Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (54 page)

In spite of Koot Hoomi’s studied indifference, Helena felt secretly shaken. To be sure, her friends had rallied during the crisis; even the long-neglected William Judge had written a supportive letter to the
Religio-Philosophical Journal,
and Henry of course had blithely dismissed the brouhaha as a tempest in a teapot. At least, he appeared to be undisturbed. Helena could not always be sure about Henry, who needed periodic injections of reassurance about the Masters and she feared that a few ungerminated seeds of doubt may have lodged in Henry’s mind as a result of the Kiddle business. What she needed was some fresh demonstration of the Masters’ reality, but at the moment she could think of nothing sufficiently startling.

At any rate, it was all she could do to cope with daily life at the compound. The house was constantly full of people and even though she enjoyed having company, it occasionally jangled her nerves. Soobiah Chetty, to name only one, insisted upon exploiting the Adyar facilities. Since he spent every night there, Helena felt justified in occasionally commandeering his services. She had once given him a twelve-page manuscript to copy, and, he recalled, she “looked at it, crumpled it, and threw it into the waste-basket. She was in a rage.” Apparently it did not occur to her to tell Chetty what he had done wrong.

Not until the next day did he realize that he had written on both sides of the paper, at which time he redid it. Madame did not apologize for her rotten temper and although Chetty felt that she treated him harshly, he knew that she treated everyone badly when in one of her moods. “Madame,” he asked one day when she seemed amiable, “you preach control of temper, but you go into outbursts now and then.”

Helena brushed off the criticism. “Soobiah, that is my loss and your gain. If I didn’t have that temper, I should have become an adept by this time.”
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Aside from the Hindus who camped at Adyar, there were frequent European visitors to Madras who drove out to meet Madame Blavatsky. Now an international figure, she received them on the veranda, fed them dinner and witty conversation, and sent them on their way. The experience with William Tournay Brown, however, was different. Brown arrived in late September with letters of introduction from Alfred Sinnett, informing her that he had heard of the Christlike life she was leading for the benefit of her fellow men and had traveled to India solely to meet her.

A nervous twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman from Glasgow, Brown had graduated from law school but never practiced owing to delicate health.
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To be more precise, he suffered from periods of severe mental illness, possibly dementia, and had spent most of his adult life traveling in the United States and Canada, where he had sought help for his problems. Earlier that year, in London to consult a homeopathic doctor, he had met Sinnett and joined the Theosophical Society, and then, later, suddenly in August, 1883, decided that he must meet Madame Blavatsky in person, hoping she might provide relief for his instability. He brought with him a middle-aged Irish woman, Sarah Parker, whose fare to India he had partially or fully paid, and who was a Theosophist and a friend of H.P.B.’s old friend Emily Kislingbury. Hospitable as always, Helena welcomed them both. Brown impressed her as “a fine young fellow” and Mrs. Parker as “a lunatic in many things but no better, sincere, truthly, honest woman ever breathed in an Irish carcase.” A week later Helena changed her mind in a hurry about Sarah Parker, who drove her wild by hanging over Damodar and the other Indians in the
Theosophist
office and crooning, “Oh, I am enjoying their magnetism—it is so pure!!” When Brown received a Mahatma letter and she did not, Sarah informed H.P.B. that the Masters were “ungrateful curs.” Outraged, Helena had a few choice names for her, writing Sinnett that she was “an ungrateful, vain, selfish, ridiculous old mare.”
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What exasperated her most about Brown and Parker was that they seemed to despise each other. Every time they met, they quarreled, always bickering at the dining table, until H.P.B. finally stopped coming down to meals. When Brown asked permission to join the colonel who was then touring in the vicinity south of Bombay, Helena gladly “packed him off to Olcott.” When Parker came down with jaundice and abruptly announced that she would be moving on to Calcutta. Madame could not have been more relieved, although at the last minute she felt sorry for her and wrote letters of introduction to several Calcutta Theosophists.

