Wild Talent (4 page)

In the meantime, Alexandra and I have had a visitor. Our sponsor Mrs. Elisabeth Morgan came to call this afternoon, saying it was time she met her newest protégé. She is a lady of middle years, with a kind face and pleasant manner, though it seems to me rather eccentric in her dress. This afternoon she wore a long plum-coloured velvet waistcoat over a grey woollen gown belted with a tasselled cord and over that a paisley shawl. Perhaps this is a new London fashion, though she did put me in mind a little of the White Queen in Alice.

Of course Alexandra has not told her why I came to London and Mrs. Morgan was too discreet to inquire, though when I said that I had been a bondager, she gazed at me admiringly through the monocle she carries on a ribbon. “To have led such a hard life, and yet still aspire to cultivate the spirit and the intellect — my dear child, you make me feel quite humbled.” Clearly, Mrs. Morgan is persuaded that I, like Alexandra, am a seeker after arcane wisdom. I spoke as little as possible, for fear of revealing my true ignorance; leaving Alexandra to seize the reins of the conversation in her usual confident way.

“It is time, my dear Alexandra,” said Mrs. Morgan, setting down her teacup, “that you paid your respects at 17 Lansdowne Road. You must join our little gathering this Saturday, and of course Miss Guthrie must come as well.” So saying, she opened her reticule and produced a printed card.

It was an invitation, which Alexandra read aloud.

“Madame Blavatsky. At Home, Saturday 4:00 to 10:00 o'clock.”

“This Madame Blavatsky,” said Alexandra. “They say she is
très formidable
.”

“Indeed she is,” said Elisabeth Morgan. “But my dear, you must not let her intimidate you. You too can be
très
formidable
!”

Of this Madame Blavatsky, I know only what Alexandra has told me: that she is widely read and widely travelled, and a famous Theosophist. 17 Lansdowne Road, it seems, is the very epicentre of London occultism. I have no notion what a Theosophist might be, and I look forward to Saturday with some trepidation. Still, as Alexandra says, it should prove “
bien intéressant.”

CHAPTER SIX

Sunday, June 10

Yesterday was the strangest day I have ever spent; and I suspect there may be stranger still to come.

Mrs. Morgan came to collect us in late afternoon, and we travelled by cab to Holland Park. So far I had seen little of London. As we made our way though the crowded, noisy streets in the shadow of enormous buildings, with never a chink or cranny where green things might grow, it seemed to me like a city so vast it had swallowed up the world. I thought I would never wish to find myself afoot here, and alone. But Lansdowne Road was pleasant enough — a broad street of very large stone houses (villas, Mrs. Morgan calls them) set among clipped trees and shrubbery, each one with its tidy garden.

Just after six we drew up at Number 17, which overlooks the park. The house seemed very grand, and I was anxious about our costumes, for we had no afternoon frocks or feathered hats, only our workaday serge. Alexandra, who is of independent mind and I suspect may have anarchist leanings, clearly had not given this much thought. Kind Mrs. Morgan, in flowing dove-grey silk, tried to reassure me, saying, “My dear, Madame Blavatsky has never been one to concern herself with fashion!”

But the woman who answered our knock seemed to me the very epitome of fashion, a slender lady of fifty or so in a flounced and beaded dinner gown, her ash-blonde hair immaculately coiffed.

“Mrs. Morgan, do come in, how pleasant to see you again!”

“My dear Countess,” said Mrs. Morgan, as we all stepped into the entrance-hall, “may I present my young protégé, Mlle Alexandra David, and her friend Miss Guthrie. My dears, this is the Countess Constance Wachmeister, who looks after this household with quite miraculous efficiency.”

“HPB is in her office,” said the Countess. Her competent, take-charge manner seemed quite at odds with her gown.

“She has especially asked to meet the young ladies.”

“Courage, my dears,” said Mrs. Morgan,
sotto voce
, as the Countess led us away. I looked at Alexandra in alarm.

