Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (73 page)

By early December the two women had settled into tedious tranquillity. Babaji had been sent to Elberfeld, probably at Constance’s suggestion, because his bright, beady eyes made her uncomfortable. H.P.B., deep into her writing, worked with iron-willed concentration; Constance shielded her from annoyances and made herself useful by making fair copies of the completed pages. What she described as a “quiet studious life”
⁸⁵
continued until New Year’s Eve when a Society member, Professor Sellin, brought Helena a copy of the Society for Psychical Research’s final report on Theosophy. After Sellin left, she crumpled over her desk and when Constance came in, she attacked her savagely. “Why don’t you leave me?” she snarled. “Go before you are defiled by my shame,”
⁸⁶

“You may imagine,” Constance wrote in agitation to Sinnett the next morning, “what a lively time we had of it. Palpitations of the heart, digitalis, etc.”
⁸⁷
First Helena began to write letters of protest, then she announced that she was leaving for London to annihilate the S.P.R. in person. Not until evening did Constance manage to pacify her. Writing her second letter to Sinnett that day, the countess acknowledged her weariness and summed up the newest traumas by saying, “We have had a terrible day.”

H.P.B.’s outrage was to be expected, but in all honesty she had to admit there was nothing surprising about Hodgson’s report. His general conclusions had been known to her since March, when he had personally explained them at Adyar and, in June, they had been read aloud in London at a meeting of the S.P.R. What did astound her was that he had not abandoned his theory that she was a Russian spy. “I should consider this Report incomplete,” he wrote, “unless I suggest what I myself believe to be an adequate explanation of her ten years’ toil on behalf of the Theosophical Society.” What could have induced her to labor over a fantastic imposture? Was it egotism? Such a supposition he dismissed as “quite untenable.” Was she a plain fraud? “She is, indeed, a rare psychological study, almost as rare as a ‘Mahatma!’ “ Religious mania then? “Even this hypothesis I was unable to adopt.” Then what
was
her motive for a career of deception? “Her real object has been the furtherance of Russian interests... I suggest it here only as a supposition which appears to best cover the known incidents of her career during the past 13 or 14 years.”
⁸⁸

Helena was quick to understand that the blatant absurdity of the spying charge weakened Hodgson’s case. He had tripped himself up a second time when he used the testimony of the handwriting expert to prove she forged the Mahatma letters. “He calls me a forger!” she exclaimed in a letter to Olcott. “Funny and stupid.
If I
invented the
two Masters,
then they do not exist, and
if they do not
exist, how could I forge
their
handwritings which did not equally exist
before I invented them?”
⁸⁹
Both the spy and forgery charges were so silly that Helena could, and would, pounce on them as a pretext for declaring the rest of the S.P.R. Report equally inaccurate. Nevertheless, it must have been mortifying to read the conclusions that the S.P.R.’s committee had attached to Hodgson’s work:

For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.
⁹⁰

And it was similarly disconcerting to see that Hodgson had let Henry Olcott off scot-free. The “Theosophical twins” no longer stood or fell together; she had toppled, but Henry remained upright. He was a fool in Hodgson’s opinion, but an honest fool. How bitterly she must have smiled as she wrote Henry, “Now you see
you
are SAVED not dishonoured by my referring to you as a ‘psychological baby’ and saying I am smarter than you to H. Chintamon. This said in fun has saved you.” And she added, “Your Karma, dear.”
⁹¹

Needless to say, work on
The Secret Doctrine
ground to a halt. The S.P.R. Report had done both H.P.B. and the Society untold damage, as evidenced by the growing number of resignations, and the countess recalled that “every post only increased her anger and despair.”
⁹²
Professor Sellin called the Society “a humbug”;
⁹³
Hubbe-Schleiden wanted either to resign or to drop the word Theosophical from the German branch. Sinnett, while shaken,
“cannot leave,
too far deep in it,”
⁹⁴
H.P.B. assured Olcott. She wrote a letter of explanation to the London
Times,
who did not have the courtesy to publish it, and she scratched out private explanations to friends, encouraging
them
to write protests to the papers.

