Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (66 page)

Greeting to you,
my new chela.

K.H.

Leadbeater failed to question how the Mahatma, who lived in Tibet, could be familiar with the steamship routes to India. Neither did he hesitate to obey the Master’s troublesome command that he leave England in the next four days.

As she left for Liverpool, Helena delivered her last words to Leadbeater, and they emerged a chilly “See that you do not fail me,” rather than a warm farewell. Koot Hoomi’s new chela spent the day “bustling around to steamer offices trying to obtain a passage for myself,”
¹³⁴
but he discovered that the November fifth boat K.H. had recommended was already filled up. More disconcertingly, he learned that the only vessel sailing to Alexandria that arrived by the fifth of November was the SS
Erymanthe,
embarking from Marseilles the night of the fourth.

For the next four days, Leadbeater rushed madly around packing his telescope and books and buying tropical clothing. On the evening of November 3, he put on a promised fireworks display for his church before quietly stealing away, having not been to bed for four days and also having failed to notify his superiors that he was leaving his position. Only to his boys did he make a whispered farewell before boarding the train to Marseilles.

A breathless Leadbeater finally caught up with Madame Blavatsky at Port Said, having lost five days due to a cholera quarantine at Alexandria. When he arrived at the hotel, he found her sitting on the veranda with Isabel Cooper-Oakley. “Well, Leadbeater,” she offered quietly, “so you have really come in spite of all difficulties.” When he answered that of course he had because he always kept his promises, she gruffly remarked, “Good for you,”
¹³⁵
and immediately turned her attention back to Isabel.

As the Cooper-Oakleys were already beginning to discover, traveling with H.P.B. was a unique experience, and those two weeks aboard the
Clan Drummond
had been enough to deflate anybody. With customary irascibility, H.P.B. had declared the steamer to be a rolling washtub, the steward “an infamy,”
¹³⁶
and the galley hands part of a conspiracy to starve her. Considering .that she weighed-in at two hundred forty-five pounds, such a conspiracy could only work in her best interests.

The party that gathered at Port Said on November 17 expected to spend a quiet few days until they boarded a steamer for Ceylon. Some years earlier the town had a well-deserved reputation for international crime, and travelers walked its streets after dark at their own risk. Now that gendarmes patrolled regularly, there were few serious disturbances lying in wait for tourists. Neither the Cooper-Oakleys nor Leadbeater had ever visited the Middle East, and all were anxious to tour the Arab bazaars and dine on the rock fish and salmon for which Port Said was famous. Most of all Leadbeater wanted a good night’s sleep in a proper bed; he engaged a room, but would not have long to use it, for “Madame Blavatsky had one of those sudden flashes of inspiration which so frequently came to her from the inner side of things.”
¹³⁷
Instead of waiting for the Ceylon steamer, they were to leave immediately for Cairo. It was not her idea, indeed she felt somewhat annoyed about it, but the Masters had ordered her there to obtain information about the Coulombs. This was flagrant nonsense; she had been planning to stop at Cairo all along, had even pulled a few strings to get letters of introduction to the Egyptian prime minister, Nubar Pasha, and to the Russian consul. For inexplicable reasons, she chose not to share this information with her traveling companions.

They must leave at once, she declared, that very evening, in fact. As there was no railroad between Port Said and Cairo, they would be forced to take a tugboat down the Suez Canal as far as Ismailia, where then they would transfer to a train bound for the capital. The khedive’s packet-boat, departing Port Said at midnight each evening and arriving at Ismailia in early morning, was the dirtiest and least convenient craft to which Leadbeater had ever been exposed. A ten-foot-square hutch in the stern passed for a cabin, inside of which was a windowless cupboard labeled
ladies room.
Actually, it was hardly a room at all, since, once the door was closed, it was totally dark. H.P.B. requisitioned the “ladies room” for herself and shut the door; a grumbling Alfred Cooper-Oakley, who had not yet adjusted to the sudden change in plans, threw himself down on a wooden bench and fell asleep. When Isabel and Charles noticed “the army of enormous cockroaches which was already in full possession of both cabins” and which instantly swarmed over the sleeping Alfred, they promptly retreated outside to the deck. Looking back on that night, Leadbeater recalled that Mrs. Cooper-Oakley, “who was a particularly fastidious person in ordinary life, was somewhat depressed,” but he did his best to comfort her with glowing pictures of the beauty awaiting them at Adyar.

