Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (42 page)

Their return to India was marked by a rough passage during which almost all of the party were miserably seasick. In his diary Olcott noted that during the trip Helena had gained eight pounds, bringing her to 237 pounds, while he shed 15 pounds and Damodar was down to 90. “It rained cats and dogs on the last day of our return voyage,”
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Henry also recorded, but the downpour was mild compared to the storm waiting for them at home: “Arriving house found a hell of a row on the carpet between Dame Coulomb and Spin. Bates.”
⁶²
Dagger drawn, Rosa said that Emma had tried to poison her and truculently demanded that both Emma and Alexis be expelled from the house at once; Emma, of course, denied everything. Charges and counter-charges flew thickly back and forth as Olcott tried to arbitrate the quarrel and H.P.B., furiously chain-smoking, threw in an occasional incendiary remark that caused tempers to sputter and blaze. Wimbridge managed to help Henry negotiate a temporary cease-fire, and everyone went to bed exhausted.

The squabble could not have come as a surprise to Helena because she had been hearing snatches of it all summer. Rosa, furious that a newcomer should have been given charge of the household, as well as being made editor of the
Theosophist,
had called Emma a meddler. Emma had been the first to agree, but H.P.B. assured her that she was nothing of the kind. “You are one of my ‘Assistant Secretaries,’ “ she had written on June 16. “You are my friend— and that is more.”
⁶³

For two weeks the battle raged, with H.P.B. taking her friend’s side, Wimbridge supporting Rosa, and Olcott teetering helplessly in the middle but growing angrier every day. He had begged Helena not to bring Rosa to India, but she had bullied him into it and in the end he had yielded to “her presumably superior occult foresight.” Now, through no fault of his own, he “had to assume the disagreeable task of forcing Miss Bates out of the Society. This was always my lot: H.P.B. made the rows and I had to take the kicks and clear out the intruders.”
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He suggested that the Society purchase Rosa a steamship ticket to New York; at first she agreed and the booking was made, but she changed her mind. Within a few days H.P.B. and Henry had abandoned the dining room to Wimbridge and Bates and began eating their meals in H.P.B.’s room. “Hell of an explosion between Rosa and us,” Henry told his diary on August 6. “This settles her hash; she must go.”
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The situation grew steadily worse until none of the household was on speaking terms; Wimbridge and Bates moved their belongings into a separate section of the bungalow and actually bricked up the connecting doorway. The tension grew so deadly that it began to affect Helena’s health and Olcott recalled that she “fretted herself into a fever.”
⁶⁶

It was not only the feud that agitated her. During Helena’s and Henry’s absence, many of their new members had either lost interest in the Society or resigned, and she had also been greatly shocked to learn of Moolji Thackersey’s unexpected death. After their remarkable success in Ceylon, it did not seem possible that the Society could lose ground, but that was precisely what appeared to be happening. She had crossed off the Society in the United States; Judge had enough trouble supporting himself and Ella on his legal earnings and had sent Madame letters to this effect, but she had no encouragement to give him. A few months earlier, she had written to a French correspondent that “at Lhasa, in Tibet, another branch is being formed under the direction of initiated Lamas. Within a few years you will see how our Society will be honored and sought after.”
⁶⁷
Of course she had yet to meet a Tibetan lama. She had felt certain that the Society would continue to expand; now, she was suddenly plunged into a fit of doubt. She drew closer to Henry, for he had the knack of pretending cheerfulness he did not feel, and together they commiserated over this kitchen row. It was pitifully childish and not worth brooding over; it would pass like a summer cloud.

On August 12, Wimbridge and Rosa left the house at last. Sometime before the separation, Olcott had used his personal influence with a Parsi friend to obtain capital so that Wimbridge might establish a furniture and interior decoration business. It was not as if he and Rosa were going off to starve, but still, H.P.B. was shaken by this transformation of old friends into enemies. She also felt that her charity in “boarding, lodging, washing, and in many instances CLOTHING Mr. Wimbridge and Miss Bates for over 18 months”
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was being ill repaid.

