by Marion Meade
Shortly after this, Helena rented a place of her own at the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. It was a musty top-floor room containing only an iron cot, a table, and a three-drawer cabinet; downstairs, a saloon occupied the ground floor. Helena, a rabid teetotaler, could not have been delighted.
To make matters worse, she had a fire in her room, perhaps as a result of careless smoking, and after the firemen had extinguished the blaze, she discovered that her watch and chain were missing. When she complained to her landlord, who happened to be the proprietor of the saloon, he scoffed that she had never owned a watch. Helena’s almost paranoid reaction to the fire supplies a clue to her anguished state of mind at that period of her life; she told Elizabeth Holt that the fire had been deliberately set in order to rob her, and, referring to what Elizabeth assumed were her spirit guides, she kept talking about “they” and “them.” When she had asked “them” to give her proof of the robbery, there had immediately materialized a charred piece of paper with two white spots in the shape of a watch and chain, meaning to indicate, one supposes, that the objects had been resting on the paper before the fire.4
If H.P.B. actually offered this “documentation” to her landlord, it failed to sway him. In response to Elizabeth’s expressions of sympathy, Helena cheerfully assured her that money was no problem—she had only to ask “them” for it and would find what she needed in the drawers of her cabinet. But it was a meaningless boast. For all her outward nonchalance, “they” had evidently failed her and it was clear that she must find another place to live. Although by this time the Madison Street commune had failed financially and closed, she was able to locate a similar working woman’s home at 45 Elizabeth Street. Unlike Mr. Rinaldo’s house, this was a massive, six-story brick building accommodating five hundred boarders. The ground floor was given over to a parlor, reading room, laundry and restaurant, while the upper stories had been made into dormitories. Helena had to pay $1.25 a week for lodging and laundry privileges, and she could have a decent meal in the restaurant for twenty-five cents.5
In early 1874, Helena met Hannah Wolff, a reporter for the New York Star who visited the home while interviewing one of H.P.B.’s roommates. “Scantily clad,” Mme. Blavatsky lay on the carpetless floor during the conversation and “rolled and smoked cigarettes with marvellous rapidity.” Afterward Helena interrogated Hannah at such length about the position of women in the American press that Miss Wolff felt she was the one being interviewed. When Wolff finally got a word in and asked why she was living in a working woman’s home, H.P.B. cited necessity. So a month later, meeting her again at a women’s rights convention, Wolff was surprised to find Helena with money to spare. Having received, she told Wolff, a large sum of money from Russia, she had been able to move to an expensive hotel on Fourth Avenue near Twenty-third Street. “She invited half a dozen ladies to lunch with her,” Wolff recalled, “and subsequently told me that her bill footed up to five dollars each.”
Neither H.P.B.’s presence at a feminist convention, nor her lavish entertaining of delegates, should be construed to mean that she had any particular interest in the cause of women’s rights. On the contrary, the fact that Susan B. Anthony had illegally voted in the 1872 election left her indifferent. H.P.B. herself had no desire to vote, even though she felt strongly that women deserved the right if they wanted it. As for the notorious Victoria Woodhull who had run for President in that same election (and who had actually announced that she believed in “free love”), this was the last person Helena would champion, Mrs. Woodhull’s sexual liberation being much too close to home for comfort. Rather it was loneliness that sent her to the feminist conclave, just as her need for companionship made her pursue Hannah Wolff.
Highly intuitive up to a point, H.P.B. could be, nonetheless, myopic when it came to reading people’s true feelings. Failing to grasp that Hannah Wolff considered her batty, she believed that she had made a friend and began dropping in frequently at Hannah’s apartment where she talked compulsively about herself. In the course of these conversations, she mentioned having fought with Garibaldi but, Wolff recalled, “I was never able to hold her to the subject so as to get any succinct or lucid account of her adventures as a soldier.” By professional training or by temperament, Hannah accepted nothing unquestioningly. When Helena displayed her scars, claiming them saber wounds, Hannah privately concluded that they must be marks of a knout. She found H.P.B.’s smoking a pound of tobacco a day to be offensive and her use of opium and hashish shocking. H.P.B. would ramble on enthusiastically about the relative benefits of hashish versus opium in stimulating the imagination. She considered hashish to be superior and urged Hannah to sample the drug for herself. Hannah claims to have declined.