Suddenly the night stillness was shattered by “pitiable cries from Madame Blavatsky in her cupboard. Mrs. Oakley at once dashed in bravely, facing the insect plague with only a momentary shudder,” and as Leadbeater put it delicately, found Madame “vehemently demanding conveniences which on that squalid little tug-boat simply did not exist.” Fortunately the captain agreed to stop at the next village so that Madame could find a toilet, but it turned out that there was no gangway or wharf, only a plank about a foot wide. Oakley and Leadbeater carried Helena down the plank and afterward back up again, an experience that Leadbeater described as “nervous work” because “Madame Blavatsky’s language on that occasion was more conspicuous for strength than suavity.” Finally, with H.P.B. stowed in her cubbyhole once more, the tug continued on its way.

Next morning, after stopping for breakfast at a hotel, they moved on to Cairo by rail. By now, nerves were beginning to fray, and the travelers sat in the four corners of the compartment glowering at one another. H.P.B. kept up a steady stream of insults about enfeebled European occultists who fell apart at the first bit of inconvenience. Obviously she wanted to provoke a reaction but nobody responded; Alfred merely stared at her with the resigned expression of an early Christian martyr while Isabel, “with a face of ever-increasing horror,” wept profusely. Finally Helena brought out a book and began to read, no easy task owing to the clouds of desert dust pouring through the open window and coating the pages. When Alfred made a motion as if to close the window, Helena pinned him to his seat with a scornful look.

“You don’t mind a little dust, do you?” she barked.

He shrank back against the seat like a snail retreating into its shell.

Leadbeater found the dust “rather trying, but after that one remark we thought it best to suffer in silence.” For the rest of the journey he watched with fascinated horror as Isabel’s feather boa slowly turned into “a solid rope of sand, the feathers being indistinguishable.”
¹³⁸

At Cairo, Alfred and Charles saw the mounds of luggage safely piled into a carriage and set off for Shepheard’s, the great hotel at which English visitors invariably stopped; Helena herself had stayed there in 1851 on her previous visit to Cairo. In the lobby, however, thirty or forty other Britons were milling about trying to get accommodations. “Our luggage,” wrote Leadbeater, “of which we had a considerable amount, had been piled upon the floor in the middle of the hall; and Madame Blavatsky sat upon it, while Mr. Oakley was trying to fight his way through the crowd to the clerk’s desk in order to engage rooms for us.” But the minute Helena saw him fighting his way back, she sprang up and shouted to him that they could not stay at Shepheard’s after all, but were to move over to the Hotel d’Orient, once owned by Alexis Coulomb’s family. “Poor Mr. Oakley had to go back and countermand the rooms which he had engaged,”
¹³⁹
Leadbeater wrote, and one can imagine that by this time Oakley was wishing he had never laid eyes on Madame.

During her ten days in Cairo, H.P.B. enjoyed herself enormously, playing to the hilt the role of the visiting empress. The Hotel d’Orient on Ezbekieh Square, if not so fashionable as Shepheard’s, proved more than comfortable, and she had a pleasant room overlooking the garden. To her delight, the Russian consul, M. Hitrovo, sent her a bouquet of flowers every morning and treated her as a true descendant of the Dolgorukov princes. “You cannot imagine,” she raved to Vera, “how much was made of me. As soon as Hitrovo learned that I had arrived, he invited us to his house and immediately began all sorts of dinners, lunches, picnics, till the sky was very hot.” For several pages she went on name-dropping and gossiping in the inimitable style she employed for letters to her family: the prime minister’s wife was “a real
grand dame”
the viceroy’s wife “positively a beauty, a most charming face, but it is a pity she is too stout.”
¹⁴⁰

