d the devil.
After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the
members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about
harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A
fellow-theosophist once found him hanging from the windowpole, but cut him
down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, "What did
you say to each other?" He said, "We spent the night telling comic stories
and laughing a great deal." This man, torn between sensuality and
visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in
the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little
"astral bell" whereby Madame Blavatsky's master called her attention, and
that, although it was a silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake.
Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had
right of entrance, on some night when the discussion was private, and as I
passed he whispered into my ear, "Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real
woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon
some Russian battlefield." She had two dominant moods, both of extreme
activity, one calm and philosophic, and this was the mood always on that
night in the week when she answered questions upon her system, and as I
look back after thirty years I often ask myself, "Was her speech
automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in
every week?" In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent
raillery. "That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion," I
recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and
then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, "it spread out and
became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome." Then rubbing it all out
except one straight line, "Now they have lopped off the branches and
turned it into a broomstick and that is protestantism." And so it was
night after night always varied and unforeseen. I have observed a like
sudden extreme change in others, half whose thought was supernatural and
Lawrence Oliphant records somewhere or other like observations. I can
remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had
happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon
herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de
Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and
George Sand, w