Russell E. - The Secret Doctrine: Difference between revisions

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{{Style P-No indent|WELL do I remember the evening I first saw Mrs. Besant. One night I had taken some theosophists from Washington to visit the great seeress. She was sitting in seamless robe before her table. On the floor at her feet crouched a little grey woman who pressed one of the “card dealer’s” hands to her cheek, who only inclined at the introductions, who did not speak, whose name I did not catch. All the evening she held the hand as if this time the shipwrecked mariner was drawing force from the giant octopus to whose tentacle he clung. Walking home I happened to mention the simile.}}   

“I cannot—I am too old—the physical effort of concentration necessary to produce such vibration might kill me.”

She was very cultured in all the arts, as high-class Russians always are. Even sad Maxim Gorky told me once that Russia was the only country having a cultured aristocracy—the others but here-and-there. Very few must be left now. Friends with whom she lived in the “Isis Unveiled” days say she was a wonderful musician, in bursts of savage improvisation like nothing else in the world, foreshadowing the Rimsky-Korsakoff school. She also painted and was excellent in caricatures and sketches which she used to sell to the New York papers when her father’s remittances (he always kept in touch with her during her wanderings) did not arrive in time or were spent the day they came. They said her room was piled with the MSS. of her forthcoming book. If the publishers pressed her and she got angry she would seize a sheaf regardless of sequence and pack it off to them, which may account for the apparent lack of continuity one occasionally finds.

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