In the spring of 1874, Helena was still moving in Hannah’s circle of friends. Introduced to a Mr. W. and learning that he was a Spiritualist, she pleaded ignorance of the subject and asked him to escort her to a lecture being given by E. V. Wilson, a well-known trance medium. Afterward she told Mr. W. that it was her first experience with mediums and that she had been thoroughly impressed.
Soon after that, she met Hannah and Mr. W. on the street, and animatedly informed them that as a result of the medium’s lecture, she had begun to develop occult powers. Having placed some photographs in a bureau, she found to her astonishment that spirits had tinted them like watercolor paintings. She invited Hannah and Mr. W. back to the cheap apartment she shared with three journalists. Her roommates were two men and a woman, a decidedly bohemian arrangement for the 1870s, but at least she had a small bedroom of her own off the dining room. When Hannah and Mr. W. stopped in to see the spirit art, Helena led them to a sideboard in the dining room, pulled out some colored pictures and explained that the “colouring seemed chiefly to be done in the night and when nature was in her negative mood.” Hannah did not believe this for a minute. Speaking privately to the other residents of the apartment, she learned that they too, had been skeptical of Madame’s occult powers and
had laid wait for the spirit who worked in the night-watches, and had discovered it materialized in the form of Madame Blavatsky, dressed in saque de nuit [sic]; had seen it glide softly across the room, armed with lamp, colours and brushes, take the pictures from the drawers, and rapidly work upon them one after another until they were as nearly completed as could be at one sitting.
Whatever one may conclude about these shenanigans, they attest to Helena’s immense need to make an impression on those around her. It was discouraging to realize that after nearly a year in New York she was still as poor and unknown, as lonely and fragmented, as the day she arrived. Despite a few superficial friendships, including a Russian couple who lived in Brooklyn, she had failed to put down any real roots in the city and simultaneously, receiving no mail from Russia, she felt cut off from her past. Sensing the constant specter of starvation at her elbow, she felt obliged to conserve what remained of her father’s inheritance while making continual efforts to find additional income.
Strangely enough, she decided to become a writer, an illogical choice of professions, because while she spoke English fairly well, her command of English grammar was virtually nil; but perhaps her association with various journalists accounts for it. Asking Hannah to be her editor, she divulged that she was writing a humorous satire on the United States government and when Wolff suggested that this might be impertinent in a newcomer who had little insight into American institutions, H.P.B. forcefully declared that she should look at the manuscript before condemning it.
By this time Wolff’s distrust of Madame Blavatsky had become automatic. She showed the manuscript to one of H.P.B.’s roommates, who, in turn, escorted her to the home of Helena’s Brooklyn friends, Mr. and Mrs. Yule.
“Did she tell you it was original?” Mr. Yule wanted to know.
“Certainly,” Hannah said. “She claimed that it was an expression of her own views of our government in satire.”
From a bookcase, Yule removed a work
by a celebrated Russian humorist and said, “Well, the portion of it that you have, she translated from this volume. The second volume she borrowed when she left here and has not yet returned.”
Listening to Yule read aloud from the Russian text, Hannah realized that except for the substitution of “United States” for “Russia,” “President” for “Czar,” and so forth, the manuscript she had been given to edit was a verbatim translation. Furious, she rushed back to Helena with the manuscript and upbraided her for plagiarism. Not only did Helena not deny it, she professed not to understand what horrendous thing she had done because, she remarked, “Americans were almost entirely ignorant of Russian literature.”6 In this attitude, she was being perfectly sincere; in fact, she would never manage to understand the inviolate nature of other authors’ works, saw nothing wrong in borrowing freely, with or without attribution, and regarded those who objected as nitpickers.
