by Marion Meade
Henry was baffled by certain changes in Helena’s personality. The jolliness that he had loved was gone, and now, he wrote to Charles Massey, “she is all sobriety, dignity, stern self-repression.”205 Even though Henry felt that Helena could read his thoughts, he had yet to figure her out. He had even written to Nadyezhda for information about her childhood, but received only enough clues to mystify him further. Sometimes he thought that she was no more a she than he was, but “a very old man and most learned and wonderful man,”206 a Hindu man. It was a totally fanciful description, but Helena was inclined to like it.
During May and June legal matters preoccupied her. First, Michael finally divorced her on grounds of desertion, and the decree was granted on May 25. Secondly, despite her growing antipathy toward America, she made the inconsistent move of applying for citizenship. Having filed for naturalization in September, 1874, she had recently abandoned any intention of following through, but Henry wisely pointed out that, given the tension between Russia and Britain, it would be far safer to arrive in British India with an American passport.
On July 8, he accompanied her to Superior Court to be sworn in. An hour after returning home, she was railing in a letter to Nadyezhda that “to my utter astonishment and disgust, I was compelled to repeat publicly after the judge, like a mere parrot,” that she renounced her loyalty to Russia. “I was awfully scared when pronouncing this blackguardly recantation of Russia and the emperor,”207 because while she managed to choke out the words, they were a lie.
Since H.P.B. had the distinction of being the first Russian woman to be naturalized, the press, true to form, descended on the Lamasery. Was it true, asked the Daily Graphic reporter, that Madame had become a citizen in order to take a leading role in the woman suffrage movement? Or, rather, to make extensive real estate purchases?
Madame, staring him down, solemnly intoned that she had been naturalized “because I love liberty. There is little liberty in Russia today.” She was “glad” and “proud” to call herself an American.208
To the New York Star man, who wondered if she were married, she glowered, “I am a widow, a blessed widow and I thank God! I wouldn’t be a slave to God Himself, let alone man.”209 She knew from Nadyezhda that Nikifor was still alive at Poltava, but that was no business of the reporter.210 Her marriage to Michael seemed so unreal, she had no compunction in denying it had ever happened; even to friends such as Caroline Corson she wrote that anything she might have once confided about marrying Betanelly had been in jest. In any case, “that poor fellow who was twenty years younger than myself”211 had actually married a Miss Allen.
Public personality that she was, she still avoided any comment to the press about her departure for India. Clearly, such an announcement would have been inappropriate at that time, but H.P.B. was never one to demure from unconventional behavior. She had another, more complicated reason to keep quiet. Only in principle Henry had agreed that the move was inevitable; in fact, he had procrastinated endlessly, refusing even to set a departure date. His lack of enthusiasm drove Helena wild, although she understood that raising the passage money would be far from easy. Throughout the summer, Olcott worked on various business ventures that he might undertake once they arrived in their new home, specifically trading American clocks for tiger skins and curios. In Albany and Philadelphia he managed to interest several companies in retaining him as their agent and also applied to President Hayes for a diplomatic passport, a letter of recommendation to all U.S. ministers and consuls abroad, and a commission to investigate the practicality of extending American commercial interests in Asia, all of which were granted in due time.
For Helena, the summer dragged on. When Henry went to Albany on business in mid-June, she did not care to remain at the Lamasery alone and made several excursions to New Jersey with Belle Mitchell and also with Edward Wimbridge, a tall English architect and artist who had grown so chummy with H.P.B. and Olcott that he practically lived with them. At the end of the month, still restless, Helena took the night boat to Troy, New York, and from there journeyed to Albany, where she joined Henry. Back in New York, she complained of finding the city’s ninety-degree heat unbearably tropical and suggested a seaside vacation. On the thirteenth of July, she and Henry, accompanied by Wimbridge, left for a three-week vacation at East Hampton, Long Island, where they stayed at Captain Gardiner’s Hotel. “A superb day,” Henry wrote in his diary the next day,
bright sun, cool, pleasant air, everything charming. We three took a carriage, drove to the beach and all bathed. H.P.B. presented a most amusing appearance; paddling about in the surf, with her bare legs, and showing an almost infantile glee to be in such a ‘splendid magnetism.’212
When people stared at her, because women ordinarily did not bare their legs at the beach, nor did they smoke, she lit up another cigarette and dismissed them as “pious Xtians.”213 No doubt part of her friskiness can be attributed to having recently shed nearly ninety pounds.
