On May 22nd he started for New York on a year's travels. "You won't see me again till I'm a bold, bad, bearded broncho-buster in a red shirt and riding-breeches," he wrote to Miss Sybil Pye. His plans were vague, and at that time he expected to be back by the end of 1913. He had written to his mother in February, to explain: "I think, now my physical health is quite all right, I shall go off to America or somewhere. I feel just as I did in the autumn, that it's no good going on in England. . . . . . . It is only wasting time to go on without doing proper work. I think of going off to California or somewhere, and doing some kind of work, or tramping. I shall take what money I have, and if they don't give me a fellowship, I can capitalise £200 or so, and that'll last me for as long as I want to be abroad. I have no fear about being able to make a living now, for there are so many papers that'll print anything by me whenever I like."
"We may meet again in this world," he wrote to the Raverats, "I brown and bearded, you mere red round farmers. When that'll be, I know not. Perhaps in six months. Perhaps in six years. Or we may only find each other in a whiter world, nighty-clad, harped, winged, celibate.
Here is his farewell to England, in a letter to a friend from the s.s. Cedric: "I arrived solitary on the boat. After it started I went to the office, more to show that I existed than in the dimmest hope of getting anything—and there was stuck up a list called 'Unclaimed Mail.' (I thought it sounded as if a lot of the Knights who had promised to equip themselves for the Quest of the Holy Grail had missed the train, or married a wife, or overslept, or something). And at the top of the list 'Mr Rupert Brooke,' . . . . . .
"—— day. Time is no more. I have been a million years on this boat. I don't know if it's this month or last or next. Sometime, remotely, in a past existence, I was on land. But this is another existence. . . . I have my joys. Today I ate clam-chowder. That's romance, isn't it? I ordered it quite recklessly. I didn't know what it was. I only knew that anything called clam-chowder must be strange beyond words.
(But you don't know Swinburne.) 'Clam-chowder,' my God! what am I coming to ? . . .
"I haven't told you much about my voyage, have I? There's not much to tell. I felt, before I got your letter, a trifle lonely at Liverpool. Everybody else seemed to have people to see them off. So I went back on shore and found a dirty little boy, who was unoccupied, and said his name was William. 'Will you wave to me if I give you sixpence, William?' I said. 'Why yes,' said William. So I gave him sixpence, and went back on board. And when the time came he leaned over his railing on the landing-stage, and waved. And now and then he shouted indistinct messages in a shrill voice. And as we slid away, the last object I looked at was a small dot waving a white handkerchief, or nearly white, faithfully. So I got my sixpenn'orth and my farewell—Dear William!"
For his travels in America and Canada, his letters to the Westminster Gazette, since republished, must be allowed in the main to speak; but these may be supplemented by scraps of his letters to his Mother and his friends. "America hasn't changed me much yet," he wrote from New York. "I've got the adorablest little touch of an American accent, and I'm a bit thinner." He wasn't very happy at first. "When I'm alone," he wrote to me on June 29th from the Montreal Express, "I sink into a kind of mental stupor which may last for months. I shan't be really right till I get back to you all." And again from Ottawa, ten days later, "I don't get very miserable, or go to pieces (save for occasional bursts of home-sickness just before meals); but my whole level of life descends to an incredible muddy flatness. I do no reading, no thinking, no writing. And very often I don't see many things. The real hell of it is that I get so numb that my brain and senses don't record fine or clear impressions. So the time is nearly all waste. I'm very much ashamed of it all. For I've always beforehand a picture of myself dancing through foreign cities, drinking in novelty, hurling off letters to the W.G., breaking into song and sonnet, dashing off plays and novels. . . . Lord, Lord! . . . . . .
"American 'hospitality' means that with the nice ones you can be at once on happy and intimate terms. Oh dear, the tears quite literally well up into my eyes when I think of a group of young Harvard people I tumbled into—at Harvard. They had the charm and freshness and capacity for instantly creating a relation of happy and warm friendliness that, for instance, Denis has. It's a nice thing . . . . . .