Another reason for this reticence may have been a consideration which faces any leader of a moral and spiritual crusade. Although it was accepted that the final reference-point for the thousands working with him should be God, not Buchman himself, he did not care to unload his own unhappinesses on others, who might as yet be spiritually immature. He said frequently that he was not without sin, and sometimes publicly specified that he was fearful or had done an injustice or lost his temper. But he was often forced to take up King Alfred's attitude: 'If thou hast a woe, tell it not to the weakling; tell it to thy saddle-bow, and ride singing forth.' Buchman had often to bear his burdens alone, as few had the courage or insight to ask him how he was getting along. He said on one occasion, 'I am surrounded by people with great faith, but they lack love.' He was, by nature, an ebullient person and too many believed that the exterior was the whole man.

Oliver Corderoy, Stella Belden's younger brother, who began to work with Buchman soon after the war, remembers walking on the lawn at Caux with Buchman one evening in the late 1940s. 'Are you depressed?' Corderoy asked him, putting his hand on his shoulder. 'Does it show?' replied Buchman. Then for a quarter of an hour Corderoy listened. He said nothing in reply. At midnight the buzzer went in Corderoy's room. Buchman wanted some mint tea. It was full moon, and the mountains across the lake looked like black velvet. 'There are many people more committed to God's plan than you,' Buchman said. 'But not so many who do for me what you did this afternoon. You didn't say a blooming thing. I felt your peace.'

Buchman, in fact, was not only a private, but often a lonely man. The few who did take the risk of breaking through his reserve found a man who was informal, relaxed, often groping his way uncertainly, on occasion as lost as he sometimes looked. At one point Bunny and Phyllis Austin felt that they should return to Australia, leaving Buchman in Europe. 'Oh, no, no,' said Buchman. The Austins, after reflection, still thought that this was what they should do, and told him so once more. 'Come back and see me tomorrow morning,' said Buchman. The next morning, he said to them, 'Yes, go to Australia. The truth is I just didn't want you to leave me.'

His own answer to the natural question of why he never married was invariably, 'Because I have never been guided to.' In his early twenties he had, like most young men, his list of 'possibles', and seems a little later to have taken more than a friendly interest in Edith Randall during their encounters in Europe. But he wrote to his mother from Seoul in 1918, 'It may relieve you to know that I am still single, and expect to remain single for the rest of my life.'1 Whether, as his cousin Fred Fetherolf believed, he, like Bacon, regarded wife and children as 'impediments to great enterprises' we do not know, though it is clear that Buchman always and increasingly felt called to such enterprises. Mrs Adams, his hostess in Kuling and long-time friend, wrote to his mother in 1922, 'Our prayers and love will mean more to him as the years go by, especially if it does not seem God's purpose to bestow upon him the companionship of a wife - though he deserves one of the very best.'2 There was no lack, until far on in his life, of women who would cheerfully have risked marrying him; but he seems to have accepted, equally cheerfully, that his life was destined to be a single one.

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