by Marion Meade
On September 15, Helena received Damodar’s “explosion” cable and within days the European papers were full of dispatches from Calcutta and Madras, announcing the publication of Madame Blavatsky’s compromising letters to her confederate Emma Coulomb. The full text of the Patterson article would not arrive for several weeks but the summaries gave an excellent idea of its contents. The Theosophists at Elberfeld reacted with predictable consternation despite H.P.B.’s vehement protestations that she had never written two lines to Emma; the rest of the group went to pieces, frantically cabling Alfred Sinnett, then in Switzerland, to rush to Elberfeld.
Seated in an arm chair, Helena smoked even more than usual as she watched Olcott, Sinnett and the others trying to decide on the best course of action. Slowly it began to dawn on her that everyone must assume she had written the letters since no one had bothered to offer her sympathy. Olcott could only obsess on the wretched missionaries whom he began calling fools and swine. He hoped they did not “fancy they could break me and my work down with such balderdash!”98 (Koot Hoomi commented, “The situation is furiously serious. O. is a blockhead, but there is no one else.”99) When Helena volunteered her resignation from the Society, “they all clutched at the idea with such delight”100 that it disgusted her. Did none of them have any consideration for her feelings?
As in earlier traumas, Helena’s instinct was to run, but this time her anguish was worse than ever: she had counted on Olcott to protect and baby her only to find that his sole concern was his own reputation. In despair she wrote Solovyov, whom she believed a real friend: “I will go to China, to Tibet, to the devil, if I must, where nobody will find me, where nobody will see me or know where I am; I will be dead to everyone but two or three devoted friends like you.”101 The notion of being believed dead seemed to please her. In a year or two, when people had forgotten all about Emma Coulomb’s forged letters, she could suddenly reappear to great acclaim. But where to sojourn? She wrote to Solovyov that the Masters had not yet decided that question. All she could tell him was that it was “essential for my plans to vanish without a trace for a time.”
Her emotions flipflopped from self-pity to shame and back again before she realized that it would be impossible to run anywhere; she could not even walk unassisted. In any case, she wrote pathetically to Solovyov, “I have no money.”102
Abruptly the Theosophical house party at Elberfeld broke up and everybody scattered. Instead of escorting H.P.B. to England, Olcott sped off alone, announcing he planned to take the next steamer to India. Mohini went to Paris. Helena stayed on a few days longer before straggling to London on October 5 with Laura Holloway and the Gebhards’ son Rudolf. She next wrote to Solovyov from 9 Victoria Road, Kensington, but did not explain in whose home she was staying or why she had not returned to Francesca Arundale’s house. “This is my new address, for a fortnight, not longer.” She spoke of “they” deciding to send her to Egypt and then to Ceylon, “nearer home, but not home.”103 In fact, “they” did not know what to do with her. Olcott said flatly that he could not afford to keep her in Europe but neither could he have her at Adyar until the scandal had quieted down. She did not know whether to feel angry or pleased by the authoritarian pose he had assumed: “Oh, this is nonsense,” he blustered, “I will go and put it all right.” Just how he would proceed to put it right remained unclear to her for as she told Solovyov, everyone “thought and thought, but thought out nothing.”104
As she began to feel more and more like a pariah, Helena’s physical condition naturally worsened. The paralysis she was experiencing in all parts of her body, especially the shoulder, she called rheumatism; but she believed that if the pain reached her heart it would kill her. It is a matter of speculation whether H.P.B.’s chronic ill health was psychosomatic, or due entirely to her kidney disorder, or partially pretended. One can only suppose that, even though she sometimes used illness as a cover for her phenomena, her body was now beginning to deteriorate from an admixture of Bright’s disease, hysterical anxiety and obesity.
