Exactly the Cost of the Ticket

*A retelling based on **The Diary of Juliet Thompson** by Juliet Thompson. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that account.*

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At the Hotel de la Paix in Geneva, 'Abdu'l-Bahá would not take the elevator. He walked up four long flights of stairs to the top floor. "Really," Juliet Thompson wrote, "He floated up the stairs."

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It was the end of the summer of 1911. She had believed her time with Him was over. She had spent several days near Him at Thonon, on the French shore of the lake, and had said goodbye, and was on her way home to New York. Then, from her hotel in Geneva, she had called Hippolyte Dreyfus and learned that the Master was coming to Geneva the next night, and that He wished her to ask her friend Edith Sanderson to join her there.

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Now He was here. While His dinner was being prepared He sat with her and Edith in Edith's room, talking to them tenderly, and suddenly He turned to her.

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"Could you go to London, Juliet?"

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Miss Rosenberg, a friend in London, had written inviting her to stay. He was going to London too. "My heart leapt!" she wrote.

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Then, almost at once, her mind went to the practical difficulty. "I had almost no money left." Her steamer ticket was already bought, on an independent line, and could not be exchanged. To catch the boat she had to leave Geneva on the early train the next morning. She told Him all this. She offered to stay until nine and try to arrange some kind of change.

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"No," He answered, "it is not necessary." Miss Rosenberg had written, that was all; Miss Rosenberg loved her very much.

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Years later, in 1924, Juliet went back to this page of her diary and added a note beneath it. She called that answer her third and most fatal mistake: "always thinking about pocketbooks," she wrote, even the pocketbook of the all-powerful Lord, instead of leaving everything in His hands with perfect trust.

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That evening the Master had something else to say to her. After dinner He called her to His room. Tamaddunu'l-Mulk was there to translate. She had heard that He had eaten almost nothing at dinner, and she begged to go out and bring Him fruit with her own hands. He would not let her. He had been served beautifully, He said. He had only been too tired to eat.

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Then, gently, He raised the subject she had known was coming: Dr Percy Grant, the New York clergyman to whom she was deeply attached, in an attachment that had never become a marriage. The Master described the man and the whole history of it with a knowledge that took her breath away. He did not want to separate them, He told her. He wished her to marry him. But the present state of things had to end. "Either you must marry him or separate yourself from him, cut yourself entirely from him."

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It was nearly midnight. He looked very tired. He told her He had come to Geneva to say this to her, and had stayed up so late to say it.

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At dawn she went to Him alone, before her train. He had left His door ajar. She knelt, and a great flood of sorrow rose in her, and she felt His fingers wiping the tears from her eyes. "Don't cry!" He said. Then He asked her the question He had asked her before: "Always?"

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"Always!"

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In English He answered her: "With Me-- always."

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The ship that carried her home was, in her words, a queer little ship, and the journey took things from her one by one. Through the help of a well-meaning stranger at the customs, she lost her trunk; it would be nine weeks before she saw it again. In Naples she lost her fountain pen. Somewhere she lost her prayer book, even her prayer book. "I have just the clothes on my back, nothing else," she wrote in her cabin.

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What she still had she carried in a little bag: her diary, the Master's Tablets to her, and her diary from 'Akká. For seven days the sea stormed.

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"I have been curiously stripped on this journey," she wrote. She thought she would find Him again in the hardship waiting for her, in what she called the "Heaven of Poverty."

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She moved into a small old house on West Tenth Street, almost opposite the house of Percy Grant. In November a Tablet came from the Master.

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She had never written to Him about her troubles on the way. She had mentioned them only to Tamaddunu'l-Mulk, as trifles. Yet here He was, in the midst of all His work, sympathising with her difficulties on the road, and naming their cause: "For the love of seeing that unkind person you made great haste to go."

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Every morning after that, she woke with the words in her ears. At first she asked herself how it could be true. Then she looked deep into her heart, and knew that it was. All through Thonon she had been planning what she would say to him when she got home.

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At the bottom of the Tablet was a postscript. "I send you a small sum of money."

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"It was $120: exactly the cost of the ticket."

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The sum, she wrote, was "the most pointed of signs" that she could easily have given up her passage on the independent line. It was not the ticket that had held her, she saw, but her attachment to Percy Grant. But for that attachment, she might have spent weeks with Him in Paris and London. What stayed with her was the picture of Him on the first night in Geneva, leading her and Edith "up those four flights of stairs to the Upper Chamber."

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Diary of Juliet Thompson** by Juliet Thompson.*

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