Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/49

Rh After two days he looked into the envelope for that missive again. It was gone!

Some judicious hand had removed it. “Judicious,” says the Dictionary, “literally: of or pertaining to a Judge.” Colonel Olcott concluded with some assurance that the hand which had removed that missive, the hand which had put it there, and the hand which had written it, were one and the same hand, and that hand William Q. Judge’s. That is a conclusion which we must leave the two gentlemen to settle between them.

But note the sequel. The writer of the missive, whoever he was, was as good as his word.

When the Convention in due course was held, it was announced that a donation had been contributed towards the expenses in a peculiar way.

There had appeared to one of the brethren one afternoon a dark and mysterious Oriental figure, who gave no name, but deposited two Bank of England £10 notes (from Tibet?), which were backed with the familiar red cryptograph, after which he, like Mr. Lewis Carroll’s Snark, “softly and silently vanished away.”

It will not surprise the astute reader to learn that the brother favoured with this substantial spectre was William Q. Judge.

Well, there was the £20, and the vice-president’s reputation as an occultist stood higher than ever. There was a time, years before, when the society had made much of a similar vision of its president’s, one which, the Colonel used to explain, had first assured him of the truth of Madame Blavatsky’s doctrines. On his asking for a sign, the Colonel’s figure, which was, of course, like Mr. Judge’s, the “astral body” of a Mahatma, had materialised its turban, and disappeared into several yards of substantial textile fabric. “And here,” the Colonel was wont to conclude the story, “here, you see, is the turban!”—whipping it from his coat-tail pocket. Ah! that was in the palmy eighties. But now where was he? What was a chela who conjured up a turban beside one who could conjure up £20 hard cash—“on the table,” as Hilda Wangel would say?

In a word, Colonel Olcott was altogether thrown into the shade by