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 homœopathy 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 that other aspect of our relations in which gidding becomes impulse and urgency. "seeing we have these ideas," said he,—"and mind you there must be others who have them or are getting to them, for nobody thinks all alone in this world,—seeing we have these ideas what are we going to do?"
