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Title: Imre
A Memorandum
Author: Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson
Editor: Xavier Mayne
Release Date: September 27, 2021 [eBook #66390]
Language: English
Produced by: anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteers
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMRE ***
IMRE:
A MEMORANDUM
EDITED BY
XAVIER MAYNE.
"There is a war, a chaos of the mind,
When all its elements convulsed, combined,
Like dark and jarring..."
"The whole heart exhaled into One Want,
I found the thing I sought, and that was--thee."
"The Friendship which is Love--the Love which is Friendship"
NAPLES.
THE ENGLISH BOOK-PRESS: R. RISPOLI,
CALATA TRINITÀ MAGGIORE, 53.
1906.
(PRIVATELY PRINTED AND ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
THIS BOOK IS PRIVATELY PRINTED
IN A LIMITED EDITION, OF WHICH THIS COPY IS
NUMBER 10
CONTENTS
PREFATORY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 3
MASKS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ' 9
MASKS AND--A FACE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ' 79
FACES--HEARTS--SOULS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ' 157
PREFATORY.
My dear Mayne:
In these pages I give you a chapter out of my life... an episode that
at first seemed impossible to write even to you. It has lengthened
under my hand, as autobiography is likely to do. My apology is that in
setting forth absolute truth in which we ourselves are concerned so
deeply, the perspectives, and what painters call the values, are not
easily maintained. But I hope not to be tedious to the reader for
whom, especially, I have laid open as mysterious and profoundly
personal an incident.
You know why it has been written at all for you. Now that it lies
before me, finished, I do not feel so dubious of what may be thought
of its utterly sincere course as I did when I began to put it on
paper. And as you have more than once urged me to write something
concerning just that topic which is the mainspring of my pages I have
asked myself whether, instead of some impersonal essay, I would not
do best to give over to your editorial hand all that is here?--as
something for other men than for you and me only? Do with it,
therefore, as you please. As speaking out to any other human heart
that is throbbing on in rebellion against the ignorances, the narrow
psychologic conventions, the false social ethics of our epoch--too
many men's hearts must do so!--as offered in a hope that some
perplexed and solitary soul may grow a little calmer, may feel itself
a little less alone in our world of mysteries--so do I give this
record to you, to use it as you will. Take it as from Imre and from
me.
As regards the actual narrative, I may say to you here that the
dialogue is kept, word for word, faithfully as it passed, in all the
more significant passages; and that the correspondence is literally
translated.
I do not know what may be the exact shade of even your sympathetic
judgment, as you lay down the manuscript, read. But, for myself, I
put by my pen after the last lines were written, with two lines of
Platen in my mind that had often recurred to me during the progress
of my record: as a hope, a trust, a conviction:
"Ist's möglich ein Geschöpf in der Natur zu sein,
Und stets und wiederum auf falscher Spur zu sein?
Or, as the question of the poet can be put into English:
"Can one created be--of Nature part--
And ever, ever trace a track that's false?
No... I do not believe it!
Faithfully yours,
Oswald.
Velencze,
19--
... "You have spoken of homosexualism, that profound problem in human
nature of old or of to-day; noble or ignoble; outspoken or masked;
never to be repressed by religions nor philosophies nor laws; which
more and more is demanding the thought of all modern civilizations,
however unwillingly accorded it..... Its diverse aspects bewilder
me... Homosexualism is a symphony running through a marvellous
range of psychic keys, with many high and heroic (one may say
divine) harmonies; but constantly relapsing to base and fantastic
discords!... Is there really now, as ages ago, a sexual aristocracy of
the male? A mystic and hellenic Brotherhood, a sort of super-virile
man? A race with hearts never to be kindled by any woman; though, if
once aglow, their strange fires can burn not less ardently and purely
than ours? An _élite_ in passion, conscious of a superior knowledge
of Love, initiated into finer joys and pains than ours?--that looks
down with pity and contempt on the millions of men wandering in the
valleys of the sexual commonplace?"...
