mpressive
I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed
impatient of the formalism of the shrill abstract idealism of those about
her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: "O you
are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother." The most
devout and learned of all her followers said to me, "H. P. B. has just
told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so
that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb-bell." I said, for
I knew that her imagination contained all the folklore of the world, "That
must be some piece of Eastern mythology." "O no it is not," he said, "of
that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have
said it." Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice
would become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when she
spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this
antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of
brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this
woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to
specialists alone, was European, and because of this brother a family
pride in everything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely
opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to
Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over
the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility,
the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle
herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began complaining of her
ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master--her
"old Jew," her "Ahasuerus"--cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. "I
was sitting here in my chair," said she, "when the master came in and
brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm which
enclosed my knee--it was a live dog which he had cut open." I recognized a
cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters and their
portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist,
stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night when talk was
impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the
dimly lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining
upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It