In October, then, Colonel Olcott, who was just returning to India, got a letter from a Mr. Abbott Clark, of Orange County, California, a gentleman who was under no sort of suspicion of having anything to do with Mahatmas. And in this, if you please, there had somehow found its way into the envelope a slip of paper bearing a message in the M script, with signature, but with seal too blurred to distinguish, in facsimile as follows:—
So much is in the usual red pencil; the part represented by shading above is smudged, as is the red blotch which represents the seal, apparently by being rubbed with the finger. Across a margin of the paper is the following postscript, in the black carbon usually devoted to the seal impression:—
Rather cryptic, this missive; but the meaning seems to be this. The Mahatma has to explain to the suspicious Colonel several things: why the missives habitually come in letters from Mr. Judge; why, nevertheless, Mr. Judge knows nothing of them; why he, the Master, has used a bogus seal which bungles his own cryptograph; and, above all, why the impressions of that seal have been illegible ever since an exposure of it was threatened. He hints, accordingly, that he “uses” Mr. Judge to assist in some undefined psychic way in the precipitation process; but Judge’s part in this is unconscious—it must be “when he does not know.” Also, the thing precipitated “fades out often”—and plump on the word comes an illustration.
In saying that “Judge did not write Annie” (i.e., Mrs. Besant, for this spirit is a familiar one), the Master is misinformed, as we have seen. Mr. Judge had just “written Annie,” enclosing the Master’s own warning against Colonel Olcott. Lastly, the remark about “facit per alium” (the Mahatma can use a tag of lawyers’ Latin on occasion) seems to mean that when Colonel Olcott had the “flap-doodle” seal made he was unconsciously prompted by the Master himself, who had now adopted it, overlooking the blunder in engraving. The prescience which foresaw that the “precipitation” would give out in just this letter is no less remarkable than that which provided for an unexpressed doubt by the assurance, “No, it is not pencil.”
But for Colonel Olcott the gem of this letter was none of these. It was the reference to the Panjab seal as the “Lahore brass.” All that Mr. Judge knew, as we have seen, was that the seal was made at a “certain city in the Panjab.” Mr. Judge’s Mahatma assumes that this city was the capital of the province. It was a likely guess—a good shot, if such a phrase may be used of the mental processes of a Tibetan sage—and one calculated to end the Colonel’s doubts—if correct. But that is just what it was not. The city at which the Colonel got the seal was quite another city; so the Mahatma, though he hints that he psychically presided over the purchase, does not even know where that purchase took place!
The result of this unlucky lapse of memory on the part of the Master was that the missive made bad worse. Despite the distance of California, where Mr. Clark’s envelope was posted, from New York, and the offices of Mr. William Q. Judge, the Colonel suspected Mr. Judge’s hand in it. He wrote to Mr. Clark, and discovered that Judge had spent two days in Orange County at the very date when the Master availed himself of Mr. Clark’s envelope. Thereupon the Colonel formed his own ideas as to how the Master had “used” his favourite chela on that occasion.
THE “POISON-THREAT” MISSIVE.