To Netnews Homepage Previous Next Index Table of Contents
Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter VI
The second year that we went to Ascona was one of very real interest. Grand Duke Alexander joined us there and gave some very interesting talks and, more important still to me was the coming to Ascona of Violet Tweedale. It was a red-letter day for me when she arrived there and I can see her now coming down the hillside with her husband, and, immediately through the power of her spiritual personality, dominating the whole center. She was so beautiful, so gracious and so stately and her arrival marked the beginning of a very real friendship between her husband and herself and Foster and me. Later we stayed with them frequently in their beautiful home at Torquay, South Devon, [226] and when I got tired or worried I would go down to Violet and talk with her. She was a prolific writer. She wrote numerous popular novels and her books on psychism, based on her own experiences, are sound and intriguing and one of her last books, called The Cosmic Christ, has had a wide and most useful distribution. She was one of the few psychics in the world in whom it was possible absolutely to believe. She was highly intelligent; with a strong sense of humor and a well developed investigating spirit. She was a great student of the Tibetan's books and I kept her supplied with everything He wrote as soon as He wrote it. She was a friend of high and low and when she died not long ago there were hundreds besides myself and my husband who registered a sense of lasting loss. The brooch that she constantly wore was given to me by her husband and I wear it all the time and always think of her with the deepest love and affection. Each year after our trip abroad we returned to the United States for some months, usually leaving the girls behind in England where we rented houses when needed and where one house, Ospringe Place in Kent, was very kindly put at our disposal for two years by a friend and school student. During these years all the three girls married. As related, Dorothy married a Captain Morton, six months her senior and admirably suited to her. It is one of those really happy marriages that are satisfying to contemplate. I think that they are both fortunate. I know that Terence is for Dorothy one in a million, quiet, clever, kind and firm in the right places and Dorothy is witty, sparkling, quite a deep thinker and good psychologist, quick tempered, very artistic and devoted to her husband. Later, Ellison married a fellow-officer of Terence's, Arthur Leahy. Both Arthur and Terence are at the time of this writing Colonels on active [227] service abroad. One year, my second daughter, Mildred, came back with us to the States and there married Meredith Pugh which was a most unfortunate marriage, though the indications were that it should not have been an unhappy one. Circumstances arose which were so drastic that within four months Mildred was engaged, married and divorced and her little son was on the way. This same little son was more than adequate compensation for all she went through. There is no need for me to deal with the details of the story. On all counts Mildred handled a most difficult situation with poise and serenity and wisdom. When she returned to me in England I was amazed at her lack of rancor or spirit of revenge and retaliation but I was also amazed that anyone could look so desperately ill and still continue to live. During these years in which my husband and I were five months over in Great Britain and Europe and seven months in the United States the school work was steadily growing. The work done in Ascona for three years had brought a number of people of different nationalities into the school and these along with others who had already joined the school through reading the books had produced a nucleus in many countries in Europe on which we could build the future work. The work in Spain under Francisco Brualla was going ahead exceedingly well and we already had several hundred Spanish students, most of them men. The work in Great Britain was also going ahead. Little groups of students scattered throughout the world were beginning to join the school together as a group. One such group in India interested me very much. There was an organization in India called the Suddha Dharma Mandala. It had been founded by Sir Subra Maniyer. It was an occult order of apparently an advanced kind. I had come across one of the books they had put out and had [228] discovered several of the leaders of the Theosophical Society were working in the order, having outgrown the esoteric section in the T.S. I'm not a good hand at joining organizations but I wrote to the head of the order and asked permission to join but received no reply. The following year, as I had heard nothing, I wrote again and ordered some of their books, enclosing a check in payment. I received no reply and no books were sent me, though the check was cashed. After some months I sent a carbon copy of my previous letter to the head of the order but still received no reply. I gave up the attempt and decided that it was one of those peculiar, fake organizations which snare the gullible occidental. Three years later I went down to Washington, D.C., to give a course of lectures in the New Willard Hotel. At the close of a lecture a man came up to me with a small suit case in his hand and said, "I have been ordered by the Suddha Dharma Mandala to give you these books." And there were all the books I had requested and my faith in the righteousness of the organization was restored. I heard no more for some time and then I got a letter from a member of the group saying that Sir Subra Maniyer was dead and that my book A Treatise on Cosmic Fire had been his constant companion and that on his death bed he had requested the seven senior members of his organization to join the Arcane School and put themselves under my instruction. This they did and for years this most interesting group of old Hindu students worked with us. All these men were old and have gradually died off until today there seem no more for me to be in touch with. They had a great reverence for H.P. Blavatsky and I found my contact with them most interesting.
To Netnews Homepage Previous Next Index Table of Contents
Last updated Monday, July 6, 1998 © 1998 Netnews Association. All rights reserved.