botherations without that, I have ceased to notice it at all.
I wish you all joy in your lovely Suisse chalet — splendid health, good appetite, and a
light study of Swiss or other antiquities just to liven things up a bit. I am so glad that
you are breathing the free air of the mountains, but sorry that Sam is not in the best of
health. Well, there is no anxiety about it; he has naturally such a fine physique.
'Woman's moods and man's luck — the gods themselves do not know, not to speak of
men.' My instincts may be very feminine — but what I am exercised with just this
moment is that you get a little bit of manliness about you. Oh! Mary, your brain,
health, beauty, everything, is going to waste just for the lack of that one essential —
assertion of individuality. Your haughtiness, spirit, etc. are all nonsense — only
mockery. You are at best a boarding-school girl — no backbone! no backbone!
Alas! this lifelong leading-string business! This is very harsh, very brutal — but I can't
help it. I love you, Mary — sincerely, genuinely. I can't cheat you with namby-pamby
sugar candies. Nor do they ever come to me.
Then again, I am a dying man; I have no time to fool in. Wake up, girl! I expect now
from you letters of the right slashing order. Give it right straight — I need a good deal
of rousing....
I am in a sense a retired man. I don't keep much note of what is going on about the
Movement. Then the Movement is getting bigger and it is impossible for one man to
know all about it minutely. I now do nothing except try to eat and sleep and nurse my
body the rest of the time.
Good-bye, dear Mary. Hope we shall meet again somewhere in this life — but meeting
or no meeting, I remain ever your loving brother, Vivekananda.
To his beloved disciple Nivedita he wrote on February 12, 1902: 'May all powers come
unto you! May Mother Herself be your hands and mind! It is immense power —
irresistible — that I pray for you, and, if possible, along with it infinite peace.... 'If
there was any truth in Sri Ramakrishna, may He take you into His leading, even as He
did me, nay, a thousand times more!'
And again, to Miss MacLeod: 'I can't, even in imagination, pay the immense debt of
gratitude I owe you. Wherever you are you never forget my welfare; and there, you are
the only one that bears all my burdens, all my brutal outbursts....' The sun, enveloped
in a golden radiance, was fast descending to the horizon. The last two months of the
Swami's life on earth had been full of events foreshadowing the approaching end. Yet
few had thought the end so near.
Soon after his return from Varanasi the Swami greatly desired to see his sannyasin
disciples and he wrote to them to come to the Belur Math, even if only for a short time.
'Many of his disciples from distant parts of the world,' writes Sister Nivedita, 'gathered