Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (88 page)

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.

This time there was no miraculous Mahatma letter at sea to pacify Olcott, but waiting for him at Lansdowne Road was Helena’s newest weapon, Annie Besant. By the time he arrived, Annie had temporarily vacated her house in St. John’s Wood and moved bag and baggage into 17 Lansdowne Road, but on the evening of his arrival, she was nowhere in sight. According to Henry, Helena greeted him warmly and as if nothing were amiss, kept him up talking, Lamasery-fashion, until 2 a.m. It was not until the following evening that he finally met Annie, who immediately impressed him as “a natural Theosophist,” even though he was a bit taken back by her appearance and thought her costume made her look like an “Annie Militant.” Finally, he liked her very much and as president of the Society had to admit that “she is the most important gain to us since Sinnett.” As they parted that evening, he took her hand and said solemnly, “I think you will find yourself happier than you have ever been in your life before, for I see you are a mystic and have been frozen into your brain by your environment. You come now into a family of thinkers who will know you as you are and love you dearly.”
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Helena watched with satisfaction as their friendship quickly ripened: the next day he accompanied Annie to pay a call on Charles Bradlaugh, whom he had known in New York and had nominated for membership in the Lotos Club, and on Sunday he attended one of her lectures at the Hall of Science; after that he saw her frequently at the house and attended her lectures whenever possible, sometimes sharing the platform with her. To keep Henry gainfully occupied, Helena set up a table beside her desk and put him to work writing letters and articles for
Lucifer
and also helping her prepare teaching papers for her Esoteric students. Olcott enjoyed this for a while, then balked at being tied to her desk and began to schedule appointments and lectures. “She called me a ‘mule’ and all sorts of pet names of the kind,”
¹⁶⁵
he recalled, but he held firm to his independence.

In time, both of them softened slightly. Seeing Henry again did have an effect on Helena because she began to confide in him her feelings about various members of the London group and solicited his advice about the best way to handle certain problems. Needless to say, the advice was not followed. By the time Henry left in December she must have mellowed considerably because she agreed to a slight amendment of the E.S. obedience clause: she did not even protest when he made doubly clear that the Esoteric Section had no official connection with the Society by changing its name to the “Eastern School of Theosophy,” nor did she object noticeably when he avoided giving her decision-making powers by appointing a special four-person Board of Control for Britain that could decide on his behalf. Of course Helena was chairman but he hoped to staunch her tendency toward autocracy by adding to the committee Annie, Herbert Burrows and William Kingsland, all of whom he respected. The formal order was drawn up on December 25, 1889, but, as Henry noted in his memoirs, it looked to Helena “a larger Xmas present than it really was,”
¹⁶⁶
because it forbade her making any decision alone. Privately he believed that his mission to London had been successful, since “H.P.B.’s angry feelings were subsiding, and ali danger of a disruption was swiftly passing away.”
¹⁶⁷
In reality, she was merely making a tactical withdrawal, the better to fight again another day, and within six months would once more push Olcott to the point of resignation.

Unknown to Henry, Helena was busy sinking the foundations of a kingdom that would survive both of them, by unobtrusively grooming her successor. For the remainder of that year and all through the next, Annie would break most of her ties with her own past life, resigning her membership in the Fabian and other Socialist societies, participating less actively in strikes and labor demonstrations and making fewer speeches to factory workers. In some aspects, this was both predictable and natural but in others, H.P.B. can be seen aiding an historical process by gradually handing over authority to her personal heir. In September she made Annie co-editor of
Lucifer,
and four months later, after the president of the Blavatsky Lodge, William Kingsland, had “resigned,” Annie was elected to the position.

By now, the personal intimacy between the two women had deepened until Annie felt unhappy being separated from her friend and teacher. Perhaps as a result of the weeks she spent with Helena during Olcott’s visit, she realized that the house had outgrown its adequacy as a headquarters, but still she wanted to be near H.P.B. When Annie proposed making her house at 19 Avenue Road into both the Society’s Headquarters and H.P.B.’s residence, Helena at first refused, perhaps for decorum’s sake, and then seeing the younger woman’s disappointment, submitted to the idea. To her surprise, this unilateral decision was greeted with indignation by the other members of the household. Bert, Arch, Mead, and the countess all protested that Madame had not only failed to consult them but now was “authoritatively and
autocratically”m
trying to force her decision upon them. Mrs. Besant’s generosity was all very well, and of course they had no objection to her intrusion per se, but what would happen if H.P.B. died, or if Annie suddenly decided to turn them out, or if, as somebody suggested, Annie died in a railway accident? The Society would be out in the cold; verbal agreement between Madame and Mrs. Besant was clearly unsuitable. The transfer must be done legally.

For ten days Helena could not bring herself to mention the contretemps to Annie, but finally she explained the situation in a letter. Her worries proved groundless for Annie understood at once, and before the end of 1889, she formally deeded her house to the Theosophists for the remainder of her eighteen-year mortgage. About this time she issued an appeal for a “Theosophical Building Fund” both to remodel her house and build a new structure that could be used as a meeting hall and as living quarters for the T.S. staff. Since one anonymous donor provided almost the entire cost of this work, the necessary renovations and construction got under way immediately and Annie was predicting the transfer could be made in June, 1890.

During the winter of 1889-1890, the explosion of energy Helena had experienced in the summer gradually evaporated, and, while she was probably allowing herself to relax a bit now that Annie could shoulder the burdens, she was clearly slowing down: instead of presiding over E.S. meetings herself, she let Annie run them. Hence, she was not present on December 20 when Willie Yeats proposed that the group undertake a few occult experiments. Suspecting that Madame would disapprove “on the ground of danger by opening up means of black magic,”
¹⁶⁹
he was pleased when Annie promised to refer his idea to H.P.B. and more than a little shocked when Madame actually gave them a go-ahead and appointed Yeats to head a paranormal research committee.

Whether H.P.B. kept track of Yeats’ work is doubtful since most of it was conducted at the Duke Street office, which she never visited. One moonlit night the researchers burned a flower and then tried to reincarnate it with an air pump, but the ashes refused to cooperate. In another experiment, they suspended a needle by a silk thread under a glass case, then tried to move it by psychokinesis; next they brought in a medium named Monsey to mesmerize Yeats. None of these experiments could be termed successful; in fact, as time went on they grew increasingly silly, and nine months later Madame would put an end to Yeats’ career as a psychic researcher. His final appearance at the Blavatsky Lodge was a lecture on “Theosophy and Modern Culture”; shortly afterward Mead called him into his office and said that his presence and conduct were causing disturbances; quite honestly, one female member had complained about him. Feeling that the poet was not in full agreement with the Society’s methods or philosophy, Mead asked Yeats to resign. Yeats complied regretfully, but not unhappily, because he had recently been initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn, another secret society in communication with unknown supermen.