by Marion Meade
In the first place, from everything known about the professional relationships between women and their physicians in the 1880s, it seems unlikely that H.P.B. ever had a gynecological examination, certainly not a proper one. In that prudish period women customarily described their symptoms and then were escorted to the bedroom where a superficial examination took place. Even in cases where a diagnosis was urgently needed, there were widespread objections to being examined by male physicians.
Secondly, and more significant, the term anteflexio uteri means only that the uterus is tipped forward, a condition common to about twenty-five percent of all women; and it does not prevent a woman from bearing children. Finally,in a fifty-four-year-old, post-menopausal woman, the uterus that once could accommodate a fetus has already begun shrinking to the size of a womb that has never experienced pregnancy. Therefore, given Helena’s age at the time of Dr. Oppenheim’s examination, it would have been virtually impossible to determine whether or not she had ever been pregnant.72 Nevertheless, to this day Helena’s supporters continue to cite the Oppenheim certificate as unassailable evidence that she had never consummated the sexual act nor borne an illegitimate child.
Although Helena proclaimed Dr. Oppenheim’s proof as “a great triumph,”73 and spoke about her supposedly deformed uterus in detail to Sinnett and Olcott and other trusted friends, there were times when she thought the whole thing shameful. In her elder years she had grown particularly prudish, even for a Victorian, and the necessity of mentioning unmentionable organs distressed her. Mailing the certificate to Sinnett, she enclosed a pathetic note saying that “I had always had a dim conception that ‘uterus’ was the same thing as ‘bladder,’“ and signing herself, “Yours dishonoured in my old age.”74
In November a tinge of unexpected tragedy entered her life when she learned that her brother Leonid had died at the age of forty-five. They had never been close, and she could not truly mourn for him, but the news of his passing saddened and depressed her. Writing to Mary Gebhard, she did not mention Leonid, but asked how one could help being lonely with only Babaji and Louise for company. Most probably she was hinting that she would appreciate a visit from Mary, since their residences were less than a day apart, but Madame Gebhard could not spare time from her family. However, she did show the letter to her friend and house guest Countess Constance Wachtmeister and suggest that she might visit H.P.B. for a few weeks. “She needs sympathy,” Mary told the countess, “and you can cheer her up.”75
The countess was stopping at Elberfeld on her way to Rome, where she planned to join friends for the winter. However, thinking over Mary’s suggestion, she decided her friends could wait a few weeks while she paid a sympathy call on a needy, sick woman, and wrote to Wiirzburg indicating her wish to visit H.P.B., if it met with her approval. To the countess’s consternation, it did not. Madame was sorry, but she had no room for the countess and, besides, was so preoccupied with her Secret Doctrine that she had no time to entertain; still, she hoped they might meet on the countess’s return from Italy.
This was not Constance’s first contact with Helena. In the spring of 1884, they had been introduced at one of Alfred Sinnett’s receptions, and she had been arrested by Madame’s eyes “which seemed to penetrate and unveil the secrets of the heart.” She had been repulsed by the coterie of sycophants sitting at H.P.B.’s feet and hanging on every word she said, so she had not joined the group, who were gazing up at Madame “with an expression of homage and adoration.”76 A few weeks later, she had been astonished to receive a letter from H.P.B., inviting her to Paris for a private talk. Even though she was on her way back to Sweden at the time, Constance was sufficiently curious to make the detour to Paris.
Catching up with H.P.B. at Enghien, where she was visiting the Count and Countess d’Adhemar, she sent in her card only to be told that Madame was busy and could not see her. “I replied that I was perfectly willing to wait,” Wachtmeister recalled, “because having come from England at Madame Blavatsky’s behest, I declined to go away until my errand was accomplished.”77 Apparently that was the correct answer, because she was immediately ushered into a crowded salon and led up to the main celebrity, Madame Blavatsky, who paid her scarcely any attention.
For several days Constance trailed after H.P.B., both at Enghien and then in Paris, waiting to learn the reason for Madame’s summons, but the information was not forthcoming. When at last she informed Madame that she was leaving, Helena condescended to take her aside. Within two years, she said, Constance would be devoting her life wholly to Theosophy. That was impossible, the countess replied, for she had a son and family ties in Sweden.