During the writing of Isis, she was fond of describing her appetite as being like “three hogs”214 and she had taken no exercise. By the book’s completion, she was huge, and although she laughed about her obesity, her body disgusted her. When Belle Mitchell took her to a shop that owned a scale, and Helena found that she weighed 245 pounds, she resolved to reduce to an appropriate weight for traveling—156 pounds, she told Belle.
According to Olcott, her diet plan was simple. Ten minutes before each meal, she held her palm over a glass of plain water, stared hypnotically for a few seconds, and then downed the water in a single gulp. It was not more than a few weeks later, he maintained, that she went back to the shop with the scale and weighed in at 156 pounds.
That H.P.B. lived in a fever of nervous excitement during the autumn of 1878 is documented by her own pen. While she herself kept no diary, Olcott did, and since they had begun living together Helena fell into the habit of making entries in his daybook.215 With Henry now frequently away hustling business deals, it was Helena who jotted down the minutiae of her daily life: an attack of neuralgia, the lack of hot water in the apartment, the grocer’s dunning over an unpaid bill in the amount of a hundred dollars,216 articles written, letters sent and received—many of them to and from Hurrychund Chintamon—and names of people, sometimes a dozen or more daily who drifted up to the Lamasery to wile away the afternoon or evening and sometimes spend the night. That Helena incessantly praised India at America’s expense and even solicited contributions for the Arya Samaj deterred no one; indeed, it gave the visits exoticism. Not unexpectedly, word of her departure soon filtered down to the press and on Sunday, October 13, a gossipy editorial in the New York Sun announced that the colonel and the Madame were “packing up their trunks.”217
The one overriding obstacle to the pilgrimage Helena felt might well come from Henry’s ex-wife, whom she had mockingly nicknamed “Kali” after the malevolent Hindu goddess of death and destruction. That somehow she would prevent Henry from leaving, perhaps by having him arrested, tortured H.P.B. How strongly Mary protested the departure of her former husband is not known, but it stands to reason that the idea displeased her, since he was the sole support of herself and their two sons. Later William Judge would claim that by this time one of Henry’s sons was working and the other was about to graduate from college; neither required his support. But the truth was quite a bit different, for Morgan and William were seventeen and sixteen respectively, and very much in need of their father’s financial and emotional support. Henry’s absconding to India with Madame Blavatsky must at best have been regarded as scandalous abandonment by both the boys and their mother. To mislead Mary Olcott and take some of the pressure off Henry, Helena dispatched a sarcastic reply to the Sun, protesting against “the chronic habit the papers have of constantly hitching our two names together like a runaway team bound on a race of destruction.” As for the rumors about the two of them leaving town, “I wish sincerely we were; but we are not. America, my adopted country, will have to bear with me
a little longer.” She doubted very much that the colonel intended spending the rest of his life as an Indian mystic seated cross-legged in meditation or perched upon a pillar “with his gaze concentrated upon the tip of his nose.”218
It was not only Mary Olcott who could throw a wrench into her plans; until the very last moment Helena would fear that Henry himself would find an excuse for backing out. Uprooting him from his native soil became almost a full-time occupation for not only H.P.B. but also for masters Serapis and M., whose bombardment of supernatural messages are regular entries in his diary: “Orders from Serapis to complete all by the first days of December”; “Furniture and rest must be sold and disposed of before the 12th. ORDERS”; “Definite orders from Serapis. Have to go; the latest from 15 to 20th Dec.”219
Henry had to deal with their departure as a reality when he returned from Philadelphia in early November to find that H.P.B. had sold their carpets and that the Theosophical traveling party had become a quartet. It was at Helena’s urging that they would be joined by Edward Wimbridge and Rosa “Taffy” Bates. Rosa, who was a temporarily unemployed English governess in her late thirties, had no more money than Wimbridge, so, at Helena’s insistence, Henry assumed the cost of their steamship fares. It was definitely not the sort of plan Olcott would greet enthusiastically, especially since he was having enough difficulty rounding up the cash for two passages to India, but Helena convinced him that arriving in the company of two English people would give them an entree they might not have as an American and Russian. In principle, Henry had no objection to Wimbridge, who was an agreeable fellow, but he insisted that Rosa Bates, whom he disliked, would only cause trouble. Behind her back, H.P.B. denigrated her as “Spinster Bates”—but felt she could be useful. Helena continued to insist to Henry that she knew best about Rosa and in the end he relented.
