by Marion Meade
Officially Helena took no note of the S.P.R.’s newly-enhanced investigation. However, she wrote Solovyov that, while the world seemed upside down to her, “the battle is beginning and it is for life and death,”122 without mentioning a word about the psychists. With an eye to her public relations, she agreed to give an exclusive interview to the Pall Mall Gazette, in which she would reveal for the first time the true story behind the Coulomb scandal. “The whole story,” she began, “is very simple. Madame Coulomb was a woman whom I had befriended, and whose avarice I had checked.”123 Helena, in the Gazette version, reported she had foreborne Emma’s unpleasant habits out of deference to Colonel Olcott, who believed utterly in her sincerity. The shrine, about which the reporter seemed most curious, was “nothing but a box in which we place our letters to our Masters,”124 but it was far from essential to the Mahatma letters, which were received by persons all over the world. The letters themselves? Forgeries, with the exception of one, written from Suez in March, “and it contains absolutely nothing in which the most suspicious could detect fraud.”125
It was in this interview that H.P.B. first took the position from which she would never deviate, that Emma had mixed genuine passages with forged excerpts describing fraudulent activities, and had either recopied them in H.P.B.’s handwriting or had somehow spliced them together. While her supporters professed to see the logic in this, others came away puzzled at exactly how it had been done. Arthur Liilie wondered, “How could a piece of paper be found with watermarks, etc., corresponding exactly with those of the letter altered, and how could two pieces of paper be spliced together so as to avoid detection?”126 And why had Emma spent years as a low-paid housekeeper at Adyar when she possessed this remarkable talent? The Pall Mall Gazette reporter apparently neglected to press Helena on this point, merely inquiring what effect the alleged revelations were having on the Theosophical Society. She replied with an understated informality that one has to admire: “At first it created some uneasiness among those who did not know the Coulombs and whose faith was weak; as soon, however, as the full details of the so-called revelation reached us we exploded with laughter; the fraud was too silly to deceive anyone...”127 She was returning to India, she declared, to prosecute the Coulombs.
In the last week of October, a few days before her departure, Helena’s attention was drawn to a man who seemed to keep popping up in various Theosophical homes and meetings, never opening his mouth but never taking his eyes off her. She learned his name was Charles W. Leadbeater, which seemed familiar, and that he was a member of the Society as well as an Anglican clergyman. Almost at once, Helena remembered where she had heard his name: months earlier, her medium friend William Eglinton had forwarded to her a letter that Leadbeater had written to Master Koot Hoomi; at the time, embroiled in the daily dispatches from Adyar, she had not gotten around to answering Koot Hoomi’s fan mail. Now she recalled Leadbeater’s earnest wish to become a pupil of K.H.’s and his fervent hope that it would be possible to waive the seven-year Indian probationary period. Could it perhaps be done in Bramshott parish, England, he had asked, where he happened to be employed as a curate? In closing, he had begged the Mahatma’s pardon for requesting shortcuts.
Helena could not know then that Leadbeater would become a power in the Theosophical Society. What she saw was an awe-struck clergyman who impressed her as an ass; nonetheless he might just be a useful ass. What a blow it would be to the Madras missionaries if she railroaded an ordained priest of the Church of England into giving up his religion and his career for the Society. Then too, she felt far from secure about traveling with the Cooper-Oakleys who might not care to cater to her whims. Leadbeater appeared to be a strong, healthy fellow, tiresome but dependable, and could be relied upon to take charge of the most bothersome of traveling details. It was time for Koot Hoomi to catch up on his unanswered correspondence.
Thirty-seven-year-old Charles Webster Leadbeater, “a village curate out on a bust,”128 as Henry Olcott would describe him, had been fascinated by the occult since childhood. Little is known of his early life except that as a boy he accompanied his father, a railway contractor, to Brazil and led a life of hair-raising adventure. According to Leadbeater, his father “was killed by rebels, refusing to trample on the Cross, and he himself endured horrible torture and was tied to a tree at night; he felt arms come around him, his father’s arms, and his bonds were cut and he was carried away by him and a Negro servant, who loved him.”129
After returning to England, Leadbeater entered Oxford, left when the family’s fortune failed, and finally succeeded in taking holy orders in 1878, after which he became a curate of St. Mary’s, Bramshott, Hampshire, where his uncle was rector. It was in his seminary days that his homosexual tendencies first emerged; he learned to masturbate and probably became a practicing homosexual, although it was not until later, at St. Mary’s, that his interest in young boys became obvious.
