Most of these marvels, as I have hinted, required the mise en scène of the Adyar bungalow. Here Madame and the Colonel, and a few favoured chelas, had apartments. “Our domestic imbeciles” and “our familiar muffs” the latter are termed in one of the letters attributed to Madame. Here, too, in the “Occult Room” adjoining Madame’s bed-chamber, hung the famous “Shrine,” a sort of cupboard containing a fancy portrait in oils of the condescending Koot. This became associated with as many marvels as the image of a mediæval saint. Suppose you are an intending Theosophist—a hesitating convert, especially a moneyed one, like Mr. Jacob Sassoon. You call at headquarters. You are shown round by Damodar, or by M. or Madame Coulomb, librarian and secretary. With natural curiosity you ask to gaze upon the Master’s features. You are told of his indulgent concessions to deserving neophytes seeking for a sign. When the cupboard has been shut again, you are asked if there is anything you particularly desire from the Master. You indicate, not unnaturally, a message. It is about even chances whether the said message—reading generally not unlike Mr. Martin Tupper in his more oracular vein—is discovered in the cupboard immediately on reopening the door, or descends from the ceiling on to the top of your head.
The fame of these things, set out in the driest possible detail in the pages of “The Occult World,” aroused a furore of curiosity in this country, where people were just beginning to take a new interest in questions of psychical research. It was about the time when family circles played the “willing game,” and sat in the dark trying to see purple flames coming out of a magnet. Quick to seize the psychological moment, Madame Blavatsky came to England and “starred” London in the season of 1884. In her train came Colonel Olcott and Mohini L. Chatterji. Mohini, a Brahmin graduate of the University of Calcutta, shone like Damodar with a lustre not all reflected. He, it was whispered, was a chela of some attainments. He was not to be touched. He held his hands politely behind him when being introduced. There was a splendour as of some astral oil about his dusky countenance and thick black locks; while his big, dark eyes were as piercing as those of Madame herself. Men gazed on Mohini with awe, and ladies with enthusiasm. In the background hovered the recording Sinnett.
In spite of the disappointing fact that the London air proved unfavourable to miracles, the tale of the Indian ones was greedily drunk in, and Theosophy became the fashionable fad. Society people took to calling themselves Esoteric Buddhists: some were enrolled as chelas at short notice. The Theosophists went the round of the London drawing-rooms, penetrated to provincial towns, were not unheard of at the Universities. Madame rolled cigarettes and swore and talked black magic in the rooms of well-known Cambridge dons, till the hair of undergraduate listeners stood on end. Those were the days when a set of enthusiastic pass-men lived “the higher life” on a course of Turkish baths and a date diet; while three unlucky youths at Trinity nearly poisoned themselves with hasheesh in an attempt to project their astral bodies, and were only recovered at midnight by a relentless tutor armed with the college authority and a stomach-pump.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH EXPOSURE.
“Either she is a messenger from the Mahatmas or else she is a fraud. In either case the Theosophical Society would have had no existence without her.”—Mrs. Besant in Lucifer, December 15, 1890.
At the time of the Blavatsky season in London and Cambridge, the lately-founded Psychical Research Society, which had close connexion with the University town, was spoiling for something to investigate, and it decided to investigate Madame Blavatsky. Madame and her friends were delighted with this testimony to the stir which they had made, and entered into the thing with every hope of converting the Researchers. Were they not all ready to asseverate that such-and-such things had indeed happened——in India?
Whatever Theosophists may now say, the ‘S.P.R.’ was certainly not a hostile tribunal. Its very existence and objects were a challenge to the average educated prejudice which assumes that nothing can ever happen in nature which is not accounted for in current scientific textbooks. The society had itself vouched for “telepathy,” and coquetted with “phantasms of the living”; it has since bestowed a statistical respectability on the common ghost. To the miracles of Adyar some of its members had lent a more than friendly ear. One of the most prominent had actually been dubbed a chela. Dr. Hodgson (now secretary of the S.P.R. American Branch), who conducted the Indian part of the inquiry, declared that whatever prepossessions he may have had “were distinctly in favour of occultism and Madame Blavatsky.”
When Mr. Hodgson got to India he found people very much excited over some highly suspicious and suggestive letters which had just appeared in a Madras paper, communicated by the Madame Coulomb already spoken of, and alleged by her to have been written by Madame Blavatsky. Mr. Hodgson had to inquire on the spot: first, into the genuineness of these letters; secondly, into that of the missives alleged to have been precipitated by Mahatmas; thirdly, into the credibility of the evidence about other marvels given before the Psychical Committee by Madame herself, Colonel Olcott, Mr. Sinnett, and Mohini. He inquired and investigated for three months; and his report, with copious facsimiles and plans, is on record in Part IX. of the S.P.R. Proceedings (December, 1885).
The allegation of the Coulombs was that the whole series of miracles had been a matter of vulgar trickery, some of which they had been employed to carry out for Madame. During Madame’s absence in Europe, the people at Adyar had quarrelled with them and dismissed the pair, partly for having at various times hinted to outsiders the secrets which they now proceeded to make a clean breast of. The origin of their close relationship with Madame Blavatsky is obscure. She and Madame Coulomb had been associated at Cairo in the seventies in some “page” which the foundress of Theosophy had expressed a wish to have “torn out of the book of my life.” By the foundress’s own account, this torn-out page was such as made it odd that she should pitch on the Coulombs when in want of fit guardians for the sacred Shrine. Mrs. Besant once expounded to me a theory that Madame did this, with the full foreknowledge that frauds would follow and would discredit her and her Masters, partly from a sublime benevolence towards the wicked Coulombs, partly because it was necessary that she should herself “have her Calvary.” It was the same combined motives, no doubt, which led Madame Blavatsky to act more than once exactly as if Madame Coulomb had some secret hold over her. An agitated telegram from Paris, however, failed to heal the present rupture; and the result was the giving to the press of a long series of letters in Madame’s hand, teeming with veiled instructions to the Coulombs which fitted in at every point with their accounts of jugglery at Adyar.
The Coulomb story tallied also with equal accuracy with such outside circumstantial evidence as happened to touch it. Did Madame Coulomb allege that a “miracle” was worked by the substitution of one vase for another exactly similar, the shop she named proved to have record of the purchase of just such an exact pair just before the date of the miracle. Did she make a similar statement about a “miraculous” shower of roses, the like corroboration would be forthcoming. Did her husband describe the famous “Shrine” cupboard as a trick-cabinet with three sliding panels in the back, the panels had to be admitted, and explained by Madame as “for convenience of packing in case of removal.” It had hung against a hidden recess in the wall—there was the recess, the coincidence had to be deplored as unfortunate. On the other side of that recess, in Madame’s bedroom, the sideboard had a false back—that, too, was to be seen, and the Theosophists must content themselves with alleging that M. Coulomb had made it so after the miracles, and in the nick of time for the inquiry. As for the scribbled instructions and letters in which some of these arrangements were clearly hinted at, Madame was driven to the peculiar course of admitting some letters and even parts of letters and denying the rest. This, by the way, was exactly what she had done about a similar incriminating letter on the subject of a trick “missive,” which was planted on Mr. C. C. Massey, in 1882; the discovery of which led to the resignation of that gentleman and others from the Society.