"Many [spiritual teachers] have come to America from India, but have done nothing. You are the only one I know of who has done something [to enlighten the atmosphere here]. I feel it; I understand it. I feel the power flowing from you. There are tremendous forces working here, and something terrible is coming. Nobody knows who you are and what you are here for and what you are doing — but I do. Thank you very much for helping me. I am ready to work in your service at any moment."
The critic, lecturer and radio personality, Edgar White Burrill came to Harmon on the 18th, as did the stage actresses Anna Kostant and the novelist and playwright Zona Gale, 57.1
Another prominent individual who would have a lifetime contact with the Master was Nadia Tolstoy, the daughter-in-law of Count Leo Tolstoy (the Russian author of War and Peace ). Nadia, 48, was living in the area with her husband Ilya. She was a Russian émigré who had studied music at the University of Petrograd and spoke several languages. Interested in mystical literature and esoteric philosophy, Nadia was a sincere seeker of Truth; but merely reading books had not satisfied her and she was in search of a living Master.
When her friends Malcolm and Jean wrote to her of Meher Baba's visit, she came to Harmon for his darshan on Thursday, 19 November 1931, with a friend named Martha Hentschell.2 No sooner had she set eyes on Baba than she exclaimed, "My search is over!"
Nadia Tolstoy was later nicknamed Nadine by Baba.3 The following is her account of her first meeting:
As I climbed the steps to his upper room, I remember chanting "Om." I entered the room. Stretched on the couch at the far side of the room was that mysterious, long-expected Being, the Divine Enigma — the True One!
Simple, light, thin, small, sparkling and youthful, so unpretentious, but strangely mysterious and clear. He had an almost boyish look, but gazing from high and afar, unfathomably deep, yet smiling with pure light in his shining eyes. Impenetrable, impersonal transparency — purity!
He reminded me of something, of somebody, I knew far off but could not catch the vision of. I felt as if he were challenging my inner memory; his whole posture and atmosphere demanded, "Can't you remember? Don't you remember me from the past?"
Footnotes
- 1.Zona Gale was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
- 2.In 1930, Nadine and her husband were living on the City College campus, just down the street from President Robinson's house, so she most likely knew the Robinsons also. Martha Hentschell was a young German immigrant nurse.
- 3.Baba changed Nadia's name to Nadine when she came to India, to distinguish her from his cousin Naja.