The Swami, who had been in fragile health before and also during his Camp Taylor days, became even more indisposed upon reaching San Francisco. Alice, who had returned with him from the retreat , went to stay with her brother-in-law for about four days after which she left for Los Angeles. During these last few days in San Francisco she saw him every day and twice on the last day. She describes the last time she saw Vivekananda:
“Then he was ill in bed. I stood at the foot of the bed and said good-bye to him. ‘Come and shake hands,’ he said. ‘I never make a fuss over people even when I have known them many years.’ I assured him that I had certainly not expected him to make any fuss over me. ‘The Lord bless you and keep you,’ he said, and I departed. Later I discovered that I had left a handbag there. But after all the false starts for Camp Taylor I was not going back for that, so I asked Mrs. Aspinall to get it when she had an opportunity and send it on to me. She told me later that when she went for it, Swamiji remarked: ‘So she left that, did she? Take it out of here!’”
Alice Hansborough was one of the blessed souls to have played a significant part in the mission for which Vivekananda came and the Swami’s six month stay and work in California is inseparable from her shadow-like presence and devoted selfless service. One really wonders at this enigmatic ways in which the Almighty provides instruments to serve along the Prophets and messengers of the Divine. Mrs. Hansborough is a striking example of this.
The memories of the times spent with the towering personality of this teacher of the Spirit’s grandeur, was to stay with her and sustain her, all her life. She continued to be a part of Vedanta movement all her life and was known as Shanti in the Vedanta circles.
Mrs. Hansborough, who was not given to effusive expressions, recalled that when she had returned home in Los Angeles, someone asked her how she felt about her brother William. She replied saying that she did not know how she felt toward her brother, but that she had felt much closer to the man she had been assisting in San Francisco than any other person I had ever known.
She also earnestly spoke that she had always felt that as if the Swami was her “very own, a very close relation for whom she had always been waiting a long long time.”
How the time spent with Swamiji impacted her for whole of her life is clear from these words:
“After I met Swamiji I felt lifting of a burden which was on my chest for so long that I had ceased to be conscious of it.”
She had also shared a feeling about Swamiji to Swami Ashokananda: “Whereas the rest of us were going up in our successive incarnations, Swamiji had come down to meet us on our level.”
She also said that she felt that Swamiji had showed his greater power in the San Francisco Bay Area than Southern California. “He thought that he got a better response here than in Los Angeles. And he was much more jolly in San Francisco. He could see the end of his work after he had come here.”
Mrs. Hansborough has mentioned in her reminiscences that after she left, Swamiji took another brief vacation with one Dr. Hiller who took him to his cabin in the Mount Shashta region, a beautiful mountainous area in Northern California. But later research on this has indicated that this is not likely as the Swami was unwell then and in care of Dr. Logan. After his return from the Camp Taylor the Swami had spent about two weeks at Dr. Logan’s home in San Francisco.
The doctor, it has been mentioned before, was quite an accomplished man. He was forty-four when he hosted the Swami. While he was at the University studying Chemistry, he suffered an accident at the Laboratory where blasting powder exploded on him and he was temporarily blinded that made him lose two years in his academic life. But this did not deter him from his pursuit of learning. After his recovery he studied medicine from Oakland, and later held degrees in pharmacy. He was also well-read in history, archaeology, and literature, and was an avid collector of items of archaeological and historical interest. The doctor had travelled widely across Europe and visited many great centres of learning across the continent.
Dr. Logan had become interested in Vedanta during the period of Swamiji’s stay in the Bay Area. When the Vedanta Society was formed he offered his office located at 770, Oak Street, for its meetings. However, there were tensions with the doctor’s family regarding his newly found passion. His wife and sister did not share any interest and never showed up during any of the meetings or talks even when they were held in his house. However, Swamiji, seeing the doctor’s fondness for him, had accepted the invitation to stay at his place.
In a way it turned out to be a stroke of good fortune that Swamiji stayed at the doctor’s place – not just because he was unwell and the doctor was near at hand to serve him. But also for a very important reason that was unforeseeable at that time. The doctor’s house remains the only building in San Francisco that still exists out of all the places where Swamiji had stayed. All others were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire. The house is on the junction of Oak and Steiner streets. However, the address of the house is now 510 Steiner Street as the entrance now is on that street.
Dr. Logan later wrote a short account of his association with Swamiji :
“Many are the moments of sadness since Swamijee has gone away. It seems that all the gods had left us, for his Divine presence spread peace and tranquillity wherever he went; the tumult of uncertainty departed from my soul at the sound of his magic voice. His very form and every mood were those of tender compassion and sympathy. None knew him but to love him; those of us who have had the royal good fortune to have met him in the flesh will some day realize that we have met the true Incarnation of the divine One.
“To me he is the Christ, than whom the greater one has never come; his great and liberal soul outshines all other things; his mighty spirit was as free and liberal as the mighty sun, or the air of heaven. No being lived so mean or low that he would not salute. His was not only an appeal to the poor and the lowly but to kings and princes and mighty rulers of the earth, to grand masters of learning, of finances, of arts and of the sciences, to leaders of thought and all its higher lines. Great teachers bowed reverently at his feet, the humble followed reverently to kiss the hem of his garments, no single human being was reverenced more during his life than was Vivekananda.”
While staying at the Logan residence, Swamiji also delivered four lectures on the Gita to serious seekers that had by now gathered around him. These talks were under the auspices of the newly formed Vedanta Society. His central theme in these lectures was that of self-reliance.
On the morning of 30th May, Swami Vivekananda bid farewell to the American West Coast and boarded the train from Oakland to Chicago, travelling through Ogden, Utah, and Nebraska. He would subsequently travel to New York for a short time and leave America forever leaving his footprints on the New World and seeds that would blossom in times to come. He was thirty-seven then and a couple of years later he left the world of the mortals.