The essay finished, Dr. Randolph wrote on the fly-leaf of the book my name and the date, and gave it to me. It was “Locusts and Wild Honey”—the first book of John Burroughs’s that I ever owned, or knew. Were there nothing else to be grateful to the Doctor for, the bestowal of that book, and of all that it later brought into my life, would make me forever deeply his debtor.
For two or more years it was the only book of this author that I owned; but as soon as I could indulge myself in book-buying, his were the first that I secured. I remember so well the three-quarters guilty feeling I had in ordering them; it was such unmitigated self-indulgence; they were so distinctly a purely personal pleasure, and I had so long schooled myself to regard self-indulgence as reprehensible. Here was a sober little Stoic taking almost her first dip into epicureanism; she had many qualms of conscience, but many thrills of pride as well, each time that another olive-green volume was added to the row. The “Strawberries” had done it! Doubtless God might have created a more seductive and more delicious berry, but doubtless God never did!
It was many years after I had grown to know and love the author through his books before I met him face to face. Through his writings I had learned to love all outdoors; to feel a kinship with Nature which had deeply enriched my life; and at length there came a day when I journeyed to his home, sat by his hearth, and felt a deepening of the sense of comradeship that I had felt in reading his books. He became my friend. Many years later I even gathered strawberries with him and Dr. Randolph from the upland meadows of which he had written in that essay which was the means of bringing this rare friendship into my life.
Dr. Randolph had a nickname for me which had grown out of our reading James’s “Psychology” together. There had been a good deal said in the early chapters about “psychosis,” and one day in my attempts to be funny I had said something about “psychosis” being undignified—that James should have said “psychosister”; hence he had dubbed me his “psychosister.”
There had been a time, when my intimacy with the Randolphs began, that I had felt uneasy at the growing friendship. There was charm in the companionship with him, and sympathy and congeniality between us; and when his hand rested on my shoulder in a kindly way I was moved by it, also by the gentleness and consideration he invariably showed me; but I soon began torturing myself with doubts and fears. The fact was, I was no longer innocent: one man, who had no right to, had grown to care for me more than he should, and I began to wonder if this friendship, too, might not turn out in that way. I shrank from such an ending to so beautiful a friendship, then blushed with shame at my unfounded fear. I was experiencing for the first time what, I think, is one of the saddest things about transgressions—the feeling of suspicion toward others that grows in us as soon as we have done wrong ourselves, or have even nibbled at the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But I soon put aside this fear as unworthy of my friend, and enjoyed the intimacy of which I have written—a friendship with which I am still blessed, and which has been one of the most enlarging and ennobling of my life.
Interests outside of medicine claimed some of my time, of which activities in the Working Women’s League, emergency lectures to a Girls’ Friendly Society, and to nurses in one of the city hospitals, membership in a German class, in a Browning club, even in a Plato club, were among the chief. The Browning club, especially, proved intensely interesting—three or four married couples, three spinsters (including myself) and one bashful bachelor. None of us, except Dr. Randolph, knew anything about Browning when we began; the club was not started in the reverential spirit that I fancy most Browning clubs are. At first we ridiculed ourselves and Browning not a little; but if we came to scoff, we remained to pray—or, if we first endured our poet, then pitied ourselves, we ended by embracing Browning. But the last stage was slow in coming; we struggled and puzzled and got entangled; we were helped out by Dr. Randolph, and amused by Mrs. Randolph, who would not stand—only up to a certain point—what she could not understand. She would blurt out, “Oh, mercy! let’s stop this moonshine, and read something we can understand.” And we soon learned that hers was the sensible view—there was so much that was lucid in Browning that we came in time to pity the too-easily discouraged readers who stopped short at the stumbling-blocks.
The Plato Club, conducted by the Universalist minister, was an incongruous affair—the clergyman, a young lawyer, a factory girl who wrote poetry, a Vassar graduate, teachers in the seminary, two seamstresses, a choice assortment of “old maids,” and the “girl doctor.” They met at my office. I got very little from Plato as we read it, but the incongruous assembly was a perpetual delight. In a few months it petered out, but the young lawyer and I formed a club of two and read Emerson together Sunday evenings (until he became engaged), and thus cemented a friendship which has grown and strengthened with the years.
Another of the Browning Club friendships has also proved of lasting delight. Marion Rockwood, a bachelor-maid who had a studio two floors above me, was a splendid, energetic creature with a glorious soprano voice. Both too occupied to see much of each other, we called a greeting in the morning and at night as we went through the halls. I loved to hear her trilling away up there in her sky-top, as she went about busy with household duties, as I with mine. In the years that followed, reverses and sorrows have come to her, but she has sung on when her heart was heavy; sung to supply losses that would have crushed one less stout of heart. Now a great happiness has come into her life; but whatever of joy or sorrow comes, she will always be the dauntless, inimitable creature I knew in the old Browning Club days.
The first taste of real wild life, the first taste of any woods life, since the camp-meeting days, came to me one summer while in U——, when, joining a jolly crowd of young people, with three elders, we camped on Lake Piseco in the Adirondacks for two happy weeks.