(Magyarból.)
I.
MASKS.
Like flash toward metal, magnet sped to iron,
A Something goes--a Current, mystic, strange--
From man to man, from human breast to breast:
Yet 'tis not Beauty, Virtue, Grace, not Truth
That binds nor shall unbind, that magic tie.
(GRILLPARZER)
It was about four o' clock that summer afternoon, that I sauntered
across a street in the cheerful Hungarian city of Szent-Istvánhely,
and turned aimlessly into the café-garden of the Erzsébet-tér, where
the usual vehement military-band concert was in progress. I looked
about for a free table, at which to drink an iced-coffee, and to mind
my own business for an hour or so. Not in a really cross-grained mood
was I; but certainly dull, and preoccupied with perplexing affairs
left loose in Vienna; and little inclined to observe persons and
things for the mere pleasure of doing so.
The kiosque-garden was somewhat crowded. At a table, a few steps
away, sat only one person; a young Hungarian officer in the pale
blue-and-fawn of a lieutenant of the well-known A-- Infantry Regiment.
He was not reading, though at his hand lay one or two journals. Nor
did he appear to be bestowing any great amount of attention on the
chattering around him, in that distinctively Szent-Istvánhely manner
which ignores any kind of outdoor musical entertainment as a thing to
be listened-to. An open letter was lying beside him, on a chair; but
he was not heeding that. I turned his way; we exchanged the usual
sacramental saluts, in which attention I met the glance, by no means
welcoming, of a pair of peculiarly brilliant but not shadowless hazel
eyes; and I sat down for my coffee. I remember that I had a swift,
general impression that my neighbour was of no ordinary beauty of
physique and elegance of bearing, even in a land where such matters
are normal details of personality. And somehow it was also borne in
upon me promptly that his mood was rather like mine. But this was a
vague concern. What was Hecuba to me?--or Priam, or Helen, or Helenus,
or anybody else, when for the moment I was so out of tune with life!
Presently, however, the band began playing (with amazing calmness
from any Hungarian wind-orchestra) Roth's graceful "Frau Réclame"
Waltz, then a novelty, of which trifle I happen to be fond. Becoming
interested in the leader, I wanted to know his name. I looked across
the table at my vis-à-vis. He was pocketing the letter. With a word
of apology, which turned his face to me, I put the inquiry. I met
again the look, this time full, and no longer unfriendly, of as
winning and sincere a countenance, a face that was withal strikingly
a temperamental face, as ever is bent toward friend or stranger. And
it was a Magyar voice, that characteristically seductive thing in the
seductive race, which answered my query; a voice slow and low, yet
so distinct, and with just that vibrant thrill lurking in it which
instantly says something to a listener's heart, merely as a sound,
if he be susceptible to speaking-voices. A few commonplaces followed
between us, as to the band, the programme, the weather--each
interlocutor, for no reason that he could afterward explain, any more
than can one explain thousands of such attitudes of mind during casual
first meetings--taking a sort of involuntary account of the other.
The commonplaces became more real exchanges of individual ideas.
Evidently, this Magyar fellow-idler, in the Erzsébet-tér café, was in
a social frame of mind, after all. As for myself, indifference to the
world in general and to my surroundings in particular, dissipated and
were forgot, my disgruntled and egotistical humour went to the limbo
of all unwholesomenesses, under the charm of that musical accent,
and in the frank sunlight of those manly, limpid eyes. There was
soon a regular dialogue in course, between this stranger and me.
From music (that open road to all sorts of mutualities on short
acquaintanceships) and an art of which my neighbour showed that he
knew much and felt even more than he expressed--from music, we passed
to one or another aesthetic question; to literature, to social life,
to human relationships, to human emotions. And thus, more and more, by
unobserved advances, we came onward to our own two lives and beings.
