Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (65 page)

When Helena reappeared in London in the fall, Isabel and Alfred were quick to offer both sympathy and their house in Kensington. Although grateful for the hospitality, Helena found Isabel’s somewhat masculine face unattractive and her dressing style—for instance, a silk polka-dot dress adorned with a gold swastika, a cameo brooch and a feather boa flung over one shoulder— excessive. “Alf,” who attracted Madame even less, was a chronically gloomy insomniac, addicted to sleeping remedies, who emitted exclusively gray vibrations. H.P.B. thought of him as “a man whose soul is filled with the scum falling from other people’s wicked souls, with the puss
[sic]
exuding from other people’s wounds.”
¹¹⁶
Nevertheless she resolved to ignore the couple’s defects for reasons of expediency. Less than a week after H.P.B. had arrived in Kensington, the Cooper-Oakleys suddenly became her staunch defenders, even disciples, and vowed they were ready to set out for India. “They have even sold their house,” Helena wrote Solovyov, “and are going with me either to conquer the foe together or to die.... Think what devotion! You see they have broken up their whole career.”
¹¹⁷
Helena had always appreciated, if not respected, those people who broke up their lives for her sake.

“Things are getting dark and hazy,”
¹¹⁸
she warned Alfred Sinnett, but, in actuality, she was beginning to see the light for the first time in weeks. With the Cooper-Oakleys at her side, she no longer had to worry about making the long sea voyage alone, so she decided to stop in Cairo and do a little detective work on the Coulombs. Since Emma had seen fit to broadcast her secrets to the world, she would see what skeletons were rattling around the Coulomb closet. Why, she wondered, had they left Egypt so suddenly? If Alexis’s father had left his children a respectable fortune as well as a prosperous business, the Hotel d’Orient, why had his son become a penniless bum? H.P.B. determined to discover the reason and then to “show up these rascals.”
¹¹⁹

Having rallied her strength, H.P.B. re-examined her most immediate enemies, namely Alfred Sinnett, who had dissociated himself from Koot Hoomi’s recent correspondence on the grounds of triteness. Annoyed beyond words, H.P.B. decided that the Master would have to cease corresponding with Sinnett, and it fell to K.H. himself gently to announce the cessation of their relationship. The reason given was that H.P.B. no longer had the psychic stamina to transmit letters. Sinnett responded by calling the letter absurd and claiming that H.P.B. had concocted it; this letter provoked another letter from Master Morya, assuring Alfred that while Koot Hoomi could no longer use H.P.B. as a channel, it might in time be possible to find another transmitter. Helena, totally disgusted with Alfred, had to admit she much preferred Olcott who generally “behaved like an ass, utterly devoid of tact,”
¹²⁰
but who at least possessed a few redeeming qualities, chiefly obedience and humility.

During the weeks in London, while making arrangements for her steamer passage, Helena received a piece of news that displeased her intensely: the Society for Psychical Research had taken oral testimony from the Theosophists and was writing a mildly favorable report, even though some of its members had no great faith in Madame’s miracles. However, wrote Frank Podmore, once her letters had appeared in the
Christian College Magazine,
“it seemed desirable to us that a fuller investigation should be made on the spot”;
¹²¹
if the letters were genuine, the Theosophists must be viewed in an entirely different light. As the S.P.R. had no funds to undertake a large-scale inquiry, one of its wealthy founders, Henry Sidgwick, offered to underwrite personally the expense of sending an investigator to India.

Officially Helena took no note of the S.P.R.’s newly-enhanced investigation. However, she wrote Solovyov that, while the world seemed upside down to her, “the battle is beginning and it is for life and death,”
¹²²
without mentioning a word about the psychists. With an eye to her public relations, she agreed to give an exclusive interview to the
Pall Mall Gazette,
in which she would reveal for the first time the true story behind the Coulomb scandal. “The whole story,” she began, “is very simple. Madame Coulomb was a woman whom I had befriended, and whose avarice I had checked.”
¹²³
Helena, in the
Gazette
version, reported she had foreborne Emma’s unpleasant habits out of deference to Colonel Olcott, who believed utterly in her sincerity. The shrine, about which the reporter seemed most curious, was “nothing but a box in which we place our letters to our Masters,”
¹²⁴
but it was far from essential to the Mahatma letters, which were received by persons all over the world. The letters themselves? Forgeries, with the exception of one, written from Suez in March, “and it contains absolutely nothing in which the most suspicious could detect fraud.”
¹²⁵

