Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (70 page)

Initially she found Torre del Greco perversely suited to her mood and felt that “here in loneliness and quiet on the slopes of Vesuvius I must either recover—or die.”
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On the day of her arrival, she sent a dramatic letter to Vsevolod Solovyov in Paris urging him to come quickly as she was sure to die any day and she had many things to tell him “before I go off.” Besides, he would like the town for “the view is marvellous, the air healthy, and the living ‘cheaper than stewed turnips.’”
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At the same time, she sent a report of her new home to Henry, whom she addressed icily as “My dear Colonel Olcott”: she was sitting in a damp room on the side of Vesuvius with her feet resting on an uncarpeted stone floor, in a country where stoves were apparently unknown and arctic air whistled under doors and through windows. While she understood perfectly that he had sent her away to die and that he had no money for better accommodations or for frivolities such as carpets, would he please ship her the old carpet from Bombay so that she might cut it into two pieces. Otherwise she could see no way of avoiding another attack of gout.

It was unseasonably chilly for April, and she proved accurate in predicting a worsening of the gout; by the end of May, when the weather was still freezing, her right hand had swollen until she had trouble holding a pen. Not only was she physically uncomfortable but she shivered from the chill of a crushing emotional abandonment. Increasingly obsessed with Henry’s treachery, she knew she could never forgive his cruel taunts at Adyar; as for the rest of them, the Cooper-Oakleys and Subba Row and Hartmann, they made her churn with disgust. “My heart is broken—physically and morally,” not by her enemies whose persecutions she could have borne, but by selfish, weak-hearted friends who believed in her guilt yet were eager to lie on her behalf “since I was a convenient step to rise upon.” Human nature, for which she had no high regard anyway, had never seemed so obscene. Nevertheless, “with most of them, I shall remain on good terms to my dying day. Nor shall I allow them to suspect I read through them from the first.”
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She would not give them the pleasure of revealing how much she hated them, but asked only “to be left to die like a mangy dog, quietly and alone in my corner.”
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She continued to shoot off a stream of angry letters to Henry, accusing him of cowardice and demanding that he remove her name from the
Theosophist.
When he replied that her letters hurt him, she responded with a half-hearted apology. Looking back only a year to the days when Theosophy had become almost fashionable, she mourned for lost fame and absent friends. Even Solovyov, her “little father,”
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had written that, although he would like to see her again, his liver had been acting up, and he simply was in no shape for a journey. Hartmann had gone, but that had been a relief, because she knew him for a cunning, vindictive liar; suddenly, she felt cut off and surrounded by tiresome people. Babaji, simply an extra mouth to feed, was of no use to her whatsoever. Mary Flynn meant well but was also “an arrant fool, spoilt at home, and does not even know how to boil water in a coffee pot. One cannot talk to her about anything but dress.”
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Besides, she longed for “something to eat besides the eternal macaroni.”
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Having no one to talk to and no energy for writing, Helena, suddenly seeing Torre del Greco as more isolated than Siberia, decided on a change of scene. In April, Michael Katkov had published the final installment of the
Blue Mountains
and, while she did not know exactly how much he owed her, she was sure it could not be less than several thousand francs, enough to leave Italy. Dead set against settling in London, Paris or any other large European city, she considered Wurzburg, Germany; at least the Germans had warm stoves and double windows and knew the meaning of comfort. She liked Wurzburg because “it is near Heidelberg and Nuremberg and all the centres one of the Masters lived in.”
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It is reasonable to assume that she was familiar with this section of Germany, probably from the days when she lived with Agardi Metrovitch, and that she retained fond memories of it. Another consideration was that Wiirzburg seemed closer to Odessa than did France or England, and the likelihood of Nadyezhda’s visiting her was greatest there.

The prospect of a cozy German apartment, where she could set up her samovar and feel comfortable, brightened her mood a little. Upon her arrival at Torre del Greco, she had felt like hiding, had in fact warned Solovyov not to reveal her whereabouts; now, however, she began to reestablish contact with people. Neither she nor Koot Hoomi had written to Alfred Sinnett in months, and she had not heard from him; she must make an immediate effort to win him back. From Mohini, who was now living in London, she learned that Alfred had lost nearly all his life savings in an unfortunate business venture. Hard pressed to support his family, he had recently written an occult novel,
Karma.
Even Patience had turned out a manual called “The Purpose of Theosophy.” Helena had deliberately neglected to read
Karma,
in which she appeared as a main character, since she could well imagine what Sinnett had done to her; she had read Rosa Praed’s
Affinities,
in which Mohini figured prominently. She had thought it simply dreadful, and it had made her wonder about Mohini, who had become fashionable as London’s resident Indian mystic.

Deciding to approach Sinnett in a roundabout fashion, she wrote Mohini and asked him to show her letter to Alfred; but if this was an attempt to recapture the old friendship, she had set about it in the worst possible way. In a typical counter-attack, she flung the blame for the Coulomb charges onto Sinnett. Were it not for his greediness for phenomena and his hotheaded rush to thrust two books of the Masters’ teachings before the unenlightened public, none of this would have happened. She had “never
deceived him,
never tried to
mislead,
never
lied
to him”
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but now she was dying; it was she who suffered the karmic results of his ill-timed and selfish zeal. For her part, she could no longer act as intermediary between him and the Masters. “Let him drop me out of his life like a bad penny,”
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and, if Sinnett wished, he should feel free to find other channels to Tibet. The latter was a realistic concession because after Laura Holloway had returned to the United States, Sinnett had tried reaching the Mahatmas through other mediums; H.P.B. knew there was no way to stop him. And at that point, she hardly cared.

