Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (23 page)

When William Eddy finished, his brother Horatio turned up the lamp wick and conducted a seance in the light. Among the phenomena was a spirit-hand that wrote Helena’s name on a calling card in Russian script and another disembodied hand that she swiftly identified as that of Michalko’s because a string of amber beads was wound around the wrist, a custom among Georgian peasants, she explained. Whispering in French, Olcott told her to ask the spirit if he would play a song on the guitar lying on a nearby table. “She first asked him, in Georgian and Russian, if he were really Michalko, and certain other questions; to which he responded by sweeping the guitar strings once, or thrice, as he wished to indicate ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ “

“Ilaparakey sheni tscheerimy” [sic]
(Speak to me, my good fellow).

There was no response.

“If it is you, knock five times or five sweeps of the guitar.”

Again there was silence.

But when Helena commanded, “Play the Lezguinka,”
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the patriotic spirit overcame its shyness and obliged with a passable rendition; afterwards, it played two more Caucasian dances as an encore.

Olcott could scarcely believe his ears. At last he had found something worth writing about, positive proof as far as he was concerned that the Eddys were genuine. It would be unlikely, he decided, that a Vermont farmer would know about the strings of amber beads on the wrists of Georgian peasants, or, for that matter, be familiar with the tunes of Russian folk songs. Besides, the Madame was “a lady of such social position, as to be incapable of entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair of tricksters, to deceive the public.”
²⁹

Tremendously excited, the next morning he dashed off a short piece for the
Sun
about “Madame Blowtskey” whose spirit Michalko had rapped, “not being able to speak,” and whose music had been “applauded by the Madame, who is herself a musician.”
³⁰
In his semiweekly report for the
Graphic,
Olcott described the concert in considerably greater detail, and this time managed to spell H.P.B.’s name correctly.

What happened on the night of October 14 is far from clear. According to Mrs. Carey, who was taking notes for her article, something took place but it was not musical. Madame’s spirit, she wrote in the
Religio-Philosophical Journal,
“was dressed as an Arab and proved to be an Arabian guide which she had known while traveling in that country. She asked him several questions in his native tongue and he replied in the same language.” After the talking, non-musical Arab, the Madame had been visited by a Turk and then by a Russian whom “she recognized as her father, but as he did not come out very distinctly she was not positive.”
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It should be pointed out that what people saw and heard at séances was quite subjective and depended on their will to believe, or as the case may be, disbelieve. At the Eddys’, for example, a skeptical visitor who had departed the day before Helena’s arrival observed that the séance room was so “very dark” that he found it “impossible to distinguish faces;”
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in his opinion the so-called spirits looked like nothing more than “three dollars’ worth of costumes.”

During the ten days that Helena stayed at the farm, she told Olcott the story of her life —with a few deletions and additions. While she did not refer to the tragic loss of her son and lover, she did mention, for example, visits to Indian temples, her search for antiquities at the base of the Pyramids, and a particularly thrilling exploration into the interior of Africa with an armed escort. Henry thought that no biographer could have written a more romantic story than Helena had lived. “In the whole course of my experience, I never met so interesting and, if I may say it without offence, eccentric a character.”
³³
He could not deny being terribly impressed by both her Dolgorukov ancestors and the social position of the Fadeyevs, which doubtless encouraged Helena to embroider the lives of those relatives of a somewhat lesser status; for instance, she gave Captain von Hahn the rank of general and promoted Nikifor Blavatsky from vice-governor to governor of Erivan, but it was all the same to Olcott. However, for at least one brief moment he must have been bothered by a few doubts because he asked Madame to furnish documentary proof of her identity. Helena could not have been pleased at his request, but she acted the grand dame and responded serenely by handing him her passport, her father’s will, and personal letters on crested stationery from several noblemen, including Baron Nicholas Meyendorff. It seems incredible that she had carried halfway around the globe fifteen-year-old letters from a despised ex-lover, but apparently she believed they might come in handy someday. Certainly they impressed Olcott, as did her often-repeated account of having fought with Garibaldi’s army.

