Through Mrs Hansborough’s memoirs we come to know of a range of moods that Swamiji had.
Swamiji could be a strict disciplinarian and did not like work done in a careless manner. Mrs Hansborough recounted about his rebukes. “’Mother brings me fools to work with!’ he would say. Or, ‘ I have to associate with fools!’ This was a favourite word in his vocabulary of scolding. Somehow I never felt hurt. I would get angry sometimes and walk out of the room but usually I was able to hear him through.
“Once in the Turk Street Flat I was dusting after breakfast in the dining room. As I worked Swamiji was talking about something. He suddenly exclaimed, ‘You are a silly brainless fool. That’s what you are.’ He continued to scold me heatedly until Mrs. Aspinall appeared and he stopped. I said to him, “Never mind Mrs. Aspinall, Swami, if you are not through, just keep right on.
“And though he himself said, ‘I never apologise”, he would nevertheless come after the scolding was over to find me, and say in a voice so gentle and with a manner so cool that butter and honey would not melt in his mouth, “What are you doing?” It was clear that he was seeking to make amends for the scolding. He used to say, ‘The people I love most, I scold most’, and I remember thinking he was making a poor kind of apology!
Once when the Swami and Mrs Hansborough were ascending the steps of a hall in San Francisco before one of the lectures Swamiji asked her about something she had told him she was going to do but had neglected to take care of it. She told him that she had intended to do it, but had not. “Your intentions are good,” the Swami remarked, “but how like devils you sometimes act!” But Alice recalled that the Swami would also give credit when he chose to do that. She particularly remembered the evening they left the Turk Street for the ‘Home of Truth’ on the east side of the Bay, Swamiji was helping her on with her overcoat, and remarked, “Well, you have worked like a demon.”
Swamiji once asked Alice why could she not join their Order. Her answer was that she had her own little world which she had to go back and take care of. In regard to Mrs Hansborough’s attachment to her little daughter, Swamiji said to her : “You think you love your child. That is not love at all. It is the same as a hen has for her chicken. She will scratch all day to get food for her chicks, but let a strange chik come in and what will she do?”
In intimate company there were many moments he made remarks, often cryptic statements, which gave clues as to what went on in his mind.
While discussing family life in India one day with Alice at the Turk Street flat the Swami said, “I have in mind to send my mother a thousand dollars. In your country a man is allowed to have a mother; in my country I am not allowed.” He was referring to the strict rules of monastic life where a Sannyasin severed all bonds of his pre-monastic life and resigned all familial and social obligations. “Do you think that is bad?” he asked her. The Swami’s mother was in considerable distress at that time far away in Calcutta. It was more of ‘thinking aloud’ before a listener who was close to him, something which he often did. To this Alice said that she did not find anything bad in that. Swamiji later had the money sent to his mother.
Sometimes he spoke of his Master. He always spoke of him as Atmaram. Whenever there were difficulties he would say, “Well if things do not go well we will wake up Atmaram.” Or sometimes he would speak intimately of himself and his mission. “The Mother dropped me in a strange world, among a strange people who do not understand me and whom I do not understand. But the longer I stay here I come to feel that some of the people in the West who I have met belong to me, they also are to serve in the work assigned to me.” He often said “I am here to serve the Mother and to give the message which I came into the world to give.”
Alice also remembered that “he talked a great deal of the Divine Mother. He said that she was the receptacle of every germ of religion, and that she was here as a form. She had her desires, he said, but they were related to people. She would reach for people, though they did not know it, and gradually she would draw them to her.” Swamiji sometimes went to a grave mood and made some remarks not fully comprehensible to Alice or others. He used to say that “there is none with whom I can speak of the Beloved, not one. You do not know, you cannot imagine the loneliness of it.” Sometimes he looked at the life in the world with great disgust, saying that “this world is a huge sore and we are wounded with that deceitful soreness, that untrueness of the world’s disease. We have that in ourselves and will not admit that we have it. We live to gloss it over and throw flowers over the wound to hide it over our eyes.”
Alice recalled an incident when a lady student once said to the Swami regretfully, “Oh, if I had only lived earlier I could have seen Sri Ramakrishna.” Swamiji responded, “You say that, and you have seen me?” Another time at the flat Mrs. Aspinall told him that he should not charge anything to his lectures. “God will provide,” she said. ‘Madam’, Swamiji answered, “God has made a mess of everything. I am trying to straighten it out.”
Mrs. Hansborough recounted a remarkable incident when one evening she and some others were walking with Swamiji after his lecture at the Washington Hall. “Several of us were walking home with him. I was in front with someone, and he behind some others. Apropos of something he had been discussing, he said, ‘you have heard the Christ said, ‘My words are spirit and they are life.’’ He pointed his finger at me and declared, ‘So are my words spirit and life; they will burn their way into your brain and you will never get away from them.’”
She also mentioned about another occasion when they were at the Turk Street flat. She had questioned about the way Swamiji was handling the work. He did not answer, but simply said, “Within ten years of my death, I will be worshipped as a god!”
▶Next Chapter: Recasting Lives – Ida Ansell