A tall, large-boned man, Leadbeater is said to have had a peculiar walk and a drawling parsonic voice. “His only unpleasant feature,” an observer commented, “was a pair of very long yellow eye-teeth that invariably brought vampires to mind.”130 His contempt for women was noticeable, as was his charming manner with children, who invariably adored him. He lived at Hartford cottage first with his mother and then, after her death, with the parish’s other curate and a tabby named Peter. Leadbeater played tennis, watched the stars through a twelve-inch telescope, and organized a club for parish boys over ten. As one of the boys, James Matley, would remember, “it was a club in which you promised not to be cruel to any creature”;131 they sang, told stories and Leadbeater provided refreshments in the form of cake, fruit and nuts.
On occasion he liked to travel to London, to take in a show, but the city’s main attraction was its mediums. He was strongly drawn to Spiritualism and seances, and through them, to Theosophy. After reading Alfred Sinnett’s two books, he applied for admission to the Society in 1883. At first Sinnett seemed reluctant to have him and Leadbeater recalled him saying “that would hardly do seeing that I was a clergyman.”132 After that, when Leadbeater made the fifty-mile trip to London every week for meetings, Sinnett issued a standing invitation to dine and spend the night.
When Leadbeater first glimpsed Madame Blavatsky during her surprise entrance, he said nothing about his letter to Koot Hoomi; indeed, he had been too awed to speak at all. Besides, it had never occurred to him that H.P.B. might know the contents of a letter addressed to Tibet. That summer he took James Matley and his brother Frank for a month’s holiday at Ramsgate, then in the fall resumed his regular routines at St. Mary’s. He had not forgotten his letter to Koot Hoomi, but by this time he had stopped looking for a reply.
On the morning of October 31, having come up to London for Madame Blavatsky’s farewell party and stayed overnight at the Sinnetts, he took the 11:35 train from Waterloo Station and arrived at Bramshott about 1 p.m. Koot Hoomi’s answer was waiting for him. Posted October 30 from H.P.B.’s own neighborhood, Kensington, the envelope appeared to have been hastily addressed. The stamp was misplaced and glued on upside down: the Mahatma had started to write England but had crossed out the capital E and wrote below it the word Hants, a postal contraction for Hampshire. Koot Hoomi told Leadbeater that it was not necessary to spend seven years in India, for a chela could pass them anywhere, but it would be worthwhile for him to spend a few months at Adyar. “Our cause needs missionaries, devotees, agents, even martyrs perhaps.”133 With that last phrase, H.P.B. had unerringly hit upon exactly the right words, for Leadbeater had a secret passion for martyrdom. Hurrying to the station, he caught the 3:56 train back to London.
That evening Helena was preparing to attend her final farewell gathering. The next morning she would depart for Liverpool to board the SS Clan Drummond, and she was ready to go. In the midst of her preparations, a delirious Charles Leadbeater rapped at her door. He had just received a letter from Master Koot Hoomi, he told her, but unfortunately had no idea of ho
w to send a reply. Reading the letter, she asked him what he wished to tell Koot Hoomi. That it would be impossible for him to spend three months at Adyar and then return to St. Mary’s, he said, “but that I was perfectly ready to throw up that work altogether and to devote my life absolutely to His Service.”
Madame Blavatsky greeted Leadbeater’s announcement with indifference. She did, however, make a point of not allowing him out of her sight, “even making me accompany her into the bedroom when she went to put on her hat,” he recalled, and standing with him at the curb while he whistled for a hansom cab. During the ride he felt horribly self-conscious, both from the honor of riding with her and also because “I was crushed sideways into a tiny corner of the seat, while her huge bulk weighted down her side of the vehicle, so that the springs were grinding all through the journey.”
