Letter III
[Reprinted from The Path (New York), February 1896, pp. 332-333.]
[No Date.]
My Dear Doctor: --- Two words in answer to what the Countess told me. I do myself harm, you say, "in telling everyone that Damodar is in Tibet, when he is only at Benares." You are mistaken. He left Benares toward the middle of May, (ask in Adyar; I cannot say for certain whether it was in May or April) and went off, as everybody knows, to Darjeeling, and thence to the frontier via Sikkhim. Our Darjeeling Fellows accompanied him a good way. He wrote a last word from there to the office bidding good-bye and saying: "If I am not back by July 21st you may count me as dead." He did not come back, and Olcott was in great grief and wrote to me about two months ago, to ask whether I knew anything. News had come by some Tibetan pedlars in Darjeeling that a young man of that description, with very long flowing hair, had been found frozen in the (forget the name) pass, stark dead, with twelve rupees in his pockets and his things and hat a few yards off. Olcott was in despair, but Maji told him (and he, D., lived with Maji for some time at Benares,) that he was not dead - she knew it through pilgrims who had returned, though Olcott supposes - which may be also - that she knew it clairvoyantly. Well I know that he is alive, and am almost certain that he is in Tibet - as I am certain also that he will not come back - not for years, at any rate. Who told you he was at Benares? We want him sorely now to refute all Hodgson’s guesses and inferences that I simply call lies, as much as my "spy" business and forging - the blackguard: now mind, I do not give myself out as infallible in this case. But I do know what he told me before going away - and at that moment he would not have said a fib, when he wept like a Magdalen. He said, "I go for your sake. If the Maha Chohan is satisfied with my services and my devotion, He may permit me to vindicate you by proving that Masters do exist. If I fail no one shall ever see me for years to come, but I will send messages. But I am determined in the meanwhile to make people give up searching for me. I want them to believe I am dead."
This is why I think he must have arranged some trick to spread reports of his death by freezing.
But if the poor boy had indeed met with such an accident - why I think I would commit suicide; for it is out of pure devotion for me that he went. (1) I would never forgive myself for this, for letting him go. That’s the truth and only the truth. Don’t be harsh, Doctor - forgive him his faults and mistakes, willing and unwilling.
The poor boy, whether dead or alive, has no happy times now, since he is on probation and this is terrible. I wish you would write to someone at Calcutta to enquire from Darjeeling whether it is so or not. Sinnett will write to you, I think. I wish you would.
Yours ever gratefully,
H. P. B.Endnote
(1) The fact is that Damodar was never asked to go to Tibet, but begged to be permitted to go there, and at last went with permission of H.P.B., on which occasion I accompanied him to the steamer. - H[artmann].
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