In late October, still trying to round up money for the
Phoenix,
H.P.B. spent several days in Bombay on a fishing expedition for Koot Hoomi’s newspaper; she had received an invitation to visit Maharajah Holkar of Indore, but when practically on his doorstep, she was refused an audience, receiving instead two hundred rupees to cover the expense of trekking back across India. “Holkar—fiasco,” she wrote tersely to Emma. “I dare say he was afraid , . , Damn him.”
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At Bombay, she gratefully accepted the hospitality of the Flynn family and settled down for a two-day stay with, as she put it, “nice people.”
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When Olcott and Brown came into the city for a reunion, Flynn, a government translator, gave a dinner party and invited fifty local Theosophists. One of the Flynn children, Mary, who was just recovering from smallpox, seemed to be generally unstable. According to her father, she had become so taken with Madame Blavatsky that she wanted to join her at Adyar. When Flynn had refused, she had talked about suicide and at night gone out walking barefoot in the mud. When Flynn begged Helena to take the girl back to Adyar, for a month or so, she shrugged and agreed. As she told Emma, “He gives her plenty of money for her pocket expenses and she eats hardly anything.”
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Helena was observant enough to spot a neurotic when she met one, and she could not have helped noticing that a certain percentage of her converts were undeniably high-strung in one respect or another. Although one supposes she preferred dealing with healthy people, she did not go so far as to reject the crazies; on the contrary, part of her genius was in realizing how they might be useful to her.

Olcott, Brown and Damodar headed for Jubbulpore; H.P.B. with Mary Flynn and Babula started toward Madras, but on the way stopped at Poona to see Judge N. D. Khandalavala, who had guaranteed Helena an introduction to a wealthy industrialist, Jacob Sassoon, a man whom Helena thought of as “the happy proprietor of a crore of rupees.” Hopes high, she accepted dinner and breakfast invitations from Sassoon, who announced that not only was he anxious to join the Society, but also was prepared to pay off the Adyar mortgage. Of course, he wanted a return on his investment, and if only he might witness a miracle or two, he would be reassured about the Mahatmas’ existence. H.P.B. gave it a try but Sassoon, unimpressed by the phenomena, kept his rupees. Nothing seemed to go right at Poona. When, for four days Babula cried and pleaded to be sent home to his wife, Helena finally gave in and let him go. Next, a dress for which she had paid twenty-six rupees literally fell apart and “I just escaped coming home quite naked.”
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Nevertheless, the trip was worthwhile because it provided her with an unexpected inspiration: at Bombay she had had a chance to observe William Brown more carefully. Ever since his arrival in India he had been begging her to suggest some way in which he might help the Mahatmas; now she saw exactly how William Brown could serve.

By the middle of November, Henry Olcott was toiling his way through the Punjab in a peculiar combination of Anglo-Indian pomp and American Yankee camping. His party of six included his secretary and bearer, William Brown and his bearer, and Damodar. They traveled by rail and at each stop would hire a dozen coolies to carry their beds, chairs, food and water, as well as Henry’s desk and official papers, then set up their tents. It was a primitive way of touring, but Henry hated to waste the Society’s money on hotels and, in any case, enjoyed outdoor life. Occasionally a local raja would insist on their accepting his hospitality, and then elephants would be sent to escort the Theosophists to a few days of free and unbridled luxury. Henry always counted his rupees.

On November 19, at Lahore, they were greeted by local Theosophists and escorted to a camp of six tents and four open pavilions that had already been prepared for them on a plain north of the city. Throughout the day, the camp was mobbed with visitors, and Henry addressed an immense crowd that had congregated despite the freezing weather. That night, asleep in the tent he was sharing with Brown, Henry felt someone clutch him. Lurching awake, fearing a thief or assassin, he tussled with the intruder and prepared to grapple for his life but then he heard a sweet voice whisper, “Do you not know me? Do you not remember me?”
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Bowing his head reverently, Henry tried to climb out of bed but Mahatma Koot Hoomi laid his hand on his forehead and blessed him before walking around the canvas screen to Brown’s bed, where he sat down to a chat. When the Master had finally gone, Henry and Brown found that each of them had been left letters wrapped in silk cloth. Brown had been singled out for further honors with a white silk handkerchief embroidered with the initials “K.H.” Damodar seems to have been omitted from the Mahatmic visitation, although no one heard him express disappointment.

