by Marion Meade
As a matter of fact, no one could have been more surprised over Annie Besant’s conversion than Madame Blavatsky. After all the “miracles” she had staged on behalf of her own cause, this was a genuine miracle, and she had played no part in it.
During the summer of 1889 Helena experienced a renascence of psychic, physical and emotional well-being. One sign of it was an immediate improvement in her health, another was the budding of emotions frozen so long ago that she concluded they were sealed forever. Annie stirred up feelings that she had experienced only for Yuri, Nadyezhda and a very few others. Judging by her letters from this period, one cannot avoid the impression that she had fallen in love and the fact that the object of her passion happened to be an individual of her own sex, a sex which incidentally neither she nor Annie liked very much, had no bearing on the matter. That there were, as Annie’s most recent biographer, Arthur Nethercot, pointed out, definite lesbian overtones in their relationship is a fact too obvious to overlook. This is not to imply that they were lovers in the physical meaning of the word; rather, theirs was a union of mind and emotions that supplied the missing piece both had been needing in their lives. Helena, overflowing with happiness, spilled out endearments with characteristic candor: “Dearly Beloved One, I am proud of you, I love you, I honour you. You are and will be yet before all men—the star of salvation.” Annie was her “sweet mango”; “my darling Penelope” to her “female Ulysses”; “My dove-eyed one”; her “dearest” whom she longed to kiss “on both your big lotus-like eyes peeping into mine.”145
To her Russian family, she raved about Annie and even a rash of exclamation points could not adequately convey her bliss: “What a kind, noble and wonderful woman she is! And what an orator she is! One cannot have enough of her. Demosthenes in petticoats! It is such an achievement [getting her, I guess] and gives me endless joy.”146
Annie expressed her devotion by calling H.P.B. her “saviour,” and by vowing that she would forsake neither her nor the Theosophical cause. Her letters to Helena have not survived, but from descriptions of her behavior recorded by those who knew them, one can readily guess that she shared Helena’s satisfaction with the relationship. Edmund Russell recalled that Annie would sit on the floor beside H.P.B. during a card game and reverently press one of Madame’s hands to her cheek. All evening she would clutch H.P.B. like some shipwrecked mariner clinging to the tentacle of a giant octopus. Helena treated her with a tenderness that her other friends and pupils rarely glimpsed, a calculated move in the opinion of Alfred Sinnett, who cynically observed that Madame “took care to keep her loftiest characteristics in evidence.”147 Annie Besant, he added, never knew the Old Lady during the stormy period of her life when temper tantrums were the rule rather than the exception.
But after only a short time in H.P.B.’s company, Annie was well aware of her temper and noted that she treated people variously, depending on their natures: patient at times, she lashed out scornfully when she detected vanity, conceit or hypocrisy. She believed that her sole purpose was to get across her points as a teacher, “careless what they or anyone else thought of her.” As for herself, immune to Helena’s barbed tongue, Madame was a “noble and heroic Soul” who had brought her “through storm to peace.”148
In mid-June, bubbling with new-found energy, Helena took the uncharacteristic step of actually leaving her house to make a public appearance. On Monday, June 17, the day after Annie first announced her conversion in the Sun, she accompanied her to the grand opening of Isabel Cooper-Oakley’s Dorothy Restaurant for working women in the West End. Isabel was making a reputation for herself as an entrepreneur: in addition to this restaurant, she was also the proprietor of another Dorothy tea shop for “ladies” and a Bond Street boutique, “Madame Isabel,” agent for Felix, Pasquier, Virot and Reboux and carrying “the Latest Models in Dresses, Mantles, Bonnets, & c.... First-Rate Fit Guaranteed.”
H.P.B., of course, had no particular affection for Isabel, never went to restaurants, and under other circumstances would not have been caught near such a flamboyantly commercial event. Still, Annie planned to attend and probably Helena could not resist appearing in public with her dearest pupil.
As it turned out, H.P.B. wandered straight into one of the season’s most sensational social affairs. While the restaurant may have been designed to cater to working-class women, the first day it was difficult, if not impossible, to find any among the gaggle of ladies crowding the shop: Lady Colin Campbell, Lady Mary Hope, the Baroness de Pallandt, Mrs. Oscar Wilde, and so forth. But the two women around whom the reporters most eagerly clustered were Madame Blavatsky, who puffed cigarettes and declared that she certainly did not approve of mesmerism, and Annie Besant, who merely listened to Madame and played the role of devoted disciple.
According to the Sun, all the women were charmingly attired, although one wonders if this blanket description included Helena in her dowdy bag and Annie whose equally tacky uniform made her look like one of the working women to whom the Dorothy would be catering. After luncheon, which was reported to be excellent, Madame drank coffee, smoked more cigarettes and engaged in a spirited debate with Oscar Wilde on the relative merits of aestheticism and Theosophy; both debaters ignored the crowds who had gathered outside, pressing their noses against the window to get a peek at the reclusive, cigarette-smoking Madame and the elegant Wilde.
Two weeks later, still in exuberant spirits, Helena set off on a Continental holiday with a rich American Theosophist, Ida Candler, who had appeared in London with her daughter, scooped up H.P.B. and insisted on taking her to Fontainebleau for a few weeks’ rest. Ida was not what H.P.B. called a deep Theosophist but rather a kindhearted woman who wanted to do something nice for Madame. The fact that H.P.B. so readily acceded was undoubtedly owing to the fact that Annie along with Herbert Burrows would be nearby in Paris attending the International Labour Congress and promised to join her afterward. While Annie was sitting through long days of speech-making and brushing off jibes from her trade-unionist friends about her recent spiritual transformation, Helena went sightseeing with a gusto that astounded Mrs. Candler who considered her an invalid and had rented a bath chair to wheel her about in. Madame refused to ride. “Out of the fifty-eight state rooms of the palace,” she reported happily to Nadyezhda, “I have done forty-five with my own, unborrowed legs!! It is more than five years since I have walked so much!” She insisted on examining Marie Antoinette’s bedroom and inspecting the dance hall where Diane de Poitiers had once cavorted; she raved over the Gobelins, the Sevres china, and a table on which Napoleon had signed his resignation. Merely strolling under the great oaks and Scotch firs and inhaling air impregnated with the resin of pine “has revived me, has given me back my long lost strength.”149
It was in the restful glades at Fontainebleau that a relaxed H.P.B. felt inspired to begin a new book, her last, and by the time Annie and Burrows arrived from Paris she had already composed many passages. The Voice of the Silence150 is a slender volume of poetic maxims meant to serve as an inspirational guide for those students attempting the path of true occultism.
She told Annie that the aphorisms were not her invention but merely translations of fragments from a mysterious book she called The Book of the Golden Precepts. Annie recalled that “she wrote it swiftly, without any material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to see if the ‘English was decent.’ “ It was in perfectly beautiful English and Annie could find only a few words that needed to be changed. Helena, she said, “looked at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises.”151
In her preface to the work, H.P.B. noted that she had done her best to preserve the poetic imagery of the original, a companion piece to the Stanzas of Dzyan, but the question of her success she would leave to the reader’s judgment. Whatever her reservations, there is no doubt that she produced an exquisite prose poem:
Before the Soul can see, the harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion
s.
Before the Soul can hear, the image (man) has to become as deaf to roaring as to whispers, to cries of bellowing elephants as to the silvery buzzing of the golden firefly.
Before the Soul can comprehend and may remember, she must unto the Silent Speaker be united, just as the form to which the clay is modeled is first united with the potter’s mind.
For then the Soul will hear, and will remember.
And then to the inner ear will speak—
THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE152
If The Voice of the Silence is any indication, Helena was in a highly creative state at Fontainebleau. Feeling better physically than she had in years, she even undertook to perform a few phenomena for Annie and offered to show her how the raps at Spiritualist seances were made.
“You don’t use spirits to produce taps,” she told her. “See here.” Placing her hands slightly above Annie’s head, careful not to touch her, she sent gentle taps pinging down on the bone of her skull, each one thrilling a tiny electric shiver down Annie’s spine. For several decades Helena had matter-of-factly been rapping for audiences on various continents but it was startling and extremely impressive to Annie. Later that evening, still keyed up from Madame’s demonstrations, she retired for the night in a small room adjoining H.P.B.’s. After she had been sleeping for some time, she suddenly woke “to find the air of the room thrown into pulsating waves, and then appeared the radiant astral Figure of the Master, visible to my physical eyes.”153 In this, her first psychic experience, she not only saw, but heard and touched Mahatma Morya and smelled the odors of sandalwood and other Oriental spices.
In late July Annie headed back to London where she had promised H.P.B. help on getting out the next issue of Lucifer. Helena trundled along in the wake of Ida Candler, who dragged her back to Paris to view the Eiffel Tower—”one of the latest fungi of modern commercial enterprise,”154 Helena sniffed—and from there to the Exposition Universelle where Mrs. Candler spent two hours searching for a Parsi who sold paper knives “whom we only found at the last moment when there was a great rush of spilt porte-monnaies, lost pocket-handkerchiefs, umbrellas, above all (Karma.)”155 Ida had a habit of losing her belongings: at Fontainebleau she had accused Helena of having stolen a silver-headed umbrella that she had actually left on the train, and at Paris, Helena joked, she had nearly lost the train. Disorganized, Mrs. Candler left her daughter and H.P.B. at the Gare St. Lazare while she flapped back to their lodgings for the luggage and did not return until the train was about to pull out. The trip to Granville on the coast, normally a four-hour ride on the express, lasted seven-and-a-half hours, and when they finally arrived after midnight, there were no vacant rooms at the first hotel they tried. Helena, “unwilling to submit my unfortunate knees to further tortures by climbing back in the omnibus,” walked two blocks in a rainstorm to another hotel, checked in, and fell into bed at 3 a.m.
The next day they sailed “in an old wash-tub called a steamer” to St. Heliers on the Channel island of Jersey. Its yellow sand and camellias and roses had an Italianate air that enchanted Helena; she was amused by the inhabitants, who got terribly offended if anyone called them English, French, or anything but Jersey men. She wrote Annie that she did not much care for the Eagle House hotel, which was run by “a mother and daughter who have seen better days” and one servant “incapable of discerning a stinking chop from a fresh one.”156 Amazed that her system had withstood the recent dousing at Granville, she told herself that she must be stronger than she imagined if it had not resulted in a cold; still, her knees were beginning to ache slightly and she took the precaution of spending a day in bed. Perhaps because the Eagle House cuisine proved inedible, Ida decided to transfer to the town of St. Aubins where the Theosophical party took a honeysuckle-twined cottage, Bel-grave Villa. “Dearest,” H.P.B. wrote Annie on August 2,
We had to move these last two days and were like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, sitting disconsolate on our trunks. Now we are within reach of pen and ink once more. Thousand thanks for your dear ash-tray and your thought of me, you, sweet mango, among women. I will not dirty and use it, but look at it standing before me. It is lovely for it comes from you... 157
And a few days later, bemoaning Bertram Keightley’s inefficiency (or so she regarded it) in handling the editing of Lucifer,
Now my trust and only hope is in you—Bert is positively losing his memory. It is impossible to rely upon him in anything as far as memory and recollection go. It is simply awful. Oh Lord how I do wish to see you.158
At St. Aubins she worked simultaneously on The Voice of the Silence and Lucifer, the latter’s proofs sent over by mail. When she saw that this procedure was not working, she cabled George Mead to join her. “No sooner had I arrived,” Mead recalled, “than she gave me the run of all her papers, and set me to work on a pile of correspondence that would otherwise have remained unanswered till doomsday, for if she detested anything, it was answering letters.” One day she came into his room and handed him The Voice of the Silence. “Read that, old man,” she said, “and tell me what you think of it.”159
Smoking and tapping her foot restlessly against the floor, she finally interrupted with a sharp “Well?”
When Mead told her that it was the grandest piece of Theosophical literature he had read, she appeared unconvinced and replied that, in her opinion, the translation failed to do justice to the original.
