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Correspondence from Jane Wolfe to Karl Germer
[3 August 1942]
The group at 1003 [S. Orange Grove Avenue] are becoming welded into one whole. It took a few weeks to indicate this happening. I mention it, because I had felt no roots, and wondered. But IT has entered. The bees swarmed, there was quite a hubbub, humming, irritability, stinging even; but the hive has been entered, and we are settling each to the appointed task. It isn't easy: I recall my own days at Cefalu.
We all have heretofore worked just as hard, but spasmodically. Now there is the never-ending laundry work for a house and family of this size, which we do ourselves to save money; the eternal scouring, cleaning, dusting of a 17 room house, with its 5 baths, additional lavatories, halls, etc., the eating, eating! The children. The weariness of body & nerves. Some times too tired to be decent to one another.
All this a passionate & ecstatic enterprise? At times it is—really! May it become more so.
Many personal wills are still with us and Wilfred [Wilfred Talbot Smith] has his hands full most of the time. Nor can he take A.C.'s method of putting disgruntled ones out of the house for a week or two, as in Cefalu, as a disciplinarian measure, to carry on as best they may elsewhere, for "friends" stand by to "sympathize". And, too, we can hardly get along without their assistance! So we wait for the humour to pass, some times with considerable pain to one, some times with sane humour with another. Realizing that the leaven is working and that only through friction can there be growth.
Wilfred has his limitations, to be sure: but the establishment of the Order is his reason for living; I am quite sure that expresses his will. His honesty of purpose here can be trusted. 1942 has done much for Smith and is doing. Too, these new associations, responsibilities and obligations are simplifying Smith. He is achieving humility.
His methods are defensive—his métier, no doubt. In the early days at Winona Blvd., Regina [Regina Kahl] had to push him forward and hold him on the firing line, else had he remained a gas clerk all his life, for he was a frightened, shivering child. This made—and still makes—him retire into himself when hurt and shut or slam the door, depending on his mood.
I do not think his method so much a matter of grasping at the Order—certainly not today—as that he cannot adapt himself to the ideas of others about things. He feels his feet firmly under him when handling things as he sees them and that conditions here cannot be understood as well by those at a distance.
I cannot, of course, excuse his bad manners. And he has a strange naiveté, indeed extraordinary, one which I cannot see as egotism—in the following illustration, it is rather the child, out of great love and veneration, striving to be the father by imitating him. In all sincerity he asked me a few days back if I didn't think that he could eventually grow to be like A.C. Modesty and simplicity will be his crown: hardly that power before which all people bow.
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