Sinnett did not reply to her, doubtless because of the Mahatmas’ letters, encouraging him to write
Occult World
and
Esoteric Buddhism
and expressing their utmost confidence in his judgment as to how the teachings should be presented. But Patience must have intuited the pain behind H.P.B.’s words and wrote gently that “[I] cannot imagine how anyone knowing you can believe you guilty.”
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Even were she convinced that Madame “had written those wretched letters, I should love you still.”
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How Helena must have groaned to realize that even the saintly Patience seemed less than totally convinced of her innocence. Soothing reassurances of affection were not what she needed; nothing would do but to make everyone believe wholeheartedly in her innocence.

All of Helena’s correspondence from this period fiercely proclaims that she had never deceived anyone and never written Emma incriminating letters; one almost senses she was hiding from herself the full extent of her guilt, or, even more incredibly, that she could not bear to face reality and had actually convinced herself that she had done nothing to warrant blame. Still, in her reply to Patience written on July 23, she peels away an important layer of her psyche to reveal complete awareness of her situation and the terrible price she was paying for a career built on deception.

Had I written
even one
of those idiotic and at bottom
infamous
interpolations now made to appear in the said letters; had I been guilty
only once
—of a deliberate, purposely concocted fraud, especially when those deceived were my best, my
truest
friends—no “love” for such a one as I! At best—pity, or eternal contempt. Pity, if proved that I was an irresponsible lunatic, a hallucinated
medium
made to trick by my “guides” whom I was representing as
Mahatmas;
contempt—// a conscious fraud—but then where would be the
Masters?
Ah, dear child of my old heart, I was, I
really was
guilty, of but one crime…,
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That single crime was concealment of certain secrets she was not permitted to divulge without betraying the Masters. “Never, never shall you, or even could you, realize... all I had to suffer for the last ten years!”
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Then she insisted on enumerating the crimes with which she had been charged: “ambition,” “love of cheap fame,” “fraud and deceit,” “cunning and unscrupulousness,” “lying and cheating,” and “deliberately bogus phenomena.” These, she said, were part of the exterior carcass that the world perceived as Madame Blavatsky; they did not see “the interior wretched prisoner,”
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nor was she able to explain herself due to the pledge of secrecy she had made to the Brotherhood. Only in some future existence did she hope for justice.

Clearly, this wishful thinking was an attempt to twist truth into a defense for defenseless actions, but it had a more serious purpose than merely assuaging her personal agony: if she were to salvage anything from the wreckage she had left behind in India, she firmly believed her one hope lay with the European Theosophists. Thus, during the summer at Torre del Greco, she made an important decision: to break secretly with Henry Olcott, to undermine his power quietly without jeopardizing her monthly allowance and to transfer the heart and soul of the Society from India to Europe. In Helena’s opinion, the Society, like herself, had outgrown Henry Olcott. The first clue to her thinking crops up in a letter to Francesca Arundale and her mother, Mary, odd confidantes considering that they were Henry’s closest friends in London.

“Listen:
try to disconnect the L.L.
[London Lodge]
as much as you can
from H.Q. You may be at heart—
one.
Try to become
two
in the management.”
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Adyar was full of traitors and Judases who hated Europeans. Even Subba Row, she said, had called her “a shell deserted and abandoned by the Masters” because she had committed the most terrible of crimes by revealing occult secrets to whites. Henry, “a wind-bag full of vanity,”
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had fallen under Subba Row’s influence.

Thus she planted the seeds of schism, suspecting that the Londoners would not be so quick to abandon her if they believed she still had tantalizing tidbits to solve the riddle of the universe. The public could never get enough of two things: phenomena and occult secrets. With the first she could no longer oblige them, but if they liked, they should have secrets such as they had never dreamed of. Long ago she had learned that human nature could be repulsive; now she vowed to use that insight for her own ends. And it might just be possible to save herself.

At the end of July, accompanied by Babaji and Mary Flynn, Madame Blavatsky bid farewell to Vesuvius, taking with her as a momento a cold she had caught in their last hours before departing. After a week’s stopover in Rome, she started north to join Vsevolod Solovyov and Emile de Morsier at the fashionable Swiss resort of St. Cergues. One afternoon at about 3 p.m. she arrived on the Geneva diligence that stopped at the front door of Solovyov’s hotel, the Pension Delaigue. The journey had exhausted Helena; worse, she had grown so maddened by the ineptness of her two companions that she wanted to throttle them. Solovyov, standing outside the pension, found himself mortified at the sight of H.P.B. and her entourage, which must have presented a bizarre spectacle in the provincial town. Nevertheless, his description of her arrival, more vicious than amusing, is best described as racist, sexist, and generally insensitive:

Suddenly there sprang from the diligence a strange creature, something half way between a great ape and a tiny black man. Its leanness was amazing. A poor half-European sort of dress dangled on it, as though there were nothing but bones beneath, a face the size of a fist, of a dark cinnamon colour and without any signs of vegetation; on the head a dense cap of long black curling hair; huge eyes, also perfectly black, of course, with a frightened and suspicious expression.
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Babaji repelled the Russian. Mary Flynn merely embarrassed him. She was “a clumsy young person, with a red, disconcerted and not particularly intelligent face...”

The public gazed open-mouthed at the black man. But the most interesting was yet to come. The black man and the clumsy young woman, and then I and Madame de Morsier, succeeded with great difficulty in extracting from the diligence something that was shut up in it. This something was “Madame” herself, all swollen, tired out with travelling, grumbling; with a huge dark-grey face, and wide open eyes, like two round discoloured turquoises. On her head was set a very high grey felt fireman’s helmet with ventilators and a veil. Her globular figure seemed yet more globular from an incredible sort of sacque in which she was draped.
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