As it happened, on the very morning that the enemy decamped, she and Henry received an invitation to visit the Sinnetts at Simla. The letter, Olcott remembered, “was like a draught of sweet water,”
⁶⁹
and Helena, too impatient to wait on the mails, rushed to telegraph their acceptance. Nervous depression suddenly gone, she rattled joyfully about the house, then dragged Olcott with her to purchase a new outfit for her “debut” in the British summer capital.

She would have set out for Simla the very next day, but there was still work to be done: upcoming issues of the magazine, which Damodar would supervise, had to be finalized, and Emma, who would be left in charge of the house, had to be given her instructions. As a result of the recent imbroglio, the balance of power between Helena and the Coulombs had shifted dramatically. Thanks to H.P.B.’s sacrifice of Wimbridge and Rosa, Emma had been saved from becoming a charity case; Emma and Alexis were more than aware of what they now owed Madame.

Around this time, Helena moved the couple into a bedroom directly above Henry’s office. On the twenty-third of August, when she was expecting a visit from the distinguished Dewan Sankariah of Cochin, she came to Emma’s room to ask her to saw a hole in the floor, pointing out exactly where it should be made. The task completed, it was now possible for Emma to slide the entire length of her arm through the hole until it touched the ceiling cloth (used in India to prevent spiders and insects from dropping down one’s neck) in the colonel’s office. On Madame’s instructions, Emma cut a slit in the cloth that was wide enough to slip an envelope through. During the meeting with the Dewan, Henry was startled to see an envelope fall through the air and whack a tin box on his desk. Opening it, he found a portrait of a yogi; he had last owned it in New York and believed it lost. A few moments later, a portrait of Swami Dayananda sailed down. As Helena had hoped, the Dewan was wide-eyed with astonishment.

Later, Emma felt sheepish about her deception of Colonel Olcott; she justified her actions by saying that Madame 

told me that she did these things to divert the Colonel’s mind from certain painful occurrences that he had experienced while in America, and that if she had not got over him by these means he certainly would have destroyed himself, and also she added that she had prevented him from doing so by climbing through a window into his room when she found him with a revolver in his hands, ready to commit suicide.
⁷⁰

If the thought of Madame Blavatsky hauling her 237 pounds through a window made Emma smile, she managed to suppress her amusement; for all she knew the seemingly amicable colonel might very well be secretly contemplating suicide. At that point, Emma’s livelihood depended on the Madame, and pushing letters through ceiling clothes seemed a trivial price to pay. A few days later, when Helena brought her three handkerchiefs and some blue silk, Emma embroidered “A. P. Sinnett” on each of them and did not even bother to ask for explanations.

II

The Mahatmas

On August 27, H.P.B. left Bombay on the evening mail train with Henry and Babula. They stopped briefly in Allahabad and then took another train to Meerut, where they planned to try to patch up their differences with Swami Dayananda. The heat was almost unbearable, and Helena sweated as Henry debated with Dayananda, mainly about the powers of yogis, prodding the Swami about H.P.B., without mentioning her by name. Was it possible, he asked, for a person to possess occult powers and perform supernatural phenomena without having submitted to the disciplines of yoga? Only, the Swami answered carefully, if they had practiced Hatha Yoga in a previous lifetime. Satisfied, Henry changed the subject.

