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Is This Theosophy?

by

Ernest Egerton Wood

 

 

 

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BOOK I



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Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER I

JUVENILITY

 

AMONG the warmest and clearest of my early recollections a dirty old field

stands out pre-eminent – if I may describe as a field a patch of ground,

abandoned for the time being by a discouraged suburban builder, between the

backyard walls of two rows of houses facing two parallel streets. Very little

grass there was on this field, but it was pitted all over with delightful holes

full of sticky reddish-grey clay, and right across its centre it was diversified

by two parallel lines of kerbstones, marking the place where in some remote

future – too far off to disturb a child’s enjoyment – another street would run,

flanked by two more rows of houses, which would eventually obliterate this

paradise and subject it to utility instead of joy.

Standing out more clearly than my brother and the few shadowy boy friends who

played in those delightful holes of clay – I can recollect no girls, or else I

was unconscious of any difference between girls and boys – were several strange

creatures from other spheres.

There was a fox-terrier dog, dressed in white with black patches, which

attracted my gaze again and again – something outstanding and interesting, as

not of my world, but more the material of which fairy tales were made. There was

a very old woman who hung round about with pieces of grey-black cloth. Even her

face and hands were of almost the same colour. She was always bending. I cannot

recollect that she ever straightened herself up. And she was always poking about

among the old cans and other rubbish that obscured the earth in those parts. The

little boy watched her with untiring and almost breathless [11] fascination, as

she gathered together her peck of dirt, the which presumably to eat before she

died.

Other foreign beings – somewhat midway in shadowiness between these two

outstanding figures and the other playfellows – used to emerge at eventide from

sundry back doors, and presently, passing the time of evening to one another,

these would urge their offspring through backyard gates to the inevitabilities

that lay beyond.

My mother is not to be counted among the foreign or shadowy beings. Far from it.

She was a very substantial young woman, the daughter of a Shropshire

tenant-farmer, aged about nineteen when I was born. Even at the early age of

five, of which I am now writing, I remember regarding her as a beauty, not

perhaps that I used that word or idea to myself, but I know that I particularly

liked the line of her cheek and her dark colouring. Although the aesthetics of

touch – especially with reference to clay, sand, pebbles and water, and I

remember, too, a very keen appreciation of velvet and an equal abhorrence of

leather – were much more in my department than those of sight, I was not without

eyes for a handsome curve, of which my mother presented many, composed, as I

again knew by tactual experience, of good firm muscle.

In the early mornings I used to go from my bedroom – where I slept with my elder

brother – to hers, and watch her dress. She never laced or unlaced her stays,

but simply put them on or off, and yet – as I learnt later, when keeping my ears

open in the course of shopping expeditions – they measured only twenty-three

inches at the waist, which was not to be considered much under the

circumstances, even in those days of eighteen– and nineteen-inch figures, and

indeed looked small beside her muscular shoulders and neck, especially when

covered closely with cloth and presented in photographic form in the family

album. There were many mysteries of dress in those latter years of the

eighteen-eighties. I could never understand why she tied a big pad on the back

of her (they were days of the bustle).

My mother’s muscularity I remember well also on bath nights. A zinc tub would be

brought into the kitchen – a cosy place with a roaring fire, for my father and

mother, however poor at the time of which I am writing, were never mean with

reference to their children’s needs and comforts – dumped down on the oilcloth

before the fire and filled [12] with hot water. My brother and I were then

invited, and if necessary commanded, to enter the water, where we sat side by

side immersed to the neck, while our heads and laces, and afterwards the rest of

our bodies, standing, were subjected to a merciless application of soap and

elbow-grease, with regard to which also there was no parsimony, though I would

have welcomed it in that sphere.

The water was painfully hot to me, though not to my mother’s hands, and not

apparently to my brother’s skin; but she never understood my complaints and

protests in this particular, but always thought me fanciful or wayward, and

supplemented her commands when necessary with physical force. However, what

would you? When a muscular young female of our species has embarked upon a

career of mass production at the age of about eighteen, one cannot expect too

much discrimination of particulars, but rather what the poet has described as

the method of Nature – so careless of the single life, so careful of the type!

Still, I must add that economics had their say then, as today, and the mass

production stopped with me for more than five years, when came my younger

brother, whereby presently will hang a tale.

I had my mother very much to myself for several years, as my elder brother was

not much in evidence. Somehow he did not make a very strong mark on me during

this period, although we played together constantly. I used to follow my mother

about the house and watch every little thing that she was doing, and must have

been a great trouble, always getting in her way, watching and listening to

everything, though not speaking very much. In some aspects I was a

disappointment to her: she had very much wanted her second child to be a girl.

In fact, she kept me dressed as a little girl as long as she could; the family

album shows me in that form at the age of about three or four. There is a

picture in a velvet dress. I wonder if it was then I hat I acquired my love for

the touch of velvet and other soft textiles, and consequent dislike for hard or

homespun cloths.

Vivid domestic pictures of my mother remain in my mind: (I) at her treadle

sewing-machine – she used to make all our clothes, as well as her own, which she

fitted upon a revolting headless and legless dummy, whose presence quite spoilt

the pleasure of our empty back bedroom as a playroom; (2) in [13] the kitchen,

with her sleeves turned up, rolling pastry with anuncomm only large rolling-pin

– she was, and still is, an excellent cook; and (3) in the cellar, at the

copper, which had a fire underneath, and was filled with boiling water and

clothes, where she wielded a three-legged dolly with immense speed and vigour,

while the floor swam in water, and an atmosphere of tropical heat and moisture

intrigued my skin and my sense of smell.

During those years I thus acquired much feminine lore, though no art or skill. I

was just a looker-on. If it had been New York, instead of a suburb of an English

commercial town, they would have called me a rubber-neck! But our houses and

streets were miniature, and not overstrong at that. I recollect that a few years

later, when I came to a more athletic age, and had rigged up an old broomstick

or something as a horizontal bar, fastened to one of the beams of the roof, the

man who had built the house called upon my father and told him that it must be

taken down or else I should bring the whole roof upon their heads.

This close association, and my mother’s thoughts towards me for several years,

must have influenced my psychology very greatly, for still I do not distinguish

very clearly between the sexes, except when I specially think of it, and I am

more at home with women than with men, not because they are women, but because

of their ways, their gentleness, their delicacy, their freedom from earthiness,

which I tend not to admire from a distance so much as to absorb for my own. As a

consequence, I am afraid that I am much more of a friend than of a husband to my

wife. Recently a travelling companion asked me: “Done any shooting lately – ah?”

Taken aback, I could only stammeringly reply: “Er – not since the war.”

With all that, though short of stature, I was not an effeminate boy. Sometimes

on the rather rare occasions on which a neighbour might have ventured into our

very self-centred home, there would be an exhibition of the heavy muscular

development of my shoulders and legs, of which my mother was proud, though

unreasoningly, as they were quite out of proportion, and in competition with the

bones my calf muscles had got the best of it and caused my legs to become

slightly bowed. Generally the display of two crowns (whorls in the hair) would

conclude this entertainment. [14]

My brother was much more effeminate in appearance and build than I. He was tall,

thin, fair-haired (like his father) and languid; I was just the opposite; short,

dark-haired (like my mother), muscular and energetic. Later, in my schooldays, I

remember I was occasionally censured for being too rough at football – though I

know now that all that was a semi-conscious revolt against my own feminine

complexes. Again, at the age of about eighteen, I sported a long, dark beard,

which used to make people ask which was the father and which the son when I took

walks with my father in the village, as we called our suburb. And later still,

when the Great War came, the doctors put me into the A class without hesitation,

notwithstanding my meagre five feet six inches of height. But I digress.

§2

My father used to come home from his business in the city every evening about

seven o’clock. He was then manager and buyer in one of the large stationery

warehouses in the city, and in conjunction with that occupation he contrived to

give my brother and me an almost Montessori education, by the constant supply of

otherwise useless samples that he used to bring home. Every evening, when we

heard his key in the lock, we would rush into the lobby to greet him like a pair

of young puppy dogs, and almost his first act would be to draw from his pocket

some small sample-books of coloured tissue or printing paper, or two or three

sample playing cards, or something of the kind. After that he would take off his

coat, go upstairs two or three at a time – he had been an apprentice in a

sailing ship – take off his collar and tie, turn down the neck-band of his

shirt, remove his cuffs and roll up his shirt sleeves, and subject himself to

such a washing of neck and ears and face and arms as I never ceased to marvel

at, in view of the fact that it was not compulsory in his case. Then he would

dress himself carefully again and come down to tea, which was our chief meal of

the day.

A good meal it was, too, for, as I before remarked, my mother was an excellent

cook, with an unerring instinct for the proper moment to take things off the

fire or out of the oven. She made also our supplies of jams and pickles, while I

used to stand by with discs of paper and a saucer of [15] flour paste, putting

on the “lids” of the jars, as she filled them with the steaming jam – there were

no screw stoppers then. But I remember that her one solitary attempt to make the

household bread was a failure; it came out as hard as bricks and was eventually

used instead of coal.

In the midday our meal was much simpler. My father would take a few sandwiches

to town with him, and eat them somewhere privately during the lunch hour, or

else go to one of the cheap little vegetarian restaurants which abounded then –

there were twenty-two of them in our city – and spend a few pence on a bit of

something to eat. My mother, at home, would be equally frugal in the middle of

the day; at that meal we could not have jam and butter on our bread both at the

same time, but only one or the other. I recollect that it was then that my

scientific proclivities began to manifest themselves, in the discovery that I

got more taste out of my bread and butter or my bread and jam by eating it

upside down than right side up, for thus the tasty portion rather than the mere

pabulum would most fully and immediately strike the tongue; though I cannot say

that this discovery of mine was highly approved in the family from the aesthetic

point of view. Another bit of science was my formula for learning right and left

– “If I stand beside the oven and look through the window my right arm is on the

oven side.” For a long time I had to picture this scene when I wanted to know

which side was right or left. I remember also systematically finding out that it

took ten minutes to count a thousand.

In the early mornings my father used to get up and make the kitchen fire, clean

the boots, and make his own breakfast and a cup of tea for my mother, which he

took up to her bed, for he firmly disapproved of her getting up until he was off

to his business. Often he had a sausage for breakfast, and when we came down my

brother and I used to find the two ends, each about an inch long, standing up

neatly on a plate, titbits greatly relished by us, not only for their taste, but

also on account of their interesting appearance and shape. My father used

playfully to call these “sassengers,” until one day he went into a provision

dealer’s shop and asked for “a pound of sassengers,” thereby attracting in his

direction more eyes than he was accustomed to meet at one time. Notwithstanding

the charm of these titbits, tea remained the chief gustatory event of the day

for all of us, [16] though it was probably marred to some extent for my father

by my insistence upon sitting so close up against him at table that he could

hardly use his arm.

My father and mother had no friends. They never went out to tea or evening

functions, and no one came to see them. Occasional advances of friendliness by

neighbours they quietly but firmly discouraged. Their time was entirely devoted

to their children and to reading. Tea being over at about half-past seven, my

mother would clear the table and then sit down to read by the fire, while my

father would play with us and teach us. It was in this way that we learnt to

read and to perform the operations of simple arithmetic, long before going to

school. Somehow our father made this learning into a kind of play, so that we

were never conscious of any effort, or indeed that we were learning anything.

These occasions were enlivened, however, by a certain amount of undesirable

competition, especially in mental arithmetic, in which my brother used to become

annoyed because I was quicker in answering, and seldom gave him a chance to

reply.

Those evening studies were mingled with games – among which I remember

particularly wall quoits, tiddleywinks and the flicking of marbles through holes

in a board, or at rows of toy soldiers. I was always good at marbles, but my

brother would not touch them at all, declaring – though not in exactly these

words – that they were too plebeian for his lofty taste. Our father never

brought in playing cards – except snap cards, with ugly faces and mottoes on

them, such as “Away with Melancholy,” of which I could never see the sense. Nor

did he bring in any of those games which depend upon the throwing of dice.

I suppose that no children could ever have had a more companionable or

entertaining young father. When we were tired of games or of reading he would

tell us thrilling stories of his schooldays, which were very amusing when not

painful, and of his adventures at sea in sailing ships, and in various distant

lands, especially South America and Australia. He would talk, for example, of

the long walk that he undertook across country from Melbourne to Sydney, of the

trying experience of a sailing ship held up for six weeks off the south of Cape

Horn, heeling over on its side on account of the shifting of a cargo of guano,

while all hands dug the unsavoury substance back to its proper position, [17]

hard put to it to prevent the handles of the spades from freezing to their

fingers and taking away the skin. He would talk of quarrels and fights at sea,

bordering on mutiny, in which his sympathies were always with the men in their

complaints of rough treatment and of live stock and decay in their food. He

would talk of the desolate nitrate tracts behind Iquique and the more pleasant

country around Valparaiso and Concepcion, all of which I was destined to see for

myself in years to come.

My brother and I acquired many fragments of economic and scientific knowledge

from these histories. Once our father had decided, after leaving a sheep farm,

to stay in Sydney and look round for work there. He did look, for weeks, until

he had come to the last of his money. He was wandering on the Circular Quay

(which, by the way, is square) wondering what to do, when – the last straw – the

sole came off one of his shoes. He was looking at this with stunned helplessness

when he heard a voice calling his name. Looking up he saw the face of a ship’s

sailmaker whom he had known protruding over the gunwale of the famous ship

Thermopylae. The sailmaker stitched the shoe, and took him to the captain, who

gave him a job as rigger.

Among the scientific bits, we learned that in a storm at sea a man on deck would

go and shut himself in a cabin in order to hear more clearly the voice of a man

up aloft.

§3

Sundays were dreadfully dull, especially the mornings, as, although we were

never troubled with religion in any form, we were not allowed any but very quiet

games. Sunday afternoon walks brightened things up a bit, and often we used to

go to a dell called Daisy Nook and pick flowers. Although we lived in a street

composed of rows of houses, the front doors of which opened straight on to the

pavement, the neighbourhood was not heavily built up, and there were some nice

walks. Opposite our house was a neat little municipal park, to which our mother

used to take us in the afternoons, while our father was in town. There we used

to play ball on the grass or sit while she read to us from picture and story

books. Nursery stories were followed by Grimms and Andersen. Grimms I liked,

with their caverns and magic, but I could not bear Andersen’s habit of making

[18] leather and broomsticks talk. And I wanted to know, if a princess was shut

up in a tower, what arrangements were made for her sanitary convenience. Later

The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments proved a glorified Grimms. Saturday

afternoons were devoted to shopping. I remember standing outside a greengrocer’s

and looking at tomatoes. They were something new. It was remarked that they were

“an acquired taste.”

Twice, I think, my brother and I went to Sunday-school, upon the solicitation of

a young lady who called at our house and volunteered to take us. But our

experiments in religion came to an abrupt end. Somebody had been talking about

Hell, to which my father seriously objected. He was a keen admirer of Mr.

Charles Bradlaugh and in a lesser degree of Mrs. Annie Besant; he took me once,

at the age of about four, to one of Mr. Bradlaugh’s lectures, but I do not think

I profited much by the occasion, as to which I can only remember a big broad

back blocking my view.

Still, like many other children, I was not without my own private hells. One of

these was called “the bury hole.” Who put this into my mind I do not know, but I

had a good deal of vague fear in connection with it. I thought that little boys

called naughty – not really naughty, of course, for there was no such thing! I

was quite destitute of what the clergy call the sense of sin – were driven away

in a big black hearse, drawn by two black horses hung round with black tassels,

to a barren land, where they were then buried up to the neck with their heads

sticking out, or were put into a deep hole which was then filled entirely with

earth, and thus left to their future. I had no idea of death as a termination of

consciousness.

Night I dreaded. My especial trouble for a long time was a dreadful man who had

secreted himself under the bed and was always about to plunge a sword right

through the mattress into some part of my defenceless anatomy; I always had a

dread of this sword, and used to picture quite in detail the events of its

playing about in my abdominal regions. And what a trouble my father had to

persuade me to go to the barber’s shop for the first time! Our mother had always

cut our hair before that. Though he remained beside me the whole time, I

expected every moment that the barber would cut my throat with one of the razors

of [19] which he had a handsome display, or else would jab the points of his

scissors into my eyes.

At night the gas jet used to be left on low in our bedroom. Nevertheless, as I

looked at the patch of light on the wall I used to see there malignant grimacing

faces. There was always a great battle of wills with these. By force of will I

used to convert them piecemeal into portraits of my father, whom I regarded

practically as God; but always the portrait would escape control and would

change again into some new horror, and so the contest would go on until I fell

asleep from sheer exhaustion. I do not think there were any pleasant imaginings

to compensate for these. Only sometimes I used to put my head under the

bedclothes and deliberately imagine that I was passing along some underground

corridors which were literally lined on either side with thousands upon

thousands of toys, but only once did I succeed in making it seem at all real to

myself.

I kept all my fears entirely to myself, and endured them privately until they

gradually faded away, to be replaced by another implanted by my mother. She had

a fear of her own, much more real than any of mine, and she did not keep it to

herself. It was that her husband might fall ill. He had a delicate appearance,

and in some ways was, perhaps, not very strong, especially being a restless

sleeper and sometimes subject to biliousness. She considered that after a hard

day in town the attention of two boys in the evening might wisely be subjected

to a little moderation, which she administered by telling us to be very gentle

with our father, lest he fall ill and lose his employment and we find ourselves

in the workhouse, pictured as a sort of prison – as indeed it was in those days

– or wandering the streets as dreadful, loathsome beggars – objects of which we

had plenty of ocular evidence. I then learnt that food, clothing and shelter did

not drop as manna from heaven, but that certain means had to be taken to obtain

them, and at best it was a precarious business indeed. This thought preoccupied

me for many years. This new sword was all the worse because it not only hovered

over myself, but harried me with regard to all sorts of people, some of them

quite imaginary.

My mother was not altogether to be blamed for this. She had felt poverty. When

my elder brother was born she and her husband had lived in one room in a

ramshackle house in [20] Liverpool, and a moderate gale had sufficed to blow the

window in, frame and all, while she lay in bed – a situation distressing enough

to two young love-birds who, though they had roughed it a bit before marriage,

had known gentler days, for my father had been to a school where the young

gentlemen wore toppers, and my mother’s family was not without dignity of name.

These two young people had quarrelled violently with their respective fathers,

on the subject in each case of a second marriage of the latter, as those were

times when fathers were fathers (somewhat as in some remote parts of the world,

men are still men, if our modern novelists are to be believed). It was also true

that some boys and girls were boys and girls – at least my parents were, though

they also proved themselves to be men and women, for they left their respective

homes, practically penniless, and subsequently met and loved and married on the

munificent income of fifteen shillings a week. However, my father was well

educated, trustworthy, intelligent and painstaking, and so he made his way

steadily up the ladder of commercial life, ill adapted to it though his previous

life had been.

§4

At the time of which I am writing our little family had progressed through four

houses (materially, not astrologically) since my birth. I was born in one of

those houses which are now becoming scarcer, which have no backs, not of course

that they are open to the atmosphere, but because the back wall of the rooms is

also the back wall of the rooms of another row of houses facing another parallel

street.

I do not remember living in that street, but I saw it afterwards, and also heard

talk about it. My mother and father always dressed carefully, and even

fashionably, and the neighbours, lounging at their doors, were wont to pass

audible remarks about them, sometimes more euphonious than classical. So their

days were not long in that land. They moved as soon as possible to something a

bit better, and again moved, when circumstances permitted, to the place of my

earliest recollections, at 52 Bell Street.

Here I became a collector, and even something of a connoisseur, the subject

being not pictures, nor china, nor [21] numismatics, nor philately, but the more

modest one of handbills – handbills large and small and of every conceivable

colour – which remained for a long time piled in a neat heap in a corner of an

empty back upstairs bedroom, until my mother decided that they were harbouring

too much dust and too many spiders, and swept the whole lot away.

While we lived in that house, we watched the building of a new row of houses

further up the street, and when they were ready we moved – from number 52 to

number 26, a mathematical curiosity which stuck firmly in my young mind.

It was in 26 Bell Street, when I was five years and nearly ten months old, that

my younger brother was born. That disturbing event happened in the following

manner, as far as my share in it was concerned. On a certain evening I had been

playing in one of the clay pits, and by dusk I had accumulated about a dozen

small clay models, some of them very neatly rounded by rolling between the

hands. These precious objects had to be taken home with me. When it came time

for sleep I was not allowed to take them into the bed, but after some discussion

a compromise was struck and they were placed on a saucer on a small table at the

side of the bed.

Evidently I was of a mystical temperament, and quite prepared to regard myself

as a modern Pygmalion capable of producing even a round dozen of Venuses, for

when I was awakened in the night by thin squeaking and piping sounds and an

occasional wail, I was fully prepared to believe that the clay figures had come

to life and were beginning to express their individuality and independence. This

frightened me, I confess, and I shut my eyes tightly and kept the clothes well

pulled up about my head. The next morning I was taken into my mother’s bedroom

by my father – an unusual procedure, calculated to awaken excitement as well as

curiosity. But oh! what a disappointment when I entered the bedroom and found my

mother lying in bed with something resembling a large slug beside her, as to

which I could see no reason for the fuss that was being made. And my clay images

were as dead as ever they had been. I do not think I ever played in the clay pit

again. My temper seems also to have been affected a little, for I remember,

while my mother was still in bed, threatening [22] both nurse and housemaid to

joint combat with a diminutive cricket bat, because they had eaten all the jam.

Somehow I realized that this thing had come to stay in our house. Probably I had

put the question of its departure and had had my feelings dashed by a negative

reply. In any case, my misgivings were justified, for, though it was interesting

to watch my mother washing and powdering the thing in the mornings, I was often

called upon during the day to “mind the baby,” an occupation – or rather lack of

occupation – which I loathed for its monotony, and also because I very much

disliked its dirty ways. What with one thing and another my relations with my

mother lost their intimacy, and even, I fear, some of their affectionateness for

some time after this.

I would date real affection for my mother from about the age of twelve – too old

to show it. I can remember awakenings to love – they were always sudden, and

distinct events. One must not expect love in small children. It was related of

myself – though the incident is not in my memory – that my father once asked:

“You would not like your mother to die, would you?” The disturbing answer was

“No; who would get my breakfast ready?” I remember, however, an evening on which

my father came home without any plaything in his pocket, and I looked

disappointed. He made some remark that showed that he was hurt, and I

immediately became aware of his consciousness and was filled with remorse.

Before that he had been something in my life. Now his life appeared as something

in itself, though coming into mine.

§5

After this, world-shaking events began to occur in my life in quick succession.

First came the death of my paternal grandfather’s second wife (who had been the

cause of my father’s troubles and poverty, though also the cause indirectly of

his alliance with my mother – such is the law of compensation) and a consequent

armistice and even slight rapprochement between my father and his father,

familiarly alluded to as “the Gov’nor.” Not that I knew much about this, and it

did not appear that there were any pecuniary benefits attaching to it, but its

results manifested in my life in the appearance in our house of some dozens [23]

of old school books which had belonged to my father and his elder brothers and

had now come to us consequent upon my grandfather’s desire to simplify the

contents of his household.

I did not myself see the old man until many years later, and then I did not

harmonize with him, for I found him to be a short-tempered and dominating old

gentleman, though I tried, not very successfully, to be polite. He was a man of

some importance in his own world, being proprietor of a wholesale business which

was the second largest of its kind in England, and he could not forget it in

private life. When later on I went into business on my own account at the age of

sixteen, and was quite proud of the sixteen clerks in my office, his patronizing

air irritated me much, and I am afraid I caused some anxiety to my father by

showing my irritability a little sometimes. “The Gov’nor” and I had too much in

common – our short stature, big noses, instinct for money-making and

incorrigible obstinacy.

It was my grandfather who made “the warehouse” into a really big business,

though his grandfather had established it, but the big nose must have been there

before that, for tradition had it that it was brought over from the Continent by

some Norman ancestor who had been given a jaghire in Yorkshire, but my

grandfather’s grandfather had degraded it to commerce after recklessly ruining

himself in racing and betting on horses in the neighbourhood of London.

This third commercial generation, allied to a country girl from the south of

Ireland – where my grandfather frequently went on business – who smoked a long

churchwarden clay pipe while sitting in her hooped skirts (although she was the

descendant of semi-divine kings!) presented my grandfather with numerous

offspring and also the companionship of a brother of hers, rejoicing in the name

of Aloysius Gonzigu, who could patronize even my grandfather, and would enter a

shop with the command: “Show me the overcoat that you would show to the Prince

of Wales if he came in here,” and would buy it, too! But I digress once more.

Those books which I mentioned some time ago became almost my principal

playthings. Many of them contained intriguing diagrams, particularly Newth’s

Natural Philosophy, as Physics was then called, and Todhunter’s Euclid; while

the root-signs in Colenso’s Algebra and some [24] trigonometry books puzzled me

exceedingly. Among the reading books, which were entirely unillustrated, one

attracted me especially because it contained a series of stories upon “The

Transmigrations of Indur,” which I read again and again.

A few months afterwards we brothers caught scarlet fever, and nothing would

console me in bed but that about a dozen of these books should be arranged in

two piles, one on either side of my pillow, and though they fell down again and

again they had always to be replaced. I remember, too, lying in bed and watching

some pigeons and sparrows which flitted past the window, and wondering whether,

if I died, I should become a pigeon or a sparrow. There was a Dr. Hamil who came

to visit us, with his little pointed black beard – a very charming and agreeable

gentleman, who quite prevented us from developing any fear of “the doctor.” I

remember him at an earlier period in our previous house, turning our trousers

down and our behinds up to see if we had chicken-pox.

When we were better of scarlet fever, but still not allowed out of the bedroom,

my mother went out by herself one afternoon, leaving us locked in the house. I

remember how pretty and buoyant she looked as she came back into the bedroom. I

think she was very happy about the successful termination of our illness. It was

almost a Christmas occasion, she brought back with her so many toys and books. I

remember among the books some of the Hesba Stretton series – Christie’s Old

Organ, Jessica’s First Prayer, and Max Homburg – the last a story of Strassburg

during the Franco-Prussian war. The advent of these books was the beginning of a

sort of religious career of mine, which took place at dead of night, was never

made known to anyone else, and was quite short-lived.

It happened that my brother was a much steadier sleeper than I. Not infrequently

I would wake in the middle of the night, and feeling cold, would complain

against him for taking all the clothes to his side of the bed – until I found

that I was lying on the floor, having fallen out of bed. The actual fall never

woke me up, but the subsequent cold did. Again, I was much troubled with colds

in the head and I would turn periodically from one side to the other, with the

stuffed nostril on top, so as to get some relief in breathing, for I resolutely

refused to open my mouth. My mother took [25] what precautions she could against

this, rubbed goose grease on my chest and placed hot oven plates wrapped in old

blankets in the bed. And she well knew the warm virtues of newspapers and brown

paper when laid between the blankets. No, I was not cold, but very restless,

while my brother was a steady sleeper.

Thus the stage was well set for my bout of religion, when the handy little books

arrived. Waiting till dead of night, when all the household was perfectly quiet,

I would silently slip out of bed, creep across the room and turn up the gas

sufficiently for me to read. Then I would creep back into bed, draw my book from

under the pillow and revel in it for one or two hours. Christie’s Old Organ was

the book particularly suited to the circumstances of my mood. I shuddered over

the evils of drink and untruth; I was thrilled with the beauty of kindness and

unselfishness. God was a magnification of my father, somehow invisible, yet

ever-present – the last an important point. Jesus was my ideal self. 1 wanted to

go about with Him and even more to melt myself into Him. I did not pray, but I

yearned. Somehow the references in the stories to persons going to church and

praying and performing ceremonies made no impression on me. I would hurry

through those portions and seek for passages of human life. Surely if God is

really omnipresent these things constitute the reverse of devotion – I felt

this, but I did not think it. I was seeking the fulness of life, not trying to

understand it. [26]



-------
Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER II

PUPILARITY

§1

SCHOOL came in its appointed time. My first school lasted a short time for me,

mercifully brought to an end by the arrival of the scarlet fever already

mentioned. My brother had been going to that school for some time before I

started. I think that was how he escaped my fate of having to mind the baby. It

was a dame’s school run by two sisters. I remember the two ladies – or rather my

vision of them – quite well. One was old and dry and always dressed in black,

and as stiff as a ramrod, the other very much younger, rounded and playful. We

were taken to this school by some elder girls who lived on the opposite side of

our street, midway between the old house and the new, but these girls have left

no impression upon my memory except for their legs – black boots and stockings.

I suppose I was so small that these constituted the chief part of the scenery

when I walked with them.

I cannot remember anything in the school except that we sat bunched on benches

in an open square waiting for closing time. The elder schoolmistress put the lid

completely on this misery, as far as I was concerned, by expecting me to kiss

her, or allow her to kiss me. Though it was only a matter of routine – for she

went round the whole class systematically, and I remember watching with a

sinking heart the deadly peril coming nearer and nearer – when it came I openly

and violently rebelled, and thus created quite a sensation and I think a

precedent in the school. That school did not see me many times more. I had been

so upset that I was quite ill and unfit to attend. I am sure I lost nothing by

this absence. It did not seem that they really taught anything, and if they had

done so the [27] memory of the indignity would have driven it from my thoughts.

My second school was a more business-like affair. I was much impressed by the

huge building – a large main half curtained off for several classes, and a

number of separate rooms. I joined that school on my seventh birthday. My first

memory of it is that of standing before one whom I may call the reception clerk,

along with three or four other boys. Do what I would I could not make that man

understand that it was my birthday.

“How old are you?”

“Seven” (years understood).

“And when was your birthday?”

“To-day.”

He persisted in thinking I had misunderstood him, and what he ultimately wrote

down in his record I have no idea. I paid my tenpence – it was tenpence a week –

and that was that.

That school was a great place for misunderstandings. Sometimes the teachers

misunderstood me; sometimes I misunderstood them. I remember an occasion when

our class was confronted with a large map of Egypt and the land of Canaan. The

teacher was instructing us in the wanderings of the Jews. I was somewhat

interested in this, for I thought he was talking about the migrations of some

kind of black birds. Crows were interesting; ancient Jews not at all. It was

only afterwards, in another school (my fourth), that I learnt what ancient Jews

really were, though I remembered very clearly the configuration of the map, and

understood that quite well.

It was in that same class and on that very occasion that I was first threatened

with physical violence at school – first, that is, if we omit the kissing from

that category. There were about four rows of boys in that class, arranged on the

gallery system. I was on the second row. At the beginning of the lesson the

teacher used to appoint one boy to stand at the end of each row and watch the

others, and call out the names of any boys who appeared to be inattentive to the

teacher, such boys being then required to stand out in front of the class. There

would usually be about half a dozen of these boys by the end of the lesson, each

of whom would receive a whack on the hand from the cane of the teacher and then

would go back to his place. [28] I remember that my name was called out on the

occasion of the wanderings of the Jews, but I pretended not to hear, and for

some reason the monitor did not insist.

Teachers differed very much in their temper and degree of cruelty. There was one

man, whom we called Toby, who was constantly and ferociously cruel, until one

day the father of one of the boys walked in and gave him a thorough thrashing

before the whole class, which laid him up in hospital for several weeks. There

was one horrible school-master, very often half-drunk, who used to beat little

boys, but leave the bigger ones alone, and that was commented upon privately by

all the boys.

Another schoolmaster, a thick-set man with a very dark beard, assembled the

whole school of perhaps five hundred boys, and then, holding one small boy aloft

by the back of his coat, with one strong hand, administered to him a merciless

beating with a stick held in the other. In whispered consultation with other

boys I tried to learn what the boy had done, and understood that he had been

guilty of soiling the wrong portion of the school latrine. This was what was

called “an example.” Of what? Quite apart from any abnormal soiling, those

school latrines were dreadfully noisome; it was necessary to go into them

sometimes, but always a torture. There were obviously sins of omission as well

as of commission in connection with them, but the former were excused.

I remember another misunderstanding in that same school. There was to be an

examination. We were taken into a big room with individual desks on which paper,

pens and ink and other articles were laid out. Cards were then handed round,

containing questions which we were to answer. There was no pen on my desk, so I

sat still, while the others were either writing or chewing their penholders, as

the case might be. Presently a pleasant young man came along and looked at me.

“Have you no pen?”

“Yes,” I replied, meaning, quite logically, that I had not a pen.

He went away, and I waited patiently for him to bring the pen, but it did not

come. After a long time someone else came up.

“Where is your pen?”

“I don’t know.” [29]

I assumed that there must be a certain pen intended for me, since he talked of

my pen, but I did not know where they had put it. However, after some further

confused discussion he seemed to understand that no pen had been placed on my

desk that morning. I had lost about half my time, but came through the

examination all right. All these things occurred in somewhat of a dream, which

only occasionally took on the aspect of a nightmare.

Many years afterwards I had a similar experience in a High Court in India, when

I happened to be one of the witnesses in a rather celebrated case.

“Did you,” asked the advocate, “on the night of August 22nd, sleep in the next

room with a big stick, intending to prevent anyone from molesting So-and-so?”

I hesitated, and was about to try to explain what had really happened.

The Judge thundered: “Answer the question, Yes or No!”

With obvious discomfort I answered “No,” though in fact it was only the date

that was wrong. And later, in the written judgment of the case, in the Appellate

Court appeared the interesting remark: “I do not believe – (another witness’s

name, very similar to mine!) when he says that he did not sleep in an adjacent

room with a big stick for the purpose of preventing any interference with -”

The only other thing of note that I remember in that school was the spelling

lessons, held in the same examination room. They did not give me much trouble,

as I seem to have had an eye for the form of words, but I was much struck by the

lack of uniformity in the spelling of similar sounds, and I theorized to myself

on the vast amount of time wasted and trouble caused to children thereby. No

wonder the English do not learn many languages, when they have to spend so much

time and energy learning their own.

St. Luke’s School was about fifteen minutes’ walk from our house. I remember

walking there by myself sometimes, with a satchel over my shoulder. After

passing the spot where I had formerly seen the old woman gathering her peck of

dirt, one came to a road which ran along two sides of a square field which was

fenced in. I remember that field very well because of an incident that happened

one day on my way to school.

While walking along beside the fence I had been [30] entertaining myself with a

little cinematograph which I carried in my hand. Perhaps I had better explain.

One of the early childhood toys which my mother used sometimes to make for us

consisted of a large button, through two holes of which a circle of thin string

or thread was run and the two ends tied together. Holding the thread taut,

horizontally, by looping it over the two middle fingers, with the button

standing vertically in the middle of it, one gave the button a number of turns

so as to twist the threads, then started the button spinning by gradually

drawing the threads tight so as to untwist them, and then allowing the momentum

to twist the thread the other way, by gradually reducing the pull on the thread,

and so, alternately increasing and reducing the pull, one caused the button to

spin with great speed. The cinematograph was somewhat on that principle. A stiff

card, with pictures on the margins, was mounted on two pieces of string. By

making it to revolve at a certain speed, one caused the pictures partially to

blend, and 10, the cow jumped over the moon.

While I was strolling along engrossed in this interesting occupation, I suddenly

heard a loud shout from the rear. I looked round, and there, to my horror, was a

large policeman, shouting and gesticulating and hurrying towards me. Having no

more confidence in the law outside school than within it, I fled for my life,

the policeman after me.

After running some distance, I looked fearfully round to see how far away my

pursuer was, and then observed that he was not running very fast and was holding

up to my view, as he shouted, a school satchel. I suddenly realized that mine

was missing – I must have dropped it – and that this was it, which he wished to

return to me. Half-reassured, I warily approached the policeman, and as he held

the satchel at arm’s length, I took it from him also at arm’s length, and once

more fled. One never knew what trick a policeman might play to get a little boy

into prison, so that he could enjoy himself by gloating through the bars, and

saying:

“Fee, fi, fo, fum,” or something equally dreadful.

Teachers, too, were a bit ogreish. When they asked a question they did not want

you to say what you knew or thought on the subject, but they wanted you to guess

what was in their minds. It was a sort of idiotic game, having little to do with

facts. I remember that we were once asked to write a small essay on the

telephone – a typical subject [31] for small boys coming chiefly from penurious

homes! – and got myself much abused for mentioning, among other things, that

there had been telephones in Egypt – yet I had read that very thing in a weekly

paper of snippets or titbits. I do not suppose that one single boy in that class

had ever seen a telephone instrument. I was fortunate enough to have had a toy

one – two little parchment drums connected by a thread. My father had played

with us with it, and talked about it, so I had something to say.

On another occasion, on a sixth of November, we were asked to write on our

experiences of a Guy Fawkes’ night bonfire. I said that it was a wonderfully big

fire, and that it actually had not gone out until ten o’clock at night! The

teacher, having more spacious ideas and experience, insisted that that must be

altered to ten o’clock the next morning, though what I had said was perfectly

accurate. The school day was one round of bickering. If it was not oneself, it

was someone else in the class.

§2

I did not stay in that school more than a year. As soon as circumstances were

favourable my parents decided to move further out of town, into what was then a

little old-fashioned country place, but near enough to town for my father to go

and come by train daily. But before I relate what occurred in our new residence

I must mention The Four Events of the Year, far more important than the

Christian or any other Calendar. These were – in order of importance in our eyes

– a week at Blackpool, Christmas, a visit to Hamilton’s Panorama, and a Saturday

afternoon at the Zoological Gardens.

At Blackpool the prime thing was to dig in the sand and let the waves supply

water to the moats of the castles which you made. It did not outrage our sense

of the fitness of things when the waves overdid their business and flooded the

whole works. Rather the young mind rejoiced at this opportunity for a spectacle

of destruction. Niggers were there, but I admired only their athletic

exhibitions, not their blackness, nor their buffoonery, which hurt my feelings,

which were over-sensitive to human dignity. Lucky packets absorbed a large

number of our pennies. The sense of height was satisfied by walks and play on

the pier, [32] especially when the waves roared and bounded about beneath, as

waves can at Blackpool. The pier also contained many slot machines, and when I

saw other people about to drop their pennies therein I used to buzz along to see

the fun. There was only one slot machine that tempted me – a “try your grip”

machine, which would give you your penny back if you could ring the bell. I put

my penny through again and again, joyously listening to the ringing of the bell

when I pulled, until at last I lost it. There must have been something wrong

with that machine – a small boy could not have been so strong in the wrist.

Another attraction was a phrenologist, with his curious diagrams and little

lectures outside his tent. I sunk sixpence on him once and learned that I ought

to become a doctor, or failing that an auctioneer, though to this day I cannot

see the connection between the two.

Talking of the pier reminds me of my father’s next younger brother, whom we

always liked for both his jollity and his largess. He was in “the warehouse”

(and, in fact, inherited it when my grandfather died) and consequently was

well-to-do. Nearly always when he visited us he would slip coins into our hands

on his way to the front door. I recollect that at a very early age he held out

before me a large brown coin and a very little white one and asked me which I

would have. I chose the threepenny bit, having been born canny in such matters.

He and his wife came to Blackpool when we were there. The latter was a

profoundly respectable lady, daughter of a clergyman in a family which took

religion and social restrictions very seriously. Once my uncle was riding in a

tramcar and talking to a friend, and his wife’s father happened to be sitting on

the other side in the far corner (the seats used to run the length of the car).

The friend got out, and the father-in-law came over and sat beside the

son-in-law.

“I am surprised,” he said, “to see you so friendly with that man. Don’t you know

that he is a Roman Catholic?”

Well, my uncle was always very jolly (except when he was, not infrequently,

steeped in profound melancholy) and at Blackpool there occurred a grand

opportunity to have a little game with his wife. She was sitting on a seat at

the side of the pier, my father and his brother and we boys being on the sand

beneath. Suddenly my uncle looked up to the [33] pier, cupped his hands at the

side of his mouth and shouted in the broadest possible Lancashire dialect: “Eh,

missus! ’Ast ’ad ta baggin’?” to her great confusion, and to the amusement of

the numerous onlookers, who certainly thought they had discovered a shining

example of the new rich. Still, she could not be displeased for long with my

uncle; he was so genuinely good-natured, even if his playfulness was sometimes

embarrassing. Perhaps, by the way, his remark needs translation. It meant

nothing more than “Have you had your lunch?”

The journey from our home to Blackpool in the train occupied about an hour and a

half, but that was all too long. I used to sit whenever possible with my face to

the engine in a corner window seat. I would put my hand against the side of the

frame of the window and push as hard as I could, to speed the train along. We

used generally to return at night so as to make as much of the holiday as

possible. Looking into the darkness through the windows I was much frightened in

my younger days by the horrible faces that were to be seen there. Only later on

I learnt that they were the reflections of the faces of my fellow-passengers.

Children have a great capacity for looking forward. I believe we began to think

about Christmas as soon as the summer holidays were over. Its chief events for

us were the presents to be found at the foot of the bed on Christmas morning, a

visit to the pantomime, and a tour of the decorated shops. Of all the things

ever found at the foot of the bed the most exciting were two watches complete

with chains – watches that really went, and told the time, and made us feel very

grown up. They had been sent by our jolly uncle. The only thing to mar the full

enjoyment of them was the fact that we should have to write letters of thanks –

rather a formidable task.

Perhaps some readers of these recollections will remember that the three great

symbols of initiation into the brotherhood of men are the first watch, the first

pair of long trousers, and the first cigarette. Those watches at least made us

feel our novitiate, although we knew that the long trousers and the cigarette

were still far ahead.

As to the pantomime, one never understood the story, but the transformation

scenes gave a glimpse of other worlds, perhaps of real fairylands in which the

hard facts of our world could be escaped at will. One heard some ladies call

[34] these scenes heavenly, and formed one’s pictures of heaven accordingly.

Hamilton’s Panorama used to put in its appearance in the largest hall in our

city about half-way between Blackpool and Christmas. It must have been a

gigantic undertaking for Mr. Hamilton, or whoever was behind the scenes. For

about two hours scenes from all over the world would unroll themselves across

the back of the stage, accompanied by the most realistic sound and light

effects. A ship would come sailing through a smooth starlit sea. Gradually dawn

would appear, the sun would rise, and as the day wore on clouds would make their

appearance, a storm would blow up and lash the elements into fury. Then

lightning, rain and wind would afflict the scene until at last the ship either

sank before our eyes or won its way through the storm to a peaceful harbour –

and all in the comfortable space of about ten minutes. Within a similar period

the Bay of Naples would present its charm, and Vesuvius its fearsome

possibilities, while a gentleman in evening dress and a huge moustache explained

in an Oxford voice the implications of the scene. And interspersed between these

grander demonstrations, a Chinese juggler or conjurer would perform for us in a

street in Hong Kong, and Hungarian acrobats would imperil their lives for our

delectation in marble halls of Italy or among the minarets of India.

In anticipation of Hamilton’s Panorama, before leaving Blackpool we used to buy

little panoramas for twopence each. They were shaped like a stage front, and

there were about twenty pictures mounted on rollers. Unfortunately the pictures

consisted mostly of scenes of such doubtful educational value as the murder of

the little princes in the Tower. I will give them credit, however, for being

very realistically executed.

The visit to the Zoo was a movable feast, occurring some time between Christmas

and Blackpool, and much dependent on the weather. It was literally a feast, in

the restricted modern use of the word, as it always included a period devoted to

the consumption of ices – not ice cream, but real ices, which were composed, I

suppose, of ice chopped up small and sugared and then served in small saucers.

This and the elephant ride were the two chief features of the Zoo. There were

animals to look at, but they were not very interesting, being shut up in little

enclosures behind bars, and for [35] the most part looking very bored. It was

much more interesting to feed the ducks in the park, to see them swim under the

little bridges and come out on the other side, though when they put down their

heads and stood with their tails out of the water one did not know whether it

was proper to continue staring, and wondering at the suppressed giggles of the

young ladies standing near by.

§3

One day there came to our house two big furniture vans with splendid

heavy-weight horses and three men in thick green aprons, who clumped into the

house, drank glasses of beer at one draught, and in a marvellously short time

deposited all our belongings on the pavement outside in a sea of straw, for the

covert scrutiny of the neighbours, prior to packing them in the vans.

Leaving them to finish their work, my mother took us off by bus, train and foot,

seriatim; first, through the suburbs into a big railway station, then in the

train – one never ceased wondering how it could go without horses, nor fearing

that it would mount the platform as it came with a deafening roar into the

station. For five minutes the train clanked across a veritable sea of railway

lines, among chimneys and factories; then it went through a long and perfectly

dark tunnel, and finally it ran for another five minutes in a cutting with grass

on either side, ultimately depositing us in a little country station, with

nothing outside but fields and fences.

Fifteen minutes’ walk brought us to some new building activities, a few rows of

little houses with small spaces for gardens in front. One of these, number 30

Brookfield Avenue, was our destination, and there really were both a field and a

brook within forty or fifty yards – or I should say one brook and many fields,

as far as the eye could reach, containing occasional thatched cottages and

rambling farmhouses – one of them with black and white gables and the

distinction of having been slept in by Queen Elizabeth on one of her journeys to

the north.

This was indeed a new world. Often we used to watch the builder’s men preparing

for new rows of houses by cutting down the old oak and beech trees, watching

with an illusion of participating in the work. In the mornings we would [36]

walk the long distance – on a footpath, with a field of poppies on one side, an

orchard on the other, through the cobbled yard of a farm, then along a road

through “the old village,” past the smithy – often lingering to see a horse

shod, or a piece of iron hammered into shape on the anvil, to the accompaniment

of glittering sparks, which never hurt the big strong man in the leather apron –

past a few little shops with window panes six inches square, and round a corner

to the old school, which stood in a garden, looked like a church, and was a

thousand times nicer outside than in. In front of the school was the village

green – a small triangle of land, having at one point “the old church” and on

the other two sides of the triangle respectively, a little thatched farm and a

public-house with a swinging sign.

In the school – twopence a week this time – we were taught by a fat girl with a

big flat face. I remember her name, but forbear to mention it. She liked

history, I think, for she awoke our young English blood to patriotism with her

accounts of Caractacus and Cassivellaunus and Boadicea, and dropped us to depths

of gloom and horror with her grim stories of the many civil wars of England. She

added also to our already awakened pessimism a picture of probable wars to come.

The boys were a rough lot, speaking an only half intelligible language. The

first day, at close of school, a big fellow came up to me.

“I can fight you,” he announced. He did, too, in a ring of ghoulish onlookers,

but I do not remember to have been much hurt, and nobody troubled me any more

with attentions of that kind.

There was, however, a disagreeable group of boys who used to shout from the

other side of the road when some of us were walking home. One of these – the

most troublesome – rejoiced in the name of Livingstone. One day, these boys were

shouting something particularly offensive from a distance behind us, and in

exasperation I picked up a flint from the side of the path and threw it at them,

not intending to hurt but only to frighten them. With beginner’s luck – ill-luck

this time – I hit Livingstone fair and square on the head. It was several weeks

before he could return to school.

I expected dire consequences, but nothing happened.

Evidently the boys kept the matter to themselves and [37] invented some excuse

for the broken head. But they must have regarded me as a potential Chicago

gangster, something quite the reverse of truth, for I was physically nervous. I

did almost everything from a motive of cowardice. Our teachers seemed to

encourage that ignoble motive, for they were always telling us to study hard so

that we might save ourselves from being among those whose faces are walked upon

in the battle of life, to take physical exercises so as to avoid disease, to be

honest so as to avoid prison, to be good so that God would not send us to hell,

and finally and above all to obey themselves, in order to avoid a whacking.

I was really sorry that I hit poor Livingstone on the head, for I bore him no

malice. Nevertheless, by some peculiarity of fate or coincidence, I have been

repaid in kind and with interest for that injury. In the half-dozen or so

motor-car and other accidents in which I have since participated I have

invariably been injured on the head and nowhere else. Fate began to work in this

direction comparatively soon after the incident I have mentioned. One day I had

been much out of sorts, and I was lying on the sofa while my mother was sewing

near the window at the other side of the room. Suddenly I said to myself: “It is

all nonsense lying here feeling sick. The thing to do is to get up and do

something!” With a leap I jumped up from the sofa, only to meet the corner of an

open cupboard door just above my head.

I have never seen a woman cry as my mother did as she took me into her arms in a

rocking-chair and mopped up the blood with several towels. When I was able to go

back to school I was the proud bearer for weeks of a conspicuous patch of

sticking plaster on a partially shaved head. The spot still remains without

hair, although it is now threatening to merge itself into that bright and

shining place where there is no parting.

Perhaps I owed something in the bank of fate, too, on account of the numerous

jacksharps, tadpoles, moths and caterpillars which had met an untimely fate at

my hands, having been incarcerated in various bowls, jars and boxes which were

evidently not suited to them. But I was never cruel, like some of the boys, who

used to catch frogs, insert straws into their recta and blow them up until they

burst. Or like the cartmen who were bringing bricks to the houses opposite, who,

when language failed, used to kick their [38] horses in the stomach with their

hobnailed boots in order to force them over the rougher parts. Or like the

farmer whom I once watched through the hedge of the village green as he walked

about his garden, picked up one duck after another, slit its throat with his

penknife and then put it down again on the ground, where it walked a few feet

and then threw a somersault backwards. Or like those other farmers who hung the

squealing pigs by the back legs while they poured boiling water over them so

that the bristles might come out more easily afterwards. But once more I am in

danger of digressing.

I was speaking, I think, of luck, in connection with stone-throwing. I had

another stroke of luck one day, or rather one night. Once a travelling fair came

to our village and set itself up on a vacant plot of ground beside the police

station. One evening my brother and I begged twopence each and went off with a

few friends to enjoy ourselves thereat. First I turned my attention to the

roulette wheel. One put a halfpenny on a chosen number on the circle which

surrounded a spinning pointer. The man in charge spun the wheel, and if the

pointer stopped opposite the number containing the coin one received a coco-nut.

Failing that, the halfpenny was irretrievably lost, with nothing to show for it.

Down went my halfpenny, I got a coco-nut. As I did not want the coco-nut, I sold

it back to the man for twopence. I suppose he thought he would get the twopence

back. Thirteen times running this phenomenon was repeated. Calculate – thirteen

twopences, minus thirteen halfpennies. I was beginning to be in clover. On the

fourteenth turn I lost, pocketed my balance and, with a deaf ear to the man who

was urging me to try again, turned away. I shared the money in equal parts with

my friends, who quite logically maintained that they deserved it as much as I

did and watched them spend it on swings and roundabouts, while I kept my

portion, to go home triumphantly about as rich as I had come out, which could be

said of few people who attended that fair. I think I shall never play at Monte

Carlo, for no one can expect such luck twice in a lifetime. Only once have I

ventured to lay down any stakes at roulette – in the Casino at Santos in Brazil

– when I found this axiom duly confirmed. [39]

§4

We had the luck of being removed from the twopenny school after a few months.

Whether my grandfather had suddenly melted, and decided no longer to visit the

sins of the fathers upon the children, or whether my father had made one of his

periodical advances in the business world, I do not know. Anyhow, we were sent

to what was considered the best private high school within reach. It was rather

a small affair – about a hundred boys.

We were excited by the playground, which was actually composed partly of grass,

on which we could have splendid games of leap frog and “cappy” without hurting

ourselves too much. The idea of the last was that one boy would make a back over

which the others had to go in turn, each leaving his cap behind. Sooner or later

one of the leapers would upset the caps, and would then have to make a “back.”

There was also a greenhouse in that playground, but I fancy the chief thing

about it was the schoolmaster’s son, who used to sit there smoking a pipe, to

keep the insects off the plants, he said. I suppose this exhibition must have

started many boys smoking surreptitiously. I was once induced to go shares in

the expenses of a packet of cigarettes. I tried one of them behind a wall, and

decided that as an amusement smoking was overrated, and though as an assertion

of manhood it might have its points, a halfpenny in the pocket was much more

desirable than a cigarette in the mouth.

It was about this time that my brief musical career began. When our piano first

arrived I had solemnly announced to my father that I did not intend to learn to

play in the ordinary way; I simply wanted to make a noise by knocking on the

keys. However, he firmly informed me that I must learn properly or leave it

alone. The upshot of it was that once a week my brother and I went to the house

of a little old lady (that is what we called Miss Nash, though probably she was

only about thirty – for such is the judgment of the young) and made a sufficient

progress with her help and an hour’s practice every day. It was a tiresome

obstacle that my hands were too small to stretch an octave, though I gradually

overcame this difficulty with regard to the left hand only, by forcing my thumb

to become double jointed at the root, thus increasing my span by nearly an inch.

[40]

At Blackpool I had been much impressed by the sound of a mandoline, played in a

concert on the pier, and nothing would satisfy me but to add this also to my

musical accomplishments. My indulgent father immediately bought one of the

instruments and brought it home. For some time I learnt to play alone, and

afterwards at the big school of music in the city, where they brought me to the

point of playing in public. I nearly became a professional musician at the age

of thirteen, as will shortly appear.

It was now time for us to remove again to a new house. My mother always

absolutely refused to have one which had been occupied by anybody before. She

seemed to have an idea that it would retain emanations from the previous

occupants. We removed a very short distance to a high-standing three-storied

house directly overlooking a beautiful meadow containing many oak and beech

trees. This meadow had the form of a valley, the brook already mentioned running

down the middle. It had also the great merit of being accessible for play, as a

public path ran across it. It was a fine place for flying kites, which we used

to make for ourselves often in fantastic shapes. One of mine took the form of a

phrenological head marked with the localities of the various faculties, copied

from a chart issued by the professor of the art on Blackpool sands.

Safety bicycles now came within our ken. The word safety has long been dropped,

but it was used then to distinguish the new bicycles having wheels about the

same size from the old ones which had one big wheel in front, with pedals

attached to its hubs, and a tiny little wheel behind. We used occasionally to

watch performers on the old type of bicycle – I say performers because they were

rarely riders, but seemed to spend most of their time getting on and falling

off. We saw, too, the big roller skates, with wheels which appeared about nine

inches in diameter. A man ran from London to Manchester on these and we saw him

pass. It seemed terribly dangerous. I wondered if he had any sort of braking

arrangement. I saw, too, one of the first motor-cars, with a man running in

front shouting and waving a red flag, as required by law.

The new safety bicycles were heavy things, with solid rubber tyres and no free

wheel. My father bought one cheap from a man who had been stopped in a country

road by a burly fellow who grasped his handlebar and demanded his [41] money.

Though the cyclist had saved his money by pulling a spanner out of his pocket

and with it dealing a smashing blow to the hand on the handlebar, and then

riding swiftly away, the incident had spoiled his taste for cycling in the

country.

A second bicycle, for my elder brother, soon appeared. Then, of course, the

question of one for me arose. One Saturday afternoon my father and mother and I

looked at a small-size bicycle in one of the big shops. It was, alas, very

expensive – about five pounds. We had walked some distance away from the shop in

silence and gloom, when I heard my mother say quietly to my father: “Think of

the child’s feelings -” My mother was that said-to-be-rare phenomenon, a woman

who does not speak much. She could always convey a lot of meaning, however, in

half a dozen words.

My father went back to the shop alone and later arrived home, having ridden with

great difficulty on the tiny machine, with his knees knocking the handle-bar at

every rotation. So I became the possessor not of a heavy old hard-tyred

second-hand bicycle, but of a brand new machine having the marvellous pneumatic

tyres, which had only just come in and about which we and apparently even the

shop-man knew so little at first that my father had actually ridden it home on

flat tyres, not knowing that they had to be pumped up. Fortunately it did not

spoil them.

How my brother and I cleaned those bicycles, down even to the ball bearings, in

preparation for the Sunday morning rides which our father took with us all over

the surrounding country-side! My mother, however, could not be persuaded to

become one of “the new women,” who at that date began to go on bicycles and were

generally treated to rude remarks and sometimes to stones. She was free to come,

as we had by then a maid, or rather a succession of maids. One of them, I

remember, new from the country, blackleaded all the spoons, with disastrous

effect when we started to eat our boiled eggs!

§5

Although our new school was considered to be very highly respectable, and

intended for the “sons of gentlemen” (there might have been no ladies involved

from the little one heard of them in this connection) things were not [42]

entirely what they seemed. There were some rough boys, a Jew bullies, and some

worse than that. I remember an occasion when two of these bullies hoisted me on

their shoulders to carry me off somewhere for purposes of petty torture, but I

managed to free myself at the expense of a nasty bump, by giving one of them a

kick in the ear with all my force. They dropped me to the ground, upon which I

ran across the street, put my back to a large plate-glass shop window, and from

that vantage pelted them with stones until they went away.

I used sometimes to see some of the boys rolling on the grass; one would be on

his back and the others apparently playfully pulling off his clothes. I did not

like that sort of rough and tumble, and I vowed that if any of them subjected me

to those indignities I would not stop short of killing them. Only years

afterwards I learnt from one of them that those invasions of one another’s

privacy were a prelude to private instruction in sexual vice. In the vista of

years I do not think as badly as I did of those boys. I realize that heredity

varies enormously in respect of the sex-excitement and sex-imagination that is

such a peculiar and unnatural feature of humanity. It never troubled me. Years

afterwards, in translating from Sanskrit, I wrote with regard to a certain type

of sinner: “He will be reborn from the womb of a wild cock,” and never noticed

the incongruity until somebody showed me a marked copy of my book!

In our family there was always more education in the home than at school. We

were voracious readers of weekly papers and novels. At an early age, my brother

and I had read all Dickens and a great part of Walter Scott and Thackeray. While

still in Brookfield Avenue I had an exercise book containing a list of all the

books I had read, and it then numbered over eighty, though among these I

included serial stories which I had read in Chums and The Boy’s Own Paper. Also,

my father was always willing to teach when we were willing to learn. He started

us off with French when I was eight years old, and he taught me also Pitman’s

shorthand, in which I ultimately attained the respectable speed of a hundred and

eighty words a minute, which I could keep up on the average for an hour and read

completely afterwards, and he taught me also a good amount of commercial

book-keeping, including double entry. [43]

I think our school was almost useless for learning anything, however excellent

its respectability. If a boy could teach himself in it, well and good, not

otherwise. Practically nothing was ever explained.

“Form III. Open your geography books, page 54. Study to the end of page 55. I

will hear you at four o’clock.” The master would then go out, to obtain a drop

for his thirst, duly return in an irritable mood, call our form “up,” and

question us. There was much indignation if we had not learnt the lesson, though

the idea of teaching it never seemed to enter his mind. He used to give us marks

on the results of these questions, and call them out for us to enter in our mark

books at the end of the day. Still I got on pretty well. I was eager to learn,

and was always running neck and neck at the head of the class with a boy named

Carver, about two years older than myself. I had ambitions, and used still at

home to make use of the old school books in subjects not taught in the school at

our age. I would get down on the floor of the bedroom – somehow I was able to

study better on the floor – with Initia Latina until again and again my mother

would come in and literally drive me out unwillingly to play.

We had in our school a real army sergeant, full of talk about the Crimean war.

He conducted real army drill with wooden imitation rifles, in the playground,

often with errand boys jeering over the wall. I detested those wooden rifles,

and the sneering tongue of the sergeant, and wanted to have as little as

possible to do with them. One day he offered me the corporal’s stripe in our

platoon and his indignation when I declined it knew no bounds, I hated the sham

of it all.

Two of our fellow-students were Greeks. I very much wanted to make a beginning

with Greek, and begged of the elder to teach me the Greek alphabet, which he

could rattle off with alluring speed. But the mercenary young scamp demanded too

high a price – as much as sixpence, I think – which was more than I could make

in a fortnight by selling marbles at half the shop prices, since it had become

known that I could win all the marbles that came within reach.

One of our favourite occupations in the school was map-drawing. The son of the

schoolmaster, himself a junior master, used to supply us with railway maps from

various parts of the world, which we would copy on full sheets of [44] printing

paper pinned on our drawing-boards. We had large and expensive drawing-boards,

which we were expected occasionally to carry home in black alpaca covers, as

also those wooden rifles; this no doubt being a subtle advertisement for the

school. It appeared that each boy had one or two favourite colours for doing the

outlines of the countries in his maps – mine was pale chrome, and sometimes we

used to quarrel on account of our loyalty to our respective colours. We had also

favourite towns. Two that struck my fancy particularly were Boston and

Philadelphia, and another was the smaller Hyderabad in Sind, where, curiously

enough, I was to become Principal of the College later on.

Crayon drawing was also a popular subject – it gave such a good opportunity for

many of the boys to stand round the hot stove sharpening their pencils. My

brother was a born artist, could draw and paint as well as write beautifully

without an effort. Me, I could never write on the line, and drawing was an

effort that fatigued me enormously, and produced results that exasperated the

drawing master. When he saw such little and such poor results he accused me of

idling, and when I denied that, he accused me of lying, for which he lost every

atom of respect I might have had for him, though he probably cared as little for

my good will as I cared for his.

I had a curious experience, which might be called psychic, about this time. As I

was walking home from school, crossing a little street, I seemed to hear a

voice, which asked me whether I would rather be tall or short “this time.” I

will not attempt to say what peculiarity of the subconscious mind or other cause

may have produced this, but will only record that it was perfectly clear, and

took me in such a mood that I did not till afterwards wonder what it meant by

the curious expression “this time.” I had been for some time in a mood of

humility. I wanted to go through life inconspicuously, and I had some subtle and

indefinite dislike for anything in the world in the shape of pomp or display. It

may have been this which caused me to give the reply, after the slightest

hesitation, that I would choose the short. In any case, I scarcely grew for

several years, though fortunately I made a bit of a spurt after sixteen, which

at last gave me my meagre five feet six inches of height. [45]

At last my brother left school to go to business. I wanted to leave at the same

time, for I did not think that school could teach me any more, and I was

impatient to be a man and independent. I was then twelve years old. However,

everybody decided that I was too young to leave, so I had to spend another year

in a class by myself at the top of the school – a little fellow, and younger by

years than many of the other boys. Practically I studied by myself for that

year. I took some of the ancient school books and showed them to the

schoolmaster, and he permitted me to study them by myself, saying that he would

help me when I came to any difficulties. His help did not amount to much. I

remember going to him with some difficulties in Colenso’s Algebra (I still have

the book – about seventy-five years old). Poor man, he had to confess that he

had forgotten, and suggest that I should look at the answers and try to work

from them backwards.

I had ambitions. I wanted to become a doctor, or failing that a student

interpreter in Japan. No luck. What with shortage of money, unkind reports by

the schoolmaster – to cover his own shortcomings – and the tradition of

business, it was decided that I should become an apprentice in a wholesale

warehouse. I was far too young for a shipping firm. [46]



-------
Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER III

JUNIORITY

§1

WHEN I left school my mother pressed that I should be allowed a holiday for some

months before being sent to work, and gained her point. But it proved

disastrous. I became one of the unemployed even before I was employed. I must

have presented myself to twenty or thirty heads of firms before I got a chance.

I would be called into the private office and questioned on my scholastic

attainments, which were quite satisfactory, and then the trouble would begin,

always the same.

“You are very small. You look pale. Are you strong? When did you leave school?”

– and then the dreadful question, which I soon learnt to recognize as sealing my

fate: “What have you been doing since you left school?” And finally: “Well, we

will let you know,” – which they never did, even negatively. I believe there

were always anything from twenty to two hundred applicants for those posts.

Some of these people who interviewed me were kindly, but most of them were rude,

and a few bullies. One disagreeable man asked if I knew all the streets in the

city, and when I replied “Yes,” thinking quite naturally that he meant the main

streets, since no one could possibly be expected to know all the others, he

blackguarded me disgracefully for a young liar. And this, when I was suffering

from truthfulness with regard to the date of leaving school! My discomforts as a

truth addict began early.

However, I got a position at last as an apprentice in a millinery warehouse. The

proprietor who engaged me was [47] a charming gentleman, and spoke very kindly

and encouragingly – he would give me five shillings a week for the first year

and I was to go through a three years’ apprenticeship. But unluckily he had as

practical manager (the devil for steward, as so often!) a younger brother of his

who was rather a freak, six feet three inches tall, and proportionately

disagreeable. He had a curious manner and way of speaking which made me wonder

whether he was right in the head and was not put there out of a compassion which

would be very natural in his brother.

