Catherine Amy Passingham was the President of the England Branch
of the Theosophical Society, and when Blavatsky died she wrote the following article in tribute
to HPB.
A TRIBUTE FROM THE WEST
Truly the character of H.P.B. was
a many-sided one, and many of those sides have been ably depicted by the
various friends and followers who have given us their impressions of her; but
none of them have represented her as she invariably appeared to me, namely, the
very essence of loving affection. I am well aware that this is not the view that
is commonly taken, but every one must speak of her as they found her, and my
experience since my first sight of her at a meeting of the Society for Psychical
Research, in Mr. Oscar Browning’s rooms at Cambridge in (I think) 1884, till my
last interview with her about two years since, has been one of the most unvarying
affection.
She always received me with an embrace
and words of endearment — never parted from me without kindly expressed wishes for
my welfare. If she had been my own mother, she could not have been kinder. She may
have had a rough side to her nature, but I always had the benefit of the very smoothest
side, a side that I shall always remember her by, with the deepest gratitude
and affection.
A
little incident happened while she was at Maycot, which may be interesting.
One
night she was taken seriously ill; I was then staying in London with Mrs. Duncan,
who has strong powers of magnetic healing. She went to see H.P.B. and afforded her
some relief, but when she came back in the evening she said she thought her very
ill, and as she had no female with her but her maid.
I
started off early the next morning, and arrived to find H.P.B. (who had been almost
in a state of collapse the previous evening), sitting at her desk writing, as well
as possible. I had come prepared to stay and nurse her, but finding I was not wanted
for that purpose, I would not stay long to disturb her work. However she seemed
unwilling I should go, so I stayed talking till twelve. Just behind her chair there
hung on the wall a cuckoo clock which began to rattle before striking, as is
the custom. I looked up.
H.P.B.
said:
-
“Oh,
it is only that crazy cuckoo.”
Then
it struck up to five, when H.P.B. said impatiently, looking half round at it, “Oh,
shut up”, and it never uttered another sound. H.P.B. gave a short “H’m”, as
much as to say, “Your noise is stopped”, and quietly went on talking.
All
seemed so natural and unimportant that I thought nothing of it till I arrived at
Mrs. Duncan’s house, when at lunch some one said apropos of my having spent the
morning with Madame Blavatsky:
-
“And
did you see no phenomena?”
I
said:
-
“No,
of course I did not”, when all of a sudden the thought flashed across me “Why,
yes, I did", and then I told them what had happened.
Of
course a sceptic, full of the theory of trickery on H.P.B.'s part, would say:
-
Oh,
of course cuckoo clocks are always getting out of order; she knew it only struck
five when it ought to strike twelve, and cunningly waited the proper time to
say, ‘shut up'.
But
I know better, and I do not even believe it was done with the object of showing
me a specimen of her powers; she simply felt annoyed that the noise should
interrupt the conversation, and so stopped it, just as we should command a
noisy child to be quiet or leave the room.
Some
years after I related this incident before H.P.B. at Lansdowne Road, and she
nodded her head when I asked her if it was not true that she stopped the clock
by occult means, and said:
-
“Of
course.”
I
never placed the least importance in phenomena for their own sake, and I never
asked H.P.B. for even the smallest evidence of her power.
My
personal remembrance of her will always be that of the kindest anti most
affectionate, as well as revered, friend.
(This article was published in Lucifer magazine, August 1891, p.457-458)
No comments:
Post a Comment