The Swami visited Detroit again for a week and on July 20 sailed for Paris.
Before continuing the thread of Swami Vivekananda's life, it will be interesting for the
reader to get a glimpse of his state of mind. During the past two years, the Swami
wrote to his friends, he had gone through great mental anguish. His message, to be
sure, had begun to reach an ever-increasing number of people both in India and in
America, and naturally he had been made happy by this fact; yet he had suffered
intensely on account of 'poverty, treachery, and my own foolishness,' as he wrote to
Mary Hale on February 20, 1900. Though his outward appearance was that of a stern
non-dualist, he possessed a tender heart that was often bruised by the blows of the
world. To Margaret Noble he wrote on December 6, 1899: 'Some people are made that
way — to love being miserable. If I did not break my heart over the people I was born
amongst, I would do it for somebody else. I am sure of that. This is the way of some —
I am coming to see it. We are all after happiness, true, but some are only happy in
being unhappy — queer, is it not?'
How sensitive he was to the sufferings of men! 'I went years ago to the Himalayas,' he
wrote to an American friend on December 12, 1899, 'never to come back — and my
sister committed suicide, the news reached me there, and that weak heart flung me off
from the prospect of peace! It is the weak heart that has driven me out of India to seek
some help for those I love, and here I am! Peace have I sought, but the heart, that seat
of bhakti, would not allow me to find it. Struggle and torture, torture and struggle!
Well, so be it then, since it is my fate; and the quicker it is over, the better.'
His health had been indifferent even before he had left for the West. 'This sort of
nervous body,' he wrote on November 15, 1899, 'is just an instrument to play great
music at times, and at times to moan in darkness.' While in America, he was under the
treatment of an osteopath and a 'magnetic healer,' but received no lasting benefit. At
Los Angeles he got the news of the serious illness of his brother disciple Niranjan. Mr.
Sturdy, his beloved English disciple, had given up the Swami because he felt that the
teacher was not living in the West the life of an ascetic. Miss Henrietta Müller, who
had helped him financially to buy the Belur Math, left him on account of his illness;
she could not associate sickness with holiness. One of the objects of the Swami's visit
to California was to raise money to promote his various activities in India: people came
to his meetings in large numbers, but of money he received very little. He suffered a
bereavement in the passing away of his devoted friend Mr. George Hale of Chicago.
Reports about the work in New York caused him much anxiety. Swami Abhedananda
was not getting on well with some of Vivekananda's disciples, and Mr. Leggett severed
his relationship with the Society. All these things, like so many claws, pierced
Vivekananda's heart. Further, perhaps he now felt that his mission on earth was over.
He began to lose interest in work. The arrow, however, was still flying, carried, by its
original impetus; but it was approaching the end, when it would fall to the ground.
The Swami longed to return to India. On January 17, 1900, he wrote to Mrs. Ole Bull
that he wanted to build a hut on the bank of the Ganga and spend the rest of his life
there with his mother: 'She has suffered much through me. I must try to smooth her last