A Pilgrim's Account of the Master's Last Years: Genevieve Coy in Haifa

In the summer of 1920 the *Star of the West* printed an account of pilgrimage by Genevieve Coy, a young American teacher who had travelled to Haifa in the post-war months. The Master was then seventy-six years old, His health visibly diminished by the long years of confinement and by the privations of the war just ended; but His house on the slope of Mount Carmel was still open to the pilgrims who could find their way to it.

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Coy's notes, set down in the manner of a quiet diary and arranged by the editors of the *Star* into a short serial, preserved the small textures of those days. The Master would rise before dawn and chant prayers. He would receive deputations of believers from the local Persian, Arab and Jewish communities of Haifa through the morning. He would walk in the small garden of the house with His grandchildren and with Bahíyyih Khánum, His sister. In the afternoon He would receive the Western pilgrims in His own modest reception room.

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> He served the tea Himself with His own hands.

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Coy preserved the detail because she had not expected it. She had imagined, like many Westerners on first pilgrimage, that the Centre of the Bahá'í Cause would be served by attendants and that the pilgrim would be received in some formal way. The Master had no such formality. He sat with the small tea things in front of Him on the low table. He poured. He passed the cups Himself. He asked the pilgrims their names, their cities, their work; He listened to the answers; He commented gently; He poured another cup.

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In the talks Coy preserves, the great Bahá'í themes of the hour came through in their usual order: the unity of the human family; the harmony of science and religion; the equality of women and men; the necessity, after the disaster of the war just ended, of a binding international order; the centrality of the spiritual life in any society's healing. The Master spoke briefly. He did not lecture. He answered the questions the pilgrims were asking themselves and stopped when the question had been answered.

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What stayed with Coy after she had gone home, and what stayed with the *Star of the West's* readers when they read her notes, was the small repeated picture: the seventy-six-year-old Master, tired in His body, courteous in His bearing, *serving the tea Himself with His own hands.* It was the permanent image of the Bahá'í Centre as the Master Himself had wished it to be: the great Cause carried on, day by day, by the personal hospitality of one man to a few visitors at a time, in a small reception room on the slope of a mountain in Palestine.

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