it was necessary to tell my father of my intentions. i made numerous beginnings. i tore up several letters and quarrelled bitterly with the hotel pens. at first i tried to describe the change that had happened to my mind, to give him some impression of the new light, the release that had come to me. but how difficult this present world is with its tainted and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings! here was i writing for the first time in my life of something essentially religious and writing it to him whose profession was religion, and i could find no words to convey my meaning to him that did not seem to me fraught with the possibilities of misinterpretation. one evening i made a desperate resolve to let myself go, and scrawled my heart out to him as it seemed that night, a strange, long letter. it was one of the profoundest regrets that came to me when i saw him dead last winter that i did not risk his misunderstanding and post that letter. but when i re-read it in the next morning's daylight it seemed to me so rhetorical, so full of—what shall i call it?—spiritual bombast, it so caricatured and reflected upon the deep feelings sustaining me, that i could not post it for shamefacedness, and i tore it up into little pieces and sent instead the briefest of notes.
"i am doing no good here in switzerland," i wrote. "would you mind if i went east? i want to see something of the world outside europe. i have a fancy i may find something to do beyond there. of course, it will cost rather more than my present allowance. i will do my best to economize. don't bother if it bothers you—i've been bother enough to you...."
he replied still more compactly. "by all means. i will send you some circular notes, poste restante, rome. that will be on your way. good wishes to you, stephen. i'm glad you want to go east instead of just staying in switzerland."
i sit here now and wonder, little son, what he thought, what he supposed, what he understood.
i loved my father, and i began to perceive he loved me wonderfully. i can imagine no man i would have sooner had for a priest than him; all priestcraft lays hands if it can, and with an excellent wisdom, upon the titles and dignity of fatherhood; and yet here am i left to guessing—i do not know whether my father ever worshipped, whether he ever prayed with his heart bared to god. there are times when the inexpressiveness of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand munching slowly in a field. why couldn't we and why didn't we talk together?... we fear bathos too much, are shyly decent to the pitch of mania. we have neither the courage of our bodies nor of our souls....
i went almost immediately to rome. i stayed in rome some days, getting together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city of the dead in whose embrace the modern city lies. i was now becoming interested in things outside my grooves, though my grooves were still there, deep and receptive, and i went about the place at last almost eagerly, tracing the outlines of that great departed city on whose colossal bones the churches and palaces of the middle ages cluster like weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden. i found myself one day in the forum, thinking of that imperialism that had built the basilica of julius cæsar, and comparing its cramped vestiges with that vaster second administrative effort which has left the world the monstrous arches of constantine. i sat down over against these last among the ruins of the vestals' house, and mused on that later reconstruction when the empire, with its science aborted and its literature and philosophy shrivelled to nothing, its social fabric ruined by the extravagances of financial adventure and its honor and patriotism altogether dead, united itself, in a desperate effort to continue, with all that was most bickeringly intolerant and destructive in christianity—only to achieve one common vast decay. all europe to this day is little more than the sequel to that failure. it is the roman empire in disintegration. the very churches whose domes rise to the northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds and nothing clearer....
i discovered i was putting all this into the form of a letter to mary. i was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. and i remember that i wandered upon the palatine hill musing over the idea of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort of diary of impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, i might be able to put into her hands.
one does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little hope of its delivery; yet for many years i kept up an impalpable correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer came—until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering interests of a new rôle in life diverted it to other ends.