It was in this interview that H.P.B. first took the position from which she would never deviate, that Emma had mixed genuine passages with forged excerpts describing fraudulent activities, and had either recopied them in H.P.B.’s handwriting or had somehow spliced them together. While her supporters professed to see the logic in this, others came away puzzled at exactly how it had been done. Arthur Liilie wondered, “How could a piece of paper be found with watermarks, etc., corresponding exactly with those of the letter altered, and how could two pieces of paper be spliced together so as to avoid detection?”
¹²⁶
And why had Emma spent years as a low-paid housekeeper at Adyar when she possessed this remarkable talent? The
Pall Mall Gazette
reporter apparently neglected to press Helena on this point, merely inquiring what effect the alleged revelations were having on the Theosophical Society. She replied with an understated informality that one has to admire: “At first it created some uneasiness among those who did not know the Coulombs and whose faith was weak; as soon, however, as the full details of the so-called revelation reached us we exploded with laughter; the fraud was too silly to deceive anyone...”
¹²⁷
She was returning to India, she declared, to prosecute the Coulombs.

In the last week of October, a few days before her departure, Helena’s attention was drawn to a man who seemed to keep popping up in various Theosophical homes and meetings, never opening his mouth but never taking his eyes off her. She learned his name was Charles W. Leadbeater, which seemed familiar, and that he was a member of the Society as well as an Anglican clergyman. Almost at once, Helena remembered where she had heard his name: months earlier, her medium friend William Eglinton had forwarded to her a letter that Leadbeater had written to Master Koot Hoomi; at the time, embroiled in the daily dispatches from Adyar, she had not gotten around to answering Koot Hoomi’s fan mail. Now she recalled Leadbeater’s earnest wish to become a pupil of K.H.’s and his fervent hope that it would be possible to waive the seven-year Indian probationary period. Could it perhaps be done in Bramshott parish, England, he had asked, where he happened to be employed as a curate? In closing, he had begged the Mahatma’s pardon for requesting shortcuts.

Helena could not know then that Leadbeater would become a power in the Theosophical Society. What she saw was an awe-struck clergyman who impressed her as an ass; nonetheless he might just be a useful ass. What a blow it would be to the Madras missionaries if she railroaded an ordained priest of the Church of England into giving up his religion and his career for the Society. Then too, she felt far from secure about traveling with the Cooper-Oakleys who might not care to cater to her whims. Leadbeater appeared to be a strong, healthy fellow, tiresome but dependable, and could be relied upon to take charge of the most bothersome of traveling details. It was time for Koot Hoomi to catch up on his unanswered correspondence.

Thirty-seven-year-old Charles Webster Leadbeater, “a village curate out on a bust,”
¹²⁸
as Henry Olcott would describe him, had been fascinated by the occult since childhood. Little is known of his early life except that as a boy he accompanied his father, a railway contractor, to Brazil and led a life of hair-raising adventure. According to Leadbeater, his father “was killed by rebels, refusing to trample on the Cross, and he himself endured horrible torture and was tied to a tree at night; he felt arms come around him, his father’s arms, and his bonds were cut and he was carried away by him and a Negro servant, who loved him.”
¹²⁹

After returning to England, Leadbeater entered Oxford, left when the family’s fortune failed, and finally succeeded in taking holy orders in 1878, after which he became a curate of St. Mary’s, Bramshott, Hampshire, where his uncle was rector. It was in his seminary days that his homosexual tendencies first emerged; he learned to masturbate and probably became a practicing homosexual, although it was not until later, at St. Mary’s, that his interest in young boys became obvious.