Madame Blavatsky awaited us in her ground-floor study, seated in a great armchair with her back to a large and extraordinarily cluttered desk. Behind her, a bay window with half-drawn curtains looked out into the shadowy park. Every shelf and table was heaped with books, and more volumes were stacked haphazardly on the floor. Scattered about, as well, were all manner of exotic objects — oriental sculptures, Indian mats and wall-plaques, a golden Buddha. A gas stove glowed in a corner, filling the room with fusty warmth, and the close air held a lingering odour, sweet and cloying. (Alexandra whispered to me, afterwards, that it was hashish, which she had lately learned to recognise.) On one wall, looking curiously out of place, was a Swiss cuckoo clock. Though it seemed to be broken — for its weights were lying on the floor — as we sat down it gave a curious kind of sigh, or groan.

Madame Blavatsky herself was a huge, shapeless presence draped in a baggy black gown girdled with a black rope, the hem riding up to reveal grotesquely swollen ankles and feet. Her crinkly grey hair was pulled back into an untidy knot, her massive double-chinned face netted with wrinkles and yellow-tinged. Yet what one notices first is not that awkward bulk, but her large, luminous eyes. A piercing azure-blue, they are filled with a shrewd intelligence. They seem to transfix you, so that you cannot look away.

“Here is the young lady from Belgium,” said the Countess, “and her Scottish friend.” And with that she abandoned us to Madame Blavatsky's mercies.

“Where exactly in Belgium?” With nicotine-stained fingers Madame Blavatsky tapped a cigarette into an overflowing ashtray.

“From Brussels, Madame. But I was born in Paris, and lived there until I was five.”

“Paris,” said Madame Blavatsky, with a look of distaste. “I understand they are ruining the view with some sort of enormous metal excrescence.”

“Monsieur Eiffel's tower,” said Alexandra. “Indeed,” she added, in her correct but hesitant English, “it is the centre of much controversy. There are those who call it
‘Notre
Dame des ferrailleurs'.”

“The junkman's Notre Dame — exactly so,” said Madame B. “Well then, Mademoiselle David. Mrs. Morgan tells me you are a student of the occult.”

Alexandra seemed to recoil a little under the intensity of that bright blue gaze. “It interests me a great deal, that is true.”

“And you plan to make it your career?”

“
Au contraire
,” said Alexandra. “I have trained for a career in music — but now I believe I would like to study medicine, and perhaps become a medical missionary.” Devious Alexandra! I knew she was really in London to escape from her dreary Brussels home.

“A doctor — now there is a worthy undertaking!”

“It's difficult, of course, for a woman . . . ” Alexandra started to say.

“Flapdoodle!” said Madame Blavatsky, fiercely. “These days a woman can do anything she wishes. I myself am a living example of that. Did you know that I fought with Garibaldi's army at the Battle of Mentana, and was wounded five times, and left for dead in a ditch?”

“
Incroyable
!” murmured Alexandra. (We had already heard this tale from Elisabeth Morgan.)

“And furthermore I had a dear friend, Anna Kingsford, who was an eminent doctor. It doesn't do to limit one's aspirations.”

Though she had yet to address a word to me, I felt myself warming to this immense, untidy, blunt-spoken woman.

“When you have finished your medical studies,” said Madame Blavatsky, “you must come and see me again. By then my good Dr. Mennell will have retired, and perhaps I will take you on as my personal physician. That is, if these rotting kidneys have not already finished me off.”

“I had thought,” said Alexandra politely, “that I might use my skills in the Orient. Even perhaps Tibet.”

“Ah, yes,” said Madame B. with sudden animation. “I myself have travelled extensively in the Forbidden Kingdom.”

Alexandra said nothing. I think, like me, she was trying to imagine those elephantine lower limbs transporting their owner over the Himalayas.

But now Madame B. turned the full force of her attention on me. “And you will be the young person from Scotland. A backward country, in many respects, though I'm told it produces excellent doctors. Are you also a medical student?”

I summoned my courage and prayed not to trip over my tongue. “No, Madame. I have hopes of one day becoming an author.”

“Hah!” said Madame B. “Everybody wants to be an author. Better you should take in laundry, or scrub floors for a living. It's easier work.” She stubbed out her cigarette, and paused in the act of reaching for another. “There is the dinner-bell. We must see what guests have come to amuse us tonight. Let me have your arm. These gouty old legs of mine are giving me no end of trouble.” So saying, she heaved herself to her feet, and leaning heavily on my shoulder she began her laborious progress into dinner.

We went through folding doors into the dining room, where in the glow of gaslight a dozen or so guests were preparing to sit down to a meal.