Sometimes Constance did not know where she would find the physical strength to bear up under Madame’s problems. On the fourth of January, she thought H.P.B. would have an apoplectic fit after Professor Sellin brutally accused her of plagiarizing
Isis Unveiled
from other books. “A violent attack of diarrhea saved her,” Constance wrote Sinnett, “but I do weary of it all so much.”
⁹⁵

For two solid weeks Helena’s energies were thrown into a futile counterattack. She admitted to feeling like “an old, squeezed-out lemon, physically and morally, good only for cleaning old Nick’s nails with, and perhaps to be made to write 12 or 13 hours a day the Secret Doctrine under dictation...”
⁹⁶
However, she was not destined to return to work for many weeks because the S.P.R. Report was shortly followed by a series of alarming attacks. At Elberfeld, where Babaji had been keeping the Gebhards entertained with stories of his forest-dwelling days, the little man suddenly went berserk and began foaming at the mouth, smashing mirrors, and screaming terrible accusations at Madame Blavatsky: she had desecrated the Masters by sharing their secrets with Europeans and by mixing up Their names with “phenomena, women and common worldly matters”;
⁹⁷
she used trickery to perform her marvels and hypnosis to turn her followers into sheep who then believed they saw things that did not exist; she wrote the Mahatma letters herself. Madame, he howled, should be thrown out of the Theosophical Society, which itself was rotten to the roots.

Babaji’s revolt terrified Helena. Determined to quiet him, she sent Constance back to Elberfeld but Babaji continued to rave. During the years when he had submitted meekly to Madame’s bullying, he had stored up an abundance of animosity and, unluckily for H.P.B., he had also kept his eyes open. His charges may have sounded like gratuitous insults, but they certainly supplied interesting details. Madame, he told the Gebhards, had extorted money from Prince Harisinghji Rupsinghji; she had almost caused Olcott’s suicide; she had recently written two Mahatma letters to Hubbe-Schleiden. Constance thought that Babaji was “really a lunatic,” but nevertheless her faith in H.P.B. began to waver. Since coming to Wurzburg, she had shut her eyes to “little irregularities”
⁹⁸
in Madame’s household by telling herself that she did not understand occult laws, but Babaji was talking of extortion, a crime that was punishable by law. If H.P.B. had really extorted money from Prince Harisinghji, Constance felt that “I cannot remain in a Society where the Founders lie under the imputation of criminal fraud.” From Olcott she demanded that the prince sign a statement exonerating Madame of the charge: “I must see my way clearly and honestly before me and not blush to be called a Theosophist.”
⁹⁹

Henry refused to bother the prince with a trifling matter. Everyone knew that Babaji was a “half-crazy”
¹⁰⁰
epileptic. Did Constance actually expect him to repeat Babaji’s deranged assertions and ask for a written document that the prince had
not
been swindled? Put yourself in my place, Olcott begged. The countess did not press him.

Helena asked her friends at Elberfeld to hustle Babaji off to London but, she moaned to Sinnett, “Babaji has unsettled the Gebhards entirely. If he is permitted to return—say good-bye to the German branch and our mutual friends. Let
this be a prophecy”
¹⁰¹
The Gebhards did not resign but they began asking embarrassing questions about certain Mahatma letters received by them and their friends. H.P.B. was obliged to account for the general crudenesses of the series with a complicated and incomprehensible dissertation on the hazards of “precipitation” by inexperienced
chelas.
The Gebhards, still suspicious, remained in the Society, but Dr. Hubbe-Schleiden finally lost faith and submitted his resignation, taking with him his two personal Mahatma letters.

