"I scarcely find a family so highly pure and kind. Or why should God shower His blessings on them in such abundance? Oh, how wonderfully kind they are! If they chance to learn that a poor man is in a strait at such and such a place, there they will go, ladies and gentlemen, to give him food and clothing, and find him some job,
It should be added here for the sake of completeness that there was a married McKindley niece named Mary, who was living in Omaha, Nebraska, during the time Swamiji was in Chicago. Mary never met Swamiji, but her seven-year-old daughter-then Louise Baker and later Mrs. Herbert E. Hyde -often saw him while visiting her great-aunt, Mrs. Hale. "I remember Swami very well," Mrs. Hyde told me. "I remember his luminous eyes and his beautiful voice. He was so gorgeous, so handsome! I remember him sitting in a beautiful robe and snow-white turban. He pointed his finger at me and said, `That child is a fire-worshiper.' And, to be sure, I have always loved fire; I have loved fireplaces, and I have also loved the sun." Mrs. Hyde has told me of her memories not only of Swamiji but of the Hales and McKindleys, and thus more can be added to our knowledge of this family to whom Swamiji was so close.
Mrs. Hyde's mother and her two aunts, Harriet and Isabelle McKindley, were the daughters of Mr. Hale's sister Mrs. John Gilchrist McKindley, who had died when her children were young. Harriet and Isabelle had come to live with their Uncle George and Aunt Belle Hale after the death of their father, who, during his last years, had lost a good deal of money in the stock market, leaving his two unmarried daughters without means of support. The Hales' spacious, three-story house on Dearborn Avenue in Chicago was well able to accommodate the two girls with room to spare, and the arrangement was a happy one, For the Hale daughters and nieces were close friends. Of the four girls, all of whom were in their twenties when Swamiji was in America, Harriet McKindley was the oldest by several years; next in age was her sister Isabelle; then came Mary Hale and, after her, Harriet Hale. Sam Hale, the only boy in this household of spirited women, was the youngest of all and in 1893 had been but a short time out of Yale University. Like his sisters, Sam was tall, blond, and very handsome. Although he was not living at home when Swamiji was first in Chicago, he was no doubt in and out of the house, for Swamiji knew him and often mentioned him in his letters to the family. Later in the nineties, Sam took off in a spirit of adventure for the Klondike gold fields near Alaska, where thousands of Americans hoped to find their fortune and where a large percentage found only extreme hardship. (It was this trip to which Swamiji referred when he wrote in July of 1901 to Mary Hale, who was then in Italy: "Sam is with you this year ¬I am so glad! He must be enjoying the good things of Europe after his dreary experience in the North: ')
The kindergarten that Harriet and Isabelle conducted in Chicago to earn a living was in its day a somewhat startling innovation. While charity kindergartens for children of destitute parents were comparatively well known, private kindergartens for the children of the rich were a new departure in the field of education. It was to this latter type of school that the McKindley girls gave their time. "It wou1d be impossible to find women of more culture, refinement and intelligence than the little band of kindergartners," a contemporary newspaper writes of the McKindleys and their colleagues. "They are all well connected and known socially, which seems almost neces¬sary, since they must gain the whole confidence of the mothers and come in such close and frequent contact with them. They are earnest women who appreciate the importance of the work they are doing, and they are giving the very best of themselves to it. . . . Miss [Isabelle] McKindley has a wonderfully comprehensive grasp of the work, and her attitude with the children is all that love and wisdom could suggest. She has a fine mind and is a brilliant conversationalist.
Of all the four girls, Isabelle was perhaps the most sparkling. "It was said in years gone by " Mrs. Hyde related, "that no dinner party was complete without Isabelle McKindley. Her conversation was scintillating and she had a rare sense of humor. she was, moreover, very good looking. She was the dominant one of the McKindley sisters; Harriet, more dryly intellectual and far less beautiful, adored her and bowed to her in everything. A line drawing of Isabelle McKindley, which accompanied the newspaper article quoted above, shows her classical beauty and her resemblance to the Venus de Milo-a resemblance that was remarked upon by her family and that Swamiji verified for himself when he later visited Europe. "By the by," he wrote to Mary Hale from Darjeeling in 1897, "I saw the Venus of what do you call it-and you are right¬ Isabelle's face is much like that statue. Of course her hands are better, for the statue has only stumps-that is to say, to our uneducated taste. Anyhow, Isabelle is beautiful because she is like Venus and that Venus is beautiful because she is like Isabelle!!* On the whole I think she is much more beautiful than the statue, stumps notwithstanding.
Mary Hale, in her own blond and statuesque way, was as beautiful as Isabelle and, perhaps, as talented. Although neither she nor her younger sister Harriet had to earn a living, for Mr. Hale had retired in 1882 from a senior partnership in a highly successful iron-manufactory firm and was well off, they were not idle; both were actively engaged in charitable work and busy also, of course, in the whirl of Chicago's social life. Both girls were gifted pianists and often played duets together ¬no doubt at times for Swamiji himself.
