Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (75 page)

But, above all, Sinnett hoped that no one would notice the obvious: that his subject had made a fool of him.

III

Ostend

Despite three months of almost unrelieved trauma, Helena had been working intermittently on
The Secret Doctrine
and had now accumulated about three hundred pages of foolscap. That she had been able to accomplish that much was entirely because of the presence of the capable Constance Wachtmeister who protected her from petty annoyances and battled valiantly against the major crises. H.P.B. had grown to rely enormously on the countess, who, by early March would have to begin planning her return to Sweden: her son’s twenty-first birthday was approaching, and her own affairs had been neglected all winter. While Helena insisted that she would get along on her own, Constance must have felt guilty about deserting her, especially since it was unsafe to leave Madame alone to vent her feelings in those letters: “J
have saved
her again and again from these indiscretions.”
¹³⁰
Her proposal that H.P.B. accompany her to Sweden was firmly rejected, ostensibly because the country was cold, but more likely because it was dull.

In desperation, Constance appealed to Alfred: did he know of any woman in London who would come and spend a few weeks with Madame, all expenses paid, someone trustworthy who would not worm her way into Madame’s confidence and then betray her later? He did not, nor did he react favorably to the Old Lady’s proposal that he sublet his home and take a house on the French coast at Boulogne, Calais or Dieppe, so she might live with him. By sharing expenses it would be cheap and “we could settle lovely, I think.”
¹³¹
Sinnett adroitly wriggled out of that tight corner without hurting H.P.B.’s feelings.

As the weeks passed with no replacement for the countess, Helena began thinking seriously about her future. When she had left India, it had been assumed that she would return once the furor had died down; in fact Henry Olcott was still proceeding on that assumption. In recent letters he had advised her to begin hoarding her spare shillings, francs and thalers toward her passage home by October or November. Think twice, he said, before buying perfume and other gim-racks. At first his letters annoyed her, then made her furious, and finally convinced her that she would not return to Adyar. Extravagance, Henry sermonized, would not be permitted. “So when you come home just make up your mind that the days of full swing and the gratification of the least whim are gone forever, and that you must live quietly like the rest of us,” and furthermore, he would not permit her to keep the Society “in hot water” by performing phenomena and getting into fights with individuals. “Now, mark my words, dear chum. Adyar is your only home, the only refuge you have upon earth. The proverb says, ‘It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.’ Don’t make yours uninhabitable.”
¹³²
She marked his words with some blistering words of her own, perhaps the mildest being “Balaam’s she-ass,”133 as she called him in a letter written about this time.

If Henry wanted to go on imagining she would return under those humiliating restrictions, he was free to do so. In the meantime, determined to make plans of her own, she had to face the fact that she had no idea of where she wanted to go. Of course, she could remain in Wiirzburg, but recently the city had been making her uncomfortable. At the university there was a Sanskrit professor with friends in India who received all the gossip about Madame Blavatsky. Even though she rarely poked her head out of the apartment, she suspected that people were promenading outside her window, whispering and pointing fingers, and it made her nervous. With Miss Leonard’s libel suit pending, she dared not go to England or France, even under an assumed name. Finally she decided that the safest place to go would be Belgium. “O lovely, peaceful old age!” she moaned. “To have to play at the Wandering Jew, to hide like a culprit, a felon...”
¹³⁴

By the end of March it was all settled: the countess would “pack up for me my goods and chattels, books and frying pans before she goes.”
¹³⁵
On April 15, when her rent ran out, she would proceed to the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend where she hoped to find comfortable warm lodgings. Her selection of Ostend, a fairly expensive place, was predicated on an unexpected hundred twenty-five dollars she had just received from J. W. Bouton, probably a belated royalty payment from
Isis.
When Bouton promised there might be more, she began doing as Henry had directed and tallied her small change. With the four hundred francs a month she received from Adyar, augmented by Bouton’s dollars, she calculated she could afford the move. At Ostend, she could patch up her quarrel with Vera by inviting her for a visit; Ostend was an impressive enough lure. To make the offer doubly tempting, she invited Vera to bring along one of her daughters and concluded by remarking that Vera must come to say goodbye because she would be dying shortly.

