A Walk in the Night: Juliet Beside the Master

In The Diary of Juliet Thompson the painter records an evening in the summer of 1912 in New York. The Master had been speaking, that afternoon, to a great gathering at one of the larger halls of the city. The talk had run long; the queue of those who had come forward to greet Him afterwards had run longer. By the time the room had cleared the streets of the city were already dark.

Juliet was preparing, with several of the other American believers, to walk Him back to His residence. She herself was tired; she had been on her feet most of the day; she had not expected to be among the small group that walked. The Master, on the way out of the hall, looked at her, and indicated that she should walk beside Him.

She fell in. The small party — perhaps four people, including the Master’s interpreter — moved at His pace through the streets. New York at that hour had thinned; the buses had slackened; the air had cooled.

The Master did not speak. The interpreter, perhaps sensing the quality of the walk, did not initiate any conversation. Juliet, beside Him, did not feel that she should fill the silence. She walked. He walked.

We walked in silence, and the silence was full.

The walk took perhaps twenty minutes. They reached the residence; the Master ascended the stair; He turned at the door and gave the small party His blessing. Juliet stood for a long moment in the street after He had gone in. Then she turned and walked, alone, through the streets back to her own studio.

She writes in the diary, that evening, only one paragraph about the walk. She did not, she says, know what to say. The walk had not contained a teaching that could be reproduced; it had not contained a word that could be quoted; it had contained only the steady step of a man whose presence she had been beside for twenty minutes in the night air of New York. But she had arrived at her studio, she writes, full of something I cannot name and cannot lose.

The diary leaves the small entry as it found it. The walk in the night passed into the long fidelity of her life as one of the moments she would in old age return to. There had been no sermon. There had been the unbroken quiet of a man walking, in the dark city, beside the woman He had asked to walk with Him.

Paraphrased from The Diary of Juliet Thompson (Kalimát Press, 1947); see original for full text.

Thompson, J.. (1947). *The Diary of Juliet Thompson*. Kalimát Press.