The Passionate Friends
way--overcome. I had storms of retrospective passion at the thoroughness
of her surrender.... Yes, and that's in everyone of us,--in everyone. I
wonder if in all decent law-abiding London there lives a single healthy
adult man who has not at times longed to trample and kill....
For once I think the Fürstin miscalculated consequences. I think I
should have engaged myself to Rachel before I went to America if it had
not been for the Fürstin's revelation, but this so tore me that I could
no longer go on falling in love again, naturally and sweetly. No man
falls in love if he has just been flayed.... I could no longer think of
Rachel except as a foil to Mary. I was moved to marry her by a new set
of motives; to fling her so to speak in Mary's face, and from the fierce
vulgarity of that at least I recoiled--and let her go as I have told
you.
§ 7
I had thought all that was over.
I remember my struggles to recover my peace.
I remember how very late one night I went up to the promenade deck to
smoke a cigar before turning in. It was a warm moonlight night. The
broad low waves of ebony water that went seething past below, foamed
luminous and were streaked and starred with phosphorescence. The
recumbent moon, past its full and sinking westward, seemed bigger than I
had ever seen it before, and the roundness of the watery globe was
manifest about the edge of the sky. One had that sense so rare on land,
so common in the night at sea, of the world as a conceivable sphere, and
of interstellar space as of something clear and close at hand.
There came back to me again that feeling I had lost for a time in
Germany of being not myself but Man consciously on his little planet
communing with God.
But my spirit was saying all the time, "I am still in my pit, in my pit.
After all I am still in my pit."
And then there broke the answer on my mind, that all our lives we must
struggle out of our pits, that to struggle out of our pit is this life,
there is no individual life but that, and that there comes no escape
here, no end to that effort, until the release of death. Continually or
frequently we may taste salvation, but never may we achieve it while we
are things of substance. Each moment in our lives we come to the test
and are lost again or saved again. To be assured of one's security is to
forget and fall away.
And standing at the rail with these thoughts in my mind, suddenly I
prayed....
I remember how the engine-throbs beat through me like the beating of a
heart, and that far below, among the dim lights that came up from the
emigrants in the steerage, there was a tinkling music as I prayed and a
man's voice singing a plaintive air in some strange Slavonic tongue.
That voice of the invisible singer and the spirit of the unknown
song-maker and the serenity of the sky, they were all, I perceived, no
more and no less than things in myself that I did not understand. They
were out beyond the range of understanding. And yet they fell into the
completest harmony that night with all that I seemed to understand....
§ 8
The onset of New York was extraordinarily stimulating to me. I write
onset. It is indeed that. New York rides up out of the waters, a cliff
of man's making; its great buildings at a distance seem like long
Chinese banners held up against the sky. From Sandy Hook to the great
landing stages and the swirling hooting traffic of the Hudson River
there fails nothing in that magnificent crescendo of approach.
And New York keeps the promise of its first appearance. There is no
such fulness of life elsewhere in all the world. The common man in the
streets is a bigger common man than any Old World city can show,
physically bigger; there is hope in his eyes and a braced defiance. New
York may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from
the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the Americans of
all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men.
I went to America curious, balancing between hope and scepticism. The
European world is full of the criticism of America, and for the matter
of that America too is full of it; hostility and depreciation
prevail,--overmuch, for in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of
blatant, oh! quite asinine folly, the United States of America remains
the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is
the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most
valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.
Here was the antithesis of India; here were no peasants whatever, no
traditional culture, no castes, no established differences (except for
the one schism of color); this amazing place had never had a famine,
never a plague; here were no temples and no priesthoods dominating the
lives of the people,--old Trinity church embedded amidst towering
sky-scrapers was a symbol for as much as they had of all that; and here
too there was no crown, no affectations of an ancient loyalty, no
visible army, no traditions of hostility, for the old defiance of
Britain is a thing now ridiculous and dead; and everyone I met had an
air as if he knew that to-morrow must be different from to-day and
different and novel and remarkable by virtue of himself and such as
himself.
I went about New York, with the incredulous satisfaction of a man who
has long doubted, to find that after all America was coming true. The
very clatter pleased me, the crowds, the camp-like slovenliness, a
disorder so entirely different from the established and accepted
untidiness of China or India. Here was something the old world had never
shown me, a new enterprise, a fresh vigor. In the old world there is
Change, a mighty wave now of Change, but it drives men before it as if
it were a power outside them and not in them; they do not know, they do
not believe; but here the change is in the very blood and spirit of
mankind. They breathe it in even before the launch has brought their
feet to Ellis Island soil. In six months they are Americanized. Does it
matter that a thing so gigantic should be a little coarse and blundering
in detail, if this stumbling giant of the new time breaks a gracious
relic or so in his eager clutch and treads a little on the flowers?
