In so very peculiar and morbid an atmosphere, then, in which the solemn truths of Protestant Christianity were judged, perhaps, not sufficiently exotic, or not sufficiently entertaining, to hold the concentration of shallow personalities, it is not to be regarded as implausible, that a girl of less than twenty years of age, known to the public only as “Deirdre of the Shadows,” should emerge from absolute obscurity, and, within a few fevered years in the early Eighties, win the acclaim of so wide and divers a Spiritualist populace, that she was to be called—for a time, at least—the equal of D. D. Home himself, and a veritable Princess of the Shadow World.
(“THE MORE FANTASTICAL a belief,” Madame Blavatsky was to confide in her Lolo, with her hoarse throaty chuckle, and many a squeeze of her nicotine-stained fingers, “the more they rush to believe! It is a law of nature, my dear child,” Madame averred. “It is not to be wondered at, but only applied.”)
DEIRDRE’S RECOLLECTION OF the immense black silken balloon, and the sombre-garbed personage who manned it, was always to remain clouded, doubtless confused with the floating dreams and visions she so frequently experienced, as a young girl. One shard of memory would have had her believe that she had been borne away by her bridegroom, across the Atlantic Ocean, bade a loving farewell by her bridesmaid sisters, attired in pastel chiffon, and weeping to lose her; another, that the Raging Captain himself, his chest wound miraculously healed, and every tear, tatter, and stain in his handsome uniform vanish’d, had not only carried her from that place of temptation, but had spoken kindly to her, and placed a chaste kiss on her burning brow.
Precisely how she was carried, senseless, out of the Bloodsmoor Valley, to awaken upon the morn hundreds of miles away in the scenic wilds of northwestern Massachusetts, unhurt, but gravely fatigued, on a grassy knoll in a park belonging to the estate of the late millionaire F. Holtman Strong; precisely how the alleged violet-radiance of her aura brought her at once to the excited attention of the Countess Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (then in residence, with her chela-companion Hassan Agha, at the Strong manor house); and how, assured on all sides of her mediumistic gifts, and given a carefully orchestrated début in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a small and élite circle of believers, Deirdre gradually grew—nay, blossomed—into so confident a trance medium, as to feel no apprehension of the formidable Society for Psychical Research itself!—how these extraordinary events came to pass, I have some slender knowledge, at secondhand; but fear to burden my chronicle with an excess of historical detail, lest it become o’erlong.
Withal, it happened that Madame Blavatsky’s most trusted chela, the dusky-skinned young Hassan Agha (of Madras, India—or so it was claimed: detractors within the Society placed his origins firmly, in the West, in Sicily or Athens, or even Liverpool), meditating at dawn, in the park, chanced upon the unconscious young woman; and necessarily sounded the alarm, that help should be summoned; noting, even in the confusion of the moment—as Madame would soon confirm—that the strange black-haired girl, even in her stuporous state, possessed an aura of such magnificent luminosity, violet and iridescent blue, and all the lovelier hues of the rainbow, as to suggest her psychic powers—freely admitted by Madame to be in excess of her own.
So Deirdre was taken into the Strong home, hardly conscious of her surroundings, and put under the care of an eminent Boston physician whose Spiritualist sympathies were not in doubt; and enjoyed a peaceful convalescence of upward of four weeks, attended much of the time by Madame herself, who declared that a miracle “had fallen out of the sky,” and that her own “Lolo” had been “restored” to her. And even before rising from her bed, and coming downstairs to meet with company, Deirdre was able, with very little conscious direction of her own, to cause to appear, in her bedchamber, the veiled ectoplasmic form of Mrs. Strong’s late husband, and to be the means by which—through her physical being, but not by way of her voice—this worthy deceased gentleman spoke to his wife, giving her all manner of advice, both financial and domestic, and consolation as to the reality of Spirit World, and his own continued well-being: with what tearful gratitude on the part of the widow, the reader can well envision. “We have been awaiting this miraculous child,” Madame Blavatsky said, “not knowing that she would come to us out of nowhere: materialized like a very spirit!”