I was in the ribbon department. We supplied some hundreds, I should think, of

retail shops. In the early morning I had to see that all the reels of ribbon

were neatly arranged on the long counters in the enormous showroom, and, with a

feather duster, to see that they were kept free from the minutest speck of dust.

In the afternoons our customers would generally come in. Most of them were

ladies, probably milliners, for ribbons were much used in ladies’ hats. In the

evening two of us would cover everything up with large dust-sheets.

It was part of my work to tie up some of the parcels, for the ribbons could not

be sent to the packing-room in an exposed condition. The senior apprentice,

after having been told to show me how to do everything, did all in his power to

prevent me from getting to know how things were to be done, so that it was some

time before I discovered the best way even to turn the string and form the knots

of the parcels. Once he demanded money to show me something, but soon came to

the conclusion, I think, that if I had not come from Aberdeen I must have had an

ancestor who had.

The hours of work for everybody were fairly long in those days. I used to go to

town on my father’s train, which left the station at five minutes to seven. He

would awaken me at six o’clock, and then we would have an intensive hour working

together (it was a period of no maid) making the fire, cleaning the boots,

preparing and eating our breakfast and – I look back upon this with surprise –

doing ten minutes Sandow exercises, also together (I used dumb-bells weighing

eight pounds each), in addition to all the business of getting ourselves ready,

including the fixing of stiff collars and cuffs which were very hard on the

thumbs.

My father used to wear “solitaire” cuff-links – the kind [48] which came in two

pieces, and of which you punched the stem of the head into the socket of the

lower piece. I remember a curious incident that occurred before I left school in

connection with these. I was walking home, when I saw lying on the pathway the

head of a gold cuff link. I put it in my pocket. That evening my father told us

that during the day he had lost the head of one of his cuff links. I pulled my

find out of my pocket and handed it to him. It fitted perfectly, though of quite

a different design from the one he had lost. I never found a cuff-link head

before, nor since, nor did he lose one.

Thus our day began with forty minutes’ miscellaneous rather strenuous

activities. Then ten minutes’ quick walk in the dark (for a large part of the

year) brought us to the railway station. After getting out of the train I had

another fifteen minutes’ walk through the city streets to the warehouse, and so

I would arrive in good time. The warehouse hours were from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.,

with an hour’s interval for lunch. Then back through the city streets to the

train and through the country lanes from the train home – wash, tea, a game of

chess with my father and at last bed. Rather a heavy day for a boy of thirteen,

especially in a city where the presence of sulphur in the air, from burning

coal, necessitated the weekly removal to the country of the decorative plants

growing in tubs in the city square. We were keen chess players at that time; I

entered for the “Hobbies” correspondence tournament and came out in the third

place.

I lost my job after two or three months. It was decided to remove one of the

departments to another room in a distant part of the building. Nothing was to be

done during the day, lest a customer come in and find us disarrayed. But at 6

p.m. we were told to start carrying the things. I was already very tired with

standing all day, having nothing to eat since breakfast except a very meagre

lunch, but I tried to do my share of carrying. By eight o’clock I could hardly

walk, but when I said so I was merely rebuked for laziness. By nine I was on the

verge of collapse, so I told the department manager that I simply must go home,

and I went – without his consent. The next day the general manager came along,

about six feet three inches towering above me. He poured out words of

indignation, and the end of the conversation, or rather monologue, was that I

must [49] leave when the month was up. I left that night, and forfeited whatever

wages were due.

§2

Then began again the answering of questions. As I had no reference I had to say

I had not been engaged before, which was very galling. And the question as to

what I had been doing since I left school was more formidable than ever.

Luckily, after a month or two, a warehouse in which my elder brother had worked

wanted an apprentice. I applied, and because they had been delighted with my

brother they gave me the job, merely remarking: “You don’t look strong.”

At first I was in the ready-mades department – workmen’s shirts, women’s aprons,

children’s frocks and what not. Attached to our department was a workroom, with

thirty or forty girls incessantly toiling at sewing machines, the sight of whom

moved me to the profoundest pity. By working in those dismal surroundings from

morning till night for fifty-one weeks in the year they could just keep body and

soul together, but they could not clothe themselves well, nor provide themselves

with decent and sufficient shoe-leather.

I had once more to keep the stock clean and tidy, open and pack up parcels, box

shirts and other things in dozens and half-dozens, layout orders and list the

things for sending to the packing room. It had been impressed upon me at home

that I was an apprentice and must not allow myself to be put upon for inferior

work, particularly that of an errand boy. So I acquired some unpopularity when

the head of my department and his first assistant desired me to go out to a

little restaurant near by and bring in their tenpenny lunches on a tray, which I

refused to do.

After about three months I was transferred to the shirting and quilt department.

It was a heavy job to keep those large pieces in order on the racks, to get them

down, unpack them and pack them and put them back. In this warehouse we were

allowed only half an hour for lunch, but hot water was given to us on the

premises, so I had my little store of mixed tea and sugar, and bread and cheese

– how glad I was to learn from a magazine that the cheapest kinds of cheese were

the most nourishing – and a tin of condensed milk, [50] which was quite dark

brown in colour before I had done with it.

This department was managed by one of the partners, who was seldom in. Next to

him there was one man, then a senior apprentice, then myself. The conversation

of the senor apprentice and his friends who used to drop in from other

departments now and then was not edifying. It was mostly about what they called

“tarts.”

After I had been in the department some few months it happened that the

assistant manager was taken ill and could not come to work, and then the senior

apprentice left, so that I was alone in that department, except when the partner

in charge happened to come in. Customers rarely came in person, unless they had

already made an appointment with him. I had now the task of laying out the

orders for the day, entering them in the daybook, making out department

invoices, writing letters to the customers when necessary to regret that certain

goods were out of stock and to explain when they might be expected, and

preparing all the orders for the packing room. In addition to this I had to

telephone to various other warehouses and manufacturers’ offices, ordering

patterns which had run out of stock, or to explain to other apprentices on

outdoor duty for the day where to look for various necessary items, for which I

would give them samples, with written orders. All this I managed to do to the

satisfaction of my employers – and all on the munificent pay of fifteen

shillings a month. Of course, as an apprentice my compensation was supposed to

lie in an opportunity to learn the business, which I certainly had in that

department.

Now, unluckily for me, it happened once in the middle of a day that one of our

biggest customers – a man who would think nothing of ordering a hundred pieces

of shirting of one kind at a single time – came in. When he arrived I ran round

the warehouse looking for the partner in charge of my department, who would

certainly have wanted to see him, but failed to find him, he being out for his

two or three hours’ lunch. So I served the customer myself. There was a line

that we called “Diamond” shirting, which we sold at 5 1/8 d. per yard, and which

our customer sold at 5 1/4 d. – it was by cutting prices that he had such a

volume of trade. He wanted some of that.

A new book of patterns had come from the manufacturers [51] a day or two before,

but I first let the customer make his selection from the old pattern book and

then said: “Would you not like some of these new patterns as well?” bringing out

the new cuttings. He was rather amused at my little trick; it mattered nothing

to him to order another fifty or sixty pieces, though he had already taken as

many as he originally intended. But this was to prove my undoing. When he next

met the partner he seems to have indulged in some jocular remark about the size

of their “manager” in the shirting and quilt department, though he spoke highly

of me. The pride of the firm was wounded. They sent down a young man from

another department into mine and requested me to teach him all about everything,

and he was then to be my boss! This was too bad, from my limited point of view,

and I protested that I was quite capable of carrying on alone.

The head of the firm was a venerable old gentleman, whom we all respected very

much. He would even take the trouble to say “Good morning” to all the employees

whom he passed, even though they were worth only 3s. 9d. a week! He called me

into his private office and reasoned with me. But it was quite hopeless. I could

manage their department, but I could not reason. He begged me to have patience,

and pointed out how well I might expect to succeed later on. I was an obstinate

young donkey. One point I remember very well. He said: “Suppose in your father’s

warehouse such a thing had happened. Do you not think your father would want an

older man in the department, because of what customers would think?”

But the surly boy only replied with a logical rudeness born of wounded pride:

“But it could not happen there, where they have eighteen or twenty men in every

department!”

What patience the old gentleman had! Here was I threatening him with notice, and

at last he gave in with a sigh for my sake and accepted it, and I for the third

time joined the army of unemployed at the age of fourteen.

The mention of my father’s warehouse here requires some comment. I have

mentioned that my father had become the manager of a stationery concern, but it

happened that by the time of which I am now writing he had joined our family

warehouse. “The Guv’nor” had died, and my jolly uncle who, out of five brothers,

had solely inherited the [52] business, invited him to join him, which he had

done. The two warehouses knew each other, being among the biggest in their

respective lines, and the proprietor of mine took it for granted that my father

was a man of greater importance in the family concern than he really was. It was

only later on that my father became the head of the family business, after my

uncle died. In the meantime, my uncle was sole proprietor, and the natural

course of things was that his two sons should go into the business and inherit

from him, while the rest of the grandchildren should keep outside and be content

with certain monetary bequests which “the Guv’nor” had bequeathed them, to

become theirs on tile death of their parents.

It might be wondered by those who do not know the customs of city merchants why

my benevolent proprietor did not expect me to go into the family warehouse. The

explanation is simple: it was not usually considered desirable for the character

and development of youngsters that they should serve their apprenticeship in

their own family warehouses, where they might become slack in work or in

character on account of family indulgence and the superior respect with which

the other employees might treat them in view of favours to come.

I must also explain that my brother had left the warehouse where I now worked

because he had taken a fancy to retail business. He had gone into a “gents’

outfitters” to learn the business, having been promised a shop of his own – he

had a chain of shops in his mind’s eye – when he and the time should be ripe. He

had always been interested and careful in his own dress, and therefore was quite

at home in that business. In our Sunday afternoon walks when we were still at

school, when we had come to the stage at which we were expected to walk along

sedately without shaking our bowler hats off our heads, it had been I, not he,

who had raised objections to this uncomfortable headgear. I had objected to

stiff cuffs and collars and fronts, as well as bowler hats, but had had to

submit to them.

It must have gone against me in business that I was careless in dress. As a

young man, in fact, I refused to wear anything but cloth caps, which put me

rather in the “workman class.” But I had another reason for that. I had been

taken one day by my father to see one of the big felt hat manufacturing works at

Denton, near [53] Manchester. I saw the chopped fur being blown on to the

revolving cones, and in a later stage of the process the felts being washed in

steaming vats over which several people were bending. All those workers seemed

rather hollow cheeked, but one man was worse than the others. My father

commented on this.

“Yes,” replied the proprietor, “he will not last long now. They never last more

than about five years at this job.”

To my vivid young mind, the wearing of felt hats was thenceforth to be regarded

as nothing short of indirect murder. I had already seen the unhappy girls in the

shirt factory. I learnt from my father of other and even worse cases. There was

one factory known to him where he had asked why better ventilation was not

provided. He learned that there were plenty of windows that would open, but the

work-girls objected to their being opened, because the fresher air made them

hungry and they could not afford to buy more food.

§3

My third bout of unemployment was more trying than ever. It went on month after

month – some six months of the hardest and most soul-destroying kind of work –

that of looking for a job. Do not talk to me about unemployment in the

nineteen-thirties; it was hellish enough in the eighteen-nineties. My only

solace during those days of searching in the city was the public art gallery,

where I used to go for an occasional hour, no, not to rest, but to look at the

pictures and escape from reality into a more heroic world. I lingered also at

the booksellers’ windows, and especially longed for those little books which

told how to achieve success in life with nothing but ability and honesty to

recommend one, or how to perform miracles of development of character or memory.

I have spoken of our new house. The address was officially 6 Nell Lane, but the

inhabitants, not wishing to be regarded as living in a lane, generally called it

Clough Road. It had attics, which we had not enjoyed before. One of these attics

had been put at my disposal, and I had seen it through several transformations –

a gallery for archery, a gymnasium, a theatre – in which I had been sole actor,

in various capacities, to an audience of imaginary people on imaginary [54]

chairs – and lastly a sort of Venice, which I announced on a placard on the door

as

VENICE

on the ADRIATIC SEA

(A dry attic. See?)

I was a little disappointed that nobody ever laughed at it! Sometimes I used to

go up there, play my mandoline, and imagine myself in quite another world.

Now, it happened later, during my unemployment, that the biggest department

store in the city – Lewis’s – fitted up a tank in its large basement, decorated

the entire floor in Italian style, and called the ensemble “Venice.” There was a

charge of one penny to enter, and another penny for a tour, which was quite

extensive, in a real gondola.

Two or three times when I was searching for work I went down there and lingered

for hours trying to make up my mind to ask for the manager, in order to put

before him a business proposition which had entered my head and also, in fact,

my heart. I thought it might be an additional attraction if they had a small boy

playing the mandoline on one of the gondolas. I could play it well enough for

public purposes, in fact as well as the average professional, almost as well, I

thought, as the German professor and his two daughters who had taught me for

some two years in a class of about fifteen girls in the school of music.

However, I could not screw up my courage to the working point. I was also afraid

of what my mother would say, that she might think I was disgracing the family by

becoming a cheap musician in a public place. The incident reacted badly upon my

interest in music. I announced to my father, much to his regret, that I must now

give up all my music and devote myself entirely to the thought of making money.

I rarely played the piano or the mandoline after that, and soon gave them up

altogether.

§4

My third period of unemployment bade fair to become permanent, but at last a

vacancy arose for an apprentice in a “gents’ outfitting” shop which had been

newly opened in our suburb at the end of a row of shops near the railway [55]

station. It was thought that I might follow in the same path as my brother and

ultimately have a shop – or a chain of shops – of my own.

This time the apprenticeship was a more formal affair, and I had to sign on for

three years. Apparently, as the formalities increased the emoluments diminished.

I had sunk from five shillings to three shillings and nine pence a week, before,

and now the salary was to be nothing for the first year, five shillings a week

for the second and I forget what for the third. The hours of work also

increased, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays (except for Wednesday, which

contained a half-holiday), but to 10 p.m. on Saturdays, with an hour for lunch

and an hour for tea. The work was not hard, but some ten hours’ standing and one

hour’s quick walking every day proved fatiguing, and often I used to arrive home

so tired at night that I had to go upstairs to bed on my hands and knees. I was

left alone in the shop a great deal and used to consider it a pleasant thing

when a customer came in. I was soon able to do everything connected with the

business, except the actual buying of goods – on that side the proprietor seemed

anxious that my tuition should be delayed as long as possible. I think that all

he wanted was a cheap salesman, which he certainly got!

From beginning to end I disliked the year and a half which I spent in that shop.

I used to get tired, as already mentioned. Sometimes my attitude when alone –

which was constant, as the proprietor more and more stayed at home, and once he

was away for weeks in hospital – might have served as illustration for a modern

murder story, as I lolled across the counter in a state of mental as well as

physical despair. To add to my distress, my clothes gave me endless trouble. My

socks were always coming down (it was before the invention of sock suspenders).

My hands were always tensely curled up, trying to hold up my loose cuffs. The

stiff loose shirt front was always trying to get through the opening of my

waistcoat. One size of collar was too small and the next size was said to look

too big. My shoes were heavy and clumsy, but this was my own fault, for I bought

them myself and got them like that to thwart a craving in myself for something

quite the opposite.

Sometimes in the long idle hours of waiting for customers I used to picture how

I could be quite cheerful and comfortable in that shop if I could dress in a

style of my own, [56] combining the conveniences of dress worn by all kinds of

people – I never thought of sexes as such. There would be long stockings,

supported from a light corset, which would save me from the need of lolling on

the counter, would give my back comfortable support through the long hours of

waiting and provide a convenient place for a belt to hold knickers buttoning

beneath the knee. There would be some soft kind of tennis shirt – emphatically

no collar, nor front, nor cuffs, nor hard hat. There would be no waistcoat, but

a simple coat. There would be light shoes, shaped so as not to press the toes

sideways, and with perhaps a two inch heel to add a little to my height, which I

was then beginning to desire increased, for practical convenience in association

with other people.

I think that for the most part I hit in my imagination upon a costume which

would have made mankind healthier and happier if it could have been introduced,

though it was certainly not in keeping with aspiration for success in the

“gents’ outfitting” business! It would have made all the difference in my own

life. It may be that there was some morbidity in part of it, but as I look back

upon it I see that it contained not only a desire for relief from very real and

constant discomfort, but also a longing for something positive in the way of

lightness and refinement – a desire for material spirituality.

But all that was not to be, and I remained thoroughly out of accord with my

environment. The demands of a ridiculous and cruel orthodoxy in dress,

associated with caste ideas (in America they talk of the “white collar” class,

but we had no word for it in England), have always been inexorable. I remember

when I was at school that one day there came along the street a gentleman

wearing a soft felt hat dinted in at the top. The boys ran after him shouting,

“Trilby, Trilby!” I was the only one not to share in that pursuit, though I too

thought the hat an absurd shape. Perhaps the masculine element of mankind is a

bit cynically acceptive of coarseness and earthiness. A rough assertiveness,

even if clumsy and unintelligent, adds to its sense of personality or life.

It would be interesting to record the beginnings of adolescence. But that does

not seem possible. Either there was nothing in particular or I cannot remember

it. Such slight physical discomfort as I may have had was not [57] associated

with any sexual imaginings. I am quite sure that I never dreamed or thought

about girls or women. I knew that men and women got married and set up joint

establishments, but I did not know that there was any physical connection

between men and women, either for pleasure or the production of children. I must

have been unusually unknowledgeable for my age in such matters.

Where did my thoughts run? I am afraid they were mostly negative, preoccupied

with present discomforts and future economics, with only an occasional lifting

of the imagination to pictures of freedom, open skies, sunshine and foreign

travel, though at the same time I knew that these could not satisfy me, for I

wanted to solve the economic problem for everybody, not only for myself, though

that came first.

Two or three times I had been to the city to an old house which had fallen on

evil times, to get the shirts cut to measure by my employer for his richer

patrons. My destination was one room, bare of furniture but for a sewing

machine, a crooked table, some broken chairs, a screen, and a dirty mattress

laid on the floor in one corner. There were an old woman and two girls, the

former bent out of human shape, with red eyes, an underlip hanging far over

(from constant wetting of thread) and a thickened flattened thumb (from pressing

the cloth), the latter preparing for the same dreadful fate. With my own eyes I

had seen something which might well have inspired Hood’s

Stitch, stitch, stitch ...

In poverty, hunger and dirt.

I had not been at the shop more than a few months when I was saved the long walk

several times a day by our removal from Clough Road to 12 Silverdale Road – I am

bound to say that builder had a genius for inventing fetching names for his

streets. The new house was only two or three minutes’ walk away from the shop,

and this time it was not rented but bought outright – a nice semi-detached house

with a good-sized lawn, on which one could, and did, play croquet. On this

occasion my employer earned a bit more of my dislike by quoting, I suppose for

want of something else to say, that three removals were as bad as a fire, which

I – absurdly sensitive as usual – took to be a criticism of my father, which I

could not tolerate. [58]

It was at this period that I made my first experiments in Indian Yoga. I found

an article in a popular magazine, describing how the yogis developed

extraordinary powers by means of special methods of breathing. I felt that I

needed special powers, since the ordinary ones seemed of little use in life

unless conjoined by some chance with special opportunities. So once, in the

midday, when I had the shop to myself, I went into the back room (which had been

newly acquired and contained a chair) and sat down to practise the breathing

exercises prescribed. I did it for about forty minutes. At that point I heard

somebody come into the shop. I rose from the chair and walked to the front room

without feeling the floor I walked on or any sense of my own weight. My employer

entered and asked for a pair of scissors, which I found and handed to him

without any feeling of the article or sense of its weight. I must have looked

peculiar in some way, for I remember he stared at me very hard and with a

surprised expression. The incident passed off. Gradually my sense of touch and

weight returned. I did not perform the experiment again, as I considered it to

be dangerous. Still it remained in my mind as an interesting possibility, to be

pursued further if an opportunity for greater knowledge in connection with it

should turn up.

Another occult possibility came within my ken about this time. When we were out

cycling one Sunday morning my father told me about a lecture of Mrs. Besant’s

which he had just attended. She had spoken of visits to the worlds of the dead,

describing the modes of life of the departed as continuing the mental and

emotional interests with which they had left the earth, and she had concluded by

saying that almost anybody who would take the trouble could develop the use of

astral and mental bodies so as to move in those worlds and observe for

themselves. I vowed to myself that I would hear Mrs. Besant on her next visit,

and would do this thing myself if it were really true. These were dangerous

subjects, I knew – populus vult decipi – but I would be scientific about them.

[59]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER IV

MASTERY

§1

LIKE many other boys, I had in my schooldays collected foreign stamps, and in my

last year at school I had been in the habit of exchanging and selling my

duplicates, and had even done some selling for a London firm on a commission

which I shared with the purchasers. It happened that while I was at the shop I

one day saw an advertisement of an old stamp collection for sale for £7. I went

to see it, and knew it for a rare bargain. I had, however, only £2 saved up. I

borrowed £5 from my father, promising to repay the amount soon, and bought the

collection.

I started to sell the collection piecemeal. Within a week my father had his

money back – much to his surprise – I was some pounds in pocket and I had still

most of the stamps in stock.

I began to deal. I advertised cheap packets of stamps in some of the weekly and

monthly magazines, and with the packets I sent out “approval sheets” of a better

class of stamps than those which appeared in the packets. Within a month I was

doing a roaring trade. There was a good element of luck in it. I happened to get

that collection and to hit the market at a favourable moment, not at the time of

financial depression. I was thus able to obtain the business of a large number

of boys in the public schools and also a certain number of more mature

collectors. I opened up trade connections with prominent dealers, and began to

import the cheaper stamps in sacks containing a million each, from the

collections made by Swiss convents. I was also selling these by tens of

thousands by weight, after picking them over and extracting the unusual kinds.

This [60] work occupied my Sundays, my Wednesday afternoons, my early mornings

and the greater part of my lunch and tea hours. My father, always ready to help

his sons in any way, used to come up into the attic to help me in his spare

time. My elder brother had by now gone to live in another town, where he was

employed. My younger brother was at school.

After some time and discussion my employer consented to the cancellation of my

agreement of apprenticeship, so, with a joyous heart, I bade good-bye to

warehouses and retail shops, to stiff collars and fronts and loose cuffs.

Very shortly afterwards I rented the living quarters over a large stationery and

toyshop, and began to employ clerks. At first two, then three and more until at

the age of sixteen I had sixteen clerks in my office. These were all girls.

I employed girls instead of men, not because they were cheaper, but because my

father emphatically assured me that they were steadier for simple work, more

honest (my business offered many opportunities for theft), more contented, and

less likely to learn my methods of business in order to go away and start rival

businesses, perhaps with a list of my customers in the pocket. He also hinted to

me that apart from business this method had, however, its dangers, and impressed

upon me again and again the blessings of a bachelor’s life. He was not thinking

of immorality; I fancy he knew that I was as safe from that as the Bank of

England, so to speak; but there might be several young ladies who would not

object to marrying my business, however lacking in charms the proprietor

thereof.

I did, in fact, fall in love with the very first girl I engaged, and even before

I engaged her, during the five minutes’ preliminary interview. She was a

handsome girl, with large brown eyes and a smile which, when she let it loose

towards the termination of our interview, nearly carried me off my feet. She was

a typical “Gibson girl” – the style of the period – of the same age and just as

tall as myself, with a pompadour, a blouse and skirt costume with an

unbelievably small waist, and shoes – which I disapproved, for anything in the

nature of voluntary deformity always made me feel quite sick – which must have

been pushing her big toe very much out of line.

I never gave her the slightest indication of my devotion, though it lasted for

several years, and we were together all day, laughing and chatting over our

work. There is no [61] doubt that I should have let myself go sooner or later –

a little later rather than sooner – but for one fact. She used to come to

business by train, and some weeks after our first meeting I heard, from her

conversation with the other girls – which was not concealed from me, as I did

not try to stop my employees from talking, since I wanted them to enjoy

themselves while they worked – that she had met on the train a young city clerk

or secretary in a good position in the Ship Canal (which turned out to be

perfectly true) who had become very much attached to her and used to take her

out to theatres and other entertainments. She liked him, too.

That was enough for me. I reasoned it out that the young man concerned was in a

better position to make her happy than I was, untrained as I was to society and

theatres and dancing, and my business after all was not a very safe one in

economic emergencies, as I dealt only in luxuries. I had indulged in pictures of

good business and a happy wife with a little child in her arms (though, believe

me, I did not yet know that there was such a thing as physical connection

between man and woman and the birth of children thereby), but I put these aside

decisively and finally when the other young man appeared on the scenes, and

rigidly confined myself to a “fatherly” interest after that. Y ears afterwards

they were married. I met her again some fourteen years after we parted; she was

happy and well kept and very fond of a little daughter.

§2

This girl became my head clerk, and manageress whenever I was not on the spot.

She was very intelligent, and flung all her vivacity and energy into the

business as if it were her own. She was an expert typist, playing the whole

keyboard with one finger of each hand, after the fashion of those days. She

could rattle off letters by the dozen, once given the idea of the points to be

written about. I had a card-index system of my own invention, which was a great

time-saver. It was a little tricky, but she understood it and could handle it

perfectly. It was no mean business that I was carrying on, for it was not at all

unusual for me to have to open five hundred letters in the morning mail, and I

used to make it a practice to clear out all orders on the same day, [62] even

those which came by the afternoon post. I had an old four-wheeler “growler” –

horse cab – to take my mails to the post office; nothing so musty exists on

earth now, I think.

I took care to pay wages about fifteen per cent above the market, and most of

the girls were fairly happy. One, an orphan, had a cruel time living with a

distant relative who expected her to be general servant as well as to bring in

some money every week, but I could do nothing about that. One was absolutely

alone and entirely dependent upon the small wage she received from me; I could

never send her away, though she proved to be very slow and incompetent. Two or

three of them were rather down at heel, especially one girl who had some younger

brothers and sisters to help to maintain. One was a clergyman’s daughter, a

delicate, pretty girl, with a club foot; she was the only one who objected to

take her turn at making the fire, because she said she was afraid that her

mother would take her away if she did, and then she would not have her

pocket-money. We had all sorts.

The conversation of the girls was always interesting and laughter was constantly

passing round the tables. It was always clean, in contrast with that of the

young men I had known in business. Rarely, there was a little bit of

spitefulness. I remember an occasion near the beginning, when the head girl was

wearing a blue serge dress, which was probably home-made and had represented a

good deal of economy and care. One or two of the other girls made fun of it,

quite unnecessarily. She was greatly upset and did not wear it again. I very

much wanted to tell her that I liked her better in that dress than any other,

but I dared not rise to such intimacy. Altogether, the company of those girls

was much to my taste, even if it did partake somewhat of the nature of a musical

comedy scene. When my religious aunt was visiting our house one day she

expressed wonder that I did not fall in love with one of them. I startled her by

replying – without thought – that there was safety in numbers.

I was a firm believer in the adage that it pays to advertise. Every week I used

to make a careful estimate of my profits, and at least half of them I would

immediately put into advertising, while most of the other half went to

increasing the stock. I was also quite willing to sell some stamps at [63] a

loss in order to make a profit on others. The cheap packets of stamps which I

advertised and sold at twenty-five per cent less than the actual cost to me of

the stamps contained in them brought me thousands of customers, from many of

whom I obtained further business, once my catalogue and approval selections were

in their hands.

In my regular lines I did not raise the price to compensate for these losses,

which I regarded as part of my advertising expenses, but on the whole I sold

well under the general market, as I worked on the principle of small profits and

quick returns.

Another little stroke of luck came for me at this time in the sudden enthusiasm

for penny post throughout the Empire. It became possible to send letters under

two ounces weight to all parts of the Empire, except, I think, Rhodesia, for one

penny. This may seem a small matter, but it instantly increased my trade with

the Colonies about tenfold. That postal arrangement was entirely reciprocal,

very much in contrast with the present, when the Englishman sending his letter

to India puts on it a 1 1/2 d. stamp, but the poor Indian posting his to England

must put on 2 1/2 annas, equal to about 2 3/4 d.

After about a year I began to find my premises altogether too small. As no

suitable building was available for rent I decided to build. My father disliked

the idea of my stock lying practically unprotected in a vacant office at nights,

so he suggested selling his house and building a new one along with my proposed

new office. First we planned a house with a huge basement for my business, but

my mother objected to that idea because it would bring business and employees

actually into her house, even if there were a separate entrance to the basement.

We then decided on a two-storied office, each floor sixty by eighteen feet, to

stand in the garden at the side of the new house. All this took many months to

build, as it was a year of abnormal rains and the contractors also got

themselves into some financial difficulties.

Before we moved, however, I had an experience which bade fair to terminate the

entire proceedings, as far as I was concerned. My upper lip began to swell and

become hard, then my cheek and forehead, and then the side of the head near the

temple. I lay in the front bedroom in Silverdale Road. It was an abnormally hot

season, and I could [64] hear the hum of a mosquito in the room – a rare thing

in the north of England.

The doctor came and did what he could. He opened the swelling, but nothing would

come out. Then I heard my father and the doctor talking in the adjacent

bathroom. They forgot that the walls were very thin. My father said, in a broken

voice: “He was a good boy” – was, mind you. The past tense was quite

unequivocal. I told myself that I did not want to die, just when I was

beginning, at the age of seventeen, to get a bit of success and fun out of life.

The doctor said that if I survived the night he would make another trial to get

the stuff out in the morning. He duly arrived with an instrument shaped like a

glove-stretcher, made an opening in my lip, pushed the long end of the

instrument in gradually, about as far as my eye, and stretched it open a bit by

means of the handles, which he then told me to hold while he knelt on the side

of the bed and pressed his knuckles on my face with all his weight behind them.

I thought the bones would cave in under the pressure. Fortunately he succeeded

in squeezing out some of the bad matter, a hard greenish substance. The doctor

insisted that I was a brick, but I rather thought it was the bones that had

proved themselves of that category.

That day the weather broke. Rain fell in torrents. The trains were running a

foot deep in water in the railway cutting. The air became cool. I felt immediate

relief, and in a few days was able to attend to my work in a modified degree. In

the interval my father had carried on the selling end of the business with the

aid of the head girl. [65]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER V

FRATERNITY

§1

SHORTLY after we removed, Mrs. Besant came again to our city, and gave two

lectures in a small hall seating about six hundred people. I went with my father

to hear her. She had a sort of superhuman halo or atmosphere about her. She did

not carry herself or act like other people. All the people present seemed to

believe that she walked as easily in the worlds of the dead as in those of the

living, or at least were impressed by her sincerity and held the idea that “it

might be so.” Her fluent words, impressive voice and holy manner, and the

importance of the subject combined to produce an atmosphere intense, devout and

even aspirational. I was quite carried away, though I cannot remember the

subject of her oration.

On the occasion of a second lecture I bought at the door a book of hers called

In the Outer Court. I was greatly impressed by it and read it again and again.

The heights to which a human being could climb thrilled me; the practical ways

in which this could be done called for instant endeavour. They were simply the

old time-worn formulae of virtue, but carried to their climax with

uncompromising rigidity – spotless truth, love for all, even for those who hate

and hurt, perfect control of thought, the building of character by imagination,

purity and above all self-sacrifice. The climax dwelt upon words quoted by her

from another book, as follows:

Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears.

Before the ear can hear it must have lost its sensitiveness.

Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the

power to wound.

Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters its feet must be washed

in the blood of the heart. [66]

Mrs. Besant held the crucible theory. We must make ourselves into crucibles,

standing in the fire while in us the evils of the world are transformed to good.

My father was not quite so much impressed as I. He remarked that when such a

little book was sold for two shillings, somebody must be getting something out

of it.

It happened perhaps a year before this time that my jolly uncle gave to my

father an extract from The Light of Asia, which had been given to him in turn by

a doctor friend of his who was a student of mystical literature. My uncle had a

passion for poetry. One afternoon, when my elder brother was with us, I entered

the kitchen and found him leaning against the dresser, obviously thinking hard,

with a slip of paper – this extract – in his hand. He said: “Have you read

this?”

I took the paper, and read of Buddha carrying the wounded lamb down the

hill-side to the hall of sacrifice, and speaking to the king such words as made

the priests hide their crimsoned hands:

While still our Lord went on, teaching how fair

This earth were if all living things be linked

In friendliness and common use of foods,

Bloodless and pure; the golden grain, bright fruits,

Sweet herbs which grow for all, the waters wan,

Sufficient drinks and meats. Which when these heard

The might of gentleness so conquered them,

The priests themselves scattered their altar-flames

And through the land next day passed a decree

Proclaimed by criers, and in this way graved

On rock and column: “Thus the King’s will is:

There hath been slaughter for the sacrifice

And slaying for the meat, but henceforth none

Shall spill the blood of life or taste of flesh,

Seeing that knowledge grows, and life is one,

And mercy cometh to the merciful.”

My brother said: “If you will become a vegetarian, I will.”

“All right,” said I.

From that moment we were vegetarians, though my mother put up a good deal of

opposition, fearing that we would lose our health. My father also would have

become a vegetarian then, but for his consideration for her feelings.

We listened to all the arguments against vegetarianism, but none of them was

sufficiently convincing to counteract [67] the moral issue. It was said by some

that the animals would overrun the earth if we did not destroy them for food.

The Chinese might as well argue to the American that his continent would be

overrun by frogs if he persisted in his foolish policy of not eating frogs. On

the contrary it is found necessary to breed animals by the million to fill the

meat markets. This very aspect of the matter, however, constituted in my eyes

the greatest argument in favour of flesh food.

I was once, years later, speaking to a lady on a boat, and she put me this

issue: “But do you not realize that if we did not eat meat there would be

millions of animals which would never have any life at all?”

A bit Irish, perhaps, but I understood, and replied: “Yes. I could be reconciled

to that idea, if we could have an agreement that every animal before being

killed should be given its share of the bargain, that is, a reasonable long

life, at least to the other side of maturity, and there should be no lamb and

sucking pig on our tables, and no horrors such as pate de foie gras, goose liver

produced by nailing the bird’s feet permanently to a board so as to deprive it

of all exercise, and stuffing food forcibly down its throat so as to enlarge its

liver.”

There was no answer to this. Besides, if it is on the ground of providing life

to other creatures that we ought to eat them, we ought on the same ground to

insist on using horse-carriages and refuse the use of motor-cars for ordinary

short-distance traffic. A city taxi-cab should be an object of execration and

our streets ought still to be filled with growlers and hansom cabs. There must

be millions fewer horses on earth than there were twenty-five years ago.

Speaking of vegetarianism reminds me of an amusing incident with reference to

smoking. My elder brother, always rather thin and fragile, was obviously smoking

too much. My father used to advise him strongly against it. One day my brother

suddenly said to himself, as he was going along a path across a field which led

to our house:

“What is the use of smoking, anyway?” and he took out his pipe from his pocket

and flung it away. A day or two later my father was crossing the field, when he

happened to see the pipe lying in the grass. He recognized it and brought it

home.

“It seems a pity,” he remarked, “to throw away a good pipe that cost several

shillings.” [68]

The next day my brother was puffing away as hard as ever at the same old pipe.

I never smoked. I preferred the money. I was very careful about money – except

on one occasion when I was travelling on the top of a tramcar at night, and on

reaching home I found that in the dark I had given the conductor two sovereigns

in mistake for two halfpennies to pay the penny fare!

§2

After Mrs. Besant’s lecture the chairman announced that there was a branch of

the Theosophical Society in the city and there would be a meeting on Tuesday

evening at which the public were invited to ask questions. My father and I

attended. We were both thoroughly dissatisfied with the answers to the

half-dozen questions put by members of the public.

My father asked: “If there were a good power or principle as the basis of all

things, how could there be imperfection, pain, cruelty or any evil in the

world?” Several people tried to answer this – quite hopelessly. One illogical

answer was that God had given man free will and it was man who produced the evil

– quite innocent of the obvious implication that God must have produced man as

an evil being and therefore have produced the evil.

The only man there whom we appreciated and respected was the chairman, a

venerable gentleman (afterwards to be my father-in-law) who explained that

members of the Theosophical Society were only students, and that though man

could not yet solve such ultimate questions, it was still worth while to study

and find out what we could. He himself felt that were there not some good

principle gradually emerging and increasing its sway, there could be no good at

all in man, since no purely material being could be unselfish or could rise to

the heights of self-sacrifice. Such a thing would mean that matter could

overstep the nature of matter. And besides there was that mysterious divine

discontent which at last left no one completely satisfied with any material

pleasures or gains. He begged the audience not to go to extremes in any way, but

to use reason just as far as it would go with the very limited data at our

disposal. My father was very much taken by this old gentleman who was old enough

to be his father. We went [69] to the meeting a second time, only to find a man

reading an extremely dull and futile paper. We went no more, but decided that we

would hear Mrs. Besant whenever she came to the city.

It was not long before I obtained a copy of The Light of Asia. It affected me so

deeply that I had to read it in the privacy of my own room. Here at last was

true religion, from my point of view. The life of Buddha, as given in this poem,

was supremely gentle, beautiful, unselfish; but what was it that Buddha had

discovered which brought hope into the world? It was the law of karma. Why?

Because it showed that man was making himself through a series of lives, and if

it was somewhat hard that such a puny being was faced with such a herculean task

– that he could obtain nothing except by his own efforts – there was at the same

time the assurance that he could never suffer in the least except by his own

doing, that present cruelty and injustice to himself was but the payment for his

own past cruelty and injustice to others, and that the door was open for him to

make of his own future just what he liked. Here was no capricious God who, if

capable of creating cancer on earth, would be equally capable of providing

dreadful hells hereafter. No blind unmoral chance also, which could so easily

bring to naught in a moment the most strenuous endeavours.

I still thought of Mrs. Besant in connection with all this Buddhism. It was one

thing to have a theory or a voice from the past, however beautiful and eminent.

It seemed quite another to have at hand a living person, a noble, trustworthy,

and unselfish character, who could add to that theory the living testimony of

direct super-sensuous vision, who could declare these things to be true,

certain, scientifically sure, in a ringing convincing voice.

§3

In the new building, I invited my elder brother to join me in the business. He

left the shop that he was then managing, and we opened new departments in the

upper floor of the office. We started making rubber stamps, and by following the

methods that I had already found successful, succeeded in developing a large

postal business, importing most of our raw materials and small mechanisms from

America and Germany. We opened out also in the sale of picture post [70] cards,

and luckily got in right in the height of the craze, selling especially

Continental views, most beautifully collotyped in Germany. We missed, however, a

good trade in safety razors and some other small articles, through over-caution.

In my new offices on the ground floor I had partitioned off a portion as private

office. Here I used to attend to my account books and also retire occasionally

to practise various mental and physical exercises which I had found in Mrs.

Besant’s book, and in some books on hypnotism and cognate subjects which I had

obtained elsewhere, particularly one called Your Finer Forces and How to Develop

Them. I practised breathing exercises but not of the Hatha Yoga kind. I had had

for some time after my experiment in breathing at the shop a romantic notion of

curing large numbers of variously afflicted people in practically no time by

means of mesmeric passes.

Some months after the visit to the Theosophical Lodge I began to desire more

knowledge about it. I remembered to have seen a small library there and thought

it might possibly be open to the public. I was determined to read extensively,

if I could find suitable books. So one evening I went again to the Theosophical

Lodge premises. I found there, sitting at a table, an oldish gentleman with a

bald head, a small “horse-thief” beard, and a snuffle. Later I learned that he

was by profession a knocker-up. He lived in the mill area and made his living by

going round the streets in the early mornings and rattling on the bedroom

windows of his clients with a long stick. This occupation gave him plenty of

time to indulge in his hobby – the study of Greek and Neo-Platonic philosophy,

in which he had read profoundly. Anyone would have taken him for a university

professor of the old style, or a second-hand bookseller. I also found a notice

saying that books could be borrowed for a penny a week, or two shillings and

sixpence a year.

I walked over to the table, and when the old gentleman looked up at me I put

down a half-crown and said I wanted to join the library. He stared owlishly at

the coin for a few moments, then pushed it back towards me and said: “No, take a

book; pay a penny when you return it. Perhaps you will not want to read any

more.”

This negative sort of salesmanship took me, a business [71] man, very much by

surprise. But I had made up my mind. Pushing the half-crown back again I

replied: “No, put me down for a year’s subscription. I am going to read them

all.”

It happened at that moment that two small middle-aged ladies entered the room.

One, I learnt afterwards, was the wife of the president to whom my father and I

had taken a liking on the occasion of our first visit to the Lodge; the other

kept a small toffee shop in the mill area. They spoke to me – words of welcome.

I was shy, and wanted to get away with my book. Would I not give them the

pleasure of my company at the meeting that was about to take place? I preferred

not, I explained that I had come only to obtain books to read, to find out more

about Mrs. Besant’s philosophy. Oh! But it would give them so much pleasure if I

would stay. So I went with them into an adjacent, larger room, which was by day

a sort of board-room connected with a solicitor’s office. They sat me down on a

large settee and brought me a number of photographs to see. “This is Mr.

Sinnett. This is Mr. Leadbeater. This is Mr. Mead. This is Mrs. Mead. This is

Mr. Keightley” – and so on.

I said: “Yes; yes; yes; yes,” very politely, though full of inward wonder at

this sudden transition from an atmosphere of rare philosophy to the intimacies

of something resembling a family album. And the persons represented in the

portraits did not resemble the perfect men or Mahatmas of whom I was in search,

though Mrs. Besant had done so to some extent, with her priestessly robes and

manner.

After several other people had drifted in and the chairman had called the

meeting to order with two minutes’ silent meditation, I listened to an hour’s

lecture by a parrot-faced and parrot-voiced lady, on the theory that the earth

came from the moon and not the moon from the earth, and then went home, having

given a promise to attend again the next week.

§4

Though the lodge-meetings bored me, the literature had the reverse effect. At

the beginning I read mostly books written by Mrs. Besant, of which there were a

large number, and five largish volumes entitled: Isis Unveiled and The [72]

[Photo missing: DR. ANNIE BESANT IN HER PRIME (Lafayette)]

Secret Doctrine, by Madame Blavatsky, chief founder of the movement. With the

portrait of the author in Isis Unveiled I almost fell in love.

In both of these authors I read about Mahatmas. I was already prepared for the

main ideas of Theosophy (as this philosophy was somewhat erroneously called) by

my reading of The Light of Asia. I was a worshipper at the shrine of Buddha as

depicted therein. I had read that other people could follow in his steps and

bring to an end the procession of their lives (or rather bodies) by attaining

Nirvana, a state which could not be defined, but certainly bore no resemblance

to any sort of heaven.

According to Buddha, this Nirvana was to be attained not by any external means,

not by breathings or posturings, not by prayer or supplication, not by the aid

of any teacher or guide, but simply by surrendering absolutely all selfishness

and turning the full light of reason upon the imperfection of the world and all

human fancies, and thus reaching “illumination” and the “true life kept for him

who false puts by.” I understood that thousands had attained Nirvana, the state

of Buddha, the Wise, just as he himself had done, and had gone on into Nirvana.

But in these works I read of Mahatmas, men who had attained Nirvana but were

nevertheless actually living in human Indian bodies in Tibet. Though they had

attained perfection, they had not accepted the full liberty of Nirvana, but

remained in touch with man on the threshold of that state, so that they might

help others to attain.

I wanted above all things to find one of these Mahatmas, to serve him, to learn

and practise at his feet. Notwithstanding my coolness towards the celebrities of

the Theosophical Society, my lack of response to the contents of the family

album, I was completely captivated by the greater, though similar attraction of

the Mahatmas.

I found from conversation with my new friends that they were very humble in

these matters. They worshipped the Masters or Adepts from afar. They said that

if they behaved themselves in the station in life to which they had so far

attained, they might hope, after some more lives, to approach the feet of the

Masters and begin to tread the Path which led – usually through seven or

fourteen lives of intense endeavour – to Their estate. In the meantime they sat

at the feet of those who were already Their disciples. [73]

This was not good enough for me. I had pictured myself as another edition of the

Buddha himself, a Nirvani in this life. I was prepared to surrender everything,

everything. I wanted this joy not only for myself. I wanted everybody to see

that they suffered from themselves, that none else compelled them to hug the

wheel of birth and death, and kiss its spokes of agony. The Theosophical Society

was founded by the Masters for the purpose of spreading this knowledge of the

open door to Nirvana above and brotherhood on earth. I would work for it with

every ounce of my strength, with every gasp of my breath.

I gave my name for membership to the President, vowing in a broken voice that I

would do my best to help the great work. My vehemence disturbed the members

standing by; it was perhaps a little unseemly to be so religious in public. My

name went up to higher quarters, and after several months’ delay I received from

London a certificate of membership, though I was only at the age of nineteen.

Their rule that minors could be admitted only with the consent of their parents

and guardians seems to have been overlooked in my case.

In my reading I had pictured one of the Mahatmas as particularly suited to

myself. I wanted to go to him and learn. In the privacy of my room I would throw

myself on the ground in my longing, like any medieval devotee. Life was barren,

unthinkable, impossible. It could not go on without Him. I doubt if any hart

panted after the water-brooks as I after the Master. I wrote to Mrs. Besant

about this. She replied that I had a good brain, deep devotion, a great gift of

expression, and would certainly go far in this life. She said that her own

literary and scientific education had been of great value to her in her work,

and advised me to prepare myself by completing a sound education. Old people

must be taken as they are, she said, but young people should study and make

themselves worth having.

Some little time afterwards Mrs. Besant came to the city again and I was told

that I might have an interview with her. She stayed at the house of the

President. I went there on the appointed day. There was a hushed atmosphere.

Several people were sitting tensely on chairs in the drawing-room, waiting for

their turns, while our hostess, the little lady mentioned before (who was

destined to become my mother-in-law, though I did not know it then), busied

herself [75] with the arrangements. It was a large well-appointed house, for the

President was a successful business man, proprietor of a fairly large ironworks.

In due course my turn came. I had had time to work myself up into a considerable

state of agitation, the suppression of which produced an outward state of

abnormal stiffness. I entered Mrs. Besant’s room. She was sitting on a chair at

the far side. I balanced myself on the edge of another chair at a respectful

distance, very conscious of my clumsy boots, my tennis shirt and my long dark

beard – would have been very promising material for a caricaturist of

Bolsheviks. I waited nervously for her to speak the words which would change the

whole of my life and even future eternities, deeming no words necessary for me

in the presence of practical omniscience! She looked at me intently for what

seemed a long time – it was characteristic of her great heart that she did not

burst into laughter or else into tears. At last she asked me what my plans were.

I told her my desire. She advised patience and preparation – strangely like the

advice given to me by the kind old gentleman who was the proprietor of my second

warehouse. This time I had the sense to take the advice. I was consoled to some

extent by her suggestion that I should keep in touch with her by correspondence.

It was in that house that I became acquainted with a little girl who was to play

a big part in the future that was then troubling me so much. I was frequently

invited there, with other friends, and occasionally we used to sit for a kind of

group meditation. Eight or ten of us, very much in sympathy with one another,

used to gather at a big round table in one of the spare rooms, for an hour’s

meditation, after which we would tell to one another our experiences. In order

to counteract to some extent the impure “magnetism” of our daily clothing, at

these gatherings we used to put on white robes, all alike. Afterwards we would

generally return to the drawing-room and have a little refreshment and

conversation before proceeding to our various homes.

It was on one such occasion that I first met the little girl above mentioned.

Ordinarily she was not in evidence at any of our gatherings or tea parties,

being sent to play somewhere or being entertained by the maids. But she was

brought to meet the visitors and to receive a good night kiss [75] before going

to bed. She drove me nearly out of my wits by starting to go round the whole

circle of visitors for this good night kiss. I was in a mild perspiration when

my turn came, but I managed to do my duty by planting a most undexterous

osculation somewhere in the neighbourhood of the parting of the hair. I had not

kissed anybody, not even my mother, since my dreadful experience with the

school-ma’am, and I was not sure now but that it was a most dangerous thing to

do, leading to one could not tell what lengths on the downward path!

Although the little girl was quite willing to kiss the visitors, she

nevertheless most obviously regarded us with the greatest possible scorn. I had

never before seen such a proud child, nor indeed any person so expert in giving

a snub or showing the cold shoulder. There was, of course, nothing deliberate in

this; it was simply that she did not hide her thoughts or feelings. She had her

own views about the white robes!

§5

Mrs. Besant’s advice sent me back to school – the last thing in the world I

could have expected. Not satisfied entirely with the theosophical library, I had

developed the habit of going to the big city reference library. There I became a

voracious reader whenever I could find time. Every book was interesting –

philosophy, science, travel, biography, history. Once more I wanted to read them

all. But my ardour for this was damped when one day I made a calculation and

discovered that if I spent eight hours a day reading in that library I could

finish the job in about five hundred full life-times! I must select. One thing,

however, I would not set aside – the Sanskrit books.

I had read in one of Mrs. Besant’s printed lectures that the philosophy of

Shankaracharya – an Indian metaphysician who lived about three hundred years

B.C., according to some, but about a thousand years later than that according to

others – could not be fully understood unless one read it in the original

Sanskrit. The implication was that she herself could do this. She also spoke of

him as the greatest of Masters.

To me her words had the force of divine authority and imperative necessity. At

the city library I called for their [76] small collection of Sanskrit books,

including several grammars, and was overjoyed to find that it was a language one

could learn by oneself, without a teacher. There were no difficulties of

pronunciation, since the script in which it was written was purely phonetic. The

grammar books were not all quite clear about this pronunciation, but by

comparing three or four of them and making my own deductions I arrived at what I

was afterwards very pleased to learn (when an Indian friend visited us) to be

the correct pronunciation, according to South Indian standards. Then I wrote to

Bombay for grammar and other Sanskrit books of my own.

Hanging on the side of a screen near the entrance to the library I one day

noticed a pamphlet of the University Tutorial College of Cambridge, which told

about the London University examinations, and how one could prepare for them by

postal tuition. Here was my opportunity to complete the sound education advised

by Mrs. Besant. I would give point to my studies by reading for examinations as

explained in that booklet. I wrote to the College. I wanted to take their course

for the Matriculation Examination first of all; but I did not want to take Latin

or French for my second language, though I had learnt both at school. I wanted

to take Sanskrit, which was permissible at the examination by payment of an

extra fee of £2. But when I learnt that the tuition fee for Sanskrit would be

£10 extra for every ten lessons by post, I dropped the Tutorial College and

decided to learn everything by myself.

I bought the books, settled down to three or four hours’ study every day, part

of it in business hours in my private office. For the scientific subjects I

attended the Municipal School of Technology – a magnificent affair, costing half

a million pounds, modelled somewhat on the lines of the famous Boston

Technological Institution – for two and a half hours every evening, except Lodge

nights. Thus in about a year I matriculated in London University, having passed

in my coveted Sanskrit as well as the other subjects required by the University.

I had then to decide whether I would go in for the Arts or the Science course

for the Degree. Philosophy and metaphysics were to me the veriest child’s play.

I decided, therefore, in order to avoid a bias in my education, to take up

science, to which I devoted a large part of my time for four [77] years, in

chemistry, physics, geology and mathematics, attending the Technical College

nearly every night.

I loved that College, and the teachers; they were real teachers, in complete

contrast to what I had known in my schooldays. I no longer had any qualms about

going back to school. The College was part of the Victoria University, but the

night students were not allowed in those less democratic days to have the

degrees (as they are now) so we had to content ourselves with the numerous

certificates of the Board of Education in separate subjects of study. I obtained

many first classes and numerous prizes, which more than covered the cost of my

fees. Meals necessarily became very irregular at this time, and I expert at

poaching eggs and toasting cheese on a gas ring. [78]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VI

MYSTERY

§1

THERE were not many members who cared to attend the Theosophical Lodge

regularly; the average was perhaps eight or ten, though there were about thirty

members on the rolls. Lecturers would come occasionally from London and other

places, and then the Lodge room would be filled with members and their friends.

The President’s wife, who was hostess for the Lodge, had the difficult task of

bringing about a closer association of the alpha and omega of society. She would

go much out of her way to encourage any visitors of education and culture to

come more intimately into touch with the Lodge; but she would also do what she

could for the poorest and the most ignorant, and invite them also to her house.

There was one old man, a boot and shoe repairer from a back street, who was

half-crazed with incoherent visions, and would talk on all occasions. The

problem was accentuated by his indifference to soap, water and nail scissors.

She was always kind to him, yet tried firmly to quieten him and prevent him from

unconsciously insulting other people who happened to hold views differing from

his. There was a highfalutin’ widow of the semi-artistic world, with two

marriageable daughters. Our hostess thought it would do me immense good if I

could hit it off with one of those, and did her best to make suitable

opportunity. But it meant nothing to me in my then mood. My position was rather

that of a pedigreed cat belonging to a friend, which turned up its nose at the

pedigreed partner thoughtfully provided for it, and preferred to devote its

amours to a rapscallion which lived in a convent near by – in my case the great

orphan, humanity. [79]

The membership was not permanent. There were always some coming in and some

going out, for various reasons. One gentleman, who had been in the habit of

reading papers at the meetings, showed me a new book one day. It was full of

coloured plates of astral and other auras of various kinds of people. He said it

was impossible to believe. Did I not think so? No, I did not think so, nor

apparently did any of the others. We had a rational argument, even if there was

a weak spot in it. These things were probabilities. Those who claimed to see

them were good people. Therefore what they said was probably true. The gentleman

went home and came no more.

There was one professional man whom we had made our treasurer. He was very

ardent, but the annual meeting finished him off. There was a deficit of £9. What

was to be done about it? He suggested we should increase the annual dues to wipe

it off. But, as had happened year after year before, the President paid it.

Thereupon our Treasurer resigned membership, saying he was unwilling to

associate with such irresponsible people, who came there for what they could get

and had not the dignity to pay their way even when they could.

Gradually the attendance at meetings diminished. Only five or six would turn up.

Our financial position grew worse, so that we had to remove to inferior

premises. I was then librarian. I said we must have Sunday evening lectures for

propaganda purposes. But who would lecture? I would, if no one better could be

found. Hm! But I knew I could, for I used to lecture my studies in my empty

office on Sundays in order to impress them on my memory. The situation gradually

became acute. I pointed out that few people in the city had even heard about

Theosophy. The public ought to be given a chance to know about it, to accept or

reject. We had all come into this splendid thing, which had changed our lives,

by some accident; let us make some more accidents! If they would not do

anything, I must go and take a room somewhere and try by myself.

Very well, they would make a trial (no doubt the lesser of two evils). I must

arrange the meetings and take the responsibility. The President’s wife would

come to help, though she was no speaker. One or two others volunteered to be

present. I put a two-line advertisement in a newspaper; there would be a

discussion on Reincarnation at [80] the rooms of the Theosophical Society on

Sunday evening, all welcome.

Twelve people turned up, all tongue-tied. To save the situation I had to get up

and make a speech on the subject. They would like to ask one or two questions,

that was all. I did the answering.

I followed my old business methods, took a collection to pay for the

advertisements, spent it all on the advertisement for the next week, and was

rejoiced to find an audience of sixteen people. The third week twenty came, and

so on. Some came again and again, became friends, joined the Lodge. The

membership rose to about ninety and the Lodge meetings began to present quite

busy scenes.

Week after week I lectured. Audiences began to average nearly a hundred. The

Lodge had to move again into larger premises. I was a wonder, a phenomenon, a

lecturer in our midst, inspired, etc.! They made me Vice-President. Other Lodges

wanted me to speak for them. Tours were arranged in different parts of England,

and I would take an occasional holiday from my business to carry on this good

work.

Once I undertook a walking tour in Yorkshire – three lectures in seven towns –

Harrogate, Leeds, Wakefield, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Halifax and Bradford. By

day I walked from one town to the next, an average of perhaps fifteen miles; in

the evenings I lectured. I certainly proved to myself the accuracy of Emerson’s

saying that no man would break down in a speech on the day in which he had

walked ten miles.

Behold me, tramping along – clumsy boots, cloth cap, tennis shirt, long beard –

which would not grow on the front of the chin – ardent expression, mackintosh

over arm, and, above all things, in hand a large green umbrella which would not

close up closely, which had belonged to my grandfather! It spoke volumes for the

self-control of the English people that I was only once awakened to a sense of

how others saw me. It occurred in a tramcar, when one workman sitting opposite

me said explosively to another: “Oh, Christ!” and everybody stared. Yet I vow

there was no pose in my composition. I was quite unself-conscious. When friends

had occasionally suggested the removal of the beard I had always replied that I

did not see why I should scrape myself with a piece of iron, and the beard was

quite natural – as truly it was! [81]

Really, I was quite scientific in my dispositions. It was the world that was

full of absurd customs. Why should I bow to these follies? If there was love and

truth and beauty in the world, why all this nonsense of preserving unnecessary

fashions, habits and customs? In the Theosophical Lodge itself I used to feel

uncomfortable when there were expressions of blind faith. I was all for reason

and a scientific basis for belief. It was on that account that I started and

carried on what was called a third object group.

§2

The “Third Object” of the Society was: “To investigate unexplained laws of

nature and the powers latent in man.” About twelve of us took part in the Third

Object group. Our aim was not to experiment with mediumship, but to see if we

could obtain first-hand knowledge of clairvoyance and such faculties, under test

conditions. We had successful results from the very beginning.

The first experiment was the “battery of minds.” We all sat round in a

semicircle, except one member who was seated at the centre of the circle and

blindfolded with a thick scarf. I sat at the end of the semicircle, wrote the

name of a simple object on a bit of paper and passed it round for all to read.

We all then concentrated on a picture of the object written down and tried to

send it into the mind of the subject, whose business it was to keep the mind

quiet but alert – like that of a person looking out of a window with wonder as

to what might pass by – and to state whatever arose or appeared in the mind.

After a short time, the lady who took the first turn as subject said: “I am

afraid I do not see anything at all. All that has happened is that I seemed to

hear someone calling ‘Puss, puss, puss’.”

We were quite satisfied, for the word which I had written on the paper was

“cat.” Then I wrote the word “watch,” and she was at once very accurate and

precise: “I can see the dial of a watch.” Other members took their turns. One

gentleman received the messages with about fifty per cent of correctness. I

remember that in his case penknife came out as a table knife, and dog as a pug

dog. Of all the experimenters only two or three had a zero result in reception.

We tried many experiments in reading words written [82] on a paper placed inside

a closed envelope. The first time, I wrote HEAD. The subject spelt it out: “H –

then a vowel – two vowels – E and A -one letter more – I cannot see it clearly –

it is R, or rather D.”

On the next paper I wrote XMAS. Immediately on touching the paper she said,

laughing, “O, Christmas.” “Got it in a Hash,” she added, “without seeing the

letters at all.”

Generally the letters were spelt out. When asked how she got the word, our

subject said that in most cases she actually saw the letters. That must have

been so, for on one occasion when I wrote the word STEAMER she spelt it quite

methodically: “S-t-a-i-m – no – s-t-a-r, star.” This showed that there was some

broken kind of sight. None of us had thought about a star, so it could not have

been thought-transmission in this case.

In a variant of this experiment each member in the semicircle wrote his own word

on a separate piece of paper. I collected the papers, shuffled them and handed

one to the subject, without knowing what was written upon it. She took hold of

the paper and presently said: “I see a dragonfly.”

The word written on the paper was “fly.” In this case t here must have been

visualization of a thought rising from the written word.

One of the most interesting experiments gave us a probable answer to the

question: Is the thought conveyed by some sort of wave in ether, like wireless

telegraphy, or is something tangible transmitted from mind to mind, like a

letter through the post? We obtained evidence of something tangible at least

that the thought could impress itself on material objects and could be taken

from them by the receptive mind.

For these experiments I prepared a number of small pieces of paper by trying to

impress pictures upon them by thought; on one I would imagine a house, on

another a tree, and so on. I wrote something in the corner of each paper in tiny

almost illegible writing, so that I would know them again. Then I shuffled these

papers and put one out without looking. The subject said: “I can see a hen in a

farmyard. She is surrounded by chickens and is scratching the ground to get

something for them to eat.”

I looked at the paper. It was the one with the word “hen” written on the corner.

I had pictured simply the hen, not the chickens, the farmyard and the

scratching. [83]

At the second paper the lady shuddered: “Ugh! I do not like this. It reminds me

of vermin.” Then, after a moment: “I see an underground archway and a sewer. It

is swarming with rats.”

I had thought only of a rat, not consciously of any underground place. None of

us knew which paper had been put out. My thought must have impressed the paper

in some way, and that impression could be seen or received direct from the paper

by the sensitive person.

It is interesting to notice that in every case the sensitive added something to

what was transmitted by the sender. When we experimented with proverbs instead

of simple objects there was much scope for imagination. For example, “Too many

cooks spoil the broth” elicited quite a story: “I see a large room – a kitchen.

A lot of men are hurrying about and getting in each other’s way and spilling

things. O! I know” – with a laugh – “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

A different kind of experiment was that of sensing the presence of a person. The

subject was blindfolded, as before. Then one of the experimenters would quietly

stand near, while the rest of us remained at some distance. On one evening this

was done fourteen times with our best subject, and every time she named the

person correctly, frequently adding further information, such as: “You have been

in the presence of death, lately,” or “You have been sick so that you could not

eat” -remarks in every case admitted to be correct.

The fifty per cent gentleman was remarkably good in this experiment. Out of

seventeen trials he named ten correctly immediately, five correctly on the

second attempt, after the word “No” had been called out once, and the remaining

two on the third attempt. In a variant of this experiment we scattered chairs in

different parts of the large room; then moved about, stamping and making

clapping and other noises, until we suddenly sat down in the chairs which we

happened to be near. Then the subject pointed to us individually and correctly

named us all. When we asked for explanations of the process, the answer was: “I

can see colours round you, and recognize you by those colours.” One curious

detail was that when I stood near to the subject and strongly imagined myself to

be in a distant place, the subject could not identify me. [84]

Outside the group another sort of experiment (highly recommended by Mr. W. T.

Stead) was undertaken by myself and one of the members. We sat for ten minutes

each morning in our respective homes and alternately “sent” and “received” a

thought, keeping a record, which we compared only at the end of six months. It

showed no results for about a month at the beginning, then some correct

transmissions in increasing frequency, until in total there was an average of

more than ten per cent correct.

Our group ultimately broke up through the illness of some of its members and the

departure of others to new homes.

§3

As far as I ever heard, ours was the only Lodge of the Theosophical Society in

the world in which such scientific experiments were conducted, under test

conditions. The prominent clairvoyants in the Society, Mrs. Besant and Mr.

Leadbeater, and in a minor degree two or three others, always said that they

were not allowed by the Masters to give any definite evidence of their unusual

faculties or powers. Mme Blavatsky, however, had performed many remarkable

experiments in the presence of numbers of persons who had signed their names to

written statements of what they had collectively seen.

Most of the members of the Society accepted unquestioningly anything said to be

seen by Mrs. Besant or Mr. Leadbeater. When, later, I was in intimate touch with

them, I learnt that they frequently received letters somewhat as follows: “It is

not necessary for me to describe my trouble. With your wonderful powers you will

know everything when you receive this letter. Please help me, or advise me ...”

In reply to such letters they always explained that it was not right or

permissible to use psychic powers in matters which could be attended to by

ordinary physical faculties; it would be a waste of power; if the writer would

explain his case clearly, and briefly, they would see what could be done!

Some members declined to believe without evidence, notably Babu Bhagavan Das of

Benares, who used to say: “I am sorry. If you are not permitted to show, I am

not permitted to believe.”

In this he followed the tradition of the Indian yogis, [85] who always show

their powers to their prospective pupils, as I had occasion to learn in my own

experience in India.

Dependence upon leaders was always a weak point in the Society, although the

original intention had been to base everything on rationality, even in the study

of abnormal things. Some would say: “See how the mother cat has to carry her

kittens about while they are small. Why should it not be so in occult matters?”

Others, thinking this a trifle extreme, would prefer the simile of the young

monkey, which clings to its mother with its own hands. This “monkey policy” was

often put forward by leaders and would-be leaders who considered that the act of

choosing a leader to be approached for orders and hints to be obeyed implicitly

constituted all the positivity of character necessary for occult development.

