The first real sorrow of my life came to me that year: One forenoon, as we all piled out from the lecture room and rushed to the mail-rack for our home letters, a tall blond youth who was usually on hand to lift down my microscope and sharpen my dissecting knives handed me the home letter which was always too high on the rack for me to reach—the letter which never failed to come on Tuesday noon. Running with it to the cloak room, eager for the home news, I read:
Grandpa is very ill. The Doctor says he cannot get well. “Tell Eugenie I shall never see her again,” he said last night. Perhaps you can write him a letter we can read to him. You better not try to come home. It is too far, would cost so much, and would break into your studies so.
How the sunshine vanished as my thoughts flew to that little bedroom where he lay—my dear, touchy, indulgent grandfather! I did not go to the lecture that afternoon, but stayed in the library and wrote him a farewell letter. I should like to see that letter now. I wonder what I wrote; I know nothing more genuine and tender ever went from one soul to another. Besides a loving farewell, which his approaching death made possible for me to express, reticent as I was by nature and training, it contained, I know, a passionate assurance that it would be well with him where he was going. I knew that Mother was praying and thinking, “Oh, if he were only prepared to go!” Something of this might be in his own heart, too. I thought of his ungodly life, of his profanity; but against these I weighed his uprightness and his big loving heart, and I knew that these would count—count with what I was no wise sure; but I knew that it was right thus to try to ease the terrors of his last hours, if such were troubling him. It was the passionate protest of my struggling mind, becoming tinctured with Unitarianism and Universalism, against the suffering that I knew was Mother’s (if, indeed, it was not Grandpa’s also), with her Methodist way of looking at things. Somehow, I could see my grandfather, sturdy to the last, scorning weakly to repent, even to escape the terrors of the Unknown into which he must soon go.
He never saw that letter. Whether he became unconscious before it reached there; or whether Mother in her zeal felt that it might prevent his last chance of repentance; or whether, because of its passionate, perhaps hysterical, character, it was deemed by my parents better withheld, I never knew. I was unwilling to inquire when, months later, I reached home. Mother said it seemed best only to tell him of my good-bye. Perhaps it was; but I wonder if he didn’t know without seeing it—I felt very near him that hour in the library framing my farewell, and learning for the first time what it means when Death comes to our own.
After some months, Belle and I took a larger room at the Y. W. C. A., and a girl in the class ahead of us joined us—a quiet, amiable girl who acted as a kind of buffer between us, after which we got on much more comfortably.
One evening she took me with her to a confinement case on which she and a senior student were engaged. It was my first experience in dispensary quarters, and the sordid surroundings, the mean tenements, the poverty and misery were a revelation to me. Everything was untidy and unclean. I could not bear even to sit on the chairs. The night was long; the groans of the woman were painful to hear. Being only a junior, with no knowledge of obstetrics, I had little intelligent interest in the case. I gathered from the low conferences of the students, after their frequent examinations, that all was not progressing satisfactorily; and some time after midnight they told me they would need to call in the professor in obstetrics, since it promised to be a case for instrumental interference. Undergraduates were not allowed to assume charge of such cases unaided.
The senior student and I went for the professor. I had never been on the street at so late an hour, and felt a pleasurable excitement in the adventure. I dreaded most those mean streets through which we had to go before reaching the more respectable quarters. We had gone only a short way when our progress was arrested by a night-prowler, though no more formidable one than a goat. On nearing Boylston Street we met a few men and saw an occasional policeman. Everyone we passed showed more or less curiosity, and one policeman halted near us, but said nothing, Miss Farnsworth’s obstetric bag perhaps indicating to him and others that we were out on some legitimate errand.
Presently my heart almost stopped: A man stepping alongside Miss Farnsworth had caught step and was walking by her side without a word. Glancing up at her in apprehension, I saw her face was pale and stern, but she looked straight ahead, apparently oblivious of his presence. Soon I felt her crowding me, and saw he was pushing close to her side; but she neither slackened her pace nor betrayed awareness of him. My heart was going like a trip-hammer, but somehow I felt secure, she seemed so unmoved. Soon the man ceased crowding, lifted his hat, and in a deferential tone said, “I beg your pardon, ladies,” and walked on. We walked on, too, not speaking till he had disappeared from sight; then the imperturbable young woman, with trembling voice, told me she had heard that that was the best way to treat such an encounter, but that it was the first time she had had to test the advice.
Professor S—— went back with us and delivered the child.