The only interruptions, as that long and clear afternoon lengthened
about us, occurred when some military or civil acquaintance of my
incognito passed him, and gave a greeting. I spoke of my birth-land,
to which I was nowadays so much a stranger. I sketched some of the
long and rather goal-less wanderings, almost always alone, that I had
made in Central Europe and the Nearer East--his country growing,
little by little, my special haunt. I found myself charting-out to
him what things I liked and what things I anything but liked, in this
world where most of us must be satisfied to wish for considerably more
than we receive. And in return, without any more questions from me
than I had from him--each of us carried along by that irresistible
undercurrent of human intercourse that is indeed, the Italian
_simpatia_, by the quick confidence that one's instinct assures him
is neither lightly-bestowed, after all, nor lightly-taken--did I
begin, during even those first hours of our coming-together, to know
no small part of the inner individuality of Imre von N..., _hadnagy_
(Lieutenant) in the A... Honvéd Regiment, stationed during some years
in Szent-Istvánhely.
Lieutenant Imre's concrete story was an exceedingly simple matter. It
was the everyday outline of the life of nine young Magyar officers in
ten. He was twenty-five; the only son of an old Transylvanian family;
one poor now as never before, but evidently quite as proud as ever. He
had had other notions, as a lad, of a calling. But the men of the
N.... line had always been in the army, ever since the days of
Szigetvár and the Field of Mohács. Soldiers, soldiers! always
soldiers! So he had graduated at the Military Academy. Since then? Oh,
mostly routine-life, routine work... a few professional journeyings in
the provinces--no advancement and poor pay, in a country where an
officer must live particularly like a gentleman; if too frequently
only with the aid of confidential business-interviews with Jewish
usurers. He sketched his happenings in the barracks or the ménage--and
his own simple, social interests, when in Szent-Istvánhely. He did not
live with his people, who were in too remote a quarter of the town for
his duties. I could see that even if he were rather removed from daily
contact with the family-affairs, the present home atmosphere was a
depressing one, weighing much on his spirits. And no wonder! In the
beginning of a brilliant career, the father had become blind and was
now a pensioned officer, with a shattered, irritable mind as well as
body, a burden to everyone about him. The mother had been a beauty and
rich. Both her beauty and riches long ago had departed, and her health
with them. Two sisters were dead, and two others had married officials
in modest Government stations in distant cities. There were more
decided shadows than lights in the picture. And there came to me, now
and then, as it was sketched, certain inferences that made it a
thought less promising. I guessed the speaker's own nervous distaste
for a profession arbitrarily bestowed on him. I caught his something
too-passionate half-sigh for the more ideal daily existence, seen
always through the dust of the dull highroad that often does not
seem likely ever to lead one out into the open. I noticed traces of
weakness in just the ordinary armour a man needs in making the most of
his environment, or in holding-out against its tyrannies. I saw the
irresolution, the doubts of the value of life's struggle, the sense
of fatality as not only a hindrance but as excuse. Not in mere
curiosity so much as in sympathy, I traced or divined such things;
and then in looking at him, I partly understood why, at only about
five-and-twenty, Lieutenant Imre von N.....'s forehead showed those
three or four lines that were incongruous with as sunny a face. Still,
I found enough of the lighter vein in his autobiography to relieve
it wholesomely. So I set him down for the average-situated young
Hungarian soldier, as to the material side of his life or the rest;
blessed with a cheerful temperament and a good appetite, and plagued
by no undue faculties of melancholy or introspection. And, by-the-by,
merely to hear, to see, Imre von N.... laugh, was to forget that
one's own mood a moment earlier had been grave enough. It might be,
he had the charm of a child's most infectious mirth, and its current
was irresistible.