Only a few held that if members of the Theosophical Society had not yet been

weaned it was about time to begin; I was one of these, and therefore destined

for ultimate unpopularity. But I anticipate.

My membership in the Theosophical Society brought into my life a social element

which had been lacking before. At first I used to walk part of the way home from

the Lodge meetings with a young business man who was very much taken with a

literary young lady who used to bore us with her excessive enthusiasm for Plato.

They tried to supplant our President, and put the young lady in office instead,

but the scheme was not a success. The young man did not remain a member for very

long.

After that, I generally walked home with a lady who was about thirty years my

senior, but as lively as a cricket, and I am almost tempted to say as small. She

had been manageress in some sort of factory where many girls were employed, and

had retired on a tiny pension. We used to talk much about systems of yoga and

methods of meditation, in which I was greatly interested.

She was a member of the Eastern School of Theosophy, an organization composed

only of members of the Theosophical Society, but not officially connected with

it. There were frequent references to this school in the writings of Mme

Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant. When introducing new members to the Society Mrs.

Besant would often speak of the “further step” which they could take after some

time by joining the E.S. Its proceedings were entirely secret, [86] under

pledge, so I could not ask what its methods of meditation were. But I used to

tell my friend that I was puzzled by the fact that its members appeared to have

no more knowledge and no more self-control than other people, and I disliked the

slight atmosphere of superiority and sacerdotalism which seemed to surround it.

When it came to matters of election to office, or the selection of speakers,

membership in the “E.S.” was certainly an asset. At the time of the election of

Committee members for the British Section of the Society, lists of “suitable

people” were sent round privately.

I joined the School after some time, and did not find its systems of meditation

as good as those which I already knew and had been privately practising. In

saying this I do not break any pledge, for I do not say what those meditations

were.

I was always very much against anything which might have an hypnotic effect in

meditation. Repetition of formulas; dwelling in thought on Masters’ forms, with

vows of fidelity and obedience; prayers to the Masters, asking them for guidance

and blessing – all seemed to be bad psychology and bad reverence. If Masters

were there, surely they would do their utmost without being asked. And the habit

of thinking every day of them or of their disciples with requests and hopes for

orders or guidance seemed to me to lead to paralysis of initiative, in which

alone I thought either intuition or inner guidance could find its opportunity.

I was ready to admit the principle of mystical union with higher intelligence

than my own. That was a matter of both logic and experience. Logic, since in the

world visible to the senses our physical powers are enchanced by harmonious

co-operation with the laws and forces of nature. I disliked the formula “the

conquest of nature” often employed in connection with scientific achievement. In

the use of wind, steam, electricity, we were simply co-operating or associating

intelligently with the forces of the greater world outside our personality.

To one convinced of thought-transference such association mentally was also a

reasonable idea. When a thinker has a flash of intuition, as is common among

scientists and philosophers, I could regard it as a kind of mental contact with

a deeper intelligence, or a world of ideas, even a universal [86] mind or some

great world of life in which live the liberated souls. That also was in accord

with experience. Many people had declared that they sometimes felt themselves

illuminated with an intelligence altogether greater than any which they felt

that they could call their own. I had myself had such experience a number of

times. Even if the Masters did retain actual human form, their aim would be to

advise men to become responsive to that world, not to become worshippers of

themselves and mere followers to carry out orders or hints given by them. Such

were my thoughts. Certainly above everything I wanted to meet a Master, not to

worship him externally, but to be of his company and his mode and order of life.

§4

The new social contacts of the Lodge were most precious to me. Here was

friendship and brotherhood, without safeguards such as those of the

drawing-room, where religion and economics are tacitly avoided. I resented the

E.S. a little, as forming a cleavage within our brotherhood. How could we

discuss important subjects if some among us were pledged to mental reservations,

or if you assumed that they knew what others did not know and were not allowed

to know?

Another movement which seemed to me to harm our brotherhood was the Co-Masonry,

which was taken up eagerly by some of our members some time after I had joined

the Lodge. I was perhaps a little jealous of this, as the members who would not

help the Lodge in its financial difficulties could find much money for the new

Masonic movement. We had had various proposals to reduce expenditure. We had

even removed the Lodge to smaller premises, comparatively obscure and

inconvenient. Scarcely had the removal taken place when up came this question of

starting a Co-Masonic Lodge. All the leading members were canvassed on the

subject; it was whispered round that the Masters were keenly anxious to have the

new movement promoted, and would give of their power and force to or through

those who joined it. In a trice the members hustled to ransack their monetary

resources, and very soon hundreds of pounds were forthcoming. Most of those who

could afford it could not resist the concreteness and the [88] pomp of a

ceremonial movement, backed by the statement or its organized access to the

Masters’ power and blessing.

Again and again prominent members pressed me to join the Masonic movement. Did I

not believe that there was a European Master behind it? He would probably

manifest himself visibly to the members; it might be at the meetings to be held

during the forthcoming Theosophical Convention in Budapest. One leading member

told me about a doctor who helped a certain poor man as soon as he learned that

he was a Mason. This was real brotherhood, was it not? No, communalism. But that

was a step towards universal hrotherhood? It did not seem so to me; it was a

step downwards from it. Later, I joined the movement in India, on the proposal

of Mrs. Besant. After the first meeting I was chatting with Mr. Leadbeater.

“How did you get on?” he asked.

“I have told more lies to-night than in all the rest of my life,” I sadly

replied. This was, of course, no criticism of Masonry. It is no secret that

there are rituals and formulas. It was simply that I had said what I had been

told to say, but again and again it did not agree with my own thought and

belief.

After I had been Vice-President of the Lodge for two or three years, our

President fell ill and it became my duty to carry on his work. At last he died,

and I was elected President in his place. During these years a deep friendship

had grown up between us. I had been a frequent visitor at his house, and had

even been on holidays with him and his wife and little girl. We went to the

country and to the Isle of Wight. It was something new to me to pick flowers in

the woods with a little child. When the father died, I was there to help, to

console, to fill the gap to some extent, or rather to be a distraction from the

emptiness. Often after that I took the little girl, now thirteen years old, for

bicycle rides. Something new, clean and simple came into my life, which till

then had consciously known nothing but struggle and conflict.

I had no intention of going to India. That was brought about by psychic

experiences. I cannot say whether these in turn were brought about by some

activity of my subconscious mind or were actual occurrences. I can only report

what happened, or seemed to happen.

One evening, when I was sitting in meditation with the [89] group of friends I

have already mentioned, I suddenly became aware of a Master standing opposite me

across the table, and speaking to me. He put me through a kind of catechism. Did

I understand what honesty meant? Did I know the importance of it? Did I consider

myself honest? Somehow I was made to see the tremendous value of perfect honesty

– not simply honesty in speech and in dealing with others, but also honesty in

knowing oneself. Yes, I was very honest according to the world’s standards, but

I could not say that I was always fundamentally honest to myself. After some

time there was a pause and suddenly I became aware of a hand lightly resting on

my left shoulder. Looking that way – though I do not think that I opened my eyes

or made any movement – I saw, or thought I saw, Mme Blavatsky (who had then been

dead for about seventeen years) standing beside me. She was laughing, and

looking not at me, but across in front of me towards my right. Following her

gaze I saw Colonel Olcott standing there (he had been dead about a year). Mme

Blavatsky spoke to him, merely the words: “He’s ripe, Olcott; we’ll send him to

India.”

Then the vision faded. I opened my eyes and became aware again of my friends

sitting round the table. At the time the vision gave me no surprise. It seemed

perfectly natural that the Master should be there; he was as familiar to me as

my own father. It seemed quite natural also that Mme Blavatsky and Colonel

Olcott should be there, like familiar friends.

It was not this vision that decided me to go to India, however. I was not

prepared to give so much credit to visions. Besides, had I not seen in our

experimental group that even reliable clairvoyants unconsciously embellished

what they saw with elements drawn from their own personalities? I went on with

my life as usual, merely wondering whether I would ever go to India or not.

Something more happened, however. One night, as I was going home alone on top of

a tramcar, I seemed to see Mrs. Besant in front of me, asking me to come to her.

Still, I took no notice. In my opinion there was nothing decisive enough to call

for any action. Then another vision came. I was going down some steps from a

railway station at night. The steps were roofed in, and only dimly lighted.

Suddenly the whole cavern-like place was brightly illuminated, and [90] I saw

Mrs. Besant standing before me in a golden radiance. She spoke: “I want you to

come and help me.”

That night, when I reached home I told my father that I had a fancy to take a

trip to India for three months. Would he help my brother to look after the

business in my absence? Yes, of course. I did not tell him nor my friends at the

Lodge of my reason for going, though I had told my friends in the meditation

group of my vision there. I took a Japanese steamer to Colombo from London, in

November, 1908, and my father came with me to London to see me off. I meant to

go for a three months’ trip to see what would happen. I had no idea that India

would become my home and that I should not see England again for over thirteen

years. [91]

BOOK II



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER I

A VOYAGE TO INDIA

§1

IT was with a sense of emptiness that on the evening of departure I watched the

white cliffs of England disappear into the dusk, having established myself on

the extreme edge of the poop deck. That became my favourite spot on the ship.

From there I viewed the coast of Portugal and watched Gibraltar go by. From

there day after day I gazed down into the swirling, churning waters, which were

so sympathetic with my mood. There, when we had stormy weather, I enjoyed the

lift and fall, as of a child’s swing, with no uneasiness save the thought that

something might break, when the propeller rose clear of the water and raced

madly, vibrating the ship with its superfluous energy. Sitting there on a

stanchion, I had no sickness, did not even think of sickness, only remembered

vaguely having seen people sick years before on an Isle of Man boat, among them

a lady who kept on saying, in her anxiety: “Oh! I am sure I shall be sick,” and

was sick even before the vessel left the landing stage.

During that voyage I suffered great hunger, physical as well as spiritual – the

former because I would eat nothing that had ever wagged a tail. There must be no

trace of such impurity in the body that was going to the Masters’ land, and

perhaps to his immediate society! There must also be no pollution of the mind

with trashy novels or magazines; I took with me only books of Hindu philosophy.

As to the spiritual hunger, it was absolutely indefinite, a kind of protracted

gaze into a formless sky.

Only occasionally my fellow-voyagers drew me out of this mood to some extent.

Sometimes the important question of the day was: who, standing on one foot and

toeing a [95] certain line, could place a little block of wood furthest away?

Sometimes we would watch a small Japanese professor of ju-jutsu – who had gone

to England to make a living by teaching the art, and failed to do so – and a

gigantic Scotsman – who was going out to be a policeman in Singapore – wrestling

on a large mat spread on the deck. The Japanese always won, though the Scotsman

constantly thought that next time he would be able to escape his opponent’s

wiles.

Sometimes I would play igo or “fives” with the Japanese officers and passengers

– in fives you put counters on the crossings of the lines of a chequered board,

not on the squares, and you try to get five of these in an unbroken line, while

your opponent, placing counters of opposite colour in his turn, tries to prevent

you and to make a five of his own – quite a fascinating game, requiring,

however, a board of about twice as many squares as an ordinary chess board.

Once I gave a lecture explaining, with reference to many experiments made in

France and other countries, the peculiar activities of the mind possible under

hypnosis and in other abnormal conditions.

Frequently, two young Japanese salvationists, who had been to London for study

and training, would try to convert me to Christianity, as they understood it. I

was fond of those two boys, and went with them for a walk on shore at Port Said,

our only port of call between London and Colombo. We had much in common

temperamentally though little in beliefs or ideas, and so, ignoring the curio

shops, we walked far into the interior of the town to see life there in the

gathering darkness, until an urchin, running alongside us, called out: “Want my

sister, sah? Want my sister, sah?” when we turned back to the ship with

something of a shudder, and some fear that where such things could be there

might also be robbery with violence.

When we ultimately parted one of those friends gave me a little Bible, with a

suitable inscription in the fly-leaf. Though they had argued much with me about

the contents of the Bible, they did not realize that I knew the book far better

than they did, having read it through and through at school. It had been the one

intelligent act of our schoolmaster, I think, to make that our reading book in

English, in daily use year after year.

My cabin companions, three burly men of mature age and [96] language, going out

East to police duties after some furlough, also went together on shore. On

returning, one of them stepped from the boat into the Mediterranean Sea instead

of on the ship’s ladder, to the great amusement of his companions and the

lookers-on.

One respectable police officer travelling with a large family – florid wife and

six or seven children -would constantly talk of sex adventures in China. He

assured me that if a European man went with a Chinese woman, the children his

own European wife bore to him afterwards would show some Chinese peculiarities.

I did not notice any such features in his own children, so assumed that this was

his way of warning the young idea not to shoot!

In addition to the three policemen there were other companions in my cabin,

namely, hundreds of cockroaches; actually in my bunk, which was back to back

with the washing-up table of the steward’s pantry. They were a smallish, rather

ethereal type of cockroach, mostly pale brown and whitish in colour, and gifted

with considerable speed of movement. It did not occur to me to complain about

these. I had a sort of idea that such things were to be expected on shipboard –

my father had talked of cockroaches on sailing ships. I knew there were not many

of them, perhaps none at all, on the other two sides of the cabin, where the

policemen slept, but did not change over to their side, though there was a

vacant bunk, as the proximity of beetles was preferable to a stronger smell of

whisky than that to which I was subjected even where I was. Besides, was I not

going out to India to face anything, anything, and perhaps these cockroaches

would serve as a small apprenticeship?

§2

After twenty-three days at sea we arrived at Colombo. One of my friends – the

very gentleman who had told me the story of the doctor and the poor man, in

support of my coming into the brotherhood of his Masonic circle – proved

superior to his creed, and wrote to a friend in Ceylon, introducing this

inexperienced young man and recommending him to tender care.

A messenger came on board to meet me and took me in a little boat to the quay.

We went through the Custom House [97] with my luggage, consisting of one rather

large gladstone bag. “Any firearms? No? It seems very heavy. Let us see.” They

saw – one side filled with clothes, the other with books and lecture notes.

It was not till I was out in the street that I realized that I was drinking hot

air into my lungs. I think the greatest trial in Ceylon and South India is never

to be able to get a breath of cool air. The messenger guided me a short distance

to the premises of Volkart Brothers, a large Swiss shipping company, and into a

private office where a kindly Cingalese gentleman, who occupied an important

position in the firm, received me most affably and entertained me for a while

with conversation containing more than a spice of humour.

I waited while my host finished up his business for the day. He then hailed two

rickshaws, and we bowled off to his bungalow in the Cinammon Gardens, where he

entertained me for four days. I had my first introduction to Oriental

expressiveness when the rickshaw coolie tried to extract from me, as being a

greenhorn, double the proper fare. My host vituperated him with violence of

language and gesture and threw the money on the ground, leaving him to pick it

up. The East is full of contrasts.

What a pleasure it was to walk in the mornings in the red roads, and to see the

blue and white sky through the leaves of magnificent trees forming a natural

archway overhead! Seldom in England had one known such a clear atmosphere, such

a blue sky, such splendour of twisting trunks and lengthened arborages, and

never such red roads – which, however, have long since disappeared, buried under

tar surfaces required by the new motor traffic.

Notwithstanding my host’s kindness, my hunger was not yet to be dispersed. He

was a bachelor, well served by a variety of attendants – one for the bathroom,

another for the kitchen, another to tidy the bungalow, and several others whose

occupations I could not discern at all. In the mornings he went to his office

quite early, having arranged for my morning meal. This duly arrived – dry boiled

rice in a fluffy heap, soup in a little silver bowl, vegetable curry, some small

savoury cakes, and two or three bananas on the side, all served at one time,

with an attendant in the offing, waiting to put out a little more of anything

which I might consume to the end. [98]

The attendant waited in vain. My meal actually consisted of rice and bananas. As

to the soup, curry and cakes – these gentle little Cingalese, were they provided

with leather interiors to compensate for external softness?

In the evening my host came home, hoped I was comfortable, had been well served

with all that I needed, and so on. Oh, yes. The inexperienced young man was not

going to look the gift horse in the mouth, nor to hurt anybody’s feelings.

In the evening we called on friends, and sat in wicker chairs under the trees.

While we partook of fruit and cool drinks, the mosquitoes were busy on other

richer juices not yet thinned by sojourn in the tropics, drinking in through

little trunks put up through the interstices of the canes, and dexterously

punched through the seat of my pants. Ah, the generous tropics – generous to one

and all! No wonder in the East men do not regard themselves as quite different

and separate from the rest of creation. Their greater sense of unity with it is

only the counterpart of a greater intimacy in actual living; in the air above,

on the ground beside us, in the earth beneath, life surges in a restless tide.

It was at one of these evening parties that I first met Mrs. Musaeus Higgins, a

lady of German birth, who had determined to bring modern education to Cingalese

girls without making it a means to draw them away from their own social and

religious traditions. She was working at the development of a school on those

lines. At the time of my visit she was writing a volume of stories of Cingalese

history, and I had the pleasure of helping her with the final edit, especially

to give English instead of German structure to the sentences where necessary.

She had had her experience of the life beneath. She told how one day as she sat

in her former school hall she had looked up and seen the roof swaying. Quickly

she had called to the girls. They all ran out of the building just before it

collapsed in a cloud of dust and palm leaves.

The white ants had eaten the entire interior of the posts and roofing timbers,

leaving only a shell, and now it had reached the point at which a puff of wind

could do the rest. This spectacular disappearance of the old school building

had, however, been good publicity, and funds had soon come forward for housing

the school in a modern bungalow. Later it grew into a splendid and most modern

institution. [99] The book of stories also prospered; it rose to the position of

one of the favourite text books in schools all over Ceylon.

§3

On the fourth evening I was placed in a steamer bound for the Indian port of

Tuticorin – a night’s journey. The entire hold of the steamer was filled with

plantation coolies, men, women and their children. It was a stormy night. Ever

and anon I woke to hear the wails of the crowd below, rising even above the

sound of the wind and the lashing waves.

The daily mail train from Tuticorin to Madras appeared to me phenomenally slow.

It was so, in fact, for it took twenty-four hours to accomplish a journey of

less than 450 miles. New as the country through which we passed was to me, it

did not excite my interest very much, for I was intent only upon reaching my

goal. Sometimes I would look out of the window and watch the deeply-coloured

country-side slinking by – large, flat shrub-covered plains for the most part,

often under water at that time of the year, browns of the dry crops and the

fallow lands alternating with the greens of rice fields – richest green in the

world.

Now and then we would clatter over a level crossing, and see a small scattery

crowd of wayfarers waiting at the gates – men clad in two white cloths or one

cloth and a shirt, the lower garment reaching just below the knees if they were

workmen, to the feet if they were of the land-owning or the literary class –

women in one long check-patterned cloth of reddish-orange or brown or,

occasionally, blue, and a little bodice skin-tight over the shoulders and

breasts, with children clustered beside them or sitting astride the hip, and

sometimes bundles or baskets upon their heads. There would also be occasional

two-wheeled carts with round covers – matting stretched on canes -and drawn by

bulls.

Two things repelled me; the trident marks on the foreheads of men who wished to

advertise that they had done their morning worship according to the rules of

certain sects, and the betel-chewing of men and women alike, with its attendant

spitting and, even worse, its display of unnaturally red mouth and discoloured

teeth.

Men were there with long hair, fuzzy hair, and no hair at all, except a tuft at

the crown. All were shaved at [100] least round the back, the sides and the

front, leaving only a circular cap to grow. None had the scissor crop of Europe,

though it has come into vogue since then. The women had, all alike, a centre

parting and a bun low on the neck. The tradition of the Hindus is to avoid

scissors and tailoring, which are left mainly to the Muhammadans. But all this

as regards the men is much changed; relatively few shaved or long-haired men or

decorated faces are now to be seen.

There were lengthy stops at the larger railway stations and junctions –

sometimes as much as half an hour. As the stations were never in the towns, but

some distance away, the transition was sudden from the open countryside to a

raging sea of human beings on the platforms. Hurrying and scurrying people

crossed one another in all directions in search of room in the long train – some

having started at one end and some at the other – amid a babel of noise created

by their own excitement and the effort to keep large family groups together, and

by cries of vendors of cooked foods and fruits and drinks and coloured toys and

cloths and cheap imported trifles. At length someone banged discordantly and

deafeningly on a length of old railway-line suspended to act as a bell, someone

else whistled, and we clumpetty-clumpetty-clumped out of the station and away

into the fields again, the carriages swaying on their narrow track.

The passengers varied enormously. How different all this from the uniformity of

English life! There was a man travelling without a ticket; he had done it many

times by judiciously changing from one carriage to another. He did not seem to

have any other business on the train. Perhaps it was his hobby. But seemingly no

one would give him away, even if they disapproved. There was a man looking for a

man travelling without a ticket. He was fierce with his muttered threats that he

would get him sooner or later. Both were in my carriage for part of the journey.

There was a stout Muhammadan merchant, with loose white trousers, silk coat to

his knees, and a golden hat. There was a young priest, fresh from his training

in Ceylon, who somehow gravitated to me and fell into a discussion on theology –

which ended when he affirmed a belief in hell-fire and I asked him if he in

heaven would be able to look on happily while his mother or someone else whom he

loved was burning in hell, and he replied that God would somehow [101] make it

acceptable to him, and I remarked that I liked his God even less than his hell.

All along the train, except in the first class, occupied chiefly by the insular

English, people were talking volubly. In the third class they seemed to have

wonderful power of concentration or selective attention, as well as of the

lungs. The huge carriages seemed to contain anything from fifty to a hundred

people, who travelled in a roar of the globular liquid sounds of the Tamil

language, which, to the uninitiated ear seemed to be composed entirely of

vowels. The faces, too, matched the voices, large, soft and round, all feminine,

though the eyes very occasionally might be acquisitive and fierce.

At night came sudden dusk and dark, the short twilight of the tropics. Upper

bunks, loosened from hooks, were dropped to the horizontal. Passengers unrolled

their bedding and laid themselves to sleep. But the bustle and babel at the

stations – all shouting, none listening – went on as before, whatever the time

of night. When we drew up in the morning to the orderliness and comparative

quiet of the Egmore station in Madras, coolie porters leaped into the carriages,

passengers poured out and away in a great stream, mixed with the coolies bearing

bedding and boxes and bags and baskets and bundles of every conceivable

description and no description at all, and passed out through the gates to the

bullock carts, the pony carts and the horse carriages waiting outside. [102]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER II

A “MOTHER” OF INDIA

§1

IT was a long ride to the suburb of Adyar in a dismal victoria hired at the

station, behind a horse which had learned syncopation in advance of the times,

on a seat whose springs had known heavier passengers than I and had not

forgotten them. Down road after road we went, all very similar, past large

dilapidated bungalows standing in spacious compounds with broken walls or

perforated hedges. Everywhere was decay, but everywhere also the glorifying

feature of magnificent trees -mostly banyan and peepul – meeting overhead.

At length we came to the Elphinstone Bridge across the Adyar river – the bridge

a furlong in length, the river varying constantly from half to four times that

width – a quiet sheet of water, a lake rather than a river, disfigured only by

two or three mud flats in the centre. My eyes were all for the headquarters’

building of the Theosophical Society, standing out prominently on the opposite

bank – a bungalow transformed by additions until it resembled a rambling

monastery.

We were soon across the river, in at the gate, along the drive, under the

corrugated iron porch – and presently I was out of the carriage and into the

office of the Treasurer, Mr. Albert Schwarz, who received me kindly and took me

upstairs to the sanctum of Mrs. Besant. Shoes off on the terrace outside her

door, a kind welcome inside, enquiries about the journey, a statement that a

room had been prepared for me at the Blavatsky Gardens’ Bungalow, an appointment

for the next morning to discuss plans, and I was guided along narrow paths,

through a grove of palm trees, to my temporary abode. [103]

Mrs. Besant looked more at home in her Indian surroundings than in Europe. The

chief furniture of her sitting-room or office was a large square chauki or

platform about one foot high, on which were placed a thick round white bolster

for her back, a carpet for her seat, and a large low desk for her writing as she

sat cross-legged and barefooted in her white or cream Indian woman’s garb. At

the back of the desk were racks for papers, and office conveniences in great

profusion – a dozen pencils ready sharpened at one hand, correspondence waiting

to be answered at the other.

Mrs. Besant never varied the arrangement of that room during the twenty-five

years that I knew her there. Never varied her own posture – leaning back to

read, leaning forward to write, and so growing rounder and rounder shouldered

year by year. Of all people I have known, Mrs. Besant had the greatest habit of

repose. Her body would be quiet, her features placid, while her hand ran rapidly

over sheet after sheet of paper, producing page after page of small, neat,

beautiful and – when one knew its little tricks – uncommonly legible

handwriting. She liked to be alone to write; would have no secretary and no

typewriting machine for this, even to the last, and when services were offered

in these directions would always reply that she could think best at the end of

her pen – which was, however, a lead pencil.

As I sat with Mrs. Besant, discussing plans, my thoughts were more on her than

on the plans. Here was cleanliness and peace of body and mind; not simplicity by

any means, but an orderliness that achieved simplicity.

In person, then about sixty years old, she was short and corpulent, but not

clumsy or coarse. Her face, long; forehead, tall and rather narrow; lips, wide

and rather thick; nose, long, straight and rather fleshy; eyes always round and

wide-open, and only to be described as starry and conspicuously beautiful (her

daughter inherited them) but not quite far enough apart for modern taste;

expression, saintly and human at the same time, with no trace of anything

cryptic, reserved, aloof, self-considering or superior; hair, pure white, short

and curly, equal all over the head; smile, dazzling.

I had written to her before my arrival telling her of my visions, of my plans to

take a three months’ trip to see what [104] would happen. She did not comment

upon the visions, and I did not question her about them. She told me that she

would like me to stay there and write for the Theosophist, the Presidential

magazine of the Society. Would I do so? Yes. Money? I had sufficient for the

simple life at Adyar, if I sold out my business and invested the capital. She

would help me with money from some funds that she had. No, I could manage; I was

there to help, not to be a burden on anybody. Still, I felt uneasy at the idea

of living on interest, consuming the fruits of the labour of others without

taking any part in the world’s work myself. No, I really ought not to feel like

that, for I was not intending to live in idleness but to give my best to the

collective life of humanity. Very good, then; settled. It was decided that I

should stay indefinitely, so I wrote to England, parted with my share of the

business on reasonable terms, and in December, 1908, at the age of twenty-five,

settled down at Adyar to my new life, which was to be more varied and eventful

than I imagined.

§2

The estate or compound at Adyar stretched for nearly a mile on the river side,

and it was about half a mile long in its greatest width, which was along the

seashore, at the farther end from the Elphinstone Bridge and the road leading to

Madras. Most of this land had been acquired since Mrs. Besant had become

President. The original compound, of the time of Colonel Olcott and Mme

Blavatsky, was about a tenth the size of what it became by the purchase of

surrounding properties in the years during which Mrs. Besant was President. She

wanted to make the headquarters into a settlement for Theosophists from all over

the world; not that they should live there permanently, except a few workers in

the estate itself, in the book department or on the staff of the magazine, but

that they should come to reside there for about two years’ devotion to study and

meditation, so as to prepare themselves for better Theosophical propaganda work

afterwards in their own countries.

There were several bungalows scattered over the estate, suitable for the

European style of living, as it is known in Madras, and other smaller buildings

– converted stables and [105] a few cottages -providing rooms for those who

wished to follow the Indian mode of life. I commented on the use of the word

bungalow for such large solid two-storied buildings as that in the Blavatsky

Gardens, with spacious rooms having ceilings fourteen or sixteen feet high, and

massive verandas supported on huge round pillars. My idea of bungalows had been

the English one; little one-storied houses, detached from one another in garden

plots. Now I was informed that the word bungalow was derived from the word

Bengal, where a new mode of suburban dwellings had become popular even among

Indians, in preference to the old system of dwelling in flats or tenements or in

town houses which, though they were entirely individual in architecture and

alignment (differing from the rows of town houses in Europe and America in this

respect) formed one solid block all along the street.

The diversification of frontage on every street is one of the pleasing features

of Indian towns. Diversification of interiors is likewise one of the charms of

Indian homes. When an Indian enters the house of a neighbour he will find

certain principles which are common to all. He will find a small veranda in

front, then an entrance hall – a little room with a raised platform or sitting

place in the portion not devoted to passage-way. Beyond that he will find an

interior courtyard with verandas on all sides and rooms opening from the

verandas. But all these will be different in arrangement and shape from his own.

I do not think anybody in India ever built a street of houses, except the

British, who have built them for the use of policemen or railway workers, and

then they have had the grace to call them “lines” – “police lines,” etc.

The houses in an Indian street have been built individually by each family, and

most of them have passed on in the same family for many generations. Where the

Indians have had reason to develop the bungalow system, as in the city of

Bangalore and some of the suburbs of Madras, they have retained their old liking

for individual design, so you will find one resembling a palace and another a

cottage standing in adjacent compounds (“plots” sounds too small) in the very

same road.

The bungalows of Adyar stand amid magnificent trees. The biggest banyan tree, in

the portion of the grounds known as Blavatsky Gardens, is regarded as the second

[106] largest in India, and possibly in the world. I have seen audiences of

three and four thousand people sitting comfortably listening to lectures in its

shade. When I first went to Adyar it was thronged with birds, and squirrels

constantly chasing one another along the horizontal branches and up and down the

pendant roots, but now the squirrels are few and the little birds almost none,

for the Theosophists brought in town-life habits – leavings which have attracted

and bred innumerable noisy crows, and cats which have reduced the population of

squirrels to a tenth of what it was.

§3

At the time of my arrival there were perhaps fifty human residents at Adyar,

more or less equally European (as all the white-skinned people are called in

India, even if they come from America, Australia or South Africa) and Indians.

Among the latter there were two from the north, different in shade of brown and

in dress from those of the south. One was a well-known – famous in India

-thinker and writer, Babu B. Bhagavan Das, a close friend of Mrs. Besant’s; the

other a young prince of a Punjab ruling house. The former wore long coat and

trousers on important occasions, the latter long coat and cotton riding breeches

extending to the ankle.

The South Indians all looked very much alike to me at first, as my eye was

struck by the main features of colour and form until it became used to those and

could attend to minor differences – short of stature, stocky of build, and

dressed mostly in a pair of white cloths with coloured borders, the upper cloth

cast over the shoulders like a shawl, often leaving hairy chest and prominent

abdomen exposed to view, the lower cloth twisted round the waist and pendant to

the ankles.

I soon committed two solecisms in the matter of dress; the first, when I went

out in the garden in a tennis shirt and grey flannel trousers; and Mrs. Besant

told me it shocked the Indians to see the lower part of the trunk not loosely

draped; the second when I took to Indian dress and failed at first to drape the

lower cloth sufficiently over the ankles! There was no eight-inch skirt-line for

men. Two inches was quite a maximum, unless you were willing to be mistaken for

a workman! All the same, the European [107] ladies at Adyar were still wearing

blouses and skirts in the Gibson style, and some of the Indian ladies, when they

sat down or walked about, exposed a three-inch ring of bare waist, except where

it was crossed by a strip of the sari, which was wound round the lower part of

the body a number of times and then carried diagonally to the shoulders.

There was one European, rather tall, with cropped fair hair, and wearing a cloth

or a pair of cloths – this was difficult to distinguish – whom I saw first when

we were all walking through the gardens one evening with Mrs. Besant. I asked my

neighbour whether it was a man or a woman – a question which was material for a

ripple of whispered amusement among the Europeans for some time, though I think

it did not embarrass the lady it chiefly concerned, who was intent upon her own

thoughts. She had been one of Mrs. Besant’s helpers many years before in the

working girls’ club in London.

I was received among the residents not as an unknown Theosophist, but as a

lecturer and a bit of a celebrity in my own country, and President of one of the

biggest Lodges in the world. I had already written two booklets which were much

in use, and some copies of which had found their way abroad. Mrs. Besant had

also spoken of me as “very promising.” So on the very first Sunday morning at

Adyar I was requested to give a lecture, which I did, on mental training and

meditation. Besides the residents of Adyar there were a good number of people

from Madras, so the hall was comfortably filled.

After the lecture a stout young Brahmin with thick spectacles got up and asked

some question about memory, which led me to tell a story I had heard about a

young man who went to work in a Custom office. One day the head of the office

gave him a booklet showing the rates for all kinds of articles, and asked him to

familiarize himself with it. The young man – an extremist evidently – did not

turn up at the office for several days, and when he returned the boss wanted to

know why he had been absent.

“I have been learning the code,” replied the clerk, much hurt at being

misunderstood. He had taken the trouble to learn the whole pamphlet and could

repeat it by heart. But when it came to the application of his knowledge to

practical things he was all at sea.

“The young man’s name was Subrahmanyam,” I [108] concluded, showing off my

knowledge of an Indian name. To my surprise the audience dissolved into fits of

laughter. Was my pronunciation so very funny? No, it merely happened that

Subrahmanyam was the name of the questioner, and he was well known as a

talkative, theoretical and not practical young man.

§4

There were plenty of occasions for personal contact with Mrs. Besant. On the

morning of my arrival she looked in at my room to ask if it were comfortable,

and not content with my answer, to inspect it for herself, make some inaudible

irritable remark – could she be irritable? Apparently so – hurry out of the room

and reappear in a few moments carrying a cane chair nearly as big as herself.

A day or two later she suddenly startled me, standing at my side and watching me

make notes for a review she had asked me to make of Babu Bhavagan Das’s new

edition of The Science of the Emotions – a work of his which I valued highly.

I also went with her and several others to visit different Panchama schools,

which had been founded by Colonel Olcott to provide free education for the

poorest of the poor – once known as Pariahs, then as Panchamas (fifth caste –

orthodox Hinduism admits only four castes), and now as Harijans (God’s people –

God help them!) as politeness and democracy have advanced.

Picture several irregular cottage-like buildings round an open plot of ground,

and three or four hundred tiny children, some of them clad in space (to use an

Indian expression), some in a brass fig leaf on a piece of string, some with a

shirt reaching to their middles and nothing below, some with a skirt below the

middle and nothing above, some – the biggest – with both shirt and skirt or

shirt and little pants.

It would be a special occasion when Mrs. Besant visited the school, and all

would gather under the shade of a big tree or temporary palm-leaf shed. There

would be an opening song or prayer by the children. There would be some

collective dancing by the girls – one dance something like a maypole dance, and

another in which the girls with a short stick in either hand wove themselves

into patterns to the tune of a song and the clapping together of the sticks,

[109] as they passed and wound round one another. There would be brave

recitations and dramatic scenes by the boys. There would be speeches by the

Superintendent, the Headmaster and the visitor. There would be distribution of

sweetmeats. And there would be hurrahs and farewells and departures in horse

carriage and pony carts, and an aftermath of scattered conversation among the

visitors and wide, open-eyed and open-mouthed wonderings by the children as to

what was going to happen next or was it all going to end in just nothing at all?

Mrs. Besant had a horse named Sultan. Like the early motor-cars it had the

defect of possessing no self-starting arrangements. She would sit in the

carriage all ready to start, and several coachmen and syces would coax and pull

and push, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes before it would go. When it did

go it went like the wind, with a splendid high-stepping display. She would never

allow the whip to be used, but would sit smiling in her carriage, confident of

reaching her meeting or train in time, as she invariably did – partly, I think,

because she always used to go much earlier than was necessary to the railway

station or to any appointment.

Shortly after I reached Adyar someone presented Mrs. Besant with a motor-car – a

rare thing in India at that time. She learnt to drive it herself, and used to

take us out one by one with her for a ride in the early mornings. She seemed a

little disappointed when I told her, being overly addicted to truth, that I did

not enjoy it very much. I was interested in other things – not the road nor the

telegraph poles at the side of the road, for she was a good driver. On the

platform and in the meetings so much was talked about glorious occult matters,

it was not really my fault if I took them seriously and was impatient of

ordinary occupations and amusements.

Every evening Mrs. Besant held a meeting on a roof some forty feet square

outside the door of her own set of rooms. It was delightful under the stars and,

sometimes, the moon, the only artificial light a hurricane lamp on a teapoy at

her side. In the centre of the square a large carpet was spread and round this

was a row of chairs. The Indians and a few of the Europeans sat on the carpet

with faces turned upwards. Mrs. Besant sat on a basket chair, and the others in

a miscellany of chairs collected round the square. [110]

Some doubted whether those who sat on chairs could be as spiritual or as “highly

evolved” as those who sat cross-legged on the floor!

“Our Teacher” – a usual expression among the Hindus – used to expound a book of

her own on one day, give answers to questions on another and discuss some

subject on a third. Once only she tried the system of questioning us. It fell

very flat. She started by asking what difference the knowledge of the law of

karma should make to our conduct. No answer. A long time passed, and still no

answer, while Mrs. Besant regarded us with an uncomfortable smile. I do not

think she could see our faces as well as we could see hers. If she had she would

have seen them stamped with fear – each was afraid to make a fool of himself

before the others, and most of all before the Teacher! At last, after sizzling

for a while, I blurted out: “None whatever.” The tension was relieved. Mrs.

Besant’s face broke into a real smile. “Quite right,” said she. “Presumably you

will all do the right for its own sake and not to gain reward or escape

punishment in future lives.”

Mrs. Besant was very downright in those days. Once, when some member was

injured, she told us that it would not be right to wish that she might get

better quickly, for who was to say what was the blessed lesson that the

experience was bringing her? Ours only to send thoughts of sympathy, not to

indulge in ignorant wishes. (Strange how she changed later on, and approved of

ceremonials involving prayers for aid, intercession and mediation.) In her own

person she seemed to object even to sympathy, though she was lavish of it to

others. One morning when I went to her room I found tears streaming down her

face and a newspaper in her hand. She could not speak, but handed me the paper,

and pointed to a paragraph about a mining disaster in Wales.

I was with her once at Mayavaram, a city approaching two hundred miles south of

Madras. We had been to a theosophical gathering in a large high-school, and had

been given rooms for personal use in the upper story of the building. The

meetings being over, and our train soon due, we came out of our rooms and

proceeded down some rough stone outside-steps which led to the garden below. In

the dark, she slipped on one of those steep irregular steps and fell, bumping on

her back, down about six of them to the [111] ground below. I hastened after her

to assist her to rise, but my expressions of sympathy met with a curt response.

She let no one else know of the incident, but went to the train, and had a bad

night’s journey with headache and pains, as she told me when we reached Madras

the next morning.

§5

Sometimes Mrs. Besant could be very rough, uncompromisingly so, when she thought

we were failing in some duty, but generally she was very gracious, quite in the

Victorian manner.

Early in the year 1909 some South Indian Lodges had decided to hold a general

gathering in a town in the Tanjore district. The secretaries called upon me,

asked me to be present and to deliver one or two lectures. I went to Mrs. Besant

to see if I could be spared at that time.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “I have promised to go and preside for them. They cannot

expect two of us “– two of us! -” at the same time.” Then, after a moment’s

thought: “I will tell you what we will do. You go and preside on the first day

and I will come on the second” – and it was arranged accordingly. She wanted to

give me a chance to show what I could do.

It was further arranged that I should make a tour of seven towns ending at the

place of the general gathering. I was immensely impressed by the brilliance of

her public lectures at the gathering. I think that in Europe and America, where

she was by many regarded as the foremost orator of the day, in days when oratory

was not in disfavour as it is to-day, she never rose to such heights and powers

of moral appeal as she did in India. Yet, with all that eloquence, she had no

small talk. I remember an occasion when we were together with some

non-theosophists (amusing, but familiar expression); notwithstanding my lack of

savoir-faire I had to come to her rescue in conversation. In that she was quite

the opposite of Mme Blavatsky, who had been a brilliant conversationalist at a

time when conversation was a great art, but no public speaker at all. [112]

 



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER III

WONDERS

§1

TRAVELLING with sympathy for Hinduism and with vegetarian and teetotal habits,

and a spiritual or at least a philosophic purpose, and staying in Indian houses,

I soon had an opportunity of knowing India as no tourist or merchant or official

or schoolmaster or even missionary ever can. My first stop was for two days at

Madura. My new friends met me in force at the station, flooding the platform as

the train came in, and heaped me about with garlands of flowers and coloured

metallic paper and filled my hands with limes, while they introduced the

celebrities among them. Apparently official position constituted social rank

also: “Mr. So-and-so, our Sub-Judge; Mr. So-and-so, our Tahsildar (a revenue

officer and magistrate); Mr. So-and-so, Headmaster of our high-school; Mr.

So-and-so, Vakil (advocate)” – and so on.

They carried me off to a simple lodging. One corner of a lecture hall was

screened off as a room for me. Two benches were put side by side to act as

sleeping couch. I had already learnt to sleep hard. The common type of bed at

Adyar was a cot frame with webbing drawn tightly across it as warp and woof, but

I had taken to the wooden benches provided in the Indian quarters. It happened

that Mrs. Besant spoke to us one evening about the way in which she had learnt

to sleep on a bench, so that she could do so when necessary, though she usually

slept on a webbed bed. That night found me sleeping, or rather lying awake, on

an old dining-table which happened to be standing on a veranda at Blavatsky

Gardens. The second night, however, I slept soundly. I have always been able to

sleep comfortably on a bench since then. The secret of this art is relaxation,

for [113] that allows a maximum of contact with the surface of the board. It was

said that one could sleep better on a board than on the softest bed, because

relaxation was there compulsory. I attained this by imagining that my body was

loose and could collapse like that of a cat, and at the same time that I was

sinking into the board.

This trifling accomplishment greatly increased my prestige, and caused my words

to be received with an amount of consideration and credibility which they

otherwise would not have attained. The Hindu is essentially a pragmatist; he

will judge a man’s philosophy by seeing his life. Contrary to popular idealistic

fancy, I am convinced that this is the most utilitarian race in the world. They

will not move a finger to do anything that is not absolutely necessary to

achieve a precise result. Even the religious ceremonials are each based upon a

clearly stated quid pro quo. The people have little sympathy with play. Either

work or be still – and both these they can do marvellously well. Talking too,

but always talking with a purpose in view. They are not conversationalists. They

credit the Englishman with similar practicality. When he enters a village or a

town, the whisper goes round: “What has he come to get?”

By judicious placing of screens and matting, a bathroom had been fixed up for me

in the courtyard, which was a pretty little enclosure with some flower-beds and

a well in the centre, fitted with a pulley wheel and surrounded by a paved

platform from which the water ran off to the flowerbeds. I discarded the

bathroom and took my bath at the well in old Indian style. Naked but for a loin

cloth I stood at the side of the well, drew up pots of water and poured them

over myself, soaping and rubbing between. This was a luxury I had learnt at

Adyar, in the Indian quarters, where I had developed a friendship with the young

Brahmin Subrahmanyam Aiyar, already mentioned. We used to draw water for each

other in turn. One sat cross-legged near the parapet wall of the well, while the

other drew large pots of water and poured them mercilessly over the head of his

friend, who gasped for air as the flood burst upon him from time to time.

The water was never cold in Madras, and as it came direct from the well the

touch of it had a richness and fullness like velvet – a feel which cannot be

described. The [114] same water left to stand for a while in any vessel, and

then used, as in European bathrooms, felt harsh and hard. My friend Subrahmanyam

was deservedly proud of his physical strength. He would insist on my having the

“fifty-pot bath,” the “seventy-five pot bath,” and even sometimes the “one

hundred-pot bath,” while I used to give him about twenty-five pots. A pot would

equal an ordinary bucket of water. When the bath was over we would towel

ourselves vigorously in the sun, and at the proper moment would slip off the

loin cloth and substitute a towel therefor, the same to be replaced by the lower

cloth or dhoti in its turn. Orthodox Hindus do not bathe naked, even in a

private bathroom.

With all my sympathy for Hinduism, I never liked the system of worship – the

shrines, the temples, the ceremonies. Of course, there is no idol worship, but

there are thousands of statues and symbols, and there is some belief in material

agencies for approach to Ishwara (God – literally, the ruler) or His agents,

such as one finds still among ritualistic sects in the West. In Madura there is

a gigantic temple covering acres of ground. Several times I wandered in the

twilight of its vast stone corridors and chambers, and lingered to admire its

innumerable statues and legendary figures, or the four great gateways with

pagodas rising hundreds of feet into the air, and covered with symbolic and

legendary figures. It was here that I first learnt the peculiarity of Indian art

– that its main intention is to suggest. A statue is beautiful to a Hindu for

what it suggests to his mind, not what it displays to his eye.

I will not trouble my reader with a description of my dwelling-places in other

towns, or of the other massive temples which abound in South India. I was not

interested in them myself. To discuss philosophic questions with small groups of

people who would call at my quarters, or to expound my views before large

audiences seated upon mats, was more to my taste. Instinctively I held to the

adage that the proper study of mankind is man. But man is very unsatisfactory as

he is and the idea therefore was to find in man something superior to the

ordinary, for which India has always had a great reputation, and to discover the

steps by which those superior elements might be developed and increased. [115]

 

§2

There are various wandering conjurers in India, who generally gravitate to

places where great gatherings and festivals are being held, but there are also

men of extraordinary powers who hide their lights completely under the bushels

of simple religiosity and even pretence of madness, and are prepared to open

their hearts only to very sympathetic souls.

It fell to my lot to be introduced from time to time to men of this latter kind,

when it became known that my mode of life and aspirations were so close to their

own.

It was in Trichinopoly that I first met a man with remarkable powers of mind.

The invitation came from him, he having heard of me through my lectures. One

morning two Hindu acquaintances asked me if I would go with them to see this

gentleman, so we took our way in a pony cart to the foot of the “Trichy Rock” –

really a rock mountain, precipitous on one side but sloping on the opposite –

and then on foot along a passage leading between small houses up the sloping

side. Some distance up, we were guided into the interior of a little house,

where I was introduced to an elderly man, well educated, speaking English, who

offered to show me some interesting things and to tell me how they were done. He

wanted, and received, no money, nor anything else.

I think the most interesting of his experiments was one which he did with a pack

of cards. First he handed the pack to me for examination. They appeared to be

quite ordinary. Then he wrote something on a small piece of paper, folded it up,

gave it to me and asked me to place it in my pocket.

“Now,” said he, “shuffle the cards as much as you like, spread them face

downwards in front of you, and pick up anyone.”

I was sitting on a kind of platform with my two friends, they being on my right,

forming a row. The Shastri was sitting down below in a chair, directly in front

of me, at three or four arms’ length. I shuffled the cards and spread them over

a large portion of the platform in front of me with their faces downwards,

allowed my hand to hover above them, moving about, then suddenly dropped the

hand casually and picked up a card.

“Now take the paper out of your pocket and look at it.” [116]

There on the paper was written the name of the very card that I had picked up.

Next, I gathered the cards together, passed them on to my friends who reshuffled

them, spread them out, and had the same experience with regard to pieces of

paper which had been given to them.

I then thought I would like to try a little experiment of my own, so I requested

my host to give me a new paper. We went through the same procedure, but this

time, as I was allowing my hand to drop among the cards, I fixed my thought upon

him and said mentally: “Now, whatever card you have chosen, I will not have that

card.”

I took out the paper and found that the name of the card written upon it did not

agree with that which I had picked up. When I showed this to the Shastri he was

much surprised; but when I told him how I had willed not to have the card of his

choice he smiled with amusement, and said that that explained everything,

because his method was to concentrate on a card and transmit the thought of it

to my subconscious mind, which could know where the required card lay and could

direct my hand to it. My two friends then decided that they would try the same

experiment. He gave them new papers, but in each case – not being taken unawares

– he compelled them to take the cards which he had written down.

It will be in place here to relate a curious sequel to these experiments, which

occurred about ten years later when I was sitting one evening with one of the

Professors of the college where I was Principal at Hyderabad in Sind. This

professor was entertaining me and my wife with some conjuring tricks with cards

which he had somehow picked up while a student at Oxford University, where he

had taken a brilliant degree. While this was going on, I suddenly heard a voice

speaking strongly and clearly, as though in the middle of my head. It spoke only

six words: “Five of clubs. Try that experiment.”

At once I wrote “five of clubs” on a piece of paper, folded it up, and gave it

to the professor. Then I asked him to shuffle his cards, spread them out face

downwards before him and pick one up. This having been done, I told him to take

out his paper and look at it. His astonishment was great. I believe he thinks to

this day that I played a very clever trick on him. But my own belief is that the

Shastri [117] whom I had seen in Trichinopoly had somehow become aware of what

we were doing, and had performed the whole experiment somehow, after speaking

telepathically to me. There were other psychological possibilities, of course,

but considering all that I have seen done by such people, I think that the most

probable explanation.

The same gentleman showed me the power that he had over his own bodily

functions. He asked me to put my ear to his bare chest and listen to the beating

of his heart. He would, he said, stop it at my bidding, and keep it in suspense

until I told him to start it again. This he did with perfect success. As soon as

I said “Stop,” the heart stopped, and when a few seconds later I said “Start,”

it went on again. I took care not to keep it long in suspension, as I was rather

afraid of the possible consequences!

He then showed me his control of the flow of blood. He took a nail and stood it

upright above his knee, a little to the inside of the centre line of the thigh.

Holding it with one hand he hammered it down to the head with the other. He was

a fat man, so there was plenty of room. Then he pulled out the nail, leaving a

small wound, and said: “Tell me when you want the blood to flow, and to stop.”

Several times I said: “Flow” and “Stop,” and it obeyed my words. Afterwards he

wiped the place and said: “Now I will show you the healing of the flesh.”

He slowly passed the ball of his thumb over the spot with a little pressure, and

when it had passed the skin was perfectly normal and there was no sign of the

wound.

It might be suggested that the old gentleman used some form of hypnotism in

connection with his exhibition, but that would be inconsistent with his friendly

desire to talk about the various items, and with my having tried a little trick

of my own and taken him by surprise.

§3

It was on the same tour, but in the town of Mannargudi, that I was taken to see

an astrologer who certainly knew a thing or two. In that town I was accommodated

in the public travellers’ bungalow, a spacious building a little distant from

the town. About midnight I was awakened by a knocking on the door. I got out of

bed, turned up the lamp, opened the door, and observed with some trepidation

[118] a group of men standing in the darkness, dimly lit by a hand lantern. They

proved to be quite harmless, in fact, benevolent. They were students of the

local college, who had been to my lecture and had taken a fancy to me.

“There is a certain astrologer,” they informed me, “who would like to meet you

and make your horoscope. Will you please us by coming to his cottage?”

I went with them through the dark night, with the aid of the lantern. We came at

last into a little whitewashed room, and found a bearded man with grey hair

sitting on the floor, with a palm-leaf manuscript beside him. After salutation,

we all sat on the floor in a group, quite near to him.

I had no prepossession in favour of astrology. The lady who had given such

accurate tests of telepathy in my home town used to practise the art. She had

made horoscopes of most of her friends, which gave very accurate diagnoses,

within the limitations of a certain vagueness which seems to pervade most

astrology and to prevent any very definite proof of its general accuracy.

Moreover, a leading London astrologer had given to the President’s wife (my

future mother-in-law, as before mentioned) three several dates for the probable

death of her husband, which had occasioned her considerable anxiety each time,

but proved inaccurate.

The astrologer whom I now met did not know English, but one of the students

acted as interpreter. Would I tell him my place of birth? Yes – Manchester,

England. Date and time? I understood that I had begun to appear about ten

minutes past twelve Greenwich time in the early morning of August 18th, 1883.

That would be about midnight according to the sun, would it not? I supposed so.

The astrologer looked at his palm-leaf manuscript and fixed his time, then drew

a diagram of twelve “houses” in the form of a square. Translating into English –

the Sun was in Leo, in conjunction with Venus, in opposition to the Moon in

Aquarius; Cancer was the rising sign; Jupiter was the rising planet, and so on.

Then he began to interpret the meaning of these relationships, with the aid of

his palm-leaf manuscript, and I kept notes of what he said.

“You have money,” said he, and he named the amount which I possessed in England

after the selling of my business!

“But, sir,” exclaimed one of the young men, [119] reproachfully, “we thought you

were a sannyasi” – a penniless, wandering preacher, who has renounced all

possessions.

I explained that I was a Theosophist, paying my own way at Adyar, but taking no

money for writing or lecturing. There were some professional Theosophists, who

made a living, and quite a fortune out of it, but I was not one of them. I

thought it was best to retain my small capital, live on the proceeds and do what

I could without being a burden on those whom I was trying to help.

They were pacified, and the astrologer proceeded: “You will marry at about the

age of thirty-two.”

I thought it unlikely that I would marry, but I did so, seven years later, at

the age of thirty-two.

“The lady will be of a smiling disposition, and she will have a small mole in

the middle of her neck.”

Yes, the smile was all right; people have sometimes asked me if my wife’s

portrait represents a “movie star.” It looks like that – or a tooth-paste

advertisement. She has acted on the screen, as I also, but only once, in a film

bearing the dreadful title, The Devil and the Damsel. She was not the damsel nor

I the devil. I was a perfectly respectable judge on the bench, and she a

hospital nurse. The devil was DRINK; the damsel a stoutish young lady – very

charming, however – whose husband, a veritable hero otherwise, had been caught

by the devil, but was of course ultimately saved by the sweetness of a little

child.

As to the mole, I found it some years after marriage, when my wife one day

succumbed to the new fashion, a little belatedly, and cut short her hair. It

revealed itself exactly in the middle on the back of the neck.

The astrologer gave me five or six other items of information about my future

wife, all of which turned out correct, except one, her age. He went on:

“You have two brothers.” Correct.

“One is younger, the other older.” Correct.

“Both are still unmarried.” Correct.

A description of the brothers and their future wives followed – accurate enough,

but I abstain from publication!

“You will have five children, three boys and two girls.”

Wrong. We have had no children. A curious incident was that some time before our

marriage, and while my future wife was engaged to someone else, a wandering

conjurer – who had turned rupees into scorpions in her hand and [120] performed

other alarming and impoverishing feats – told her that she would not marry the

man to whom she was then engaged, but would marry a small man and have five

children.

I think, however, that I can explain this lapse. There was a highly respectable

friend of mine, Mr. Sitarama Shastri by name, who at the time of our marriage

told us that it was considered the height of spirituality among Brahmins for

husband and wife to abstain from actual marital connection for seven years. My

wife had already told me that she did not wish to have any children for several

years after marriage, as she was so young. So we decided on this seven-year plan

– or absence of plan. Unluckily, when the seven years were over, nothing

happened. I went to a doctor and he told me that he thought there must be some

atrophy in my case, on account of disuse until nearly the age of forty.

“You will write many books.” I have since written about fifteen of them, and

here is another.

“You will become well known in many countries.” To some extent. I have

undertaken lecturing tours in about forty different countries in almost every

part of the world, and some of my books have been translated and published in

several languages. One of them is computed to have circulated to the extent of

about a quarter of a million.

“Karma will bring you no bad disease.” A trifle ambiguous. Though I have had

dangerous illnesses, they can be traced to immediate causes.

“You will not tell lies.” There is some hope for me then as an autobiographer!

“This will be your last life on earth; you will not need to reincarnate any

more.” Let us wait and see.

“You will return to England in a year and a half.”

This did not come about, though it nearly did, as I shall relate in due course.

It will be seen that most of the predictions were fairly sound. As I write I

have before me the horoscope and the written notes that I made in the little

cottage while the astrologer spoke and his words were being interpreted to me.

[121]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER IV

FEATS

§1

IN contrast with these high accomplishments of the Hindus I had some very humble

and elementary ones to attain myself. It was in the small town of Tiruvallur

that I essayed my first pair of sandals – not the kind specially made for

Europeans, with a criss-cross of leather enclosing the toes, and a strap round

the back of the heel, but real ordinary Indian sandals, with a band across the

instep, a strap between the big toe and the second toe, and nothing at all but

the sole at the heel.

By some peculiar fate I started to wear these in that particular town, which has

the sandiest streets that I have seen in any town or village of perhaps three

hundred which I have visited in India. As it happens that sandals are the

footwear most unsuitable for walking in sand – why on earth are they called

sandals? – I made a most amusing exhibition of myself. When I put my foot

forward with any degree of confidence, the sandal, like John Gilpin of immortal

memory, could not stop in the proper place, but would continue on its way and

end up two or three feet beyond the place where my foot would touch the ground.

My friends roared with laughter and the public joined in, as I pursued my

languid, though by no means elegant way. I persevered – as I have never objected

to adding to the gaiety of others; and also I think it increased the audience at

my lectures – until at last my toes had learnt to work. It was their business,

as the foot lifted from the ground, to press downwards and a little together, so

as to grip the sandal until it reached the ground again. Afterwards, I never had

trouble with sandals, and I can recommend them to all who wish to have strong

and shapely feet! [122]

Another accomplishment was the twisting of the dhoti or lower cloth about the

waist so that it will not fall off. The Hindus use no belt or pin for this.

After draping the cloth behind and crossing it in front, you hold it with each

hand at its own side of the body, give it a little twist at those two points

with the finger and thumb, and there you are, at least until you begin to walk,

and then you wish you weren’t, like the celebrated conductor of an orchestra

whose buttons came off in the middle of a piece. No one seemed able to say how

the dhoti holds up, but after a little time you have the knack and all is well.

Still another accomplishment was that of eating by hand. This proved to be less

difficult than it looked, even with semi-liquid foods. As a result of my own

experience my advice is that one should not try it at a table, for then you must

carry the food through an angle of perhaps forty degrees with the surface of the

table. But if you sit cross-legged on the floor, you lean forward a little as

you raise the food to the mouth, and as you now have an angle of seventy degrees

or more you are less liable to drop the food by the way.

The speed of movement of the arm also bears upon this science – there must be a

certain momentum to carry the food from the fingers into the mouth – for it is

bad form to put the fingers in the mouth or even, in some parts, to touch the

lips at all. If the speed is too little the food will slide down your chin, if

too great there is danger that you may choke, if indeed you do not receive it in

the eye, instead of the orifice which nature intended.

My friends were tolerant of spoons; they would provide them, if necessary, for

the ignorant and unskilled; but still, how could the European continue that

dirty habit? The same spoon had been in many people’s mouths, and everyone knew

that you could not wash metal perfectly clean. The spoon had also been in one’s

own mouth in the previous mouthful, and had therefore gone away unclean. But

hands were washed before you ate and skin was very easily cleaned – could one

not see that bare feet were far easier to keep clean than feet which wore shoes?

– and besides you had your own magnetism, not someone else’s. In drinking, too,

it was cleanest to pour from the cup into the mouth without touching the lips

with the cup, though it might be admitted to be somewhat less artistic. This

[123] last feat I never learned, though I might have done so if I had practised

in private. Instead, I carried my own tumbler and washed it myself when I washed

out my mouth, as was the custom, before and after each meal.

In most of the houses I ate by myself, generally with an audience, ostensibly to

attend to my needs. But some of my hosts and friends, defying convention and

caste rules, would sit along with me, saving the situation by sitting at right

angles to me, not in the same line or row, except in recent years, as caste

rigidities have decayed. The orthodox ladies would never sit with us. That would

have been a terrible disgrace. They held it their duty to see that the food was

properly cooked and properly served, and the greatest honour to the guest was to

serve it themselves.

First a large plantain leaf would be placed before one. Then would come dish

after dish, little heaps, ladled direct from the cooking pots, placed along the

far edge of the leaf. Then two small bowls of brass or stitched leaf would be

put alongside, and filled with water and soup (generally mulligatawny –

literally “pepper water”), and perhaps another containing buttermilk, or sweet

milk with raisins, nuts and spices cooked in it. Then would come a large heap of

rice in the centre and on that a thick soupy mixture of vegetables and grains.

From time to time you take portions from the little heaps, mix them with the

rice, according to taste, give a little circular motion to form a loose ball,

and then with the proper motion, as explained before, convey the bolus to the

mouth.

When several are dining together none must rise until all are finished; it is

very bad form to “break the row;” then all rise together and troop off to the

veranda, where water is placed at the edge for washing the hands, rinsing the

mouth and pouring over the feet. Hands must never be dipped into the

washing-bowls. The water must be poured over the hands. In bathing, too, one

must never sit in the bath. If you do you are getting your own dirt back against

the skin again and again. One must take up the dipper, dip it into the tub of

water, and pour it over oneself again and again, allowing the water to run away,

unless one bathes at the well and pours directly from the pot attached to the

rope. [124]

§2

When I returned to Adyar I took up my residence in the Indian quarters. These

were converted stables, with the addition of a few new rooms, the whole forming

a quadrangle with a large well in the centre, which for a long time was

delightful for bathing, until the water, much neglected by the management,

became dark in colour and unpleasant in odour on account of the fine rootlets of

trees coming through the brickwork and growing into large tufts inside the well.

The only drawback to life in the quadrangle was that the Hindus would read aloud

very early in the mornings. That gave no trouble to themselves, for they have

wonderful powers of concentration or selective attention, due perhaps partly to

lack of privacy from earliest childhood, and partly to the method of teaching in

many elementary schools, where a large number of children in one room or veranda

read and repeat aloud their individual lessons, while the schoolmaster sits in

the midst listening to them all and picking out and correcting any mistakes

which he may hear.

Besides, there was no harm in early waking, as it was our habit to go to the

shrine room at headquarters for an hour’s meditation at five or six o’clock in

the morning. In this Mrs. Besant used to join. Some of us would also make use of

the room for an hour or a half-hour during the day. We used to sit on the floor,

or on little mats or cushions. I was proud because Mrs. Besant lent me her

antelope skin. Among Hindu devotees it is considered best to use an antelope

skin of a dark colour, or as explained in that most popular of Hindu religious

books, the Bhagavad Gita, straw on the ground, and on that a cloth, and on that

a skin.

Mrs. Besant had ideas of a very monastic life in those days, but these were

brought to an end by the introduction of electric light, which tempted people to

sit up at night and even to have supper parties, and gradually put an end to

most of the early morning meditation.

For the Indians food was cooked in the back quarters of a little old cottage,

the two rooms of which were set aside for Brahmin and non-Brahmin caste

dining-rooms. It was not until 1913, when Mrs. Besant took up political work in

India, that she turned against the caste system and told us that it [125] must

be brought to an end. Before that she spoke and wrote strongly of its essential

excellence, and in favour of attempts to rid it of excesses and abuses so as to

make it again what it was reputed to have been in very ancient times. There was

no objection to hereditary occupations, because, in accordance with the theory

of reincarnation, one would be born into the circumstances or the caste suited

to one’s needs. Abnormal cases could be adjusted.

Mrs. Besant was in favour of strictness among the Hindus in pursuit of their

ancient customs, except the early marriage of children, the ban on widow

remarriage, and the habit of men of forty marrying girls in their teens. When

the father of my friend Subrahmanyam Aiyar died, and the young man, being very

modern in his views, and much opposed to the priest-craft which prevails in

connection with ceremonials, which anyhow he regarded as superstition, declined

to perform the orthodox ceremonies supposed to assist his father’s soul in the

beyond, she gave him the alternative of performing them or leaving Adyar, for

she said his neglect of them would bring the Society into disrepute among the

orthodox, especially as his father had been a well-known man in a good position.

I sympathized with Subrahmanyam.

There was no general dining-room attached to the Hindu kitchen, so Mrs. Besant

allowed me the use of her private dining-room – for she ate the food from the

Indian kitchen – which she had built near by, until some jealous person reported

to her that I was inviting stray dogs in to eat the leavings, which she believed

– what is a king to do when spies hand in their reports? – notwithstanding my

protest that it was not so, and further, that even if she believed it had been

so she could rely upon it not occurring in the future. It was my first

experience of a sharp temper which sometimes appeared. After that I used to sit

and eat on the outer veranda of the cook-house itself.

“But what did you eat in the European dining-room before you changed over,” some

voice seems to ask. Oh, stewed guavas. I admit there were other things preceding

it at the meals, but somehow stewed guavas constantly dominated the spread.

Guavas are cheap beyond compare in Madras. You see, the butler was paid a fixed

price of ten shillings a week per head for feeding us, and he was expected to do

it as well as he could. So there were soup, boiled rice and curry, some

vegetables, cutlets, bread with white [126] buffalo butter on the side, and

stewed guavas. Yes, and bananas. I did not mind bananas if they were fully ripe;

otherwise they proved themselves – as some of the members used to say with

brutal frankness – nothing but wind and water.