Swamiji was totally at home in this family and, elder brother, sage, and child combined, he was much loved. There was, certainly, no dull moment in his company, and very likely no predictable one. Mary Hale once told a small but revealing story of life at Dearborn Avenue with Swamiji to Swami Abhedananda, who has recounted it in his autobiography. It seems that one day Swamiji decided to learn to roller-skate. Forthwith, he fastened skates to his shoes and for two or three days earnestly practiced in the expensively carpeted and furnished parlors and halls of the Hale house, wheeling about the rooms to his heart's content, no one objecting. Mercifully, after mastering the art, this beloved, gerrua-clad son promptly lost interest in his new skill.
With his keen perception and concern for their future, the girls' beloved "brother" once wrote a character sketch of them: "Harriett [Hale] will have a most blessed and happy life," he predicted, "because she is not so imaginative and sentimental as to make a fool of herself She has enough of sentiment as to make life sweet, and enough common sense and gentleness as to soften the hard points in life which must come to everyone. So has Harriett McKindley in a still higher degree. She is just the girl to make the best of wives. . . . You, Mary, are like a mettlesome Arab-grand, splendid. You will make a splendid queen, physically, mentally. You will shine alongside of a dashing, bold, adventurous heroic husband; but, my dear sister, you will make one of the worst wives. You will take the life out of our easy-going, practical, plodding husbands of the everyday world. . . . As to sister Isabelle she has the same temperament as you; only this kindergarten has taught her a good lesson of patience and forbearance. Perhaps she will make a good wife.**
Although Swamiji loved all four "sisters" it was not the two Harriets whom he Found the most companionable. Rather it was the two "mettlesome Arabs," Isabelle McKindley and her cousin, Mary, who was not only queenly and spirited but also, according to her niece, "a very gentle and sweet person, warm¬hearted and serene." Swamiji's deep and abiding affection for Mary Hale is well known to readers of his published letters, but not so his affection for Isabelle McKindley, for his letters to the latter have been unknown. However, in the bundle of papers that Swami Vishwananda discovered and made available to us were many letters from Swamiji to Isabelle, most of which will be produced in the course of this narrative. Suffice it to say here that they show how fond he was of her, confiding to her his various thoughts, allowing her to attend to many small personal matters for him and feeling sure that in whatever mood he wrote-playful or serious-his letters would be read in a matching spirit. "Dear Sister," he wrote from Detroit in one of the many letters found in the bundle of papers and very likely meant for Isabelle, "Got your package yesterday. Sorry that you send those stockings-I could have got some myself here. Glad that it shows your love. After all the satchel has become more than a thoroughly stuffed sausage. I do not know how to carry it along.
Isabelle was perhaps as dear to Swamiji as was Mary Hale. But however that may be, all four Hale "sisters" must have been extraordinary young women, born, as he writes, "like Howers," "good and pure," their faces "holy, happy," for otherwise he could not have associated with them as intimately as he did throughout the years. "You are all so kind, the whole Family, to me," he wrote to Mary Hale from India in 1898, "I must have belonged to you in the past as we Hindus say. And again in 1899, "It is curious, your family, Mother Church [Mrs. Hale] and her clergy, both monastic and secular, have made more impression on me than any family I know of. Lord bless you ever and ever.
But to return to the midwestern lecture tour, such "holy happy faces" as those of the Hales and McKindleys were few and far between, and on the whole we cannot but look upon the tour as an ordeal in which, as Sister Nivedita writes, using Swamiji's own words, "he was bowled along from place to place, being broken the while!'
* It is generally assumed that it was the armless Venus de Milo that Isabelle McKindley resembled. However, in his letter of April 28, 1897, Swamiji’s reference seems to have been to a statue in Florence, which city he had visited in December of 1896. The Venus de Milo is and was in the Louvre in Paris. During his first visit to the West, Swamiji visited the museums of Paris only in August of 1895. The Venus de Medici is in Florence, but both her arms are intact._x000d_
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** Swamiji was not here foretelling the future; he was reading character only. Neither Harriet nor Isabelle McKindley married. Isbelle died young; Harriet lived to be 95, dying in 1955 in San Diego, where for many years she had lived at the El Cortez Hotel. Harriet Hale’s marriage to Clarence Woolley was not happy and ended in divorce. As for Mary Hale, in the early 1900s (after 1902) she married Signor Giuseppe Matteini, a wealthy Italian, very much her senior. They lived in a large and beautiful estate outside Florence, and as far as is known, the marriage was not unhappy. Mr. Matteini died in 1922 and Mary went to live with her mother in a hotel in Florence.