Some of Henry’s bluster must have rubbed off on her because she wrote a scrappy letter to Light (which they did not print) announcing her resignation from the Theosophical Society and stating that “no such correspondence between myself and the wicked treacherous woman just expelled from the Society, ever took place.” If all the fiends of the netherworld allied themselves against her, it was her karma. She had thrown before an unappreciative world the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven and now had “to bear my penalty.”105
But at this point she seems to have been mainly concerned with reassuring her family and friends that they needn’t be ashamed on her behalf. To her sister:
There are more than a thousand people who have arisen in my defence. Not letters alone, but telegrams costing thousands of rupees have been sent to the Times of London... with the exception of two or three government papers in India, everyone is on my side.106
To Vsevolod Solovyov:
It is war to the death with the missionaries. They or we! 220 students of Christian College, all Hindus, have refused to attend the courses and have left the college, after this dirty plot of the missionaries and the letters they have printed as mine....107
The missionaries, she kept insisting, had given Emma ten thousand rupees to destroy the Society; she had also heard of them posting thousands of handbills on street corners to announce “The Fall of Madame Blavatsky.” This was completely untrue but the idea gave her courage and she told herself “I am not fallen yet, and please God I will let them see it. My ‘fall’ shall be a triumph yet, if I do not die.”108
Helena did not lack defenders in India, and one of the most vocal, surprisingly enough, was Allan Hume. In spite of his own suspicions of H.P.B.’s fraudulence, he could not believe, he wrote the Calcutta Statesman, that she had written the letters in the Christian College Magazine:
Madame Blavatsky is no fool; on the contrary, as all who know her, be they friends or foes, will admit, she is an exceptionally clever and far-sighted woman, with a remarkably keen perception of character. Would such a woman ever give a person like Madame Coulomb the entire power over her future?... Believe me, Madame Blavatsky is far too shrewd a woman to have ever written to anyone, anything that could convict her of fraud.109
It was a backhanded compliment to be sure, but a telling point in Helena’s favor, one that she herself could later make use of.
Of course it had been reckless of her to write so openly to Emma, but everyone occasionally does something self-incriminating, never supposing that the evidence will be kept as a weapon for future use. What Hume and others failed to understand was that Emma had not only been Helena’s confederate, she had also been one of the few people in whom she could confide. With Emma, Madame could let slip the mask she had worn all day, every day, for nearly ten years; she could be herself, could boast a little about her success. Since childhood she had recognized her power over people and turned that power into a test of the limits of human credulity. Vsevolod Solovyov would one day speculate that the secret of Helena’s success lay in the extraordinary cynicism that she ordinarily concealed with great skill: once he remembered her telling him that the simpler and the sillier the phenomenon, the more likely it was to succeed.
“If you only knew,” she remarked to him, “what lions and eagles in every part of the world have turned into asses at my whistle, and have obediently wagged their long ears in time as I piped the tune.”110
It may be suggested that Solovyov, who would come to despise her as a “thief of souls,”111 invented those words, but they sound amazingly like the sentiments Madame expressed in letters to Prince Dondoukoff-Korsakoff.
On rare occasions H.P.B. could be highly impulsive and indiscreet; even though she made a fetish of refusing credit for her phenomena, her philosophy and her Mahatma letters, she was, after all, human. What pleasure was there in fooling the world if nobody knew about it? Perhaps Madame Blavatsky’s single fatal flaw was her need to be acknow
ledged as her true self—fat little Lelinka von Hahn who was too crazy to ever amount to much, whose mother’s dying words had been relief that she would not be around to see what became of her. Only to Emma Coulomb did Helena reveal the child within.
If Allan Hume believed H.P.B. too shrewd to leave herself open to blackmail, the Theosophists in India certainly could not give credence to the theory that Madame had dispensed bogus letters through a trick cabinet. During the autumn of 1884, the three Europeans still at Adyar, Franz Hartmann, William Brown, and William Judge, remained staunchly loyal to Madame, although it appears some doubts must have existed. After the Coulombs’ departure, Damodar had taken possession of the keys to the Occult Room as well as to Helena’s bedroom, and he refused to relinquish them to anyone, including Hartmann. But then William Judge had come, and then the article in the Christian College Magazine, by which time both Judge and Hartmann had ganged up on Damodar and demanded an inspection of the shrine. Since he knew what they would find, it is curious that Damodar allowed himself to be talked out of the keys.