Late that night, H.P.B. was seated in an easy chair near the fireplace, rolling a cigarette, when her hand suddenly jerked toward the fire; less than a second later a square of folded paper materialized in her palm. Matter-of-factly she handed it to Leadbeater: “There is your answer.” Koot Hoomi did not bother to beat about the bush:
The sooner you go the better. Do not lose one more day than you can help. Sail on the 5th, if possible. Join Upasika at Alexandria. Let no one know that you are going, and may the blessing of our Lord and my poor blessing shield you from every evil in your new life.
Greeting to you, my new chela.
K.H.
Leadbeater failed to question how the Mahatma, who lived in Tibet, could be familiar with the steamship routes to India. Neither did he hesitate to obey the Master’s troublesome command that he leave England in the next four days.
As she left for Liverpool, Helena delivered her last words to Leadbeater, and they emerged a chilly “See that you do not fail me,” rather than a warm farewell. Koot Hoomi’s new chela spent the day “bustling around to steamer offices trying to obtain a passage for myself,”134 but he discovered that the November fifth boat K.H. had recommended was already filled up. More disconcertingly, he learned that the only vessel sailing to Alexandria that arrived by the fifth of November was the SS Erymanthe, embarking from Marseilles the night of the fourth.
For the next four days, Leadbeater rushed madly around packing his telescope and books and buying tropical clothing. On the evening of November 3, he put on a promised fireworks display for his church before quietly stealing away, having not been to bed for four days and also having failed to notify his superiors that he was leaving his position. Only to his boys did he make a whispered farewell before boarding the train to Marseilles.
A breathless Leadbeater finally caught up with Madame Blavatsky at Port Said, having lost five days due to a cholera quarantine at Alexandria. When he arrived at the hotel, he found her sitting on the veranda with Isabel Cooper-Oakley. “Well, Leadbeater,” she offered quietly, “so you have really come in spite of all difficulties.” When he answered that of course he had because he always kept his promises, she gruffly remarked, “Good for you,”135 and immediately turned her attention back to Isabel.
As the Cooper-Oakleys were already beginning to discover, traveling with H.P.B. was a unique experience, and those two weeks aboard the Clan Drummond had been enough to deflate anybody. With customary irascibility, H.P.B. had declared the steamer to be a rolling washtub, the steward “an infamy,”136 and the galley hands part of a conspiracy to starve her. Considering .that she weighed-in at two hundred forty-five pounds, such a conspiracy could only work in her best interests.
The party that gathered at Port Said on November 17 expected to spend a quiet few days until they boarded a steamer for Ceylon. Some years earlier the town had a well-deserved reputation for international crime, and travelers walked its streets after dark at their own risk. Now that gendarmes patrolled regularly, there were few serious disturbances lying in wait for tourists. Neither the Cooper-Oakleys nor Leadbeater had ever visited the Middle East, and all were anxious to tour the Arab bazaars and dine on the rock fish and salmon for which Port Said was famous. Most of all Leadbeater wanted a good night’s sleep in a proper bed; he engaged a room, but would not have long to use it, for “Madame Blavatsky had one of those sudden flashes of inspiration which so frequently came to her from the inner side of things.”137 Instead of waiting for the Ceylon steamer, they were to leave immediately for Cairo. It was not her idea, indeed she felt somewhat annoyed about it, but the Masters had ordered her there to obtain information about the Coulombs. This was flagrant nonsense; she had been planning to stop at Cairo all along, had even pulled a few strings to get letters of introduction to the Egyptian prime minister, Nubar Pasha, and to the Russian consul. For inexplicable reasons, she chose not to share this information with her traveling companions.
They must leave at once, she declared, that very evening, in fact. As there was no railroad between Port Said and Cairo, they would be forced to take a tugboat down the Suez Canal as far as Ismailia, where then they would transfer to a train bound for the capital. The khedive’s packet-boat, departing Port Said at midnight each evening and arriving at Ismailia in early morning, was the dirtiest and least convenient craft to which Leadbeater had ever been exposed. A ten-foot-square hutch in the stern passed for a cabin, inside of which was a windowless cupboard labeled ladies room. Actually, it was hardly a room at all, since, once the door was closed, it was totally dark. H.P.B. requisitioned the “ladies room” for herself and shut the door; a grumbling Alfred Cooper-Oakley, who had not yet adjusted to the sudden change in plans, threw himself down on a wooden bench and fell asleep. When Isabel and Charles noticed “the army of enormous cockroaches which was already in full possession of both cabins” and which instantly swarmed over the sleeping Alfred, they promptly retreated outside to the deck. Looking back on that night, Leadbeater recalled that Mrs. Cooper-Oakley, “who was a particularly fastidious person in ordinary life, was somewhat depressed,” but he did his best to comfort her with glowing pictures of the beauty awaiting them at Adyar.