At this time, on the two-thousand-acre country estate of the Strongs, in the Landsdowne Valley, there dwelled, not only the charismatic Madame Blavatsky and several chelas, but a number of like-minded persons, who shared, not a common belief in Theosophy, or even in the existence of the Tibetan masters, but a general amorphous belief in occult matters, which they took to be the Religion of the Future—to fructify most dramatically in the Twentieth Century. (A divers group of individuals, to be sure, yet not deserving, in the aggregate, the condemnation of Mr. Strong’s relatives, who spoke of the widow’s assemblage as a “swarm” buzzing about a “honey hive”—the honey being, of course, Mr. Strong’s considerable fortune.)
Mrs. Strong, having read that great tome Isis Unveiled, compiled by Madame Blavatsky in a veritable frenzy of inspiration some years previously, had, after the death of her spouse, sought out the celebrated Russian countess, lavishing many gifts upon her; and would not cease her overtures, that Madame and as many of her chelas as she wished, might come to Landsdowne House (for such her enormous manor was called) for a sojourn of as brief, or as extended, time as she might wish. Madame did reluctantly accept this generous invitation, after it was repeated several times, for, tho’ she was inordinately busy with the Theosophical chapters in Boston and New York, and absorbed in plans for a long pilgrimage to India, there to commune with the celebrated Swami Dayanand Saraswati, she took pity upon the widow’s anguish, which was considerable, and saw no reason not to alleviate her grief, so far as she was capable. It was, however, only with the arrival of Deirdre—soon baptized by Madame “Deirdre of the Shadows”—that Mrs. Strong entered into a fully satisfying communication with her deceased husband.
“A miracle,” Madame exclaimed, a dozen times daily, “my Lolo restored. And in the pretty shape of an American girl.”
(It should be noted at this point that Lolo was not, in fact, the name of any child of Madame’s—but the pet name of Madame herself, given to her as a baby by her mother, long dead!—one eccentricity among many, which constituted the perplexing phenomenon of Blavatsky.)
SO “DEIRDRE OF the Shadows” was introduced to the Spiritualist community, then very much more populous than now, tho’ similarly tight-knit, and possessed of an eagerness to believe, which some observers find laudable, as others find contemptible. Financed by the generous Mrs. Strong, and fiercely protected by Madame Blavatsky, Deirdre acquitted herself admirably as a “trance medium”—a métier to be explained presently—and, to her grief be it uttered, cast never a backward glance at her Bloodsmoor years, and the charitable Christian family that had given her succor in her time of need. In Cambridge, and in Boston, and in Quincy, Massachusetts; and most conspicuously in New York City; in hotel rooms whose opulence must hardly have compensated strangeness, and abject loneliness; in private homes like that of Mrs. Strong’s, “haunted,” as it were, by a sickly and morbid obsession with the dead—how her young heart should have grieved for all it had rejected, and oh what lacrimination should have sprung forth, from that tight-skinned carapace of youthful, indeed witchlike beauty!—had the heedless child paused to contemplate her situation: both the loving family she had left behind, and the doubtful personages amongst whom she now dwelled.
Despite her arrival as a penniless immigrant in the summer of 1873, Madame Blavatsky had by this time done admirably well for herself: she was known as a Spiritualist who had devoted her life for the past fifteen years to “purifying” the “sacred calling” of mediumship—a calling, I am unhappy to say, rife with fraud, and constantly under attack by both Rationalists and Christians, who lived in terror of its “revolutionary truths.” She befriended other mediums, gave séances of her own, culti
vated such influential persons as the New York lawyer Thomas Olcott, whose position with the tolerant New York Tribune allowed him to write at length, and with unrestrained enthusiasm, for those mediums innocent of all fraud whom he encountered; and she had established her secret brotherhood, the Theosophical Society, by which the ancient wisdom of Tibetan Mahatmas was to be communicated to the world, through the person of Madame herself. Recognizing in Deirdre a kindred spirit, and not to be discouraged by a certain withholding of affection, on the part of the young girl, she was most boisterous in her praise of this new medium, and confident that she should “scale the walls” of the “fortress of ignorance and indifference” that characterized America: “A land of great material wealth, in which the most shocking spiritual impoverishment is to be found,” Madame oft said, “—and in the homes of the wealthy more than elsewhere.”