Now, in remembering what was to come later for us two, I need record
here only one incident, in itself slight, of that first afternoon's
parliament. I have mentioned that Lieutenant Imre seemed to have his
full share of acquaintances, at least of the comrade-class, in Szent
Istvánhely. I came to the conclusion as the afternoon went along, that
he must be what is known as a distinctly "popular party". One man
after another, by no means of only his particular regiment, would stop
to chat with him as they entered and quit the garden, or would come
over to exchange a bit of chaff with him. And in such of the meetings,
came more or less--how shall I call it?--demonstrativeness, never
unmanly, which is almost as racial to many Magyarak as to the Italians
and Austrians. But afterwards I remembered, as a trait not so much
noticed at the time, that Lieutenant Imre, did not seem to be at all a
friend of such demeanour. For example, if the interlocutor laid a hand
on Lieutenant Imre's shoulder, the Lieutenant quietly drew himself
back a little. If a hand were put out, he did not see it at once, nor
did he hold it long in the fraternal clasp. It was like a nervous
habit of personal reserve; the subtlest sort of mannerism. Yet he was
absolutely courteous, even cordial. His regimental friends appeared to
meet him in no such merely perfunctory fashion as generally comes from
the daily intercourse of the service, the army-world over. One
brother-officer paused to reproach him sharply for not appearing
at some affair or other at a friend's quarters, on the preceding
evening--"when the very cat and dog missed you." Another comrade
wanted to know why he kept "out of a fellow's way, no matter how
hard one tries to see something of you." An elderly civilian remained
several minutes at his side, to make sure that the young Herr
Lieutenant would not forget to dine with the So-and-So family, at a
birthday-fête, in course of next few days. Again,--"Seven weeks was I
up there, in that d--d little hole in Calizien! And I wrote you long
letters, three letters! Not a post-card from you did I get, the whole
time!"...... remonstrated another comrade.
Soon I remarked on this kind of dialogue. "You have plenty of
excellent friends in the world, I perceive," said I.
For the first time, that day, since one or another topic had occurred,
something like scorn--or a mocking petulance--came across his face.
"I must make you a stale sort of answer, to--pardon me--a very stale
little flattery," he answered. "I have acquaintances, many of them
quite well enough, as far as they go--men that I see a good deal of,
and willingly. But friends? Why, I have the fewest possible! I can
count them on one hand! I live too much to myself, in a way, to be
more fortunate, even with every Béla, János and Ferencz reckoned-in. I
don't believe you have to learn that a man can be always much more
alone in his life than appears his case. Much!" He paused and then
added:
"And, as it chances, I have just lost, so to say, one of my friends.
One of the few of them. One who has all at once gone quite out of my
life, as ill-luck would have it. It has given me a downright stroke at
my heart. You know how such things affect one. I have been dismal just
this very afternoon, absurdly so, merely in realizing it."
"I infer that your friend is not dead?"
"Dead? No, no, not that!" He laughed. "But, all things concerned,
he might as well be dead--for me. He is a marine-officer in the
Royal Service. We met about four years ago. He has been doing some
Government engineering work here. We have been constantly together,
day in, day out. Our tastes are precisely the same. For only one of
them, he is almost as much a music-fiend as I am! We've never had the
least difference. He is the sort of man one never tires of. Everyone
likes him! I never knew a finer character, not anyone quite his equal,
who could count for as much in my own life. And then, besides," he
continued in a more earnest tone, "he is the type to exert on such a
fellow, as I happen to be, exactly the influences that are good for
me. That I know. A man of iron resolution..... strong will.... energies.
Nothing stops him, once he sees what is worth doing, what must be
done. Not at all a dreamer.... not morbid.. and so on."
"Well," said I, both touched and amused by this naïveté, "and what has
happened?"
"Oh, he was married last month, and ordered to China for time
indefinite.... a long affair for the Government. He cannot possibly
return for many years, quite likely never."
"Two afflictions at once, indeed," I said, laughing a little, he
joining in ruefully. "And might I know under which one of them you,
as his deserted Fidus Achates, are suffering most? I infer that you
think your friend has added insult to injury."