H.P.B. smiled and said, “Master says so, and therefore I know it to be true.”78
Now, at Elberfeld, Constance read her letter of rejection to Mary Gebhard, who found it incomprehensible. Putting Helena from her mind, she prepared to set out for Italy. It was at the last moment, when her luggage was piled at the door and a cab waiting, that a telegram from H.P.B. arrived: “Come to Wurzburg at once, wanted immediately—Blavatsky.” Continuing to the station, Constance exchanged her Rome ticket “and was soon travelling onwards to work out my karma.”79
Constance Georgina Louise Wachtmeister, nee de Bourbel de Montjuncon, was the daughter of the Marquis de Bourbel, a French diplomat, and Constance Buckley, an Englishwoman. Born in Florence in 1838 and orphaned while a child, she was raised by an aunt in England and when she was twenty-five made an excellent marriage with her cousin, Count Karl Wachtmeister, then Swedish and Norwegian Minister to the Court of St. James. After three years in England, the count was assigned to the Danish court at Copenhagen and then brought home to be Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. When Constance was thirty-three, her husband died and left her a sizable estate and a six-year-old son to raise. As befitted a woman of independent means, she kept a stately home in Sweden, spent her winters in Italy, and traveled in England, France and Germany as the mood struck her. Apparently disinclined to remarry, she devoted herself to her son and to the fashionable hobby of mysticism, becoming first a Spiritualist and finally a Theosophist. One observer described her as “a lovely woman of blonde-cendrte hair and ‘Lost Lenore’ expression,” who always reminded him of “Bulwer’s violet-velvet heroines.”80 No doubt her ruffled gowns and beribboned hats helped contribute to this misimpression, for, in reality, Constance was far from helpless.
Arriving at Wurzburg in December, 1885, remembering the Paris summons, when she had cooled her heels waiting for Madame to notice her, she half expected to be back on the train for Rome within hours. At forty-seven she was, as H.P.B. called her, “no woman of gush or impulse.”81 Worse yet, she did not in the least resemble a prospective invalid’s attendant, a fact of which H.P.B. was well aware. Her curt note to Constance at Elberfeld had simply been the reflection of her understandable fear that the Countess would not want to put up with a sick person in a cramped apartment. Confessing her embarrassment, she apologized to Constance for having “only one bedroom here and I thought you might be a fine lady and not care to share it with me.”82 But when the Master had assured her that Countess Wachtmeister would not mind, she had sent the telegram and spent the day fixing up the bedroom. She had bought a large screen to divide the room and hoped it would not be too uncomfortable.
Constance replied graciously that whatever the surroundings to which she had been accustomed, she would willingly relinquish them for the pleasure of Madame’s company. Then they sat down in the dining room to take tea.
The next day Constance “began to realize what the course of H.P.B.’s life was, and what mine was likely to be while I stayed with her.”83 If the rhythm of Helena’s daily routine was undeniably dull, Constance must have felt that it would be endurable for a few weeks until she could politely make her departure for sunny Italy. It would be many weeks, perhaps months, before she realized she had been entrapped.
The two women’s day soon fell into an unvarying pattern. Louise wakened them at six o’clo
ck with coffee, after which Madame rose and dressed, and by seven was seated at her desk in the study. After a pause for breakfast at eight, H.P.B. returned to her desk and began the day’s work in earnest. At one o’clock Constance would stand outside Madame’s door and ring a small bell to announce dinner. Sometimes H.P.B. came at once, but at other times her door would remain closed all afternoon until finally Louise would come crying to the countess, desperate over Madame’s dinner, which was getting cold, burnt, or dried up. When Helena eventually emerged, a fresh dinner would have to be cooked, or Louise would be sent to Rugmer’s Hotel for a hot meal. At seven, the writing was put aside for the day and tea would be served. H.P.B. would lay out her cards for a game of patience to relax her mind, while the countess read aloud from newspapers, books and magazines. Once a week Dr. Oppenheim came by to inquire after H.P.B.’s health and usually stayed to gossip for an hour; occasionally the landlord would stop in. At 9 p.m. Helena got into bed with her Russian newspapers and read until midnight.