A tall, large-boned man, Leadbeater is said to have had a peculiar walk and a drawling parsonic voice. “His only unpleasant feature,” an observer commented, “was a pair of very long yellow eye-teeth that invariably brought vampires to mind.”
¹³⁰
His contempt for women was noticeable, as was his charming manner with children, who invariably adored him. He lived at Hartford cottage first with his mother and then, after her death, with the parish’s other curate and a tabby named Peter. Leadbeater played tennis, watched the stars through a twelve-inch telescope, and organized a club for parish boys over ten. As one of the boys, James Matley, would remember, “it was a club in which you promised not to be cruel to any creature”;
¹³¹
they sang, told stories and Leadbeater provided refreshments in the form of cake, fruit and nuts.

On occasion he liked to travel to London, to take in a show, but the city’s main attraction was its mediums. He was strongly drawn to Spiritualism and seances, and through them, to Theosophy. After reading Alfred Sinnett’s two books, he applied for admission to the Society in 1883. At first Sinnett seemed reluctant to have him and Leadbeater recalled him saying “that would hardly do seeing that I was a clergyman.”
¹³²
After that, when Leadbeater made the fifty-mile trip to London every week for meetings, Sinnett issued a standing invitation to dine and spend the night.

When Leadbeater first glimpsed Madame Blavatsky during her surprise entrance, he said nothing about his letter to Koot Hoomi; indeed, he had been too awed to speak at all. Besides, it had never occurred to him that H.P.B. might know the contents of a letter addressed to Tibet. That summer he took James Matley and his brother Frank for a month’s holiday at Ramsgate, then in the fall resumed his regular routines at St. Mary’s. He had not forgotten his letter to Koot Hoomi, but by this time he had stopped looking for a reply.

On the morning of October 31, having come up to London for Madame Blavatsky’s farewell party and stayed overnight at the Sinnetts, he took the 11:35 train from Waterloo Station and arrived at Bramshott about 1 p.m. Koot Hoomi’s answer was waiting for him. Posted October 30 from H.P.B.’s own neighborhood, Kensington, the envelope appeared to have been hastily addressed. The stamp was misplaced and glued on upside down: the Mahatma had started to write
England
but had crossed out the capital E and wrote below it the word
Hants,
a postal contraction for Hampshire. Koot Hoomi told Leadbeater that it was not necessary to spend seven years in India, for a
chela
could pass them anywhere, but it would be worthwhile for him to spend a few months at Adyar. “Our cause needs missionaries, devotees, agents, even martyrs perhaps.”
¹³³
With that last phrase, H.P.B. had unerringly hit upon exactly the right words, for Leadbeater had a secret passion for martyrdom. Hurrying to the station, he caught the 3:56 train back to London.

That evening Helena was preparing to attend her final farewell gathering. The next morning she would depart for Liverpool to board the SS
Clan Drummond,
and she was ready to go. In the midst of her preparations, a delirious Charles Leadbeater rapped at her door. He had just received a letter from Master Koot Hoomi, he told her, but unfortunately had no idea of how to send a reply. Reading the letter, she asked him what he wished to tell Koot Hoomi. That it would be impossible for him to spend three months at Adyar and then return to St. Mary’s, he said, “but that I was perfectly ready to throw up that work altogether and to devote my life absolutely to His Service.”

Madame Blavatsky greeted Leadbeater’s announcement with indifference. She did, however, make a point of not allowing him out of her sight, “even making me accompany her into the bedroom when she went to put on her hat,” he recalled, and standing with him at the curb while he whistled for a hansom cab. During the ride he felt horribly self-conscious, both from the honor of riding with her and also because “I was crushed sideways into a tiny corner of the seat, while her huge bulk weighted down her side of the vehicle, so that the springs were grinding all through the journey.”

Late that night, H.P.B. was seated in an easy chair near the fireplace, rolling a cigarette, when her hand suddenly jerked toward the fire; less than a second later a square of folded paper materialized in her palm. Matter-of-factly she handed it to Leadbeater: “There is your answer.” Koot Hoomi did not bother to beat about the bush:

The sooner you go the better. Do not lose one more day than you can help. Sail on the 5th, if possible. Join Upasika at Alexandria. Let no one know that you are going, and may the blessing of our Lord and my poor blessing shield you from every evil in your new life.