I took up my literary duties seriously. It was the time of the beginning of many

new activities. One member, Mr. Sitarama Shastri, had started a little press in

a closed-in veranda of a store-room. That grew into the large Vazanta Press,

which afterwards printed the Theosophist magazine (theretofore printed in Madras

city) and a great variety of books, supplying the theosophical market all over

the world.

A little book of mine, entitled A Guide of Theosophy, was the first published

book to be printed on the Vazanta Press. Mrs. Besant liked it much and put it

into her advertised list of “books recommended for study.” That was followed by

my “Tanjore Lectures” – a selection from the lectures given during my tour in

the South. Mrs. Besant herself reviewed this little book and said it ought to be

on the shelves (I supposed she meant in the hands) of all Theosophists, as she

said it contained interesting elements of original thought. I was the first to

point out, I think, that karma could not be taken as punishment for our sins,

but it must be a scheme for presenting at each moment the very best

opportunities to each individual. Even yet that idea has penetrated the

intelligence of comparatively few Theosophists. Others still go on speaking and

writing of “bad karma” as something that can retard a man on the upward way

until he had “paid his debts.” In later years I followed it up with a statement

that there could be no material casuality, nothing material to connect my

striking a man two thousand years ago and somebody else’s striking me to-day,

but that the casual connection must be in our own will – in the depth of my

nature I choose to “pay the debts” of yesterday, because the experience of what

I willingly do to others is the greatest need of my own nature, with a view to

my realization of the unity of life.

While I was on tour someone had said in a meeting that one of the old Indian

books, the Garuda Purana, dealing with death ceremonies, conditions of life

after death and the means to liberation, was similar to the teaching of Mrs.

Besant on the subject. I therefore took up the translation [127] of that book as

an additional literary work, with the aid of Mr. Subrahmanyam Aiyar, who had the

capacity of a walking dictionary. Afterwards I carried the manuscript on tour

through many towns of North India, discussed with many pundits in different

towns the possible meanings of obscure passages, and finally completed it and

prepared it for the press, when it was published in The Sacred Books of the

Hindus Series in Allahabad.

§3

In 1909 two people came to live at Adyar who were destined to play a large part

in my life. These were Mr. C. W. Leadbeater and J. Krishnamurti – the latter

then a schoolboy.

For many years Mr. Leadbeater had been established in the minds of most

Theosophists as the principal psychic investigator of the day. True, Mrs. Besant

was credited with psychic powers, but she had not written extensively, as he

had, about personal experiences of the astral and mental planes, of the modes of

life of the dead, and of the auras and the thought-forms of men.

His presence at Adyar was a great relief to Mrs. Besant, who had borne the whole

burden of the daily meetings until he arrived. He now sat beside her and shared

the work to some extent, and took the meetings himself in her absence on tour.

In the early summer of 1909, Mrs. Besant having gone to lecture in England and

America, I took the opportunity to make another lecture tour, through Poona,

Bombay and many towns to the north of Bombay. In Poona I spoke in a large

theatre, with Mr. G. K. Gokhale, the famous politician and social worker, in the

chair. After the lecture, questions were invited. It then appeared that a large

number of people had come to the meeting for an opportunity to question and

heckle the chairman, not to hear the lecture. Up jumped several of these,

followers of Mr. B. G. Tilak who were bitterly against Mr. Gokhale, and began to

speak against him. Others got up and protested, and the meeting was soon out of

hand. As the ferment increased, Mr. Gokhale caught me by the arm and we made a

precipitous exit by a little door at the back of the theatre, and so removed the

chief cause of the excitement. I continued [128] my tour to Bombay and other

towns, and on into the promontory of Kathiawar.

It was in Kathiawar that I first saw something of life in the States ruled by

Indian Princes, which retain old-fashioned manners and customs much more than

British India. In four different States I was the guest of the Raja.

It happened at Morvi that I fell in with one of the Indian “memory men,” or

ashtavadanis. This title is a very modest one. It implies memory of eight

(ashta) things, but generally the performers show the memory of fifty or a

hundred things. I was invited to the exhibition. We sat in a large hall in the

palace. The memory man – Mr. Nathuram P. Shukla – took his place on the carpet.

Immediately in front of him sat twenty selected people, while the rest formed

the audience. He attended to each one of the twenty people five times, that is,

going along the line five times. Several of them gave him sentences composed of

five words, each person using a different language, and these words were given

out of their order in the sentences, such as “My third word is ‘field’.” One man

gave him moves in a game of chess. Two others gave him figures to be multiplied

together. Another carried on an intricate conversation. Still another struck a

bell a number of times on each round. After all the items had been given, Mr.

Shukla sat in meditation for five or ten minutes, then answered questions

relating to the items, and finally repeated the whole.

It was here that I had a sample of real old-world politeness. After the

exhibition was over I was talking with one of the Raja’s ministers, and I

expressed admiration for the hall. He told me that it was about thirty feet

high. I happened to say that it had appeared to me about forty feet. Then he

said: “Oh, yes, it is forty feet.” I was quite sure afterwards that it was only

thirty!

While in the train I was surprised at one of the wayside stations with a visit

from a gentleman who brought a message from the Maharaja of Limbdi, who had his

special carriage attached to that train. The Maharaja expressed a desire to see

me. I went over to his carriage, where he received me with formal and yet

intimate politeness. He wanted me to come over for a while to his State and give

two or three lectures. I did so, was most kindly received [129] and ultimately

presented with two big red embroidered shawls, such as are given to pundits on

special occasions. As I wanted no possessions I posted these off to my mother in

England, which was just as well, for during my next tour my room at Adyar was

burgled stark naked.

It was in the guest house at Limbdi that I again met Mr. Shukla. We spent a good

deal of time together and experimented a little with thought-transference, in

which we had a fair measure of success, apparently due largely to sympathy of

temperament. He was good enough to explain to me some of the methods of memory

culture in vogue in his profession.

I had already taken great interest in this subject. I now obtained from Europe

all the books I could about it and was fortunate enough to secure a variety of

them, one of them as much as a hundred and fifty years old, some of them giving

very full information about the systems in vogue in earlier centuries in Europe,

when it had been a popular subject amongst the monks. These, and a considerable

amount of personal practice, enabled me to perform the ashtavadana feat

occasionally for the entertainment of friends and in public – the latter very

rarely – as I shrank from display and did not want to become an entertainer of

any kind, only a very serious philosopher and preacher! The last time I

performed the feat, with fifty things at once, was at the Jubilee Convention of

the Theosophical Society in Madras in 1925. Since then I have refused all

requests to make any of these exhibitions as I consider them dangerous to brains

more than about fifty years old. All these things, however, enabled me to

produce a system of memory training which still appears to me to be the best

extant, superior to many expensive and well-known courses. [130]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER V

A EUROPEAN YOGI

§1

On my way back from Kathiawar I broke my journey for a few days at Surat. What

was my surprise on receiving there a letter from Mr. Leadbeater, enclosing a

cable from Mrs. Besant: “Please stop Wood’s proceedings may cause serious

trouble in work.” Mr. Leadbeater wrote very sympathetically, telling me not to

be uneasy, that he knew what was the matter and would explain everything. By the

time I reached Adyar a letter also arrived from Mrs. Besant saying that she

thought, after all, that my proper work lay in England, that many people wanted

me there, and I would do well to make arrangements to return – quite forgetting,

however, that I had given up my business and would be, to say the least,

financially strained if I attempted to live in England on my small resources.

I learned from Mr. Leadbeater that somebody at Adyar had heard about the

disturbance in the Poona theatre and had written to Mrs. Besant to the effect

that I was taking part in politics, so she hastened to stop my speaking lest the

Theosophical Society come under suspicion of being associated in any way with

political thought and activities. Mr. Leadbeater wrote to her and explained the

whole matter, so that on her return she told me that everything was quite all

right, and requested me not to trouble about it any more.

The incident threw me into very close contact with Mr. Leadbeater, whom I had

met previously only rather casually. I had called on him one morning to ask for

his opinion on some subject. When we had finished talking, it occurred to me to

offer to help him in his literary work. He was much pleased at the idea. He

opened a drawer full of [131] letters. “Could you answer these for me if I give

you the points?” We went over the letters, discussed the hundred and one

questions that they contained, and I cleared them all up in two or three weeks.

In the evening meetings I took notes of his answers to the various questions

raised in the meetings. I became his constant companion for a long time, to such

an extent that in 1913 I was in a position to write an article about him

entitled “Ten Thousand Hours with Mr. Leadbeater.”

Mr. Leadbeater lived in a small octagonal room with a little dressing-room and a

bathroom at one side and a broad veranda round the rest of it. As he sat at his

roll-top desk in the middle of the room he presented a striking figure,

notwithstanding his sixty-two years of age. He was a massive, muscular man, five

feet eleven inches in height, and some sixty inches round the chest, with arms

to match, fair hair, almost white, a straggly beard, and an abnormally great

development of forehead at the centre just above the eyes, with a sharp retreat

above that. He might have sat for a portrait of an ancient Dane.

He wore only cotton trousers and shirt, with throat and feet bare. He would go

out in the hottest sun without a hat and would enjoy it, and never experience

the slightest ill effect. Though prepared always to work from early morning till

far into the night, having his meals – such as they were (for a long time I

estimated the cost at twopence each) – on a cleared space amongst his papers, he

would nevertheless take an hour off every evening for a walk down to the shore

to bathe in the river mouth or in the sea.

He was very fond of long walks also on occasions. One night, when we were taking

a walk to deliver some proofs at the printing-office in Madras, as we went along

the five-mile marina, the famous water-front of Madras, he fell over a heap of

road metal in the darkness. He was somewhat shaken, but nevertheless completed

the twelve-mile walk almost as if nothing had happened. On another occasion we

took a walk of twenty-four miles in the mountains near Kodaikanal, a hill

station seven thousand feet high. On that occasion he did a bit too much for a

man of his age, and had to lean on my shoulder for the uphill climb of the last

two or three miles. We had been to try to find the men who, according to some

guide-books, lived in trees, but our search had been in vain. [132]

Once, when I was being carried out to sea by a treacherous current – several

swimmers have been drowned in the Bay of Bengal at Adyar – he managed to help me

in, standing on a sandbank and reaching out for my hand. Inch by inch he edged

backwards until we were out of danger. Though a powerful swimmer he could not

have overcome the current if he had lost his footing.

§2

It was during one of these bathing expeditions that Krishnamurti, soon

afterwards to become famous as the prospective vehicle for the impending return

of the Christ, burst upon our view.

It happened that a certain Brahmin widower, with four sons, retired about that

time from Government service, and offered to come and live at Adyar and give his

services in some capacity. Mrs. Besant, however, objected to having any boys

living on the compound, so it was finally arranged that he should live in a

little cottage which happened to be let just outside the estate, and should come

in daily to do some secretarial work.

There was nothing, however, to prevent the boys – seven in all, four sons and

three wards – from coming into the compound, and on the beach, as Mrs. Besant

never liked the idea of closing up the compound walls, so as to prevent our

neighbours or others from coming in and enjoying the gardens and the shade of

the trees. So ere long we had for our swimming parties quite an audience –

highly interested, these boys from the country, who had scarcely seen a white

man in their lives, and were now presented with an uncommonly full view.

Krishnamurti was one of those boys. He was tallish for his age, about thirteen,

but woefully thin, with almost every bone showing.

The boys also came to the Indian quadrangle at nights to see Mr. Subrahmanyam

Aiyar, who was a particular friend of their father’s and to obtain from that

genial young man, who was always ready to help anybody in almost any way – and

very soon from me also, as I was living in the next room – some help in

connection with the home-work set in their school. Subrahmanyam was frequently

one of our small bathing party, which included also a Dutchman, an [133] old

friend of Mr. Leadbeater’s. This Dutchman, too, was very genial and sociable, so

before long he and Subrahmanyam were inviting the boys into the water and

offering to teach them to swim. After a few days’ preliminary hesitation, our

party was regularly increased by the inclusion of the boys.

Now, it happened that I raised a question about the method of reincarnation of

Indians. Almost every Indian I had met regarded the idea of a possible future

incarnation as a European with the utmost alarm. Yet there was an idea current

among Theosophists that the ego took birth in different races in succession, so

as to obtain a variety of experiences. Mr. Leadbeater had in the past made

psychic observations with regard to the past lives of several Europeans, and had

seen them moving from America to China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and later

Europe. There was one intriguing life in which he and I and about half a dozen

others were declared to have lived in far Eskimoland and apparently spent most

of our time eating blubber! That was regarded as rather a lapse!

The question now was, do the Hindus go through exactly the same course? Mr.

Leadbeater said he would look into the past lives of some Indians, and see what

had happened in their cases. “But,” said he, “it is better not to look into the

lives of the members here. Theosophists are always abnormal anyhow! I must find

somebody else, who will agree to be examined.”

Then came up the suggestion; why not these boys? Mr. Leadbeater asked the

father’s permission, which was instantly and delightedly given. Then he began to

write a series of lives, which appeared first in the Theosophist and later in

book form under the title The Lives of Alcyone – Alcyone being a pseudonym under

which to hide the personality of Krishnamurti. The other boys figured in these

life-stories, as well as some of the Adyar residents and a few people whom Mr.

Leadbeater had met before.

Mr. Leadbeater explained that he could run his vision of the past backwards at

any speed. He thus first made a list of the last thirty appearances of

Krishnamurti, without looking into the details at all. He told me that he fixed

the dates by observation of the position of the stars and by counting the

precession of the equinoxes. He had been an enthusiastic student of astronomy.

Then, every evening, [134] after the roof meetings were over, we would retire to

his room. I would sit at his roll-top desk, writing down the dramatic incidents

of a life, as he clairvoyantly looked at them while he walked round and round

the room to keep himself awake. Thus we would go on far into the night,

sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning, until the life under review

was finished. At any moment I might interrupt him with questions or suggestions.

Mr. Leadbeater would become much absorbed while thus walking round, and more

than once he kicked his bare toe against the corner of the desk with a force

sufficient to draw blood, but without at all noticing it. So far as I could see

he had no time during the day to invent these stories; only occasionally he

would consult a book or encyclopaedia with reference to some point that he

wanted to verify.

The lives were written mostly in reverse order, but they were numbered

successively, as the list of thirty had been made in advance. The first to be

done was the twenty-ninth life, in which Krishnamurti figured as a disciple of

the Buddha, and his next younger brother as proprietor of a temple at a centre

of pilgrimage in North India. In telling the story, allusion would be made to

but few other persons by name, but afterwards Mr. Leadbeater would sit by

himself and draw up a genealogical chart containing the names of some thirty

people, with their relationships in the particular life. In writing these down

it was considered advisable to avoid the actual names of persons who might,

after all, be in a position to sue for libel, especially the villains of the

piece, who attained to heights of melodramatic villainy worthy of the stage of

half a century ago. So Mr. Leadbeater kept a list of pseudonyms, which came to

be called the “star names” of the people concerned, because they were mostly

names of stars. The identities were supposed to be kept secret, but they somehow

leaked out, and members used to go about with little books exchanging

discoveries with one another to complete their lists!

When the series of thirty lives was complete the investigation ceased for a

while. Years later the charts were enlarged to contain over three hundred

persons, and the number of lives was increased to forty-eight. [135]

§3

I had much confidence in Mr. Leadbeater. I grew to like him very much. His whole

life was that of a man who took himself seriously and had no interest beyond the

“great cause” for which he was working. It was, however, more than a “cause”

with him; it was a mission. He was still of the disposition which had made him a

very serious curate of the Church of England in his younger days – a position

which he had left in order to plunge himself into the work of the Theosophical

Society, which he had approached through the half-way house of table-turning. So

he was interested much more in lifting people rapidly on the road of evolution

of the soul – which persisted from life to life, or rather from body to body –

than in – what some of us preferred – the mere search for truth, and the spread

of truth, leaving others to uplift themselves by its aid. He believed in the

personal element in soul-evolution – the domestic animals had awakenings of

superior intelligence because of their contact with man, and the flowers and

fruits as well as the animals were brought to greater perfection by being bred

under human guidance.

These ideas I accepted as rather obvious for a long time, until I later came to

have much closer experience of many kinds of animals and men and to reflect upon

their progress. Then I discovered that the monkey, having had no contact at all

with man, is ahead of other animals, even the dog and the cat, in intelligence,

and is unsurpassed for loyalty and reckless bravery in defence of the human or

other creature whom it loves. It will cry for you in your absence, and when you

return it will put its arms round your neck in a tight hug, and its cheek

against yours, and “yum-yum” with great satisfaction, giving a little bite or

nip, which is its kiss, and may probably be the origin of all kisses. If

impersonal character is the test, I have noticed that when you say or do

something in the presence of both a monkey and a dog, the dog will perk up and

come along to be taken notice of, but the monkey will look at your eyes, follow

the direction of your gaze, and take an interest in what you are referring to,

without apparent thought of itself.

The cat? Beautiful and pleasant companion as it is, it will come to you when it

is in the mood to be stroked or tickled, and will even give you a soulful glance

while the [136] process is going on, but it is much more likely to convert you

into a sort of a cat than you are to change it into a sort of a man or woman. I

observed also that the elephant, caught from the wild and trained only to

subjection and obedience displays remarkable intelligence. But I digress too

much.

The point is that the intellectual and emotional uplift of the animals does not

depend upon man. Those who think it does are apt to imagine that the uplift of

the “lower orders” among men depends upon the paternal administration of the

higher, and is at its best when the lower remember their places and cultivate

themselves with due respect and obedience to their superiors. Mr. Leadbeater was

adamant in this point of view. Notwithstanding the progress of democracy in the

world, he remained an entire disbeliever in it and a good old Tory of the early

Victorian style. Though so much with him, I was never in the least converted to

his social and political outlook, which always seemed to me reactionary and

uninformed in the extreme.

Although I was quite satisfied that Mr. Leadbeater was sincere I had no decisive

evidence of the accuracy of any of his visions. Some people believed that those

visions were constant, that he was aware of almost everything that was going on

in his neighbourhood and a good deal far away.

That was a belief based on exaggeration. I was a little disappointed that

neither he nor Mrs. Besant ever took decisive steps to scotch that belief with

regard to themselves. It may have been that they found it difficult to make

clear just where the line of belief ought to be drawn.

I never knew one occasion on which Mr. Leadbeater was in the least aware of any

thought that was going on in my mind, and in ordinary matters he certainly used

no clairvoyant power at all. Often, being busy at something, he would ask me if

I would go and see “whether our President” – a word he always used with a

reverential pause and deep old-fashioned impressments – “is in her room,” though

that room was only fifty paces distant and her aura was described as blazing

like the sun for a hundred yards all round. Often he would say, with regard to a

point of interest: “Come along, let us consult the President about this,” and we

would rush off together (we would run on these little excursions for the mere

joy of living), sometimes to be brought [137] to a halt a few feet inside her

room and utter the disappointed exclamation: “Why, she is not here!”

The incident nearest to evidence that I ever saw occurred as follows. We were

working away and all was pitch darkness outside, when a knock came at the door

and in response to Mr. Leadbeater's “come in,” a young Englishman, newly

resident at Adyar, appeared and said that three Indian gentlemen were sitting on

the bench outside. They had come from Madras eagerly seeking his help with

reference to a baby belonging to one of them. Mr. Leadbeater leaned back in his

chair, looked at the messenger, and said without hesitation: “Which one is it?

Is it the one with the fuzzy hair?” The messenger did not know, but when the men

were called in it proved to be one of them who had hair of a frizzy kind, which

stood far out from his head.

I should mention here that callers were rare and generally discouraged, but a

large part of Mr. Leadbeater’s correspondence referred to dead people. On

account of his books describing his first-hand knowledge of the dead and how

they were living and what they were doing, people used to write to him from all

parts of the world, sending photographs of their departed relatives (or pieces

of paper on which they had written, or scraps from the clothing which they had

worn), with requests for information about them, for help to them, and for

messages from them.

Mr. Leadbeater would “look them up,” and reply. Generally the departed were seen

enjoying themselves with friends they had met or made on the astral plane, they

needed no help – but when necessary it would be given – and it was quite

forbidden to bring messages from the dead to the living. It was, however,

permissible to take messages from the living to the dead, but that was seldom

necessary, since most educated and cultured people were quite capable of

mingling with the departed during the hours of sleep, when their astral bodies

were released from the physical integument, though it was rare for anyone to

remember these experiences on waking, on account of the lack of responsiveness

of the physical brain to impressions from higher planes.

Another incident approaching the nature of evidence occurred somewhat later. An

old gentleman and his wife arrived seeking consolation for the loss of their

little son, a schoolboy. They had come from the Telugu-speaking [138] country to

the north of Madras, from which Krishnamurti’s father had also come. They wanted

Mr. Leadbeater to talk with their little boy. He remarked to me that he could

not do so on account of the difference of language, but this might be an

opportunity to see what Krishnamurti could do. Krishnamurti was sitting studying

at a table against the far wall of the room. Mr. Leadbeater called across to

him: “Come and see if you can help.” Krishnamurti then sat with the two old

people on a couch just inside the door, while Mr. Leadbeater and I went on

working together at the other side of the room. The three carried on an animated

conversation in the Telugu language for, I think, about half an hour, presumably

in reference to the dead boy, and then the old people bowed themselves out with

expressions of profound gratitude and satisfaction.

On the other hand, there were occasional incidents which shook my confidence in

the reliability of Mr. Leadbeater’s clairvoyance. Though I admired him and loved

him, and was convinced of his sincerity, it did sometimes cross my mind that as

he was obviously much more interested in uplifting people than in the

investigations themselves, that great interest might easily colour his psychic

vision. He practically never took up any investigation on his own account, but

only when the subjects were requested or suggested by others, and he was always

ready to break them off in order to spend his time with promising boys – a

matter which irritated me a little because I was bent upon gathering material

which might turn out to be of real scientific value sooner or later.

I noticed that as we proceeded with the writing of the lives of Alcyone, boring

further and further into the past Krishnamurti seemed to grow greater and

greater; in more recent lives he was a humble individual, though pure and good,

but in the earlier lives he appeared as a personage of great eminence, playing a

leading part in the political and social life of his time. If the book of lives

is now consulted, it will appear curious to the critical reader that

Krishnamurti, one of the right-hand men of the Manu, semi-divine king of the new

Aryan race seventy-two thousand years ago, should gradually diminish in

importance to become an ordinary man, though of fine character, in the last ten

or fifteen lives. I commented to myself that Krishnamurti was obviously growing

upon Mr. Leadbeater, [139] and that imagination was seriously affecting the

visions, though that would be no reason to regard them as fundamentally unsound.

§4

There were three attitudes of the residents of Adyar towards these lives, which

created quite a sensation as they were read at the evening meetings on the roof.

Most of the residents accepted them without question. They were “wonderful, and

surely Mrs. Besant would not have upheld them unless she was satisfied that they

were correct.” Some few rejected them altogether, used to laugh at them and were

not above composing comic verses about them:

“In the lives, in the lives,

We had plenty of husbands and wives,” etc.

One of them, a Parsi, said that in the Persian life Mr. Leadbeater had mixed the

names badly, somehow confusing male and female names; that was one of the few

lives in which he did give names of the period to the characters referred to,

and it was one of the rare occasions on which he had consulted a book in

connection with it.

The same resident maintained that he had confutation of another item which had

some appearance of evidence. One night Mr. Leadbeater had with much hesitation

given me a few words in Sanskrit, to which he told me he was listening. There

was much difficulty, he said, in getting words of foreign languages clearly. He

asked me if I recognized the language. Yes, it was Sanskrit, quite recognizable.

It went down into the first draft of the lives. On the next day the Parsi friend

happened to be talking with Mr. Leadbeater in his room when this item came up in

conversation. The friend said he felt convinced that he had come across the

sentence somewhere else, before, and they both wondered where it might have

been. At that moment the Parsi gentleman’s eye happened to fall upon a book

which was out of alignment on the shelf. On the instant he remembered that the

passage that they were talking about was quoted in that book.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “now I remember. It was in this book, The Dream of Ravan,

which is out of line, that I [140] read the sentence.” Mr. Leadbeater, he said,

looked confused, remarked that the servant had been dusting the books, and

diverted the conversation to some other subject.

Another friend, a European doctor, quietly severed his connection with Mr.

Leadbeater altogether. He was the only person, as far as I know, who ever tried

secretly to put Mr. Leadbeater to the test. They were very friendly and had been

together to a theatre. This gentleman deliberately pretended that he had a

vision of two gigantic figures one on each side of the stage, standing up there

like the guardian genii of Indian temples, or Japanese doorways. He described

them, and Mr. Leadbeater, he said, told him that he was correct.

There was an explanation for this, however. Mr. Leadbeater always gave great

credit to imagination as verging on clairvoyance. When you imagine something, he

would say, there is nearly always something present to cause that imagination.

He held that the best way for most people to develop clairvoyance was to let the

imagination play in the first place.

A striking conversation took place in my presence on this point. One of our

prominent members had been through an important ceremony on the astral plane

during the sleep of his physical body, and had thereby become what was called

“an Initiate.” It happened that he was to be called as a witness in a certain

case. He was full of anxiety about it.

“Whatever shall I say if they ask me about my being an Initiate? I do not

remember anything at all of it.”

Mr. Leadbeater’s reply was: “But why don’t you remember? You ought to be able to

remember.”

“Well, if I let my imagination play on it, I can get a sort of impression about

it.”

“That is just what you ought to do. There is a cause for such imaginings. How

can you expect your clairvoyant power to develop if you destroy its delicate

beginnings?”

The member followed this advice and became one of the prominent clairvoyants in

the Theosophical Society, though years later he mentioned in conversation, that

he never really saw anything; only he received an impression so vivid that he

felt it must be so, and he was justified in saying with confidence that

such-and-such a being was [141] present and was saying such-and-such a thing.

His position was not without rationality, though I personally never considered

it sound enough to warrant a claim to great leadership and the guidance of

others in important matters.

It is doubtful whether any clairvoyant operates through senses in any way

comparable with those familiar to us as sight, hearing and the rest. It is more

than probable that when impressions are clearly received in terms of these (as

when I heard the sentence relating to the five of clubs) it is due to

“visualization” superimposed upon the impression, and forming a species of

interpretation. When I put this theory before Mr. Leadbeater he quite agreed to

it and wrote a passage to that effect in one of his books.

My own position with regard to Mr. Leadbeater, therefore, was midway between the

extremes of acceptance and rejection. It was that of one who had otherwise had

convincing proof of the existence of clairvoyant power (though not on anything

like the lavish scale presented by Mr. Leadbeater, nor of the perfect accuracy

which he always took for granted in his own case), who did not see any reason

why Mr. Leadbeater should cheat, but many reasons why he should not do so, who,

knowing him and liking him, was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt

where at all reasonable, who at the same time knew that human nature was streaky

(like bacon, as it has been said) and did not expect Mr. Leadbeater to be

perfect in all respects, even though the devotees thought him to be so.

I found, on the other hand, that most of my friends were rather in the position

expressed in an article which I read recently, in which the writer said: “I

accept that as true, being ignorant of the matter.” Some few were actually a

little afraid of disbelief. They might miss something good, or even “something”

might happen to them. I was reminded of the story of the old lady who bowed

whenever the devil was mentioned, and when asked why she did so, replied: “Well,

minister, it’s best to be ready for everything.”

There had been charges against Mr. Leadbeater of very reprehensible actions with

boys, but Mrs. Besant had been satisfied that they were unsound, and had

readmitted him to her closest friendship. I am convinced to this day that he

loved young people and would do nothing intentionally to harm them, and during

the whole of my close contact [142] with him, intermittently covering thirteen

years, I never saw in him any signs of sexual excitement or desire. Only once or

twice we talked of the attacks made upon him. He said that evidence had been

manufactured against him. He had given advice, in good faith, and with the best

intentions, which Mrs. Besant had disapproved. In deference to her wishes, he

had promised not to give that advice again, although his opinion still was that

it was the best under the circumstances.

One “streak,” however, that did trouble me was his liability to irritability,

which would sometimes become quite explosive and verging on the cruel – a

quality common enough, however, and accepted rather as a matter of course among

old English gentlemen of the Victorian school. My first introduction to this

occurred when one morning a German countess, who had undertaken to supervise the

house-keeping, came fluttering at the doorway. Only ten feet away from her, he

bellowed out at the top of his great lungs: “What does that woman want here?”

“Oh, Mr. Leadbeater,” faltered the stricken lady, “I was only looking to see if

the servants had done their work properly.”

This fault of irritability was, however, recognized by Mr. Leadbeater himself,

and he used to tell me that some day he would conquer it. I thought to myself:

“Great people have great faults, but they disappear suddenly; little people have

little faults, but they seem to go on for ever.”

Sometimes, when ants and beetles invaded his desk – a common occurrence in South

India – he would completely lose his temper, and then he would methodically

press them individually to death with the flat of his paperknife, with such an

unpleasant expression upon his face that it made me feel quite sick. When I

showed my unhappiness, he would laugh at me, call me over-sensitive and finally

say that the life in those creatures was infinitesimally small. I was perhaps

anthropomorphizing their feelings to some extent. But could they not have been

swept off in a gentler way, and without that sadistic delight?

Still, I knew well that kindness was really the biggest thing in his life, and

so I was quite ready to forget these lapses. When anyone, especially a child,

had been admitted to the charmed circle of his immediate friendship – and he was

very exclusive – he would sacrifice his comfort, his [143] money, everything,

for him. But he was uncompromisingly short with anybody outside that circle who

showed the least intrusiveness or made the least disturbance.

I was a very favoured person, and could discuss these things with him. He had a

definite theory on the point – that he existed only to do good, and it would be

folly to spread himself out too thin. If he succeeded in doing great good to a

few, then in their lives they would extend that good in ever-enlarging

concentric circles. He admitted that “our President,” with her magnetic

personality and her magnificent gift of oratory, could work on a larger scale,

but such greatness was not for him; he knew his limitations.

I agreed that his position was logical. I knew that though he would angrily

rebuff outsiders, there was no venom behind his anger. It was a sort of smoke

screen in self-defence, though generally quite unnecessarily effective. He

wished well to all, and would injure none, but his company and services were

reserved for those upon whom he had focused his affection. He would have a

garden of beautiful and delicate flowers – weeds were all right in their place,

but they must keep out of here.

§5

Before leaving this subject, I must give another instance of Mr. Leadbeater’s

work that impressed me very much at the time. One morning I found him lying on

his couch, with the Dutch friend, whom I have already mentioned, sitting in a

chair at his side. Mr. Leadbeater was saying that he had had a visit from a deva

(a non-human angelic being) who had shown him some living pictures of scenes to

occur in a community which was to come into existence in Lower (now Mexican)

California about eight hundred years in the future. He said from the points of

contact given to him by the deva he could now observe the entire life of that

community of the future. Our friend, always eager to gather knowledge, suggested

the compilation of as much information as possible about that community. He

always held the view that we were at the stage of compilation of occult

information and would be in a better position to correlate and criticize the

points later on.

Mr. Leadbeater agreed to the proposition, and after that [144] for about three

weeks he and I spent three or four hours every day working on the subject. My

part was to put to him every question I could think of, on every conceivable

topic relating to such a community. His was to lie on the sofa and look up the

information required. In this way we betook ourselves, so to speak, into the

streets, the factories, the restaurants, the homes, the temples, everywhere, and

he described the appearance of the people, their dress, language, habits, food

and a hundred other things.

They were an advanced community, living in a kind of garden city under the

leadership of two Masters who would incarnate especially to establish this

community as the nucleus of a new race, for it was intended that these people

should at some stage of their development begin to migrate and multiply

themselves all over North America. It was a highly technical civilization, with

machinery carried to an advanced point, with new inventions, including tiny

individual motor-cars, aeroplanes for distant service, talking pictures and

television, the last including even the actual reproduction, from the ether, of

historical scenes.

I wanted information about some of the new scientific methods, but this was not

permitted. There was also a new system of writing the language, which was

English, in very brief form, with apparently an ideographic foundation, but the

main features subject to inflectional marks. I was told with reference to this

that if I succeeded in working it out for myself I would be informed if it was

correct! I worked at it for a long time, but could not make a system of

shorthand on that basis!

To obtain knowledge of not very evident things, such as the economic system, it

was necessary to put questions to the people then living, so I held

conversations on these points with various people in the future, through the

agency of Mr. Leadbeater! For example, I wanted to know about conditions in a

certain factory.

“There is a girl here working in the factory. Let us ask her.”

But the girl was frightened when she heard a ghostly voice addressing her!

“Well, here is a fellow coming along the street. Let us put it into his mind

that he would like to see the factory and to know about the points you ask. We

will get him to go inside and ask questions.” [145]

The man proved responsive, went inside and asked the questions, while Mr.

Leadbeater listened to the future conversation and told it to me. We discussed

the curious phenomenon – would this man actually walk up the street and go in

and ask these questions eight hundred years hence? Oh, yes. And would there be a

ghostly voice from the past, frightening the girl in the factory, and wanting to

know back into the past what was happening then? Yes, inexplicable, of course,

but there it was.

In the end I had hundreds of questions with their answers, each written on a

separate slip of paper. The Dutch friend and I sat together, classified all

these, and arranged them in order under suitable headings. Mr. Leadbeater then

went through them, dictating afresh and smoothing out the language according to

the literary form he desired. We were struck by the remarkable consistency of

the result. There was no confusion or clash in the material. Still, as we knew

that Mr. Leadbeater was very fond of H. G. Wells’s scientific romances and the

adventure stories of Rider Haggard and Jules Verne, and had often told stories

on these lines to boys, we did not consider it beyond the bounds of invention by

his sub-conscious mind. Mr. Leadbeater used to tell us how stories sometimes

wrote themselves before the eyes, so to say, of some novelists, the characters

in them taking matters into their own hands and conducting the whole affair, and

how Conan Doyle would take up his pen and write an imaginative story without

knowing at all what he was going to write.

The series appeared in the magazine under the heading of “The Beginnings of the

Sixth Root Race” and was afterwards incorporated in a book containing other

investigations entitled Man: Whence, How, and Whither?

In connection with this investigation Mr. Leadbeater also talked to us of other

future incidents which came within his vision, to occur within fifty years. The

force in the atom would be tapped and would replace electricity, far within the

fifty years – of which, by the way, twenty-six have already gone. There would be

a great war, in which Germany and England would be opposed. Germany would be

defeated and Holland would gain an accession of territory in Europe! It was

thought advisable not to print such items as the last. Mr. Leadbeater always had

the coming war much on his mind, and when early in 1914 I was thinking [146] of

accepting an invitation to become National Lecturer of the British Section of

the Society, he advised me strongly not to go: “It will be of no use; that war

will be coming on soon.” I took his advice and remained in India. [147]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VI

KRISHNAMURTI

§1

AN incident big with consequence occurred when one day Krishnamurti’s father

came to Mr. Leadbeater in great distress. The boy had been treated most cruelly

at school. It was true that he was a very dreamy boy, and therefore not good at

his lessons, but this cruelty was really unbearable. Mr. Leadbeater’s advice was

simple:

“Take him away from the school.”

It was not practical, the father replied, since the schools were registered by

the Government, and if a boy did not pass through this Government system he

could not afterwards take up any of the traditional occupations of the literary

classes – government service, the law, medicine, engineering, teaching, etc.

Mr. Leadbeater said: “But anyhow you cannot allow that cruelty to go on. And it

is all the worse in the case of such a sensitive boy.”

Regarding Krishnamurti as one who was destined to become a great spiritual

teacher, Mr. Leadbeater then said that if the father liked he would write to

Mrs. Besant and ask her interest in the boy’s career. Knowing the importance of

his future, she would probably arrange for him to be educated in England – the

desire of the heart of many Indian fathers, for English education brought in its

train considerable economic advantages. In the meantime he and his friends would

see that Krishnamurti did not lack private tuition, pending Mrs. Besant’s return

from America, where she then was.

The father accepted this solution of his difficulty, and the result was that

Krishnamurti and his next younger brother, Nityananda, became constant members

of our party. [148] Several people volunteered to give them private tuition, two

subjects falling to my lot, including Sanskrit after the departure from Adyar of

Mr. Subrahmanyam Aiyar, who was their first teacher of Sanskrit. I had thus the

best of opportunities of knowing Krishnamurti, who was to become a celebrity

later on. Indeed, a strong affection grew up between us.

Krishnamurti was a very delicate boy, Mr. Leadbeater’s first concern was for his

health. Caste difficulties stood in the way of some dietetic changes which Mr.

Leadbeater would have liked, but there was no objection to a frequent drink of

milk during the day, and an occasional resort to a large glass jar full of

prunes. Though Krishnamurti did not like these, he took them, in obedience to

the desire of his friends. At the same time the young Englishman mentioned in

connection with the episode of the baby supervised a course of athletics,

outings on bicycles in the early mornings, and tennis in the evenings.

Mr. Leadbeater was very motherly in all these things. While they were out

cycling, he would go to the bathroom and himself prepare the proper mixture of

hot water at the moment when we saw the cyclists returning in the distance over

the Elphinstone Bridge, and I would go there with him, so that we should not

lose time in the discussion of our literary material, for Mr. Leadbeater was a

prodigious worker. As a result of all this attention Krishnamurti picked up

considerably in health.

Krishnamurti was extraordinarily unselfish and affectionate for a boy of his

age. When asked as to what they should do or where go at any time, his

invariable answer would be: “What you like.”

This sometimes irritated Mr. Leadbeater, who could not draw him out further, and

he would exclaim: “Oh, confound these bairagis.” (A vairagi or bairagi is a

Hindu holy man who takes no interest in anything in the world.) Krishnamurti was

not fond of studies. He would often say with reference to arithmetic: “Why do

you trouble me with these things? I shall never need them.”

I had better luck with the Sanskrit, but not much. We would retire to the empty

drawing-room, next to Mrs. Besant’s rooms. There was a big couch there.

Krishnamurti would sit on the left, Nityananda on the right, I in the middle,

one arm round each of them, Krishnamurti’s [149] arm round my neck. Thus huddled

together, with the book precariously balanced on my knee, and frequently falling

upon the floor, we would attempt our study. Nityananda was a playful boy, so

that sometimes our studies would degenerate into a tussle, myself the referee

trying to separate the two pseudo-pugilists. Sometimes Mrs. Besant would pass

through the room, after she had returned and undertaken the legal wardship of

the two boys, and would be much amused and pleased at our appearance. But

Krishnamurti could concentrate when he liked. One day when I reproached him for

inattentiveness to the lesson, he said: “Well, give me the book.” He went off by

himself for a little while and came back knowing the lesson very well.

In the early mornings Krishnamurti was encouraged to write down his dreams,

partly for practice in English composition, and partly for the sake of psychic

training. He had a little black book and also some exercise books in which he

used to write. I never looked into those, but it was said that the dreams were

very coherent and of great interest. Sometimes also Mr. Leadbeater would

experiment with thought-transference, putting his hands on Krishnamurti’s

temples and asking him what he saw, with, I understood, very interesting

results.

To Mrs. Besant the wardship of the boys was a very sacred duty. She shared in

the belief that Krishnamurti’s body would probably be used for a new appearance

on earth of the great Master of Masters, whom both she and Mr. Leadbeater

declared they knew as having entered into the body of Jesus for the brief

ministry in Palestine of which accounts appear in the Gospels. She herself spent

about two hours each day teaching them, and used to take them with her for

private meditation in the shrine-room. In the roof meetings Krishnamurti was put

to sit between her and Mr. Leadbeater. The arrangements for tuition and physical

culture continued as before. To the latter the young Englishman added with great

devotion the duties of personal attendant and valet.

Although Krishnamurti became the centre of much attention, and presented a

conspicuous figure, with his unusual arrangement of hair, cut to the shoulders

and parted down the middle, forming a glossy black aureole to his face, his

personality did not become affected with any signs of a sense of superiority to

others. How far he grasped [150] the idea of the great honour that was to be his

in becoming the vehicle for the Christ or World-Teacher I do not know; he never

made any allusion to it, and there was no conceit at all in his composition. His

younger brother might have traded a little upon the situation, being not

insensitive to its material advantages, but Krishnamurti seemed entirely

unspoiled, even when a number of people who were impressed with the greatest

devotion to him in view of his impending greatness began to assume central

partings in their hair and to vow themselves to do everything possible to help

him to prepare for his mission!

For this purpose, indeed, they were formed into a special body or Order, with

coloured robes and symbols of the rising sun. I was not attracted to this. Let

the Christ come, and I would follow him into the last ditch, but in the meantime

I would not part my hair down the centre (although more than one friend assured

me that I would look very Christ-like) and I would make no vows. Vows were quite

unnecessary, and I detested the spectacular. I would spontaneously help

Krishnamurti, and I think I did so more than most, even to the extent of copying

out in my large print-like writing of Sanskrit characters a whole volume of

ancient Sanskrit stories to be used as a lesson-book by him, to save his eyes

from the dangers of the execrable type and impress of the cheap school-books

printed in India.

I do not pretend that I presented any less peculiar spectacle than my friends;

but if my hair and beard were long it was because of a mixture of neglect and

shrinking from modern artificiality – as I then regarded it, for my childhood

and youth had induced in me very little respect for Western civilization. It was

certainly not as a pose, even to myself. In my own way I was as lacking in

extra-spection as Krishnamurti himself. A visiting friend once tried to convert

me to modernity. He pointed out that I was trying my friends very hard, but I

regret to say his words could not produce any living picture on the screen of my

mind, occupied as it was with what to me were infinitely more important things.

Some months later Mrs. Besant went to pay visits at several places in the north

of India, ending up with a long stay in Benares, where she had a bungalow of her

own near to the Central Hindu College, in the management of which [151] she was

the most prominent figure. She took the two boys with her, to give them

experience. Mr. Leadbeater missed them very much. I often thought what a devoted

mother he would have made but for the accident of sex. He would occasionally

sigh for them, and he told me that, although he was fully aware that there was

really no separation, the physical brain could not help feeling it. We busied

ourselves more than ever with literary work. At least fifty per cent of the

whole literary output of Mr. Leadbeater’s life was done during the ten thousand

hours I worked with him at Adyar, discussing, suggesting, arranging, sometimes

contributing an idea and even a vision or two, and always preparing material for

the press.

§2

While Mrs. Besant was away I had a week’s vacation under curious circumstances.

One night, as I was sleeping in my room, I was suddenly awakened by something

unknown. I sat up and looked before me, and it seemed as if the wall of my room

had disappeared, for I could see far across the field outside, at the back of

the quadrangle. In the distance a group of Hindu gentlemen was to be seen

approaching, and as they drew towards me a figure in the centre became very

clear. He was an elderly man, with long and shaggy grey hair and beard, very

distinctive features and a peculiar manner of bending his shoulders and knees as

he walked. As they came across the field they seemed to exude a soft light,

which illuminated the familiar trees as they passed them.

When they had come near to me, the central figure drew my attention so that the

others seemed only very vaguely present. He told me that he was the father of

one of the boys who had come to Adyar with Krishnamurti. I knew the boy quite

well, and liked him. The father was very anxious about his son’s education. He

asked me, in the easy way in which such things are done in India, whether I

would be so kind as to do what I could to improve the boy’s opportunities; at

present the educational arrangements were far from satisfactory. I replied that

I would look into the matter and do my best to help him. With an expression of

satisfaction the elderly gentleman faded away, and only [152] then did I

experience surprise, and realize that something unusual had happened.

This boy was one of those who had already been to me frequently for help in

their homework. I did not like the school that he was attending, on account of

Krishnamurti’s experience there. I considered whether my modest means would

permit me to send him to England for further education, after some preliminary

work in India – perhaps study for the Cambridge Local Examination with subjects

that would exempt him from the university entrance examination in England. He

was a bright boy, and might even succeed in entering the Indian Civil Service. I

spoke to Krishnamurti’s father about it, and he was quite pleased. I took

opportunities to see more and more of the student and to talk with him about his

home. He came from a village about two hundred miles from Madras. His father and

his uncle, though not rich, were the joint owners of most of the land in five

villages. His uncle managed all the business affairs of the family, as his

father, having found some old yoga books among the effects left by his wife’s

father when he died, had taken to meditation on the river bank, and was looked

upon as lost to the family for all practical purposes.

There was to be a vacation at the school shortly. The boy asked would I come and

pay a visit to the village and his house? That was the sort of thing an Indian

boy could arrange without consulting his parents. Children are not treated as

inferiors in India to the extent that they were in England in my time. In the

conduct of family affairs they often throw out opinions which are treated with

the same respectful attention as those put forward by grown-up members of the

family, even though the final decision is reserved for the father or the

grandfather. I accepted the invitation with thanks.

The vacation arrived, and some days after most of the students had departed to

their villages I put on Indian clothes and started off for the village. In the

train I had the experience of being mistaken for an Indian, and told to “get

out” of the compartment by an Englishman who had already established himself

there, who, however, subsided sheepishly when I looked him straight in the eye.

Probably he thought that I was a criminal intelligence man disguised as an

Indian sannyasi. About twenty hours brought [153] me, after two changes, at

country junctions, one from midnight to three o’clock, the other from about six

o’clock to eight o’clock, to the nearest station to the village.

Outside the station I began to enquire my way. The people there were delighted

to see an Englishman who had taken to Hindu ways. They insisted on my going to a

house and taking food; wanted me to stay a few days and proceed on my way

afterwards. But I was firm in my desire to make the sixteen-mile walk through

the forest by night, as I would find it trying in the heat of the day. A local

policeman volunteered to accompany me, and bring his lantern.

We had an interesting walk along the jungle pathways, listening to the forest

noises, and fording two or three streams running swiftly down their rocky beds,

and by no means easy to negotiate, as the water reached our waists. After

midnight we slept two or three hours in a little ruined temple almost overgrown

by the jungle plants. There were snakes, of course, but we took our chances with

them. We were very near to nature, and nothing seemed repulsive, scarcely

anything dangerous. We heard the cries of cheetahs in the forest. It was all

very beautiful, romantic, free; one did not fear death under such conditions.

Resuming our journey we reached the house at dawn. Without a moment’s delay my

friend the policeman took his leave and started back. There was no question of

offering him money. That would have been an insult. He was sufficiently

recompensed by having done a kindness. As to the distance, he would enjoy a

little jaunt of thirty-two miles. Nothing under a thousand miles seems to be

regarded as a long distance in the Indian mind. And a walk of many hours is

nothing, for there is no hurry; it is not the destination that is the important

thing. Both the walk and the occasional rest by the roadside constitute the

height of luxury.

Mounting the plinth, I knocked at the door of the family house – the only pukka

(that is, solidly built) house in a village of perhaps fifty thatched houses and

huts nestling among the trees, amid cultivated fields, and orchards of plantain,

mango, lime and pomelo. The pomelo, by the way, is the ancestor of the

grape-fruit; larger than the largest orange, with a very thick rind and, when

you get at them, pulp and juice having a strongly quinine-like flavour, which,

however, grows upon one and soon becomes an attractive acquired taste. [154]

Indian doors, with their heavy brass-studded cross-beams and elaborate carvings,

stand open all day, but are shut at night. In response to my knock I presently

heard heavy bars being removed. The door opened inwards, and there was standing

the man whom I had seen in my vision, the father of the student in whom I was by

now taking almost as much interest as if he had been my own son.

Very soon the student himself appeared from within the house, introduced me to

his father, and acted as interpreter. Saying nothing of my vision, I expressed

recognition. “Surely we have met somewhere before?” No, was the reply, it could

not be so, for this gentleman had never been far away from the group of

villages. But somehow I was very familiar to him. He felt as if he had known me

for a long time. Again and again, during the week that followed, in which I

stayed with the family, he remarked upon his puzzlement that he knew me so well

and yet we could not have met before. I never told him nor the boy about my

vision of his appearing to me at Adyar. The uncle was a hard-headed man of

business, and I did not think such confidence would increase his confidence in

me. But the father spoke to me about his son’s education. He did want him to

have better opportunities, and he wished that I might help.

After about a week, I took my leave, walked back to another railway station, and

so returned to Madras. At the country station I nearly missed my train. As I

arrived on the platform it was steaming out, with only the tail-end visible. But

a sannyasi had come! More than that, a European sannyasi! The station-master

blew frantically on his whistle. Great alarms! The train slowed down, stopped,

paused, and backed into the station, all heads sticking out of the windows.

A moment for a few mutual expressions of esteem between the station-master and

myself, and off went the train again, with me inside, the only fussing thing in

that countryside, notwithstanding its achievement of a mere ten miles per hour.

Nothing would satisfy the guard but that at the next station I should change

over into his little compartment and spend the rest of the day exchanging

experiences and opinions with him, until it was time for me to return to my

compartment and sleep. He could not understand how I, being an Englishman, was

not able to share with him his meat sandwiches. Vegetarianism had never come

within [155] his ken, though he lived in a country where the vast majority of

the population were vegetarians. Such is the separative effect of race and caste

in India. He was an Anglo-Indian, and carried about with him a portrait of his

father, which he showed in proud proof thereof.

Later, when I told some friends at Adyar of my having had that vision in the

night, and having afterwards in the village seen and recognized my visitor in

the person of the boy’s father, they doubted the accuracy of my memory in the

matter. Notwithstanding their belief in such matters, when it came down to brass

tacks they were doubtful that anyone (except their chosen leaders) could have

had such satisfactory physical proof. But I knew that I had not deceived myself.

For one thing, in the third train on my way to the village I had fallen into

conversation with several Indian villagers of the zamindar (landlord) class, and

it was of the intimate character common to such occasions. A casual acquaintance

will ask your name and address, occupation, income, whether married or

unmarried, children and their education, health of the family, immediate

business. These questions are quite essential to politeness, and in discussing

them you may be sure of rejoicings with you in your good fortune and sympathy in

your sorrow. So; where was I going? to Kotala. Whom to see? One Ramappa. Had I

known him before? Oh, yes. No doubt he had been to Madras. No, so far as I knew.

How then? Out it came; he had appeared to me in some sort of astral body.

Sensation! And further talk about yoga, et hoc genus omne.

§3

A year or two later when I was making a lecture tour in another part of India, I

had a further curious piece of experience relating to the nocturnal activities

of the same gentleman. I had at that time a certain Muhammadan friend, Mr. Wazir

Ahmed, who was a Sufi, that is, one of the more mystical or theosophical type of

the followers of Islam, such a man as must have been the Hindustani poet who

wrote:

Raze the Mosque to the ground,

Bring the Kaaba to the dust,

But do not break a heart,

For it is the dwelling-place of God Himself. [156]

My friend used to come and see me a great deal whenever I visited that city, as

I did occasionally. He was a disciple of a great Sufi teacher and yogi who, he

told me, had no fewer than sixteen thousand disciples scattered over that part

of India, living in their villages, pursuing all sorts of ordinary occupations,

and visiting the home and mosque of the teacher occasionally, or else being

visited by one or other of his senior disciples. This friend was one of his most

successful pupils. Several times he showed me his psychic powers.

One morning, as we were sitting in the garden, Mr. Wazir Ahmed was telling me

about some of his experiences while travelling in his subtle body during sleep,

which he said he regularly remembered. He used to tell me that I was much more

active in that way than he was himself, and to reproach me a little for not

confiding more in him on that subject. He could hardly believe me when I told

him that I very rarely had any memory of any such thing, and even then I did not

regard it as particularly reliable.

On this occasion he suggested an experiment. He wanted me to will before going

to sleep that night that at a certain time he and I should meet in our astral

bodies on the veranda of the bungalow. We were then to try to remember when we

awoke in the morning what we had done together, and afterwards compare notes. It

happened, however, that I forgot all about the matter, on account of some social

activities which kept me very busy that evening, and next morning I had nothing

to tell. I thought I should have had nothing in any case. When my friend arrived

he was brimful of experience:

“It was a curious trick you played on me last night,” he said.

“Oh,” I replied, “I do not recollect it. I am sorry if anything unfortunate

occurred. What happened?”

He told me that after he had left his body he came to the appointed place on the

veranda, but found there, instead of me, another man, a stranger, who repulsed

him vigorously and said:

“You shall not come here. My son is sleeping here, and I am protecting him.”

I did not realize whom he had seen until he went on to describe the man. Then he

gave me a point for point [157] description of the gentleman who had appeared to

me in Madras, whom I had afterwards found in his village – who now had evidently

appeared again in this distant city. And his son was staying in that bungalow,

for I had taken him on a visit to some friends so as to broaden his experience

of the world.

It was on another trip to the same town that this Muhammadan friend took me to

see and to stay with his teacher. We had a long and complicated journey, but at

last we arrived. I cannot give the name nor the place of residence of the

teacher, nor any description of the strange things which he showed me, for I

gave my solemn promise to keep all these things private. I may say that he was a

man of magnificent physique, much more than six feet in height and broad in

proportion, looking about eighty years old and having a long white beard.

Hearing of me, he had requested a visit, and now he invited me to stay as long

as I could. There were some twenty or thirty disciples with him at the time. We

all assembled in one of the rooms opening upon a central courtyard of his large

house. Then he put to me the typical question of an Indian teacher: “What is it

that you want?”

I told him. I wanted to know the atman, the one life.

Again and again he put the same question, trying to force me to a kind of

introspective realization of what I was aiming at. I kept to my point. That was

the essential thing in my eyes. We discussed it the whole day in all its

bearings. But then, was there not something else I wanted in the meantime, in a

more practical ordinary way? Yes, I could say that there was. I wanted to be

able to look into the minds of men, to understand them, and to be able to help

them.

This gentleman was very pleased with me. He took me to participate in the

worship, along with the disciples, in their private mosque. He showed me his

psychic powers before putting a proposition before me. The proposition was that

I should become one of his disciples. He said he could see that I was ready for

the opening of considerable psychic powers. With three months’ training they

would be in full working order. But I must give up my excessive pride, and must

moderate my excessive asceticism, which was too hard on the body. And he would

expect me to become a [158] Muhammadan and to help the Sufi movement. I told him

that I could never consent to become a member of a particular religion; so he

waived that point.

On the second day we discussed again. I thanked him for his offer, told him it

was extremely attractive, for I had long had great regard for the Sufi movement

and considered that its promotion would be of great value in the world. But I

wanted time to think the matter over, and I would like to consult Mrs. Besant,

to whom I felt that I owed a certain loyalty.

Mrs. Besant he said he knew. He admired her in many ways, but her powers were of

an inferior order. Why should I not make my decision at once instead of losing

time? I almost said “Yes.” It was at that moment that I saw standing behind him

the Master whom I had seen in meditation in England, who had questioned me about

honesty and other things. There was a warning expression on his face. (Was it a

subconscious way of talking to myself?) No, I could not decide now. I would

write as soon as I had seen Mrs. Besant. He must give me permission to tell her

what I had seen, though I would tell nobody else. The permission was given.

I resumed my tour, completed it, went to Mrs. Besant, told her. She said she

would ask the Master about it. After a few days she told me that she had put the

matter before him, that he had said that he knew the teacher to whom I had been,

that he was “All right, but not quite on our line,” and the decision must rest

with me. These words were sufficient to determine my purpose. I wrote to the

Sufi teacher regretting that I did not feel that I could put down the work that

I had already taken up, in order to change over to his.

It was while on the same tour that I had some further experiences with

thought-transference. One man told me that if I would think of somebody or

something, he would not only read the thought in my mind, but would transfer it

to the mind of a third person, and make him tell me what I was thinking of. He

performed the feat several times with the greatest ease. I thought in one

instance of the head and face of a gentleman whom I had known – the late Colonel

Olcott. The experimenter looked at me intently for a few seconds, then turned

his gaze on a young [159] man sitting at the corner of the group of people who

were there, and the young man gave an accurate description of the Colonel’s head

and face.

§4

I must return to what happened at Adyar after I had been to the village to see

the father of the student in whom I had become interested. It proved to be a

critical moment. Great changes were impending among the members of the

Theosophical Society.

Arrived at Adyar, in the early evening, I went over to Mr. Leadbeater’s room – a

new apartment, upstairs, to which he had comparatively recently moved. He was

typing away on his little Blickensderfer. He looked up with a greeting,

continued typing for a few minutes, and then finished with a flourish and an air

of great satisfaction. He gathered his papers together while rising from his

roll-top desk, and came over to the square table in the centre of the room where

we usually sat to work. He put a manuscript into my hand and told me it was

Krishnamurti’s first book.

Krishnamurti had made a great impression upon some members of the staff and some

senior students of the Central Hindu College, particularly the then principal

Mr. G. S. Arundale. Some of them had been at meetings in the evenings in Mrs.

Besant’s bungalow, and at these he had been answering questions for them, and

giving them some teachings from the notes which he had made of his morning

memories. The notes had now been put together, and here was the result, a little

book. Would I take it home with me and tell him – Mr. Leadbeater –I n the

morning what I thought of it?

The Introduction began: “These are not my words; they are the words of the

Master who taught me.” I read the manuscript through with great pleasure. I

thought it very pleasing and of flower-like simplicity. It dealt with the

qualifications of character requisite for spiritual unfoldment. There were two

kinds of people in the world, it said, those who know and those who do not know

God’s plan for men, and those who know cannot help working for it, because it is

so glorious. The book was divided into four parts, following the course of the

four qualifications [160] expounded centuries ago by the famous Indian

philosopher Shankaracharya, but with the terms newly translated as

“Discrimination,” “Desirelessness,” “Good Conduct,” and “Love.” It was something

far simpler than the works on the same subject commonly in use among

Theosophists – The Path of Discipleship, by Mrs. Besant, The Voice of the

Silence, by Mme Blavatsky and Light on the Path, by Miss Collins.

I delivered my opinion – a delightful little book, but extremely simple. Would

the instructions contained in it be sufficient to bring one to the “Path

proper,” to the First Initiation, which Mrs. Besant had described in her book?

Yes, said Mr. Leadbeater, more than that, if completely carried out these

instructions would lead one to Adeptship itself.

I remarked that there were one or two curious things about the manuscript. It

was very much in Mr. Leadbeater’s own style, and there were some sentences which

were exactly the same as in a book of his which we had already prepared for the

press. He told me that he wished indeed that he might have been able to write

such a book himself. As to the sentences I mentioned, he had usually been

present when Krishnamurti was being taught in his astral body by the Master; he

remembered these points, and had made use of them in meetings of Theosophists; I

had noted them down and had incorporated them into the material of his book. As

to style, it was but natural that he himself should have adopted something of

his own Master’s style after himself being taught by him for so many years.

Mrs. Besant very soon returned from Benares, with her retinue. She selected a

title for the book from a large number submitted to her for consideration. She

had a decided flair for the selection of fetching book-titles.

The little book was published under the title: At the Feet of the Master. It

created a sensation and practically a new cult, in view of its containing the

actual instructions of one of the Masters, and being the output of a child who

was to become in effect the very incarnation of the Master of Masters himself.

Not long afterwards the band devoted to Krishnamurti made themselves into a

public body under the name of “The Order of the Star in the East.” Its

declaration of [161] principles began, “We believe that a great Teacher will

soon appear in the world, and we wish to live now that we may be worthy to know

Him when He comes.” Then followed a series of clauses saying that they would try

to keep the Teacher in their minds always, to do their work, in His name, to do

something to prepare for His coming, to make devotion, steadfastness and

gentleness prominent characteristics of their daily lives, to devote a little

time morning and evening to asking His blessing upon the work to try to

recognize and reverence greatness wheresoever shown, and to co-operate with

those felt to be spiritual superiors. The “Protector” of the Order was Mrs.

Besant, the “Head” Mr. Krishnamurti, the Private Secretary to the Head, Mr. G.

S. Arundale. There was no fee for membership, but one could buy a silver star to

be worn to draw attention to the new movement. Golden stars were permissible

only to the Purple Order, an inner group, and the National Representatives in

each country.

Thousands of the members of the Theosophical Society flung themselves into the

new movement. Some held aloof, among them myself. Some few criticized it on

various grounds. One or two pronounced the opinion that Krishnamurti did not

know enough English to write the sentences in the book. I quite agreed with

them, but I explained the difficulty away to myself by saying that the preface

announced that Krishnamurti had not written it himself – they were the words of

the Master. Still the difficulty remained that Krishnamurti could not have

linked the sentences together and punctuated them so well. Nor could he have

written the preface, in my opinion. These problems I left in suspense. We could

very well wait to see if the Teacher came. In the meantime, the ethical teaching

in the book was of rare value and beauty.

Later, when Krishnamurti and his brother were in England, with Mr. Arundale as

private tutor, and there had been a quarrel in Central Hindu College circles in

Benares in connection with this matter, and Krishnamurti’s father had grown

dissatisfied and instituted a case at law for the recovery of the custody of his

sons – Mrs. Besant indeed could not give them up, as they themselves flatly

refused to go back to their father – a case which was finally lost to him when

carried up to the Privy Council, the question [162] of the authorship of the

book was brought up in court, but the judge himself pointed out that there was

no cause for complaint as the preface began with the statement that these words

were not Krishnamurti’s own words but those of “the Master who taught me,” and

there was no statement as to who that master was.

This subject was to be the undoing of my friend Subrahmanyam. He said that when

questioned by his father in his presence Krishnamurti had said in Telugu: “The

book is not mine; they fathered it on me.” Mrs. Besant was indignant about this.

She called Subrahmanyam to her presence, told him that Krishnamurti could not

have said anything so false, and presented him with the alternative of

recantation or banishment from Adyar. Right or wrong, Subrahmanyam believed that

he had heard that declaration. He regretted that he could not deny it.

I went to Mrs. Besant and pleaded for Subrahmanyam. Believing that those words

had been said, he had repeated them in good faith; could she not put them down

to some misunderstanding or confusion of language, and leave it at that? No, she

was adamant. I talked with Mr. Leadbeater about the matter. He gave to

Subrahmanyam the highest praise that he knew by saying that he had always been a

gentleman. He believed him to be telling the truth; but there must have been

some mistake. Subrahmanyam returned to his native town, and died there shortly

afterwards, while still himself little more than a boy.

The same circumstances proved also the undoing of the student whom I was trying

to help. Krishnamurti’s father, now turned against Mrs. Besant and Mr.

Leadbeater, communicated his sorrows to the boy’s uncle and he, as head of the

family, put his foot down firmly on my project of education in England, which he

thought might turn the boy against his own father, as Krishnamurti and

Nityananda had evidently been turned against theirs. I went again to see the

uncle in another village where he had gone, Subrahmanyam with me to act as

interpreter, but could not move him to a change of decision.

It was on that visit that I had the interesting experience of sleeping one night

in a barn. I must have been tired out indeed, for in the morning I awoke to find

myself leaning against the body of a huge cow, which must have settled [163]

down beside me with surprising gentleness – I was thankful that it had kept its

horns still; while cuddling against me on the other side for warmth – it was

rather high country and the nights were cold – was one of the homeless,

half-wild dogs which abound in India. [164]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VII

AN INDIAN YOGI

§1

In my earliest days in India I had developed a particular friendship for a

certain Mr. K. Narayanaswami Aiyar, who had been a High Court Advocate, but for

some years had given his time entirely to the activities of a travelling

lecturer, an avocation in which he had shown great ability and had acquired a

reputation all over the country. He looked the part of a wandering religious

teacher, having a very enthusiastic and impulsive manner, a humorous and happy

disposition, long shaggy grey hair and beard, and a nose which had originally

been aquiline but had been flattened by an accident in his younger days.

We once spent a considerable time together in Benares. It was winter, and too

cold in the north of India for the bare feet usual in the south. To meet this

contingency Narayanaswami had bought a pair of yellow boots, with no idea as to

fit. They were altogether wrongly shaped for his unspoiled feet, and too small

for him anyhow. But he persevered in forcing his feet into them, much to the

entertainment of Babu Bhagavan Das and myself, who were his particular friends.

He made a curious spectacle, with his yellow boots and his otherwise yogi-like

dress and countenance, but inside he could bear pain as only yogis can.

