As Baba's taxi drove to Kensington, purposely taking an indirect route that led past the Foreign Office and Downing Street, Herbert pointed out Buckingham Palace and the houses of Parliament. After this short sightseeing excursion, Baba reached the Davys' house, and another "beggar," Mary Margaret Craske, slowly opened the door — and also the portals of her heart, where the Master was already enthroned.
Margaret, 39, had also gone to Devonshire at the end of March that year, seeking a quiet retreat, and thus found out about Meher Baba. A former member of the Diaghilev Ballet of Russia and a prominent dancer, she had been conducting a ballet school in London with a colleague named Mabel Ryan.
The following is Margaret Craske's recollection of the events leading up to her meeting with Baba:
I had read Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and other esoteric writers, but never found what I was looking for.1 Between 1929 and 1931, everything I valued disappeared. My father died, my mother died, the man I was in love with died. Diaghilev died, Anna Pavlova died. So I was in quite a bad state. I had spent my life looking for God and I now thought it was all nonsense. I was not going to look anymore — I had had enough! I resolved to go somewhere to recover enough to decide what to do next.
On my way to Hastings in South England, where I had gone to judge a dance competition, I met a woman named Dorothea who approached me at the Victoria railroad station and asked where I was going. I told her, and she said, "How wonderful! That's where I spent my honeymoon." The woman wanted to go, but had no money. On the spur of the moment, I paid her fare and we went together.
On the way, I mentioned I wanted to go somewhere for Easter away from friends. She told me about a "wonderful place" down in Devonshire run by Meredith Starr. She wrote to Meredith, and it was arranged. She didn't tell me about it being spiritual. (I wouldn't have gone if I had known.) On the day I went, she came again to see me off, and as I was leaving she said, "Oh, there's just one other thing. There are four hours a day of meditation required there!"
Footnotes
- 1.Sergei Diaghilev was a Russian ballet producer and art critic whose greatest protégé was Nijinsky. George Gurdjieff was an esoteric teacher of music, dance and spiritual practices, and one of the forerunners of Eastern philosophy (Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism) in Europe and America. P. D. Ouspensky was a Russian mathematician who became a pupil of Gurdjieff's thought.