In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five dollars per week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall.
By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their inherited deeply musical brain-cells!
One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston interests, and by careful reading of the Transcript was enabled to vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border. Washington a vulgar political camp—only Philadelphia was admitted to have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources were pitiably slender and failing!
But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my meat was being cut down and my coat hung ever more loosely over my ribs. Pale and languid I longed for spring, for sunshine, with all the passion of a prisoner, and when at last the grass began to show green in the sheltered places on the Common and the sparrows began to utter their love notes, I went often of an afternoon to a bench in lee of a clump of trees and there sprawled out like a debilitated fox, basking in the tepid rays of a diminished sun.
For all his expressed admiration of my literary and scientific acumen, Brown did not see fit to invite me to dinner, probably because of my rusty suit and frayed cuffs. I did not blame him. I was in truth a shabby figure, and the dark-brown beard which had come upon me added to the unhealthy pallor of my skin, so that Mrs. Brown, a rather smart and socially ambitious lady, must have regarded me as something of an anarchist, a person to avoid. She always smiled as we met, but her smile was defensive.
However, a blessed break in the monotony of my fare came during April when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted his invitation with naïve precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not welcome a visitor with fringed cuffs and celluloid collars.
This was my first sea voyage and I greatly enjoyed the trip—after I got there!
Mrs. Bashford received me kindly, but (I imagined) with a trace of official hospitality in her greeting. It was plain that she (like Mrs. Brown) considered me a "Charity Patient." Well, no matter, Bashford and I got on smoothly.
Their house was large and its grandeur was almost oppressive to me, but I spent nearly a week in it. As I was leaving, Bashford gave me a card to Dr. Cross, a former parishioner in Jamaica Plain, saying, "Call upon the Doctor as soon as you return. He'll be glad to hear of Dakota."
My little den in Boylston Place was almost intolerable to me now. Spring sunshine, real sunshine flooded the land and my heart was full of longing for the country. Therefore—though I dreaded meeting another stranger,—I decided to risk a dime and make the trip to Jamaica Plains, to call upon Dr. Cross.