Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  When Helena first met him in 1879, he was fifty-years-old, tall, exceptionally handsome and exceptionally arrogant in a charming way. Earlier that year he had suffered a humiliating setback that might have chastened a less confident man, but which apparently had little effect on Hume. He had been dismissed from his post for insubordination and failure to cooperate with his superiors, and demoted to ordinary membership in the Revenue Board at Allahabad. Hume, outspoken and belligerent, believed himself superior to almost everyone, which no doubt figured in his career problems. After the demotion, he devoted himself to his greatest interest, ornithology, deciding to become an expert on the game birds of India. With a vengeance, he began cataloguing and collecting specimens, wrote several books on the subject, and published a quarterly journal, Stray Feathers. At Rothney Castle, built on Mount Jakko at a reported cost of a quarter of a million dollars, Hume had created a museum to house his collection of sixty-three-thousand skins and nineteen-thousand eggs.

  Something about Hume powerfully attracted H.P.B.; perhaps his museum filled with stuffed birds reminded her of her grandmother’s. Maybe it was simply the obvious fact of his wealth and influence. Having met him briefly the previous year at Allahabad, she knew that he had studied Eastern religions, spoke several Indian languages, and unlike Sinnett and most of the British, had a genuine concern for the Indian people. Far from despising them as an inferior race, he believed that eventually they should win control over their own country. This was enough, in Helena’s opinion, to make him supremely eligible for conversion to belief in the Brotherhood. Unknown to Hume, Helena was already acquainted with his daughter Maria Jane Burnby, nicknamed Minnie, from whom she had acquired an intimate knowledge of the target. In February, Ross Scott had brought Minnie, with whom he had fallen in love, to Girgaum Back Road where they were house guests for three days. H.P.B. had not much liked Minnie, probably because the snooty Miss Hume had told her flatly that while she had lived in India ten years she had yet to touch the hand of a native. Helena wrote Nadyezhda on February 21 that she felt “embittered and somewhat angry” because “my house is full of disorder.” Blaming Minnie, Helena added, “I am bored with her to the utmost possibility.”90 According to the letter, Minnie already had joined the Theosophical Society and now had come to be initiated. As it turned out, Minnie’s visit had an importance that H.P.B. could only vaguely have foreseen: in Bombay, Minnie had in her possession an old-fashioned brooch set with pearls that had been handed down from her grandmother to her mother, and finally to her. About to take passage to London, she presented the pin to Scott as a love token. Since the clasp was broken, he promised to have it repaired; but temporarily low on funds, he pawned it instead. Whether he actually gave H.P.B. the pawn ticket, or whether she acquired it in some other manner is unclear. Nonetheless, she redeemed the brooch, had it repaired by a Bombay jeweler, Hormusji Seevai, and locked it away for safekeeping. In case she should again run into Minnie’s parents, it just might prove useful.

  At Rothney Castle on the evening of the third, there were eleven guests at table, with Madame seated next to Allan Hume. During the early part of the meal, she seemed unusually quiet, so Hume directed his conversation to a woman on his other side. Someone noticed that Helena was absently rubbing her hands over her metal plate warmer and jokingly asked her why. She remarked flippantly that they could all warm their hands and see what good it did them. She meant it as a rebuff, but several of the guests began to imitate her.

  Allan’s wife, Mary Anne, known as Moggy, held up her hands with a laugh. “But I have warmed my hands, what next?”

  As Sinnett recollected the sequence of events, Madame Blavatsky reached out for Moggy’s hands and asked, “Well then, do you wish for anything in particular?” Olcott’s version ran that Helena ran her eyes around the table and queried, “Well, who wants something?” and Moggy chirped, “I do.”

  Then there ensued a torrent of advice urging Moggy to think of some object that Helena might bring to her as an apport, nothing simple now. The conversation continued.

  Moggy said, “If I could really get it, I should like to have an old family jewel that I have not seen for a long time, a brooch set round with pearls.”

  “Have you the image of it clear in your mind?” Helena asked.

  “Yes, perfectly clear; it has just come to me like a flash.”

