, she gaped at the Taj Mahal, which looked to her like “a magnificent pea on a heap of manure.”
²⁶
She omitted mentioning to Wilder that the Maharajah of Jeypore had invited them to stay at his palace, but hearing they were Russian spies, refused to provide food or beds and ejected them rather unceremoniously the next morning. Nor did she report the policeman who had been dogging their footsteps, or Olcott’s complaints to the British resident who expressed regrets in the most courteous and ineffectual manner.

On their arrival at Saharanpur, still accompanied by their police escort, they were greeted warmly by the Arya Samajists who brought them gifts of fruit and sweetmeats and arranged a formal reception and banquet. The next morning the Swami was to arrive. Although this was the moment Helena had been awaiting, she grew suddenly apprehensive about his possible reaction to a woman, and delegated Olcott and Thackersey to pay their respects. An hour later, Henry appeared with the Swami at their dak-bungalow. Fifty five years old, over six feet tall and stout, the Swami may have had the lofty, dreamy-eyed look of a mystic, but was actually an extremely practical person with a violent temper. Helena’s fears were not ill-founded, for his views on women were virulently sexist. After greeting her with restrained cordiality, he proceeded to ignore her in favor of Olcott. Helena listened to him expounding on Nirvana and God and his seven years in the jungle, but she learned nothing about magic and phenomenal powers. Moreover, dialogue was difficult since he spoke no English, but she suspected it mattered little since he had no intention of taking her seriously. Having told Henry that Dayananda was a member of the Brotherhood, she must have been chagrined by his obvious disregard. She must also have been intimidated for she did not even bring up the subject of her Masters, as she did with everyone else she met.

On the seventh of May, they began the trip back to Bombay. Olcott professed not to find their experience with the Swami so disappointing as Helena; in any case, the high point of his trip had come at Bhurtpore, where one evening, while sitting on the veranda of their dak-bungalow, an old Hindu had appeared, salaamed, and handed him a letter from Goolab Singh. “It was beautifully worded,” he noted, “and, to me, a most important letter as it pointed out the fact that the surest way to seek the Masters was through the channel of faithful work in the Theosophical Society.”
²⁷
Helena would have done well to take this consoling advice herself. By the time the train pulled into Bombay early on the tenth, frustration and the torrid heat had sparked a temper tantrum. On the platform she marched up to their police escort and, according to Henry, “gave him a piece of her mind.”
²⁸
Flinching under this unexpected tongue-lashing, the man stammered and blushed. Instead of going to their house for a much-needed bath and breakfast, she then insisted upon driving to the U.S. Consulate, where she demanded that the Consul protest their treatment.

In the excitement of the past month, there had been much to see and little time to brood about their problems. Now, once more back in Girgaum Back Road, the despondence and tension in the household had increased. Wimbridge grouched a great deal, as did Rosa, who had taken over the housekeeping and now kept chickens and ducks in the yard behind the kitchen. Rosa’s whining was grating intensely on H.P.B.’s nerves; once so insistent on bringing her to India, Madame now regretted it and called her, behind her back, “the maid,” and she also fussed about Rosa’s “malevolent magnetism.” The police continued to spy and the money to dwindle. Henry began to send weekly articles about conditions in India to the New York
Sun,
while Helena tried to persuade Bouton to publish a pamphlet about curious religious sects. When all that failed, she succeeded in obtaining an assignment for a series of articles on occult India from Michael Katkov, a leading newspaper editor and publisher of the Moscow
Chronicle.
Under the pseudonym Radda Bai, these reports, actually highly skilled fiction, would eventually be published as
From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan
and bring her literary praise in her native country.

In June, the monsoon began and Bombay turned into a passable imitation of Venice. The unconcerned Hindus, naked to the waist, paddled around on their daily business, but the four Theosophists suffered miserably. When the roof began to leak, they had to sit under umbrellas in the sopping drawing room; before long, clothing and furniture turned damp and began to mold, then rot. Every few days H.P.B. dried her books over a brazier. Soon the house was inundated with scorpions, centipedes, lizards, snakes and cockroaches. Making the rounds of the bungalow every night, “I became a bloodthirsty Nimrod and killed cockroaches as big as small mice, spiders which could be mistaken for moderate-sized crabs,”
²⁹
Helena wrote. The rains did nothing to improve tempers, and Olcott, bitterly depressed and homesick, could be found weeping over his sons’ pictures. He grimly told Helena that it had been “an act of lunatics”
³⁰
to leave New York and they would surely all starve. This outburst brought a biting reprimand from Master Morya, who pointed out that nobody forced him to leave home and expressed regret that Henry did not fight like a man. “If you are unfit to pass your first probation and assert your rights of a future Adept by forcing circumstances to bow before you—you are as totally unfit for any further trials.”
³¹

If Helena hoped to shame the colonel into rallying, she was relatively successful. Soon, he stopped talking about home. A few weeks later, when informed that he had been cheated out of a ten-thousand-dollar fee owed him for a insurance case and that a silver mining investment would bring no return, he took the news fairly calmly. About this time, Helena herself received a letter more ominous than any prospect of starvation. Emma Cutting, her old friend in Cairo, was now living in Ceylon with her French husband, Alexis Coulomb. Seemingly friendly on the surface, Emma had nothing but woes to relate. Shortly after H.P.B. had left Cairo, Emma had married a man she believed to be rich, but “almost immediately we lost our fortune.” Impoverished, the couple had found their way to India, where Alexis could find no employment and Emma was forced to support both of them as a teacher and tutor of rich young ladies; subsequently Emma had become ill and they moved to Ceylon and bought an old hotel that went bankrupt shortly. They moved again, this time to a rural area “hoping to be able to grow some European vegetables” but the soil was so stony, nothing would grow. Having exhausted all means of earning a living, Emma had been immensely pleased to read in the Ceylon
Times
about the arrival of Madame Blavatsky, which “I really considered a God-send.”

Helena was petrified. There were a half-dozen people who knew enough about her to really ruin her and Emma Coulomb was one of them. Steeling herself, she took her cue from Emma and composed a newsy reply bringing her life up to date since they last had met: Paris, New York, the Theosophical Society,
Isis Unveiled.
She mentioned that in 1872 she had spend eight months in India. “My lodge in India, of which I may have spoken to you, had decided that as the Society established by myself and old Sebire was a failure, I had to go to America and establish one on a larger scale.”