"What? I don't understand. Ah, you mean the marriage-part of it? Dear
me, no! nothing of the sort! I an only too delighted that it has come
about for him. His bride has gone out to Hong-Kong with him, and
they expect to settle down into the most complete matrimonial bliss
there. Besides, she is a woman that I have always admired simply
unspeakably... oh, quite platonically, I beg to assure you!.. as have
done just about half the men in Szent-Istvánhely, year in and out--who
were not as lucky as my friend. She is absolutely charming--of high
rank--an old Bohemian family--beautiful, talented, with the best
heart in the world..... and-_Istenem!_" he exclaimed in a sudden,
enthusiastic retrospect... "how she sings Brahms! They are the model of
a match.... the handsomest couple that you could ever meet."
"Ah... is your marine friend of uncommon good-looks?" He glanced
across at the acacia-tree opposite, as if not having heard my
careless question, or else as if momentarily abstracted. I was
about to make some other remark, when he replied, in an odd,
vaguely-directed accent. "I beg your pardon! Oh, yes, indeed... my
friend is of exceptional physique. In the service, he is called
'Hermes Karvaly'... his family name is Karvaly.... though there's
Sicilian blood in him too--because he looks so astonishingly like
that statue you know--the one by that Greek--Praxiteles, isn't it?
However, looks are just one detail of Karvaly's unusualness. And to
carry out that, never was a man more head over heels in love with his
own wife! Karvaly never does anything by halves."
"I beg to compliment on your enthusiasm for your friend... plainly one
of the 'real ones' indeed," I said. For, I was not a little stirred by
this frank evidence, of a trait that sometimes brings to its possessor
about as much melancholy as it does happiness. "Or, perhaps I would
better congratulate Mr. Karvaly and his wife on leaving their merits
in such generous care. I can understand that this separation means
much to you."
He turned full upon me. It was as if he forgot wholly that I was a
stranger. He threw back his head slightly, and opened wide those
unforgettable eyes--eyes that were, for the instant, sombre, troubled
ones.
"Means much? Ah, ah, so very much! I dare say you think it odd.... but
I have never had anything... never... work upon me so!.... I couldn't
have believed that such a thing could so upset me. I was thinking of
some matters that are part of the affair--of its ridiculous effect on
me--just when you came here and sat down. I have a letter from him,
too, today, with all sorts of messages from himself and his bride, a
regular turtle-dove letter. Ah, the lucky people in this world! What
a good thing that there are some!" He paused, reflectively. I did not
break the silence ensuing. All at once, "_Teremtette_!" he exclaimed,
with a short laugh, of no particular merriment,--"what must you think
of me, my dear sir! Pray pardon me! To be talking along--all this
personal, sentimental stuff--rubbish--to a perfect stranger! Idiotic!"
He frowned irritably, the lines in his brow showing clear. He was
looking me in the eyes with a mixture of, shall I say, antagonism
and appeal; psychic counter-waves of inward query and of outward
resistance.... of apprehension, too. Then, again he said most formally,
"I never talked this way with any one--at least never till now. I am
an idiot! I beg your pardon."
"You haven't the slightest need to beg it," I answered, "much
less to feel the least discomfort in having spoken so warmly
of this friendship and separation. Believe me, stranger or
not... and, really we seem to be passing quickly out of that degree of
acquaintance... I happen to be able to enter thoroughly into your
mood. I have a special sense of the beauty and value of friendship.
It often seems a lost emotion. Certainly, life is worth living only
as we love our friends and are sure of their regard for us. Nobody
ever can feel too much of that; and it is, in some respects, a pity
that we don't say it out more. It is the best thing in the world,
even if the exchange of friendship for friendship is a chemical
result often not to be analyzed; and too often not at all equal as an
exchange."
He repeated my last phrase slowly, "Too often--not equal!"
"Not by any means. We all have to prove that. Or most of us do. But
that fact must not make too much difference with us; not work too
much against our giving our best, even in receiving less than we wish.
You may remember that a great French social philosopher has declared
that when we love, we are happier in the emotion we feel than in that
which we excite."
"That sounds like--like that 'Maxims' gentleman--Rochefoucauld!"
"It was Rochefoucauld."