If Constance found the days monotonous she could say the same of the nights. Beginning at ten each evening, the raps would begin, continuing at intervals of ten minutes until six the following morning. When Constance asked for an explanation, Madame said that it was only the psychic telegraph that linked her to the Masters in Tibet, who watched over her body while she slept. Even though a screen divided the bedroom, there was no way to shut out the sound, or the lamp that Helena kept burning. Understandably, Constance had difficulty sleeping and one night, when the clock had struck one and the light still burned, she tiptoed around the screen, found Madame asleep, and extinguished the lamp. Back in bed, she was annoyed to see the room brightly illuminated as before. Three times she got up to turn off the light; three times if flamed up again, until finally she could take no more and woke H.P.B. by yelling her name. Then came an agonized gasp, “Oh, my heart! my heart! Countess, you have nearly killed me.” Constance flew across the floor.
“I was with Master,” H.P.B. whispered. “Why did you call me back?”84 It was dangerous to shout at her when her astral form was absent from her physical body, she explained.
Thoroughly frightened, Constance gave her a dose of digitalis and promised she would never do it again.
Obviously possessed of a genuinely gentle nature, the countess quickly accustomed herself to the nightly sound-and-light shows, growing used even to a defective cuckoo clock that emitted strange sighs and groans. What she could not bear was being boxed in twenty-four hours a day. Eventually, she made it a daily practice to escape for a half-hour’s walk, look in shop windows, and breathe the fresh air unavailable in the apartment where the windows were never opened and the stove roared full blast day and night. Only three times during her months at Wiirzburg, did Constance recall Helena leaving the apartment to go for a drive, and that was at Constance’s insistence. Helena admitted that she enjoyed the outings but also thought them an outrageous waste of time.
By early December the two women had settled into tedious tranquillity. Babaji had been sent to Elberfeld, probably at Constance’s suggestion, because his bright, beady eyes made her uncomfortable. H.P.B., deep into her writing, worked with iron-willed concentration; Constance shielded her from annoyances and made herself useful by making fair copies of the completed pages. What she described as a “quiet studious life”85 continued until New Year’s Eve when a Society member, Professor Sellin, brought Helena a copy of the Society for Psychical Research’s final report on Theosophy. After Sellin left, she crumpled over her desk and when Constance came in, she attacked her savagely. “Why don’t you leave me?” she snarled. “Go before you are defiled by my shame,”86
“You may imagine,” Constance wrote in agitation to Sinnett the next morning, “what a lively time we had of it. Palpitations of the heart, digitalis, etc.”87 First Helena began to write letters of protest, then she announced that she was leaving for London to annihilate the S.P.R. in person. Not until evening did Constance manage to pacify her. Writing her second letter to Sinnett that day, the countess acknowledged her weariness and summed up the newest traumas by saying, “We have had a terrible day.”