Vera hesitated. She suspected that the visit might be unpleasant and when Vsevolod Solovyov warned that it was a trick, she was secretly inclined to agree. On the other hand, she felt that a reconciliation would only be possible if they met. Perhaps Helena truly was ill, in which case Vera would never forgive herself for having refused her last request. She wrote her acceptance, promising to meet Helena in Ostend and help get her settled in a new apartment.

It was not until the eighth of May that H.P.B. finally left Wurzburg, for the departure had proved a bigger headache than she supposed. The countess had packed her belongings and had also wrapped in oilcloth and shipped to Adyar a copy of
The Secret Doctrine
manuscript completed to date, so that Subba Row could make corrections. However, that left the problem of how H.P.B. was to get to Ostend. Constance had accepted an invitation to visit Austria with Mary Gebhard, who could not recover from the suicide of her son, so she could not assume this task herself. Providentially, there turned up at the last minute H.P.B.’s old friend Emily Kislingbury, who had been vacationing in Germany and stopped off to see Helena. Since she would be passing through Ostend on her way back to London, she said it would be no trouble to shepherd Madame and Louise to their destination. Emily was no longer a Theosophist, in fact she had converted to Catholicism, but H.P.B. was happy to see her and grateful for her help.

On the last morning at Wurzburg, Constance looked in dismay at the nine pieces of luggage and thought that just getting H.P.B. and her bundles into the train would be a formidable task; she suggested they start early for the station. “Poor H.P.B. who had not been out of her room in weeks, had to walk all along the platform, and this was performed with difficulty,”
¹³⁶
Constance recalled. By the time she and Emily had bribed the conductor to give H.P.B. a compartment to herself, got Madame comfortably seated, and stowed around her coverlets, pillows, luggage and the precious box containing
The Secret Doctrine,
all three women were exhausted. Just as Constance was congratulating herself on having managed things so well, a railway official began objecting sternly to the use of a passenger compartment for baggage. All the luggage must be removed at once, the official yelled in German, but Madame shouted back in French, and Constance and Emily winced from the sidelines. Luckily the whistle blew and the train began moving out of the station, leaving the irate rail man behind. As Constance watched it go, “a feeling of pity came over me for Miss Kislingbury”
¹³⁷
who would be responsible for unloading and reloading H.P.B. and her luggage at the train change in Cologne, getting her through customs, and finally settling her at Ostend.

At Cologne, however, Emily won an unexpected reprieve when they were greeted at the station by Gustav Gebhard, who happened to be in the city visiting his daughter. Three months earlier Gebhard had teetered on the brink of bolting the Society; in February he had even submitted samples of H.P.B.’s writing and a few Mahatma letters to Ernst Schutze, the imperial calligra-pher; in Schutze’s opinion, they were not written by the same person. Satisfied with Madame’s honesty, Gebhard had once again become a loyal supporter and now prevailed upon her to break the journey by spending a day or two at Elberfeld.

The day after H.P.B.’s arrival at the Gebhards, she slipped on the parquet floor of her bedroom and sprained her ankle. At first inclined to dismiss the injury as trifling, she changed her mind when it began to throb; once again, she would be confined to her bed and her armchair. The immobility actually turned out to be more pleasant than she had expected: Mary Gebhard hurried back from Austria to nurse her personally, and the entire household fussed over her extravagantly. Vera was notified of the accident and invited to Elberfeld with her daughter for the recuperation.

By mid-May Helena was enjoying herself as much as could be expected under the circumstances. “The old leg goes a little better,” she reported to Constance, “pain gone, but it is entirely helpless, and heaven alone knows
when
I will be able to walk with it even as superficially as I did before.”
¹³⁸
With the arrival of her sister and twenty-two-year-old niece Vera, whom she was meeting for the first time, H.P.B.’s contentment was almost complete. The three of them sat on the terrace or in the garden talking in Russian; suddenly, the quarrels of the past winter no longer were important. It seems likely that during those tearful conversations the sisters came to a mutual understanding of sorts, because never again would Vera express open criticism of Helena’s follies or speak of being asked to perform actions against her conscience. From her later declarations that Theosophy was a pure and lofty doctrine and from her panegyrics on behalf of H.P.B., one can presume that Helena somehow won her promise of public support, regardless of her private reservations about the reality of the Mahatmas.

