Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (41 page)

H.P.B.’s six-week visit, Sinnett wrote, meant “a great and momentous change in my life.” He does not state if the change was for better or worse.

Alfred Percy Sinnett, a slender, balding man with a well-trimmed mustache, was an unlikely candidate for a counter-cultural religious movement. At thirty-nine, he was one of the most influential men in India by virtue of his editorship of the
Pioneer,
but for many years he had been a person of no visible achievements and small hope for such. Born in London, his entire childhood had been marked by an unbroken series of deprivations; his father had died penniless when Alfred was only five and his widowed mother provided for her six children by newspaper articles and translations. Alfred did poorly in school and left without finishing his studies. Taking up mechanical drawing, he became a skilled draftsman, which enabled him to support himself and contribute to the meager earnings of his mother. Eventually, however, he was able to move into the newspaper field when he got a job as assistant editor of the London
Globe,
but this was short-lived; he was fired for neglect of his duties after being rejected by a German woman.

Next, he moved around aimlessly from one London paper to another until, in 1865, he was offered the editorship of the Hong Kong
Daily Press.
After three successful years in Hong Kong, he returned to England with eight hundred pounds and an excellent poker game and got a good job as an editorial writer on the
Evening Standard.
By 1870 he had met and married Patience Edensor, a rather frail, soft-spoken young woman who was later described by her friend Isabelle de Steiger as a person “whose patience and unvarying kindness never failed.” She was extremely intelligent, rather more intelligent in fact than her husband but “too loving and lovable a woman actively to oppose him, and her devotion was too intuitive ever to irritate him with opposition,” which Isabelle regarded as “unfortunate.”
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In 1872, Alfred was presented with his biggest opportunity, to date, when George Allen, owner of the
Pioneer,
offered him the chance to go out to India as editor. The years since then had been the happiest of Sinnett’s life. At last, he had an excellent income, a luxurious home, social position, servants, and professional recognition. For him and Patience and their son, Denny, it was a life of incredible ease. There were winters in Allahabad, summers at Simla, the government’s hot-weather capital in the cool foothills of the Himalayas, mint juleps on verandas, games of tennis to work off the rich meals, and periodic, all-expense-paid trips home to England.

Several years prior to meeting H.P.B., Sinnett had attended a séance at the London home of the well-known medium Mrs. Guppy and was immediately intrigued, declaring the phenomena he had witnessed to be “overwhelming and precluded any conceivable theory of imposture.”
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He had read
Isis Unveiled,
which impressed him tremendously despite his assumption that Madame Blavatsky was a Spiritualist, and when the author and Colonel Olcott appeared in Bombay, he did not hesitate to contact them. “We thought they would be interesting people,”
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he wrote blandly in his unpublished memoirs.

The Sinnetts outdid themselves to entertain Helena and Henry with dinner parties and introductions to prominent persons, among them Allan Octavian Hume, who would become the first chairman of the Indian National Congress. Sinnett had to admit that Helena failed to make a favorable impression on all his friends. “Anglo-Indian society is strongly coloured with conventional views, and Mme. Blavatsky was too violent a departure from accepted standards in a great variety of ways to be assimilated in Anglo-Indian circles with readiness.”
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That, perhaps, was to be expected. At the same time, the guests who appreciated bright, intelligent dinner-table conversation “were loud in her praises and eager of her society,”
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and forbore to overlook her militant teetotaling and her bullying attacks on people who were merely sipping table wine. Alfred, who jokingly called her “Old Lady,”
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took her idiosyncrasies about alcohol with equanimity, but he was secretly shocked by the way she nagged and abused Colonel Olcott. Once, after Henry had delivered a lecture that had not met with her approval, she “opened fire on him with exceeding bitterness.”
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The savagery of her outburst made Sinnett wonder why Olcott bore it so mildly, and after that could never think of Henry as anything other than spineless.

