Her Eyes Charged with Memories: A Portrait of the Greatest Holy Leaf

In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield includes a portrait of the Greatest Holy Leaf as she found her in Haifa in the spring of 1922. The Master had passed only a few months before. The household was in mourning. The young Shoghi Effendi had withdrawn to Switzerland for the long retreat that the early Guardianship would require. The day-to-day affairs of the Cause, in the meantime, rested in the small bent woman in the upstairs room of the house on Persian Street.

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Lady Blomfield, herself an aristocratic Englishwoman of warmth and stature, had come to Haifa to gather, for the volume that would become *The Chosen Highway,* the family’s own first-hand recollections of the early days. She found the Greatest Holy Leaf willing, at quiet moments of the afternoon, to speak.

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She describes her physically with the care of one who knew that this woman had been present in scenes very few others had witnessed:

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> She was small, her white veil falling almost to the ground, > her eyes charged with memories. She did not speak until she > had thought a long time, and then she spoke quietly.

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Bahíyyih Khánum had been six years old in 1852, when soldiers had taken her father and stripped the household of its possessions. She had been seven on the road from Tihrán to Baghdád. She had been a young woman in the prison-city of ‘Akká. She had been in middle age when her brother ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ministry began.

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She had now, in her old age, seen the passing of that brother and was holding, by her own hand and Shoghi Effendi's, the affairs of the third generation of the Faith. The Cause she had begun to carry as a frightened child in the plundered Tihrán house had grown, in the seventy years since, into a worldwide movement. She had carried it without interruption.

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Lady Blomfield records the long afternoons in the upper room. The Greatest Holy Leaf would speak, in her quiet Persian, of events Lady Blomfield could not have known. She would name companions long dead. She would describe rooms in Adrianople and Baghdád that no Western eye had ever seen. She would smile at small things her father had said in private. She would weep, occasionally, at the memory of her younger brother Mírzá Mihdí’s death from the roof in ‘Akká. She would compose herself and continue.

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> When she had finished speaking, she would sit very still. The > light through the window of the upper room would lie quietly > on her white veil.

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The chapter is, in form, a biographical interview. It is, in substance, a portrait of dignity. Lady Blomfield gives, in her brief description, what would not have been preserved otherwise: the look in the face of a woman who had carried, across an entire long life, a fidelity to one Cause that the years had only deepened. Her eyes, as Lady Blomfield writes, were charged with memories. They were also charged with the ongoing work that, until her own passing in 1932, she would not set down.

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