Chapter IV.

FROM APPRENTICESHIP TO DUTY. 1867-1875.
The period of her life from 1867-70, if it could be told, would probably prove of great interest. But all that is known of these years is that they were spent in the East, and that a great increase in occult know- ledge was their fruit. They mark the transition from " apprenticeship to duty " as Mr. Sinnett puts it, for Madame Blavatsky returned from the East with much of the knowledge which it was her great but enormously difficult task to re-introduce to the world.
It requires but a slight exercise of the imagination to reahze something of the task which lay before Madame Blavatsky. The work of introducing to a world either entirely ignorant of, or greatly prejudiced against, the Eastern teachings which we now term Theosophy, was one which only the bravest heart and the most devoted character could carry through : but our heroine possessed these two qualities in a splendid degree. She was a Russian, and, for the most part, had to speak and write in languages that were not her own ; her teachings were new and strange, and utterly opposed to many of the religious views then prevailing ; not only had she to face opposition, but also she had the great initial difficulty of finding out how and when to start. There was no Theosophical
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Society with its own Publishing Department waiting to receive and propagate her teachings ! She had to find the people scattered through the world who were likely to appreciate and understand her. Although Madame Blavatsky was a pupil of one of the Great Masters and was entrusted with this piece of work, we must not suppose that the precise details and methods of action were given to her ; nor do we find that she herself fully understood, at first, all the teaching which later she was to give out so abundantly.
In 1870 she returned from the East, meeting with her customary adventures en route, for a dreadful explosion occurred on her ship, and she was among the very few on board who were picked out of the water. She managed to reach Cairo, where she suffered many inconveniences until money reached her from Russia. In Cairo, she found a certain number of people who were interested in Spiritualism, and concluded that it would be wise to start work among them. She hoped to show them that she herself could produce at will the phenomena which ordinarily they obtained through a medium, and thereby to awaken their interest in the deeper side of her teach- ings. But her efforts met with no success, as a number of quite unsuitable people attached themselves to her and speedily brought the little society into such disrepute that Madame Blavatsky severed her con- nection with it, although she had already given some important demonstrations of her own powers.
She again met the venerable Copt, of whom we have already spoken, and saw many of the wonders of Egypt ; in particular she passed a night in the black
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darkness of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, comfortably settled in a sarcophagus ! A characteristic recreation ! One other acquaintance she made at this time who ought to be mentioned, z;i>., Madame Coulomb, then attached to a small hotel in Cairo ; years after- wards this person and her husband, finding themselves in great destitution in India, availed themselves of Madame Blavatsky's generous help and repaid her kindness by an act of cruel ingratitude, as we shall see later on. At the end of 1872 her family at Odessa were surprised by Madame Blavatsky's unannounced return, but the bird of passage did not settle for long. In 1873 she started on her travels again, this time turning Westward for the soil in which she might plant the seeds of Eastern thought with which she was entrusted.
An incident which occurred on this journey was so characteristic of her and so similar to many others which are remembered by those who knew Madame Blavatsky, that it is well to record it here. Madame Blavatsky had taken a first-class ticket for New York, and was going on board the steamer at Havre, when she saw a poor woman with two httle children, standing on the pier and weeping bitterly. " Why are you crying ? " she asked. The woman replied that her husband had sent to her, from America, money to enable her and her children to join him. She had expended it all in the purchase, from a bogus Steam- ship Agent, of steerage tickets which turned out to be fraudulent imitations. She could not find the rogue who sold them to her, and was quite penniless in a strange city. Madame Blavatsky went to the Agent
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of the Steamship Company and induced him to ex- change her own first-class ticket for steerage tickets for herself, the poor woman and the children. Thus it happened that our heroine travelled to America in the crowded discomfort of the steerage of a liner.
At the time of her arrival at New York (1873) a series of remarkable spiritualistic phenomena were commencing to attract much attention. WiUiam and Horatio Eddy were farmers at Chittenden, Vermont, U.S.A. ; they were poor and ill-educated, but strong mediums, and crowds of visitors came to witness the remarkable materializations which occurred in their presence. Among these visitors was Madame Bla- vatsky, and, shortly after her, arrived Colonel H. S. Olcott — an apparently chance meeting, which was destined to have far-reaching effects. Their acquain- tance grew into friendship, and Madame Blavatsky began to introduce to him some of the principles of the Eastern Wisdom in which she was versed.
Colonel Olcott writes that " a strange concatenation of events brought us together and united our lives for this work, under the superior direction of a group of Masters, especially of One, whose wise teaching, noble example, benevolent patience and paternal solicitude have made us regard Him with the reverence and love that a true Father inspires in his children. I am indebted to H. P. Blavatsky for making me know of the existence of these Masters and their Esoteric Philosophy ; and, later on, for acting as my mediator before I had come into direct personal intercourse with them.'
Colonel Henry Steele Olcott was an officer in the
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American Army, who served in the war between North and South, and held an honourable position as a lawyer and writer. In him Madame Blavatsky, the teacher, found a colleague and organizer, who stood her in good stead in the following years, during which the Theosophical Society was born and commenced to develop.
In 1875, when it was formally founded, he was appointed its life-President, and for thirty-two years he filled that office with dignity, judgment and tact, winning the love of thousands by the sterling qualities of his heart and the noble work for humanity to which he set his hand.
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