On December 15, the Sinnetts joined H.P.B. and Henry on a trip to Benares where they stayed at a house provided by the Maharajah of Vizianagram and visited a learned yogi, Majji, who made her home in a cave along the banks of the Ganges. Majji whispered in Henry’s ear that Madame’s body was being occupied by an important yogi—she was really a man. Henry could readily accept the idea, for he himself had often commented on Helena’s maleness, but he could not understand why the wise Majji kept saying that the man had been inside Madame for sixty-two years (Helena was forty-eight). They also met briefly with Swami Dayananda before returning to Allahabad for Christmas.

Alfred had been observing Helena, trying to decide “whether Madame Blavatsky really did, as I heard, possess the power of producing abnormal phenomena.” Nothing, he admitted, should have been simpler to ascertain, but after six weeks “the harvest of satisfaction I was enabled to obtain during this time was exceedingly small.”
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Of course she talked incessantly about the Brotherhood and favored the Sinnetts with a few demonstrations of raps, all of which were decidedly unspectacular. When Sinnett urged her to perform phenomena for scientists under test conditions, H.P.B. disdainfully refused, suggesting that the Brothers would regard such a feat as mere showing off.

Still, when Sinnett made it clear that he felt shortchanged, H.P.B. decided to toss one small scrap his way. In Benares, at the maharajah’s, they were sitting in the drawing room with Swami Dayananda and others after dinner and, Sinnett remembered, “suddenly three or four flowers— cut roses—fell in the midst of us.”53 Patience and Alfred were sufficiently impressed to become members of the Theosophical Society; the Swami, however, had only watched critically and next day, when Damodar asked him who had thrown the roses, Dayananda answered that it had not been Madame Blavatsky. Who? Damodar demanded. The Swami would say nothing more.

On December 30, learning of a train for Bombay whose second-class carriages were fitted with cushions, the Theosophists made their exit. At the station Helena realized she had left behind a shawl and angrily blamed it on Henry; her irrational anger, accompanied by a torrent of biting language, mortified the Sinnetts who were unaccustomed to public scenes and made their farewells with almost visible relief.

The first months of 1880 passed peacefully. Helena was busy editing the
Theosophist,
writing her series for Michael Katkov, for which she was being paid the elegant sum of fifty rubles, (five pounds in those days), per page, and translating Nikolay Grodekoff’s
Through Afghanistan,
which ran as a series in the
Pioneer.
Henry had more than enough to do lecturing and supervising the affairs of the burgeoning Society. It was again the hot season; sometimes after working all day and receiving visitors, they would stay up until 4 a.m to finish their tasks, having taken a midnight drive to get a breath of cool air. By this time Damodar was living with them. His family had made no objections, and, in fact, his father joined the Society and thought so highly of Madame that he would present her with a carriage and horse as a gift. Still, he did not take seriously his son’s ambition to become an adept, believing that once Damodar got this religion out of his system he would return to his normal life.

The view was shared by Damodar’s young wife, who had been married to him as a child but had seen little of him since he had encountered the Theosophists.

In March, H.P.B.’s peace was abruptly shattered by a severe, scornful letter from Swami Dayananda who enclosed his Theosophical Society diploma and ordered his name stricken from their membership rolls. Although the contents of his letter were never made public, the nature of his feelings were abundantly clear in subsequent public statements that referred to H.P.B. and Olcott as “atheists believing in spirits and witches.”
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H.P.B.’s chagrin at being unceremoniously dismissed by a man she had called an adept of her very own Brotherhood was overshadowed ten days later by the arrival of Emma and Alexis Coulomb. In the long run, the visit was to prove far more calamitous than the Swami’s animosity. The French consul at Galle, as well as other charitable persons, had taken up a collection for the Coulombs’ passages, and they arrived in Bombay on March 28 virtually penniless. As Emma recalled, they took a room at a seamy downtown hotel and had dinner, then in the evening caught a tram car to Girgaum Back Road. “As soon as Madame Blavatsky saw me she gave a loud cry of joy, and instantly asked us to take up our abode at the headquarters,”
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and she went on to report that they moved in the next day at noon. According to Henry, he agreed to let the couple stay at the house, but only until Alexis, a mechanic, could find work. In fact, Olcott went out of his way to secure for Alexis a machinist’s job in a cotton mill. But Alexis soon squabbled with the owner and was precipitously dismissed. “I found him a man very quick-tempered and hard to please in the matter of employers,” Henry said, “and as no other opening occurred, he and his wife just drifted along with us, without any definite plans as to the future.”
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Since Emma and Alexis were clearly trying to earn their keep, he did not fuss about two extra mouths to feed.