The one-day stopover at Elberfeld lengthened, eventually, into two months. At first the sprain prevented Helena from working, but as soon as she began to feel better she went back to
The Secret Doctrine;
she would work in the evenings, arise early the next morning to revise the previous night’s copy, and read it aloud to her sister in the afternoons. During these readings, Vera was struck by the picturesqueness of the language and the complex scientific explanations, but she also found it puzzling that Helena was unable to read the algebraic and geometric calculations she had written down. Why not? she asked her.

The reason was obvious, Helena laughed. She knew nothing of higher mathematics.

Still perplexed, Vera persisted. “Then how is it that you have written all this without knowing anything about it?”

It was not she who wrote, Helena answered with some impatience; she only copied material that the Master presented to her. “I know that you have always disbelieved me, but in this case you see one more proof that I am only the tool and not the master.”
¹³⁹

Vera still doubted.

Helena, for the moment, was happy to linger at Elberfeld, where life was pleasant and everything was free. In the first days of June, however, a black cloud in the form of Babaji Nath appeared on her horizon. Since January Babaji had been living in London with Francesca Arundale and had already become a burden to everyone concerned. Unaccustomed to European winters, he had suffered from fevers and colds for months and now, terribly homesick, he wanted only to return to India. Since he had no money for the return passage, he was forced to wait until Henry Olcott could send him funds. When Francesca arrived at Elberfeld for her annual visit, she brought Babaji with her.

Helena must have made it clear to the Gebhards that she would not stay in the same house as Babaji because he was sent to stay with their elder son, Franz, who lived nearby. From that vantage point, Babaji churned out a steady stream of character defamation against his former guru. Madame, he told Franz Gebhard, had never heard of a mahatma before she came to Bombay and furthermore knew nothing of esoteric teaching; indeed her “esoteric Buddhism” was sheer nonsense and hallucination. As for himself, he still believed in the existence of mahatmas, but he knew positively they would never write what he termed “spook” letters; in fact they did not write letters at all. Helena was dismayed to find Franz taking Babaji’s side. No doubt Babaji’s constant needling and his threats to write a pamphlet denouncing her frauds had something to do with her swift departure from Elberfeld the first week in July.

Nothing had gone according to plan. She had wanted to reach Ostend in April, find an inexpensive place to live before the season began, and spend a few weeks taking the saltwater cure. Instead she arrived at the height of the season when the town was jammed with tourists and could find no accommodations that were not outlandishly expensive. There was no time left for a proper holiday with her relatives because once Helena was settled, Vera had to be getting back to St. Petersburg.

Ostend, once an ancient fishing village, was now the major Belgian port for mail boats and steamers coming from England, as well as a terminal for trains departing to all areas of Europe. At the same time it was a fashionable resort and the summer residence of the Belgian royal family. The Promenade, flanked by deluxe hotels and villas, overlooked a sandy Lido where visitors sat under umbrellas and dined in the evenings on the luscious oysters for which Ostend was famous. It was an engrossing scene if one had the money to participate. Helena, sadly disenchanted, could not believe the hotel prices. “Ye gods of Avitchi!” she wrote Constance. “For one night at the Continental I had to pay 117 francs for our rooms.”
¹⁴⁰
Next day they switched to the Villa Nova at 10 Boulevard Isaghem (Iseghemlaan) while a desperate Vera spent most of her time walking the streets looking for more suitable lodgings. More or less by chance she stumbled upon a five-room apartment in the rue d’Ouest. For H.P.B. there was a lovely three-room suite including a bedroom separated from a large study by satin hangings and a drawing room with a piano; across the hall was a parlor and another bedroom.