just
reported on her Indian phenomena--and as one of the three followers sat in
an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time
kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a
plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of
humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in
conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into
the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo
clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon
the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at
me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, "Your clock has hooted me."
"It oftens hoots at a stranger," she replied. "Is there a spirit in it?" I
said. "I do not know," she said, "I should have to be alone to know what
is in it." I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her
say: "Do not break my clock." I wondered if there was some hidden
mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any,
though Henley had said to me, "Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles,
but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her
coffin." Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained
that she was a propagandist for women's rights who had called to find out
"why men were so bad." "What explanation did you give her?" I said. "That
men were born bad, but women made themselves so," and then she explained
that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man,
whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness
of the earth.

When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some
time must have passed--probably I had been in Sligo where I returned
constantly for long visits--for she was surrounded by followers. She sat
nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green
baize she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She would
scribble symbols, sometimes humorously explained, and sometimes
unintelligible figures, but the chalk was intended to mark down her score
when she played patience. One saw in the next room a large table where
every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to
their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the folding
doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr Johnson, i