Letter No. 23 (ML-104) Rec. Oct. 1881
In Letter No. 21 (ML-27), the Mahatma gave the first intimation that he was going on a retreat: "Very soon I will have to leave you to yourselves for the period of three months. Whether it will begin in October or January will depend on the impulse given to the Society and its progress."
For reasons which we shall see, the three-month period began probably near the first of October. It seems probable that the letter was written very near the 27th of September.
Received October, 1881. (?) P.p.c letter written before retirement.
My dear friend: Your note received. What you say in it shows me that you entertain some fears lest I should have been offended by Mr. Hume's remarks. Be at ease, pray, for I never could be. It is not anything contained in his observations that annoyed me, but the persistence with which he was following out a line of argument that I knew was pregnant with future mischief. This argumentum ad hominem — renewed and taken up from where we had left it off last year was as little calculated as possible to draw the Chohan from his principles, or force him into some very desirable concessions. I dreaded the consequences and my apprehensions had a very good foundation, I can assure you. Please assure Mr. Hume of my personal sympathy and respect for him and give him my most friendly regards. But I will not have the pleasure of "catching up" any more of his letters or answering them for the next three months. As nothing whatever of the Society's original program is yet settled upon, nor do I hope of seeing it settled for some time to come, I have to give up my projected voyage to Bhootan, and my Brother M. is to take my place. We are at the end of September and nothing could be done by October 1st that might warrant my insisting to go thither. My chiefs desire me particularly to be present at our New Year's Festivals, February next, and in order to be prepared for it I have to avail myself of the three intervening months.
I will, therefore, bid you now good-bye, my good friend, thanking you warmly for all you have done and tried to do for me. January next I hope to be able to let you have news from me; and, — save new difficulties in the way of the Society arise again from "your shore" — you will find me in precisely the same disposition and frame of mind in which I now part with both of you. Whether I will succeed in bringing my beloved but very obstinate Brother M. to my way of thinking is what I am now unable to say. I have tried and will try once more, but I am really afraid Mr. Hume and he would never agree together. He told me he would answer your letter and request through a third party — not Mad. B. Meanwhile she knows quite enough to furnish Mr. Hume with ten lectures had he but a desire to deliver them, and were he but to recognise the fact, instead of entertaining such a poor [? idea] of her in one direction and such a very erroneous conception in some others. M. promised me, though to refresh her failing memory and to revive all she has learned with him in as bright a way as could be desired. Should the arrangement fail to get Mr. Hume's approbation I will have but to sincerely regret it, for it is the best I can think of.
I leave orders with my "Disinherited" to watch over all as much as it lies in his weak powers.
And now I must close. I have but a few hours before me, to prepare for my long, very long journey. Hoping we part as good friends as ever, and that we might meet as better ones still, let me now "astrally" shake hands with you and assure you of my good feelings once more.
Yours as ever,
K. H.
Letter No. 24 (ML-71) October, 1881
The Mahatma M. had taken over the correspondence. In The Occult World, Sinnett says:
The change which came over the character of our correspondence when our new master took us in hand was very remarkable. Every letter that emanated from Koot Hoomi had continued to bear the impress of his gently mellifluous style. He would write half a page at any time rather than run the least risk of letting a brief or careless phrase hurt anybody' s feelings. His handwriting, too, was always very legible and regular. Our new master treated us very differently; he declared himself almost unacquainted with our language, and wrote a very rugged hand which it was sometimes difficult to decipher. He did not beat about the bush with us at all. If we wrote out an essay on some occult ideas we had picked up, and sent it to him asking if it was right, it would sometimes come back with a heavy red line scored through it, and "No" written on the margin. On one occasion one of us had written, "Can you clear my conceptions about so and so?" The annotation found in the margin when the paper was returned was "How can I clear what you haven't got!" and so on. But with all this, we made progress under M, and by degrees the correspondence, which began on his side with brief notes scrawled in the roughest manner on bits of coarse Tibetan paper, expanded into considerable letters sometimes. And it must be understood that while his rough and abrupt ways formed an amusing contrast with the tender gentleness of Koot Hoomi, there was nothing in these to impede the growth of our attachment to him as we began to feel ourselves tolerated by him as pupils a little more willingly than at first. Some of my readers, I am sure, will realize what I mean by "attachment" in this case. I use a colourless word deliberately to avoid the parade of feelings which might not be generally understood, but I can assure them that in the course of prolonged relations — even though merely of the epistolary kind — with a personage who, though a man like the rest of us as regards his natural place in creation is elevated so far above ordinary man as to possess some attributes commonly considered divine, feelings are engendered which are too deep to be lightly or easily described.