My vis-à-vis again was mute. Presently he said sharply and with a
disagreeable note of laughter, "That isn't true, my dear sir!--that
nice little French sentiment! At least I don't believe it is! Perhaps
I am not enough of a philosopher--yet. I haven't time to be, though
I would be glad to learn how."
With that, he turned the topic. We said no more as to friends,
friendship or French philosophy. I was satisfied, however, that my new
acquaintance was anything but a cynic, in spite of his dismissal, so
cavalierly, of a subject on which he had entered with such abrupt
confidentiality.
* * * * *
So had its course my breaking into an acquaintance... no, let me not
use as burglarious and vehement a phrase, for we do not take the
Kingdom of Friendship by violence even though we are assured that
there is that sort of an entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven--so was
my passing suddenly into the open door of my intimacy (as it turned
out to be) with Lieutenant Imre von N..... It was all as casual as my
walking into the Erzsébet-tér Café. That is, if anything is casual. I
have set down only a fragment of that first conversation; and I
suspect that did I register much more, the personality of Imre would
not be significantly sharpened to anyone, that is to say in regard to
what was my impression of him then. In what I have jotted, lies one
detail of some import; and there is shown enough of the swift
confidence, the current of immediate mutuality which sped back and
forth between us. "_Es gibt ein Zug, ein wunderliches Zug_"... declares
Grillparzer, most truthfully. Such an hour or so.... for the evening
was drawing on when we parted..... was a kindly prophecy as to the
future of the intimacy, the trust, the decreed progression toward
them, even through our--reserves.
We met again, in the same place, at the same hour, a few days later;
of course, this time by an appointment carefully and gladly kept.
That second evening, I brought him back with me to supper, at the
Hotel L--, and it was not until a late hour (for one of the most
early-to-bed capitals of Europe) that we bade each other good-night
at the restaurant-door. By the by, not till that evening was
rectified a minor neglect.... complete ignorance of one another's
names! The fourth or fifth day of our ripening partnership, we spent
quite and entirely together; beginning it in the same coffee-house at
breakfast, making a long inspection of Imre's pleasant lodging,
opposite my hotel, and of his music-library; and ending it with a bit
of an excursion into one of Szent-Istvánhely's suburbs; and with what
had already become a custom, our late supper, with a long aftertalk.
The said suppers by the by, were always amusingly modest banquets.
Imre was by no means a valiant trencher-man, though so strong-limbed
and well-fleshed. So ran the quiet course of our first ten days,
our first two weeks, a term in which, no matter what necessary
interruptions came, Lieutenant Imre von N.... and I made it clear to
one another, though without a dozen words to such effect, that we
regarded the time we could pass together as by far the most agreeable,
not to say important, matter of each day. We kept on continually
adjusting every other concern of the twenty-four hours toward our
rendezvous, instinctively. We seemed to have grown so vaguely
concerned with the rest of the world, our interests that were not in
common now abode in such a curious suppression, they seemed so
colourless, that we really appeared to have entered another and a
removed sphere inhabited by only ourselves, with each meeting. As it
chanced, Imre was for the nonce, free from any routine of duties of a
regimental character. As for myself, I had come to Szent-Istvánhely
with no set time-limit before me; the less because one of the objects
of my stay was studying, under a local professor, that difficult and
exquisite tongue which was Imre's native one, though, by the way,
he was like so many other Magyars in slighting it by a perverse
preference. (For a long time, we spoke only French or German when
together.) So between my sense of duty to Magyar, and a sense,
even more acute, of a great unwillingness to leave Szent-Istvánhely--it
was growing fast to something like an eighth sense... I could abide my
time, or the date when Imre must start for certain annual regimental
maneuvers, down in Slavonia. With reference to the idle curiosity of
our acquaintances as to this so emphatic a state of dualism for Imre
and myself.... such an inseparable sort of partnership which might
well suggest something...
... "too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightening which doth cease to be
Ere one can say 'It lightens'"...