Many times we walked together the whole length of the steps and terraces of the

Benares water-front, poking our noses into everything and learning much about

the miscellaneous Hindu life that finds its way to Benares. His favourite spot

on these walks was the burning-ghat. We would stand for a long time watching the

bodies being placed on the pyres, covered with wood and finally enveloped in

flames. [165]

He used facetiously to remark that he wanted to get used to this process before

his own turn came. Perhaps there was something of sincerity in that remark,

however, for it is consistent with a certain type of Indian mind to inure

themselves to trouble before it comes, like those perverted yogis who hold their

arms up until they wither, or sit on beds of spikes, or surround themselves with

fires in the heat of summer under the blazing sun, and thus, in the brief but

expressive words of Sir Edwin Arnold, seek to “baulk hell by self-kindled

hells.”

Narayanaswami was a man of great learning, and considerable ability in the

handling of the Sanskrit language, his subject of especial interest being Yoga,

and the study of the Minor Upanishads in which there is much yogic lore.

One day he came to me at Adyar and told me that he and some other friends had

met a great yogi, who was actually one of the Masters, who lived in a little

cottage within a mile of the railway station of Tiruvallam, about eighty miles

from Madras, on the line to Mysore and the west coast. He proposed that we

should go and talk with him. He was sure that this was the great Master alluded

to among the “star names” as Jupiter, the Master of the Master who had taught

Mme Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott.

Mr. Leadbeater had often spoken to me and to others of a great Master

corresponding to this description. T. Subba Row, an occultist of the preceding

generation, now dead, had taken Mr. Leadbeater one day to see that Master, and

he had explained some points and given him a diagram which he had used in one of

his books. Mr. Leadbeater did not feel at liberty to say much about that Master.

He did not think that anyone could find him unless it was his desire. At the

time of his visit the Master occupied a little cottage within a mile of the

railway station, living as a small landowner, his greatness unsuspected by the

people, among whom he moved freely. He was elderly, a little short of stature,

had a white beard and had lived there for a long time.

I was decidedly open to conviction as regards both these accounts, but I was

always ready for experience, so one morning Narayanaswami and I set off by

train. We arrived at the Tiruvallam railway station in the middle of the day,

walked across the fields along the little ridges of earth which form the borders

between the cultivated plots, and came to the cottage, which stood on a little

rising ground beside the [166] main road leading from Madras to Calicut. We

found there only a very old woman, said to be over ninety, who told us that the

swami had gone some days before to a certain village. We went there. He had

moved on. In this search we travelled in several ways – on the railway, in

bullock carts and on foot by both day and night.

At last we came upon him early one morning, sleeping in the front room of a

little house in the main street of Muttuku, a large village. We sat quietly near

his feet on the platform on which he lay, and waited. Soon the old man awoke and

sat up. Narayanaswami said a few words to him in Tamil. Then he spoke to us by

name, told us that he had specially waited in the village that night because he

knew we were on our way to see him, said he had seen us at the railway station

and in certain of the villages to which we had been – gave us in fact quite a

sketch of our wanderings in search of him.

He was a blind man. When a little later on I stayed with him for a week at his

cottage, alone except for the old woman, I used to see him groping his way round

the walls to find the doorway when he came in from the fields. Often the old

woman or I would lead him. Yet he had a little bullock cart, in which he used to

make long journeys from one village to another.

I can form no theory as to how he drove – perhaps the little bull knew where he

wanted to go and also knew the way – or how he avoided the traffic on the roads,

little as it was. In all these accounts I am only recording what I have seen,

and rarely attempting explanations. I have not tried to explain, for example,

how it was that Mr. Leadbeater could not converse with the dead boy because of

the language barrier, and yet could understand what people were saying in the

past lives, or how the student’s father conversed with me on his nocturnal visit

though we had no language in common, and spoke also to my Muhammadan friend

under the same conditions.

The old gentleman spoke very freely of occult matters, talked about the various

Masters familiar to Theosophists, and of the coming of a great teacher whom he

called Nanjunda, said that I would not leave India soon, as I expected to, but

only after Nanjunda came. He remarked: “Your pupil will be your teacher,”

referring I supposed to Krishnamurti, from whom in fact I did afterwards learn a

good deal of common sense, and whom I also came to regard as [167] much more

deep-sighted than either Mrs. Besant or Mr. Leadbeater – though he would not

pronounce himself to be or not to be the great Teacher whose coming had been

predicted, even when in 1928 to 1930 Mrs. Besant was publicly proclaiming him as

such, and saying that there had been a blending of the consciousness of

Krishnamurti and that of the Teacher.

Narayanaswami and I enjoyed conversation with the old gentleman for an hour or

two. He expressed great liking for me, presented me with a string of beads

(rudraksha berries) taken directly from his own neck, and also his rather worn

deer skin, and sent us both off thinking that life was good, and was going to be

marvellous indeed in the future.

§2

A month or two afterwards, in the same year, 1910, I visited the old gentleman

at his cottage and stayed there about a week. The cottage – built of irregular

pieces of stone – consisted of one oblong room with a small portion partitioned

off by a low wall at one end. There were only two doors, front and back,

opposite each other in the middle of the long sides. Between the doors, exactly

in the centre of the room, was a seat hung from the central beam by chains.

Hanging from one of the chains were a drum and a horn. The old gentleman, whose

name was Nagaratnaswami, though he was usually known as the Kurruttu Paradeshi

(meaning a blind wanderer) or the Mottu Paradeshi (a wanderer living on a

mound), used generally to sit on that swing-like seat. For food, the old woman

would spread his leaf on the floor, as she did mine also. For bathing, he would

sit outside and pour water over himself with one hand while he rubbed himself

with the other. The water-pots used while I was there were very small, as there

was quite a drought at the time.

When I arrived, some villagers were digging a deep well for him – really a large

hole in the ground, a pit, perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter, slightly

narrowing as one descended the circular pathway cut in the side. Several men

dug, while women carried up baskets of earth. In the afternoon we went out to

this well. My arrival had been very auspicious; water had just been struck in

one corner of the excavation! So nothing would satisfy the Paradeshi [168] but

that I should be the first to bathe there, while he and the workpeople and a few

young men who had come up from the village to satisfy their curiosity, sat on

the pathways on the shady side of the pit, which was opposite to the little hole

of extra depth, perhaps six feet in diameter, where the water had been found.

Wearing a single loin cloth, I got down into the yellow clayey water, splashed

about in it and then sat on the side of the hole. It was while I was sitting

there that frogs began to appear – any number of them and of various sizes.

Their inevitable appearance on such occasions is almost as much a mystery as

many of the occult happenings in India. Although blind, the old gentleman

laughed heartily when the frogs began to jump on me, and called out with

increased amusement when one of them got itself entangled in my cloth.

I did not mind the contact at all. I had always liked frogs. They had been

frequent visitors, almost residents, in my room in the quadrangle. There, in the

nights, various kinds of flying things would come in, seeking the light; then

lizards would come out of their corners and frogs would hop in from outside,

seeking the flying creatures which would fall from the lamp or cluster on the

shining parts of the white-washed walls. Most people used to chase the frogs

away from their rooms, for they feared that snakes would follow the frogs, as

they sometimes did, though in several years only about half a dozen ever came

into my room. Once I killed a snake which was on the windowsill, by slamming the

shutter so as to trap it and then beating it with a stick. Never again! I

thought the sight of that unhappy snake would follow me to my dying day. Two or

three times a snake glided past my foot while I was sitting, once actually

touching it; but under such circumstances I think they are quite harmless, as

they are not aggressive. The numerous cases of snake-bite in India are due to

accidents. A villager, working in a field or walking along a path or a lane,

happens to tread on one of them.

Only once I was in such danger. I had gone to my bathroom in the night. There

was bright moonlight outside – such as I have seen only in India; one could read

by its light, and could see the colours of the leaves and flowers. Moonlight can

give colour when there is enough of it. But in the bathroom there was only a

glimmer of light coming [169] through the slats of a venetian window not

perfectly closed. I put my hand out to open the venetians a little further, and

rested it quite firmly, though gently, as it fortunately happened, on a snake

which was lying along the cross-piece in the middle of the shutter. I felt it,

of course – very nice to touch, smooth, cool and not damp. It moved very

slightly. I withdrew my hand gently, went back to my room, returned with a lamp,

and threw water from a tin dipper at the snake until it took the hint to depart

and slipped away between the partially open slats. The student in whom I was

interested also once had a very narrow escape. He was going to take dinner with

the English Sub-Collector and his wife and had dressed himself in European

clothes for the occasion, and was wearing boots. That was lucky for him as going

along the drive he happened to tread on a snake. But I was talking about frogs

in the new well at Tiruvallam.

While we were sitting in the pit the Paradeshi kept up a running commentary of

remarks, of which I have kept some notes. “Wood has come here because he is my

brother. I understand him when he speaks English. He was a king at Hastinapura

about eight hundred years ago, and I was his son. He was then named Dharmaraja.

His subtle body looks like glass, without any dust; yours are full of dust. He

is all gold. I am having this well dug for him. I knew him even before his

birth. The northern people worship a white Krishna. Colour of skin depends upon

climate. There are only four real spiritual gurus (teachers or guides) in the

world. Etc.”

These remarks were spoken in Tamil and translated to me by a young man from the

village who happened to know English.

I stayed in that cottage simply waiting to see what would happen. Sometimes the

young man knowing English would come up and then there would be conversation.

One day I happened to say some words of sympathy which drew forth an explanation

of the old gentleman’s cheerfulness, which was constant, notwithstanding the

inconvenience of his poverty and blindness. He laughed at me and said that my

sympathy was wasted, for he was a very happy man. He said that he knew the

reason for his blindness and poverty. In the past life which he had mentioned,

although I had been a good man he, succeeding to my power and wealth, had been

extremely selfish and had used his position [170] to do injury to people whom he

disliked. His present difficulties were the outcome of those injuries done to

others. But it had all turned to good. The villagers round about had been very

kind to him and that was a happiness beyond anything that material wealth could

give. He had come to learn to love others. If he had gone on as a rich man he

did not think that he would have changed his nature voluntarily, but the law of

karma had taught him.

§3

One afternoon, when I was alone with him, except for the old woman hovering in

the background over some household task, the Paradeshi motioned to me to sit on

the threshold of the front door. I sat sideways, half inside and half outside

the door. He then established himself more carefully than usual, cross-legged on

his swinging seat, facing the door. For perhaps half an hour he chanted verses,

softly at first and then in an increasingly loud voice, while I sat wondering at

this unusual procedure. Suddenly the verses came to a halt. He unhooked the drum

and beat upon it with increasing force for a few minutes. Then he put the drum

aside, took up the horn and blew upon it a long loud blast. At that moment rain

began to fall, at first large heavy drops, like pennies – as the children used

to say in England – then faster and faster until there was a steady shower,

which must have lasted from five to ten minutes. Abruptly it ceased and the sun

was shining as brazenly as before. The shower appeared to have covered a large

field at least. I went out. Women had come from various cottages some way off,

and were filling little pots with water from the various holes in the stony

ground.

Another afternoon as I was lying on my mat spread on the earthen floor of the

cottage, waiting for the heat of the day to pass, I had a striking vision. Up

above me, at some little distance in a sloping direction, I saw the form of a

young man of most serene and yet most positive aspect, looking towards me. He

stood in an aura of what I can call only blue lightning. I cannot describe the

impression of power that it gave to me. I thought this might have been the

teacher Nanjunda, he whom Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater called variously the

World Teacher – a translation of the term Jagatguru used in Hindu scriptures –

the [171] Lord Maitreya – the teacher to be successor to the Lord Buddha in

Buddhist tradition – and the Christ. When I got back to Adyar and told this to

Mr. Leadbeater, however, he did not agree with that idea, but referred me to a

description of another Master whom he called the Lord of the World.

Towards the end of the week the Paradeshi told me that he wanted me to stay

there and take up the work that he had been doing for many years, so that he

could retire from his old body. I asked him if that was the Master’s wish. A bit

huffily he told me that it was his own wish. There were, he said, certain

Bhairavas there – exactly what he meant I do not know – and he had to look after

them. He was responsible in some way for quite a large territory. Would I stay

and take over the job and release him? I did not understand the situation very

clearly. I was not satisfied that the interpreter was correctly explaining what

he said. I told the old gentleman that I would go back to Adyar and come again

with a friend.

I persuaded Subrahmanyam to accompany me on my third visit to the Paradeshi,

though he could spare only a single day. Then I elicited the information that he

had not told Narayanaswami and others that he was the Master of the Master known

to Theosophists as the Master of Mme Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott. They had

misunderstood him; what he had said was that that Master was his own Master. The

same Master, he said, was my Master. In that way we were brothers. According to

him the name of our Master was Sitaram Bhavaji. That teacher had come to the

south many years before. He had visited a temple standing in the river bed not

far away. The Paradeshi had met him then, had become his disciple, and had

afterwards seen him and been instructed by him clairvoyantly. That Master used

to travel occasionally. He had been to England about the year 1850. Working with

him there was a Kashmiri Master, a younger man, who had been educated at Oxford.

There was also a greater Master living in the mountains north of Tiruvallam, who

was very rarely seen. Mme Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott had both visited the

Paradeshi. They had “dragged him out of his obscurity,” and it was Colonel

Olcott who had taught him to smoke cigars. I explained to him that nothing but

the Master’s direct wish could induce me to give up my present work; that I was

sorry to leave him but it simply had to be. [172]

When I told Narayanaswami and the other friends who had been with him on his

first visit to Tiruvallam that the Paradeshi had explained to me that he was not

the Master of Sitaram Bhavaji, but that Sitaram Bhavaji was his Master, they

insisted that the mistake must be mine, and continued in their conviction that

they had met the great Master himself.

More then twenty years afterwards, in both 1933 and 1934, I happened to pass

that way by motor-car. I found that the Paradeshi had died in the interval, and

that some devotees had built a shrine beside the old cottage, now tumbled down,

and were worshipping there the sandals, staff, drinking-pot and other small

articles which had been used by him when alive. Sic transit gloria mundi. (Much

the same was to be done to Mrs. Besant later on.) But I saw no trace of any

successor who might be directing the “Bhairavas” in that somewhat desolate spot.

[173]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VIII

TEACHING

§1

It seemed as if I had settled down permanently into my new life in India, which

was divided between two occupations – literary work and occasional lecture

tours. Within two years I had helped Mr. Leadbeater to produce seven books and

very many articles. I had produced four books of my own, and I had travelled

fifteen thousand miles in India, visited about seventy towns, delivered three

hundred public lectures and given two hundred talks to Theosophists. I had

ranged from Colombo to Calcutta, from Calcutta to Delhi, from Madras to Bombay

and Kathiawar and back again. I had seen India in many aspects. I had lived in

palaces and in hovels. I had slept also on verandas, under trees, in caves and

temples, and once on a flagstone over an open drain.

I did not suspect that all this was to change and that I was to go to school

again.

Going to school had been one of my worst nightmares during my youth. I had

visited many schools and lectured in them during my travels, and thought that

the Indian high-schools were far superior to anything of the kind I had seen in

England, except my Municipal School of Technology, which was really of

Collegiate grade, preparing students for degrees. But I had never thought of

going to school again. Yet I did, in an old-established high-school, in the

capacity of Headmaster.

It was Mrs. Besant’s doing. She had visited the birthplace of Krishnamurti,

Madanapalle, a little town of some ten thousand people, situated in an out of

the way part of the Telugu country, but on high land, about 2500 feet above sea

level, cool, healthy, old-fashioned, and beautified by its [174] situation

within a circle of mountains, some of which stood up as large monoliths in a

sky-line of rugged shapes – in some parts like the battlements of a castle, with

which the sunset could play artist with great effect, while cool evening

air-currents soothed the skin with softest touch.

Mrs. Besant had received a tremendous ovation at Madanapalle and in the

neighbouring railway stations on the way. The local Theosophists had most

efficiently spread the news of her coming. Never before had thousands of women

thus crowded to greet a visitor, women of all classes – the delicate rose-leaf

women semi-secluded in the homes of the well-to-do, the work-worn women of the

labouring classes-some but children, others withered to an unbelievable degree –

most of them full of humble wonder, yet a few of the female sergeant-majors who

govern with a rod of iron the big joint families of moderate means, all of them

expectant of blessings and better fortune from the mere sight of the holy woman

from the West, who had made her home in India from love of India, from

admiration of India’s ancient heroes and India’s religious thought.

While in Madanapalle, Mrs. Besant learned that there was an old high-school

managed by gentlemen of the town with funds subscribed by themselves and

collected from their friends. The school was on the verge of collapse. It could

not afford modern buildings and the latest equipment. The missionaries were

bringing money from America for a new high-school of their own. Government would

give their Recognition to that school and close the Indian school because the

missionaries could win in the race for better buildings and equipment, and two

high-schools could not be permitted to exist in such a small town, on account of

the danger to discipline and economic stability involved in their competition.

Mrs. Besant, come to our aid! Mother, save our school! You, the foundress of the

great Central Hindu College of Benares, extend your help to the old school in

the birthplace of Krishnamurti, the school which surrounds the boys, the future

townsmen, with thoughts of their own ancient cultures, of their own religious

ideals, the school which can save them from the necessity of singing Christian

hymns and perhaps even learning portions of the Bible – for though that might

not be compulsory did not everybody think, be it right or wrong, that the

student who gave [175] pleasure to his teachers in their prime object of

spreading their form of religion would be favoured in marks and in promotions,

even if only unconsciously?

The Mother went back to Madras. She thought it over. She decided to save. She

promised the school a good monthly donation and she asked me if I would go there

as Headmaster. Of course I would go; anything in her service. That is, if the

Government would allow it, for they required Headmasters to have university

degrees and also a degree in teaching and I had not troubled to take my degree,

not thinking of such an eventuality, though I had done the necessary studies.

Mr. Leadbeater added his enthusiastic support. Madanapalle was to be a centre of

enormous pilgrimage in the future, as the birthplace of the great Teacher, to be

looked back upon with reverence after he had come and gone. It would be well

that we should keep a hand on the public institutions, especially in education,

which the Teacher would probably reform.

§2

I became busy immediately, collected about ten thousand rupees (£700) in a few

days by canvassing the matter among Mrs. Besant’s and Krishnamurti’s friends,

took myself off to Madanapalle, and started to build and to teach. I had already

done a bit of designing of buildings in England, before my father and I had

pitched upon the final plan of the house and office which we built there. As to

teaching I had seen it at its best in my beloved Technical School. I had studied

the little tricks of the mind thoroughly. I had done a certain amount of private

tuition, and I was accustomed to speaking and lecturing and never at a loss for

a word.

I first designed and built what was called the Krishnamurti Institute of

Science, a school laboratory 69 feet by 18 feet, adapted to both chemistry and

physics, with a tank, water-pipes and drainage system, benches built of

reinforced concrete, and a demonstration table and gallery system for lectures

constructed in the same material. I also invented a mechanical black-board – or

green-board rather, for it was dark green in colour – which could change

position and turn on a vertical axis, so that the teacher might at his

convenience swing it away from the wall to which it was [176] attached, nearer

to himself and the students, and also make use of both sides. This board was not

a success, because no one would treat it gently enough, and the supporting rods

and joints would bend. But the laboratory was pronounced the newest thing of its

kind in sight for teaching science in high-schools, and the Government Inspector

had full drawings and specifications made from it for circulation as models to

all schools within his circle.

The Inspector came within two months of my starting work. He was a man who took

his work seriously and pressed hard for the last point of efficiency. I

sympathized very much with the teachers, for he drove them nearly frantic with

his criticisms. I had to teach four classes before him, and had the satisfaction

of hearing afterwards that he had spoken of me as the best teacher he had ever

seen. On his report the Department of Public Instruction issued a notice that I

was approved as Headmaster, and so I was regularly installed in my new

profession, from which, however, I received no money, for I felt that I could

not draw what was nominally mine, on account of the condition of the school and

also because I had notions of still being a sannyasi.

I do not say that the Inspector’s criticisms were unjustified. The teaching was

often peculiar. But what would you in a profession that was ill-paid, and was

often the last resort of men who had failed to become advocates or the first

resort of those who intended to become advocates.

In the teacher’s training colleges they had by then learned the question method

of keeping the attention of the class on the subject-matter. Sometimes it turned

out like this:

Teacher: “Now – er – hrrmm – (andante) Queen Elizabeth was very fond of the Earl

of Leicester – (crescendo) who was Queen Elizabeth fond of? – WHO? – YOU

(pointing to some luckless sleepyhead in the fourth row) – urrh (staccato)

Queen– Elizabeth– was-fond-of-the-Earl-of-Leicester-now, Queen Elizabeth was

fond of WHOM – (catching sight of another sleepyhead in the third row and

pointing an accusing finger) YOU, Duraiswami, what was I saying? – No, no –

Queen – Elizabeth – was – fond – of – the – Earl – of Leicester – of whom was

Queen Elizabeth fond? – (no reply) – Come, come! Queen Elizabeth was fond of –

(waits as though for a voice from the ether).” At last a thin voice [177] rises

– “The Earl of Leicester, sir.” (Beaming smiles) “Right.” (The teacher turns to

the black-board, writes the word Leicester, points to the letters, and

pronounces) “Yell-yee-yi-see-yee-ess-tee-yee-arrrr – Leicester. Now (turning to

the class) – Who was it who was fond of the Earl of Leicester?” – and so on. I

have heard the questioning degenerate into: “Now, who said WHAT?”

All this shouting was bad for the students’ manners. He often shouted afterwards

in private conversation. Some of the boys quite excusably thought that these

were our English manners. Once a gentleman was telling me something in which I

was not much interested. Suddenly his finger shot out at me, followed by the

loud interjection “What was I saying?” He must have seen a wandering expression

in my eyes and involuntarily taken the regular steps to remove it.

§3

Following the laboratory I built a hall and then a large dormitory, and then

bought some adjacent bungalows and fields. The school began to flourish. It

could not now be closed. The missionaries were allowed to have their high-school

as well, but it did not prosper, and after a few years they reduced it to lower

status. Attracted by the new management, boarders began to come from other parts

of the country.

In the beginning we arranged to board and lodge the boys for about ten shillings

a month each. I had one keen disappointment in connection with this. I had

arranged with several farmers to give us bags of rice free. But the boys refused

to eat their own country rice. They were not working people, to eat village

rice! They must have the large-grained polished rice from Nellore, about two

hundred miles away. In vain I explained that the unpolished rice was far better

food then the polished. That did not matter. It was a question of dignity.

No dignity would have been involved in receiving the rice for nothing. According

to Hindu tradition the student quite properly expects householders to give food

and even lodging when necessary. Poor students were wandering everywhere, asking

for their school fees – which amounted to about six shillings a month in the

high-school classes [178] during the working months. We were allowed to admit

only a small proportion of free boys into the school; if we accepted any beyond

that number we should have had about half the school fees that were prescribed

deducted from our teaching grant, which might easily have been reduced to zero

by this method. This was only one of the ways in which something of a clash

occurred between the modern and the ancient methods. In the old elementary

schools of the country it would have been a great insult to offer money to the

schoolmaster.

The situation troubled me, as I considered the modern school fees economically

unsound. There was a gentleman I knew – to give one example – who was a clerk in

Government service with a salary of sixty rupees a month. He was considered to

have done well in attaining this position, which had become possible for him

only because in his youth he had passed the matriculation examination of the

Madras University, which was also the passport to Government clerkship at thirty

rupees a month, from which one could rise by diligence to sixty rupees in middle

age. He lived in a small town where there was no high-school. He had three sons,

and wished that they should all rise to his own level in the world. This meant

that they had to go to a high-school for at least three years before school

leaving or matriculation, because there was no admission to the examinations by

private study but only through recognized high-schools. The cost per month of

sending one son to high-school was somewhat as follows: Fees, Rs. 4; books, Rs.

2; hostel charges, Rs. 12; railway fares, etc., Rs. 2. The cost of educating

three sons at this rate would consume the whole of his salary, leaving him

nothing on which to maintain himself and his wife and two daughters. But he

would send his sons to school and borrow money at ruinous interest for himself

and the rest of the family for the time being, and the sons would help to face

the debt later on, until the appearance of their own sons brought new problems

for them.

The old idea was that all boys could come to the school, and each should bring

on festival occasions whatever presents the father thought fit to send to the

teacher, which were regarded as tokens of esteem and not as payment. I knew one

school that was going on in this way until the village elders decided that they

would like to make it more [179] modern, with the help of Government grant. The

Government officers maintained that the teacher would act unfairly under the old

system, giving his best attention to the boys who brought the best presents. I

do not know whether this was the case, but I do know that two years after the

change there was no school at all, for it had not been possible to find cash for

the teachers’ salary regularly, little as it had been.

Besides science, I emphasized Sanskrit among the optional subjects for study. I

held it to be one of the best things in life that the students should grow up

able to read the Bhagavad Gita in its original language. I induced no less than

sixty students to adopt it as their third language – English being the first,

Telugu, their mother-tongue, the second.

This enthusiasm of mine was to meet with an unexpected reward. One morning when

we were in assembly at the opening of school, some strange gentlemen entered the

hall and mounted the platform. Before I knew what was to happen, one of them had

thrown a red shawl over my shoulders and was addressing the assembly in their

own language. He was the Head of one of the great monasteries of South India –

Shri Jagat Guru Shankara Charya Swami of Shri Shringeri Shivaganga Samasthanam,

Mysore Province – an Archbishop, so to say, of Hinduism. He was praising me and

bestowing upon me the title of Sattwikagraganya, and stating that if I would

come to the monastery he would admit me to worship at their shrine – an honour

never before extended to a European. The title itself, I blush to relate, being

an Englishman, means: “Foremost among those who are pure.” It was intended to be

a tribute to my well-known simplicity of life.

Strange that the simplicity which won golden opinions from the Hindus should be

a matter of contemptuous amusement to many Europeans. I remember an occasion

when I was introduced to two charming young ladies of fashion (the somewhat

unnatural fashions of those days, by the way) who were quite unable to surpress

their giggles at my beard and my country clothes. I am bound to say, however,

that the high Government officers whom I met – Collectors, District Judges and

others – never showed a trace of risibility, and were always ready to appreciate

and encourage the work that was being done. [180]

I had the honour, too, of being the man to start the first Boy Scout Troop for

Indian boys. Scouting was already in motion among European and Anglo-Indians. I

thought it would be good for Indians also. I obtained a copy of Baden-Powell’s

Scouting for Boys, gave it to one of the teachers and induced him to carry on as

well as he could. This work was very inexpert at first, but later we obtained a

trained Scoutmaster, Mr. Aryaratna, from Ceylon, and he in turn taught others,

including Mr. Ratnasabhapati, who now plays a big part in South Indian Scouting.

I was never good at Scouting, but I had been a father to it, and years

afterwards when the Indian Boy Scout movement was fully organized they made me

Scout Commissioner for the Province of Sind, and offered me a position on the

Scout Council of the Governor of Bombay.

§4

When vacation came I had to go collecting. Much money was needed for both the

maintenance and the improvement of the school. One of the first things I

collected was a living tiger – one of the largest and finest I have ever seen.

Really it was a present to myself, but I dedicated it, as it were, to the cause.

What would that magnificent animal have thought if it could have known that it

was dedicated to the education of a lot of moth-eaten human beings, miserable

spavined objects at the best! I was paying a visit to a Raja who lived about

seventeen miles away from the school, in the midst of tiger country. He had at

that time in his permanent cages two splendid tigers caught by himself. I

admired them. Beware how you admire anything that belongs to an old-fashioned

Indian gentleman! In a moment one of them was presented to me. I accepted the

beautiful beast with many thanks and requested him to keep it for me until I

could have a travelling cage made for it. When next in Bombay some months later

I went to see the Superintendent of the Victoria Gardens, and got an offer of

one thousand rupees for my tiger, provided it should come up to the standard of

my description of it on its being delivered.

But I lost my tiger as easily as I had obtained it. It appeared that another

Raja visited my Raja, and he admired my tiger very much. My Raja was sure that I

[181] would have given my tiger to the other Raja if I had been there to see how

much he admired it, and so he gave it to him by deputy. And the new recipient

was wise enough to remove it to his own gardens without delay.

I never owned another tiger, though I have been near enough to them. On one

occasion when I was staying with the Maharaja of Alwar (I cannot always mention

names, but it is permissible in this case) he took me for a walk one afternoon

in his gardens. As we were strolling across a large lawn or grassy field, I

became aware of two tigers a little way off. I was a trifle nervous about them,

but I thought I had better preserve a calm exterior. As we drew near it became

evident that there was a wide, deep, circular trench around the plot occupied by

the tigers. It was the first time I had seen that mode of keeping animals in

captivity.

I think the animals, if such they can be called, which I really feared, were the

white ants, not that they could harm me, but they could destroy my good works.

They made my building operations very costly. Practically the only wood which

they did not eat was Burma teak. For most of our woodwork we had to use this

imported timber. I tried various woods from Malabar, especially the irul or

ironwood, which was so hard to work that it injured the workmen’s tools, and

only the stoutest nails could be driven into it. Still, the white ants would get

even into that wherever a little crack or split appeared, though they could not

eat it all away as they did most kinds of wood.

One of my students learned to have quite a fear of the common black ants which I

used to welcome to my room with small offerings of sugar, because they kept the

white ants away. The student had ear-ache, so I poured into his ear a little

olive oil and told him to lie down and rest. After some time I was startled by a

loud yell from the student. He had awakened with a procession of ants going into

his ear!

Sometimes there would be battles between the black and the white forces, when

the white trenches had become broken open by some chance. It was, so to speak, a

hand-to-hand conflict. A black ant would grab hold of a white one and they would

wrestle, rolling over on the ground until at last the white one was paralysed or

killed and carried away. In these encounters no white ant ever won or escaped.

[182]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER IX

THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT EAT

§1

My collection and lecture tours brought me many interesting experiences. On one

occasion I stepped out of my way to take a bath with at least one hundred

thousand other people. It was the occasion of the great twelfth-year festival

called Pushkaram, at Bezwada, near the East coast. It was estimated that two

million persons were there, but I doubt if more than a hundred thousand were

able to get into the water of the river Krishna at anyone time. It was a strange

experience to be one of such an enormous mass of people all intent upon one

object. There was a Brahmin priest there who threw to the winds his caste

restrictions, and recited for me all the necessary verses and did the other

performances proper to the occasion.

It was at that time that I slept one dark night in one of the Kondapalle caves,

beside an ancient reclining figure of the Buddha cut in the rock. Unfortunately,

I and the friend who accompanied me had both forgotten to provide ourselves with

any means of procuring a light, so we had to lie ourselves down at the approach

of darkness and stay where we were until dawn.

At Buddha Gaya, in the north, I slept under the bo tree which stands now on the

spot where grew the tree under which Buddha attained illumination two thousand

five hundred years ago. The present tree is said to have grown from a slip taken

from the old one. The occasion was a little marred for me by the kindness of the

Head of the neighbouring monastery, the Mahant who had charge of the temple and

the grounds containing the tree, which stands up against the temple in its rear.

He sent out for my use a nice mattress, thereby taking away some of the [183]

romance of my experience and introducing “magnetism” foreign to that which I was

seeking at the time.

I gathered many fallen leaves from the tree – it is not permitted to take leaves

from the branches – and afterwards presented them to friends.

I spent some time in the monastery. The Mahant showed me some yantras or

diagrams used in yoga practices, and we discussed them, though I do not think

either of us could enlighten the other very much. I admired his collection of

camels and elephants – I have always had a special attraction for those two

animals – but after my experience with the tiger I took care to keep my

admiration of them to myself.

As time went on I took more and more opportunities to go out on collection work.

I would wander for days in the main streets of the large cities, calling on all

the lawyers and big merchants, and sometimes for weeks together in the most

remote villages, travelling chiefly by bullock cart at the rate of perhaps two

miles an hour, huddled under the round top of the cart, with a cloth tied in the

opening at the back to keep out the heat of the sun, which struck up from the

hot sand of the rutty lanes. Often during those hot hours the driver would be

dozing at the front of the cart, while the bulls quietly found their own way.

Sometimes we would cross large rivers, the cart immersed to the axle or even to

the floor-boards just above it – on a few occasions the cart slightly floating,

myself partly walking, partly swimming behind.

I have never met such reckless people as the Indians in the face of common

dangers, yet most of them shudder at the sight of blood. I have seen boatloads

of them crossing a flood which had swept away a modern railway bridge. The

passengers sat quietly while two men paddled like mad in the turbulent waters,

which at last they crossed safely, after being carried about two miles down

stream. In many of the towns there were pony carts which the drivers urged along

with the most hair-raising speed over rough and sloping roads, sometimes on one

wheel, sometimes on the other, sometimes racing one another on narrow

embankments with steep slopes and a possible fall into water on either side.

I have been in several nasty accidents with these carts. Once in Madras I was

bowling along in one of these light vehicles. An electric tramcar was coming in

the opposite direction and there was not room to pass on account of [184] heaps

of road metal blocking the way. Neither my pony driver nor the driver of the

tramcar was willing to yield place. As they approached head – on my man at the

last moment tried to run over a heap of road metal. Pony and cart were thrown

over headlong in front of the tram, the ironwork of which burst through the

covering of the cart, while I was thrown about inside like a pea in a drum –

relatively rather a large pea, or rather a small drum. However, I suffered no

more than some bruises and a few knocks on the head, and after a heated

discussion between the two drivers we all went our respective ways, I walking

the rest of my journey. I was then nearer to real injury than I had been on a

former occasion in an electric tramcar in England when it leapt the rails,

performed a perfect quadrant, crossed the footpath and finally landed against a

garden wall, fortunately without capsizing. I had another similar accident in

Calicut when one of the wheels of a rickshaw in which I was riding suddenly made

a little excursion on its own account.

§2

But it was in the north of India that I really nearly lost my life, and in quite

a different way. In a certain large state of Rajputana (which must be nameless)

I undertook at the request of the Maharaja to investigate the case of an old

woman who was reputed to have lived entirely without food for over thirty years.

The old lady was quite willing that the investigation should take place. There

had been a previous investigation at the instance of the then Maharaja’s father,

but its lack of strictness had left possible loopholes for eating in secret.

I first met the old lady in the palace garden. She sat on a white cloth under a

tree near the road. Her hair was black, with a little grey, and shaved for some

space at the front. On her forehead were drawn three vertical lines – two white

lines, with a red one between them – bent at the bottom to meet at the root of

the nose. Such shaving and signs are usually confined to men, but she wore them

on account of her peculiar holiness. For clothing she wore a pale yellow

flowered lower cloth and a thin white shirt. She carried a little red cloth bag,

a red fancy cloth, a white sheet and a little round fan. [185]

I told her that the Maharaja had sent me for me to investigate and report upon

her case. She assented, and then in answer to questions said:

“It is about thirty years since I took food. I became a widow at the age of six.

My mother-in-law and other family members told me that I must not sit and read

The Thousand Names of Vishnu, as I was fond of doing, but I must go out into the

forest and bring back fuel, being a woman of a poor house.

“One day in the forest there appeared before me a boy who looked about five

years old. He had a light complexion, a mukat of hair, four arms and a cloth of

bright yellow colour, and on his forehead a tilak mark. He wore no ornaments. It

was Shri Krishna. He spoke to me:

“ ‘Why do you come here? You had better spend your time worshipping me.’

“ ‘But how can I spend my time in worship, if I have no food?’ I replied.

“The boy simply gave me a rosary and told me to worship, and said: ‘From this

day on you need not eat. Take this rosary and think of me.’

“The boy did not walk away. He simply vanished. All this happened in a thick

forest about two miles away from my late husband’s house and eighty miles from

here. After that I went and sat under a peepul tree, about thirty yards from the

house, and I remained there for three years without food.

“My relatives and everyone in the village came and asked me to take food, but I

did not. They said I would die, but I did not. After three weeks they told the

inspector of police, and he informed the Raja. The Raja ordered an observation

for forty days under the inspector’s supervision. If I did not eat, he said, he

himself would see me. So the inspector made a fence round me with bamboo and

other materials, so that no one could enter, and he kept me there for forty days

without food. Then the Raja came to see me. He built a house for me and provided

for all my needs. That was a house with arches in front, about twenty-four miles

from here. The tree is still where it was, but the house has fallen down. Now I

live in an old temple which was restored by the Maharaja and given for my use.”

Sitting near the old lady, whom we will call Mataji, was a boy who looked about

fourteen years old. I took him [186] aside and questioned him. He told me that

they had come by railway that morning at the instance of the Maharaja. He had

never seen Mataji eat, though he had been with her since he was five years old.

Nor had she even drunk water, though she bathed at the well and cleaned her

teeth. She spent most of her time outside the house, turning her beads or

talking with the many people who came to see her. He himself was her sister’s

son. For a long time his mother had had no child, so she had appealed to Mataji

and said: “If a child is born, I will give you the first.” But Mataji had

replied: “Three children will be born to you; keep two and give me the third.”

He was the third son.

The next day I met Mataji again. She sat under the same tree, but had now a

woollen carpet. She told me that she had seen other visions of Shri Krishna

occasionally. In one of them which had occurred only a month and a half

previously, she had seen him sitting with his playmate Radha on a swinging seat,

a Brahmin pulling the rope of the swing, and other people standing by, including

his foster-brother, Baladeva.

“What became of the rosary given to you by Shri Krishna?” I asked.

“It contained one hundred and eight beads. I gave them to the wives of state

officials and others, and have still about twenty or thirty of them at home.”

“Why did Shri Krishna appear to you and not to others?”

“It was his will, and my karma.”

“Why did you come away to your present abode?”

“His late Highness arranged it, because where I was there were many wild beasts

and people were afraid to come and see me. He repaired the old temple and dug a

well for me.”

I was curious to know what she carried in her bag. She smiled tolerantly, amused

at my possible idea that some food might be secreted there, and turned it out

for my inspection. It proved to be quite a modern vanity bag! There were a small

looking-glass, a small wooden comb, a round tin of red powder, some money tied

in a white bag, a little brass spoon, a piece of gopichandran (a substance

looking like chalk), a small piece of dried mud from the Ganges, some thread in

a bit of red cloth, a very small red cloth containing incense, and a small thick

brass disc. [187]

In the afternoon I went with the Maharaja’s private secretary to see an old

palace situated on a peninsula jutting into a lake. It was a beautiful old

building, surrounded on three sides by water, behind which stood a ring of

mountains. It was approachable by only one road and a small path along the edge

of the lake.

The next day we prepared this building for our experiment.

We started at the top, on the roof, and examined the whole building. I padlocked

the doors which closed off each story separately from the stairs. I set a

carpenter to screw up one outer door and a mason to build up another. This left

only one entrance. I padlocked this with a lock of my own and kept the key

myself. The top floor had been originally the women’s quarters. This I assigned

to Mataji and her nephew. The floor next beneath I locked up empty. Underneath

that was the ground floor with a courtyard and the main entrance gate. I

established myself there with an interpreter. Beneath us were servants’

quarters, approachable only from the outside. We had several servants, including

a cook. Outside the gate, barring the approach to the palace, we encamped a

company of infantry, with instructions to allow nobody to pass without orders.

Mataji was admitted to the top floor after she and her belongings had been

searched by a lady doctor from the hospital. The boy was allowed up and down. He

took his meals with the interpreter, but every time he came the door was

unlocked and locked by me and he was searched.

My method was to keep guard and to weigh the old lady every day. I wished also

to make a test – by means of lime water – of the output of carbon dioxide in the

breath, and to keep a record of her temperature and pulse; but these scientific

preparations alarmed her, so I had to be content with a record of daily

weighings. I noticed, however, that she was perspiring freely – a loss of

material which would have to be made up somehow. To see that the weighing

machine remained uniform I weighed on the first day a block of marble (13 1/2

pounds), which I kept in my room and carried up and down the stairs for testing

the machine on each occasion.

On the first day Mataji lost 2 lb. weight; on the second day, 1 lb. In my eyes

fraud was already proved. She breathed and perspired as other people did and so

must be losing weight. One could advance a theory of [188] precipitation of

matter in the body by yoga siddhis or supernormal powers, but that idea was

invalidated by proved loss of weight. Was it likely that the supernormal agency

of Shri Krishna which had sustained her for so many years would be withdrawn at

the moment of this test? No. Day after day Mataji’s weight declined, giving the

following record: July 18th, 1911, 76 17” lb.; 19th, 74 1/2 lb.; 20th, 73 1/2

lb.; 21st, 73 1/2 lb.; 22nd, 73 lb.; 23rd, 72 1/2 lb.; 24th, 71 1/2 lb.; 25th,

71 lb.; 26th, 70 1/2 lb.; 27th, 69 3/4 lb., 28th, 68 1/4 lb.; 29th, 68 lb. Thus

the total loss of weight in eleven days was 8 1/2 lb., an average of over 1 lb.

a day.

By the ninth day the old lady was showing decided signs of weakness. She also

expressed great anxiety for the welfare of her cows at home and declared her

wish to depart. In the evening the Maharaja came and decided to have her taken

home on the following day. So, on the 27th, after we had weighed the old lady,

she was taken to the principal palace garden in a phaeton, in the care of the

lady doctor, and left there with soldiers on guard. After assembling there we

all went by train to the place of her home.

Five minutes’ walk from the railway station brought us to her garden, which

contained a square building – open in the centre, in which at one side there was

a large image. The rest of the garden was occupied by our encampment – a

multitude of tents. On arrival we took every medical care of the old lady. Her

pulse was 82, her temperature under the arm 96. The doctor stated that she was

in good condition except for weakness due to starvation. Her intestines gave a

sound symptomatic of starvation.

When the old lady found that the experiment was to continue in her own grounds,

and that everywhere we had posted three guards, to watch out and to watch one

another, she became very angry and cried out: “I eat! I eat! I eat!”

We knew that she would afterwards tell the wives of the officials and others

whom she was deceiving that she had said that only to get rid of us, so I

informed her that we were ready to pack up and go as soon as we had actually

seen her eat.

In the afternoon of the 29th July, the Aide-de-camp to the Maharaja arrived and

we together interviewed the old lady. She informed us that she had been eating

various kinds of food, to the extent of two to four chataks daily, [189] and she

would now eat in our presence. All being arranged, at nine o’clock we went to

her on the roof of her temple. Her dog was with her. Before her was placed a

metal tray containing some flat cakes, some round balls made of rice-flour and

sugar, and a small basin of milk and rice. She broke up some of the cakes with

her fingers, and threw the pieces to the dog. She ate some of the milk and rice,

and a little of the rice-flour balls, which were soft and crumbly, but the rest

she rejected, saying that her stomach felt very weak after the long fast. During

this meal Mataji looked cheerful, and in the end there was a grin of humour upon

her face as of one who would say: “Well, you have found me out, but I don’t

care.”

For my part, I was glad that the incident was over. But was it?

The next morning we began to strike tents. I had been walking in the garden and

happened to go into my dining-tent, where the cook’s assistants had put some of

the food upon the table. Inside I found the nephew of the old lady prowling

about and looking into the dishes. I rebuked him, told him he had no right to be

there, and sent him away. Shortly afterwards I ate my early lunch. Within a few

minutes I felt dreadfully sick. I went to the door of the tent and vomited a

chalky mass. Then came a raging fever. As I lay on my cot outside the tent, I

saw the old woman dancing on the roof and flinging her arms about in

manifestations of joy. She was calling out something which I did not understand.

Somehow they got me back to the guest-house. I was delirious. Another guest (an

American who had come there to give a course of physical culture to the

Maharaja) found me lying in a bath of cold water in which I had apparently

permanently settled myself for some relief from the fever. He sent at once for

help. The doctor said that someone had given me arsenic, but, fortunately, I

understood, far too much. They nursed me for several days until I was fit to

travel. The Maharaja pressed me to go and stay in Simla at his expense, but I

declined, as I wanted to get back to Madanapalle. He thought it best not to make

the incident public, and I agreed to his wishes, for which reason I now conceal

the name of the State.

At last I went off, with expenses paid and an extra five hundred rupees in my

pocket to be spent upon the school. [190]

§3

The incident put an end to my headmastership after a little time, for the fever

kept coming again and again. I moved about for several months collecting money

for the school. At last I went to get relief in the cool climate of Mussoorie in

the Himalayas, but the fever grew worse in the mountains instead of better,

until one day I was carried unconscious to the cottage hospital, where I had to

stay, a large part of the time unconscious or delirious, for three and a half

months, having had my own weight brought down – a karma perhaps – to less than

that to which the old lady had been reduced. When I could rise it was a long

business learning to walk again. A month after leaving the hospital I managed to

make my way to Benares and then to Adyar, where I hobbled about for a time with

the help of two sticks, until gradually my strength returned.

In the hospital I had had my physical troubles, but they were nothing to the

mental miseries. Delirium can be a very unpleasant experience when it is

somewhat consistent and prolonged. I had some vague liking for the European

surgeon when he called, but I was quite convinced that the assistant surgeon was

deliberately inoculating me with some foul substance to keep me weak. The point

was that I was rightfully a Raja, but I was being kept in secret confinement to

prevent me from claiming my own. I used to contrive by bribery – so I thought –

to obtain a sword and secrete it under the bed-clothes, and I would wait my

opportunity to spring out of bed and lay low everybody who might try to bar my

path to escape. I was always losing my sword and getting a new one by further

scheming.

Day and night nurses were watching in turn, and they, being in the pay of the

villainous pseudo-doctor, were always ready to push me on my back whenever I

attempted to rise. They were powerful young women. Indeed they seemed to have

positively superhuman strength. One night I actually sprang, but got my feet

entangled in the bed clothes. I was fortunately caught in the arms of the nurse

before I hit the floor. But the nurses – such nice girls – could not be really

bad! They had been misled by the villain. Sometimes I tried to bribe them with

promises of large sums of money and high position, and they agreed to help me,

[191] but when the time for action came they always failed me in one way or

another, greatly to my disappointment. They bore my reproaches, made their

excuses, and were forgiven on promising to do better next time.

On one occasion it seemed to me that my father and mother visited the hospital,

but the devilish doctor had drugged me and thus driven me to desperate wildness,

so that, although they stood and looked at me, they failed to recognize me and

passed on, while I shouted to them in vain. This was the most distressing thing

of all.

I had a great hunger. I was being systematically starved! Several times I

thought I got out in my astral body and went to a large neighbouring room, a

dining-room full of little tables laden with food, prepared for a large number

of people – the very people who had captured me – who were about to be called to

their meal. Quickly I went from one table to another and ate everything, and

laughed with unholy glee at the consternation of the people when they came in

and found nothing to eat!

There were not many such items of enjoyment! There were mostly troubles and

anxieties. There were, for example, my children. Somehow I had given birth to

about twenty young living things, more or less in the nature of lizards. When I

heard anyone coming I would tie them up like bundles of firewood and push them

down under the clothes near to my feet, full of anxiety lest some of them be

suffocated, as was the case!

Once, I remember, I gave up the struggle. I wandered away into a rocky region

above the sea. I settled myself to die (I wonder if animals die deliberately and

happily, like that?) in a depression in the rock; I was comfortably swooning

away, dreaming of something indefinite but quite pleasant, when the two nurses

appeared on the scene, caught hold of me and called me by name, saying they

wanted me back. I resisted them. I complained: “Why do you trouble me, why do

you trouble me? Can’t you see that I am dead?” But they continued to trouble me,

and they lifted me and brought me back, and I liked the warmth of their hands,

for I felt cold. I learned afterwards that that had been a critical time, and

that I had actually shouted out those words.

It was after about two months (I see by my diary) that one day I opened my eyes

and my head was quite clear. [192]

One of the nurses was bending over me. “Be still,” she said, “You have been very

ill.”

I looked at her in astonishment. “Well,” I said reproachfully, “Why did not you

tell me so before, instead of all those lies?”

“We did,” she said, “but you did not understand.” After this moment of

brightness my senses seemed to leave me completely, and it was only very

gradually that I recovered the ability to see, to hear, and to speak. For some

time the nurses had to write anything they wanted to say because I could not

hear, though I could faintly see. The return of the senses was accompanied with

much pain, the slightest sound and the light from the windows being very trying.

As I was getting better I was very much troubled, and I think set back, by a

person called “the Deaconess,” who used to call two or three times a week and

would insist on trying to convert me to her orthodoxy, which she wanted to do

not by theological arguments, but by abusing my friends, particularly Mme

Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant.

I will record here two visions of the type that I had seen several times before,

which occurred while I was still in hospital. In one of them I found myself on a

gently sloping hill-side, looking upwards. I saw before me a figure like one of

the Masters, but with reddish hair and beard. Near him were standing the Master

whom I had frequently seen and another, called by the old gentleman of

Tiruvallam “the Kashmiri.” I saw the central figure, whom I then took to be the

coming Teacher, raise his hand, and from him there came a wave of love, not seen

but felt, which caused even the grass and little bushes to rise and expand for a

moment visibly. The effect upon me was that I stepped back a pace with one foot

and exclaimed to myself: “I have never before known what love is.” The other

vision of this kind occurred shortly afterwards. The Master asked me to go with

him somewhere and as I stood before him along with another person he enveloped

us both in his aura in some way, and it gave a sensation of great freedom and

rippling joy of life which one felt must be his normal condition.

I am not assuming that these visions had a true foundation, but am merely

recording that they occurred as of a quality different from ordinary dreams, on

account of a greater vividness of consciousness and experience which [193] they

seemed to contain. Do all people have such experiences, and take no notice of

them, classifying them as imagination? I remember one philosopher said that the

only difference between people who talk of their visions and those who do not is

that those who do do not realize that those who do not also have the same.

§4

On my way from Mussorie to Madras (in the train, by the way, a big suitcase fell

on to me from the upper berth and nearly sent me back to hospital) I stayed a

few days in Benares with Babu Bhagavan Das. Mrs. Besant was also in Benares. My

beard had come off while I was in the hospital. Now, when I met Mrs. Besant, for

the first moment she did not recognize me, and then she exclaimed: “I like you

much better without your beard.”

Thenceforth, of course, I had to encumber myself with a razor, shaving brush,

shaving soap and a strop, and the beard became only a memory of the past! It was

my first compromise with civilization. We discussed the school at Madanapalle.

Fortunately, a German lady with high qualifications and ability – Dr. Louise

Appell – turned up about this time and was able to relieve me of the work of

Headmaster.

When I arrived at Adyar I was received very cordially by Mr. Leadbeater, and

fell into the work of helping him again. At that time he had taken up once more

his researches into the lives of Krishnamurti, under the star name of Alcyone.

He was writing more of them – further back, as far as 70,000 B.C. – and was

introducing new characters and so enlarging all the genealogical charts.

It seemed strange to me that the people whom Mr. Leadbeater now knew well and

liked were all linked together in families throughout those past lives.

Generally in a life story there were only one or two main families, and nearly

all the persons recognized were born within those families. In the present

incarnation the reverse was the case; the very same people, though nearly all in

the Theosophical Society, had now been born in different families all over the

world. Mr. Leadbeater explained this sudden change by pointing out that the

lives before the present were of a preparatory nature, but in the present life

[194] these characters were scattered all over the world so that their services

would be available in many different countries for the great work of the World

Teacher who was about to appear.

It was the enlargement of the charts by the addition of more characters which

completely undermined my confidence in these psychic perceptions of Mr.

Leadbeater’s. It happened that three boys a few years younger than Krishnamurti

and Nityananda had now come under Mr. Leadbeater’s notice as being of great

promise. Their names were Maung Maung Ji, a Burmese, and Yajneshwara Shastri and

Rajagopalachari, South Indian Brahmans. They were expected to play important

parts in the forthcoming great events, and they were found in the “Lives.”

While looking up these boys Mr. Leadbeater thought it would be interesting to

enter into the charts other people who might probably be identified by close

inspection. He added a number, and a little later decided upon a still further

extension.

“You know a good many people,” he said to me, “who are prominent workers in the

Society and are likely to be in the ‘Lives.’ Could you suggest some names?”

I wrote down thirty or forty names and Mr. Leadbeater himself added another

thirty or forty likely people. With the exception of three or four he found all

these, and they were found to appear regularly throughout the charts.

As the charts were being thus enlarged, it struck me as incongruous, and indeed

improbable to the point of impossibility, that the persons found in the previous

investigations should have intermarried almost fully among themselves, and now

the later lot of people were mostly intermarried with one another. Out of about

three hundred people for example, in a typical chart, divided roughly into two

groups, which we may call earlier and later (the term later meaning the people

selected as I have just mentioned) the approximately 150 marriages would be

about 95 per cent between an earlier and an earlier, or a later and a later, and

only 5 per cent between an earlier and a later, so that the lots picked at

random kept very much to themselves!

A further difficulty was that most of the laters were in a later generation. And

it was a great defect that there were practically no barren marriages – only two

or three [195] cases out of over six thousand marriages – different from what

occurs in any known community in the world. Still a third improbability was that

the characters always married in their own generation, sometimes the oldest

child of an oldest child of an oldest child with a younger child of a younger

child of a younger child. Thus in the cases of large families, according to my

most conservative calculations a frequent difference in age between husband and

wife, would be fifteen years or more, as often as not the lady being the elder.

Not to trust too much to memory, I later analysed and confirmed these figures

from the published book (The Lives of Alcyone), and while doing so was struck by

a further peculiar feature. The above-mentioned percentages apply to standard

charts of the lives of Alcyone, which were completed before the later people

were added. But in other additional lives written at the last moment I found

that the intermarriages between earlier and later are usually increased about

fivefold!

When the number of persons in the “Lives” had grown to over three hundred, the

list was closed, as the investigation was becoming unwieldy. I used to keep a

ledger showing each “star” name and where the character was in relation to

others in all the lives. With this ledger I assisted Mr. Leadbeater to complete

his charts, by informing him of the periods during which a given character might

so far be missing, so that he might be looked up and accounted for throughout

the whole period covered by the investigation. We regarded the use of such a

ledger as quite legitimate for the saving of psychic energy, though it deprived

the “Lives” of any evidential value for those of us who knew the process. This

theory did not disturb me, as I knew the fatigue involved in the work; but with

regard to the conjunctions of the characters in the “Lives” – especially as many

of the new names had been suggested by me – I could not deny to myself the

mathematical impossibilities. Further, what would have happened, I thought, if

someone other than myself had been helping Mr. Leadbeater at that time? Would

other characters have appeared in the places occupied by some of those suggested

by me?

Another question in connection with this arose in my mind, when Mr. Leadbeater

left Adyar and settled in Australia. Then a new set of people swam into his ken

and [196] became prominent people in the Society, and in the preparation for the

coming Teacher. Most of these new people had no place at all in the “Lives.” Why

should the previous three hundred have been born closely together in the

families of the previous lives, and not this newly found group of people, who,

even if the investigation had now continued, could not have been accommodated in

immediate relation-ships?

And suppose that Mr. Leadbeater had had occasion to add the prominent members

whom he met still later on in his work, there could scarcely have been room for

them to intermarry at all with either the earlier or the laters of our lists,

they being all paired off, with very rare exceptions. Further, three-quarters of

the people found in the “Lives” and thus closely intermarried belonged to or

were residing in three countries familiar to Mr. Leadbeater (the British Isles,

the United States and India) and almost all the remaining quarter were in three

other regions well known to him (Australia, Holland and Java, and France); in

connection with this I asked myself whether the thousands of Theosophists in

other countries (Latin America, Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Africa, Central

and Eastern and Southern Europe) belonged to a different “crowd,” or a later

generation – a matter of great improbability. No, I was bound to conclude that

the lives as recorded simply could not be.

There were several small incidents also which drove me towards the same

conclusion. In relating the experiments in thought-transference made in England,

I have already mentioned a lady who was a hundred percent correct in reading our

thoughts. That lady also saw, or thought she saw, past lives. She told me that I

had had a life in Mexico long ago in which I had not married at all. I told all

this to Mr. Leadbeater. One of the series of Alcyone’s Lives was in Mexico, and

when the chart was made up I found myself in it as unmarried. It remained like

that for a long time. At the time of making up the chart Mr. Leadbeater had

laughingly remarked: “I hope that will satisfy you!” It was one of the very rare

cases of anyone remaining unmarried in those past lives. However, at the very

last minute, when the “later” people were added I found that Mr. Leadbeater had

provided me with a wife!

Ten years later, when I was travelling in Brazil, I learned [197] that Lord

Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, was a great hero in the eyes of South

American boys, on account of his wonderful exploits on behalf of Brazil, Chile

and Peru in their struggle to free themselves from the Portuguese and Spanish

yokes. Now, it had happened that prior to the appearance of Krishnamurti on the

scenes, Mr. Leadbeater had been greatly interested in an American boy, and had

written some of his past lives. In those lives two striking public characters

had figured prominently – Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United

States, and a great figure with American boys) and Lord Cochrane. Mr. Leadbeater

had as a boy lived in Brazil, where his father was then a railway contractor,

and he had no doubt shared in the common enthusiastic admiration for the Earl.

At any rate, he used constantly to tell of Lord Cochrane’s exploits in South

America to the American boy I have mentioned and to other boys who then

surrounded him in a group which was broken up in 1906 when some people in

America attacked Mr. Leadbeater’s moral character, as I have already mentioned.

I may take this opportunity to mention that at Adyar Mr. Leadbeater often spoke

to me with sorrow of the way in which that attack upon him had destroyed his

most cherished dream. By careful training of character in an atmosphere of

refinement of mind and body he had hoped to produce a band of people very near

and sensitive to the things of the inner world, a band which would have the

special function of linking together with a perfection never known before that

world and ours and thus leading to a great betterment of humanity. He did not

know when speaking to me that he would shortly have a better opportunity then

ever of establishing such a band in Australia. [198]

 



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER X

HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH –

§1

In the summer of 1913, when I was staying along with Mr. Leadbeater in the lofty

and cool health resort of Kodaikanal, in the Palni Hills, in the south of the

Madras Presidency, for the purposes of a summer school, I received a letter from

Mrs. Besant suggesting that I should help her as Honorary Secretary in a new

educational venture which she called the Theosophical Educational Trust. She

said that she would take up in connection with that the further development of

the Madanapalle school. Would I go over to Madanapalle, study the conditions

there and report to her?

I went, and found that the Madanapalle High-School could probably be developed

into a college affiliated to the University of Madras, but that would mean more

buildings, equipment, staff and endowment. After full discussion we came to a

personal arrangement in the matter. She would undertake to satisfy the

University in the matter of the endowment (no small matter, for they demanded a

fund of about £7000 in the background) if I would find everything else. It was a

long struggle. More collection work and apparently endless negotiations – but

success crowned our efforts and within two years Lord Pentland of Leith, then

Governor of Madras, had come to Madanapalle and formally opened the new College.

One by one other schools were started or came under the banner of the

Theosophical Educational Trust, until we had thirty-seven in all. Some of them I

organized, others already existed. Most of them I had to visit, as I combined

the duties of inspecting officer and collector of funds with those of Secretary

of the Trust, but Mrs. Besant as President [199] was the chief executive officer

of the Trust and to her all plans and ideas were submitted for approval before

being put into effect. The idea of the Trust was not to teach Theosophy, but to

provide a more balanced education, which should awaken the emotions of the

students along social and spiritual lines, and not confine itself to the

intellect as was the prevailing mode.

Early in 1914 Mr. Leadbeater settled in Sydney, where already existed the

biggest Lodge of the Theosophical Society in the world, of which I afterwards

became President for a year. I did not go with him, as my devotion was primarily

with Mrs. Besant and I was now helping her with the educational work.

§2

In 1913 Mrs. Besant began to take an active interest in Indian politics. Early

in 1914 she founded the Home Rule League – daring words “home rule” in those

days. She urged with all her eloquence the immediate establishment in India of

home rule within the Empire, by which she meant Dominion Status somewhat similar

to that enjoyed by Australia or Canada. She had instructions from her occult

sources for this work. She was told that the end would be a great triumph, but

she must take care that the process was not stained with violence. Often she

used to say that she would see home rule before she died.

Apart from sentiment, Mrs. Besant’s view of the political situation was simply

this. Ninety-nine out of every hundred thinking Indians were glad that India

should be a part of the British Empire. That arrangement was conducive to

stability and peace. There was no reason why they should have sentimental

affection towards the British, but they had a feeling of esteem, and they had

common sense. There was then no appreciable desire for separation from the

Empire. But Indians wanted self-government, so that they themselves could

determine such important matters as the development and protection of Indian

trade and the expenditure on education.

Mrs. Besant believed that delay in the grant of Dominion Status would gradually

arouse among the intelligentsia a national feeling, as in Ireland, containing a

powerful element of mistrust and dislike for the British. Twenty years [200]

afterwards those of us who had lived in close touch with educated Indians could

see that her judgment was sound. Hers was a middle policy; many others were

driving to the extremes of repression and rebellion, which could excite each

other to the destruction of all reasonableness.

Opponents to her point of view kept retorting: “But what would happen if the

British army withdrew?” They ignored the fact that it was the British who had

converted India into a disarmed people and had denied to her intellectuals the

military profession, that a moral obligation was involved in the matter, and

that in fact under Dominion Status no sudden departure of the British army and

British military officers would have been contemplated. The opponents also

emphasized the absence of unity of opinion on many subjects in India as a

barrier to political independence, forgetting that in no nation in the world is

there such unity.

Mrs. Besant’s judgment was extremely moderate, and free from any trace of

fanaticism, and was later justified by time and events. There is now a large and

growing body of national feeling surging round the idea of complete independence

for India, which has resulted in a situation which may become embarrassing to

Britain and highly dangerous in India if Britain again finds herself immersed in

serious warfare in other parts of the world.

When the Great War broke out Mrs. Besant used all her influence with Indians to

induce them to help Britain to win. In the political field she vigorously

combated the policy of civil disobedience, and broke with Mr. Gandhi on that

ground. One might resist a particular law, she once told me, in discussing this

point, if one felt that it was unjust, and take the consequences personally, but

she could not see that it was right to break a law as a demonstration of

discontent. That would also leave bad after-effects. But on the other hand India

was not to be patronized. India is the elephant of the Empire:

Give thy dog the merest mouthful, and he crouches at thy feet,

Wags his tail, and fawns, and grovels, in his eagerness to eat;

Bid the elephant be feeding, and the best of fodder bring;

Gravely – after much entreaty – condescends that mighty king.

HITOPADESHA.

A few weeks after Britain had entered the war I was [201] travelling with Mrs.

Besant in the train from Madras to Madanapalle. I had been dreaming about

battles and felt that I ought to do my bit, though detested the idea of doing

bodily injury even to a venomous enemy. I told her in effect: “I don’t want to

leave you, but I think I ought to go.” Her reaction was not flattering: “Huh, a

nice soldier you’d make.”

Of course, she knew about my illness and my frequent fevers, from which,

however, I was free at the moment, and it is highly probable that I should have

broken down in health in a few days under trench conditions. But I must have

looked rather rueful, for she soon broke into a laugh which took the cutting

edge off her remark, and said: “But seriously, there must be a few who do not

go, and with this complicated educational work on hand, which is very important,

I do not see how you can be spared.”

Later, conscription was introduced, the examining doctors put me in the A class,

and after a few months of training in the Madras Guards, with a lot of civilians

who seemed to be keeping their chests where their tummies ought to be, I became

a sapper in the Electrical Company of the Second Garrison Artillery in Madras.

My chief duty was to instruct the company in electrical science, pure and

applied, for which I was selected on account of my knowledge of physics (in

which I had specialized in electricity) and my then position as principal of a

University College. My other duty resolved itself into reclining in a deck chair

at night, looking after the searchlights used in the harbour defence, waiting

for a second Emden, which never came. A commission was offered on condition of

my going to Mesopotamia, but I refused it. Anyhow, I fell ill.

When training in the Madras Guards we used to wear a bayonet at the hip. In my

case it rubbed the sweating body, even through the khaki stuff, so as to cause a

sore, due, I understood afterwards, to a remnant of the poison still lingering

in my body. This developed into a carbuncle and I had a very unpleasant sequence

of two dozen of those inflictions, accompanied by fever. Once the fever ran so

high that I felt the necessity of making my will, and so I sent out and called

in two ladies who were passing by to act as witnesses thereto. Fortunately for

me I was well nursed by my wife and her mother – I had married the little girl I

had known in England – not a child marriage, of [202] course, though something

near to it, according to modern standards!