The Coulombs were a strange couple whose appearance and manner did not readily endear them to most people. After years of penury and ill health, Emma had become haggard and wrinkled, and she seems to have been habitually grim, undoubtedly as the result of worrying about their next meal. Alexis, with his glass eye, pasty complexion and black beard, was no more prepossessing and his propensity for surliness did little to lighten his nature. He assured H.P.B. that he was accomplished in carpentry, a rare skill in India, and could repair almost anything. Since Anglo-Indian residents were forever complaining about the shortage of European-trained handymen, it should have been easy for him to find work, but for some reason, he felt disinclined to look.

From the outset of their visit, Helena must have seen that Alexis was content to let his wife play the decision-making role. While treating Alexis with deference and kindness, she directed her amicable overtures toward Emma. After warning her not to talk about their lives in Cairo, she went out of her way to be hospitable and, in fact, seems actually to have enjoyed Emma’s company. Now that she was rarely even speaking to Rosa Bates, it was a comforting change to have a woman with whom she could gossip. Moreover, it occurred to her that the Coulombs might turn out to be extremely useful. One evening, Emma remembered, H.P.B. took her arm and said, “Look here, run and tell the colonel that you have seen a figure in the garden.”

“Where is the figure?” Emma asked.

“Never mind, run and tell him so. We shall have some fun.”

Emma did as she was told, but to her amazement the colonel took her seriously and declared that she had probably seen one of the Brothers. Emma professed to be as mystified by Madame’s contriving such a lie as by the colonel’s taking it for the truth. Nevertheless, she continued to perform similar services, including the embroidering of names on handkerchiefs, simply from an “earnest desire to please her in everything.”
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Temporarily reassured in the matter of Emma, Helena turned her attention to a trip that she and Henry had been considering for some time. Olcott had been corresponding with several Buddhist priests in Ceylon, who urged them to visit the island. There was much to do before their departure, including the readying of several advance issues of the
Theosophist,
and neither he nor H.P.B. had time to worry about the Coulombs. To save expenses, it was decided that H.P.B., Henry and Wimbridge would make the journey while Rosa and Emma remained behind to look after the house. “As Miss Bates was a spinster and Mme. Coulomb an experienced housewife,”
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Henry decided to make Emma officially responsible, although it seems reasonable to assume that it was H.P.B. who urged Rosa’s demotion in favor of Emma. Rosa, smoldering, said nothing. On May 7, when the travelers embarked on the SS
Ellora,
the party included not only Wimbridge but Babula, Damodar, and five other Hindu members of the Society.

The next months were among the most relaxed and gratifying that Madame would spend in the East. Everywhere they went, the Theosophists were greeted by enormous crowds and showered with gifts.

For three months we went from triumph to triumph—processions headed by Buddhist high priests and elephants—I rode a coffee-coloured one!— garlands and triumphal arches every ten steps along the road from one side of Ceylon to the other; women from the central provinces decked or rather
clothed
with a diamond necklace for only garment; processions of great Cingalese ladies dressed in the fashion of Dutch ladies of the Middle Ages coming to prostrate themselves before me.
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To H.P.B., who was only truly satisfied when being adored on a grand scale, “it was like a dream!”
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At a temple in Galle, on May 25, Helena and Olcott formally became Buddhists, a rather odd step for two people who had heretofore presented themselves as staunch Hindus. This formal and flamboyant rejection of Christianity by two Europeans received wide publicity, which may account for the enthusiastic reception they received from the flattered Cingalese. During their stay, seven branches of the Theosophical Society were organized, and Henry encouraged the Buddhists to establish their own denominational schools.