Once again, Helena felt shut out. On one occasion, she seems to have got close enough to the Swami for a brief conversation about Buddhist and Brahmanist literature. The knowledge that Western scholars had of Eastern religion, said the Swami, amounted to rejected snippets from the sacred books; the
mlecchas
(foreigners) knew nothing about it and, furthermore, would have a long wait for enlightenment. The true ancient literature was not lost to the world but hidden in secret crypts in the Himalayas. Storing away this interesting idea, Helena occupied herself writing letters to the
Times of India
and the
Indian Mirror
in an effort to counteract the vicious gossip that the dismissed Wimbridge had been blabbing to the press. If Helena had counted on her former friend dropping quietly out of sight, she was very much mistaken, for he seemed to take pleasure in denigrating both the Society and Madame. “Brotherhood and justice,” Wimbridge charged, “are mere
ideas
in the Theosophical Society.”
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In his opinion, it was this hypocrisy which accounted for the flood of recent resignations. Indeed, he went on, more members would have resigned if not for H.P.B.’s “hasty flight to Simla.” Although the article was not without some validity, Helena, when she pasted the clipping in her scrapbook, sprinkled the margins with comments such as “three
lies
in six lines,” “the biggest fib,” and so forth. The Theosophical quarrel, she pointed out to the
Indian Mirror,
was “a purely personal and domestic variance having no bearing whatever upon the question of Theosophy and of no importance to the public.”
⁷²

In Allahabad she bought an embroidered white cotton cap for Damodar but mailed it instead to Emma with a note: “Manage in such a way so that Damodar may find this white cap somewhere without knowing where it comes from.”
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The boy would think it from a Brother, which would please him much more than any gift from her. Although Emma found the deception childish she followed instructions “because by complying with Madame’s wish in these trifles it kept her in good humour.”
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After a week at Allahabad, H.P.B. could no longer tolerate the Swami or the weather. On the sixth of September, after a wretched sweltering night, she barged into Henry’s room and insisted they start for Simla at once; then she marched off to wire Sinnett of their expected arrival time. Henry, who had scheduled a lecture that evening, for once refused her, and finally, she was obliged to send the Sinnetts a second telegram countermanding the first. That night her bed was placed out of doors and covered with a large mosquito net, and she slept soundly for the first time in a week. The next day, they finally managed to depart by carriage.

In the late afternoon they stopped to visit Indian friends at Umballa, but at eleven that evening decided to keep going. In a
dak-gharry,
a wooden litter on wheels, they drove all night up the mountain road into the foothills of the Himalayas, and the next morning, sleepless but excited, stopped for a five-hour rest at Kalka, an exceedingly ugly mud and stone village perched on a lower spur of the mountains. From there, like everyone else heading up the fifty-mile incline to Simla, they settled in for a perilous ride in a
tonga,
a low, two-wheeled spring cart hung very low, with the footboards only a few inches above the road, certainly a most uncomfortable conveyance for a person of Helena’s bulk. A
tonga
had the notable advantage of maintaining speed up steep gradients, but the passengers were frightfully jolted and sometimes had been known to capsize on the hairpin turns. Even the most phlegmatic of Britons accepted the
tonga
ride with dogged despair, but Helena went further, taking out her fears on the driver, and reeling off a stream of curses at him, at the ponies and at his earsplitting safety horn. Henry simply ignored her and enjoyed the breathtaking scenery.

Just before sunset, as they came in sight of Simla, they saw one of Sinnett’s servants waiting with
jampans,
those sedan chairs suspended from long poles and carried on the shoulders of coolies. At a height of 7,000 feet, peak-encircled Simla was Anglo-India’s summer capital, the seat of the government for five or six months of the year, and the gayest, most cosmopolitan town in the country during the season. Surrounded by solemn forests of deodar and keloo pine, Simla’s hillsides were enameled with wild geraniums, hill anemones, and columbine that peeped out from among ferns and feathery mosses; towering above the town loomed Mount Jakko, which at night seemed to almost shoulder the stars. In September, when the weather was often moist and cloudy, the hills were enveloped in mist, but in clear weather amber-tinged clouds curled up in fleecy bundles and hung on the brow of the hills. Simla’s lower bazaar was a crowded rabbit warren abounding in shops where everything conceivable could be bought or rented for the season. Farther up were the homes of the civil servants, wooden houses leased for half the year, veranda connecting with veranda. Later Rudyard Kipling, in
Kim,
would provide a memorable description of Simla with its “pretty ladies’ rickshaws, curio vendors, priests, pickpockets and native employees to the Government— here are discussed by courtesans the things which are supposed to be the profoundest secrets of the India Council.”
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