I must explain that at the outbreak of the war my future wife was in Paris,

being “finished.” The French Government instantly called nearly all the men to

military service, transport was disorganized, and it was several days before the

Government allowed a train for civilians to proceed to the coast. In the immense

crowd and confusion all luggage had to be left on the railway platform, though

it turned up in India three years afterwards. At the gangway of the steamer the

captain stood with a pistol threatening to shoot if any more of the people tried

to get on the boat. In England my future wife’s mother had been told to go to

Egypt for the sake of health, but she had decided on India instead. After an

exciting voyage on the S.S. City of Marseilles, on which they missed the Emden

by a hair-breadth – on account of fortunate delays in Port Said and Aden and

some trouble with the searchlight in the Suez Canal – they arrived at Colombo,

took train and settled in Madras while I was up country in India.

§3

When I returned to Adyar I was full of delight at meeting old friends; but was

this weedy object the knobbly little girl who had played marbles with my heart

in England? Anyhow, I had no need to think of any possible danger to my bachelor

liberty, for she had become engaged to a young man in Ceylon who wrote poetry to

her, and – the damnation of it was – very good poetry, too.

Time went on, and it happened that the mother and daughter were staying in a

bungalow at Ootacamund – the fashionable summer resort of the Madras Presidency,

in the Nilgiri mountains, where even the Government of Madras betakes itself for

six months of the hot season – and I was staying in a little cottage near by.

The daughter was ill in bed. It seems that an elderly friend, belonging to a

mountainous country in Europe (I do not want to disclose his name, as it is

fairly well known) had induced her to try a tiny amount of arsenic – a habit of

his – and this had disturbed a colony of worms – politely called “little

brothers” – and occasioned the sickness, which lasted for several days. [203]

Hearing of this sickness I was sufficiently concerned to determine that I would

try thought-power as a help towards a cure. So every day I sat in my room, and

in my imagination pumped along the ether enough imaginary vitality to

resuscitate a regiment of gassed elephants! Thanks to a local chemist, the

illness was soon over. The ladies betook themselves to Madras, not along with

me, but with a wretched yellow cat over which we had some words, because I

thought that it was an imbecile cat, and could not be persuaded to say

otherwise.

Later, when I returned to Madras I heard that the engagement had been broken

off. The young man had wanted to kiss his fiancee too much, and she had not

liked being kissed so much, at least by him. According to the inevitability of

things we were duly engaged, and what is not so inevitable, married. What fun,

even though the spectre of “duty” and “the cause” hovered over us. My wife had

allayed her conscience by going to Mrs. Besant and telling her that she would

not marry me if that would be at all harmful to “the work.”

“Of course, it would not” – Mrs. Besant melted into radiant kindness at the

touch of romance.

“I have been suspecting it,” she told me.

We had a grand wedding in the hall at Adyar, Mrs. Besant in the place of priest.

She made a speech and handed to me the ring to be put on my bride’s finger, and

by her presence and words and actions gave sacramental character to the

occasion.

In the morning before that we had been to the registrar of civil marriages. What

a hectic procedure that had been, for such civil marriages were rare. I first

went to the Government offices in Madras to learn the name and address of the

official in my district, Mr. Daddy, I was informed. I searched for Mr. Daddy,

but Mr. Daddy had been dead some time. I felt I could compose a sarcastic little

song entitled “Daddy is dead.” I made further enquiries. In another village,

five miles away, there was a Mr. Hart. He functioned properly.

Prophetic names and events. As a daddy I was a deader, as I have already

related, but there was nothing the matter with Mr. Hart, nor with my heart. I

knocked Mr. Hart up at dead of night, even as my heart had been awakened from

its slumber. He came to the shuttered door and spoke [204] fearfully, thinking

thieves were about, even as my heart had done. But he opened the door. Yes, he

had been appointed registrar of civil marriages, and the late Mr. Daddy’s box of

records was over in the corner, and he would go through it and find the

necessary papers. After appropriate legal delays, he pronounced the commonplace

words which produced the uncommon effort of making us man and wife, and as I

have said, Mrs. Besant lent her glory to the occasion afterwards.

As I have been talking about curious coincidences in names, I may mention that I

once entered a doctors’ chambers in the city of Hamilton in Canada, and found

there, among others, the following name-plates: Dr. Payne, Dr. Kill, Dr. Death

and Dr. Cottyn. Believe it or not, this is absolutely true. The reader may if he

likes verify it in the local telephone directory for 1921-22.

After the wedding we went off to the railway station in Mrs. Besant’s motor-car,

en route for Madanapalle and Proddutur – another place where I was building a

large high-school, which is now the municipal school.

At Madanapalle I had undertaken to put nine thirty-six-feet iron trusses on the

twenty-four-foot high walls of the main hall, with a minimum of scaffolding

material, which was very scarce in those parts. I fixed two short strong

projecting beams on one end wall, well above the height of the side walls,

hoisted the truss by these – a little diagonally so that it would not strike the

side walls – and then twisted it and lowered it so that the ends rested on the

walls.

The next process was even more ticklish. I posted a strong man on each wall with

a crowbar. It was their business to edge the truss along the wall inch by inch –

a distance of ninety feet for the first truss, eighty feet for the second, and

so on – while two gangs of workmen held on to two ropes attached to the apex of

the truss, and moved inch by inch as the men on the wall moved, so as to keep

the truss vertical all the time. There was no talking. The movements were all

made in co-ordination, in response to my signals with a bell, which I held in my

hand while I stood directly under the truss so as to give confidence to all

concerned.

A man’s work this, I felt. But fortunately there is room in the male body for

common sense as well as for such romantic things, about which it can be so proud

and foolish. [205] My wife could soften this grim builder. “As others did not

hear us” this process would go something like this:

“Look -” (she wanted to tell me something and this was the equivalent of the

American “Say!” or the military “’Shun!”).

“I am always looking.”

“Don’t be silly. Go away.”

“Don’t ask the impossible.”

And the conversation would continue without words, its original subject

forgotten.

I soon withdrew my unspoken thought about weeds. One morning there was no towel

in the bathroom. I heard a voice:

“Darling, bring me a towel.”

I handed it through the slightly opened door, without intending to look, but I

caught a glimpse of the whitest, straightest and most compact little body that

the sun had never shone on. I had never dreamed that such things lurked under

the fluttery garments of that day.

§4

After a week or so at Madanapalle we entrained for Proddutur – most of a night’s

journey. At three o’clock in the morning we got out at Yerraguntla station. In

the darkness a large bullock-cart, big enough to sleep in, awaited us, and two

big bulls lay near by. To the tune of “Giddap!” (in the vernacular, of course)

our bulls arose and allowed themselves to be yoked and started on their way,

while we lay on straw heaped on the floor of the cart.

About six o’clock there was a river to cross – generally a sandy bed perhaps two

miles wide, with a small stream to ford in one part of it, but in the rainy

season a huge torrent, which sometimes came along at great speed and filled the

sandy bed with a swirling mass of waters, which had again and again took carts

and people by surprise and carried them away. The surrounding country was

treeless and flat for miles. One lone tree constituted the half-way house

between the railway station and the river bank. The rest was rich black cotton

soil, which was a veritable goldmine for the indigo planters before synthetic

indigo came in.

It was on this journey that I had once remarked with surprise on the immense

size and strength of the bulls – [206] they were of what is known as the Nellore

breed – in view of the fact that the straw on which I lay was the chief part of

their prospective food. The driver wanted to know if I had ever tried eating

straw myself. No. Would I take a little and chew it for a long time? After ten

minutes or so I found a small piece – I would not venture on a large one – quite

succulent. I speculated by analogy that perhaps the long mental and emotional

chewing of the cud of past experience common among old people brings out of that

apparently unpromising material some succulence unknown to others, just as in

the reverse a child’s emotions can draw wonders of delight from a doll which is

little more than a “rag and a bone and a hank of hair.”

Arrived on the further bank of the river-bed, we had an hour’s journey to our

destination. At the entrance to the town we were received with great rejoicings

and special honours – many people, garlands, a horse and dog-cart, borrowed

probably from some Englishman in the neighbourhood, and a brass band. Greetings

and felicitous enquiries over, we climbed to the back seat of the dog-cart,

which was not intended for swift transit to our destination, but as a chariot of

honour and a moving pedestal on which we could be seen.

We started at a walking pace, a man leading the horse. Soon the brass band

started also, in its own inimitable way. On the instant, the horse bolted,

knocking down the man leading it, and we sped at breakneck speed through the

narrow streets, between the stone houses set at many and various angles on

either side. It would be impossible to keep our seats, I thought, even if the

horse avoided the jutting corners, for every time that we struck a stone or

irregularity in our path the light cart sprang into the air. It behaved more

like a tin can tied to the tail of a frenzied dog than a cart behind a horse. I

began to climb over the back of the seat. I thought I would try to crawl along

the shafts to the neck of the horse and there gather up the reins, which were

trailing on the ground. While I was still climbing, my wife was thrown out

headlong at one side, and a few seconds later we crashed against the corner of a

house.

I got to my feet, staggered back to where my wife was lying still in a drain,

picked her up in my arms, commandeered an empty country cart, similar to that

which had brought us from the railway station, lifted her inside, [207] climbed

in beside her, and collapsed in a mess of blood – my own, for my wife, though

badly bruised, was unbroken, but I was cut about the head. The next I knew, we

were in a cotton jinning factory, and a doctor was binding up my head. We

continued our honeymoon for four days, lying in twin cots in the factory, until

we were fit to be removed back to Madras.

It was in connection with the school building at Proddutur that I had a passage

at arms with the then Director of Public Instruction, Mr. Stone, whom I

otherwise liked and respected. By the way, our European names gave much

amusement to Indian friends. At Madanapalle they had had a series of British

officials in various departments named Partridge, Rice, Cotton and Stone, and

now there was a Wood. The Hindus always bear the names of God – of which there

are more than a thousand – such as Krishnamurti, literally “The Dark Form,”

which refers to the blue-black rain-cloud, bringer of life-giving water to the

parched lands, or again, Nityananda, literally “Constant Joy.” Women, however,

have names of goddesses or flowers.

I had planned the new high-school building at Proddutur with five equal arms,

containing three class-rooms in each, standing at equal angles with one another

and meeting at the centre in a pentagonal hall, which had its roof higher than

the rooms, in order to provide for lighting from above. Mr. Stone said to me

that it would look like a jail. I was not then familiar with jails; my school

building had been planned with no other considerations than those of internal

convenience, scientific lighting and ventilation, and external beauty. “Why do

you not get an expert to provide you with designs?” he rather acidly enquired.

“Well, you see, we think we are the experts,” was my innocent reply.

This to an official in India years ago was almost sacrilege. Yet I knew that the

next expert that came along would play havoc with the theories of his

predecessor in office. Had I not seen my green black-board praised to the skies

and then lowered beneath the earth? Black was so bad for the children’s eyes.

Black was the most restful thing for the eyes to stare at.

In the excitement of the moment I could not invite Mr. Stone’s particular

attention to my new invention to be [208] installed in every class-room – my

“automatic sun-suction cooling apparatus.” Whether my invention was ever put

into the building I do not know, for I have not seen the finished work, though I

have heard that it helps to swell the municipal pride. Like many great

inventions its best point was its simplicity! It consisted in nothing more than

a length of iron tube piercing the roof and standing some four feet above it,

like a chimney, painted black, and suitably cowled against the rain, and it

would work by getting hot in the sun and so setting up a current of air which

would pump all the hot air from underneath the ceiling of the room. And it was

hot at Proddutur, some say the hottest place in the Madras Presidency; one could

not touch a piece of iron that had been lying in the sun.

§5

Peace was not to be the order of the day in our educational work any more than

in the outside world. Our Educational Trust, with its thirty-seven institutions,

was too good to last. Many of the teachers were eager followers of Mrs. Besant

and members of the Home Rule League, which, though strictly constitutional in

its policy, was, after all, political. Some of our teachers were, perhaps,

sometimes zealous out of season, but Government went to the opposite extreme and

was for ever causing irritation by issuing orders.

This produced a certain amount of defiance, as extremes will always provoke one

another. Unfortunately one of our teachers decidedly overstepped the bounds of

our own policy – which was that whilst students should be given opportunity to

hear views about methods of government from every angle, political activity

should not be theirs until they reached maturity. He himself took students to

political meetings, and encouraged them when they jeered at a reactionary old

gentleman who had, as it happened, some influence with government. We were

threatened with disaffiliation of our college at Madanapalle unless the teacher

was dismissed.

Mrs. Besant was of opinion that this policy of the Government with regard to

education would breed only two kinds of citizens – the servile and the

rebellious, the latter more secret than open. It would be ruinous to the

character of [209] the country’s youth. Under the circumstances she declined to

parley with reference to the teacher, but herself threw off the affiliation, and

joined with a large number of reformers to produce a new educational body named

The Society for the Promotion of National Education (briefly the S.P.N.E.). The

governing body was composed of a hundred people active and well known in the

country. The idea was to form a new independent national University, issuing

private diplomas and degrees, without the authority of Government (which, it was

argued, was using educational organization for political purposes), and having

colleges and schools affiliated to it all over India.

The Madanapalle College was pitched upon as the first college of the new

University, and to recognize my services Mrs. Besant proposed that its name be

altered to Wood College, and so it remained as long as the University lasted.

The various schools of the Educational Trust were given the option of joining

the new body, setting up an independent existence, or going under other

management. The Proddutur High-School, for example, went to the Proddutur

Municipality.

Our new policy was not really different from the old; students should not take

active part in politics, but should learn as much as they liked about politics.

The elder students were to be instructed in the theory of government as it

existed in various countries; the younger were to be given a course of Civics,

for which I was commissioned to write a text-book, which duly appeared under the

title: A Text Book of Indian Citizenship.

For what precise reasons I do not know, in the summer of 19I7, shortly after the

formation of this new educational society, the Government served internment

orders on Mrs. Besant and two of her colleagues who had been particularly active

in connection with her daily newspaper. They were given a choice of several cool

and healthy places of residence, and decided to occupy the bungalow of the

Theosophical Society at Ootacamund. There Mrs. Besant insisted on flying and

saluting the Home Rule flag, despite the objections of the authorities.

This internment suspended for a few months Mrs. Besant’s own personal

educational activity in its third transformation. First she had had the Central

Hindu College, which was ultimately absorbed by the Hindu University, [210]

which bestowed upon her an honorary Doctorate in recognition of her services.

Thenceforward she was known as Dr. Besant, which I always thought much less

effective and pleasing than the simple Mrs. Annie Besant which we always heard

before. Secondly, she had the Theosophical Educational Trust. Now came The

Society for the Promotion of National Education, of which she, as Chairman of

the Executive Committee, was the life and soul, though that body contained many

distinguished people, including Sir Rash Behari Ghose and Sir Rabindranath

Tagore, in its high positions of President and Chancellor. [211]

 



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER XI

SOME PUBLIC MEN

§1

Mrs. Besant being interned, I threw myself heartily into the new movement, to do

what I could in her absence. I wrote an article almost every day on some topic

related to national education, and these appeared in nearly all the Indian

dailies – except those owned by European interests – sometimes under my own

name, sometimes as leaders.

A young man in Sind offered a start of Rs. 20,000 if I would go up there and try

to found a college similar to that at Madanapalle. I accepted this prospect. It

was an interesting journey to the north. I made three principal stops on the way

– in the first I stayed with Mr. B. G. Tilak at Poona, in the second at Baroda,

and in the third I spent a day with Mr. Gandhi at his home near Ahmedabad.

Mr. Tilak, very fiery as a patriot, was the gentlest and softest of men in

private life. My wife and I slept on cots set up for us in his old and

closely-packed library. There was only just room between the shelves set in

parallel rows across the floor. I felt happy with thousands upon thousands of

books for bedroom companions. Books are restful things – perhaps that is their

chief or only fault.

Mr. Tilak spoke sadly of the slice which had been cut out of his life by his

deportation, for no fault that he could see, and most of all sorrowed that the

death of his wife should have occurred during his absence from home. He took the

chair for me at a lecture which I gave in a theatre in Poona, which for all I

know may have been the same theatre as that in which Mr. Gokhale had presided

for me years before, when the followers of Mr. Tilak, then an unwilling guest of

the Government, had made a disturbance. [212]

At Baroda I lectured in the college hall, with H.H. the Gaekwar in the audience.

A square had been cleared at the centre of the first few rows of chairs and a

rich carpet laid there, with two chairs in the middle of it, one for himself,

one for my wife. His Highness made it the occasion to speak, after my lecture

was over, of his own rule and his own State, and to explain how much internal

distinctions of caste and the like were standing in the way of his hopes and

efforts for social and constitutional advancement. On the following day he

called us to the palace and questioned me closely on many points of educational

reform. He was obviously seeking for clear-cut workable ideas and the fruits of

experience, and was not the man to occupy himself with hopes, fancies and

dreams. Certainly his State reflected much of his high purpose and business-like

methods.

Baroda was educating nearly eighty per cent of its boys and close upon fifty per

cent of its girls, while in the territory of the British Raj only about eight

per cent of the population was literate. There were also 45 town and 655 village

libraries, serving sixty per cent of the population of the State. I was

particularly struck with the travelling library system. A box of books was sent

to each village, kept there in the charge of the local schoolmaster or some

other official for some time, and then exchanged for a different one. That

system served the whole State, and would be a blessing in other parts of India

as well, for India is a land of villages. Ninety per cent of the population is

scattered in some three-quarters of a million hamlets, and it is not

economically possible to have a permanent collection of books in each of these.

Not least among the improvements in Baroda was the children’s library,

up-to-date and resembling those of America.

At Ahmedabad we spent a day with Mr. Gandhi. He was one of the very few

prominent Indian leaders who had not lent their names to the Society for the

Promotion of National Education. We spent most of the morning talking about

education and political matters. He would not join our new scheme. He did not

like our system. To him it was highly distasteful on account of its

glorification of the fruits of modern science and its appeal to young Indians to

develop modern industrial and commercial organizations, as the Japanese had

done. To him, that was all wrong. It could not make for human happiness, which

was to be found in [213] the midst of such simple work and such simple society

as may be required to maintain humanity in the natural state and in contact with

nature. Of factory systems with their soul-destroying labour and competition he

would have none; hectic work followed by hectic pleasure, both loaded with

opportunities for many forms of human conflict, were all that they could bring

to mankind.

Mr. Gandhi was a disciple of Tolstoy. In the afternoon we rested in his library

upstairs; a large room lined with books and portraits – dozens of them it seemed

– of Leo Tolstoy. How attractive was that personality, which did not seek human

applause and company, but nevertheless received it, which worked against the

growing tendency to convert humanity into a hive of ants or bees, which

reverenced the completeness of the human individual as something to be

cherished, to be preserved if possible against the inroads of social and

economic specialization, the new efficiency. Tolstoy lived as he thought, an

example of his own theory of distributed activities of the day – manual labour,

creative activity, reading, personal intercourse. His vegetarian ideals have

recently gained much ground. We were told later, when travelling in Bulgaria,

that more than half the population of that country had been converted to that

form of diet by his life and writings.

Understand Tolstoy, and I think you have understood Gandhi. We took meals with

him in his simple dining-room which might have been any dining-room in any

village cottage, but his food, in contrast to that of his contemporaries, which

stung and burnt and almost blistered the mouth and tongue, was devoid of all

condiments. “Simplicity is best,” it seemed to say. “Do not seek artificial

enhancement of natural appetites, and happiness will take care of itself.” I was

reminded of a verse of Blake’s :

He who takes to himself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy,

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

My own theory of industrialism for India was somewhere midway between that of

Mr. Gandhi and that of Dr. Besant, who was all for the whirling wheels of modern

mass-production, though she frequently deplored the passing of handwork in arts

and crafts – some feminine inconsistency [214] in this, a wanting of things both

ways at once, which worked well on the platform of the orator, but not so well

in the courtyards of ordinary life.

I looked forward to the days when industrialization, minus competition, plus

social organization, would provide for all common needs in a maximum of a few

hours’ work a day, as it should do if there is truth in the estimate that

machinery provides an average of fifteen slaves for every man. But I thought it

would be well that India should delay the development of her factory system

until the more modern world had solved its worst economic problems, had fought

its most dreadful economic battles and found a place of peace. Let peaceful

India remain simple; afterwards the fruits of Western conflict could be hers

without the conflict.

However, I had always been encouraged to believe that “Mother knows best.” I set

aside any thought of my own and discounted any others, such as those of Mr.

Gandhi, which conflicted with Mrs. Besant, and went on my educational way with

energy and enthusiasm, though not without misgiving.

§2

We pursued our journey into Rajputana and across the desert. At length we saw

before us in the hazy atmosphere a vast army of the sheeted dead, stretching

ghostly arms gesturing eternal despair by aimless flight. Strangest of

travellers’ visions in all the world this, when first seen, I think, but a

vision soon to fade in actuality into a mass of wind-catchers erected on the

roofs of the town of Hyderabad, which my wife and I were to learn to know as one

of the hottest cities of India’s torrid land.

Hyderabad, Sind, I count one of the most picturesque towns in India. At close

quarters it fulfils all the romantic promise of its strange appearance when

viewed across the desert. Running along a hillside there is a mile-long street

which serves as main bazaar, scarcely wide enough for two of the rich merchants’

carriages to pass – rich carriages and glossy horses, the pride of Sind, and

merchants in simple white clothes and white hats costing perhaps only a day’s

keep of the horses.

A guttural warning, and all foot-passengers must squeeze [215] themselves into

the shop fronts or the narrow lanes, to let a camel train pass by. It will pass

anyhow, so they had better get out of the way. Four or five, ten or twenty of

the lordly creatures pass, stepping with long and even paces, slow in motion but

swift in effect, supercilious eyes looking from on high along lifted noses at

the scurrying human rodents whom their passage has disturbed. Big feet, shaggy

knotted knees, huge bundles on yellow matted sides, long necks, horizontal heads

and noses – we must shift our gaze several times to take in these spacious

particulars, and put these views together to form a synthetic picture of this

lordly visitant rather than denizen of our earth. Only the hanging lip and the

tiny tail seem out of concord, lacking both beauty and power.

We were to know camels well before we were finished with Hyderabad, and my wife

proved to be a first-class camel rider and driver, as she was of all things

rideable and driveable – horses, mules, motor-cars, bicycles and all the ilk,

except swings and roundabouts, for which she always had a veritable camel’s

scorn. Many a jaunt did we take on camel back, she handling the reins, I sitting

behind, over the desert, with its beauty of light and colour as lovely as any

garden. The desert has a constancy which captures the heart and makes parting

sadder then any leaving of the flowers, with all their teasing and breath-taking

reddened lips, plucked brows and inviting eyes. But to be perfect the desert

needs a river, and that we had in the Indus, most majestic of flowing waters.

The lanes of the city where the merchants dwelt, on either side of the bazaar,

were narrow enough for only two persons to pass and uninviting with a trickle of

waste water down the centre and mud or dust on either side of this. You step up

a lane and turn off through a doorway in the walls that rise high on either

side, and you are in the courtyard of a palace, for only so can be described the

homes of the wealthy merchants of this trading centre – the Bhaibund community

who, with singular courage and ability, have established themselves in every

port of the world where East meets West and, in the words of Kipling:

... There is neither East nor West

Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face,

Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth! [216]

Bhaibunds and Amals – the Hindu Sikhs of Sind – and Mussulmans all rejoiced at

the prospect of a National College in their midst – no, not exactly in their

midst, for there was no room in that crowded hive – hive for its busyness, not

for its regimentation – but on its outskirts in an old farm, standing on the

banks of an ancient canal that skirted the town. All came forward to help, some

with their thousands of rupees, some with their tens, some with their annas and

pies.

In a week we had five thousand pounds in hand. In a fortnight building

alterations were under way. In three weeks furniture, desks and seats newly

designed – standing on only two legs the pais, planted in the floor – began to

arrive, along with science apparatus, books, typewriters, cooking vessels and

many other things. In a month the staff was engaged. In five weeks from our

arrival on 24th of August, 1917, the machine was ready for the road –

adventurous as it was to prove – professors and teachers at their posts,

students at their tasks, their gossip or their games. On October 1st, 1917, by

general desire I opened the new College in the presence of all the distinguished

people of the town, and many of the undistinguished, who almost filled our large

main quadrangle.

The College has survived all the vicissitudes of the interim and remains to-day

one of the First Grade Colleges of the Bombay University, a position it assumed

even before the dissolution of the Society for the Promotion of National

Education and the National University. In my day it had the unusual degrees of

B.Sc. in Industrial Science (we prided ourselves on our wood-distillation and

other apparatus, presided over by Professor Muirson Blake, from Canada); of

B.Ag. (with many acres of experimental plots and produce-yielding fields around

the College, watered by our own pumping engine on the banks of the canal – we

even supplied the army with fodder for a time – managed and taught by Professor

Menghraj Jagtiani); of B.A. in Political Science, taught by Professor Bhagat Ram

Kumar from the Punjab and Oxford (now in 1935 Principal of the College, and one

of the best); and of B.Com. (with its pomp of charts and gleaming typewriters

under Professor Appudurai Aiyar, from Madras). In that romantic moment these

towered above the more commonplace degrees of Arts in history and languages,

pure science and mathematics. [217]

§3

After about three months’ internment Mrs. Besant was released. Everywhere she

went India went wild with enthusiasm, and drowned her in flowers and garlands.

Mr. Gandhi’s civil disobedience, and her opposition to it, were in the womb of

the future, so there was no conflict to mark the joy and the unity of that

moment, when it seemed that India would ride swiftly to the victorious goal of

Dominion Status, Home Rule within the Empire.

Mrs. Besant was named President of the National Congress for that year. We

joined her in Calcutta in December, where the Congress was to be held, which my

wife and I also attended as delegates from Madanapalle. Fifteen thousand people

in one huge tent; speeches that could not have been heard but for the stillness

and tenseness that prevailed; men from all over India, leaders in their own

towns and villages, listening mostly with trained keen brains to the close

reasonings, irrefutable arguments, carefully marshalled facts, and occasional

indignant outbursts of the speakers, the proposers, the seconders and the

supporters of resolution after resolution.

Looking and listening impartially one could not but see that here were men

sincere, sober, capable, practical, such as no country in the world could

surpass, and few equal. Only they lacked the power, the weapons, the opportunity

– these being withheld, the disturbances of India have never represented India;

they have originated and operated only as riots of the ignorant and distressed.

One of the features of that Calcutta Congress was the appearance of hundreds of

women of all communities, purdahless, and seemingly as brave and free as the

national songs which poured from their throats – the national songs of India

which speak little of fighting, or heroism, or triumphs, but much of the beauty

of sky and earth, of villages and trees and rivers and cultivated fields – the

poetry of Wordsworth, the music of Swinburne.

Congress over, we went with Mrs. Besant in the train back to Madras, talking

national education most of the way.

In carrying out her bold campaign Mrs. Besant was very concentrated. Once a plan

was decided upon and the work set in motion she had no time for any side issue

or amusement and no use for any person who did not fit into [218] that plan. Yet

it seemed to me that it was not her nature, as many have thought, to take joy in

battle, and that her greatest happiness took the very quiet form of enjoyment of

the company of a small circle of harmonious friends.

Thousands know of the appeal and charm of her personality on the public

platform, of her unremitting activity in a great variety of social and political

efforts and also of her great intellectual powers expressed in the literary

field. But perhaps only her friends know of the extraordinary affection which it

was her nature to lavish upon them and how closely her sympathies would go with

them, even sometimes in what she knew to be their foolish desires.

In her latter days some of her immediate adherents persisted in calling her

“Chief” and even “General.” I do not know whether she liked it, but I would

never do a thing like that, and I found her always simple and unpatronizing. It

was always my view that, though great, she was not without weaknesses. Her very

modesty was a weakness which sometimes put her at the mercy of others whom she

credited with knowing more than herself in certain directions. It appeared to me

that she was most praised as a “Ruler” by those who really ruled her, and could

inherit the substance of the power engendered by her greatness.

During the ensuing year my wife and I must have travelled in the train with Mrs.

Besant for at least four thousand miles, and invariably, although by far the

oldest member of the party, she would be the first to rise in the morning,

herself prepare coffee on her little oil stove in the bathroom (quite against

the railway regulations!) and hand it round smilingly to all. It was a habit of

hers to take coffee in the mornings and tea in the afternoons, both of the

strongest. In the train her extraordinary calm and poise showed to the full. She

would sit quietly and peacefully for hours and days, while other members of the

party chafed and fretted, and often she would write an article on her knee

-almost the acme of bodily and mental training, to think and write legibly in

that noisy, dusty, hot and shaking environment. [219]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER XII

AN INDIAN COLLEGE

§1

In the autumn of 1918 the Sind National College, which I had started the year

before, almost came to an untimely end. Mrs. Besant’s policy of forming bands of

people devoting themselves with vows and pledges of service was always effective

for getting things done, but it seemed to me to have a bad effect on the

character of the people concerned, who would often assume, at least inwardly, a

superiority to others which made it quite impossible for them to work with those

others on the level. If anyone had different opinions he must necessarily be

wrong, for “ours” had come from a lofty source, and one need not waste time

thinking or arguing about it! Argument and discussion were characteristic only

of “difficult” people. The proper thing was obedience – not blind obedience, of

course, but intelligent intuitive response to spiritual superiors! This method

of Mrs. Besant’s when making her plans was an old one. Mme Blavatsky had rebuked

her for it in London when she had issued orders in the working girls’ club that

only those who joined trade unions would be eligible for the privileges of

membership.

Although those who obtained the power in this way subscribed to the doctrine of

tolerance, and the dissentient voice was generally allowed to speak, in the

magazine or on the platform, it would be once only and then it must lapse into

silence in the presence of an unthinking majority whose leaders would go on

waving their flags and singing their songs of praise of each other. The least

breath of criticism of this policy was “in bad taste,” and marked its

perpetrator out for oblivion, as guilty of breach of brotherhood by his

criticism of another. Differences were natural and [220] permissible, but you

must differ in silence. It created a vicious circle, leaders making followers

and followers making leaders who had to believe in themselves because so many

others depended upon them.

When this policy affected the schools it expressed itself in favouritism and

arbitrariness. The Sindhis, people of originality, capability and independence,

would not stand for that kind of thing. A large part of the staff and students

of the Sind National College were soon in revolt. One day Mrs. Besant sent for

me, told me about this – I had not known of it, for I was no longer Secretary in

the educational work, after the new organization took charge, but Mr. G. S

Arundale, who had lately returned from England, was in that position – and asked

me to go to Sind as Principal of the College, failing which, she said, there

would be no alternative but to close down, for she knew no one else who could

pull it through the crisis. “And,” she added, “you had better stay there until

you can find someone capable of taking your place.”

So I became Principal of the College, and took up the work of Professor of

English and Physics – the latter only temporarily, to fill a vacancy, as my

knowledge of that exacting subject was even then drifting behind the times.

Suffice it to say that when the old Principal left and I came in all went well.

Every morning we all assembled in the main hall for fifteen minutes, for roll

call, patriotic songs and a five minutes’ talk on some ethical or civic subject

or the news of the day, after which the students proceeded according to subject

and grade to one or other of the twenty-four lecture rooms and laboratories. We

did good work for a year, well appreciated by the students and the public, until

external events shook the institution to its very foundations.

§2

It was on the 30th of March, 1920, that Mr. Gandhi set up in connection with his

civil disobedience movement a hartal which was to have far-reaching effects. A

hartal is a general temporary strike or suspension of business of all kinds,

usually for one day. This was announced to take place on the Sunday after the

passing of the Rowlatt Act, which conferred power on the Executive uncontrolled

by [221] the Judiciary, and was regarded by Indians as a very poor reward for

their help during the war. Owing to some confusion, this hartal was arranged to

be held on the following Sunday, April 6th, in some places, including Amritsar.

Four days later, in that city of the Punjab, Government arrested two political

leaders, Drs. Kitchelew and Satyapal. A crowd of people went outside the city to

the railway crossing leading to the Civil Lines, escorting a deputation which

wanted to interview the Deputy-Commissioner on the matter. There they were

stopped by the police and the military, some stones were thrown and shots fired,

resulting in the death of ten people, while the crowd grew to the dimensions of

about thirty thousand. In the meantime, inside the city a riot began, nobody

knows exactly how. Three European bank officials were killed, a lady cyclist was

assaulted and left for dead in the road, but afterwards succoured by some

Indians, two subordinate officials were killed at the railway goods-yard, and

much damage was done to public buildings and communications.

Military reinforcements began to arrive from various places, and the city was

quieted, but there was a tense situation. On the 12th April, Brigadier-General

Dyer, who had arrived from Jullundur and taken charge, signed a proclamation

forbidding all processions and meetings of more than four men, and that

proclamation was read in several public places on the morning of the 14th,

though there was difference of opinion as to whether the proclamation had been

given reasonably sufficient publicity. An announcement appeared that there would

be a public meeting in the Jallianwalla Bagh, a large oblong of waste land

between the back walls of houses, entirely enclosed except for a small entrance.

Someone went through the streets and told the people that there was nothing to

fear and that they could come to the meeting. The meeting gathered. They had

assembled to a number variously estimated from six to twenty thousand people

when, at about half-past four in the afternoon, General Dyer marched into the

Bagh with fifty men with rifles, and posted them in line near the entrance,

where the ground was higher than at the other end of the enclosure, where the

meeting was being held. Order was given to fire. For ten minutes firing

continued, independent, but controlled for direction, until nearly all the

ammunition was gone. [222] The crowd was not allowed to disperse. On the

contrary, the firing was directed especially to a spot where the people were

trying to escape over a wall which had been partially broken down and was low

enough to be climbed over. I saw for myself, visiting the place shortly

afterwards, that the bullet marks were numerous in that low piece of wall, but

comparatively sparse elsewhere. There was no warning and no permission to

disperse!* (*An excellent account of the incident may be read in Imperial

Policing, written by Major-General Sir C. W. Gwynn.)

News of this disaster spread like wildfire throughout India. It reached us early

in the Province of Sind, adjacent to the Punjab, and caused an intensity of

feeling of which nobody could estimate the outcome. In a morning class in our

high-school department, which my wife was taking, a small boy got up and cried

out passionately: “It will be your turn next.” She laughed at him, but we went

to bed that night with misgivings, nevertheless. However, the danger passed

over. But it left our College in a powerless state, because its Principal and

its management were not supporters of Mr. Gandhi’s civil disobedience, even

subsequent to this dreadful event, which converted millions to its standard.

In ten minutes General Dyer had destroyed the predisposition of Indians to

appreciate the British. Before that, the Briton visiting an Indian country-place

was welcomed with smiles, even though the inhabitants would whisper among

themselves: “What has he come for?” But after that event a sullen look would

replace the former smiles. Harm was done that day which can never be repaired,

and it was made the worse when it was known that a strong group in England

acclaimed General Dyer a saviour of the prestige and power of British rule in

India.

Called to account for his conduct, General Dyer explained that he wanted to

inflict a lesson which would affect the whole of the Punjab and perhaps all

India. But if every subordinate officer, even a Brigadier-General, were to

assume the authority to punish, what would become of the power of the central

Government? Firm measures may sometimes be required, but the authority to punish

and to “teach a lesson” cannot rightly be assumed by an individual. Such action

was flagrantly out of keeping with the principles [223] which have become

traditional among the officers of the British Army.

The days of immediate excitement passed off, but a division was created in the

ranks of the home rulers. The extreme left followed Mr. Gandhi in his policy of

civil disobedience. Much as I have liked and admired Mr. Gandhi, and friends as

we have been, if I may say so, in the few opportunities afforded by such a busy

life as his, I personally have always felt that his policy was unpractical.

Truly, as he said, if the people had followed him fully he would have won home

rule within six months, but it seemed to me easy to predict that the people

would not follow to the extent needed for that. It was not in human nature, not

even in Indian human nature, with its marvellous capacity for suffering in

silence, to preserve perfect non-violence when exasperated by the sight of the

suffering of women and children. When I remarked upon this to one professor of

history he replied:

“Do I not know it? I am a professor of history, and I tell you that never in the

history of mankind has a subject nation gained its independence without

violence.”

But he was willing to be a pillar in the non-violent movement at least for the

time being. I thought it was only a question of time before the movement which

Mr. Gandhi started would swell to a torrent, sweep over him and leave him far

behind.

The new left wing in our locality then turned their attention to our College.

“You call yourselves a National College,” they said, “but you will not urge your

students into the activities of the national movement.”

Mr. Patel visited our College, and we gave to him, as to all others, the

opportunity to address the students. He said: “These are abnormal times. They

are not the times for learning arithmetic and other such subjects. If

self-government is to be won within a year, you students should go out and do

propaganda in the villages.” Two or three students went away.

The local Nationalists now demanded that the College should be given over to

them. And when we would not do this they advised the people to withhold

donations, and with considerable effect. The situation was exacerbated because

Mrs. Besant had written with reference to the Amritsar shooting that it was only

to be expected that brickbats would be followed by bullets. Her stock went down

to a [224] very low figure. She did not care what happened to her popularity.

But as she was the chairman of the managing committee of the body that owned our

College, this reacted upon us. Students’ societies were formed outside our

gates, and in those they were urged to active political work.

We held our position. Students should hear all political points of view, but if

they followed our advice they would abstain from actions and even from making

important decisions. I thought that if sufficient elders could not come forward

to practise civil disobedience with great self-sacrifice it was wrong to urge

children into the firing line.

The principle of non-co-operation invaded the details of our work. Again and

again there were strikes about small matters – ordinary strikes, lightning

strikes and sympathy strikes. What our students did not know about strikes was

simply not known. But we weathered the storm, though I personally fell ill again

afterwards, of both fever and carbuncle.

§3

With regard to my malarial fever, I had an interesting experience with an

American mission doctor. He told me that he had a sure cure for malaria, but

practically nobody would submit to it. I told him I would if it did not involve

me in anything to which I objected on principle. He smiled. Quite the reverse:

it involved a certain amount of fasting.

His point was roughly as follows. Germs are being born in the blood when you get

a bout of high temperature. Those germs can be killed by means of quinine when

they are five days old; before that, quinine merely holds them for any length of

time in a state of arrested development. Quinine acts best when there is little

or no food in the stomach. So, take frequent doses of quinine for two days and

nights, fasting entirely, and thus kill off the old germs. Then, for five days

take no food but clear soup, without any quinine, while the youngsters are

growing up. After that, for two more days and nights, fast, and take quinine

periodically, to kill the new crop of elders. Then none will be left to breed

again. I followed his advice, and was freed completely and permanently from

malarial fever.

But the carbuncles started again in my back. I had been [225] playing football

with the students and one of them came at me with full force with the sharp

point of his elbow in the middle of my back. A carbuncle developed there, which

surpassed all its predecessors. It would not come out, so at last I lay on one

of my physics tables and had it cut out by two Indian surgeons. They told me

afterwards that it was within a hair-breadth of the lung and they had operated

only just in time.

As I lay getting better from this operation I had a strange occult experience,

which – as I have said before with regard to such matters – need not be taken

seriously. I simply record. A voice seemed to say to me: “That is over, you will

have no more carbuncles. But there is another thing: you will have some trouble

in the respiratory tract. Will you take that all at once now, or little by

little?” My wife had been dreadfully pained by my suffering with carbuncles, and

by the operation, so I chose little by little.

Sure enough it came; now and then I have been troubled with asthma, and recently

when I had my lungs X-rayed in hospital they told me that I had at some time had

some tuberculosis of the lungs and had got over it – though I had known nothing

about it.

Talking about X-rays, I once had an amusing experience in Cyprus, where a doctor

friend had a fine outfit of apparatus which he was showing to a party of several

people, including myself. Each of us stood in turn on a little platform while he

and the others looked at the visible radiograph on the screen.

“How strange,” said the doctor, “you have a drunkard’s liver.”

He knew I was a life-long teetotaller, and of generally abstemious disposition.

He could not at all understand how I had acquired a drunkard’s liver. Some time

afterwards I realized what had happened. In the fob pocket of my American

trousers I was wearing a rather large hunting watch, given to me by my father

before I left for India. This it must have been which had masqueraded as a

drunkard’s liver. In confirmation of my theory, there was no trace of such a

liver in my X-ray photograph taken later in hospital.

To confirm my health we went for the summer vacation to Kashmir. A month on

house-boat and ponies, and in camps beside the glaciers and among the mountains

of the [226] Zoji-la Pass leading into Tibet did all that was required. Crossing

some of the glaciers was dangerous; we dismounted from our ponies and trusted to

our hands and knees. In the pass we were mistaken for thieves. Our Indian friend

thought of buying some jewels from a merchant on his way to India from the

Tibetan sources of his wealth. We looked at the stock and had some preliminary

talk, but when we arose from sleep we found that the merchant had struck camp

and stolen silently away. Twice before I had been similarly suspected. Once, in

Madras, Subrahmanyam and I had taken a long walk in the moonlight (thirty-two

miles – what youth will do I). As we sat resting in a field beside the road, a

small party of villagers came along. As soon as they saw us they tucked up their

dhoties and fled at top speed! The third occasion had been when I disturbed the

registrar of marriages in the middle of the night.

After another year’s work in the College I thought the time was ripe for it to

try its luck with an Indian Principal. I say luck, for the success of an

institution depends much more on the character and personality of the Principal

than on his knowledge or learning. It was also more than high time for me to pay

a visit to my father and mother in England. I took a year’s leave, having

arranged for one of the senior professors to act as Principal, and arranged with

Mrs. Besant to take a year’s lecturing tour round the world. Our first objective

was Japan. [227]

 

BOOK III



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER I

WHERE BEAUTY RULES

§1

For a sea voyage let me commend a cargo boat of five or six thousand tons. It

sits nicely in the water, makes its nine or ten knots without quivering (in

Bombay harbour we could not feel the difference when the tug boats cast off and

we were moving under our own steam), rolls steadily when it rolls and pitches

steadily when it pitches, and it does not fill you with the restless sensation

that it is racing to its destination – the subtle suggestion which the big

liners give that the open sea is something to be done with, to be away from and

forgotten as soon as possible. And when you arrive in the small ports on the way

it generally goes right inside and lingers and becomes your hotel – instead of

standing far out and aloof – so that at any moment you can take a walk on land

and take a look at local life, often in unfamiliar ports.

Our ocean wave was calm from Bombay to Colombo, from Colombo to Singapore, from

Singapore to Shanghai, but in the China Sea, in the Inland Sea of Japan and off

the coast of Japan we had a lot of weather. The Calcutta Maru treated the storms

as it treated the calms; it was hilly road instead of flat road, but bumpy road

scarcely ever. It toddled up one side of the big waves and down the other with

the same cheerful restful disregard of time with which it had moved round the

south of Ceylon and the north of Sumatra, skirting the land closely to shorten

the journey, to economize the coal.

All on board were Japanese except our two selves, who were the only passengers.

Japanese ceremonial politeness replaced for us the matter-of-factness of India.

The serving-boy would enter our cabin with cat-like quietness and [231]

suppleness, put down his tray, lift his cap and bow, with a smile comfortable,

warm, but self-sufficient and seeming to require no response, resume the tray,

arrange the articles on the cabin table, and depart by inverse process. In the

dining-room one table was for us, one for the officers, who knew English only in

the Japanese way, that is, enough for business, but not enough for conversation,

except the most meagre. On the decks we had full freedom – sitting, talking with

the captain, popping into the chart-room to see what was coming next, watching

the sailors at work or at play, or bathing and sunning themselves, stark naked

and rightly unashamed, on the forecastle head.

Japan is the land of literal beauty. Insert the mind, begin to interpret, and

the beauty is lost. In India it is quite the reverse. No one will say that the

figures of the images which constitute Indian sculpture are literally beautiful.

I believe that the statues in temples produced with so much devotional care and

worshipful attention in ancient times were done with no thought of beauty. It

was power that the sculptors worshipped. Power in the deity represented by

numerous arms and symbols. Power sacrificed by the artist on the altar of the

divinity’s power, in the production of these glorifying images. So though one

says “How beautiful” in the presence of these things, it is the beauty of

something held in the imagination, in a thought revived and stimulated by the

form. An Indian will give you a monster bouquet, because he thinks of power. The

Japanese will give you one flower, because he thinks of beauty.

Beauty and simplicity go together in Japan. It is the function of the artist to

lay bare, not to ornament; he discloses something simple which is at the root of

things. The mountain Fujiyama – a constant theme of the Japanese artist, who

does not want “a hundred miles of eternal snow” – we were able to see on rare

occasions from our window in Yokohama, seventy miles away. It was just an

exquisite line poised in the air, the base of the mountain being unseen through

the denser atmosphere, a line of pure beauty, not rooted in mass. For beauty on

paper and canvas, few lines suffice in Japan. But I had better be silent, for

beauty speaks for itself, and our mental analysis can do nothing better than

remove a few scales from our eyes and then remove itself and leave beauty

unalloyed. [232]

One of the first delights of my wife and myself in Japan was to see the working

men on the wharves and in the streets, in their loose black and white coats –

black ground, white figuring. An adaptation of these coats, flowering in

brightest colours and masses of pattern, we found later in the European and

American market, under the designation of “happy coats.” We were struck by the

simple designs of the original, though could we have read them no doubt some of

our pleasure would have gone away, for we were told afterwards that they were

only the names or symbols of the firms to which they belonged, who evidently

definitely believed in either marking their property or advertising themselves.

In somewhat the same manner my wife has among her trinkets a charming little

pendant in the form of a bell. She had had it for a long time before she met

someone who could read the inscription on it, which was in Russian, and

contained the sage advice to drink somebody’s beer – after paying for it, of

course!

Another simple pleasure, with no illusions, was the long narrow envelope,

decorated with a few scrolls or a simple flower, in which you would receive even

the most commonplace missive, be it only an advertisement from a stores. There,

too, the wrapping paper was a thing of beauty, though most of the Japanese

customers dispensed with it, for they brought their own wrapper – a

dark-coloured silk or woollen square, one corner decorated with a strong design,

sometimes geometrical, sometimes picturing a natural object of special

affection, such as a pair of flying swans or a golden carp.

King of shops is the toy shop-dolls for girls, kites for boys, trick boxes and I

do not know what bewildering variety of other things for all.

It is part of the Japanese taste for beauty and simplicity to love children

above all other things, so that that country is a veritable children’s paradise

– the rod unknown, the child unprovoked into conflict with massive and

dictatorial elders. One of our greatest delights was to walk in the theatre

street of one large town after another in the evenings and see the families

strolling up and down – up one side of the street and down the other – all

wheeled traffic being forbidden in that street in the evening hour, for their

convenience. Father, mother carrying the baby on her back, [233] its big head

rolling about with every motion in a most alarming manner, big children carrying

small children, toddlers held by the hand. Seeing this one sympathizes with the

desire of the Japanese for more territory for their increasing families and

would be tempted, were it in one’s power, immediately to present them with half

Australia to be put to such good use.

§2

To see Japan properly one must walk, I think, as we did in both town and

country. Miyanoshita to Hakone and back was a nice day’s walk (18 miles) – blown

to pieces since we were there.

Outside Miyanoshita we found the Miyauchi (goldfish) Inn, at Kiga, settled into

this pleasant inn – with a delightful garden containing waterfall, pond,

goldfish, stone lanterns, stepping stones, and indeed all the beautiful adjuncts

of the typical Japanese garden – and walked a few miles to the Great Hell

(Ojigoku), a barren region among the hills, where boiling sulphur springs and

their vapour covered the whole hill-side. This was not a place in which to

linger, with its trembling earth and its threat of instant dissolution to itself

and whomsoever might have the temerity to remain there for any length of time.

We hurried back to the inn and sat up to our necks in square baths, sunk in the

floor, containing hot iron-bearing water, which was piped into the inn from

natural springs.

We stayed always in such Japanese inns, not in the large hotels provided for

foreigners here and there in tourist centres. We would arrive on the doorstep, I

with a little book of Japanese and English sentences in my hand. Again and again

I would repeat a sentence which meant, “We want a room for two nights for two

people.” This pronouncement would for a moment petrify the perennial smiles of

the management of the inn, mingling them with a look of grave concern. These

stupid English had evidently come to the wrong place. Sentences would be spoken

in reply to mine, but in vain would I search for something resembling them in my

book. Sometimes I understood a little, to the effect that this was not a hotel

for Europeans. I affected not to understand. At last someone would find a youth

who knew some English. He would tell us that [234] this was the inn for Japanese

travellers. Yes, that was what we wanted. Surely not? Yes. But to remove shoes,

and to sleep on the floor? Yes.

After much hesitation on their part and insistence on ours, and a little bout of

price fixing, we would be invited to the interior, escorted to a room upstairs,

a six-mat or eight-mat room (mats are of a standard size) containing a fire-box

and a shrine of beauty. The fire-box was for keeping warm the tea, light yellow

in colour and drunk in little handleless bowls without either the cream and

sugar of Europe or the butter of Kashmir. The shrine of beauty was a recess

containing a kakemone (picture) on the wall, and a vase standing on a little

stool beneath it – specimens of two-dimensional and three-dimensional art which

are changed occasionally, to prevent any loss of freshness in their appeal to

the senses. At night maids appeared with rolls of bedding, and spread them on

the floor, and men put up wooden shutters all round the verandas, closing in the

air and smell – the only defect of the Japanese inn.

Which came first, the instinct of the Japanese for cleanliness, or the

floor-mats of soft thick grasses, neatly sewn? The mat floors being there, you

simply cannot treat your house as a street, as the Europeans do, walking into it

with their shoes on. Or, the instinct for cleanliness being there, you cannot be

satisfied with earthern floors, like the Indian, who is perpetually washing his

feet and his cloths. We may leave the problem unsolved, like that of the hen and

the egg, yet cannot but muse upon the far-reaching effect of little things. In

England our medieval barons kept their floors in an abominable state, covered

with rushes and straw containing the remains of refuse from the tables thrown

carelessly to the dogs, and as a result we must now live up in the air on chairs

and tables and couches, and preserve stiff creases in our trouser legs, and grow

into a generation as stiff-necked and stiff-backed as the chairs we inhabit.

However did we come to speak of getting up in the morning, when really we get

down from our beds? The Japanese actually do get up.

On our nine-mile walk from Miyanoshita to Hakone we always stopped to admire the

Jizu, a sitting statue by the side of the road (one of Japan’s greatest

sculptures, it is said, carved in the solid rock by the famed artist Kobo

Daishi), representing the god of little children. On his lap [235] was a heap of

small stones, put there as reminders to him of children needing his care.

Sometimes when a child is teething the mother will take one of its bibs and hang

it upon the statue.

The Japanese seem to believe in the power of thought. We heard that one of their

pretty customs when a child is sick is for the mother to go round to

thirty-three families and ask from each a bit of cloth. With these she makes a

patchwork coat for the child to wear. Is it that the good wishes of the

thirty-three donors, stitched into that coat, work for the benefit of the child,

or is it simply that human sympathy is something precious to remember in the

midst of a mother’s sorrow for her ailing child?

Arrived at Hakone, we took lunch in a restaurant and then went for a walk in a

boat on the lake. This curious phrase occurs to me not because it is Japanese,

though it might be. I had it from some of my students in Sind, who came one

Sunday morning with the hospitable intention of taking us to enjoy a motor-car

ride. “Let us go out for a walk,” was their proposal. But when I replied: “I am

rather tired and do not feel much like walking,” their disappointed reply was:

“Oh, but we have brought a motor-car.” Hearing that, I agreed quite cheerfully

to take the “walk.” I ought to have remembered that if they had meant an

excursion under our own power they would have said that we should “foot it out,”

the local idiom, no doubt, but sounding strange in the English language.

Anyhow, we went on Ashi-no-ko in a boat, and when we were in the middle of the

lake a cloud descended upon us and at a moment’s notice we could see nothing but

mist and fine rain. It was a nervous afternoon we spent in that boat. Only by

the expedient of keeping ourselves in one direction to the wind we at last found

the shore, and crept round it for about two hours until we came back to our

landing-place. After that, we took food again in the restaurant and walked back

to Kiga in the mist, to the comfort of the Goldfish Inn. It was a nice

experience of the soft mist and straight rain which before we had seen only in

the pictures of well-known Japanese artists, who are unique in their portraiture

of rain.

The walk from Miyanoshita to Hakone was our favourite, rivalled only by that of

similar length from Nikko up the mountain-side to Lake Chuzenji – with a pause

to admire the [236] Ke-gon waterfall-waters dropping three hundred and thirty

feet.

In the streets and roads of Japan one of the things we first marvelled at was

the Japanese smile. If we stopped to look at anything, people would stop to look

at us, and smile, and even giggle together. At first we would hurry on but soon

we learnt to smile back. How simply the Japanese were pleased! Why should we not

add to the gaiety of the nation? But later we came to still another stage of

understanding of that smile; we realized that it meant a pleased interest and at

the same time an offer of help if required. We learnt also that smiling is good

manners. If you have a trouble you must smile all the more so as not to pass it

on to others. We heard one story about an Englishman who employed a Japanese

clerk. One morning the clerk came late – an unusual thing among the Japanese –

and the Englishman enquired the reason. The clerk smiled and said that his

mother had died. The Englishman stiffened with distaste, until he remembered

that there was not a hard heart, not even stoicism, behind that smile; it was

simply a form of culture and a civic idea.

You may weep, however, in the theatre. At one of the Nichi-ren plays which we

attended at Kamakura, the ladies, sitting in their little pens, wept openly at

the misfortunes of the hero and heroine. They had come there to weep. Real

religion was combined with drama; at a certain point the audience threw money in

screws of tissue paper, to the shrine depicted upon the stage.

The Japanese cinematograph (pre-talkie) also attracted us.

There were some slap-stick comics which we could not understand, but the main

theme was Samurai traditional stories – square warriors, with square swords as

big as themselves, and fighting on the square, so formal that one wondered if it

really depicted intent to hurt, or only a game – but it must have been the

former, for somebody was always killed! While this play was going on two men,

sitting on either side of the screen, supplied the dialogue, one of them talking

in a gruff voice to represent the male characters and the other in falsetto for

the females, while both clattered sticks together at any moment of special

excitement in the picture.

It was at one of the cinema theatres that we had our first experience of

Japanese honesty. I had left my [237] umbrella, through forgetfulness, at the

seat where I had been sitting. The next day I went to the booking office and

told them about it. A few words to an attendant, and he came out with an armful

of umbrellas; “Which is yours?” I could theoretically have improved the shining

hour, for my umbrella was one of the poorest of the lot, but who, under the

circumstances, could do more than take his own?

Another time, in an inn in Nikke, I left a heavy gold finger-ring of quite

ordinary local design at the side of the hand-basin in the men’s general

washing-room, and forgot all about it until later in the day, when a chambermaid

came to our room with something held daintily in a bit of tissue paper. “Is this

yours?” It had been found in the washroom, turned over to the management, and

was now being carried from room to room, with the question: “Is this yours?”

One could wander for weeks in the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka and

Nagoya, or among the gardens and temples of Kyoto and Nara and Kamakura. We

could spare only a few days in each place – we had only three months for the

whole country. Time was limited then, as space is now for these descriptions.

Let me mention only the Daibutsu which stands in a lovely garden in Kamakura. It

is a bronze statue of the Buddha seated in meditation, immensely reposeful,

without the playful smile of the Burmese Buddhas. Above its pedestal it sits

fifty feet high, with eyes of pure gold, four feet long, and a thirty-pound

silver boss on the forehead, representing the third or mystic eye.

§3

After our tour in Japan we were due to return to Shanghai for a month’s stay

there. Our second voyage across the China Sea was less fortunate than the first.

After leaving Nagasaki – with its quaint streets on the hill-side – we struck a

fair specimen of the Japanese typhoon. Our steamer, the China, battled bravely

against the crushing waves that beat upon her prow like giant hammers, gave her

the staggers, and swept swirling across her decks. In forty-eight hours we

registered four miles of progress.

Returning again to Japan, across the same sea, in a very small steamer, the

Chikugo Maru, we again struck heavy [238] weather, broke our steering chain, and

wallowed all night on a restless sea. However, we were this time compensated by

beautiful weather in the Inland Sea of Japan, which we thus saw properly for the

first time, with its pretty coast and islands, and its occasional view of

typical Japanese skyline of gentle mountains fringed with pines.

We could not go into the interior of China up the Yang-tse-kiang, as we wanted.

No one would book us, on account of the fighting that was going on at Ichang and

other places. But there was plenty to interest us in Shanghai itself. The

Nanking Road in Shanghai was then one of the seven wonders of the world, at

least of our world at the moment. It was said to be next in rank to the theatre

section of Broadway, New York, as a “Great White Way.” Certainly we had never

before seen such a display of electric lights. And I, at any rate, had never

seen such a great department store as the Wing On – which surpassed even the

Mitsukeshi and Shirokiya in the main streets of Tokyo. These stores, while not

entirely devoid of foreign goods, are filled with articles produced in their own

countries (how different from India!) and the display was for us one of the most

interesting introductions to human nature, which is everywhere to be known

through its daily desires and chosen utilities and ornaments of the home and

person, more than through the theoretical life of its literature, its politics,

and its non-industrial arts.

We had plenty of first-hand opportunities of seeing Chinese life. Long slender

coats reaching almost to the ground, presumably with men inside, were plentiful

and animate in the streets, as well as the smock and loose shapeless trousers of

the working men, and the little jackets and coloured trousers of the working

women, going off quietly to their factories in twos and fours on wheelbarrows.

Very clear minds and rich voices sometimes lived in the long coats. One of the

interpreters at my lectures could orate with all the bell-like tones of a

xylophone.

We admired, too, the conscientious devotion of the labours of the craftsmen.

Captivated by the charming workmanship, I purchased a nice set of chessmen

carved in tea wood in very realistic human designs. The Indian chessmen I had

known were all similar to one another in form, differing usually in little but

size, and one had to remember which was which. But, alas, when my luggage [239]

was being passed through the Indian customs, someone evidently thought that out

of so many little dolls I could surely spare a few, so there were only

twenty-six pieces, instead of thirty-two, when I tried to play with them later

on. They ended up literally as dolls, for I gave them to children.

Interiors of ordinary houses in China did not differ greatly from those in

India, but the Chinese proved to be more concrete in their outlook than the

Indians, though a little less extravert than the people of Japan. There was one

Chinese doctor, at whose house we were spending an evening, who told us that his

greatest pleasure was to sit and imagine that he was in heaven. He said that he

felt his imaginings with such realism that it was almost as good as if he were

already there. Such imagination is great in China, yet it does not appear to run

to abstractions, as in India. The Indian will meditate upon heavens and the

forms of deities, but he always has the thought that they are not really like

that, but are something quite different from our sense-objects. Chinese

imaginings, on the contrary, lean heavily to the concrete. One friend raised the

speculative question as to what a traffic policeman would do with himself in

heaven. The Chinese seemed to think a lot about heaven. Would there be traffic

for him to regulate there? I ventured to suggest that he might like a rest or a

change. But no, it would surely be very hard for him to surrender the splendid

authority to direct the motor-cars of the great. He was a guardian and guide of

humanity.

The problem was left unsolved, but I caught a glimpse of a point of view from

which the great kings and statesmen and preachers of the earth might appear in

very much the same category as the traffic policeman. Evidently the Chinese can

see the greatness of the commonplace, and that faculty seems to make them

singularly free from personal ambition, according to European standards.

One day we took tea with a priest in charge of a temple in the Chinese city. It

was a curious experience to sit there sipping the strong concoction, making

polite conversation, and looking all the time at the rows of statues on

galleried shelves, representing arhats, who might still be shedding their

blessings upon mankind from above, little as one would expect it from the

simpering wooden expression of their countenances. Once more I reflected – how

China [240] makes one reflect! – with amusement mixed with concern, how the

gallery of statues of arhats was beginning to accumulate also in the

headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, and I wondered if the

complacent Chinese arhats when alive had looked forward with pleasure to the

prospect of sitting thus in effigy, as our Adyar arhats seemed to do. [241]

 



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER II

“NAUGHTY” AMERICA

§1

IT was a contrast from Japan to America, even though a sea voyage across the far

from pacific Pacific Ocean, and two days at Honolulu were sandwiched between. We

did not know it at the time, but Honolulu is a bit of California set far off in

the ocean – all sunshine and ordered shrubbery. There is something similar about

the Polynesians and the Americans, whereby they fit well together – a

smoothness, an absence of spikes, a cleanliness of person – though there is also

the contrast that the Polynesians do not preserve themselves well, as the

Americans do above all. Both are supremely feminine people – in contrast to the

masculinity of India, China, Japan and Europe.

We landed at San Francisco. What bustle! And yet nothing to compare to that of

Chicago and New York, as we were to learn. Four trams abreast up Market Street,

and a couple of motor-cars on either side. As we were driven from the pier we

ran along within three inches of the giant tram-car. What nerve! But our driver

did not know that he had any nerve. By the way, why “street cars” instead of

tram-cars? For surely taxi-cabs and private motor-cars – I beg pardon,

automobiles – are also street cars, not parlour cars. Some called them “trolley

cars,” and I had visions of hanging by a thread. But I give in; street cars,

automobiles and elevators (“we went down in the elevator,” but “lift” is just as

bad) shall figure in these otherwise austere pages.

I had a big lecture programme in the United States – in the evenings and at

lunches – covering one hundred and eight cities. The daytime was mostly free for

us to indulge in our habit of walking and looking. We walked for hours at a

time, and looked up at all the tall buildings and peered [242] down into all the

boweries. We progressed through the million-dollar town halls (in that case a

little in the spirit, I fear, of the American who, it is related, coming out of

the National Gallery in London, met some friends on the steps and said: “Well,

that is done; it took me half an hour, but I could have done it in a quarter if

I had had spikes in my shoes,”) and lingered in the dime eating joints and the

five and ten cent stores. Fifth Avenue (I am now speaking of New York) and

Broadway alike entranced us – though progress on the latter, both on the

side-walk and in taxis, was generally slow – the former for its shops, the

latter for its people. America is full of people. All Americans seem to be

people, whether rich or poor. And here people greatly impress people. A Dutch

gentleman whom we knew abandoned his business in San Francisco and fled back to

Holland with his family, alarmed at the rapid Americanization of his children in

the schools. It is a curious sensation in New York to be in the midst of ten

million people. London does not give one the same impression; somehow its eight

millions are not people, though excellent homological horticultural specimens.

But San Francisco. The best part of San Francisco is the Muir Woods, and Mount

Tamalpais, with their giant sequoias or redwood trees and these, after all, are

not in San Francisco. Go out into Market Street on a Sunday morning early in

fine weather, and you will see hundreds of girls in riding breeches and long

boots, making their way to the wharf at the end of the street, to take

ferry-steamer across the harbour to Sausalito, and, after a short railway

journey to Mill Valley, to walk to the Muir Woods to lose themselves for the day

in that bit of country, extensive enough to absorb them all without noticing the

difference. These were mostly school girls and business girls – seeming not to

need the aid of young men for their week-end divertisement – a rare sight to

anyone who for years in the Orient has been accustomed to the restraint,

especially the self-restraint, and obscuration of women, at least in public

places.

Yet in America the elder people do not walk. The English who do so are

considered a bit freakish – a little reminiscent of the view of the same people

in Eastern climes were, in the words of a popular song:

The mad dog of an Englishman

Goes out in the midday sun. [243]

Perhaps it is the immensity of their country (twice as big as India) which

discourages the Americans from walking. Or perhaps it is that they cannot walk.

The numerous shoe advertisements almost suggest the latter, dealing as they do

with (a) shoes with built-in arches “to save your feet,” and (b) shoes with

perfectly flexible shanks, necessary because “the arches of the foot must be

completely free to move at every step, or else they will grow weak.” Brains

applied to feet have produced this paradox – no doubt a case of extremes

meeting. Perhaps since the depression Americans are walking more, for I see now

frequent advertisements of “shoes to fit your feet in motion.” In any case, even

if they do walk now they also ride – the old slogan (Sanskrit sloka) “One man

one vote” has been supplemented by “One house one automobile.” Even the poorest

sits on high in his ancient flivver, bought for twenty-five dollars, veritably

riding a cock-horse, and with rings on his fingers and bells on his toes, so to

speak, he does have his music wherever he goes.