In attendance to Madame at this time were a number of chelas, or disciples, her favorite being the tall, cadaverous, dark-skinned Hassan Agha, with his exceedingly narrow, yet attractive face, and his date-soft black eyes, and his Indian costume, which clung tightly to his thin frame: a black silk tunic and pajamalike trousers, and a handsome black turban, in the center of which a large scarab brooch, of Egyptian origin, glittered with uncanny power. (The brooch was a “sacred totem,” in Madame’s words, a gift not from her but from one of the Masters, who had caused it to materialize in her hand, that she might proffer it to her most faithful chela. Madame oft insisted—and begged and cajoled—that Deirdre accept a similar scarab medallion from this Master, to be worn about her neck in place of “that tawdry gold locket,” but Deirdre wisely resisted, for tho’, in these years, she was to become lost to nearly all sense of decency, and respectable behavior, she did not, the reader will be relieved to hear, succumb to Madame’s blandishments.)
Even in chilly weather Hassan Agha was barefoot indoors, as befitting an Indian chela. He was perhaps twenty-one years of age, and spoke rarely, as if distrusting his ability to employ our tongue. His thralldom to Madame was complete, and thought to be poignant: observers were invariably moved by the way the youth fell prostrate before Madame, upon both the occasion of approaching her, and taking her leave. “An adoring disciple,” Madame confided in Deirdre, when Hassan Agha was absent, “and adorable: if one had not become too deathly bored with boys.”
Madame assured Deirdre, after the early successes in Landsdowne, and Brattle Street, and Beacon Hill, that she would become not only a famous medium, but a great one; and that she would, with her remarkable unforced skills, help countless souls on both sides of the divide—both on the Earth Plane, and in Spirit World. (For many souls, having shaken off this mortal coil in extremities of emotion, scarcely know what has happened to them: hence the prevalence of “hauntings,” the preoccupation of a deranged spirit mind.)
“And we are moving, with astonishing swiftness,” Madame said, “into the Twentieth Century: which, the Masters grant me, I shall have some small role in guiding. The materialism of our time, given apparent strength by the Darwinians, presents so bleak and unimaginative a spectacle of the Universe, that one hardly knows whether to weep with sorrow, or sheer fatigue!—that Universe being in any case tiresomely masculine, in its grim physicality, while our Universe is resplendently feminine. Do you follow my sentiments, my dear child? Do you agree?”
Deirdre sipped thinly at her cup of tea, which she drank, as always, unsweetened by either sugar or cream, oft in place of heartier fare, and to the possible detriment of her fragile nerves: she sipped at the tea, without haste, not troubling to avoid Madame’s warm and, as it were, fulsome gaze. “I know not, Madame, of the abstractions of which you so casually speak,” our young lady said, with a haughtiness of tone, and a frostiness of eye, that might have done credit to Malvinia Morloch herself, “nor shall I belabor myself, as to the forging of an opinion. My life—as you and many others have given me to know—for which I am greatly in your debt—my life is my work. I am no theoretical Spiritualist, to be found virtually everywhere, but a practicing Spiritualist, and must not distract myself with the poetical, but tergiversate, rhetorical displays, which, no doubt, the Masters have inspired in you.”
Madame sensed herself rebuffed by this cool speech; yet was not entirely certain of the young lady’s meaning. (It is most amusing, as the reader should note, that this noisome Russian immigrant, the self-ordained prophet of a new religion, should pride herself upon her English—yet fail to know the commonest of our words!) To disguise her confusion, and to quell the o’erabundance of energies, which all biographers have remarked as a particular, not to say pathological, characteristic of hers, Madame sought solace in tobacco, taking pinches of ill-smelling Turkish weed out of the bizarre leather pouch she wore about her neck (it was in the shape of an animal’s head—yet no animal known to man), and rolling them in a brown cigarette paper, into an irregular cylinder. Her pudgy fingers shook somewhat, as if Deirdre’s chill words, and the yet more chill weight of her gaze, quite intimidated her; yet when she spoke she had regained the Blavatsky ebullience, and declared, with a broad smile that came close to cheering the entire chamber in which they sat: “Nonetheless, my Lolo, you shall be famous, and you shall be great; and you shall—if I have any hand in your destiny—be rich. If that prospect displeases you, little one, please allow your most devoted champion to know.”