Suddenly the night stillness was shattered by “pitiable cries from Madame Blavatsky in her cupboard. Mrs. Oakley at once dashed in bravely, facing the insect plague with only a momentary shudder,” and as Leadbeater put it delicately, found Madame “vehemently demanding conveniences which on that squalid little tug-boat simply did not exist.” Fortunately the captain agreed to stop at the next village so that Madame could find a toilet, but it turned out that there was no gangway or wharf, only a plank about a foot wide. Oakley and Leadbeater carried Helena down the plank and afterward back up again, an experience that Leadbeater described as “nervous work” because “Madame Blavatsky’s language on that occasion was more conspicuous for strength than suavity.” Finally, with H.P.B. stowed in her cubbyhole once more, the tug continued on its way.
Next morning, after stopping for breakfast at a hotel, they moved on to Cairo by rail. By now, nerves were beginning to fray, and the travelers sat in the four corners of the compartment glowering at one another. H.P.B. kept up a steady stream of insults about enfeebled European occultists who fell apart at the first bit of inconvenience. Obviously she wanted to provoke a reaction but nobody responded; Alfred merely stared at her with the resigned expression of an early Christian martyr while Isabel, “with a face of ever-increasing horror,” wept profusely. Finally Helena brought out a book and began to read, no easy task owing to the clouds of desert dust pouring through the open window and coating the pages. When Alfred made a motion as if to close the window, Helena pinned him to his seat with a scornful look.
“You don’t mind a little dust, do you?” she barked.
He shrank back against the seat like a snail retreating into its shell.
Leadbeater found the dust “rather trying, but after that one remark we thought it best to suffer in silence.” For the rest of the journey he watched with fascinated horror as Isabel’s feather boa slowly turned into “a solid rope of sand, the feathers being indistinguishable.”138
A
t Cairo, Alfred and Charles saw the mounds of luggage safely piled into a carriage and set off for Shepheard’s, the great hotel at which English visitors invariably stopped; Helena herself had stayed there in 1851 on her previous visit to Cairo. In the lobby, however, thirty or forty other Britons were milling about trying to get accommodations. “Our luggage,” wrote Leadbeater, “of which we had a considerable amount, had been piled upon the floor in the middle of the hall; and Madame Blavatsky sat upon it, while Mr. Oakley was trying to fight his way through the crowd to the clerk’s desk in order to engage rooms for us.” But the minute Helena saw him fighting his way back, she sprang up and shouted to him that they could not stay at Shepheard’s after all, but were to move over to the Hotel d’Orient, once owned by Alexis Coulomb’s family. “Poor Mr. Oakley had to go back and countermand the rooms which he had engaged,”139 Leadbeater wrote, and one can imagine that by this time Oakley was wishing he had never laid eyes on Madame.
During her ten days in Cairo, H.P.B. enjoyed herself enormously, playing to the hilt the role of the visiting empress. The Hotel d’Orient on Ezbekieh Square, if not so fashionable as Shepheard’s, proved more than comfortable, and she had a pleasant room overlooking the garden. To her delight, the Russian consul, M. Hitrovo, sent her a bouquet of flowers every morning and treated her as a true descendant of the Dolgorukov princes. “You cannot imagine,” she raved to Vera, “how much was made of me. As soon as Hitrovo learned that I had arrived, he invited us to his house and immediately began all sorts of dinners, lunches, picnics, till the sky was very hot.” For several pages she went on name-dropping and gossiping in the inimitable style she employed for letters to her family: the prime minister’s wife was “a real grand dame” the viceroy’s wife “positively a beauty, a most charming face, but it is a pity she is too stout.”140