At San Francisco we saw also the seals on the rocks, as everybody does. In those

days there was in the museum on the cliff an old stuffed seal said formerly to

have been leader of the herd for about a hundred and twenty years. The story

goes that one day a younger seal came up from the south and made battle with the

old king; they fought for three days and then the old seal, wounded in many

places, swam to shore and died. It was said to be a striking example of “Nature

red in tooth and claw with ravin.” But I reflected that these creatures cannot

enjoy rumination in old age as man can, and it may not be too bad that when

their powers begin to decline they should be brought to an end in a grand climax

of excitement, in which actual pain may be little felt.

We had a nice motor-drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a small matter of

nearly five hundred miles, which our driver proposed to accomplish in one

sitting, with but brief pauses for lunch and tea; and he would have done it too,

but that we broke an axle on a particularly foul bit of road sixty or seventy

miles out. A telephone call for reinforcements brought a new car for us from San

Francisco in two or three hours, and we bowled steadily along, racing “The Owl”

(name of a train) in the dark, though we had had to be more cautious in the

daytime, for U.S. laws are [244] very inflexible, and thirty miles per hour was

then the speed limit, with five miles extra for grace. Our driver’s plan was to

set his speedometer wrong, so that he could go at thirty-five while registering

thirty, and have another five on top of that. It was risky, all the same. Only

shortly before Bebe Daniels had been run in and jailed without the option of a

fine, for being caught doing fifty on that very road. The Judge who sentenced

her was criticized a bit for jailing a beautiful young lady who was also a

popular idol, but he replied: “When I was a barber I was a good barber and I did

my work properly, and now I am a judge I am going to be a good judge.”

On our way we stopped at Modesto, one of the many new towns of California of

which the citizens are justly proud, even if it be called Modesto. The broad

main street offered almost everything that a big city can give, but on a smaller

scale, and its sides were lined with cars which had brought the farmers into the

town for the evening’s life and fun. It was as hospitable as it was clean, which

is saying much. On arrival we entered through an arch “Welcome to Modesto,” and

on passing away we went through another “Thank you, come again.” It was there

that we sat for the first time on high stools at a counter, consuming American

sandwiches – two huge slabs of bread with a generous allowance of cheese,

lettuce and small pickled cucumbers between.

In San Francisco we had already sampled the cafeteria – an institution which had

our approval. There is a long counter with two brass rails in front of it. You

start at one end, pick up a tray and a little roll of table cutlery in a paper

napkin, slide your tray along the rails, and pass in turn the cakes, pies,

sandwiches, hot savouries, ice creams and drinks, taking from the counter or the

shelves the plates or dishes you fancy, only at the hot counter being served by

an attendant with whatever you choose.

At the end of the counter you find a young woman sitting at a sort of

typewriting machine. She casts a critical eye at your tray, then makes a

smashing attack upon the machine with capable fingers, but succeeds in producing

only a ticket – which nearly smashes your pocket-book, for of course from all

these tempting things exposed to your eye you have chosen three times as much as

you can possibly eat. You now carry your tray to a vacant table, eat what [245]

you can, leave what you can’t, and pay at the door as you go out. I learnt that

in one of these big cafeterias the proprietor assigned ninety-nine per cent of

the profits to the employees, and did himself mighty well on the remaining one

per cent.

It was a palatial cafeteria in Los Angeles that I saw a countryman, after

helping himself from the bottle of tomato sauce, lick it all round the neck to

clean it before replacing the cap. But enough of these intimacies.

Los Angeles; mushroom city, it is called, but I would say bamboo city. The

bamboo shoots in our garden in Madras would rise six or nine inches in a day and

night and leave the mushrooms panting near the starting-point. Besides, the poor

mushrooms soon faint by the way, and Los Angeles does not. I never could get the

hang of that city, though I was quite sure that it had not much to do with

angels. But all round it, in Southern California, there are dozens of little

towns as chic and understandable as you please. In one of them, Riverside (a

beauty, with rows and rows of flowers down the main streets), we were to stay at

a walnut ranch. One half expected walnuts to be capering about, humpty-dumpty

bodies on spindly legs, hotly pursued by brave boys highly skilled with the

lasso and mounted on prancing fire-nostrilled mustangs. Might not anything be,

in a land where alligator farms (“a thousand on exhibition; some of them five

hundred years old”), ostrich farms (“including the tallest bird in the world”

and a family scene of pa and ma sitting alternately on the five-pound eggs) and

lion farms abound? But no, the walnuts were quiet and well behaved, just like

our own walnuts in our own back garden of Ootacamund in the hills of South

India; and you could not have found a cosier little homestead anywhere. Well,

well, reality was good enough, especially after one had learnt that “lasso”

meant simply rope, and “sombrero” merely a hat.

Hollywood held us for several days. We spent some time in the film city and saw,

among other things, Jacky Coogan shadowing a grim old sailor-man, dodging across

the village street and hiding behind a large barrel at the critical moment, when

the sailor looked round. The poor little chap must have done the scene half a

dozen times before it was declared satisfactory, but no matter, he is a

millionaire now, for his father and mother, who were in attendance, invested

[246] the proceeds safely for him at compound interest. It is hard work, this

picture-making, but deucedly attractive.

§2

Back we went to San Francisco and from there over the mountains by the beautiful

Shasta Route to Portland, and on to Tacoma, Seattle and Vancouver and the Rocky

Mountains of Canada, with their blessed snow, that was expected to be, and was,

a joy to dust and heat bitten eyes from the deserts of Sind.

We saw that snow at its best, and were lucky enough to experience a more than

usual allowance of it, because a tunnel fell in upon the train in front of ours

and we had to make a long detour of some twenty-four hours along Lake Windermere

and Columbia Lake, with their gorgeous background of snowy peaks, past Crow’s

Nest, and thence via Macleod to Calgary. By special invitation we rode through

most of that region, during the daytime, in the “caboose,” in a little

observation chamber overlooking the roof of the train, whence the guards looked

out for trouble, whence we looked out at one of the greatest scenes in the

world. Among other things we saw the place where Turtle Mountain had turned over

without warning and entirely buried a little town, leaving only one baby alive.

The north-west is a lovely corner of America in which to ramble. We sampled

Tacoma, Seattle, Victoria, Port Angeles, Nanaimo and Vancouver by boat, so we

saw a good deal of the Puget Sound, as well as Vancouver Island, which we

crossed from Victoria to Nanaimo by automobile. Shall I enter into the

controversy as to which is the most beautiful harbour in the world? San

Francisco, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney are usually grouped as the three rivals for

first place, but something is to be said also for the Puget Sound, Cork,

Pang-Pange and Trincomalee. San Francisco harbour is disappointing in the

neighbourhood of the wharves, and miserable on the Oakland-Berkeley side, but is

lovely towards the mouth of the Sacramento river. Sydney lacks grandeur, though

it has the most attractive shape. Rio wins the heart, with its bright colours,

its ring of towering and picturesque rocks (including the thousand-foot Sugar

[247] Loaf, the two thousand-foot Hunchback and the Organ mountains with the

Five Fingers of God), and its trim palm-fringed boulevards running for miles

round the bay.

But the Puget Sound has also a charm of its own, making it quite a rival to the

Inland Sea of Japan; at least we thought so as we sat in the stern of a little

steamer and threw bits of bread into the air to be caught with wonderful skill

by the seagulls, which we watched for hours, wondering how they could alter

speed and direction so much, whirling round and overtaking or lagging behind the

steamer with only rarely a few flappings of the wings.

Vancouver city, on the mainland, has two special attractions – the Stanley Park

to the south (where one walks in a natural forest and looks out on the beauty of

the bay from its headland), and the Capilano Canon to the north where one

crosses the canon by a long narrow flexible suspension-bridge.

From Vancouver to Chilliwak by electric car was an interesting journey. There we

walked about eleven miles, looking at the farmsteads. From Chilliwak we went

through the Kettle Valley to Summerland, where apples grew by the million in

lovely surroundings and co-operative marketing of them was carried to a fine

point, then across Okanagan Lake by steamer, to Vernon by automobile and on to

Sicamous junction by train.

Sicamous railway station at night is eerie – frightening, in fact – set as it is

in the almost unexplored forest about Lake Shuswap. A curious name, Sicamous. We

heard a story about it. It was said that a raw Scotsman had come there and had

seen a moose which had been shot by a friend, and asked what it was. He had

looked at it contemplatively for a moment, and then declared he had never seen

“sic a moose” before. Sicamous was our stepping-off place for the grand journey

amongst the snows of the Rockies right round by Macleod to Calgary and then to

Banff-Banff with its splendid hotel with perhaps the most gorgeous prospect in

the world.

The Rocky Mountains have a sudden termination. You descend from Banff to

Calgary, and 10, in a moment, as it were, you are in the plains, flat as a

pancake for a thousand miles, all the way to Winnipeg, where we encountered a

temperature of 72 degrees below freezing point (or 40 degrees below zero, where

Centigrade and Fahrenheit meet) [249] which continued with us as we moved south

into the United States again, to Duluth, Saint Paul and Minneapolis.

Western Canada overshadows humanity with its natural magnitude and magnificence,

so that one scarcely notices the people – big, strong and rough as they are, the

men often clad in cow-boy hats, high-heeled boots with spurs, and short coats.

The few Red Indians we saw were poor specimens of humanity, short, fat and

shapeless, totally different from the Red Man brought to England in my boyhood

by Colonel Cody, “Buffalo Bill.”

But back in the United States we began to see the people again. Why is it that

so many in the Middle West, especially women, look rather like Red Indians, with

their dry, somewhat flat faces and broad cheek-bones, which throw the nose into

prominence? Can it be that the Red Indians are coming back again and

transferring by mental influence some elements of their past into new bodies,

mingling them with their new heredity? Or is it something in the air and the

soil which modify the human form and features?

I should have liked an answer to that question by some reliable clairvoyant, if

such there be. Why was it that people who claimed great clairvoyant powers would

never properly tackle questions of this kind, but would dwell always on the

remote? Mr. Leadbeater would count the atoms in atoms and talk about their

shapes, but I could never persuade him to give attention to their properties and

reactions. He would tell of people’s lives in the far past and future, but never

of yesterday or tomorrow, about which he gave constant indications of knowing

nothing. All clairvoyants I have known have had the same defect. There is one

who lectures frequently on the vast importance of clairvoyance in medical

research, saying that it would be easy to train a number of observers for

diagnostic purposes. But will he settle down steadily to that sort of work? Not

a bit of it. He will spend his whole life writing about his conversations with

angels and travelling and lecturing to emotional people.

Well, it was Christmas, and we were in Saint Paul, and it was our first American

Christmas, and the Americans take their Christmas very seriously in their

practical social way. It is not that God is in His heaven. God is in His own

country – America – and He sees that it is good. [249]

Christmas in America is not merely a Santa Claus day, a children’s day with much

blowing of gaily painted and tasselled tin trumpets in the morning and much

pulling about of wooden horses in the afternoon. It is a day of presents for

everybody, of packets wrapped in paper printed all over with holly and mistletoe

and fastened with small seals or scraps of gummed paper bearing seasonal designs

and greetings.

Perhaps I ought not to have said gummed paper, but mucilaginous paper. I once

made a sad mistake in this connection when I was sending directions for the

distribution of some circulars. I wrote: “They should be stuck at the top left

hand corner with gum.” Dreadful thought; the young ladies of the office knew

something of the use of chewing gum for “perfecting the facial angle” (see

advertisements), and must have been shocked at my sacrilegious suggestion. I

ought to have said “mucilage.”

The family and friends in the house gather together for the opening of these

packets, with eager wonder as to the contents. Presently the mucilaginous strips

and the holly paper lie in torn fragments on the table and floor (for the

American does not remove them carefully, fold them up and preserve them for a

subsequent Christmas) and leave disclosed to view numerous fancy handkerchiefs,

silk stockings, and a hundred different kinds of “notions.”

In the railway station, the post offices and other public places Christmas trees

abound for general enjoyment. When we were in Montana we found that it was the

custom in one small town for parties to board the long-distance trains and give

presents to the children who could not enjoy their Christmas at home.

§3

My wife and I did not go to America for sight-seeing, but we did see the Niagara

Falls, several times, on our six visits there, passing between Hamilton and

Buffalo. We stood below, looking up when all around us was ice and snow, and

again when the waters boiled and swirled between verdant banks. I cannot compare

it with anything else. I can only say it invigorated and refreshed us. To some,

I am told, such grand phenomena teach humbleness; they feel like something very

small in the presence of something very big. To [250] me they give strength. I

suppose the difference depends upon whether our habit is to admire from afar or

to enter into everything as if it were our own or natural to us. The same

psychological habit applies to many things. I have seen students who could make

nothing of chemistry or a foreign language because they looked at it from the

outside and could not then flow, as it were, into the sanctuary. In the same way

some religious devotees remain eternally stupid on the subject of God.

I think the great cities of the eastern States, human Niagaras, affected me in

much the same way – New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and to a lesser degree

Washington and Baltimore. Down in the subway at Times Square at five p.m. we

would stand in a corner and watch the tide of faces pouring by – not a fierce,

angry, hungry, restless tide, I think. Legs moved quickly, bodies pressed

together without repulsion, feet hurried, but hearts here seemed to be singing –

a truly lovable river of life, warming our coldness, cooling our heat, and

bearing us with it in, not to, an enchanting life. True, not all the same,

without variety. Faces there would be, seen but for a moment, from which it was

devastation to part – a lifetime lived in ten seconds. It was not merely

“blessed, beloved humanity”; the drops were not lost in this ocean. New York has

no landscape, but its “homoscape” is lovely with innumerable human flowers set

in picturesque craggy heights.

Pittsburg was funny; I cannot tell why, but rather a comedian, a pathetic

comedian of the stage, sorrowing for itself, appealing notwithstanding its

wealth, very Lancashire-like or Lanarkshire-like with its hills and dales. There

we stayed in an hotel in which we wiped our faces on little towels bearing the

inviting legend:

STOLEN FROM THE KING’S HOTEL.

I have spoken of heat and warmth. It reminds me of some townsmen in India who

said, when presenting a memorial to a retiring and departing British revenue

officer, expressing appreciation and affection and a sense of loss: “Your heart

was always cool towards us.” Tinkling ice, evidently, in that glass.

New Orleans somehow was not quite so kind. This was, perhaps, not America. And

yet it was America, only its pleasures and its cruelties were more subtle. It,

too, had [251] brotherhood, which has a long range-good, bad and indifferent.

In New Orleans we heard of an extreme example of bad brotherhood. A house was

shown to us in which a foreign lady had lived long ago. One night the house

caught fire. The fire-fighters broke into the top story, and there they found a

torture chamber. The lady had been in the habit of torturing slaves. I reflected

that even here was incipient brotherhood, for it would have given her no

pleasure to torture lumps of wood. She could not be happy without tasting the

feelings of her fellow-men, but unfortunately her appetite ran to caviare and

pate de foie gras rather than to corn and grapes. I do not hide from myself the

fact that brotherhood always exploits, and the flowing life which entertains a

harmless man like me is also my sacrificial victim.

In New Orleans we also visited the old dwelling-place of Paul Morphy, a wonder

at the chess board in his day. I have always liked a game of chess; it is so

clean, so free from pretence. You win or you lose, or else it is a draw, and

there is no doubt about it. That is the joy of games which are not of chance.

When in Boston we went out to Concord, Massachusetts, to see Emerson’s house. My

father had enjoyed and enriched himself with Emerson’s Essays, and had

introduced me to them when I was still a boy. Their consciousness of the hidden

good, and their teaching of individuality without individualism, had played

their part in giving me the grit to face my disappointments of youth without

despair. After looking at the “Old Manse,” and the bridge of the “minuteman,”

where the first blood was shed in the War of Independence, and passing through

the delightful little country town, or rather village, we approached the

foursquare unpretentious house of Emerson’s maturity. Though it was not open to

the public, the professor from abroad was admitted and shown round as a

privileged person. (Not that this professor particularly looked the part, or had

ever qualified for it by any act of absent-mindedness other than that of going

out in Chicago with two hats – one on head and one in hand.)

I remained in the library by myself a little while, looking at the books on the

shelves, and the table and chair in the centre of the room. The library

contained many of the [252] translations of Sanskrit books available in

Emerson’s time. I looked especially at these, and in some of them I found little

bits of paper placed there to mark the points in which he took especial

interest. By these it was easy to see where Emerson had found inspiration

similar to his own, which may well have strengthened him in his resolves. (On a

second visit, some years later, I found that the library had been tidied up, and

the scraps of paper removed.) When I sat in the chair I was suddenly overwhelmed

with a strange mood. All thoughts ceased, but not consciousness. This was my

room, these were my books, that my old writing-pad lying on the table. The mood

passed, and I went upstairs to the ladies. Hanging on the wall where the stairs

turn was a picture which brought me to a standstill. My wife. My wife of now, I

mean, as she will be thirty or forty years from now. I could not distinguish her

from the wife of Emerson, who survived him by a number of years – the same quiet

expression, broad eyes, actionful features, little laughing nose. This was the

lady who had said, turning to her chickens: “It is wicked to go to church on

Sundays.” Strange fancies. I certainly shall not try to explain them, so let me

write “whim” on the lintel of my door.

§4

America showed us many curious little evidences of the development of the

communal consciousness, promise for the future of the human race, one hopes,

when mutual trust and trustworthiness (twin deities of economic progress) shall

have become the norm. When we were staying in an apartment in an old brownstone

house in 55th Street, New York, I used to go down in the early mornings to buy a

newspaper at a store near the corner of 6th Avenue. It was not at that time of

day exactly a store, for no one was within, and the door was locked, and the

stock of newspapers was outside, placed on a large board in front of the shop

window. There were arrayed five or six piles of different morning papers, and on

each lay a quantity of coins of the realm, or rather of the Union – E Pluribus

unum.

I put down my nickel (five-cent piece), took up my two-cent paper and three

cents for change, and went my way. Other people were doubtless doing the same,

and not [253] stealing either the papers or the money. Or else, why should the

man or woman concerned continue the business, which went on unchanged at least

during the months when I was staying there? We had seen also in many cities of

the United States and Canada piles of newspapers placed on little stands

attached to suburban lamp-posts and street-car standards. It was the habit of

business men to take their morning papers from these supplies and drop their

money into little boxes fixed to the stands.

One striking experience was that of lunching at the Exchange Buffet, of which

there are several branches in New York City. You enter the restaurant, take

whatever you like from the counters and eat at one of the tables. Everything is

marked in plain figures, so that you can add up the prices of what you have

taken. On your way out you tell the cashier the total of what you owe him, and

pay, without giving any particulars. The statistics of the company show that in

the course of a year the takings do not deviate even one per cent from the value

of the food put out. I heard it said that there are some office boys who, when

their money is running short towards the end of the week, make a practice of

telling the cashier less than they owe, but they tell him more on Monday so as

to make up for their defalcations of Thursday and Friday!

On one occasion we made a long stay in New York, necessary because my wife had

to lie for three months in bed in our apartment, on account of a motor-car

accident in which her pelvic bone had been broken through in two places and

cracked in a third. Wonderful to relate, she had come through a stormy Atlantic

passage from England in that condition. It was on an icy New Year’s day that we

were coming down a long hill in Holywell, in Wales, and a man – a doctor –

coming up the hill in his car emerged without warning into our side of the road,

to avoid a parked car on his side, and we met with a staggering, sickening

crash. I had seen it coming, by a second. I had shouted out to my wife, “Duck

down,” and had myself dived into the bottom of our big car, and so escaped with

nothing more than some blows on the head and nose, since, fortunately, a

basketware suitcase was in front of me. But my wife (who would never do a thing

without first knowing why) got the blow in her side.

We were carried to cottages on opposite sides of the [254] street. At one door

the people cried out: “Do not bring her in here. She will frighten the baby.”

The doctor, for a wonder unhurt, patched us up. He said that no bones were

broken, but that my wife’s muscles were badly wrenched. Three days later I

carried her on board the S.S. Megantic at Liverpool. The ship’s doctor advised

an X-ray photograph in New York, and that revealed to us the broken bone and led

to three months in bed – three months which, my wife said, were among the most

pleasant of her life. For a year afterwards, wherever we went, though she could

walk on the level, I carried her up and down all stairs. Now, I am glad to say,

she plays tennis again with the best.

During those three months I became almost an habitue of the ladies’ shoe shops

in New York. I used to make a selection and take them on approval, to be tried

on the sound foot. “You will need some new shoes, and here are some bargains too

good to miss.” I bought so many pairs of shoes that my wife is still wearing

some of them, seven years afterwards. And why? The doctor had told me that

probably she would never walk again. A little psychology, despite Pope’s

teaching:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep or touch not the Pierian spring.

Just at that time I did, however, nearly suffer fatally for “a little learning”

with reference to the street-car system of New York. I had gone out on 55th

Street and was moving eastwards towards Broadway in search of an uptown car.

Crossing 6th Avenue I asked a policeman where I could get such a car, and he

indicated the corner of 55th Street and Broadway. Arrived there, I saw a car

coming with about fifty automobiles in attendance. I stepped into the roadway

and held up my hand, as I would in England at a “stop by request” corner. But

the car would not stop – nor its satellites: I stood stock still, and everyone

of those cars missed me, mostly by only two or three inches on either side,

though they could not see me in advance. I take off my hat to American

auto-drivers.

It was while we were staying in that apartment house that I gave four lectures

on India in the Community Church in New York, and afterwards wrote, at the

request of friends, my reply to Miss Mayo’s attack on that country, her book

being called Mother India, and my reply to it An Englishman [255] defends Mother

India – which subsequently had a large sale in India and England, was much liked

by several Cabinet ministers, and I hope did some good in restoring a decent

angle of vision towards the Indian people. Mine was a big book, crammed with

facts – at least 600 pages, until the publishers compelled me to cut it down to

400.

The book had to be written in a hurry, so I had six secretaries for it – three

stenographers and three copyists. I would dictate to one after another, and out

of office hours would correct the typewritten material, while in the very early

mornings I would prepare my notes for dictation during the day. In this work my

wife and a Cuban gentleman were helping me, and they generally sat together at a

card table at the other end of the long room in which I dictated to the

stenographers. One night my wife went to stay with a friend and she did not

return until the next afternoon. On the morning of her absence the Cuban

gentleman took a bad cold and could not come to help.

In the middle of the morning, while I was dictating, there was a terrific crash,

followed by a cloud of dust. My stenographer – a Miss Waterson – gave a tiny

squeak, like that of a little mouse. I ran to the landlady, who fell fainting on

the threshold, to which she had just come. The whole of one half of the old

plaster ceiling, thickly encrusted with floral designs, had fallen in. It had

smashed a typewriter right through the card table, and would surely have killed

both my wife and our Cuban friend if they had not been absent that morning. The

plaster had become softened because plumbers had been working upstairs and by

some mistake had allowed an overflow of water which had sunk through the floor

above into the ceiling. The only other case of the kind I have known was where

some malicious persons, wishing to injure the progress of a new theatre, allowed

steam to escape between the ornate ceiling and the roof, before the plaster had

fully set; it was discovered in the nick of time. I was taken up under the roof

to have a look. Such a queer place none of the audience ever think of, looking

up from their seats far below. That was in Chicago. Fortunately there are really

two Chicagos – poles asunder.

These incidents occurred in 1928, during our third visit to America – I am not

writing a travel book, but just some observations of men and things, including

myself. Let me not omit to mention, however, that we were served in New [256]

York by three Negro maids, as black and velvety as night (and none the worse for

that), but illumined with the names of Blanche, Lily and Pearl.

On our first visit to America, as I have said, snow and ice were especially dear

to us. We had seen them in western and central Canada and the middle West.

Mother Nature kept up the supply until and beyond the point of our departure

from North America. St. John, New Brunswick, where we embarked, was deliciously

cold. Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we spent the next day, was almost ice-bound.

Ice-breaking craft were at work nosing about the harbour and breaking up the

crust before it could grow too thick. We saw coming into harbour a sailing ship,

with auxiliary engine, which had evidently been in lively weather as well as

cold; it was literally covered with icicles, hanging from every part where

anything could hang-a most unreal picture, possible in fancy, one would have

thought, but not in fact. [257]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER III

THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME

§1

The Atlantic treated us well and we encountered nothing sad until we entered the

port of Liverpool one Sunday morning in the dismal month of March, and beheld

beneath us from the height of our deck a crowd of haggard faces, hollow cheeks

accompanied by hollow eyes, looking for a job to keep them from becoming

hollower still.

After America, Japan and even India, England had a great air of poverty in the

year 1922. In England the people looked poor; in India, their surroundings.

England was apparently a land fit for heroes, and only heroes to live in. Others

could surely not survive. It was a land for the English, a race so accustomed to

suffering that it can scarcely enjoy anything else, a people of stout hearts,

well-governed tempers, and above all disciplined minds, a race of horses

plodding through mire and rain in constant inexpressiveness, not expecting to

enjoy itself much, or horses prancing over the meadows in pursuit of foxes, and

wondering in the evening why they had not enjoyed themselves. But they console

themselves: good old England, steady, dependable England – no typhoons, no

hurricanes, no revolutions; heaven for climate, even if we must dispense with

company, which belongs to a warmer place.

While we waited at the wharf two or three hours for some official to get out of

bed, dress himself and come on board, I wondered how much extra coal we had

spent to save a few hours on the Atlantic run, and whether the gentleman was

aware that hundreds of passengers were missing, for his small pleasure, morning

trains to all parts of England. But perhaps nothing could please him, not even

the sight of some hundreds of early morning faces [258] looking for a welcome on

return to their native land. No, he would leave them standing awhile, to wonder

if this were really the Old Country, gone older than they had expected, gone

dead, in fact, and buried too.

But there was some illusion. England was not quite dead yet. At long last

passports were examined and the overdressed passengers (so different from the

people on deck the day before) descended the gangway, were swallowed up in the

huge Customs shed and, a little later, by taxi-cabs and railway stations (for

few wanted to stay in Liverpool – England’s premier doormat), after more or less

sharp encounters with the human ferrets who gravitate into the Customs

department – strange contrast from the jolly dogs who played ball with our

belongings on the wharves of San Francisco and New York, and took a pirate’s

hearty, if grim, interest in the personal idiosyncrasies revealed by the

interiors of suitcases and trunks.

At Liverpool the youthful inspector allotted to me was about to drop the lid on

the contents of a cabin trunk, when a sharp-faced senior mongoose hurried up.

“Ha, what have we here,” – he jerked out a little pile of yellow paper-backed

books. But he soon retired before the austerity of the National Geographical

Magazine, after looking at me with an injured air, as upon one who had played a

dirty trick on him, and might be expected to steal bread from the mouths of

England’s defenceless widows and orphans.

In Liverpool, as in other places, some things catch the eye more than others,

and generally they are the incongruous. As we stood about the deck of our

forlorn steamer on that cold Sunday morning our gaze was troubled, but yet

fascinated, by a huge artificial bird balanced perilously on top of one of the

prominent buildings. The high visibility of several iron rods absurdly holding

it in place did not detract from the uneasiness occasioned by the sense of its

insecurity. Only compassion for those in the place beneath prevented us from

wishing that it might immediately fall and be done with its misery and ours. I

jerked myself back to normal.

We went, as I have said, through the Customs, and then a porter took our stuff

to a waiting cab, and whispered: “Don’t let him see yer give me anything” – him

being a foreman who kept count of all luggage and collected so much [259] per

piece from the taxi driver afterwards. I thought for a moment that there was

some new and unaccountable conspiracy afoot for the protection of travelers –

until I learnt at the railway station that I had to pay the taximan a

substantial sum for each piece of luggage.

As at Liverpool my eye had been caught by the preposterous bird, so also at San

Francisco something peculiar had attracted my attention, a big “57” standing out

above the town. I wondered what it was for. Some direction to the shipping,

perhaps, and to-morrow there would be 56 or 58? Our American friends were much

amused at my not knowing that this was an advertisement – the Heinz company,

with their “From tree to bottle in one day.”

I like advertisements. They form almost the best Baedeker to the minds of the

people. They instruct that mind on the good points of ordinary useful things,

and awaken it to desire for a constantly higher standard of living. I

appreciated the hoardings of America, which are not rough planks pasted over

with printed bills, but neat individual structures bearing well-painted designs.

“Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion” can excite interest, with its variations upon

one theme. These new advertisements enter in softly, arm in arm with reason and

beauty, unlike some of the old style publicity, which tried to bludgeon us into

taking somebody’s pills.

§2

I will draw a veil over the family reunion. The English are sensitive about

their private affairs, both their defects and their virtues. If I am somewhat

different in my willingness to expose my life and thought with all their defects

and follies, as data for psychological study in the interests of science, I must

none the less respect the probable sensitiveness of my father and mother, my

brothers and their wives, and even my elder brother’s daughter, albeit she

appears in the Christmas pantomimes. Suffice it to say I renewed my close

personal friendship with my father – something additional to the ties of a

thousand appreciative memories – appeased my mother’s resentment at my long

absence, sympathized with my elder brother’s despondency at the loss of his

business (which had been closed down when he went as a cavalryman to

Mesopotamia, and could not be

revived afterwards), re-recognized my younger brother (now a watch and clock

maker and, strange to relate, almost twin brother in appearance and manner to a

gentleman I had stayed with in Washington who was in charge of the clocks in the

Government buildings in that city), made the acquaintance of the two new wives

(who corresponded to the descriptions given by the astrologer in India) and the

niece, a bouncing girl distinctly belonging to the new age, with its new ideals

in children.

My wife and I also acquainted ourselves with more of England than we had known

before. We purchased a second-hand three-wheeled two-cylindered two-seater

Coventry Premier car, for £170 – what a price cars were in 1922! I learned to

drive it on Saturday, taught my wife on Sunday, and on Monday she drove it a

hundred and twenty miles, to the home of an aunt in Anglesea. After that we

drove five thousand miles through England and Scotland.

It was a nice little car, I liked the swaying motion resulting from the single

back wheel, but that very merit made for trouble. It was difficult to avoid the

pot-holes (as numerous then in England’s roads as the hollows in English cheeks)

with the third wheel, and dangerous to drive in towns on account of the tram

lines from which the third wheel would come out only with a jerk and the start

of a fine skid in wet weather. I remember a perilous occasion on which we

performed several circles on the long hilly road near the Crystal Palace in

London. Fortunately it was Sunday morning, so we hit no other traffic.

It was a devilish little car to start, having no self-starter and a powerful

compression from which the most ardent garage boys used to shrink. My wife would

sit in the car, I would crank her up for periods varying from half a minute to

half an hour, until the engine started, then I would go outside and warn the

public that something was coming, and out she would leap through the garage door

with a roar, like a clown in a circus going through a flaming hoop. Then I would

jump on the running board, step over the door and away we would go, feeling like

Kaye Don himself. We were always losing pieces of that car, but generally we

retrieved them and stuck them on again. The driving chain especially kept coming

off. I do not think we ever went a hundred miles without some running repairs.

Ultimately we lost our little car. When we went abroad we left it in the [261]

garage of a cousin, who volunteered to sell it for us for £10, but he never

replied to our questions regarding it, and after some years went bankrupt and

disappeared from our lives.

In those days we used to think we were reckless persons if we swept along at

twenty-five miles an hour, and to expect a collision at every corner – most of

England’s roads were so constantly winding and so shut in with hedges that one

could not see far ahead. This was quite symbolic. In England the future is

always just round the corner, so we must be on the look out and not “let her

rip,” as in the long open roads of more spacious lands. So the English have

learned to live from moment to moment, relying upon character more than

calculation.

The English are not kind to themselves. They seem to have accepted labour as the

lot of man. Therefore they do not take steps, as the Americans do, to eliminate

it from their lives. There is much room for compassion in this respect. On the

tramcars and omnibuses, the conductor must perpetually be running up and down

the steps. One day I tried to pay my fare on the platform before mounting to a

seat on the roof, but the conductor would not take it. He must follow me

upstairs, collect my two-pence there and go down again, and do the same with the

next passenger. I did not wonder at the busman’s holiday; think of the luxury of

sitting up on top for a whole journey without having to run up and down those

steps ten or twenty times. And all that ticket-punching for every halfpenny

difference in the stages!

I preferred the one price pay-as-you-enter or pay-as-you-leave system I had seen

elsewhere. “One price! said a gentleman to whom I broached this idea. “But that

would be grossly unfair. Must the people who live four miles out pay only the

same price that I pay for my two miles’ ride?”

I pointed out that he was not riding for enjoyment at so much a mile, that all

were riding for the same purpose, namely to get to or from their destination, so

all really received the same service. Besides, a one-price system helped to

spread the city and to keep down the rents in the inner residential zone. But

that idea is still too communal for England, and those poor busmen will have to

run up and down for some time more. Well, well, Britons never shall be slaves,

but it is their capacity for self-imposed slavery that has put them at the top

of the world. You won’t catch [262] an Indian, nor usually an American, doing

to-day what can just as well be left till to-morrow, or altogether – such a

waste of time, which may be spent in sitting or romping in the sunshine.

§3

By invitation we went to Finland and the Baltic states to lecture. Finland gave

us a surprise. In England we had thought it “off the map.” But it appeared that

it might very soon be near the centre of European civilization, which has been

shifting steadily northwards from the Mediterranean shores these last two

thousand years, and may easily blossom anew in Leningrad and Helsingfors.

Is there another country in Europe which has made so much use of its

water-courses for electric power and has gone forward in its own special

industries at such a rate in recent years? In a paper age it has the largest

paper mill in Europe. In education – Finland has no illiterates, and its

bookshops are prominent in the big towns, instead of being aside, as in many

other countries. In the arts it has produced Sibelius and Gallen. In

architecture it speaks the latest word – clean, bold lines, and ornament

announcing only essence and power – a combination producing beauty such as I

have not seen elsewhere.

In Helsingfors we stayed in a large apartment house which was deserted by its

normal occupants, who had gone to the lakes for the holiday season. One day we

stuck halfway up in the automatic lift. Fortunately it was built on a spacious

and open plan. I dropped my wife over the tall iron gate into the arms of a

postman, before clambering out myself.

Finland is not sufficiently known as a holiday resort. In summer its sunshine

and lakes are delicious. It is called the land of a thousand lakes, though I was

told there are more than thirty thousand of them. These lakes are studded with

tiny islands covered with pine trees. Only Minnesota can elsewhere show this

kind of beauty.

It is part of the pleasure of Finland that one can travel far by water. Our

longest trip in that way was from Kajaana in the interior to Uleaborg on the

coast, in the northern part of the country. In one section of that journey we

had to shoot the rapids called Kissakoski (about 7 miles) [263] and Pyhakoski

(about 14 miles) – the most powerful rapids in Finland. This was done in a large

narrow boat of the kind used to convey the tar which is made from the resinous

fir trunks in those parts, with a crew of two – an oarsman in the prow and a

steersman who worked with a paddle in the stern. Our lives certainly depended

upon the skill with which they avoided the numerous rocks lurking beneath the

surface of the water and peeping through it, while we sped along at some forty

miles an hour, with the water tossing occasionally over the gunwales.

In a tiny steamer on one of the lakes we had a drunken skipper-steersman, who

took a delight in ramming the pine logs in the water, and once actually ran us

on the bank. Everybody was anxious, including his subordinates, but nobody dared

interfere with him.

I lectured in most of the big towns of Finland, after opening with a series in

the fine hall of the University at Helsingfors, put at my disposal as “a brother

educationist.” We saw most of the holiday places as well as the big towns. In

Abo we went into the old Cathedral to look round. It happened to be just the

critical moment for an unusual sight, for workmen were digging trenches under

the floor and taking out hundreds of human skulls and thousands of miscellaneous

bones.

Kuopio presents one of the fairest scenes, with its lovely view of lakes and

pine trees and an ancient island castle. It gave us also a small psychic

experience. I do not take much account of dreams, but I have noticed that

sometimes they seem to be connected with other people’s thoughts, apparently

left in the atmosphere or upon objects, much as my thoughts had been impressed

upon paper in the experiments in England which I have already mentioned.

My wife and I had travelled from Hull, through the Kiel Canal (is there anything

more trim in this world?) and up the Baltic Sea to Helinsgfors, in a little

steamer, the S.S. Astraea. After the first night on board my wife described to

me a peculiarly vivid dream that she had had. She had seen beautiful lakes

stretching as far as the eye could reach, and full of tree-clad islands. She had

then no knowledge that Finland was a land of lakes – had seen no pictures, read

no guidebooks and taken no interest in the subject. I brought her a book of

Finnish views from the saloon and showed her the pictures of the lakes. She

expressed her [264] astonishment and said they resembled what she had seen in

her dream, and later, when we stood on a hill in Kuopio, she declared that there

was a picture exactly like that of her dream.

In the dream the scene had been only incidental to a little drama. A woman with

a little child had run away from an erring husband; the husband had followed and

found them sitting on a hill overlooking the lakes, and had there effected a

reconciliation. It seemed to me probable that such persons had travelled in our

cabin and left their thoughts behind, because I had had a similar experience

when inspecting a country school in India. During the night I had had vivid and

prolonged dreams about South Africa. I wondered what could have caused me to

dream like that about a country which was not at all in my thoughts. The

explanation was that I had been occupying the room of a lady teacher who had

recently come from South Africa, where she had lived for many years.

A similar incident occurred when I was staying in the island of Barbados, in the

West Indies. I had been talking with a man who was interested in

thought-transference and I happened to remark that, of course, not all dreams

had such an origin, and I said: “Only last night in this little hotel I had a

strikingly clear dream about drilling for oil, and certainly here in Barbados

there is nothing of the kind.” (Quite a mistake on my part. Afterwards I learnt

that oil-development in Barbados had begun seriously four years before my visit

there.)

“Well, that is curious,” remarked my companion. “Only recently this hotel was

occupied by a party of men who had been over from Trinidad, looking for oil.”

Any mention of experiences in Finland would not be complete without allusion to

the Finnish bath – not that I went in for it myself. The bathroom is usually a

log house built at the bottom of the garden, near the edge of the lake. There is

a sort of stove with a flat top, which grows hot when wood is burnt inside. As

soon as it is well-heated water is thrown over it, so that the room becomes

filled with steam. We will suppose a young man is to have his bath and his

mother has thus made everything ready. First he lies on a low shelf while she

rubs him all over and gently switches him with sweet-smelling tender pine

branches which have been dipped in hot water. Then she throws [265] more water

on the hot stones, so as to increase the steam, and the young man climbs up to

another shelf half-way up the wall where the steam is denser, and he is again

rubbed and switched. The process is repeated a third time on a shelf near the

ceiling, in still denser steam. Finally, he springs from the shelf and rolls

himself in the snow on the edge of the frozen lake, or jumps into the water if

it is summer-time, so as to prevent himself from catching cold after the hot

steam bath.

We crossed the Gulf of Finland to Reval and after a week there we went to Riga

by a tiny steamer, the Mailand, which had a long sleepy roll, the deck reaching

down very near to the water on either side. From Riga we returned to Reval by

train – or trains rather, for one must change at the frontier of Latvia and

Esthonia.

The people of both countries were enduring great poverty. The bulk of the

population had had no new clothes for many years, as might be seen in the

picturesque gatherings in the cobbled market-places. On the tramcar in Riga I

gave a small silver coin for fare, and received as change a bundle of about one

hundred pieces of paper money, sounding, in copecks, a formidable sum. Here and

there were commission shops containing jewellery and personal articles deposited

by Russian refugees in the hope of procuring a little cash in exchange for them.

There were grand churches of the Russian type, with splendid domes. Out of

curiosity we went to the last service to be allowed to be held in the Russian

language in the church in Reval. Both countries were in constant fear of their

big neighbour to the east, so I was permitted to lecture only after explaining

my subject to the police and receiving from them an authorization heavily marked

with rubber stamps.

From Reval we again returned to Helsingfors, and from Helsingfors to England. My

wife and I always travelled with a single passport, bearing our two photographs,

of which we carried a number of extra copies, known to us familiarly as “the

grinning apes.” In a small consulate, without thinking I asked my wife if she

thought we had enough grinning apes – the smaller the country the more

photographs required – causing some quite simian lifting and waving of eyebrows.

On the pier of Reval I was talking with a friend, one Madame Sokoloska, a

Russian refugee, while my wife, [266] according to her wont, was playing about

on some part of the pier where passengers were not supposed to be. The passport

inspector asked for my papers, looked inside, scrutinized the photographs, made

a grumpy survey of Mme Sokoloska, removed his shaggy eyes once more to me, and

coughed out the words: “Mit Frau?” I thought it was simplest to say “Ya,” even

if I did give grounds for divorce. Meantime my wife had reached the proper side

of the barrier, by means best known to herself.

She was always doing things like that. She persisted in walking on the deck at

the Kiel end of the canal, despite the wavings and guttural ejaculations of a

burly German policeman, until he took her firmly by the arm, and walked her to

the ship’s steps, where I stood. I believe she thought that I ought to have

biffed him on the nose for this indignity, but I knew that where German law and

order were involved there was nothing to do but submit. You may take liberties

to a certain extent with a London bobby, even with a New York cop if you have a

dazzling smile, but nothing can divert the devotion to duty of a German

policeman, let even the heavens rain movie stars.

I sent word to my college in Sind that I was ready to return if really required,

but would continue my travels if the management were satisfied that all was

going well. In due course I heard that they could carry on without me, so my

wife and I returned to America after a brief interlude among the clogs and

cabbages of rural France and the cafes and Russian ballets of Paris. Do the

nightingales sing anywhere else as sweetly as in the environs of Paris on a

moonlit midnight?

§4

In America I was to meet Krishnamurti again after ten years. His movement, the

Order of the Star in the East, was lagging. He thought that with my experience I

might be able to help him to revive it, so one day I received a telegram while

at Duluth, asking if I could come to California, where he was living, and

discuss the matter. We went to the little town of Ojai, in Ventura County.

I must explain that although disliking it heartily in the beginning I had paid

my penny – booking fee – and joined [267] the Order at Adyar, some little time

before Mr. Leadbeater left for Australia. It had happened in this way. One day I

said to Mr. Leadbeater: “What I especially don’t like about the Order is that

you announce to the world that there is to be a coming Teacher, and that there

is great expectation of this event among Christians, Buddhists, Muhammadans and

others, but you do not say that you have a World Teacher in preparation, in the

person of Krishnamurti, though it is known to us that he, the nominal Head of

the Order looking out for a World Teacher, will himself blossom into that

Teacher. When it is plainly and openly said that Krishnamurti is to be the World

Teacher, I will join.”

There and then Mr. Leadbeater wrote a letter to a man in America stating plainly

and definitely that Krishnamurti’s body would be taken by the World Teacher,

unless there were some improbable mishap. A few minutes later I was down in Don

Fabrizio Ruspoli’s Star Office, entering my name. So I was a member of the Order

when Krishnamurti called me to Ojai, where we stayed a few days, and then

travelled with him to the home of Dr. Ingelman in Hollywood.

I studied the situation. There were eigthy branches of the Order in the United

States. It looked fine on paper but I found in fact that among them all only

about four meetings had been held in a year. They would awaken when a speaker

came round and then go to sleep again. All the members were looking forward to

the glorious leap forward that the world would take when the Teacher came (who,

it was predicted, would concern himself with public affairs, not merely ethical

teachings) and the joy and benefit of being personally in his service. But the

question in the mind of Krishnamurti, who had been persuaded, I understood, that

at some time his own consciousness would depart from his body and its place

would be taken by that of another (the World Teacher, known as the Christ and as

the Lord Maitreya, the successor of the Lord Buddha), was: “Were all these

people living in a dream, or were they really preparing for the coming of the

Teacher?” It seemed to him that the Order had gone to sleep.

I diagnosed the situation and gave my opinion: “It is your fault. The people

look to you for a lead, and have not received it. If the movement is to be

revived I think it [268] needs your personal activity, not merely nominal

existence as Head.”

What to do then?

I thought out a plan, which was that of the “self-preparation groups.” The point

was that there should be groups of people who would refine their own characters

and develop their own capacities so as to be able to respond to the Teacher and

to be serviceable to his cause when he should come. And Krishnamurti must

himself write every month a little message which would be printed and sent to

all members of these groups, who would thus have the guidance of their leader

who, it was to be presumed, would be most sensitive to the influence of the

coming Teacher and therefore able to instruct them according to his wishes.

The method met with great success. As “National Representative” I issued it for

Krishnamurti in America. The system soon extended to the whole world, and

continued for several years. Only one hitch occurred as far as I was concerned.

I advised the members not to keep Krishnamurti’s messages, but to make the

utmost use of them month by month and destroy them as new ones came in. This I

did because I knew something of human psychology. I knew that if the messages

were stored up and bound together the members would not make every possible

effort to absorb the contents of each one while it was current, and so be ready

to give full attention to the next, but they would fall into arrears, feeling

that they had the past lessons to refer to. However, my advice produced some

indignation. What, Krishnamurti’s messages to be destroyed! And I think

Krishnamurti himself was affected, for he issued a notice that they should be

kept and bound for future reference. Anyhow, the Order of the Star in the East

obtained a new impetus, which continued until the great climax of 1929, which I

will describe after disposing of my own affairs in the meantime. [269]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER IV

MERCURIAL BLOOD

§1

In 1923 my wife and I went to South America for six months – a land of

prodigious enthusiasms, and of great thirst for the occult. Spiritualism

flourishes in South America as almost nowhere else, and, incidentally, most of

the spirits preach the doctrine of reincarnation, quite in contrast to most of

the spirits of Great Britain and North America, who preach infinite progress in

the spirit world. I always thought that if infinite progress in the spirit world

were the destiny of man, this world of ours might very conveniently have been

dispensed with altogether. Its lessons could not be regarded as a necessary

springboard, when even babies dying at and before birth could continue upwards

and onwards for ever in the realms of light.

Our first call was at Rio de Janeiro. Could anyone describe this beauty of

colour and tropical vegetation, and rocky mountains thrown all around against

the sky-soft greatness (not the rugged greatness of the Rocky Mountains of the

United States and Canada, of the grand Canon of Colorado, of the castellated

gorges of the Rio Grande, of the Niagara Falls), harmonizing with the soft

greatness of human artistry in the buildings and the mosaic pavements of the

spacious Avenida Rio Branco, chief street of the city, and with the floral

architecture of the Avenida Beira-Mar, the grand boulevard along Botafego Bay.

We stayed for the first fortnight on a hill – the Morro de Santa Thereza – high

above the city, reached by a tramcar that comes tearing with screech after

screech down the curves of the hillside, and across the old two-story aqueduct

(Ponteo Arcos) – arch above arch in perilous loftiness – built [270] four

hundred years ago by Portuguese prisoners brought to Brazil especially for this

work. Or again it was reached by an escalator hauled along sloping rails up the

steep cliff-side by means of ropes. Such escalators are a common feature of the

cliff-side of Valparaiso, in Chile, and there is one also in Beyoglu, in

Istanbul, of which we frequently made use. On the same principle we found the

whole train taken up and down the cliff-side – about two thousand five hundred

feet in height – between Sao Paulo and Santos, the famous coffee port to the

south of Rio de Janeiro. In South India, at Pykara, there is a trolley on the

same principle, which goes over a cliff at an alarming angle, with a vision of

endless plains five thousand feet below – but this is for the use of the staff

of the electrical works, not for the general public, except by special

arrangement, and even then not for the ladies, who are expected to lose their

heads rather easily – while gentlemen are only prone to lose their hearts, which

do not matter so materially.

Brazil is a land of mixed blood. Its official motto is brotherhood. After

liberating the slaves over fifty years ago, the white population mingled freely

with them – a great contrast with the social colour-bar which is so strong in

the United States of North America. (The Brazilians will not speak of the

“United States of America,” because they also designate themselves the United

States – the United States of Brazil – and they also are in America. They always

speak of the sister Union, which is a little smaller than Brazil, as “Norte

America” – pronounced “naughty” – with amusing effect upon the English visitor.)

The result of this Brazilian brotherhood has been that today most of the people

have some negro blood, which helps to produce an uncommonly soft and agreeable

disposition. Truly, the negroes in North America are mostly tinged with a little

white blood, but here it is the white that predominates, and the negro influence

is seen only in the slight shade of the skin. Once only I saw in Rio a pure

negress, in a tramcar, suckling her baby; she was strikingly beautiful, the

characteristic features being in their proper place.

In Brazil the brotherhood endency comes out even in the treatment of criminals.

We were taken to see and to speak at a prison called the Caza de Correcion. Here

were some hundreds of men, mostly convicted for violent offences. The

institution bore more the aspect of a residential school [271] than of a prison.

The men had plenty of games, both indoor and outdoor, and the windows of their

rooms overlooked most beautiful scenery. Each prisoner had a decent bed and a

shelf full of books, borrowed generally from the prison library. Moving about

freely among the prisoners for several hours, I found them a sociable lot of

men, not distinguishable except in a few cases from the people outside, and

their psychological state seemed much the same as that of the ordinary citizen.

There appeared to be no resentment against society in their minds, and what they

wanted in their future was an ordinary life with ordinary pleasures.

Talking with the Superintendent afterwards, I put to him the usual question as

to the efficacy of his method:

“What percentage of men who have been in this prison come back again?”

He told me that very very few ever came back to the Casa de Correcion, although

they looked back to it as a cheerful place. It was rather in contrast to the

report of the Prison Committee presided over by Lord Sandwich in England, which

found that of the men in English prisons no less than twenty per cent had been

sentenced six times previously.

§2

Brazil for feeling; Argentine for intellect; Chile for material activity – such

is the triad of leading countries of South America to-day.

In the Argentine our career was more adventurous than in Brazil. Buenos Aires

has a natural location in great contrast to that of Rio de Janiero, as it stands

on the flat banks of the river La Plata. So flat is all this part of the country

that on the other side of the river, on a low promontory between the ocean and

Horseshoe Bay, the capital of Uruguay, to which one comes a hundred miles before

reaching Buenos Aires from the sea, bears the singular name of Montevideo, “I

see a mountain,” the said mountain being but an isolated cone.

Still, Buenos Aires is none the less beautiful, as cities are made beautiful by

man, that is, with the beauty of buildings and of plazas and parks and

promenades, and monuments and statues, and floral supplements to all of these.

My visit [272] there was opened with a grand reception and concert – more than

three hundred in the orchestra – in the St. George’s Hall (there is much English

influence in Argentina) at which I spoke on “Pleasure, Pain and Happiness” (“El

placer, el dolor y el gozo”).

In the streets of Buenos Aires we were struck (figuratively speaking) by the

tiny South American Indian policemen, regulating a mass of traffic which seemed

to take but little notice of them. We saw one of them knocked down by a passing

vehicle. He got up, and while dusting himself appeared to be apologizing for

obstructing the traffic!

I was thanked by the President of the Republic (in evening dress in the middle

of the day!) for coming to do good among “our people,” and we were provided with

free tickets on the railway by which we proceeded northward to Rosaria de Santa

Fe, Tucuman and other places, until we reached Jujuy (pronounced Hoo-hooey), and

finally La Quiaca on the frontier of Bolivia.

Tucuman especially seemed an interesting town. We saw there the little house,

now enclosed within a large hall with a glass roof, in which the Independence of

the Argentine was signed in 1816-somewhat similar to the little house enclosed

in a larger hall in Philadelphia-the place of the Declaration of Independence of

the United States.

At Tucuman we saw also the evening promenade which is a feature of very many

South American towns. This took place every evening in the central square (Plaza

Independencia), which was pleasingly lined with trees charmingly laden with

oranges – an inedible variety. The young men sat on garden seats on one side of

the broad pavement, while the ladies walked to and fro in small parties, giving

full opportunity for admiration and comment, which is considered the very

reverse of impolite, for the Spaniard is a Latin, sensitive but also frank, and

indeed full of contrasts – a paradoxical character to the more strictly

concentrated “Nordic” types. Not that any of the people call themselves

Spaniards; no, not for a moment. They are Argentinos, whether bearing the name

of Madril, or Gossweiler or Robertson.

It was between Jujuy and La Quiaca that our train ran through an immense cloud

of locusts, which I estimated to be several miles in diameter. The day was

darkened by them, and full of the smell of their burning as they fell into [273]

the engine. They settled all over the train and seemed as if they might have

smothered us had we not closed all the means of ingress. Some of them got in,

through what crevices we could not tell. Looking through the windows we could

see nothing but locusts covering the ground as well as every tree and shrub that

was near enough not to be entirely obscured from view. At length the cloud

thinned, and we then soon emerged from it and passed for many miles through a

countryside in which remained no vestige of vegetation. I reflected: “If the

locusts can multiply like this why do they not multiply even more until they

reach the limit of their food supplies and no vegetation at all is left? Is life

limited in its various forms?”

But it was at La Quiaca that the adventurous part of the journey really began.

Already high in the mountains we had now to find our way for about a hundred and

fifty miles up a gorge to Atocha, where one could get a train to Uyuni, a

junction on the railway connecting La Paz with Antofagasta and other parts of

Chile.

But before leaving Argentina I may refer to our second visit to that country,

when I was engaged to lecture for the Educational Department of the Government

of the Province of Mendoza. In Mendoza I gave a series of addresses afterwards

published by the department and circulated free to all teachers.

During that visit we three times made the long railway journey from Mendoza to

Buenos Aires, across the immense flat plains of the Argentine. Once, there had

been a great storm, and we saw clusters of carcasses of cattle which had sought

shelter, but in vain, beside the hedges in the corners of the fields. The skins

had been removed by men, and the grisly remains were being torn to pieces by

wild dogs. On one occasion we saw an ostrich careering across the plains. On

another we changed in the night at the little junction of Rufino, and sat in a

tiny cafe, playing chess and observing local life, until our train was ready to

start in the small hours. But to return to our main journey.

§3

There is now a railway between La Quiaca and Atocha, but when we passed that way

it did not yet exist, and the [274] only direct means of transport from

Argentina to the uplands of Bolivia was that afforded by a few daring motorcar

drivers, who would take passengers along the river-bed (there was no road) for a

consideration, very moderate in view of the difficulty and danger. We found a

Japanese who undertook the task for us.

Between high cliffs a river ran down the gorge. At first we could run on the

hard ground beside the stream, but afterwards the gorge grew narrower and the

river wound about, striking the vertical cliff at one side and then on the

other. We had to ford that river more than fifty times, and as we went on it

became deeper and deeper, with the increase of gradient. At each crossing we had

to get out and pack the engine closely with cloths, to prevent the water from

getting into it, and as soon as we were over we had to get out again and take

the cloths away to allow the engine to cool, for the water was boiling, although

at the same time icicles were hanging from our head-lamps, frozen almost

instantly from the water thrown up in front of us as we crossed the river.

For many miles this process was repeated, with no signs of any habitation, nor

of any human, animal or vegetable life in that rocky desolation, except when two

rough-looking men appeared apparently from nowhere and held us up. At first we

thought they were robbers, but though they looked and spoke like operatic

brigands, and commandeered the back seat of our car, apparently without payment

(my wife and I established ourselves beside the driver), they were content to

travel some forty or fifty miles and then leave us as suddenly as they had

appeared.

At length we finished with our climb up the river-bed, and came out at the

little town of Tupiza, where we were to spend the night.

Our Japanese driver took us to a little hotel with a big name and inside of it a

crowd of men drinking and playing billiards. Enquiries for a room at last caused

one individual – the proprietor – to separate himself from the rest – hair black

and shining, eyebrows of a grand distinction, moustache beyond compare, teeth

white and bare, manner excitable, the total indeed fearsome.

I had been warned against being overcharged, so with my few Spanish sentences I

beat him down to what I afterwards learned was an unreasonably low price. But

the little [275] Englishman with the pretty and dainty senora, of a figure

rarely found among the Spanish ladies, who was attracting many eyes, though

quaking in his shoes, had to put on a bold front and make it seem (no great

exaggeration) that he had but little money to attract any covetous eye.

Really behind the wildness of our host’s demeanour there was quite a gentle

heart, but it was disturbed, even somewhat angry, with my meanness, and when

evening came he would give me only half a candle and no matches. However, I went

out into the streets and found an old woman with a little stall at a corner, and

obtained from her the matches necessary for the production of light.

Night being sufficiently advanced, our host, with the aid of one servant, closed

his saloon, barricaded the doors and windows with every chair and table that

could be moved, and retired to some mysterious region in the rear, there to

sleep, while we refreshed ourselves with a little supper from a square tea

canister – in which we had previously made a mixture of raisins, nuts and

breakfast cereals – and slept with clear consciences till dawn, when we arose,

paid our modest bill (no thanks), found our car and driver (welcome sight –

fearless, dependable, silent, unobtrusive Japanese, who had come to this

unlikeliest of places to make a fortune to take home to his family in far

Nippon) and were soon speeding on a more favourable road in the uplands of

Bolivia.

A wait at Atocha, another at Uyuni, and we were in the main-line train for La

Paz, trundling along the stony plateau, which bears a striking resemblance to

the high plateau of Ladak, on the road to Leh, in Kashmirian Tibet, beyond the

Zoji-la Pass, up which we had gone when we visited Kashmir. Very similar to

Tibet is Bolivia; the people, too, are very similar to the Tibetans, with their

flat faces and reddish-brown skin.

The city of La Paz, although twelve thousand feet high, is approached from

above. The railway, after passing over stony plateau and between many groups of

fantastic rocks, comes suddenly to the edge of a great natural bowl, down the

side of which it carefully dips, until it reaches the city more than thirteen

hundred feet below.

Here I gave four lectures under the auspices of the University of San Andres

(University of La Paz) in its Salon de Honor. The Governor of the Province was

present, [276] and was so strongly impressed by the subject-matter that he gave

orders for verbatim reports of all the four lectures to appear in the leading

newspaper, in which they occupied many pages. That subject-matter seemed rather

commonplace to my wife and myself – not exactly that familiarity bred contempt,

but that there is something in human nature which requires constantly new fields

to conquer, since it is always trying to equate itself with its infinite

possibilities. We were more interested in the life around us than in our own.

La Paz, we found, contains three kinds of humanity – the trim Spaniard in his

faultless European dress, the Indian with his sandals, bare legs, brightly

striped blanket and helmet-like cap or hat, and the people of combined Indian

and European stock, distinctively dressed, at least as regards the women, in

voluminous skirts, high-legged, high-heeled boots, laced both top and bottom and

with fancy bows stitched on the toes, and a high-crowned, flat-brimmed stiff

bowler hat, generally made of straw thickly covered with white paint. The women

move about freely, like the Indians, and indeed conduct much vigorous business

in the market, but the Spanish ladies are little to be seen, except in carriages

at evening time.

The three kinds of human beings appeared to be more or less equally distributed,

but in the animal world one predominated above all – the llama (pronounced yama)

– standing and sitting about everywhere, in groups, or bearing loads along the

roads – a beast that will stand no nonsense, silly and conceited as it may look.

In La Paz we stayed in the house of a poor man, who had many little daughters,

but had lost his wife. He was honourably and indeed familiarly acquainted with

the great men of the university and the town – such is the influence of caste,

which can make bonds and cleavages across the social strata laid down by money,

as in India, where I would find a village postman, earning one pound a month,

sitting upon the veranda of the millionaire and joining as an equal in the

conversations with friends – because both were Brahmins belonging to the same

group.

We lived in a poor quarter and fared simply. This was much more agreeable to us

than would have been a sojourn in the hotel kept mainly for foreigners in the

central square, even though we were not able to preserve our vegetarian [277]

principles intact, on account of thousands of small flies which found their way

into the soup! Still, who knows the ingredients of food? I have seen, in the

large “electric kitchen” of a palatial luxury liner – while the chief steward

proudly showed a party of passengers round his spotless domain – a stream of

perspiration dropping from the eyebrows of a kitchen-boy into the vegetables

which he was peeling and cutting up for the coming meal.

From La Paz we made a side trip to Copacabana, on the shores of Lake Titicaca,

and to the Islands of the Sun and Moon (inti-Karka and Coati) where Manco-Ccapac

and his sister-wife are believed to have descended from heaven for the founding

of the Inca race and civilization, which the Spanish conquistadores brought to

an untimely end.

Our arrangements for this trip were as follows: Train from La Paz some forty or

fifty miles to Guaqui on the shore of Lake Titicaca; motor-boat over the lake to

a little landing-stage; motor-car from the landing-stage to Copacabana, and

thence whatever might turn up.

The first part of the journey took place according to schedule. The train

behaved itself as good little trains should do, and it stayed long enough in

Tiahuanaco (very different from the Tiahuanaco in Mexico where the horses race

and the fashionable world gathers from over the border) for us to fill our

pockets with little images of the ancient pre-Inca statues of that place, carved

in replica but in miniature from the soft stone of the ancient temples.

At Guaqui, we slept the night in a little hotel, and in the early morning

entered our motor-boat, in which there was just room for us along with some

twenty Indians, including a surprisingly large proportion of babies, and some

two hundred baskets of vegetables and cocks and hens. We chutted across the

waters of Lake Titicaca “highest navigable lake in the world – 12,550 feet; in

which steel will not rust”; we broke with our ripples the reflection of the

“seventy-five miles of eternal snow” ending in the handsome peak of Illimani,

twenty-two thousand feet high; we saw the reed boats with reed sails used still

by the Indian fishermen and ferry-men as in the Inca times, and we endured a

dreadful cold wind seeming impossible to endure, for it was July – mid-winter in

those parts, though too near the equator for ice to form on the lake.

When we reached the shore there was no road and no [278] motor-car to take us

over the mountain to another part of the lake, where lie the sanctuary of

Copacabana, and the islands of the Sun and the Moon. Road and motor-car were

going to be, and that was almost as good as if they already existed, in the

vivid Spanish imagination, developed in a land where the sun never fails to

shine. But there were mules, and the mules were willing to go home, and willing

to carry us, without grudge and without respite.

Fortunately those mules knew their way, for there was no guiding or stopping

them as they sped along the tracks of the mountains and slid about on the little

stones of the cliff-side and – after several hours, or was it weeks? – scampered

into the little town of Copacabana and decanted us in the courtyard of a hotel.

Or rather there was one stop, when I found myself with my back resting gently on

the ground, my hands clinging to the ventral segment of a mule – for all the

world like a baby monkey clinging to its mother – and its surprised face peering

down at mine. The girths had given way, and I had executed a graceful semicircle

into this new position, while the novelty of the situation had brought my

otherwise unmanageable steed to a complete halt.

We arrived at Copacabana two hours in advance of our guides, who came along

behind with another mule bearing our small kit.

The chief feature of Copacabana is the church of Our Lady of Candelaria, who is

reputed to have materialized in order to rescue the Apostle Thomas from the

wrathy natives by carrying him off in a boat on the lake – though he was

afterwards martyred at Copacabana (as in several other places, including St.

Thomas’s Mount outside Madras). The church is full of tinsel and votive

offerings, distasteful to one of the modern world, who regards appeal to the

supernatural or the super-physical for the satisfaction of material desires as a

great obstacle to the progress and happiness of mankind, for which man should

trust to man himself, since man himself has all the necessary power. And the

islands, with their ruins – peace, peace, peace.

§4

Our next move was down into Chile – two countries, two lands, one in the north,

nitrate fields bare and terrible, [279] another in the south, smiling green

meadows. We descended from La Paz into the clouds – a strange sight on the

railway leading down to Arica on the coast, where we were to take steamer for

Iquique, the nitrate port. We looked down upon a sea of clouds lit from beneath

by a rising sun, passed through them and down, with ears popping, to the coast,

where pelicans by the thousand sat upon the rocks and filled their baggy beaks

with fish for which one would think they could not possibly find room in their

interiors.

Chile carries with it an atmosphere of commerce. Even the audiences going to the

lectures strode along as if on business bent-a sort of Manchester march, as

sharp as a military parade, as intent and individual as the pursuits of a

mongoose. It was in Chile, where mostly the fin"" public library halls were

placed at my disposal, that while walking to a lecture I was disturbed by the

sight of large crowds of people going the opposite way. What had happened? Why

were the people going the wrong way? Was there a football match, or something?

No, these were the hundreds being turned away from my own lecture for want of

room. In Talcahuano we had a cinema theatre, crowded with workers from the

dockyards, who nevertheless seemed to find in my talk something much to their

taste.