From the owner of the d’Orient, M. Fortune, she learned a great deal of interesting gossip about the Coulombs, nearly all of it hearsay from a man who had been at odds with them for some time before their departure for India. Apparently Coulomb, Senior, had left the hotel and a respectable fortune to his children, who had promptly run the business into bankruptcy; Fortune also told H.P.B. that Emma Cutting, whom he recalled as “more mischievous than mischief itself,”
¹⁴¹
had wormed her way into the affections both of Alexis’s mother and of Alexis himself. No doubt Fortune’s recollections of Emma were colored by the fact that as an employee of the hotel in the 1870s, he had been dismissed at her instigation. Leaping on these few scraps, H.P.B. immediately enhanced them: Now the Coulombs were “fraudulent bankrupts who had decamped on the sly by night and had several times been in prison for slander.”
¹⁴²
As she wrote Vsevolod Solovyov, Emma “is a well-known charlatan and ‘sorceress’ who revealed buried treasure for money, and was caught red-handed... The French consul gave me official authority to hang them (!) and entrusted me with power of attorney to get 22,000 francs from them.”
¹⁴³

The French consul had done no such thing, but Helena must have reasoned that it would reassure Olcott, to whom she cabled: “Success complete. Outlaws. Legal proofs. Sail Colombo. Navarino.”
¹⁴⁴
Her legal proofs consisted of nothing more than written statements from Fortune and several other disgruntled ex-employees of the Coulombs, which, as Olcott subsequently pointed out, would scarcely stand up in court. Still optimistic, H.P.B. believed herself fortified for whatever ordeals awaited her at home. When Henry cabled back that Helena was to return to India at once, she wound up her visit with a sightseeing trip to the Boulak Museum. She introduced herself to the curator, and spent two pounds on a tiny bottle of attar of roses, minimizing her extravagance by saying that she planned to use it to perfume the shrine at Adyar. She was not aware that Judge and Hartmann had destroyed the shrine, nor that Henry had subsequently gutted the Occult Room.

At Suez she waited two days for the SS
Navarino.
Once aboard, she found to her annoyance that her sailing companions included “a party of eight disgusting missionaries,”
¹⁴⁵
who happened to have with them copies of the
Christian College Magazine,
and who would spend the next two weeks baiting her. Isabel recalled that “every insulting remark that could be made about H.P.B. was heard,” adding that she had found the voyage “very unpleasant.”
¹⁴⁶
More accustomed to abuse, H.P.B. dismissed the missionaries’ jibes as mere cackling. “I looked at them as an elephant looks at a pug-dog,” she said, “and got my own restlessness calmed down.”
¹⁴⁷

If Isabel found the voyage unpleasant, Leadbeater thought it excruciating: Madame was making a point of testing his loyalty. A bashful person, he had the average Englishman’s horror of appearing conspicuous or ridiculous. One of the first tasks Helena set him was to carry her full chamber pot along the main passenger deck in broad daylight. By the time they dropped anchor in Colombo, Ceylon, he could say that “I had reached a stage in which I was absolutely hardened to ridicule and did not care in the slightest degree what anybody thought of me.”
¹⁴⁸

Olcott and a party of Theosophists were on hand to greet the arrivals. During the two-day wait before the
Navarino
continued on to Madras, Helena provided Charles Leadbeater with a challenge considerably more serious than making him parade her excrement on the ship’s deck. Reminding him that on their first trip to Ceylon, she and Olcott had formally professed themselves Buddhists, she asked him if he would be willing to follow their example. She warned that the decision was his, but felt that his openly accepting Buddhism might make him far more useful in his work for the Mahatmas. When Leadbeater agreed on the condition that he need not abjure the Christian faith, she assured him that there was no incompatibility between Buddhism and
true
Christianity, only the counterfeit being preached by the missionaries, whereupon Leadbeater was presented to High Priest Sumangala and given
pansil.

Arriving in Madras on the twenty-first of December with her confidence high and her psyche in fighting strength, H.P.B. found waiting on the pier a student delegation from Pachiappa’s College and the Indian approximation of a brass band, “weird Indian musical instruments,”
¹⁴⁹
as Leadbeater called them. Along the pier ran a tramway-line with a single primitive car to which a dozen of the more enthusiastic students had harnessed themselves, insisting that they be allowed to tow H.P.B. and her party to shore. Isabel retained the “quaint” impression of “masses of smiling dark faces”
¹⁵⁰
and paper roses festooning the tramcar. Leadbeater recalled that