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The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett - 1925

By A. T. Barker

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Letter No. 108

{Ostende, Nov. 12}

Wednesday.

Mr dear Mr. Sinnett,

There seems to be a fatality attached to all you do in the best and most friendly intentions — for me. And I knew it from the first. There's fruits No. I of the "Incidents!" Yesterday I received from my sister three columns cut out of the Novoye Vremya about those accursed Memoirs, a review of your book by Moltchenoff, the London Correspondent of that paper. Prominent among other chaff is the sentence in my letter you framed yourself (for the Times that would not have it) and published in the pamphlet, that "bad as the Anglo-Indian Govt. was the Russian would be a 1000 times worse." Against its appearance in the pamphlet, I did not protest. No one read it except theosophists; but its publication in the "Incidents" is a public slap on the face of Russia, of all Russian patriots — of which my sister and nieces are foremost. She is indignant and ready to repudiate me. She says she read the proofs and never saw that — I suppose not since you added it later on!

Well any how, it is my fault, the fault of my cowardice before the cowardly art of Hodgson & Co. and of his accusation. If I have left or made to leave his attack on the phenomena unnoticed I ought to have left this beastly, vile lie and calumny untouched. Had I been hung by your Govt. in India on false suspicions I would have left at least good feeling for my memory in Russia; as it is now, I stand a spy, a beast in the eyes of England and a heartless, unpatriotic wretch in those of every Russian I honour and love, including my own sister — and Gaboriau including the translation of that same letter in his French Occult World! Now every Russian will read it. And it is a LIE; a horrid, disgusting cowardly lie of mine for which I will blush to the end of my days. For, however bad the Govt. in Russia, however intolerant and autocratic for its own subjects it is not in our Colonies like Caucasus that any Englishwoman or Englishman would receive such insults as I have in India, or would be taken for a spy, surely not. Those ninnies and goodnatured fools of Russians can never show enough hospitality and their authorities sufficient courtesy to foreigners, including the English, who hate them as the Devil does holy water. Well, I have to make mea culpa before Katkoff who is capable of refusing my articles after this, and leaving me on the tight Rs 200 from Adyar and chiefly before Russia and my relations. Pity you cannot read the beastly article — you would then judge of my feelings. He gives in it all the slander and story of the Hodgson Report and the S.P.R. and says of you that you are prudent enough not to come out as MY DEFENDER in the "Incidents" but simply as a narrator of "funny" things.

Please excuse what you are sure to call again one of the "O.L.'s fits of rage." I am not in a rage, but as deeply wounded as I can be. . . . Please also, as soon as Mr. Crookes finishes that archaic stuff and proclaims it all rot and fiddlesticks — send it back, as I have to send it to Subba Row who seems to lose patience now he is ordered to look it over.

Your ever the same,
H. P. B.