After this incident, Hannah Wolff would have none of her, and H.P.B. seems to have temporarily dropped her ambition of becoming a professional writer. In late June, still looking for something to do, she encountered Clementine Gerebko, a Frenchwoman whose Russian husband had once been captain of a private steamer owned by Prince Vorontzov, viceroy of the Caucasus. Meeting this couple whom she had known slightly in Tiflis, Helena promptly responded with a passionate outburst of enthusiasm such as might be expected in a sentimental expatriate pining for contact with her native land. The Gerebkos, who had been living in America several years, owned a six-acre farm in Suffolk County, Long Island. Not only did Clementine paint an idyllic picture of their property, she said that the farm produced an annual income of nearly two thousand dollars. Would Helena Petrovna consider going into partnership with her?
Helena would. “I had to give her one thousand dollars,” she recalled, “and pay half of the expenses that might occur,” but for this investment she was to receive half of the farm’s yearly profits. Agog with visions of the profits to be made from the bucolic setting— eggs, poultry and truck-gardening—Helena handed over a portion of Peter von Hahn’s bequest, signed a three-year contract, and went to live with the Gerebkos at the beginning of July.
Though it is not easy to imagine an indolent person like Madame Blavatsky feeding chickens, she was willing to give it a try. Once she got to Long Island, what stunned her was not the prospect of hard labor, but the realization that Clementine had tricked her. Far from being a profitable business, the farm was noticeably rundown and needed at least five hundred dollars’ worth of building improvements, which H.P.B. claimed that she made. By the end of the month, however, she had had enough, both of farming and Clementine, and she cursed “my unlucky star that brought me in contact with her.” Apparently Clementine harbored similar feelings because, after a particularly violent squabble, she “prayed to be released of the contract” and promised to return H.P.B.’s money. Agreeing to sell the farm at auction, the three of them returned to New York City, took rooms together, and decided to continue being friends. “Alas!” added H.P.B., “three days after we had taken lodging in common, on one fine afternoon, upon my returning home, I found that the fair countess had left the place, neglecting to pay me back her little bill of one thousand dollars.”
Badly rattled, Helena retained the Brooklyn law firm of Bergen, Jacobs and Ivins to bring suit against the Gerebkos. Meanwhile, of course, her inheritance had evaporated.7
On one of those days in July when Helena was fussing over her poultry in Long Island, Henry Steel Olcott sat in his law office at 7 Beekman Street “thinking over a heavy case in which I had been retained by the Corporation of the City of New York.”8 Bored by interminable memos detailing the construction of water meters, his mind began to wander; it occurred to him that in the wake of his recent personal upheavals he had not paid much attention to current events and trends and he decided to walk around the corner to a newspaper dealer where he purchased, finally, a copy of the Banner of Light. Back in his office, he began leafing through the Spiritualist paper, intending to kill time until he could go uptown to his room at the Lotos Club. One item, however, immediately grabbed his attention:
In it I read an account of certain incredible phenomena, viz., the solidification of phantom forms, which were said to be occurring at a farmhouse in the township of Chittenden, in the State of Vermont, several hundred miles distant from New York. I saw at once that, if it were true that visitors could see, even touch and converse with, deceased relatives who had found means to reconstruct their bodies and clothing so as to be temporarily solid, visible, and tangible, this was the most important fact in modern physical science. I determined to go and see for myself.9
To Olcott, who was not a Spiritualist, it all seemed wonderfully new.