... why we were careful. Even in one of the countries of Continental
Europe where sudden, romantic friendship is a good deal of a cult, it
seems that there is neither wisdom nor pleasure in wearing one's heart
on one's sleeve. Best not to placard sudden affinities; between
soldiers and civilists, especially. It was Imre von N.... himself who
gave me this information, or hint; though not any clear explanation of
its need. But he and I not only kept out of the most frequented haunts
of social and military Szent-Istvánhely thenceforth, but spoke (on
occasion) to others of my having come to the place especially to be
with Imre, again,--"for the first time in three years", since we
had become "acquainted with each other down in Sarajevo, one
morning"--during a visit to the famous Husruf-Beg Mosque there!
This easy fabrication was sufficient. Nobody questioned it. As a
fact, Imre and I, when comparing notes one afternoon had found out
that really we had been in Sarajevo at the exact date mentioned. "The
lie that is half a truth is ever".... the safest of lies, as well as
the convenientest one.
Now of what did two men thus insistent on one another's companionship,
one of them some twenty-five years of age, the other past thirty,
neither of them vapourous with the vague enthusiasms of first manhood,
nor fluent with the mere sentimentalities of idealism.... of what did
we talk, hour in and hour out, that our company was so welcome to each
other, even to the point of our being indifferent to all the rest of
our friends round about?.... centering ourselves on the time _together_
as the best thing in the world for us. Such a question repeats a
common mistake, to begin with. For it presupposes that companionship
is a sort of endless conversazione, a State-Council ever in session.
Instead, the _silences_ in intimacy stand for the most perfect
mutuality. And, besides, no man or woman has yet ciphered out
the real secret of the finest quality, clearest sense, of human
companionability--a thing that often grows up, flower and fruit, so
swiftly as to be like the oriental juggler's magic mango-plant. We are
likely to set ourselves to analyzing, over and over, the externals and
accidence... the mere inflections of friendships, as it were. But the
real secret evades us. It ever will evade. We are drawn together
because we are drawn. We are content to abide together just because
we are content. We feel that we have reached a certain harbour, after
much or little drifting, just because it is for _that_ haven, after
all, that we have been moving on and on; with all the irresistible
pilotry of the wide ocean-wash friendly to us. It is as foolish to
make too much of the definite in friendship as it is in love--which
is the highest expression of companionship. Friendship?--love?
what are they if real on both sides, but the great Findings?
Grillparzer... once more to cite that noble poet of so much that is
profoundly psychic... puts all the negative and the positive of it
into the appeal of his Jason..
"In my far home, a fair belief is found,
That double, by the Gods, each human soul
Created is... and, once so shaped, divided.
So shall the other half its fellow seek
O'er land, o'er sea, till when it once be found,
The parted halves, long-sundered, blend and mix
In one, at last! Feel'st thou this _half_-heart?
Beats it with pain, divided, in thy breast?
O... come!"
As a fact, my new friend and I had an interesting range of commonplace
and practical topics, on which to exchange ideas. Sentimentalities
were quite in abeyance. We were both interested in art, as well as
in sundry of the less popular branches of literature, and in what
scientifically underlies practical life. Moreover, I had been longtime
enthusiastic as to Hungary and the Hungarians, the land, the race, the
magnificent military history, the complicated, troublous aspects of
the present and the future of the Magyar Kingdom. And though I cannot
deny that I have met with more ardent Magyar patriots than Imre von
N... for somehow he took a conservative view of his birth-land and
fellow-citizens--still, he was always interested in clarifying my
ideas. Again, contrary-wise, Lieutenant Imre was zealous in informing
himself on matters and things pertaining to my own country and to its
system of social and military life, as well as concerning a great deal
more; even to my native language, of which he could speak precisely
seven words, four of them too forcible for use in general polite
society. Never was there a quicker, a more aggressively intelligent
mind than his; the intellect that seeks to take in a thing as swiftly
yet as fully as possible.... provided, as Imre confessed, with
complete absence of shame, the topic "attracted" him. Fortunately,
most interesting topics did so; and what he learned once, he learned
for good and all. I smile now as I remember the range, far afield
often, of our talks when we were in the mood for one. I think that in
those first ten days of our intercourse we touched on, I should say,
a hundred subjects--from Árpád the Great to the Seventh Symphony,
from the prospects of the Ausgleich to the theory of Bisexual
Languages, from Washington to Kossuth, from the novels of Jókai to
the best _gulyás_, from harvesting-machines, drainage, income-taxes,
and whether a woman ought to wear earrings or not, to the Future
State! No,--one never was at a loss for a topic when with Imre, and
one never tired of his talk about it, any more than one tired of Imre
when mute as Memnon, because of his own meditations, or when he was,
apparently, like the Jolly Young Waterman, "rowing along, thinking of
nothing at all."
