Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (69 page)

Damodar had fled through the looking glass into Madame Blavatsky’s fantasy world, but for Helena there could be no such convenient escape. Her fears continued to build when Richard Hodgson returned to Adyar in the company of Allan Hume, who had been rendering him assistance as a kind of deputy-detective. By this time, Hodgson had taken a completely different view of Madame Blavatsky. He had visited Bombay, where he took pains to crawl around the dusty attic of the “Crow’s Nest” checking to see if letters could be slipped through the rafter cracks; he had visited Hormusji Seevai, the jeweler who had repaired Minnie Hume’s brooch; he had talked to Edward Wimbridge about his experiences at Girgaum Back Road; and he also chanced to meet Hurrychund Chintamon, recently returned from England and eager to testify against the Theosophists. Apparently Chintamon had saved the 1878 letters Madame had written him from New York, those in which she had characterized Olcott as a “psychologized baby.”
¹⁶
The Yankees, she had written, thought themselves very smart; Colonel Olcott believed himself smart even for a Yankee, but he would have to get up much earlier in the morning to be as smart as she.

Back in Madras, with his dossier on Madame growing daily, Hodgson had inspected the receipt ledgers at M. Faciole and Co. and found entries for the saucers and vases that had subsequently appeared in the shrine as apports from Tibet; and he had finally wormed a confession from Franz Hartmann who told him the entire story of the shrine’s dismantling. After two-and-a-half months of painstaking legwork, Hodgson had arrived at five main conclusions: that no Brotherhood of Mahatmas existed, with or without occult powers; that Morya and Koot Hoomi were fictitious personages whose correspondence had been written by Madame Blavatsky, assisted on occasion by Damodar; that Madame had written letters to Emma Coulomb giving instructions for fraudulent phenomena; that no single phenomenon of the Madame’s could be regarded as genuine; and finally that the shrine had been nothing but a conjurer’s box designed to produce spurious miracles. The chief witnesses to the existence of the Brotherhood had been the Hindus at Adyar, but Hodgson felt convinced they had made false statements. The other witness of course was Henry Olcott, and while Hodgson suspected his testimony was often at variance with the facts, he did not think him guilty of willful dishonesty, only of stupidity and absurd credulity.

As for Madame Blavatsky’s teachings, Hodgson would later write:

Of those streams of superhuman knowledge I will only say I prefer to tap them at least one stage nearer the fountainhead. I lay claim to no vast erudition, but the sources which were good enough for Mme. Blavatsky were good enough for me and, so long as Bohn’s
Classical Library
and Trubner’s
Oriental Library
are within reach of a modest purse I prefer to draw on these useful repositories for my ideas of Platonic and Buddhist thought, even though I should be thus obliged to receive these ideas in bald, old-fashioned shape, unspiced with fraudulent marvels and uncorroborated by the forged correspondence of fictitious teachers of Truth.
¹⁷

While Hodgson had absolutely no doubt he had reached the proper conclusions, he continued to be baffled by Madame’s motives. It was true that the Theosophical Society had supported her for the past six years, but it had certainly not provided her with any great wealth. What satisfaction could she have gained from her chicanery? At a dinner party one evening, in the presence of Allan Hume and the Cooper-Oakleys, he reeled out a tentative theory that Madame must be a Russian spy. Even Hume burst out laughing at the idea of Helena, whose cover would be blown in five minutes, spying for anyone, but Hodgson was not so sure. Madame, he had come to believe, was a woman capable of every and any crime.

When this dinner table diatribe was reported to Helena, presumably through the Cooper-Oakleys, she responded with an indignant letter to Hodgson: she cared very little whether or not he thought her a fraud, but he had no right to make public slanderous statements that she was an agent of the Russian government. She ought to have him arrested, she wrote, and would have but for the fact that he was a friend of the Cooper-Oakleys and a person for whom she herself had once had “affectionate regard.”
¹⁸
Not only did she fail to take out a warrant for his arrest, she neglected even to mail the letter.