Around the end of August, when Mead and the Candler women accompanied her back to London, Helena continued to sparkle with vitality and good humor. During the trip home on the Channel steamer, H.P.B. fell into conversation with a young man from Birmingham in the course of which the subject of Theosophy arose.
“They are a rum lot, them theosophists,” he snorted.
“Yes, a rum lot,” Helena agreed.
“And that rum old woman at the head of them—”
She cut in smoothly, “That rum old woman, H. P. Blavatsky, has now the honor of speaking to you.”
“Ah! I do not mean that old woman,” he stammered, “but another old woman.”160
During Helena’s six-week absence, the Theosophical Society, commanded by its newest convert, continued to be the center of lively controversy; not a week went by that some newspaper or journal did not throw fresh branches on the fire. Since many of the statements made about the situation were absurd and some decidedly malicious, Annie scheduled two lectures on August 4 and 11 in the Hall of Science to explain “Why I Became a Theosophist.” To packed houses, she bravely charged into such subjects as reincarnation, hypnotism, the Hodgson Report, the Coulombs, and of course the mentorship of Madame Blavatsky. In a stouthearted defense of H.P.B., Annie lashed out at those who declared that if Madame had truly been the victim of slander, she should have prosecuted the Coulombs and the S.P.R. To this Annie replied that “I have been accused of the vilest life a woman could lead. Have I prosecuted? No. A strong woman and a good woman knows that her life is enough to live down slander.”161 When news of these remarks reached Helena’s ears, she must have known for a surety that in Annie Besant she had found a jewel beyond value.
All the publicity had its down side. Many had been stimulated to investigate Theosophy; memberships in the Society began to climb until the Thursday meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge were so packed the house could not contain the crowd; however, H.P.B. found the press taking advantage of the occasion to exhume incidents from her past she would have preferred to forget. Her impulse was to ignore the exposes as befit a sage engaged in matters more important than answering every nit-picker with access to a printing press. But, Helena being in a feisty mood could not resist defending herself. Clearly at her instigation, the Society established a Press Bureau, headed by Alice Cleather, whose function was, one, to answer attacks on H.P.B., and, two, to collect press clippings.
Helena could not resist shooting off a personal response which struck an attitude halfway between disdain and sarcasm. If the public wanted the true facts of her life, she
said huffily, they could go whistle for it. She had no intention of gratifying anyone’s curiosity, least of all her enemies who were “quite welcome to believe in and spread as many cock-and-bull stories about me as they choose.” As for various statements published about her by her own Theosophists, she could not hold herself responsible for their “blunders, inaccuracies and contradictions,”162 including those written by Alfred Sinnett in her biography, a book she claimed not to have read because she suspected it was full of errors. In replying to a New York Sun editorial that had both characterized Olcott and H.P.B. as clever impostors who had gotten rich on swindling dupes, and had gone on to call Helena “a snuffy old woman,” she took issue with the adjective “snuffy.” “Surely this is an incorrect epithet, a mistake proceeding from a confusion of snuff and tobacco,” and she suggested that the correct description would be “a smoky old woman.”163
Obviously there was plenty of fight left in her, which was a good thing, because in the first week of September Henry Olcott arrived in London to do battle. On his way he disembarked at Marseilles and stopped at Paris to tour the same exposition H.P.B. had visited a month earlier. But Henry had not made the long and expensive voyage to stare at exhibits: all year, he had suspected that Helena considered him an unimportant old man sitting beneath his banyan tree at Adyar, a suspicion only too strongly and unpleasantly confirmed by one of her Esoteric Section clauses demanding total obedience to herself and nobody else. Naturally this made him speculate about her loyalty to him as president. Was it possible that she was trying to control Adyar? When he had presented these ruminations in a letter, she had replied that he missed the point entirely. It was neither to him nor Adyar that she owed loyalty, but only to the Cause. Should he deviate in any way in his loyalty to the Cause, she would lop him off like a rotten branch. An irate Henry focused his revulsion for her highhandedness on the Esoteric Section, whose obedience clause must have symbolized her reborn autocracy. His back against the wall, he declared that he would resign unless she emended the clause, a threat Helena preferred to ignore.