On the second of November, still edgy after her struggle on behalf of Wimbridge and Bates, she visited a friend on East Sixtieth Street and afterwards decided to return through Central Park on foot, a form of locomotion she ordinarily eschewed. It was an especially beautiful day, however, and she even sat down quietly under the trees for a while. Once she got home, she regretted the exercise because she began to feel chilled and that evening, tired and draggy, she was not her usual volatile self. When Gus Petri, who was a friend of Wimbridge’s and an amateur fortune-teller, brought out a pack of cards and offered to prophesy their futures, his suggestion was taken up eagerly by everyone except Helena, who viewed the proceedings with barely veiled disdain. Once her turn came, however, she was appalled to hear him blithely predict that she would probably never reach Bombay. Unaware of her experiences on the S.S. Eumonia, he went on to venture that she would die at sea. Petri, according to Olcott’s diary, “hinted shipwreck for us all, in which Wim and I would be saved and H.P.B. lost! Goak!”220
Although Helena pretended to brush off Petri’s predictions as “flapdoodle,” they threw her into a genuine fright. To make matters worse, she began to sniffle the next day, and for the next two weeks suffered from a running nose, coughing, and “fearful sleepless nights.”221 “O God,” she wrote in Henry’s diary, “O Indra of the golden face! Is this really the beginning and the end!”222 It was not until the day after Thanksgiving, when Henry was off visiting his brother Emmet, that Helena’s anxiety began to subside. Petri showed up for dinner and again read the cards. This time, to H.P.B.’s enormous relief, he “prognosticated delay for departure but safe arrival to Bombay.” His next prediction was “death through murder for H.P.B. in 8 years at the age of 90(!!),” which made her howl with laughter. “Nothing like clairvoyance,”223 she observed dryly. Nonetheless, she could not entirely forget Petri’s ominous predictions.
In early December her life began to pick up speed. “Taffy” Bates, already gone ahead to England, had taken with her two of H.P.B.’s trunks, while others containing books were shipped by freighter directly to Bombay. Alexander Wilder took down the famous jungle mural from the dining room and carefully transported it to Newark where it continued to hang in his hallway for at least a dozen years. The remainder of the Lamasery’s furnishings were to be disposed of by an auctioneer, but the night before the auction, Helena still seemed to have no clear certainty about her future. She wrote in a melancholy tone, “Tomorrow good-bye, all. But—will H.S.O. be ready? That’s the question. One, only one week more! God help him if he fails.” That night she stayed up talking until 4 a.m. and after two hours’ sleep, woke to a gray rainy day. Gloomy and anxious, she could not bear the idea of watching strangers handle her things, so once the auctioneer had hung his red flag outside the building’s street door, she fled into the rain, telling Olcott that she had an appointment to meet an adept at the Battery.
When she returned at 2 p.m., the red flag was drooping soggily and nearly all the furniture remained exactly where she had left it, the bad weather having kept away many potential customers. Although one of her friends, Mortimer Marble, had gleefully sold the landlord’s window shades for fifty cents, Helena had to face the distressing fact that the auction had failed; in the end, she sold virtually the entire contents of the apartment to the auctioneer, who said he would dispose of them to a dealer. “All went for a song,”224 she moaned.
The next morning, after breakfasting on a board, for lack of any other table, she was annoyed to find at the door a reporter from the Daily Graphic, whom she “respectfully begged to go to the devil”225 and then reluctantly agreed to see.
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.