H.P.B.’s outrage was to be expected, but in all honesty she had to admit there was nothing surprising about Hodgson’s report. His general conclusions had been known to her since March, when he had personally explained them at Adyar and, in June, they had been read aloud in London at a meeting of the S.P.R. What did astound her was that he had not abandoned his theory that she was a Russian spy. “I should consider this Report incomplete,” he wrote, “unless I suggest what I myself believe to be an adequate explanation of her ten years’ toil on behalf of the Theosophical Society.” What could have induced her to labor over a fantastic imposture? Was it egotism? Such a supposition he dismissed as “quite untenable.” Was she a plain fraud? “She is, indeed, a rare psychological study, almost as rare as a ‘Mahatma!’ “ Religious mania then? “Even this hypothesis I was unable to adopt.” Then what was her motive for a career of deception? “Her real object has been the furtherance of Russian interests... I suggest it here only as a supposition which appears to best cover the known incidents of her career during the past 13 or 14 years.”88
Helena was quick to understand that the blatant absurdity of the spying charge weakened Hodgson’s case. He had tripped himself up a second time when he used the testimony of the handwriting expert to prove she forged the Mahatma letters. “He calls me a forger!” she exclaimed in a letter to Olcott. “Funny and stupid. If I invented the two Masters, then they do not exist, and if they do not exist, how could I forge their handwritings which did not equally exist before I invented them?”89 Both the spy and forgery charges were so silly that Helena could, and would, pounce on them as a pretext for declaring the rest of the S.P.R. Report equally inaccurate. Nevertheless, it must have been mortifying to read the conclusions that the S.P.R.’s committee had attached to Hodgson’s work:
For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.90
And it was similarly disconcerting to see that Hodgson had let Henry Olcott off scot-free. The “Theosophical twins” no longer stood or fell together; she had toppled, but Henry remained upright. He was a fool in Hodgson’s opinion, but an honest fool. How bitterly she must have smiled as she wrote Henry, “Now you see you are SAVED not dishonoured by my referring to you as a ‘psychological baby’ and saying I am smarter than you to H. Chintamon. This said in fun has saved you.” And she added, “Your Karma, dear.”91
Needless to say, work on The Secret Doctrine ground to a halt. The S.P.R. Report had done both H.P.B. and the Society untold damage, as evidenced by the growing number of resignations, and the countess recalled that “every post only increased her anger and despair.”92 Professor Sellin called the Society “a humbug”;93 Hubbe-Schleiden wanted either to resign or to drop the word Theosophical from the German branch. Sinnett, while shaken, “cannot leave, too far deep in it,”94 H.P.B. assured Olcott. She wrote a letter of explanation to the London Times, who did not have the courtesy to publish it, and she scratched out private explanations to friends, encouraging them to write protests to the papers.
Sometimes Constance did not know where she would find the physical strength to bear up under Madame’s problems. On the fourth of January, she thought H.P.B. would have an apoplectic fit after Professor Sellin brutally accused her of plagiarizing Isis Unveiled from other books. “A violent attack of diarrhea saved her,” Constance wrote Sinnett, “but I do weary of it all so much.”95
For two solid weeks Helena’s energies were thrown into a futile counterattack. She admitted to feeling like “an old, squeezed-out lemon, physically and morally, good only for cleaning old Nick’s nails with, and perhaps to be made to write 12 or 13 hours a day the Secret Doctrine under dictation...”96 However, she was n
ot destined to return to work for many weeks because the S.P.R. Report was shortly followed by a series of alarming attacks. At Elberfeld, where Babaji had been keeping the Gebhards entertained with stories of his forest-dwelling days, the little man suddenly went berserk and began foaming at the mouth, smashing mirrors, and screaming terrible accusations at Madame Blavatsky: she had desecrated the Masters by sharing their secrets with Europeans and by mixing up Their names with “phenomena, women and common worldly matters”;97 she used trickery to perform her marvels and hypnosis to turn her followers into sheep who then believed they saw things that did not exist; she wrote the Mahatma letters herself. Madame, he howled, should be thrown out of the Theosophical Society, which itself was rotten to the roots.
Babaji’s revolt terrified Helena. Determined to quiet him, she sent Constance back to Elberfeld but Babaji continued to rave. During the years when he had submitted meekly to Madame’s bullying, he had stored up an abundance of animosity and, unluckily for H.P.B., he had also kept his eyes open. His charges may have sounded like gratuitous insults, but they certainly supplied interesting details. Madame, he told the Gebhards, had extorted money from Prince Harisinghji Rupsinghji; she had almost caused Olcott’s suicide; she had recently written two Mahatma letters to Hubbe-Schleiden. Constance thought that Babaji was “really a lunatic,” but nevertheless her faith in H.P.B. began to waver. Since coming to Wurzburg, she had shut her eyes to “little irregularities”98 in Madame’s household by telling herself that she did not understand occult laws, but Babaji was talking of extortion, a crime that was punishable by law. If H.P.B. had really extorted money from Prince Harisinghji, Constance felt that “I cannot remain in a Society where the Founders lie under the imputation of criminal fraud.” From Olcott she demanded that the prince sign a statement exonerating Madame of the charge: “I must see my way clearly and honestly before me and not blush to be called a Theosophist.”99