  Others present reported that Madame began staring fixedly at Moggy, although she actually must have had her eyes glued to the woman for some time prior. Helena, to her horror, had discovered that Moggy drank, but now she saw how this cardinal sin could be turned to her own advantage. It was not unreasonable to assume that by that point in the evening Moggy had consumed her share of brandy and sherry. H.P.B. told her, “It will not be brought into this house but into the garden—I am told by a Brother.”91 There was a rush for wraps and lanterns and everyone except Moggy, who dared not expose herself to the cold night air, dashed into the garden, and began to dig. Finally Patience and a Captain Maitland found a small white package in a nasturtium bed. When unwrapped, it was revealed to contain the brooch.

  Back in the house, Sinnett immediately sat down and composed an account of the phenomenon for the Pioneer. Everyone present read it and added their signatures as eyewitnesses. This time, Helena seemed to have pulled off an unimpeachable miracle. Unfortunately, several weeks later the jeweler Hor-musji Seevai read the Pioneer article and told his side of the story to the Bombay Gazette. But that still lay in the future.

  In triumph, Helena moved through three more weeks of picnics and dinners, and reveled in every moment. “Here the society is mad after me,” she wrote happily to Emma. “The people in the highest position in Government are at my feet,” and she went on to mention “Major Henderson, who has become my greatest friend and who entreats me to accept him as a theosophist. And do you know who Major Henderson is? The supreme chief of all the police and of the political foreign department of India. The most dreaded and the most influential personage here, who can do everything”91

  No more miracles were called for, but from sheer pleasure she “doubled” a yellow diamond of hers and presented the apport to Patience, who on another occasion, found one of her own brooches inside a pillow. Prepared to retire from Simla with her laurels intact, Helena laughed when Sinnett, still dissatisfied that none of her phenomena had been done under test conditions, pestered her for further wonders. Thinking like a newspaperman, he proposed that the Brothers deliver to him in Simla a copy of the London Times on the day of its publication. Helena merely shrugged. Then Sinnett, turning to Olcott for support, took him to his club for a private conversation in which he deplored the whole situation as ridiculous. How, he asked Henry, could the Brothers have selected a person like Madame Blavatsky as their sole representative? The Old Lady was conspicuously boorish, ill mannered, foul-tongued, and seemingly determined to wreck any good work that the Brotherhood wished to accomplish. Olcott listened, with sympathy, but could offer no explanation. However, he could not have missed Sinnett’s implications that the Brothers would have done better to select someone solid, someone more like himself. Possibly Henry passed this along to Helena, although she already was aware of Sinnett’s wish to bypass her. Therefore, when Sinnett worked up the nerve to ask if she might forward for him a letter he was writing to the Brothers, Helena coolly reminded him that they were unapproachable to outsiders; however, she promised to try.

  Toward the end of the first week of October, Sinnett wrote his first letter to an “Unknown Brother,” and soon afterward, without waiting for a reply, dashed off a second. Probably on the evening of October seventeenth, he found on his writing table a letter written in black ink on regular white paper, addressed to:

  Esteemed Brother and Friend,

  Precisely because the test of the London newspaper would close the mouths of the skeptics—it is unthinkable. See it in what light you will— the world is yet in its first stage of disenthralment if not development, hence—unprepared.93<
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  The letter, which continued on both sides of the sheet, patiently explained the Brother’s reasoning: the general populace of the planet was not yet ready to assimilate such a “miracle,” would not even believe it and would surely vent its rage on Sinnett and Madame Blavatsky. “We know something of human nature”; the world’s prejudices had to be conquered step by step, not by airmailing newspapers across the globe. He cut Sinnett down to size by reminding him that “phenomena such as you crave, have ever been reserved as a reward” for devotion and service, and besides, Sinnett and his friends had already witnessed more than most neophyte adepts see in several years. If Sinnett sincerely wished to know more about the Brotherhood, he should publicize H.P.B.’s work in the Pioneer and regard it as his “sacred duty to instruct the public and prepare them for future possibilities by gradually opening their eyes to the truth.” In conclusion, borrowing one of Master Serapis Bey’s favorite admonitions, he advised Alfred to “TRY.”94 The letter appeared to have been hastily written; there were ink smears, misspellings and crossed-out words. Penned in slightly darker ink, the signature, Koot’ Hoomi Lai Singh, was in a different script from the text.