The next evening all three men sat in Olcott’s tent waiting for Koot Hoomi’s promised reappearance. There was a quarter moon and the camp was quiet. Finally around 10 p.m., they saw approaching a tall Hindu who beckoned Damodar to come with him and then led him away a short distance down the field to Master K.H. After a brief conversation, Damodar returned and Olcott was summoned to the Mahatma. Their conversation lasted half an hour, Henry recalled. Those two nights at Lahore seemed to him proof that he was “watched and helped; never deserted, never forgotten, howsoever dark may seem the outlook.”
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For William Brown, the honored recipient of a visit from Koot Hoomi in his physical body, something that had been denied even to the likes of Alfred Sinnett, it seemed he would never need a doctor again. The Mahatma told him that he would always be protected but he must be sure to tell his countrymen “that you are from personal knowledge as sure of our existence as you are of your own.”
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Brown was not one hundred percent sure of his own existence, but nonetheless, took comfort from the Master’s words. For the next three years, Brown would staunchly insist that Mahatma Koot Hoomi was a living person because he had seen him in the flesh and still possessed his hankie. Not until 1887 would he call Madame Blavatsky “an untruthful and unscrupulous deceiver” who, like Faust, had “sold herself, for a temporary consideration, to the devil,”
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and he offered himself as living proof of her satanic flimflammery.

In the late afternoon of January 10,1884, Moncure Daniel Conway arrived at the entrance of the Theosophical compound at Adyar and stopped for a moment to admire the view before driving through the leafy park and pulling up at the main house. A Virginian and Methodist by birth, Conway had graduated from Harvard and become a Unitarian clergyman; now he had made an international reputation as the fiery liberal occupant of the pulpit at South Place Chapel in London. He had met Madame Blavatsky briefly on her way to India and at the time felt that she was little more than an entertaining gossip; more recently, however, he had become acquainted with Alfred Sinnett, who talked of nothing but Madame and her wonderful Mahatmas. Meeting Sinnett at a reception one night, Conway mentioned he was planning a trip to India and asked for instructions as to how he might meet one of the Mahatmas. Sinnett asked, “Do you mean, can you see and talk with a Mahatma as you are talking with me now?”

“Yes,” Conway answered, feeling it a perfectly reasonable request. Would it not be possible for a visiting clergyman to pay his respects to the holy man?

Sinnett replied with a single word—”No.”

From Sinnett’s description of Madame’s self-sacrificing devotion to the Cause, Conway was expecting a female yogi in an ashram, all austerity and martyrdom with time only for meditation and plain boiled vegetables. He was hardly prepared for the handsome mansion with its long veranda dotted with cushioned easy chairs, or for the table on which were spread the latest English and American magazines and novels. Having sent in his card and learning that Madame would be happy to receive him, he sat down and watched several young Indian youths strolling in meditation among the palms. “Their faces were serenely solemn,” he recalled, “they did not talk or smile; they impressed me out there as rare plants in a nursery, that must be severally kept under glass in cold weather.” He soon found himself chatting wjth two Europeans, a dour Scotsman whose name he learned was William Tournay Brown, and a Dr. Franz Hartmann. The latter, a thin-faced, beak-nosed German wearing a fez, said he had come to Adyar from Colorado about a month earlier for the sole purpose of meeting Madame Blavatsky “to learn from her the secrets of life and death.” Both men talked volubly about the Occult Room and the messages they had received from Koot Hoomi, but when Conway intimated that he would love to have some little marvel of his own to carry back to London, he was told that unfortunately the Mahatmas were not receiving correspondence at the moment. That was just his luck, Conway replied; whenever a miracle occurred he was always too soon or too late to see it and he likened himself to Alice in her looking-glass—”Jam tomorrow, and jam yesterday, but never jam today.” His quip was not well received.

His visit with H.P.B. was relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable. Conway remembered her sitting “in her large decorated chair, in an airy white beltless gown much in the style of the midsummer dress of Russian ladies, endlessly smoking cigarettes, conversing in a free and easy way, and putting on no airs at all.” When the others had drifted away, she rose and asked Conway to follow her, leading him up the stairs to the privacy of her boudoir where she lit still another cigarette. She asked him why he had come to Adyar.