Babaji’s dramatic defection, which H.P.B. called “the basest ingratitude from one I have loved as my son,”
¹⁰²
gave her pause for reflection. Vacillating between sorrow and “ice-cold indifference and callousness,” she opted for the tougher stance. She had been “a big, stupid, trusting fool,” who had allowed herself to be harassed by “a thick crowd of circling traitors, fiends and tigers in human shape.”
¹⁰³
Therefore, when Mary and Gustav Gebhard’s twenty-year-old son Walther shot and killed himself three months later, it was on Babaji that Helena laid the blame for the tragedy.
¹⁰⁴

Neither of the two Hindu
chelas
she had transported to Europe, Babaji Nath and Mohini Chatterji, had turned out according to Helena’s expectations. Despite Babaji’s stupidity, she had felt affection for him, but now, since the betrayal, her feelings had turned to sadness. Mohini was another, more crucial matter. At some point in the past year when her attention had been directed on herself, Mohini had escaped Madame’s domination and aggressively carved out an independent career for himself as a Mahatmic messenger. This did not seem quite fair to Helena, who had snatched him from a boring lawyer’s job in Calcutta and, exercising to the hilt her flair for the dramatic, costumed him in a black-velvet tunic bordered with glossy black fur and high Russian boots. It was she who had arranged his debut on the glittering stage of Paris and London high-society drawing rooms, having heralded him as a
chela
of the superhuman Brotherhood and therefore one of the most privileged human beings in the world. Could she have forecast that Mohini’s remarkable beauty, his silent dignity, and his refusal to touch the hands of men or raise his eyes to women would make him an international sex object?

“He pleased us all,” wrote Isabelle de Steiger, speaking for the London women. “He pleased me extremely.”
¹⁰⁵
Not until much later did Isabelle learn that Mohini Chatterji could not have been so chaste as everyone supposed because he had a wife in Madras, but at the time nobody could have imagined such a thing. Isabelle, an artist who appreciated beauty for its own sake, was content to view Mohini from a distance. Other English and French female Theosophists were bolder: a Miss Leonard, an Englishwoman living in Paris, made it her business to get acquainted with Mohini and found her interest very much reciprocated.

It seems clear that Mohini and Leonard became lovers. Parisian Theosophists such as Emile de Morsier were usually tolerant of such affairs, but in this case, they raised their brows and passed the news along to Madame Blavatsky, who responded with a mixture of repugnance and jealousy. That Mohini might be a willing participant, even the aggressor, never occurred to her. “Cold marble with horror,”
¹⁰⁶
she immediately began conjuring historical panoramas of ancient Rome and Egypt in which Mohini was engulfed by bare-bosomed Messalinas and Potiphars. As Paris gossips continued to report further details, she learned that there was a whole covey of Anglo-French rapists “who burn with a scandalous ferocious passion for Mohini—with that craving of old
gourmands
for
unnatural
food, for rotten Limbourg cheese with worms in it to tickle their satiated palates—or of the ‘Pall Mall’ iniquitous old men for
forbidden
fruit—ten year old virgins! Oh, the filthy beasts!! the sacrilegious, hypocritical harlots!”
¹⁰⁷
Noticeable in this passage, aside from the startling comparison of Mohini to wormy Limburger, is Helena’s own thrill at imagining “a nut-meg Hindu” in the arms of a fair-skinned “too erotic spinster.”
¹⁰⁸
Her sexuality, rigidly repressed for a decade, could not help but reveal itself.

According to H.P.B.’s informants, the erotic Miss Leonard had sworn to seduce Mohini; she pursued him into his bedroom and when that failed, she finally stripped to the waist one afternoon in a public park. It was plain to Helena that poor Mohini had not understood at all what Miss Leonard wanted. “To show to her that I know all,”
¹⁰⁹
H.P.B. wrote Miss Leonard a long letter full of reprimands for tampering with the chastity of a holy man and bristling, one can only suppose, with Messalinas, Potiphars and other such epithets. In response, Leonard turned Helena’s letter over to her London lawyers along with the hundred-odd love letters Mohini had written her and instructed them to prosecute for defamation of character. Miss Leonard, no doubt in order to show Madame that she too
knew all,
ordered her lawyers to address the notice of legal action to “Mme. Metrovitch otherwise Mad. Blavatsky.”
¹¹⁰