Nevertheless, as incredible as the apparitions may have sounded, as earth-shaking their implications for modern science, there was, in fact, nothing particularly remarkable about either William and Horatio Eddy or their materialized spirits who identified themselves exotically as Mayflower and Honto. The United States, that summer, suffered no shortage of mediums who could “materialize” a parade of ghostly figures, not only the popular John King, self-proclaimed ghost of the famous buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, who had been “coming through” for twenty years, but also his flirtatious daughter Katie King and hundreds of lesser personalities. So there is no reason to doubt Olcott’s word when he admitted ignorance about the latest developments in Spiritualism.
Another man might have taken a weekend jaunt to Vermont, satisfied his curiosity, and returned to his law office on Monday morning. Olcott, a thrifty man, saw no reason to finance the trip himself when he might wangle a newspaper assignment and get his expenses paid. Two summers earlier he had worked briefly at the New York Sun, filling in for the vacationing drama editor, and now he talked to his editor friends and proposed that they send him to Vermont as a special correspondent; he would spend three or four days checking out the Eddys for fraud and perhaps get an offbeat story out of it.
It was a hot, dull summer in New York. The only scandal of note, the alleged adultery of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher with one of his parishioners, had already begun to pall. The Sun could use a sensational ghost story and Olcott could escape for a holiday in the cool Vermont countryside.
Henry Steel Olcott would be celebrating his forty-second birthday in a few days, but despite his law practice and other trappings of middle-class success, he could not claim to be satisfied or even happy. Most decidedly he was not happy, even though he was not the sort of person to indulge in self-pity. The eldest of six children, he had been born and raised in Orange, New Jersey, where his father owned a modest, though unsuccessful, business. While there was nothing particularly distinguished about the immediate family, the Olcotts could trace their American ancestry back to the 1630s when a well-to-do Puritan named Thomas Olcott had migrated to New England, and, going back still further, perhaps to a Dr. John Alcock who had been Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Ely in the late fifteenth century. His family’s genealogy fascinated Henry Olcott and, earlier in the year, he had devoted a great deal of time to revising the 1845 edition of The Descendants of Thomas Olcott and he had even added a new preface.
Despite impressive forebears, Henry had been obliged to struggle, and his education at the City College of New York and Columbia University was cut short when his father’s business failed. Dropping out of school, he took up farming on a share basis for two years, then returned to New York where he devoted himself to the scientific study of agriculture. By the age of twenty-three, he had won recognition for his work on various model farms, particularly for his research in sorghum, and in 1858 he wrote his first book, Sorgho and Imphee, the Chinese and African Sugar-Canes. Finding that his expertise in agriculture provided an entry into journalism, he was pleased to become associate agricultural editor of the New York Tribune.
By 1859, Henry was definitely gravitating from agriculture into newspaper work. When John Brown was scheduled to be hung that December at C
harlestown, Virginia, and the Virginians refused to allow Northern papers to cover the abolitionist’s execution, Olcott volunteered to take the assignment for the Tribune and managed not only to witness the event but write an excellent story. Two years later, the Civil War put a temporary end to both of Henry’s careers.
Enlisting in the Northern Army, he served in the North Carolina campaign under General Burnside, but dysentery very quickly invalided him back to New York; by the time he was recovered and ready to return to the front, his superiors had taken note of his ability and made him a special commissioner of the War Department with instructions to investigate fraud, graft and corruption at the New York Mustering and Disbursing Office. Throughout the remaining four years of the war, he proved so zealous that the Navy Department borrowed him to clean up abuses in the Navy Yards, and it was during this period that he was promoted to the rank of colonel, a title he would use for the rest of his life.
After the war, Olcott resigned his commission, but instead of returning to his former pursuits, he decided to study law. There is no record of his having attended a university; most probably he read law in someone’s office and was admitted to the bar in May, 1868, as a result of his work experience. With his customary energy, Olcott began to specialize in the new field of insurance law and soon had carved out a respectable practice in customs, revenue and insurance cases. Among his clients were the City of New York and the Life Mutual Insurance Company of New York, the latter retaining him to lobby for the insurance profession in the New York State Legislature. In short, Olcott was living proof of the old American adage that ability and hard work bring rewards.