Whatever the reasons, about midday on September 20, Hartmann, Judge, and Ananda Charloo, a native Theosophist, entered the room. Having removed the shrine from the wall and set it on the floor, Ananda boldly began to bang on its back remarking, “You see, the back is quite solid,”112 when a spring snapped free and sent a panel flying upward. There is no record of the men’s faces at that moment. When they went on to examine the wall behind the shrine, they found that an aperture had definitely existed, but had recently been plastered over.
After a general period of stunned silence, suggestions for coping with this unexpected crisis were tendered. Hartmann saw no reason why the discoveries must serve to discredit Madame Blavatsky; obviously, the removable panels and the hole had been made by Alexis after H.P.B.’s departure. Nevertheless, it was equally plain that their discoveries, were they made public, would precipitate grave misunderstandings. Judge, although he detested Hartmann from the beginning, was forced to agree with this line of reasoning. So far as he was concerned, the shrine had been sufficiently desecrated by Coulomb to be of no further use, and he suggested destroying it.
That very afternoon, the cabinet was moved to Damodar’s room; the following evening Judge and Hartmann hauled it to a deserted corner of the estate and hacked it to pieces with an ax; and over the course of the following week, they burned the fragments piece by piece. Hartmann, apparently a souvenir collector, slipped two chunks of cedar into his pocket and hid them in his room in a brown envelope. When visitors to Adyar inquired about the shrine, they were told that it had most probably been stolen by the missionaries or the Coulombs.
Sometime during the month of October, William Judge abruptly left Adyar, sailing first to Liverpool and then to New York, where he landed on November 26. According to his biographer, Sven Eek, there is no clue as to why he left before Olcott and H.P.B. returned; in the bibliographic sketch of Judge in volume one of H.P.B.’s Collected Writings, his precipitous departure is again presented as a mystery. Actually, the reason for Judge’s hasty retreat could not be clearer. In order to serve Madame’s Mahatmas, he had given up his wife, his career, indeed his whole life, but now the Theosophical Society seemed to be crumbling around him. The moment of truth had come with the dissolution of the shrine, but his concern lay more with saving the situation than with avenging his shattered life. Blinded by the light of reality, he overreacted by burning the shrine and fleeing, in search of some solitude, where he could find his bearings and figure out how to pick up the pieces of his previous existence. As Henry Olcott later would tell Francesca Arundale, Franz Hartmann “had confessed that he dropped upon Judge’s head a bogus Mahatma letter ordering him back to America,”113 but the letter could not have influenced Judge’s decision to leave, since now he realized exactly how it was produced.
In the end, Judge decided to keep quiet about Helena’s frauds, choosing instead to use his knowledge to carve out a Theosophic kingdom in the United States. Never would he even imply that the Mahatmas were no more real than Santa Claus. Franz Hartmann, on the other hand, while continuing to insist upon the reality of the Masters, conceded that Madame occasionally “helped the spirits”114 by performing sleights of hand. Still, “I would not criticize her too severely for it,” he advises in his autobiography, “because her only purpose was to induce people to study the higher laws of life....” He regarded her phenomena as “sweets, with which one coaxes the children to come to school and learn.”115
IV
Homeward Bound
It was Helena’s “karma,” as she would have called it, to win new converts at times when she herself craved anonymity. Earlier that summer in the drawing rooms of Theosophic London, she had been introduced to newlyweds Isabel and Alfred Cooper-Oakley. Recent additions to the Society, they regarded Theosophy as a revelation and Madame Blavatsky as its prophet. Thirty-year-old Isabel had been born at Amritsar, the daughter of Henry Cooper, commissioner of Lahore and a strong advocate of education for women. At the age of twenty-three, she had suffered a severe accident that prevented her from walking for two years, during which time she investigated Spiritualism and women’s suffrage and read Isis Unveiled. Entering Girton when she was twenty-eight, she met her future husband, Alfred J. Oakley, as well as his friend Archibald Keightley, at Cambridge and the three of them joined the Theosophical Society when Olcott had first arrived in London. While Alfred apparently had no objection to the unusual step of amalgamating his name with Isabel’s, they were already experiencing marital problems.
