Hour After Hour in the Master's House

*A retelling based on **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum. Words in quotation marks are quoted from that book.*

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In January 1926 Queen Marie of Rumania received Martha Root at the palace in Bucharest. The Queen herself had asked for the meeting, after reading Dr Esslemont's *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, which Martha had sent her. That year the Queen, who became the first crowned head to embrace the Faith, testified to the Message of Bahá'u'lláh in open letters to the press. They were printed in about two hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada.

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"A woman brought me the other day a Book," she wrote. "I spell it with a capital letter because it is a glorious Book of love and goodness, strength and beauty."

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When Shoghi Effendi wrote to thank her, she answered him from Bran on 27 August 1926. "Indeed a great light came to me with the message of Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá," she told him.

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"It came as all great messages come at an hour of dire grief and inner conflict and distress, so the seed sank deeply." Later in the same letter she wrote: "And grief was also a step leading me ever nearer truth, therefore do I not cry out against grief!" She did not hide what her stand had cost her.

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"Some of those of my caste wonder at and disapprove my courage to step forward pronouncing words not habitual for Crowned Heads to pronounce, but I advance by an inner urge I cannot resist." And: "With bowed head I recognize that I too am but an instrument in greater hands and rejoice in the knowledge."

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In 1927 Shoghi Effendi asked Martha Root to convey to the Queen and her daughter his "warm and cordial invitation to visit the Holy Land and be received in the Beloved's home." In 1928, when the Queen was in Cyprus, the newspapers announced that she intended to visit Haifa, and he wondered afterward whether these "premature disclosures" had kept her from making the pilgrimage.

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In December 1929 he wrote to her himself: "Yours surely, dearly beloved Queen, is the station ordained by Bahá'u'lláh in the realms beyond to which the strivings of no earthly power can ever hope to attain." He closed by renewing the welcome to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's home in Haifa, should she ever visit the Holy Land.

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In 1930 the Queen visited Egypt with her daughter, Princess Ileana. Shoghi Effendi had Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to her grandmother, Queen Victoria, copied in fine Persian calligraphy and illuminated in Ṭihrán, as a gift for her, and cabled that it should reach Haifa not later than the tenth of March. On 8 March he wired the Queen aboard her boat at Aswan, renewing the invitation to visit Bahá'u'lláh's Shrine and the prison-city of 'Akká. No reply came.

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On 26 March he wired again, to her hotel in Cairo, fearing that his earlier letter and telegram had gone astray. Two days later the Rumanian Minister in Cairo answered: "Her Majesty regrets that not passing through Palestine she will not be able to visit you."

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"Unfortunately it did not materialize," Shoghi Effendi wrote to Martha Root. "The reason, I absolutely ignore."

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He described to Rúḥíyyih Khánum a number of times how the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahíyyih Khánum, had waited hour after hour in the Master's home to receive the Queen and her daughter. The Queen had actually sailed for Haifa, and the news had encouraged Shoghi Effendi to believe that she would at last make the pilgrimage she had planned. Time passed, and no news came, even after the boat had docked.

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Later he learned that the Queen and her party had been met at the boat, told that the visit was impolitic and not permissible, put into a car and taken out of Palestine to another country.

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After a long silence the Queen wrote to Martha Root in her own hand, on 28 June 1931. "Both Ileana and I were cruelly disappointed at having been prevented going to the holy shrines and of meeting Shoghi Effendi," she wrote. They had been going through a cruel crisis, she explained, in which every movement she made was being turned against her and politically exploited. "It caused me a good deal of suffering and curtailed my liberty most unkindly." She had had her child to defend at that time, and so could not stand up and defy the world.

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After her signature she added one more line: "I enclose a few words which may be used in your Year Book." Rúḥíyyih Khánum thought that line perhaps more significant of the Queen's attitude and character than anything else.

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The Queen went on writing tributes for *The Bahá'í World*, and Shoghi Effendi translated one of them himself. Her last published tribute, in 1936, two years before her death, read: "To those searching for light, the Bahá'í teachings offer a star which will lead them to deeper understanding, to assurance, peace and good will with all men."

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.*

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