But Deirdre, sipping at her strong dark India tea, said not a word of assent, or protest.
FORTY-TWO
The public career of “Deirdre of the Shadows” progressed with a gratifying alacrity in the 1880’s, taking the ambitious young woman as far west as Milwaukee, and as far south as Atlanta, and acquiring for her not only a modicum of fame, in Spiritualist circles, but an income deemed more or less satisfactory: tho’ Madame Blavatsky, fiercely protective of her young charge, and given to forgivable hyperbole, naturally believed, and did not shrink from telling journalists, that this “miraculous creature” had yet to be honored “according to her deserts”—for which, Madame vaguely threatened, she might have to abandon her native land, and strike out for European, or even Oriental, climes.
Deirdre herself rarely spoke about so external, and so materialistic, an issue as her career, let alone her income, but she might have concurred, silently, with Madame’s fervent belief that she was undervalued, despite the attention she continued to receive, and the incontestable mystery of her powers (for, like all genuine mediums, Deirdre had absolutely no comprehension of those powers—and very little control over them); she did not, however, have the slightest desire to abandon her native land—the very thought of sailing for Europe, and leaving her language behind, filled her with secret distress. For not only would she then venture into a world not American, and hence, for her, not imaginable: she would be forced into an even more abject dependency upon Madame Blavatsky, who spoke fluently (or so she boasted) “all the significant European tongues.” And this our clever young lady assuredly did not wish to do, for many reasons, primary among them being her e’er-growing desire to free herself of the older woman, whose busyness, commandeering manner, and habits of personal cleanliness, offended her Lolo.
One day, Deirdre murmured to Hassan Agha, Madame being temporarily out of the house on Theosophical business: “How can you bear her—is it pretense?—is it Romish penance?”—thereby so startling the dusky-skinned youth that he stared bluntly at her, as if he had never seen her before in his life. A look passed between them fluid, and dark, and gravely disapproving on his part, and grayly-chilled on hers: and, with an inordinately clumsy bow, the chela took his leave of her in silence, backing out of the room.
In some agitation Deirdre wondered whether he would repeat her words to Madame, whether he would take advantage of her outburst, and betray her. But, in subsequent days, Madame gave no indication that her Lolo had displeased her in any way: so Deirdre felt both relief and some mild disappointment. In Hassan Agha’s presence, however, she was resolutely guarded, and could not help but note
, to her annoyance, that the chela was equally guarded with her, and would not, in fact, deign to look upon her. (Tho’ she sometimes amused herself by studying him—taking note of his bony, rather sullen face, and his emaciated frame, and his exotic silken costume, which bespoke, oddly, an arresting sort of masculinity—as did the ingeniously wrapped black turban he wore at all times on his head, completely hiding his hair. She noted his narrow, pale, slender hands—his unusually long fingernails—the black hairs on the knuckles—the large onyx ring Madame had given him, with its indecipherable Sanskrit inscription—the strangely disconcerting grace of his walk, and the absolute silence in which (how very unlike Madame, and most of the Spiritualists!) he was content to dwell, as if brooding upon a deep, rich, unfathomable mystery—a predilection, doubtless, of his ancient Indian soul.) The revulsion Deirdre felt for this most trusted of chelas had as much to do, I cannot help speculating, with the fact that, despite his eccentric mode of dress and behavior, he radiated an aura not unattractive to the female sex, as with the covert but unmistakable revulsion he felt for her—manifested, she saw to her angry amusement, by a studious, and at times rather absurd, refusal to meet her gaze, or even to acknowledge her physical presence. “As if I am all spirit!” Deirdre laughed interiorly. “As if I am only spirit!”