Probably she had not meant to make a point of mentioning Mentana but it proved convenient in accounting for her ill health at Chittenden. A few days after her arrival, her old chest wound reopened slightly and while fortunately this was not accompanied by the usual pain and convulsions, it began to cause her considerable discomfort. Olcott said that she “consulted” him about her problem and even showed him the scar. To display a scar below the heart, she would have had to partially disrobe but evidently Olcott chose not to be shocked by this immodest action. And when she solemnly explained that the scar was a stiletto wound from Mentana and made him feel the musket bullet still embedded in her right shoulder and another in her leg, he accepted her story as the truth. Of course he was aware that some of her adventures sounded not quite right and if they had come from another woman, he would have laughed in her face; but he did not imagine that a lady of such distinction as Madame Blavatsky would deliberately lie to him. Gazing into her hypnotic azure eyes and listening to her discourses with open-mouthed awe, he decided that he admired her inordinately and retired to his room where he filled his
Graphic
dispatches with accolades for the wonder woman he had chanced to discover.

There was plenty to write about. Every evening at ten minutes to seven a procession of apparitions began to drift in and out of the Eddy cabinet at intervals of from one to five minutes, and although Honto and the Indians doggedly made their appearances, they were now unceremoniously pushed out of the limelight by Madame’s people: “Hassan Aga,” a wealthy Tiflis merchant dressed in a black Astrakhan cap and tasseled hood who said three times that he had a secret to reveal but never managed to spit it out; “Safar Ali Bek,” the man who had guarded Madame for Nikifor Blavatsky in Erivan, now transformed into a gigantic Kurd warrior carrying a feathered spear; a Circassian
noukar
who bowed, smiled and said,
“Tchock yachtchi”
(all right); a huge muscular black man in white-and-gold-horned headdress, a conjurer once met in Africa, Helena said. And there were less exotic phantoms as well: an old woman in a babushka, whom Helena recognized as Vera’s nurse, and a portly man in a black evening suit and frilled white shirt, around whose neck hung a Greek cross of St. Anne suspended by a red moire ribbon with two black stripes.

“Are you my father?” Helena asked in English, later confessing that she had been trembling.

The figure advanced toward her and stopped.
“Djadja,”
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he answered reproachfully.

He was, Helena informed the group, an uncle, her father’s brother Gustave von Hahn who had been president of the criminal court at Grodno for twelve years and who had died in 1861. The sitters’ eyes were popping. In terms of dramatic interest, Madame’s relatives and even her casual acquaintances certainly outclassed the grubby Indians usually encountered at the Eddy seances.

To Henry Olcott and the others, Madame appeared to be enjoying herself enormously. According to Helena, who wrote about the Eddy seances in later years, the ectoplasmic shapes filled her with disgust; it made her skin crawl to watch the Spiritualists weeping and rejoicing in happiness at the sight of those revolting phantoms. She wished that they could see what she saw, that the creatures were not papa and mama and baby Charlie, but the dregs of personalities that had once lived; all the passions, thoughts and vices that could not follow the liberated soul and spirit after physical death. More than once, she would recall, she had seen a phantom detach itself from William Eddy and pounce upon someone in the audience, “expanding so as to envelop him or her entirely, and slowly disappearing within the living body as though sucked in by its every pore.”
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It had been, she would insist, ghastly to watch. Perhaps so. It was true that she did leave the Eddys in a hurry, but more likely this sudden exit resulted from having paid the mediums eighty dollars for room and board and having little money left.

In any case, she departed with a flourish because the séance on the eve of her leaving proved to be exceptional. As soon as the sitting began, a spirit called “George Dix” wasted no time in approaching Helena and getting right down to business:

Madame, I am now about to give you a test of the genuineness of the manifestations in this circle, which I think will satisfy not only you, but a skeptical world beside. I shall place in your hands the buckle of a medal of honor worn in life by your brave father, and buried with his body in Russia. This has been brought to you by your uncle, whom you have seen materialized...