Helena’s inability to handle large-scale catastrophe was never more evident than during the next weeks. On March 13, Hodgson and Hume strode boldly into the Adyar compound and made themselves at home while Helena foolishly hid upstairs. At a series of conferences with the leading Theosophists, Hodgson discussed the results of his investigation while Subba Row, Hartmann and the others sat around looking glum. The next day Hume chaired a meeting in which he candidly admitted having changed his mind about the authorship of the Coulomb letters. In the light of Hodgson’s findings, he now believed them genuine and of course had always assumed the phenomena to be fraudulent. However, since he believed the Society worth saving, he proposed that H.P.B., Olcott and a few others resign and the organization be reconstituted along scientific-philosophical lines; phenomena were to be prohibited. While his resolutions were thought far too radical to be carried out, the compound remained in a state of extreme tension. Helena, holed up in her bedroom, had been, invited to the meetings but sent word that she was too ill to attend.

On the nineteenth, Henry Olcott arrived to put things right, but it seemed too late. “Black care was enthroned at Adyar when I got back from Rangoon,” he wrote, “the very moral atmosphere was dark and heavy; H.P.B. was struggling for life and as vehement as an enmeshed lioness.”
¹⁹
Despite his picture of Helena as a lioness in its death throes, she finally summoned sufficient strength to descend the stairs to meet with Hodgson, who was about to return to England. He frankly told her that he had no choice but to find her phenomena false and went on to explain his reasons. Helena listened stoically, and when Hodgson had finished, she told him that the Brotherhood did not want the world to believe in its existence, that he had in fact been guided by the Mahatmas during his investigation to the verdict of fraud. She acknowledged freely that he had done the best he could. “With me personally, face to face,” Hodgson would later recall, “she was courageous unto the last.”
²⁰

Olcott, still trying to get his bearings, paid a last-minute call on Hodgson in Madras. Henry had always respected Hodgson, he had even gone out of his way to be helpful by donating to him half-a-dozen undershirts and insisting he not bother with reimbursement until he reached England. How could a man to whom he had given his underwear suddenly turn on him? It was, to Henry, as inconceivable as Hodgson’s condemnation of H.P.B. In Olcott’s view the case against Helena was not proved because, as he would write Francesca Arundale, “no one, at least no credible witness,
saw
her write to
[sic]
C. letters...”
²¹
Whether he offered this feeble defense to Hodgson is unknown; probably not, since he suspected that H.P.B. had been guilty of bogus phenomena in moments of mental instability. However, the conversation took a brutal turn when Hodgson told him about Chintamon’s letters and Helena’s flippant boasting of her ability to control Olcott by merely looking into his face.

Henry crumpled. “In my whole experience in the movement,” he wrote, “nothing ever affected me so much as this. It made me desperate, and for twenty-four hours almost ready to go down to the beach and drown myself in the sea.”
²²
When he was finally able to confront Helena, she replied only that she must have been joking.

Feeling that all was lost, Henry lived in hourly dread of fresh revelations. “If you had had the hell to pass through that I have had,” he wrote Francesca, “I think you would be nearly crazy.”
²³
As it happened, he had no time to dwell on his sorrows because on March 28 the Theosophists were thwacked by still another blow. For six months Emma Coulomb and her missionary advisers had been awaiting H.P.B.’s lawsuit, not merely in response to the articles but also to a pamphlet Emma had published in December, “Some Account of My Intercourse with Madame Blavatsky,” in which she had supplied further details on H.P.B.’s activities and additional extracts from their correspondence. As time passed and H.P.B. made no move, Emma looked for other means of luring her into court. Thus when Maj.-Gen. Henry Rhodes Morgan issued a fiery defense of H.P.B. and called Madame Coulomb a forger, Emma shifted gears at once and merrily sued Morgan for libel.

