My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood Page B

Caroline Norment, who was about to open a hostel for refugees from Nazi Europe under the auspices of the Friends Service Committee. Caroline and I took to each other and it was agreed that I should report for work as one of her assistants, in the middle of October.
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    The hostel was at Haverford, just outside Philadelphia. A large, shabby mansion, built at the beginning of the century and once luxurious, was its headquarters. Between twenty-five and thirty refugees—men, women, and children, Jews and non-Jews—were living there or at the homes of neighboring Quakers. Many of them had professional backgrounds—as teachers, lawyers, economists, musicians—and could hope to get jobs sooner or later. When they did so, they would be replaced at the hostel by other refugees who were on a waiting list.
    Meanwhile, the function of the hostel was to prepare them for an independent existence in the United States. Some needed to rest and get their health back, some needed to learn more English. But their psychological preparation was a greater and subtler problem. Uprooted, disillusioned, and suspicious, they were being asked to have faith in and adapt themselves to an abstraction called the American Way of Life, which even their mentors couldn’t quite agree with each other in defining. No doubt, the indoctrination was sometimes less than tactful. No doubt, the indoctrinees were sometimes bossed into activities they didn’t see the point of. Nevertheless, while admitting the validity of Gerald’s objections to the Quaker practice of social service, I felt that we—Caroline and her assistants—were doing considerably more good than harm.
    My days were spent giving the refugees English lessons, going for walks with them, accompanying them to classes at Haverford College—to learn the American Way of Teaching—and to social gatherings in the neighborhood—to observe the American Way of Entertaining. I also, like everybody else at the hostel, lent a hand with the housecleaning and washed dozens and dozens of dishes.
    The thought that I was serving God within the refugees came to me often, not awe-inspiringly, but comically. It sustained me as a private joke does, so long as you don’t tell it to anyone else. The essence of this joke was that most of these human temples of the God I was serving would have unhesitatingly described themselves as atheists.
    I am sure that the refugees had many jokes about me and the rest of the hostel staff. Almost without exception, they saw the Quakers as lovable but unworldly eccentrics and Quaker pacifism as mere craziness. From their point of view, my best asset was probably that I had known pre-Hitler Berlin. They kept coaxing me to talk about it. Doing so made me slip naturally into German, in which they would join me—thus breaking our often-broken hostel rule that English must be spoken whenever possible. Even those who spoke it fluently seemed unwilling to, unless compelled. Perhaps because the language reminded them of their predicament as aliens.
    What they didn’t realize was the extent to which I, too, was an alien, in Quakerdom. But, unlike them, I wanted to belong to it. Already I was using Quakerese in conversation with my fellow workers: “Caroline, I have a concern.” “Caroline, does thee want me to take thy letters to the mail?” I attended the Haverford Meeting House on Sundays and within a few weeks found myself standing up and speaking. Playacting? Yes, partly. But playacting about something that was entirely serious to me. There is no reason why you can’t equate the Quaker Inner Light with the Hindu Atman. I was really talking about Vedanta to them, but in their idiom, not mine. It was merely my self-consciousness which made this into a theatrical performance.
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    At the end of those long long workdays, I was usually eager to drop into bed and sleep. But,