  Two days later Sinnett received a second letter, this time from Koot’ Hoomi Lai Sing, who does not seem to have decided how to spell his own name. Adopting a “get tough” policy, the Brother stonily rejected Sinnett’s pleas to communicate without the use of Madame as an intermediary, and went on to question the Englishman’s motives. Why did Sinnett have so much difficulty accepting the Brothers as “real entities—not fictions of a disordered hallucinated brain?”95 If he was as eager for occult knowledge as he claimed, let him give up his luxurious life for the truth, as had Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott. Finally, addressing himself to Sinnett’s complaints about Helena, Koot Hoomi did his best to proffer man-to-man sympathy. Unquestionably she was “an enfeebled female” housing a raging cyclone. “But, imperfect as may be our visible agent—and often most unsatisfactory and imperfect she is—yet, she is the best available at present, and her phenomena have for about half a century astounded and baffled some of the cleverest minds of the age.”96 Koot Hoomi could always be depended upon to put in a good word for H.P.B.

  Before the Theosophists finally departed on October 21, Sinnett received three additional brief notes, one of which he found in a pillow and the others next to his plate at the dining table. Trivial in content, the notes are chiefly interesting because once again Koot Hoomi seems dubious about the spelling of “Singh,” twice writing “Sing.” Sinnett was now torn between his compulsion to believe and the suspicion that the Old Lady was making a fool of him. If Koot Hoomi truly existed and Madame Blavatsky was really his messenger, he had the biggest news scoop since the advent of Jesus. But if he did not exist, Sinnett would wind up the laughingstock of India. In any case, he did not care what Koot Hoomi said about Madame Blavatsky and still believed the Brothers would have been wise to have selected a better agent.

  After making their descent down the tonga road, Helena and Henry stopped overnight at Laurie’s Hotel in Kalka, then went on to Umballa, where they boarded a train for Amritsar. At this busiest and holiest of Punjabi cities, site of the Sikhs’ Golden Temple, Olcott scheduled two lectures for himself while Helena occupied herself with activities about which he knew nothing. Having established a truce with Swami Dayananda in Meerut, they were welcomed by the local Arya Samajists and given use of a virtually empty bungalow as well as the services of a cook. After six weeks of luxury at Simla, the spartan housekeeping took getting used to, but Helena, uncharacteristically, was uncomplaining.

  The next day, however, the Times of India published an article under the title “One Day with Madame Blavatsky,” which catapulted her into a tremendous rage against Henry and against newspapers in general. At Simla, the day after the cup-and-saucer phenomenon, Henry had written Damodar all about the event. It was a rapturous description typical of Henry’s letters to intimates, unimportant except that, somehow, it had found its way from Damodar’s desk to the office of the Times, who were happy to reprint the full text. How, she demanded of Henry, did the editor come into possession of the letter, which must have been stolen from Damodar? And having got it, what legal right had he to publish it without Olcott’s or Damodar’s consent? More to the point, why had Henry written such a stupid letter in the first place? She ranted about the unfairness and impoliteness of the public who treated her like “a paid juggler,”97 for, she insisted, she was not a professional medium, and had never even received so much as a rupee for her experiments. The only benefit she had ever reaped was abuse, she keened.

  Newspaper mistreatment was nothing new to her, but after the splash at Simla, expecting more respect from the world, she was bitterly disappointed to find it not forthcoming. With a good deal of effort, she finally calmed down enough to concentrate on giving Sinnett unassailable proof of Koot Hoomi’s existence. She now worked out an ingenious scheme whereby the Mahatma would send Sinnett a telegram thanking him for his letter; the hook would be that the telegram was to be dispatched at Jhelum, a hundred thirty-five miles from Amritsar, and dated two hours after receipt of Sinnett’s letter in Amrit-sar. On October 27, after receiving an expected letter from Sinnett to the Mahatma, she telegraphed a confederate previously dispatched to Jhelum with a message in Koot Hoomi’s handwriting, to send it to Sinnett. To her annoyance Sinnett failed to understand what had been done and had to have the timetable explained to him. As the Mahatma told it, H.P.B. had forwarded Sinnett’s letter by mental telepathy at 2:05 p.m. and he had answered at 4. Unless Madame had flown from Amritsar to Jhelum, Koot Hoomi pointed out, “how could she have written for me the dispatch in my own handwriting at Jhelum hardly two hours after your letter was received by her at Amritsar?”98