§ 9
And in this setting of energy and activity, towering city life and
bracing sea breezes, I met Gidding again, whom I had last seen departing
into Egypt to look more particularly at the prehistoric remains and the
temples of the first and second dynasty at Abydos. It was at a
dinner-party, one of those large gatherings that welcome interesting
visitors. It wasn't, of course, I who was the centre of interest, but a
distinguished French portrait painter; I was there as just any guest. I
hadn't even perceived Gidding until he came round to me in that
precious gap of masculine intercourse that ensues upon the departure of
the ladies. That gap is one of the rare opportunities for conversation
men get in America.
"I don't know whether you will remember me," he said, "but perhaps you
remember Crete--in the sunrise."
"And no end of talk afterwards," I said, grasping his hand, "no end--for
we didn't half finish. Did you have a good time in Egypt?"
"I'm not going to talk to you about Egypt," said Gidding. "I'm through
with ruins. I'm going to ask you--you know what I'm going to ask you."
"What I think of America. It's the same inevitable question. I think
everything of it. It's the stepping-off place. I've come here at last,
because it matters most."
"That's what we all want to believe," said Gidding. "That's what we want
you to tell us."
He reflected. "It's immense, isn't it, perfectly immense? But---- I am
afraid at times we're too disposed to forget just what it's all about.
We've got to be reminded. That, you know, is why we keep on asking."
He went on to question me where I had been, what I had done, what I made
of things. He'd never, he said, forgotten our two days' gossip in the
Levant, and all the wide questions about the world and ourselves that we
had broached then and left so open. I soon found myself talking very
freely to him. I am not a ready or abundant talker, but Gidding has the
knack of precipitating my ideas. He is America to my Europe, and at his
touch all that has been hanging in concentrated solution in my mind
comes crystallizing out. He has to a peculiar degree that directness
and simplicity which is the distinctive American quality. I tried to
explain to his solemnly nodding head and entirely intelligent eyes just
exactly what I was making of things, of the world, of humanity, of
myself....
It was an odd theme for two men to attempt after dinner, servants
hovering about them, their two faces a little flushed by wine and good
eating, their keen interest masked from the others around them by a
gossiping affectation, their hands going out as they talked for matches
or cigarette, and before we had gone further than to fling out a few
intimations to each other our colloquy was interrupted by our host
standing up and by the general stir that preluded our return to feminine
society. "We've got more to say than this," said Gidding. "We've got to
_talk_." He brought out a little engagement book that at once drew out
mine in response. And a couple of days after, we spent a morning and
afternoon together and got down to some very intimate conversation. We
motored out to lunch at a place called Nyack, above the Palisades, we
crossed on a ferry to reach it, and we visited the house of Washington
Irving near Yonkers on our way.
I've still a vivid picture in my mind of the little lawn at Irvington
that looks out upon the rushing steel of Hudson River, where Gidding
opened his heart to me. I can see him now as he leant a little forward
over the table, with his wrists resting upon it, his long clean-shaven
face very solemn and earnest and grey against the hard American sunlight
in the greenery about us, while he told me in that deliberate American
voice of his and with the deliberate American solemnity, of his desire
to "do some decent thing with life."
He was very anxious to set himself completely before me, I remember, on
that occasion. There was a peculiar mental kinship between us that even
the profound differences of our English and American trainings could not
mask. And now he told me almost everything material about his life. For
the first time I learnt how enormously rich he was, not only by reason
of his father's acquisitions, but also because of his own almost
instinctive aptitude for business. "I've got," he said, "to begin with,
what almost all men spend their whole lives in trying to get. And it
amounts to nothing. It leaves me with life like a blank sheet of paper,
and nothing in particular to write on it."
"You know," he said, "it's--exasperating. I'm already half-way to
three-score and ten, and I'm still wandering about wondering what to do
with this piece of life God has given me...."
He had "lived" as people say, he had been in scrapes and scandals,
tasted to the full the bitter intensities of the personal life; he had
come by a different route to the same conclusions as myself, was as
anxious as I to escape from memories and associations and feuds and that
excessive vividness of individual feeling which blinds us to the common
humanity, the common interest, the gentler, larger reality, which lies
behind each tawdrily emphatic self....
"It's a sort of inverted homoeopathy I want," he said. "The big thing to
cure the little thing...."
But I will say no more of that side of our friendship, because the ideas
of it are spread all through this book from the first page to the
last.... What concerns me now is not our sympathy and agreement, but