At Adyar an already volatile atmosphere was about to explode. Helena, “saying wild things,”
²⁴
tramped up and down her room as she denounced Emma, the missionaries and Colonel Olcott. Henry recalled that “it was awful to see her, with her face empurpled by the blood that rushed to her head, her eyes almost standing out from their orbits and dead-looking.”
²⁵
An all-night conference ensued, in which it was agreed that the Society would certainly go under if Helena were called as a witness in the Morgan case. Girding himself for action, Henry insisted she be kept out of sight either until the trouble died down or Emma withdrew her suit. Personally, he thought that Helena had got all of them in serious trouble. Still, he had to extricate them if he could, but this time, Madame would obey him. First she must resign her office as Corresponding Secretary, and second, leave the country without delay.
²⁶

Helena listened to his ultimatums without sacrificing her equilibrium. She was willing to resign her office, but leaving India was quite another matter. Did he expect a seriously ill person to run away? Had he forgotten she could barely walk without assistance?

Henry refused to listen. It was not, as she claimed, his testimony to the S.P.R. or his Buddha on wheels that had brought this misery on them; it was she who had insisted on going to Europe and stirring up trouble with phenomena he had suspected all along of being phony. It was she, he cried, who suffered from “mental aberrations” and behaved like an “insane lunatic.”
²⁷
Now it had fallen to him “to get the ship through the breakers,”
²⁸
and he had not the smallest doubt that if Helena remained in India, she would end in prison. She must leave quietly and swiftly, for if the missionaries heard of her departure they might take legal action to detain her. As for her inability to travel, he suggested that she take with her Mary Flynn, the suicidal girl from Bombay who had spent a year at Headquarters.

Helena watched Henry strut and sputter. He was, she thought to herself, “a perfect bag of conceit and silliness.
Il
pose pour le martyr!
The—poor man.”
²⁹
He had been her devoted friend for ten years, her “chum,” but she pitied him for failing to comprehend “that if we were
theosophical twins
during our days of glory, in such times of universal persecution, of false charges and public accusations, the ‘twins’ have to fall together as they have risen together, and that if I am called... a fraud by him, then must he be one also?”
³⁰
When he had finished railing, she ordered Babula to begin packing her bags.

The next day Olcott went into Madras and bought second-class tickets on the next ship scheduled to sail whose destination happened to be Naples. At the last moment, Franz Hartmann offered to accompany Madame because he felt she should be traveling with a physician, then Helena insisted on bringing Babaji.

On the morning of March 31, virtually unable to stand, “I was carried from my sickbed in an invalid chair, lowered into the boat, and then transferred to the steamer, like a bale of goods, hardly conscious of what was going on.”
³¹

Madame Blavatsky’s life in the land of the Mahatmas had come to an end.

By the time the SS
Pehio
docked at Naples on the twenty-third of April, 1885, Helena had almost completely shifted her rage from the Coulombs and Hodgson to Henry Olcott. Olcott was the ogre who knew that “I have not a brass farthing in my pocket” but who had nonetheless “sent off this servant of God, with three others, and 700 rupees in our pocket,”
³²
apparently expecting them to live on it. Equally infuriatingly, he had entrusted the money to Hartmann, whom she had grown to despise, and to Babaji who had never been out of India, had no business sense in the first place and was slow-witted in the second. Choosing to ignore the fact that Olcott had struggled to scrape up the seven hundred rupees, Helena could only remember bitterly his admonitions that she find cheap lodgings in Italy and settle down to wait out her exile as best she could. In trivial matters, he had offended her too; for example, he had canceled the fifteen pounds’ worth of books she had ordered from London through Francesca Arundale, writing himself to Francesca that he could not afford books that Helena might not live to read, and more to the point, that he did not have fifteen pounds in his London bank account.

Once in Naples, it took Hartmann and Babaji days to find a sufficiently inexpensive pension for them; it was not in the city or in any of the pretty little resort towns along the coast, but in a wretched village some ten miles south of Naples, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Today Torre del Greco is an industrial suburb boasting a few coral factories, where guided tour buses to Pompeii stop so that passengers may purchase coral and cameo knickknacks. In 1885 Torre del Greco offered even smaller interest to the average tourist, which explains its bargain rates. The Hotel del Vesuvio agreed to let the party occupy four furnished rooms for ninety francs a week, board included, but demanded three months’ rent in advance. When H.P.B., who had taken no part in these negotiations, learned that Babaji had parted with a considerable portion of their funds, she could only splutter helplessly. Now she must stay there whether she liked it or not.