  The preparation for this feat was taxing to say the least, as was the hiring of a man to impersonate a Mahatma and present Olcott with a rose as they toured the Golden Temple. By the time they reached Lahore on November 3, Helena announced she was not feeling well. Olcott, as usual, spent most of his time hobnobbing with local dignitaries and lecturing, which gave H.P.B. the privacy to compose further Mahatma letters to Sinnett and to Allan Hume, who had been writing to Koot Hoomi. To keep both men interested in her philosophy yet also at arm’s distance, meant treading a fine line. No, the Brotherhood could not send a private tutor to Allahabad for Hume and Sinnett because the laws of the order would not permit it; and no, it was not true that the Brotherhood had left no mark upon the history of the world and was therefore a failure. Sinnett’s questions were often childish, but Hume’s were sharp and positively devastating, yet in formulating replies H.P.B. was obliged to exercise tact, at which she never excelled. “Give to your fellow creatures half the attention you have bestowed on your ‘little birds,’ “ she had Koot Hoomi gently advise Hume, “and you will round off a useful life with a grand and noble work.”99

  Two weeks later she came down with Punjab fever. She did not want a doctor but Olcott insisted, and she was dosed with quinine and digitalis. Once recovered H.P.B. bought a hundred rupees’ worth of shawls and embroidery from a door-to-door peddler, which Olcott thought excessive. Possibly she had not fully recovered her strength because a few days later she suffered a relapse. For the next six weeks they were on the road almost constantly in the Northwest Province: Umballa, and Benares, where the maharajah graciously allowed the Theosophical Society to borrow his family motto: “There is no religion higher than truth,”100 and twice they visited the Sinnetts at Allahabad.

  Helena was happy to be away from Bombay at this particular time because during their absence Emma had been instructed to look for a new house. From Simla, she had made clear to Madame Coulomb exactly what she expected of her: “I beg you to take care of everything in the removal. Choose a good house. Let it be useful.”101 Primarily, she needed a place adaptable for phenomena; lesser factors, such as size and location, did not much interest her. House-hunting and moving were among the disagre
eable chores she left to Emma, who had little else to do anyway.

  Meanwhile Helena had her hands full writing Koot Hoomi’s letters. One surmises she alternated between excitement over her Mahatmic invention and extreme weariness at the demands of the task she had undertaken. There were times when she ran out of ideas and, in a pinch, would grab the nearest book or magazine, sometimes copying an item word for word. Just such an instance occurred in early December at the Sinnetts when she transcribed a passage from a speech made at Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, on August 15, and reported in the Banner of Light. The speaker, Henry A. Kiddle, was unknown to her, but some of his points seemed reasonable, and she copied them into her K. H. letter without thinking twice. About this time, an excruciating pain that had begun to develop in her left wrist was diagnosed as dengue, a type of rheumatic fever, and with lightning speed her arm swelled to the shoulder, despite the ministrations of Sinnett’s physician. By Christmas, after a week of agony, she had recovered and Henry, to celebrate, took her to the biggest store in Allahabad where she went on a buying spree.

  The “Crow’s Nest” was pasted on a rocky slope of Breach Candy in the northwest section of Bombay. Normally the bungalow rented for two hundred rupees a month, but Emma had bargained the owner down to sixty-five because it had a reputation for being haunted. Helena was charmed with the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, the wide verandas, but especially with its sea view and cool breezes. Better yet, the house was located a distance from the center of the city, which meant fewer unannounced visitors at odd hours. She could not have helped but recognize the effort that Emma and Alexis had made in getting the place ready; still, she did not bother to express her gratitude adequately to Emma, who understandably felt used. All day long she worked and cooked, she said, and sometimes was too exhausted to sleep, but Madame never seemed satisfied.