As I look over the scrapbook, my scrapbook (as he and I always called it), I feel the reserve about it that he himself did. My share in the Doctor's life, however, belongs to these last years of his distinguished career, and I am a contributor by special privilege.
I met him first at East Hampton, Long Island, in the summer of 1896, when I was visiting friends. The other day, while in reminiscent struggle with my scrapbook, I was visited by an old friend of Dr. Talmage, who recalled the following incident:
"It was Dr. Talmage's custom," he said, "to take long drives out into the country round about Washington. Sometimes he sent for me to drive with him. One afternoon I received a specially urgent call to be sure and drive with him that day, because he had something of great importance to discuss with me. On our way back, towards evening, I asked him what it was. He said, 'I work hard, very hard. Sometimes I come back to my home tired, very tired—lonely. I open my door and the house is dark, silent. The young folks are out somewhere and there is no one to talk to.' Then he became silent himself. I said to him: 'Have you any one in mind whom you would like to talk to?' 'I have,' he said positively. 'If so,' I said, 'go to her at once and tell her so.' 'I will,' he replied briskly—and the next night he went to Pittsburg."
We were married in January, 1898.
The first reception given in our home on Massachusetts Avenue was in the nature of a greeting between the Doctor's friends and myself. His own interest in the social side of things in Washington was an agreeable interruption rather than a part of his own activities. His friends were men and women from every highway and byway of the world. My father, a man of unusual intellectual breadth and heart, had been my companion of many years, so that I was, to some degree, accustomed to mature conceptions of people and affairs. But the busy whirl in the life of a celebrity was entirely new.
It was soon quite evident that Dr. Talmage relied upon me for the discretionary duties of a man besieged by all sorts of demands. From the first I feared that Dr. Talmage was over-taxing his strength, undiminished though it was at a time when most men begin to relinquish their burdens. Therefore, I entered eagerly into my new duties of relieving the strain he himself did not realise.
His was a full and ample life devoted to the gospel of cheerfulness; and to me, I think, was given the best part of it—the autumn. When I knew him he had already impressed the wide world of his hearers with his striking originality of thought and style. He had already established a form of preaching that was known by his name—Talmagic. Its character was the man himself, broad, brilliant, picturesque, keen with divine and human facts, told simply, always with an uplift of spiritual beauty.
In March, 1898, Dr. Talmage was called West for lecture engagements, and I went with him. What strange and delightful events that spring tour brought into my life! The Doctor lectured every night in what was to me some new and undiscovered country. We were always going to an hotel, to a train, to an opera house, to another hotel, another train, another opera house. Our experiences were not less exciting than the trials of one-night stands. I had never travelled before without a civilised quota of trunks; but the Doctor would have been overwhelmed with them in the rush to keep his engagements. So we had to be content with our bags. When we were not studying time tables the Doctor was striding across the land, his Bible under his arm, myself in gasping haste at his side. What primitive hotels we encountered; what antiquated trains we had to take! Frequently a milk train was the only means of reaching our destination, and, alas! a milk train always leaves at the trying hour of 4 a.m. Once we had to ride on a special engine; and frequently the caboose of a freight train served our desperate purpose. I began to understand something of the loneliness of the Doctor's life in experiences like these.
I insisted upon sitting in the front row at every one of Dr. Talmage's lectures, which I soon knew by heart. He used to laugh when I would repeat certain parts of them to him.
Then he would beg me to stay away that I might not be bored by listening to the same thing over again. I would not have missed one of his lectures for the world. These were the great moments of his life; the combined resources of his character came to the surface whenever he went into the pulpit or on to the platform. These were the moments that inspired his life, that gave it an ever-increasing vigour of human and divine perception. The enthusiasm of his reception by the crowds in these theatres keyed me up so that each new audience was a new pleasure. There were no preliminaries to his lectures. Frequently he had time only to drop his hat and step on to the stage as he had come from the train. After every lecture it was his custom to shake hands with hundreds of people who came up to the platform. This was very exhausting, but these were to him the moments of fruition—the spiritual harvest of the Christian seeds he had scattered over the earth. They were wonderful scenes, dramatic in their earnestness, remarkable in the evidence they brought out of his universal influence upon the hearts of men and women. Everywhere the same testimony prevailed: