At Avenue-road this mysterious telegram was at first read in the sense, “Grave danger to Olcott.” The president was just then due at Tokyo, and there was a report of an earthquake thereabouts. For a while there was a great flutter over this convincing case of Mahatmic prescience. When, however, the “early mail” arrived with Mr. Judge’s explanatory letter, quite a different complexion was put on the telegram. After reading this letter, and one from the inevitable Mahatma which Mr. Judge enclosed, the conclusion of the Inner Group was that the “grave danger” against which the Master warned Mrs. Besant was “from Olcott.” The Tibetan founder of the society, in short, warned Mrs. Besant against imperilling her safety in the neighbourhood of its president!
The Mahatma had declared war on Colonel Olcott.
This was the first shot in the campaign.
But what could this danger from Colonel Olcott be? Mr. Judge and his Mahatma left that darkly vague. Some of their friends in England dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s for them. It is hardly credible, but the suggestion was nothing less preposterous than that Colonel Olcott intended to poison Mrs. Besant!
I have no great veneration for Colonel Olcott’s character, and none at all for his intelligence; but I frankly apologise to him for having to mention this astounding nonsense in connexion with his name. I mention it simply in order to explain one of the documents which follow, and to throw a light on the minds of the colleagues who made or believed the charge; and I suppose I need scarcely add that I attach to it no other value whatever. Colonel Olcott is about as remote as it is possible to conceive from the sort of stuff of which murderers are made. I am sure he never had and never will have any more intention to poison Mrs. Besant, or anybody else, than the Man in the Moon. Having said so much to make any misunderstanding impossible, I return to the suspicions or pretended suspicions of the Colonel’s professed “Brothers.”
Positively, the only material which these ladies and gentlemen had to work on was an innocent conversation of the Colonel’s with a friend on the subject of poisons, Indian and other, which took place at a date when Mrs. Besant was not yet even a member of the society! The “evidence”—save the mark!—was such as ordinary non-Theosophical folk would not give even a dog a bad name on. But Mahatmas and their friends are different, and Mr. Judge’s Mahatma was well served. For this trivial episode, buzzed about from mouth to mouth in connexion with the sinister hints of “Mahatma M,” sufficed to make this monstrous charge against their president currently believed at Avenue-road, for some weeks at least, by the very inmost and governing circle of his colleagues, with Mrs. Besant at their head!
A belief once discarded, it is easy to deny that it ever existed. But this particular belief, or half-belief, showed itself in action. Mrs. Besant deferred her visit to India, and to impatient Indian disciples wrote that “Master had forbidden her to come,” and “till that order was countermanded” she would not budge.
Now just pause a moment, and enjoy the exquisite irony of this unique situation. The Theosophic Society was to be “the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Mankind.” At this moment, taking the three chief exponents of this new Brotherliness, the president believed the vice-president to be fabricating bogus documents; the vice-president apparently believed the president to have designs to poison the high-priestess; and the high-priestess, having these two beliefs to choose from, coquetted at least, as we have seen, with the more heinous of the two.
Other Theosophists appear from their course of action to have accomplished the intellectual feat of believing both.