When Helena began to scream, somebody hurriedly struck a light. “We all saw,” Olcott reported, “Mme. de Blavatsky holding in her hand a silver buckle of a most curious shape, which she regarded with speechless wonder.” After she had recovered, she affirmed that the buckle had indeed been attached to a medal worn by her father, that it had been granted by the late Czar Nicholas to his officers after the victorious Turkish campaign of 1828, and that it had been buried with von Hahn.

But could she be sure, someone wondered. Of course, she snapped back— they could see that the point of the pin was broken, something she herself had done many years ago in a moment of carelessness. But if her word was insufficient, she had at home in New York a photographic copy of an oil painting in which Peter von Hahn was wearing the very medal to which the buckle had been attached.

Henry Olcott could scarcely contain himself. Writing his report for the
Graphic,
he did not bother to disguise his total acceptance of this piece of theater, which must have been meticulously staged by H.P.B. and the Eddys, and from his pen rushed a geyser of purple prose:

Was there ever a “manifestation” more wonderful than this? A token drug by unknown means from a father’s grave and laid in his daughter’s hand, five thousand miles away, across an ocean? A jewel from the breast of a warrior sleeping his last sleep in Russian ground, sparkling in the candlelight in a gloomy apartment of a Vermont farm-house! A precious present from the tomb of her nearest and best beloved of kin, to be kept as a perpetual proof that death can neither extinguish the ties of blood nor long divide those who were once united and desire reunion with one another!
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The next day, October 25, Madame Magnon and a jubilant Helena Petrovna left for New York. Due to the delay in having engravings made for Kappes’ drawings, Olcott’s articles about her would not appear for several weeks, but in the meantime there was much to do. Altogether the colonel had had an exhilarating effect on her and suddenly she found herself brimming with hope. When he had mentioned collecting the
Graphic
articles into a book, she had thought it a wonderful idea and offered to help. At the same time it occurred to her that the stories were important enough to warrant international readership and, thinking of Davis’s friend Aksakov, she suggested translating Olcott’s work for
Psychische Studien
or even some Russian journal. Olcott had been thrilled by the idea.

However much she liked Henry—and she liked him a great deal—she could not really say that she respected him. He struck her as childish—”worse than a three-year-old child” was the way she would describe him to Nadyezhda—and sometimes his “ardent and gushing imagination” pushed him to heights of gullibility that were quite amazing. Had she not warned him that William Eddy’s spooks were not necessarily proof of intelligent spirit-entities? If genuine, she had tactfully suggested, they must be the medium’s double escaping from his body and masquerading in other costumes. But Henry, “in love with the spirits,”
³⁷
had not believed her and continued to insist that many of the spirit forms, the babies for instance, could not possibly have come from William.

In spite of their disagreements, he had taken to calling her “Jack” and she affectionately referred to him as “Maloney.” Parting the best of friends, they promised to meet when Henry returned to the city.

Two mornings after her return from Chittenden, full of optimism and self-possession, she opened the
Daily Graphic
to find catastrophe staring up at her. In a sarcastic article by Dr. George Beard, the Eddy brothers were denounced as frauds—not clever frauds, but frauds of the cheapest and most transparent kind—and Colonel Olcott called a dupe who had been blinded by a handful of bad magicians’ tricks. “When your correspondent returns to New York,” Beard needled, “I will teach him on any convenient evening to do all that the Eddys do.”
³⁸

H.P.B. had heard of Dr. Beard, a well-known New York neuropathologist who had spent two days at Chittenden just prior to her arrival there. Olcott had told H.P.B. that Beard had brought with him an electric battery. He proposed that the Eddys grasp its handles while he applied sufficient current to prevent them letting go in order to use their hands for trickery. Naturally the Eddys had refused, but when H.P.B. arrived people were still laughing about the skeptical Dr. Beard and his fruitless battery.