The ladies, for the most part, were beautifully dressed in what I believe must be the latest fashion: loose, diaphanous tea-gowns; draped Grecian costumes lavishly embroidered with gold thread; and stayless, high-waisted gowns like the ones the actress Sarah Bernhardt wears. In my black serge skirt and high-collared white blouse, I was like a pigeon strayed into a flock of macaws. But when Alexandra pointed out one woman in a plain skirt and jacket and sturdy laced-up boots, with a red kerchief round her neck, I felt not so entirely out of place.

The evening, already odd, was to grow odder still. Madame Blavatsky settled herself at the head of table, ashtray at hand, and immediately launched into a sort of lecture. “The whole universe is filled with spirits,” she declaimed loudly. “It's nonsense to believe that we are the only intelligent beings in the world. I believe there is latent spirit in all matter.”

Mrs. Morgan, who was listening intently, turned to us with an encouraging smile. “Do join us, my dears,” she said. We found two empty places and sat down.

The table was set for twenty at least, and people continued to arrive without ceremony in the middle of the soup course. They would find an empty chair, chat for a while, and then leave without waiting for the pudding. A perspiring housemaid appeared from time to time to set out more food and change the plates. It all seemed quite slapdash, and not at all like dinner parties in novels I have read.

I recognised none of the dishes we were served, but all seemed delicious, the more so because the Gnostics' fare had left me ravenous. However, I do not think that Borders folk would approve of Madame Blavatsky's table, for everything was strangely spiced, and there was not a scrap of mutton or mince or boiling beef to be seen.

Madame B. had begun to lecture again, her voice gaining steadily in volume as she warmed to her subject. “It's been recorded that some patients suffering from nervous diseases have been raised from their beds by a mysterious power, and it has been impossible to force them down. Thus we see that there is no such thing as the law of gravitation, as it's generally understood.”

Some guests were moving closer to Madame Blavatsky and leaning forward so as not to miss a word. Others were drifting to the farther end. All this changing of places was a little like Mr. Dodgson's Mad Tea Party. Alexandra, who a moment earlier was deep in conversation with a pale, intense young poet, now had an older lady claiming her attention. (This was Lady Wilde, Alexandra told me later — the mother of the celebrated playwright. Lady Wilde seemed under the illusion that she was attending a séance.)

The lean, bespectacled gentleman on my right introduced himself as Charles Barker, a lecturer in zoology at Cambridge.

“Do try this lentil stew,” he said, as he helped himself from the tureen. “You'll find it excellent. Though of course this vegetarianism is simply another of HPB's frauds. The woman is Russian, after all. She was raised on sausage and smoked goose.”

As I tried to think how to answer, I heard from somewhere in mid-air the silvery chiming of a bell, and a long-stemmed red rose plummeted onto the table next to my wine-glass. I stared up at the ceiling.

“Aha,” said Mr. Barker, sounding amused. “HPB is up to her parlour tricks again. Doesn't she realize we're all thoroughly bored by them?”

I pushed the rose nervously to one side, just in time to see a plain white envelope fall with a small thud onto my plate. I thrust my chair back from the table in alarm. Madame Blavatsky, who had ignored the mysterious chimes and the apparently heaven-sent rose, looked straight down the table at me, and smiled expansively.

“Look,” she said in her hoarse smoker's voice. “The Mahatma has sent our young guest a letter. You must open it and read it to us, Miss Guthrie.”

How awful to be suddenly the centre of everyone's attention! I'm sure I was blushing as I fumbled open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of a shell-pink writing paper with a message in heavy black ink: “To Miss Jean Guthrie. Master Koot Hoomi Singh sends a warm welcome to the young visitor from Scotland.” The black letters were hastily scrawled, and there was a large inkblot in one corner. Where the signature should have been, there was a line of writing in some foreign script.

Alexandra, eager to see what was happening, had moved into the chair on my left. Wordlessly, I held out the paper for her to read.

“You should feel honoured, Miss Guthrie,” said Charles Barker. “You hold in your hand one of the famous — or should I say infamous —M ahatma letters. According to HPB they are written somewhere in the Himalayas by a mysterious holy man, an initiate of the Brotherhood of the Snowy Range. And delivered, as you observe, by disembodied spirits — the astral post office, if you will.”