When Helena reappeared in London in the fall, Isabel and Alfred were quick to offer both sympathy and their house in Kensington. Although grateful for the hospitality, Helena found Isabel’s somewhat masculine face unattractive and her dressing style—for instance, a silk polka-dot dress adorned with a gold swastika, a cameo brooch and a feather boa flung over one shoulder— excessive. “Alf,” who attracted Madame even less, was a chronically gloomy insomniac, addicted to sleeping remedies, who emitted exclusively gray vibrations. H.P.B. thought of him as “a man whose soul is filled with the scum falling from other people’s wicked souls, with the puss [sic] exuding from other people’s wounds.”116 Nevertheless she resolved to ignore the couple’s defects for reasons of expediency. Less than a week after H.P.B. had arrived in Kensington, the Cooper-Oakleys suddenly became her staunch defenders, even disciples, and vowed they were ready to set out for India. “They have even sold their house,” Helena wrote Solovyov, “and are going with me either to conquer the foe together or to die.... Think what devotion! You see they have broken up their whole career.”117 Helena had always appreciated, if not respected, those people who broke up their lives for her sake.
“Things are getting dark and hazy,”118 she warned Alfred Sinnett, but, in actuality, she was beginning to see the light for the first time in weeks. With the Cooper-Oakleys at her side, she no longer had to worry about making the long sea voyage alone, so she decided to stop in Cairo and do a little detective work on the Coulombs. Since Emma had seen fit to broadcast her secrets to the world, she would see what skeletons were rattling around the Coulomb closet. Why, she wondered, had they left Egypt so suddenly? If Alexis’s father had left his children a respectable fortune as well as a prosperous business, the Hotel d’Orient, why had his son become a penniless bum? H.P.B. determined to discover the reason and then to “show up these rascals.”119
Having rallied her strength, H.P.B. re-examined her most immediate enemies, namely Alfred Sinnett, who had dissociated himself from Koot Hoomi’s recent correspondence on the grounds of triteness. Annoyed beyond words, H.P.B. decided that the Master would have to cease corresponding with Sinnett, and it fell to K.H. himself gently to announce the cessation of their relationship. The reason given was that H.P.B. no longer had the psychic stamina to transmit letters. Sinnett responded by calling the letter absurd and claiming that H.P.B. had concocted it; this letter provoked another letter from Master Morya, assur
ing Alfred that while Koot Hoomi could no longer use H.P.B. as a channel, it might in time be possible to find another transmitter. Helena, totally disgusted with Alfred, had to admit she much preferred Olcott who generally “behaved like an ass, utterly devoid of tact,”120 but who at least possessed a few redeeming qualities, chiefly obedience and humility.
During the weeks in London, while making arrangements for her steamer passage, Helena received a piece of news that displeased her intensely: the Society for Psychical Research had taken oral testimony from the Theosophists and was writing a mildly favorable report, even though some of its members had no great faith in Madame’s miracles. However, wrote Frank Podmore, once her letters had appeared in the Christian College Magazine, “it seemed desirable to us that a fuller investigation should be made on the spot”;121 if the letters were genuine, the Theosophists must be viewed in an entirely different light. As the S.P.R. had no funds to undertake a large-scale inquiry, one of its wealthy founders, Henry Sidgwick, offered to underwrite personally the expense of sending an investigator to India.