Unexpected as it might seem, the businesslike people of Chile were very eager to

know about Indian yoga (which was not the usual subject of my lectures, though I

had studied it deeply and practised it to a considerable extent). Really the

explanation was simple. Yoga is businesslike religion; more mystical people

might be content with mere methaphysical thought (as in Argentina), or

devotional exercises (as in Brazil), but here were people who wanted action

leading to definite results.

It was part of the organizing instinct of the Chilenos to have identification

cards even for comparatively temporary visitors, and one had to provide finger

prints. They insisted on adding the mother’s family name, so I was known

officially as Ernesto Wood Egerton.

Santiago de Chile is beautiful. We went to the races there, run on a glorious

course, with the snowy peaks of the southern Andes for a background. We won

something, too, on the second race – on a beautiful black horse named Puff –

exactly what we had lost on the previous race. By this [280] time I had been in

South America long enough to become a convert to judicious gambling – they seem

to be able to do it in this part of the world in such a balanced way.

It was in Brazil that my conversion to the lottery took place. I found many

people getting their weekly wages and paying out of them a small regular amount

which might at any moment bring in a fortune. This possibility is a bright ray

in many otherwise ordinary lives – I cannot say dull lives, for life in South

America is never dull.

It is nonsense to talk about saving that shilling a week for old age. As a boy I

had looked upon the dreary years ahead, and I had made my calculations. I had

figured that if I was lucky enough to obtain £4 a week and to save one of them,

I might in twenty years have capital which would bring in one pound a week, and

save myself and prospective family from the workhouse! No, give me a shilling a

week less and the open door of opportunity, and for the Government an income

which is not wrung from the people in an atmosphere of irritation and

resentment. The Latin can be trusted to gamble. They are a versatile people, but

they do not run to extreme lengths. I am not sure but that my Hindus, if

allowed, would kill themselves with lotteries, they are so thorough in all they

do, and don’t do. But if I were Dictator I would take the risk to-morrow, to

brighten four hundred million lives. [281]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER V

ANTIPODAL EXPERIENCE

§1

We were in California again in the spring of 1924. There we met Mr. A. P.

Warrington, former President of the American Section of the Theosophical Society

and still a prominent figure in the movement. He had recently been to Australia

and was filled with enthusiasm for Mr. Leadbeater’s work there. He told my wife

that Mr. Leadbeater had been asking about me, and wishing that I would come

there, and saying what a great opportunity there was for me to make rapid occult

advancement – “three initiations at least.” He and she both wanted me to go.

I hesitated for a long time, because of my lack of confidence in Mr.

Leadbeater’s clairvoyance in connection with the past lives of Krishnamurti, and

also because my personal affection for the old gentleman might cause me to get

caught again (as I put it to myself) in the work of book-making for him.

However, Mr. Warrington was very impressive on the point and I at last yielded,

fulfilled an engagement to lecture for the British Section of the Society,

returned again to America to complete engagements there, and sailed from San

Francisco for Sydney in October, 1924.

In this and other trips across the Pacific Ocean my wife and I had opportunities

to see several of the Pacific Islands. The Cook Islands, with Avarua on

Rarotonga as capital, are boldly beautiful. Papeete, on Tahiti, chief of the

Society Isles, has less rocky and more floral charm. Pango Pango, on Tutuila, of

the Samoan or Navigator Islands, is superb – mountains and the sea at their best

in a lovely land-locked harbour.

The Samoans are said to be the tallest race in the world. [282] Those at Pango

Pango seemed more accessible than most of the Polynesians, perhaps because of

the sociable tendencies of the Americans who govern it and use it as a naval

base. When a ship comes into harbour these people seat themselves in rows in the

public gardens, with specimens of their handicraft spread in front of them –

mainly carved wooden bowls and model catamarans, beaten bark “cloth,” and bead

work. These articles are for sale, but also for exchange, especially for your

umbrella. The people have a passion for umbrellas and pyjamas; we exchanged

nearly all we had for wooden bowls and bark curtains. No doubt they felt towards

us as our English felt towards the Maoris when they acquired land in exchange

for a few Birmingham toys (with the difference that the Maoris afterwards

maintained that they did not understand that they were parting with their land).

Fiji was somehow a pathetic place, no doubt because of the unhappy condition of

the colonists from India, who number two-fifths of the population. Apart from

economic conditions, there seems always a touch of pathos about Hindus-and

Spaniards. Lost glories, felt in the blood.

New Zealand and Australia, which are usually felt to be near together from the

distance of England, though really they are more than twelve hundred miles

apart, stand in considerable contrast, as regards both their natural features

(New Zealand has all the rugged beauty of Japan – both volcanic countries, which

might well compete for first place in a beauty contest) and their people (the

New Zealanders are very British and the Australians rather American in

appearance and mode of life).

We travelled throughout New Zealand. In several places we saw the Maoris at

their farming work and travelling on the railway – very gentle people they

seemed. But the women who act as guides at Potarua were altogether too pushing

and personal. They seemed to think that we wanted to see them rather than the

natural wonders of the place. We looked at the giant geyser, which happened to

spurt while we were there, at the ponds of boiling mud, which jumps up in little

lumps, giving one the illusion of a colony of lively frogs, and at the people

cooking their food in vessels placed in the waters of the boiling springs. In

the South Island, Christchurch especially seemed a little bit of old England,

with its Avon (river) and its very English population. [283]

One day I rowed some ladies on that Avon, and as we were going round a bend a

man cutting off the corner ran his prow on one of our rowlocks, causing our boat

to heel over and half fill with water. I begged him not to back off but he did

so, with the result that we rolled over on the other side, completely filled and

slowly sank. The ladies behaved with perfect calm, sitting still, and only

rising to their feet as the boat entirely disappeared under the water which was

fortunately only about three feet deep. It was very amusing to see them holding

up their little handbags and wading in three inches of mud and three feet of

water to the bank, whence we hurried home in motor-cars.

Sydney is a crowded town with narrow streets, but beautiful suburbs, containing

over a million people of the finest physical race in the world. I have said that

the Australians are something like the Americans, but physically they have got

them beat. The Americans are a little soft, but not so this outdoor race,

everywhere fond of physical sports and pastimes, especially swimming, which is

convenient for the Australian population, as it resides mostly round the coast.

It is a race good for the eyes, I never tired of looking at them, although they

made me feel rather small.

§2

Our destination was a suburb named Clifton Gardens and a fine old house, renamed

“The Manor,” when it became the residence of Mr. Leadbeater and his colony of

Theosophists. I must, however, now call him Bishop Leadbeater, because since I

had met him last he had become a Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church, a new

organization which some Theosophists had founded, with ceremonials closely

following those of the Roman Catholic Church but a platform intended to allow

entire freedom of thought with reference to all religious dogmas, except of

course the belief in Jesus Christ as “our corner-stone.”

Bishop Leadbeater had always said that churches and their ceremonies radiated

“force.” Long before, he and Mrs. Besant had inspected at Rome the holy water of

St. Peter’s and also that of an independent preacher who had not the Apostolic

Succession, and they had found the unofficial water more influential. But this

was regarded as an exceptional case, because of the superlative goodness of

[284] the independent preacher, while the organization of the Apostolic

Succession, on the other hand, provided for an allowance of force to pass

through the body of any person properly initiated into the Succession, if the

sex be male, even if the personal character be quite immoral and the body

unclean.

Bishop Leadbeater had attained his rank in the Church through the agency of two

or three other Theosophists who had obtained their Succession through a man

named Willoughby, who had been a Bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, but for

some reason had left that body and had been experimenting with a new church of

his own.

In addition to joining the Liberal Catholic Church Bishop Leadbeater had entered

the Co-Masonic movement (which admitted women and men on equal terms) and become

a leading figure in that also, with the aid of Mrs. Besant, who was at the head

of that movement as far as the British Empire was concerned.

The great attraction of both these movements from Bishop Leadbeater’s point of

view was the sacramental force of their rituals. Some of the ceremonies were

directed to help the individual – as, for example, those connected with

absolution, marriage and death. Absolution was not regarded as removing the

effects of sins but only as turning the sinner’s face back into the virtuous

direction and putting him right, so to speak, with God. But the most important

sacramental actions or ceremonies, such as the Mass, were considered to

distribute “help” over a large area.

Both these movements were held to be vastly important for the work of the World

Teacher who was still to come, and two Masters were in charge of them,

personally directing their renaissance through Bishop Leadbeater, who was

helping to revise as well as revive and popularize the ceremonial forms. The

Master Jesus, now living in seclusion somewhere in Syria, was held to be in

charge of the Church. Since his incarnation in Palestine he had been incarnated,

it was declared, in South India in the twelfth century as the reformer Sri

Ramanujacharya.

I already knew that Ramanujacharya had led a highly devotional revival in South

India and had established one of the largest and most vigorous sects, in

opposition to the old widespread Hindu belief that the soul of every man is

absolutely one with God. Afterwards I learned that he [285] rejected the

movement for the substitution of “flour-substitutes” for living victims in the

sacrifical ceremonies, and as such support of animal sacrifices did not seem

consistent with the traditional character of Jesus, I was led by this to further

doubt as to the reliability of Bishop Leadbeater’s clairvoyant powers.

In charge of the masonic movement was a Master, it was announced, living

incognito in Europe, a man of great culture, formerly incarnated as Roger Bacon,

and again as Francis Bacon, who was responsible for the chief part of the

writings attributed to Shakespeare. Both these Masters were devoted to a still

greater Master, the World Teacher, who had used the body of Jesus, and was now

to use that of Krishnamurti as soon as the occasion might be ripe.

Being of an open mind I did not regard these propositions as inherently

improbable. There are plenty of things in heaven and earth which are not yet

known to the man in the street, the man in the laboratory and the man in the

church. And I always had been predisposed to the belief that the best is the

true, that goodness sprouts from something fundamental in the Universe and is

not merely a superficial accident in man. But I disliked the ceremonials. They

seemed to me to obstruct the good and the true, and make them dependent upon

externals. How absurd to think that certain gestures and words could be vehicles

of spiritual forces. Love, truth and the will were the only spiritual forces,

and virtue was its own reward, or it was not virtue. Spiritual force could not

be ladled out like soup, nor distributed to the worthy as Sunday-school prizes,

nor inherited like grandfather’s pantaloons.

When I saw what Bishop Leadbeater had been doing during the eleven years that I

had been away from him I could not help thinking that there was little to show

for the unique clairvoyant powers of which he believed himself to be possessed.

I knew, of course, that it was “forbidden” to use those powers in any way which

would give proof of their actual existence to a public which might easily, if

convinced of such things, throw overboard its rational progress and indulge in

an orgy of revelation and magic, or might at least prostitute the new science to

selfish ends. In material matters, seemingly they could be used only for

providing such information as that jazz music attracted revolting “elementals”

and dead negroes, onions polluted [286] the astral as well as the physical body,

and the wearing or black delayed occult progress. In my younger days, in the

thoroughness of my passion for perfection, I might have dyed my hair golden, and

recommended the whole Indian nation to do the same. But by now I was a confirmed

disciple only of goodness, truth and beauty – perfection lay in the balanced

synthesis of these, a terrific task, since the conditions of human life

constantly called for the sacrifice of one virtue to another.

I think that Bishop Leadbeater had come to the conclusion that his clairvoyance

and the powers associated with it were useful only for occult purposes. He

wanted humanity to undergo a change of heart. People were too self-centred,

thinking of personal comfort, pleasure, ambition, pride and acquisition. Could

they be persuaded to come out of themselves, and look at life from the

standpoint of the general good instead of individual desire, the whole world

would change. This was the one essential of progress, from his point of view,

both for the individual and the world. One could do little for the world at

large, for who would take heed of the preaching of this truth? Therefore he

would (1) concentrate his attention upon a small community of people, especially

young people, earnestly trying to become unselfish in thought, feeling and life,

and (2) work for the ceremonial movements by which occult forces could be caused

to play upon the auras of the people, and thus facilitate the impersonalizing

process from the outside.

Impersonalization, he held, would naturally lead to occult progress, that is, to

growth on other planes, to discipleship to the Masters (who were working always

at the distribution of forces for the uplift of mankind), and to Initiations, of

which there were five, of which the last was the gateway to adeptship or

masterhood. He agreed that in this there was a subtle danger – one must take

care that one’s impersonality be not tainted by personal desire for these

achievements or rewards, for such self-induction would certainly counteract the

purpose of the effort.

I wanted to know why those who believed in the efficacy of the forces released

by the ceremonies did not practise them more. If I felt that I had such great

powers to help I would want to do the ceremonies a hundred times a day, not once

or twice. There was no satisfactory answer to this question. It could only be

said that one must not give too [287] much force. Well, then, the force was only

medicine or a tonic, not a gift of life itself, and I would on the contrary

prefer to devote myself to promoting the direct means by which life sustained

and evolved itself. Bishop Leadbeater sighed at my obstinacy. He would say: “I

find it much easier to develop the people with the aid of the ceremonies than

without them, and as long as I find that to be so I shall go on using them.”

I think he was suffering under an illusion in the matter. He thought that the

smoothing and refining of the auras indicated progress. He was running an occult

beauty parlour. The auras may have come to look prettier to the clairvoyant eye,

but it appeared to me that the people specially cultivated by him lacked in

essential qualities of character as compared with others whom I knew, and that

the atmosphere of his community encouraged the lack. He was painting dolls.

I have alluded already to the analogy which he used of the cultivation of

flowers and animals by man. I t was really useless as an argument, for that

cultivation is generally of one quality at the expense of another, and besides

it is done by selective breeding of the plants or animals, not by pumping

anything into their veins. I saw little use in making black salamanders turn

yellow by keeping them in yellow boxes.

§3

On arrival at “The Manor” I did not at first find myself in the midst of the

ceremonial activities, though the new dispensation was evident in the

conversation and occupations of the community. I heard the church music

frequently, both in the regular services and the practices, as the Manor Chapel

was next to my room.

I liked the music, which was well played and nicely softened by having to come

through the wall. But I found that it had some hypnotic effect. Sometimes, when

the mind was faced with a special difficulty requiring clear thought, it would

jump the rails and one would find oneself humming a church tune instead of

thinking. This hypnotic effect is one of the defects of all ceremonies, and of

meditation involving repetition of formulas. I remember one young man at “The

Manor” who was very devout, and used [288] always to speak with bated breath. On

one occasion he made a small faux pas in conversation, and immediately crossed

himself, involving himself in still greater confusion.

I found Bishop Leadbeater in bed. He had been suffering for a long time from

rheumatic fever, and his hands, which lay outside the bed-cover were terribly

twisted. My sympathy flamed up. I did not know how to express myself. After a

little time our conversation turned to the subject of his books. He told me that

he did not know whether he had much longer to live. He would like to have all

his latest discoveries and thoughts put into books, that they might be correctly

stated and recorded before he passed away. He had given many talks, and there

were reports of these which would serve as a basis for books. During the eleven

years he had written only three books – only one of real importance, The Science

of the Sacraments, a study of the church rituals, describing what was

clairvoyantly seen in connection with them.

I remarked that there were some twenty or thirty fine-looking people in the

community, and no doubt as soon as he was a little better they would rally round

and help him to bring his literary works up to date.

“No,” he sadly replied. “If you do not stay they will never be done. Several

people have tried, without success.” So I stayed, for over four years – with

some small interludes of travel.

The first book we selected was intended to publish all he knew about the Masters

and discipleship to them. It was called The Masters and the Path. Some material

had already been gathered together. I collected all the reports of Bishop

Leadbeater’s talks touching on these subjects, and then every day sat at his

bedside and read what I had written up from these and from notes of our

conversations. One of my little accomplishments acquired at Adyar was the

ability to write in the style of either Mr. Leadbeater or Mrs. Besant, and

neither of them could tell that paragraphs written by me had not been written by

themselves. Then there would be questions, discussions, and alterations and

additions where necessary.

In all my work with Mr. Leadbeater at Adyar there had seldom been any actual

dictation, except in The Lives of Alcyone and in the last rescension of The

Beginnings of the Sixth Root Race. Now there was no dictation at all. I must

[289] have written about half of The Masters and the Path, some parts of it

containing my own ideas, as well as language, submitted to him for

incorporation. A new thing was his statement that, surprising at it might seem,

he had seen God (the Solar Logos) in personal form; I wrote it up suitably and

put it in the book.

A curious thing happened a few days after we had started work. I was sitting

near his bed one afternoon when I suddenly felt something break open (like the

bursting of a seed pod) in my head, and from it a cold current flooded my whole

body, passing down the spine in waves and radiating from every part of the body.

It seemed to me that this was not my own force, but was coming into me through

my head, and that it was going out from me direct to Bishop Leadbeater. I was

also aware that it was a healing current of some kind. After several minutes it

died away, and I never mentioned it to Bishop Leadbeater, nor to others, except

in a letter to Mrs. Besant. I do not know anything more about this phenomenon,

which occurred quite outside my will. But it did coincide with an abrupt change

in Bishop Leadbeater’s condition. In a few days he was able to move about, and

then it was only a matter of weeks until he had straightened himself up, and

even his hands assumed their normal form.

When we were about half-way through the preparation of The Masters and the Path

Bishop Leadbeater one day showed me a document which he said had been given to

him by a Master at Adyar many years before. It was simply a table of the rays or

types of humanity. He thought it might be incorporated into the book, but there

were some points he could not understand – he indicated three items in

particular. I looked at the diagram, and at once exclaimed: “But I can explain

these items.”

I gave him my explanations of the points in question. He was much astonished and

asked me where I got this knowledge of a rather obscure subject. I told him that

before leaving India I had been now and then receiving what seemed to me like

internal communications on this subject of the rays or types of men. Sometimes

there had been a voice, but generally ideas had been, as it were, insinuated

into my mind, quite distinctly with the feeling of the presence of an

intelligence other than my own. In this way I had accumulated a quantity of

notes on the subject. [290]

I had been speaking on it occasionally at theosophical gatherings in America,

without saying anything about occult experiences in connection with it, if such

they could be called. It happened in Chicago that some of the members,

particularly one, Dr. Beckwith, a leader there, had taken my information very

seriously, and I was consequently much troubled, as I had no wish to lead others

where I was myself somewhat blind. Late one night, as I was travelling along in

an otherwise empty carriage on the elevated railway in Chicago, and I was

brooding in a troubled way over this point, something electrical in my immediate

atmosphere caused me to look up and I saw, or thought I saw, the Master standing

there; and he said: “Do not be troubled about that information about the rays.

It is quite correct. I gave it to you.”

When I had recounted this to Bishop Leadbeater, he said: “Well, we will not do

any more of my work until you have written a book of your own on the seven

rays.” He put his work aside. I set to work on my own book. Early every morning

I made notes for the day’s dictation. During the day I dictated. In eight days

my book was ready for the press. I gave the manuscript to Bishop Leadbeater with

the request to paint out any errors or defects, but after a few days he returned

it to me saying: “I should not like to interfere with anything coming from that

source.”

The book was duly published, and created quite a sensation among the

Theosophists, who translated it into several languages, but no mention was made

of the history I have recounted above. Afterwards, whenever I raised my voice

against “authority” in the theosophical movement, Bishop Leadbeater would say to

me: “But we regard you as our authority on the rays!” I could not, however,

agree with him. Such experiences as I had had might very well be the work of the

subconscious mind.

My abnormal experiences in Sydney were not all connected with psychism. One

morning I opened the newspaper, and this is what confronted me in massive type

on the front page:

PROFESSOR WOOD’S

TRAGIC END

BELOVED UNIVERSITY MAN FOUND HANGED [291]

My photograph appeared under this, and then two columns of letterpress:

“Professor Wood was found hanged in his room ...”

There was a Professor Wood in the Sydney University and he had hanged himself –

the result of a distressing illness. Only the photograph was wrong, but letters

of condolence poured into the office of the Broadcasting Station for which I was

then speaking every week. Some of the writers must afterwards have been

surprised on hearing my voice from the tomb – or rather the morgue – as it were,

if they had not heard the explanation of the mistake. [292]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VI

THE NEW APOSTLES

§1

The year 1925 was to be momentous in the history of the Theosophical Society. In

August, in Holland, Mrs. Besant made pronouncements of great import. She said

that the coming of the Lord was very near at hand and that he had chosen twelve

apostles. This followed the Palestine tradition, but this time the apostles were

to be prepared for him in advance. Seven of these apostles were already prepared

and these were of the rank of arhats, or initiates of the fourth degree.

She and Bishop Leadbeater had already pronounced themselves to be arhats. Many

others had reached the first degree and some few the second degree on their

lists. Such an extensive group of initiates was declared to be possible (it had

not existed in the Society before nor, it was thought, in the world, except

perhaps in the time of Buddha) on account of the coming of the World Teacher.

Not that the standard of the examination, so to speak, had been lowered, but

that the Lord would need many helpers, and so a little “cramming” or “forcing”

was permissible, though not generally advisable.

The seven arhats who were then named as included among the apostles were Mrs.

Besant, Bishop Leadbeater, Mr. Jinarajadasa, Bishop Arundale and his wife,

Bishop Wedgwood and the Rev. O. Kollestrom. Three of the four men had been “Mr.

Leadbeater’s boys” and the fourth a close friend in early manhood. Three of them

by now pronounced themselves clairvoyant, and in direct communication with the

World Teacher. It was announced that Bishop Arundale only just managed to become

an arhat by submitting himself to the stimulating influence connected [293] with

his becoming a Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church, and his wife, an Indian

lady, was outside the circle for a little while, but was soon ready to be

admitted.

At the same time it was announced that the Liberal Catholic Church, Co-Masonry

and a proposed World University had been officially accepted by the Lord as

special means by which he would help the world when he came.

Mrs. Besant accepted all these predictions and became the mouthpiece of them.

She had always been modest about her own psychic powers. She believed that she

could have been superlative in this respect if she had cared to practise the use

of them frequently, but she adhered to the principle of the division of labour

and its logical complements – a loyal co-operation with others and a willingness

to bear the burden if mistakes were made and trouble arose. Her position was

that she was on the “ruling line,” and therefore her chief part in the work was

to decide policy, organize campaigns and take the leading part in carrying them

out. In this division of labour it was not her method to distinguish between the

workers, but to proceed collectively, so it was not her custom to say through

whom she received any statement she might give to the world.

While this was going on in Europe Bishop Leadbeater, in Australia, was

significantly silent on the subject of the pronouncements. He would not make any

statements openly about them, but said to me: “I hope she will not wreck the

Society.” Really he did not like the idea of the twelve apostles, and the

speculations about a coming Judas also, which Mrs. Besant highly dramatized in

her speeches at that time. The fact was, from his point of view, the movement

was getting a bit out of hand. Many times he had said to me and others that

really the only fault of “our President” was that she would catch at the least

hint of the Masters’ wishes and act upon it impulsively, getting the principle

of the thing right, but not what was exactly intended to be worked out. She used

to say that she would rather make mistakes than miss the slightest hint of the

Masters’ wishes.

All through the years Bishop Leadbeater had been writing to her with hints and

suggestions, very delicately worded: he had had such and such information; no

doubt she also knew about this, etc. Practically she always rose to the

suggestion. But it now happened that among the group of [294] initiates who met

in Europe during that fateful summer of 1925 there were several who were

“bringing through” information and messages on their own account – particularly

Bishop Wedgwood, Mr. Kollestrom and Mr. Arundale and his wife. Mrs. Besant felt

that the whole situation was quite safely in the Masters’ grip, that for the

sake of conservation of energy the Masters would use the instruments easiest to

work with, and that because of her dedication to the ruling department it was

only natural that much information should come through these co-workers.

Krishnamurti “remained quiet,” to use a familiar Indian expression.

There was tremendous enthusiasm in most of the sections of the Theosophical

Society. The Society reached its peak of membership, as the statistics showed,

in the subsequent two years. There was a great Jubilee Convention at Adyar

between Christmas and New Year. An electrical expectation filled the air, that

something decisive would occur with regard to the coming Teacher. It did occur.

Krishnamurti addressed a large audience under the banyan tree. He spoke of the

great Teacher. He comes, he said, for those who are in need, etc. Suddenly there

was a pause for a second and he spoke in the first person, repeating the “I”

three or four times – “I come for those who have need of sympathy ...”

Afterwards Mrs. Besant said the Lord had now definitely spoken through his

disciple, and we might expect Him to make use of the body occasionally, while

Krishnamurti would stand aside for the time being in his subtle body.

I did not attend very many of the Convention meetings. Bishop Leadbeater and I

were engaged in every spare moment on a book on Masonry which he wished to hurry

through the press. He used this piece of work as a means of avoiding intimate

conversation with Mrs. Besant. He was afraid to talk with her at that time

because he could not agree with her but did not want to say so. Besides, he was

a little hurt at her taking important information from others in Europe without

even consulting him at all. To give an example – there was one young man,

admitted to the inner circle, whom Bishop Leadbeater regarded as quite outside

the pale. At the door before entering a meeting the Bishop quietly said: “But

surely it is not right that So-and-so should be here?” Mrs. Besant walked over

to one of the [295] European arhats, spoke with him, came back: “– says it is

quite all right.”

Bishop Leadbeater became very quiet! He would never contradict Mrs. Besant. In

fact, he would not contradict any lady. This Victorian code of manners of his

necessitated avoiding as much as possible any contact with ladies on the level.

His secluded life made him an anachronism in this and some other respects. While

tremendously loyal to Queen Victoria, King Edward and King George, in the belief

that – a divine affiatus pervaded the kingly office, he was a determined

Jacobite and would often speak of the House of Stuart as rightfully entitled to

the British throne. But although thus deferential to Mrs. Besant he nevertheless

marked off from his own list more than eighty occultly titled persons as not

being really such, although they had been informed by other arhats that they

were.

§2

After the Jubilee Convention of 1925 Bishop Leadbeater and his party of some

seventy people returned to Australia, but I stayed at Adyar for some months to

attend to literary work. I had compiled a huge volume of theosophical ethics

from rough reports of hundreds of lectures (which must have amounted to about

two million words) given by Bishop Leadbeater and Dr. Besant during thirty

years.

I must now refer to Mrs. Besant as Doctor, as she had been given an honorary

doctorate by the Benares Hindu University, which she had done much to promote.

Titles of all kinds were highly valued in the Theosophical Society.

Notwithstanding allegiance to the teaching in Light on the Path: “That power

which the disciple shall covet is that which shall make him appear as nothing in

the eyes of men,” it was thought wrong to hide one’s light under a bushel, as

one could not then do so much good – an instance of the peculiar habit of

wanting things both ways at once. Bishop Leadbeater would urge his young men to

secure a University degree, though he used to say that more good was done by an

initiate lecturing than by anyone else, even if the matter and manner of the

former was inferior.

Dr. Besant was much pleased with her part of the large book entitled Talks on

the Path of Occultism. She wrote me from Benares that she had no idea that those

old talks of [296] hers had been so good. Though an expert and exacting editor,

she had not found it necessary to make more than half a dozen alterations – and

those only typographical. One part of the work I had had to write entirely

myself, on account of the total absence of notes in that section. As regards

Bishop Leadbeater’s portion, he gave up editing it about half-way through and

did not even trouble to read the remainder.

Some amusing incidents occurred in connection with these writings. When we were

doing The Masters and the Path, I was reading to Bishop Leadbeater a portion

relating to some talks to young disciples. Suddenly he burst out: “Where did you

get that drivel?” It was not his habit to dissemble his feelings, whether of

pleasure or the reverse. I traced out the offending portions, and discovered

that it consisted of some talks by one of his colleagues which had been included

among his notes by mistake. However, the material was adapted and put into the

book.

On another occasion he exploded to me with: “That’s just like your little mind!”

What had annoyed him was an opinion expressed to me by Mrs. Besant about five

minutes earlier, which I had happened to repeat! On another occasion he threw

down a bundle of manuscript in front of me and cried out: “Can you do anything

with this ranting stuff?” I boiled it down to about half and linked it together

a little, and it finally emerged as a book – dealing with nirvana – by another

of his colleagues, who, however, never knew anything of this portion of the

history of his own book.

There was an old member at Adyar who had been somewhat opposed to Bishop

Leadbeater’s outlook. When I returned to Adyar I found him quite converted. He

told me with what joy he had read a portion of the “Talks” dealing with Nirvana

and liberation. I had supplied the whole thing, both ideas and words, but I did

not mention this, as I thought it might devaluate the ideas, since things had

now reached the stage in the Society at which it mattered very much who said a

thing, not what that thing was.

That had come about in the natural sequence of events. There had been a steady

increase of literature in the nature of revelations and many people had come to

feel that study and thought were not essentially profitable, being too

speculative, and that the important things were facts, which [297] were to be

obtained with the aid of psychical faculties rather than by thought. It was true

that Mme Blavatsky’s work of thirty years before, especially The Secret

Doctrine, was said to be derived from the Masters by psychic means, but that

dealt with main principles forming a system, while the later literature, due

almost entirely to Bishop Leadbeater’s researches, was a vast mass of detail

relating to objects or facts.

§3

While at Adyar in 1926 I had much talk with Dr. Besant about initiations and

similar matters. Of occult recognition she gave me “all that is in my power” and

said that she was diffident about it because she felt that “it was not good

enough.” She told me that my participation or nonparticipation in Masonic or

other ceremonials would make no difference to this recognition or to further

progress – yet some years later when she was ill and helpless, others cut my

name out of the list when I ceased to take part in those organized mysticisms!

I returned to Sydney trailing some clouds of glory, and resumed my work with

Bishop Leadbeater. To compose new chapters for a revised edition of his book,

The Other Side of Death, I read dozens of the latest books of spiritualistic

research, and found that such works as those of Dr. Geley, the Rev. Dray ton

Thomas and Dr. Crawford contained investigations of great scientific value in

that connection. For another book, Chakras, I placed before Bishop Leadbeater

all the information on the subject available in Sanskrit works known to me. This

book lagged for a long time, so I tried to make some investigations myself.

Concentrating on the chakra between the eyebrows, I became aware of a double

rotation like that of two plates revolving in opposite directions. I put this

idea before Bishop Leadbeater. For several weeks he told me that he could not

find it, but at last he did find such a double rotation in all the chakras, and

explained it in his book.

There was no doubt in my mind that, whatever they may have been, Bishop

Leadbeater’s psychic faculties were declining. Shortly afterwards, his principal

helper on the astral plane died unexpectedly, but the Bishop did not know it

until informed by ordinary means, and actually [298] wrote a letter to him after

he was dead. His next important helper also died unexpectedly. He had been ill.

One day a friend asked Bishop Leadbeater how he was. Oh, yes, he had seen him;

he was going on much the same. Actually he had been dead for two days.

During this time I had a little stream of psychic experiences which I need not

detail here. I used to tell these to Bishop Leadbeater and ask him about them,

and he constantly replied: “I should advise you to take them at their face

value.” They were very mixed. Some had to do with Masters and initiation; others

fell to the level of the following. One morning I awoke with the sound of a cat

mewing and in the half awake state I heard a voice saying: “You were Nathaniel;

look it up in the Bible. Promise that you will remember.” Why anybody on the

astral plane or anywhere else should wish me to believe that I had been

Nathaniel in a former incarnation I am completely at a loss to understand. My

wife was convinced that there was some kind of hypnotic influence brooding over

the Manor, to which she, however, refused to yield in any degree.

My own theory at present with regard to such experiences, whether mine or

occurring to others, is that there is a small foundation of fact in them. I had

physical confirmation of some of them, as in the experiments on

thought-transference and some experiences with Indian yogis which I have already

related, and also there is a very convincing sediment of good evidence in such

works as those of Dr. Geley, where they record experiments done under test

conditions – more convincing on that account than one’s own psychic impressions.

But there is also a vast superstructure which is completely false, being the

product of that state of mind in which dreams originate, dreams which become

perfervidly important and take the rank of truer visions in any atmosphere in

which they are cultivated or encouraged in connection with a mission, or strong

interest in oneself as a person or a character.

Even the part which is true (which anyhow is impossible to determine, except by

other means than those of the visions themselves) is not important. If one’s

conduct improves as the result of such knowledge there is no gain in character.

Virtue is spoiled by calculation.

People say that they get thrills and encouragement and uplift out of psychic

experience, but after much observation [299] I have come to the conclusion that

these are essentially of the same nature as the thrills and encouragement and

feeling of well-being and elevation that others obtain physically from the

cocktails preceding dinner. There is something in man which is struggling for

birth, but it is surely not to be liberated by stimulating the emotions and the

mind, any more than by over-feeding the stomach.

As to devotion to the Masters – whatever their true form may be it is not

logical that they should want that, either for direct personal purposes or for

setting up a new authority to govern this playground of human fancies and

desires. Nor does a thing improve by being dressed in a halo of its origin; we

can admire and love children without waiting to be guided in the matter by

knowledge of their ancestry, and without thinking of the incidents which

preceded their material births.

Sometimes in the mix-up of occult experiences the error can refute itself, as

when in America I had been wanting to set my thought beside that of the Master

and find out by feeling whether an action of mine was right, and I thought I saw

that Master and heard him say: “You must not do that. You are spoiling our

unity. What you do I do.” With that somewhat cryptic utterance I may have been

talking to myself, from the subconscious to the conscious mind. I accepted the

proposition – because it was logically sound. One must not look to God or

Masters to do one’s work or to make one’s decisions. Could one do it to

perfection one would not only miss the benefit of effort, but would become an

imbecile, as so many religious fanatics do – “O God, shall I wear my blue dress

or my green to this party? Which will have the best influence on the auras of

the people?” The same tendency destroys intellectual brotherhood, for you cannot

converse with a man who has his thoughts and ideas ready-made from above, and

quite unchangeable.

§4

As the new tendency in the theosophical movement increased it offended me more

and more. My object all along had been to sift the gold from the ore, but now it

seemed that the ore was growing more and the gold less. Theoretically there was

freedom of thought and opinion, and [300] the Society was a truth-seeking body,

and our truth-seeking was to be done as a brotherhood, without distinction of

race, sex, creed, caste or colour. In this spirit we were to study and

investigate for the promotion of knowledge of the truth, especially about man,

his relation to his environment and his destiny. But in practice there was more

than a tendency to give the platform to the believer and to squeeze out the

critic or the independent thinker. Instead of the subjection of all doctrines to

a co-operative inquisition, “You must respect the faith of your fellow-members.”

By 1925 prayers of all the materially powerful religions were introduced on the

Society’s official platform, and the movement definitely degenerated into a

brotherhood of creeds. Criticism of other people’s ideas became “unbrotherly!”

And besides, it “spoiled the work,” and the work was largely a conveyance of

blessings and forces by those who were admitted to the systems of organized

access to these things. On these grounds offices were filled, and invitations

were issued to leaders to preside and lecture at the Society’s gatherings nearly

all over the world.

Bishop Leadbeater was one of the worst politicians in this respect, especially

as he grew older. He detested argument and criticism – such a waste of time;

such a dissipation of energy. He said to me: “We must try to get our own people

in as General Secretaries in as many countries as possible.” He wrote many

letters hinting that certain persons were the best. I did not question his

earnestness and sincerity, but I thought that he ought to have gone out and

started a new society on his own lines, which were quite different from those

for which the Theosophical Society was intended. But he won his way, on account

of his extraordinary persistence.

Bishop Leadbeater and his agents were eminent in the theosophical weakness of

wanting things both ways at once, though that was quite illogical. The Society

must be quite without dogma, and yet its councils must be governed and its

platforms occupied by those who were eager to promote certain beliefs,

leaderships and objectives, and members who opposed these must be kept in the

background.

There was no question but that the Society must be neutral, just as a good

scientific society is neutral, though providing a platform for professors and

investigators to discuss and publish the results of their researches. The [301]

difference between a church and a society is that the latter does not give its

support to anyone professor or doctrine in particular.

I remember a meeting at which someone wanted to pass a resolution against

capital punishment, but a delegate, a young Indian lady who was sitting beside

me, got up and said she would consider the advocacy of the death penalty more in

accordance with brotherhood, for she herself would prefer to be hanged and on

the way to a new incarnation rather than to be kept in a degrading prison for a

long term of years!

The chairman decided that the meeting could not rightly pass the resolution, but

there was such a body as “The Theosophical Order of Service,” which could do so.

That body met immediately afterwards, passed the resolution and sent it to the

newspapers. So they had it both ways. But the public could not distinguish

between the Theosophical Society and the Theosophical Order of Service. The

Society was in the anomalous position of sponsoring the Order and lending to it

all its conveniences. In the same way there was the Eastern or Esoteric School

of Theosophy, constantly being referred to on the Society’s platform as “the

heart of the Society.” In that heart there were dogmas, beliefs and mediation,

but not in the Society!

§5

In 1927 Dr. Besant was in America with Krishnamurti. He had now become very

active and independent. He wrote charming poetry at that time, full of

sympathetic feeling and penetrating thought. Dr. Besant announced that the World

Teacher had definitely come, not as she had expected by the occasional stepping

out of Krishnamurti and stepping in of the Lord, but by a constant mingling of

the consciousness of the Lord and that of his disciple. To this belief she

adhered to the end of her life, and she made it the topic of her greatest

enthusiasm, as can be seen in all her subsequent annual presidential addresses

to the Society. In 1928 she closed the Eastern School, as the Lord had come, and

it was his guidance that the people should now seek, not hers. But it was soon

strongly represented to her by Bishop Leadbeater and his close adherents that

many of its members, released from the discipline of the School, [302] were

becoming slack in their personal conduct, and in consequence of this pressure

she opened it again a year later for those who felt that they could not

discipline themselves and wanted a routine laid down for them.

Meantime, the intensive production of disciples and initiates continued. In

Australia I was occasionally present at the selections for recommendation. The

following was not untypical: Bishop Leadbeater would say: “So-and-so has been an

accepted disciple for more than seven years. I think it is about time for her to

take a further step.” His companions would reply: “Why not?” Within a few days

she was an initiate – quite a useless person from the external point of view,

but very faithful to the Church and perhaps therefore useful for the radiation

of forces. This “force” was the dominating thought in the later part of Bishop

Leadbeater’s life. The office of Secretary for the Order of the Star fell vacant

in Melbourne, and he asked me to suggest a name. I did so, and he said: “But do

you not think that the Lord would prefer to have one of his priests in that

position?” And the priest was put in. He carried the force. [303]

 



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW KRISHNAMURTI

§1

Early in 1928, when I was in New York, writing my book on India, Krishnamurti

came there and gave a lecture in the Chemical Society’s Hall. I was asked to

preside. I found that, as he expressed it himself, the picture had come out of

its frame.

Krishnamurti was administering truth from his own point of view to the people

who had built up various organizations for his use. He declined the disciples

announced for him, rejected all the modes of organized access to the forces of

inner planes, said that the system of master and pupil was injurious, declared

that ceremonies were hindrances, not helps, and reverted uncompromisingly to the

position that in order to have spirituality a man must lean upon no thing or

person outside himself. He cast off his connection with the Theosophical Society

because, he said, it was addicted to these things. A year later he closed down

his own Order of the Star, because its members were inclined to lean upon him,

and he was determined that no cult, dogma or system should be built round his

personality.

Some persons, including Dr. Besant, not realizing at first the completeness with

which Krishnamurti was rejecting all material and mental props to spirituality,

said that of course it was quite understandable that he should not want the

ceremonials himself, but they would be useful and indeed necessary to carry on

the life-giving power which he brought to us after he had gone, just as Christ

was present in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into His Body and Blood

on the altars of the Catholic Church.

This idea also Krishnamurti severely rejected, but some of the arhats continued

in the belief none the less, now [304] saying: “Krishnamurti does not know

everything about the Lord. We too have our direct connections with him.

Krishnamurti is only authoritative in connection with a special and limited

mission.”

Dr. Besant speculated that Krishnamurti might really be speaking for the future,

and said that his utterances were probably intended for the people of the coming

sixth race, hundreds of years hence, more than for the world to-day. She said

that her policy was to take as much as she could understand from Krishnamurti

and leave the rest for the future to deal with. On the other hand Bishop

Leadbeater at the same time wrote that the realization claimed by Krishnamurti

had already been attained by “ourselves” and he was now really preaching to the

horse-racing and fox-hunting outer world, rather than to the theosophically

inclined! These views well illustrate the difference in character between Bishop

Leadbeater and Dr. Besant, the former always sure of himself, the latter modest

and seeking, and therefore yielding.

It became very clear to me that the movement was going to be shivered from top

to bottom if something was not done to relieve the Society from all connection

with other movements which were advocating material means to spiritual goals.

In the middle of 1928 Dr. Besant was re-elected President of the Society for a

fourth seven-year term. She appointed Mr. A. P. Warrington, of America,

Vice-President, and continued Mr. Albert Schwarz in the post of Hon. Treasurer,

which he had occupied for over twenty years. On my return from Australia at the

end of the year she completed her trio of officers by appointing me Hon.

Secretary of the Society, fully knowing my views with reference to the

undesirable influence of other organizations upon the practical affairs of the

Society.

At the same time she spoke very seriously to me on that subject. She told me

that she was anxious to encourage everybody in their laudable undertakings, but

she was afraid of crystallization in the Society. She praised highly the

enthusiasm of those who had launched various movements, but was at the same time

anxious to prevent any bias from establishing itself in the Society, or even

from appearing to do so. She spoke of the difficulty which she felt on account

of the pressure upon her of the religious [305] enthusiasts on one side, and

finally said on that point: “I wish some of you would push equally hard on the

other side. It would make it much easier for me.” She told me of her policy of

co-operation with others, and that she had scarcely used her own psychic powers

for years, but had been relying on her co-workers in that respect.

This last was, I confess, a blow to me. I had all along been trying to sift the

gold from the sand in connection with the many occult pronouncements made in the

Society, and had relied primarily on her testimony to the existence of that

gold. But now I was informed by Dr. Besant herself that she had been and was

accepting without critical examination or first-hand confirmation many of the

statements of those whom I positively knew to be incorrect, at least on some

points. The amount of gold in recent statements diminished in my eyes almost to

vanishing point. Although positive, recorded evidence of the earlier days as to

the abnormal powers of Mme Blavatsky and the inherent reasonableness of the

system which she had expounded under the name of theosophy remained untouched by

this, the living testimony had now vanished as far as I was concerned.

And here also was Krishnamurti, declared to be the World Teacher in person,

stating that ceremonies were hindrances to a spiritual life, and even that

explanations of life, such as those of reincarnation and karma were soporific,

for only the aid of pure action in the present, making the most of the present,

was consistent with spirituality, liberation, or the clean and self-fructifying

operation of life itself. To hold a theory that we must work for the development

or accumulation or acquisition of opportunities or powers to be attained at some

future time was simply to spoil the living present.

§3

I saw much of Krishnamurti during his visit to New York and on subsequent

occasions. I tried to grasp how life appeared and what it meant to him. That was

difficult, because it did not mean anything at all. It stood for itself and

required no interpretation. He said he had reached liberation; he was free, but

he could not describe that freedom. Mind could no more grasp life than teeth

could bite the air. Life was knowing itself direct in him, not [306] through the

veil of mind, with its clumsy categories of past, present and future.

I could see clearly what he was driving at in describing so many things as

hindrances, but I was not able to grasp the positive and superior life of which

he spoke. After all, his position seemed to be that of the yoga school of India,

which I knew well. It was simply that the mind (perception and reason) is not

the instrument for knowing the positive element of being that is, life itself,

but is concerned with the limited department of production and understanding of

forms. Its enhancement could not lead to discovery of fundamental truth any more

than could development of abnormal muscularity. On the other hand its

suppression could not lead to it, any more than material suicide.

We ought not, therefore, to picture our evolution into some godly or angelic

type of being and stultify our present power by waiting or working for that.

That would not be different from the way in which stupid devotees set aside

their own judgment and waited for orders from above. Nor, on the other hand,

should we discredit our present capacity by going backwards, as it were, to the

peaceful animal state of mind. In short, the secret of the real is to click with

the present, to be fully what we are. Consolation, hope, remorse, and any

philosophy which softens the incidence of life upon us in the present stands in

the way of life’s realization of itself. The mind can help only by removing the

obstacles, the errors created by itself. To think of life in its fullness is to

make only a picture on canvas. Life is life, and cannot be known mentally by

comparison with any object. You cannot put God in a box.

Several times I discussed with Krishnamurti the function of the Theosophical

Society. He said: “You cannot organize truth.”

I pointed out that the Society was intended to be only a business organization.

It existed for the promotion of truth, but did not say what that truth was.

“I am afraid you cannot have such a brotherhood,” was his reply. “Consider the

weakness of human nature. Some creed will get control of the thing, or will be

fighting for it and giving trouble all the time.”

I pointed out that the position is maintained in scientific and learned

societies; the Chemical Society does not advocate the use of any particular

brand of soap or matches. [307]

“People can be impersonal with reference to soap and matches,” was the substance

of his reply, “but your society proposes to deal with man himself, and you will

find that people simply will not face the truth with reference to themselves.”

“Let us put it to the test of experience,” said I. At any rate I am going to try

to make the position clear, since there ought to be a society where people may

meet to discuss and criticize their various efforts to find the truth.

“Go ahead,” was his conclusion. “I shall watch the effort with great interest,

but I think there is little hope.”

I had still to learn that there are no truth-seekers, because really to want it

would be to have it: it is because we do not really want it that we are what we

are, embodiments of wanting something less.

§4

My first active step was to join with several others in January of 1929 in a

renewed effort to establish freedom in the Society, not freedom of individual

belief, which was constantly being asserted and accepted, but with regard to the

platform of the Society, so that no party could use the organization mainly for

its own purposes. We were highly conscious of the acute situation arising in the

movement between those whom I may call the catholics, who wanted to organize a

system of living, with stations on the road and all the rest, and the

protestants, so to speak, who wanted I private judgment, individual freedom and

ethical purity, rather than ceremonials, disciplines and obedience.

The position was becoming exacerbated. The big guns began to urge that the Star

Office be not allowed on the Adyar estate, although it was full of churches and

temples administered by their several sectarian bodies. No one could tell, it

was argued, what Krishnamurti’s attitude to the Society was going to be.

Some of us, therefore, put before Dr. Besant the idea that she might take the

lead in a reconstruction, a reformed society, such that membership of it should

give not even a flavour of sectarianism, and would thereby be a suitable

instrument for the teacher to use, though it would not as a society advocate his

views any more than those of any other person. Dr. Besant was willing to make

alterations [308] somewhat on those lines. At least she went the length of

putting forward a tentative proposition which was defeated in the Council, that

the stated objects of the Society should be replaced by one simple statement

that its sole object was to seek for the truth. [309]



-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL

CHAPTER VIII

“GOOD-BYE, PROUD WORLD!”

§1

My wife and I settled down from our wanderings in our little house at Adyar. In

1930 I acted as Treasurer as well as Secretary, as in that year Mr. Schwarz took

a year’s leave to visit Switzerland, his native land. In correspondence with Dr.

Besant, who went to Europe, I conducted the business of the Society, held

meetings and edited the Adyar Theosophist.

The Theosophist had been removed to America, because it could be carried on

better from there; but shortly afterwards the Adyar Theosophist was started to

replace it at Adyar, to satisfy a condition in Colonel Olcott’s will. When

Bishop Leadbeater returned to live again at Adyar at the end of 1930, not

knowing that Dr. Besant had said in Chicago that the magazine had been

transferred to America by Master’s orders, he brought forth a statement from the

Masters that it should be returned to Adyar, as it had never been their desire

that it should be removed from there.

I also found time to continue my Sanskrit studies for several hours every day,

reading with a number of pandits in succession the original source books of all

the principal darshanas (views) or schools of Hindu philosophy. After what I had

been through I was immensely impressed by the straightforwardness and

thoroughness of the Indian philosophers. Their very quality of honesty makes

them tedious reading for most people, but I could conceive nothing more

agreeable than their method, according to which each writer collects together

all the possible arguments against his own view and systematically demolishes

them, with argument and counter-argument, bringing in [310]

every implication and side-issue that he can think of. No suppressio veri here.

Advocacy, yes, clear and decisive, but always the position that the reader is to

be the judge of truth, and is to be provided by the writer with every bit of

information or of thought which may bear on the subject.

It is curious that the very completeness of old Hindu thought has brought about

some apparent inactivity of the modern Hindus in that direction. India is full

of philosophers, but they do not rush into print with every new thought that

strikes them. They know that generally it is a very old thought, and that it has

already been well presented for those who are sufficiently interested to take

the trouble to read. And he who will not take the trouble to read and think is

not worth bothering about – there can be no kindergarten in philosophy.

I found something of the same attitude towards art in Athens. It was obvious

that the Greeks are still philosophers and artists. Yet they do not display it.

On visiting the museums in Athens I put to some friends the question: “Why do

you not do these things now?”

The answer was: “Why should we? We cannot improve upon these.”

Thousands upon thousands of exquisite shapes continued their unwinking

millennial gaze at us from the shelves of the museums, and seemed to add a

conclusive note to the argument.

But my wife and I were not Greeks. We took the trouble to collect nearly fifty

specimens of Greek pottery to take back with us to India – what a trouble,

taking these as passengers’ luggage through Cyprus, Palestine and Egypt – some

of them bought from village potters by the roadsides, some of them ancient

pieces from Athens and Kyrenia.

It was an unusual collection of things that we accumulated in our little house

at Adyar, for side by side with Greek and Oriental and South American pottery

and Buddhist sculpture there reposed my collection of paper weights – stones

from everywhere, from the pyramids of Egypt and the bathing beach of Limassol,

to “the Chilliwack potato” and quartz from the Himalayas bearing shining traces

and sometimes more than traces of rare metals all picked up in rambles in the

wild.

Always fond of nature and of architecture, in the midst of [311] our groves of

banyans and bamboos, and flowering trees and palms, I decorated our house with

Spanish and Greek gardens, with oriental patios and fountains and tanks of

goldfish. We brought the goldfish ourselves from Cyprus by hand, and they gave

us no little trouble on the way.

When we were trying to enter a train from Alexandria to go to Cairo the Egyptian

officials stopped us, saying: “No live stock allowed on the train.”

We disputed whether goldfish were live stock or not, but a local friend knew a

better way, and after a little whispering in a corner the goldfish were allowed

to continue their journey, no one caring further whether they were alive or

dead, since certain small discs of life-supporting matter had gone to enhance

the life of its recipient. On the Italian boat from Port Said to Bombay the

authorities were good enough to furnish the goldfish with a bath-tub, and on the

train from Bombay to Madras they reposed in another bath-tub in the bathroom

without even the cognizance of the authorities.

Still, the most charming addition to our house was my wife’s collection of

animals – her tame mongoose and monkey, and her deer and peacock, for which I

made an enclosed Japanese garden, with proper artificial mountain, and

stepping-stones, and stone lanterns and statues, and an irregular pond complete

with red lacquered bridge and a fountain in the centre. With these she refreshed

herself in the intervals of her work for village schools and trade unions and

co-operative stores.

But I must not linger to detail these things. I will only say that the mother

mongoose probably saved my life on one occasion, when she pulled out a big snake

that was hiding in my bed and dispatched it on the floor. She would play

charmingly, too, pretending that my wrist was a snake and performing her unique

feat of coiling into a ball and jumping from the middle of her back with the

force of her uncoiling. She loved to sleep with human company except when her

babies came from time to time.

Mongooses never have more than two babies at a time, but once ours had three.

Someone else had a little baby mongoose and she happened to catch sight of it.

At once she pounced upon it and carried it away upstairs to a little den which

she had under the roof, and for some time thereafter she ran about trailing

three youngsters instead of two. [312]

§2

At the end of 1930 Dr. Besant returned from Europe in broken health, and never

recovered. Her memory with regard to material affairs had been failing a little

for some time. It was not unnatural at her advanced age – she was eighty-five –

and would not have seemed so pathetic had not a few devotees who looked after

her physically tried to hide the facts of her decline. She spent her time in

reading and quiet reflection, they announced, and was really doing more work

than ever before by radiating beneficial forces upon the world. But the fact was

she did not attend to the practical work any more because she could not. The

Society was carried on by the officers (the Vice-President came over from

America) and the Executive Committee.

The last business transaction I did for her was the purchase of a Ford car.

Three times she told me to buy it – twice after it had been bought. Before

completing the purchase I asked her if she had no objection to going about in a

Ford instead of a Rolls-Royce. Her reply was characteristic: “I shall be proud

to co-operate with Mr. Ford, even in this small way.”

Afterwards, some devotees persuaded her that it was not dignified for her to

ride in a Ford. She called me: “I have decided not to buy that car.” I explained

that it was already done.

“What do you mean,” she demanded imperiously, “by buying a car without my

orders?” She had forgotten. I had not the heart to tell her that her memory was

at fault. I apologized for the “misunderstanding,” and by a stroke of luck sold

the car without loss the next day.

In 1931 Dr. Besant made a new will. In it she directed that her living quarters

(the traditional residence of the President of the Society) should as far as

possible be left in their then condition, as a sort of shrine, and put in the

custody of the Outer Head of the Esoteric (Eastern) School of Theosophy. This

was quite contrary to her earlier character, and contrary to the scrupulous

regard which she had always had for the property of the Society, for the E.S.

was a separate organization, and she had always before carefully distinguished

it from the Society. From about that time her strength gradually declined,

without specific disease or pain, until she died in the September of 1933 [313]

and was cremated with great pomp and ceremony at Adyar.

A few years earlier I would have considered severance from Dr. Besant a great

calamity. Now it was a relief, for really Annie Besant had left us years before.

In these last years her few utterances were almost confined to expressions of

anxiety lest the Society become “crystallized.” In the Convention of 1931 she

appeared for a few minutes, and then for a brief moment she recovered her former

fire, and flung to us again the heroic message that each should seek the divine

within himself and never in any external place or form.

That statement was of a piece with a birthday resolution which she had written

down on the preceding first of October: “I will patiently try to tune my daily

life into fuller harmony with that of the divine Master who lives within my

heart.” It was quite contrary, in my opinion, to the outlook and methods of the

group led by Bishop Leadbeater, which grasped her name for their activities and

beliefs, and afterwards indeed went so far as to claim the word Theosophy for

these and deny it to the views of Krishnamurti and others agreeing with him.

Krishnamurti unconsciously helped them in this, for he spoke often against “your

theosophy.” Theosophy had become identified in his eyes with the operations of

what was really a sect, inasmuch as it claimed evolutionary advantages (the

modern equivalent of heavenly rewards) for those who believed in it, and had

“sufficient intuition” to follow and obey its leaders.

My own last conversations with Dr. Besant were saddening, they revealed so

intimately the pathos of all material greatness. She could speak only of the

“little fairies,” and wonder why so many pretty little animals died so young.

Her loving heart was never impaired by her decline in other respects. It shone

all the brightier when she was released from material affairs. The world

overcame her. It broke her strength and her mind, but it could not stain her

heart, though it were betrayed by many a kiss.

§3

Now commenced a painful period for me. As Secretary of the Theosophical Society

I had to call for nominations [314] and to conduct the election to the office of

President – a process which was to take nine months, since the electors were

scattered all over the world. Sure that if I were President the Society would

not be one thing in the proscenium and another behind the scenes, many members

requested me to accept nominations. I did so, and on the same day resigned from

the office of Hon. Secretary.

Only one other nomination came in – that of Bishop Arundale – and he had the

great advantage of me that he claimed to be the candidate wanted by Dr. Besant

and her Master, though she had left no evidence to that effect, but had on the

contrary repeatedly declined to express an opinion or do anything that might

influence the members with reference to her possible successor.

It had happened that seven years earlier she had accepted for a time an occult

statement made to her that Bishop Arundale was to be her successor, and in two

private and very affectionate letters to him (in which she said she did not wish

to miss any hint of the Master’s desire) she mentioned it, said she thought he

would make a splendid President, and advised him to begin some

pre-electioneering in America. These old letters, with others, Bishop Arundale

gave to Mr. Jinarajadasa shortly before the death of Dr. Besant, and Mr.

Jinarajadasa circulated facsimiles of them as a first move in his election

campaign on behalf of his nominee, Bishop Arundale.

In reply to this some members who had been closely in touch with Dr. Besant

requested the President pro tem., Mr. A. P. Warrington, to prevent backstairs

propaganda by printing Dr. Besant’s letters and also their own testimony to her

later views, in fairness to the electorate. But he declined to publish anything

more than the names of the candidates, and would not allow me a statement of

policy, even in the paid advertisement pages of the magazine.

We then had the extraordinary spectacle of a great worldwide Society conducting

its presidential election (which was of the nature of a referendum on policy)

with no statements published in the presidential magazine – in which the

business affairs of the Society had always theretofore been published – and no

publication of the electoral roll.

The Society was thus delivered into the hands of other organizations, for Mr.

Jinarajadasa had the advantage of possessing lists of active workers in the

Eastern School and [315] other movements to whom to send out his circulars.

Those enthusiasts could be relied upon to do all the necessary propaganda among

the members of the Society all over the world.

Mr. Jinarajadasa followed up with one circular letter after another. With

reference to my memorial lecture on “Dr. Annie Besant and the Theosophical

Movement” he circulated and supported an electioneering canard to the effect

that in it I had made a studied depreciation of her. He did not quote a single

word of the lecture nor allude to my refutation of the canard in the Indian

newspaper which first printed it. He misrepresented my policy, ignoring my

manifesto, and only one of the General Secretaries in various countries who

printed his letters gave me an opportunity to reply. At last came a circular

saying that supporters of Professor Wood – acting no doubt under instructions –

accused Dr. Besant of misuse of funds. A French lady had so written to him. He

circulated her statement in lands as widespread as Europe, India and Australia,

with his own testimony to Dr. Besant’s honesty. That was going too far. I

insisted upon a public explanation, which was ultimately forthcoming – too late,

however, to repair the damage done. Though I could forgive him for the harm done

to my name among Theosophists and also for thus depriving me of many votes, my

regard for Dr. Besant made it impossible for me to forget that some of this mud

flung round the world would surely stick to her.

Thus the election which ought to have been a courtly record of policy and

opinion – a manifestation of brotherhood in a society established “to form a

nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity” – degenerated into something

worse than any political election I have ever known. Alas, that every experiment

in brotherhood should fail, on reaching a modicum of material prosperity.

Since Krishnamurti’s announcement that he would have no disciples, and that he

disapproved the methods prevailing in the Society, there had been a stream of

resignations and lapses, which lost the Society 28,000 (out of 45,000) members

between 1928 and the time of the election. This decline was not due to economic

depression, as some thought; the biggest part of it took place in 1928, the year

of the boom, and besides, the Society had always maintained its upward trend

through previous depressions and wars. [316]

The result of all these things was that I received less than five thousand votes

while my opponent scored more than fifteen thousand. It was a victory for Bishop

Leadbeater, who had at last attained practically full control during Dr.

Besant’s illness, though he himself, then at the age of eighty-seven, did not

live to see the result of the election.

He was entirely sincere in wanting to guide things by his own psychic

experience. But in such an atmosphere psychic experiences were bound to come to

many people – and to conflict. One afternoon, as I was about to enter the

bathroom to wash my hands (I had been gardening) I was told by an inner voice to

go at once to the library. When I arrived there I found the Master standing near

the table, and the whole room throbbing – as it appeared to me – with his aura.

He thanked me, for himself and his colleagues, for what I had done in connection

with the election. I record. The true inwardness of it I do not know. I am quite

prepared to believe that a thought-form or entity which can be created by a

group of people, having psychic influence but no intelligence of its own, can

hover above all and impress each sensitive person according to his own

subconscious desire.

§4

The new President, Mr. Arundale – he now dropped the use of his title of Bishop

outside the church activities, as he had announced his intention to do – or Dr.

Arundale, if we are to recognize the honorary degree conferred upon him by the

short-lived National University – wrote me that his intentions were to pursue a

thoroughly liberal policy. I could not congratulate him on his election,

considering the way in which it had been conducted, but I wrote wishing him

success in the liberal intentions expressed in his letter to me.

But I saw no landing-place for the weary unwelcome foot of the white dove of

truth in the new interpretation of the Society’s principle of tolerance: “Thou

shalt not find fault with a brother’s views or activities.” What a convenience

that sort of tolerance would be to lawbreakers in general, if only it could be

adopted in the outside world!

I learned to detest theosophical politics, with their hiding of everything that

does not redound to the credit of [317] those in power, and their perpetual

circles of mutual admiration, but I was left with a high regard for the

theosophists scattered over the world as a lovable – albeit most innocent and

childlike – body of people.

It is not here, nor is it there, that pure life or truth shall be found. There

are no secret passages to truth. No hocus-pocus of incantations, of word or of

the subtler word that is thought, can light or fan the central fire. No

establishment can establish it; no communications communicate.

THE END

 

 

 

 

 

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Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales

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Instant Guide to Theosophy

Quick Explanations with Links to More Detailed Info

 

 

What is Theosophy ?  Theosophy Defined (More Detail)

 

Three Fundamental Propositions  Key Concepts of Theosophy

 

Cosmogenesis  Anthropogenesis  Root Races

 

Ascended Masters  After Death States

 

The Seven Principles of Man  Karma

 

Reincarnation   Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

 

Colonel Henry Steel Olcott  William Quan Judge

 

The Start of the Theosophical Society

 

History of the Theosophical Society

 

Theosophical Society Presidents

 

History of the Theosophical Society in Wales

 

The Three Objectives of the Theosophical Society

 

Explanation of the Theosophical Society Emblem

 

The Theosophical Order of Service (TOS)

 

Ocean of Theosophy

William Quan Judge

 

Glossaries of Theosophical Terms

 

Worldwide Theosophical Links

 

 

Index of Searchable

Full Text Versions of

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H P Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine

 

Isis Unveiled by H P Blavatsky

 

H P Blavatsky’s Esoteric Glossary

 

Mahatma Letters to A P Sinnett 1 - 25

 

A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

 

Studies in Occultism

(Selection of Articles by H P Blavatsky)

 

The Conquest of Illusion

J J van der Leeuw

 

The Secret Doctrine – Volume 3

A compilation of H P Blavatsky’s

writings published after her death

 

Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries

Annie Besant

 

The Ancient Wisdom

Annie Besant

 

Reincarnation

Annie Besant

 

The Early Teachings of The Masters

1881-1883

Edited by

C. Jinarajadasa

 

Study in Consciousness

Annie Besant

 

 

A Textbook of Theosophy

C W Leadbeater

 

A Modern Panarion

A Collection of Fugitive Fragments

From the Pen of

H P Blavatsky

 

The Perfect Way or,

The Finding of Christ

Anna Bonus Kingsford

& Edward Maitland

Part1

 

The Perfect Way or,

The Finding of Christ

Anna Bonus Kingsford

& Edward Maitland

Part2

 

Pistis Sophia

A Gnostic Gospel

Foreword by G R S Mead

 

The Devachanic Plane.

Its Characteristics

and Inhabitants

C. W. Leadbeater

 

Theosophy

Annie Besant

 

The

Bhagavad Gita

Translated from the Sanskrit

By

William Quan Judge

 

Psychic Glossary

 

Sanskrit Dictionary

 

Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy

G de Purucker

 

In The Outer Court

Annie Besant

 

Dreams and

Dream-Stories

Anna Kingsford

 

My Path to Atheism

Annie Besant

 

From the Caves and

Jungles of Hindostan

H P Blavatsky

 

The Hidden Side

Of Things

C W Leadbeater

 

Glimpses of

Masonic History

C W Leadbeater

 

Five Years Of

Theosophy

Various Theosophical

Authors

Mystical, Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical

and Scientific Essays Selected from "The Theosophist"

Edited by George Robert Stow Mead

 

Spiritualism and Theosophy

C W Leadbeater

 

Commentary on

The Voice of the Silence

Annie Besant and

C W Leadbeater

From Talks on the Path of Occultism - Vol. II

 

Is This Theosophy?

Ernest Egerton Wood

 

 

Obras Teosoficas En Espanol

 

La Sabiduria Antigua

Annie Besant

 

Glosario Teosofico

1892

H P Blavatsky

 

 

Theosophische Schriften Auf Deutsch

 

Die Geheimlehre

Von

H P Blavatsky