* * * * *
And besides more general matters, there was... for so is it in
friendship as in love... ever that quiet undercurrent of inexhaustible
curiosity about each other as an Ego, a psychic fact not yet mutually
explained. Therewith comes in that kindly seeking to know better and
better the Other, as a being not yet fully outlined, as one whom we
would understand even from the farthest-away time when neither friend
suspected the other's existence, when each was meeting the world
_alone_--as one now looks back on those days... and was absorbed in so
much else in life, before Time had been willing to say, "Now meet, you
two! Have I not been preparing you for each other?" So met, the simple
personal retrospect is an ever new affair of detail for them, with its
queries, its concessions, its comparisons. "I thought that, but now I
think this. Once on a time I believed that, but now I believe this. I
did so and so, in those old days; but now, not so. I have desired,
hoped, feared, purposed, such or such a matter then; now no longer.
Such manner of man have I been, whereas nowadays my identity before
myself is thus and so." Or, it is the presenting of what has been
enduringly a part of ourselves, and is likely ever abide such?
Ah, these are the moods and tenses of the heart and the soul in
friendship! more and more willingly uttered and listened-to as
intimacy and confidence thrive. Two natures are seeking to blend.
Each is glad to be its own directory for the newcomer; to treat him as
an expected and welcomed guest to the Castle of Self, while yet
something of a stranger to it; opening to him any doors and windows
that will throw light on the labyrinth of rooms and corridors, wishing
to keep none shut.... perhaps not even some specially haunted, remote
and even black-hung chamber. Guest? No, more than that, for is it not
the tenant of all others, the Master, who at last, has arrived!
Probably this is the best place in my narrative to record certain
particularly personal aspects of Lieutenant Imre, though in
giving them I must draw on details and impressions that I gained
gradually--later. During even that earlier stage of our friendship,
he insisted on my going with him to his father's house, to meet his
parents. From them, as from two or three of his officer-friends with
whom I occasionally foregathered, when Imre did not happen to be of
the party of us, I derived facts--side-lights and perspectives--of
use. But the most part of what I note came from Imre's tendency
toward introspection; and from his own frank lips.
He had been a singularly sensitive, warm-hearted boy, indeed too
high-strung, too impressionable. He had been petted by even the
merest strangers because of his engaging manners and his peculiarly
striking boyish beauty. He had not been robust as a lad (though now
superbly so) with the result that his schooling had been desultory
and unsystematic. "And I wanted to study art, I didn't care what
art... music, painting, sculpture, perhaps music more than anything...
I hated the army! But my father--his heart was set on my doing what
the rest of us had done... I was the only son left.. it had to be." And
however little was Imre at heart a soldier, he had made himself into
a most excellent officer. I soon heard that from all his comrades whom
I met; and I have heard it often since those days in Szent-Istvánhely.
His sense of his personal duty, his pride, his filial affection, his
feeling toward his King, all contributed toward the outward semblance
that was at least so desirable. He had already been highly commended;
probably promotion would soon come. He had always won cordial words
from his superiors. Loving not in the least the work, he played his
unwelcome part well and manly, so that not more than half a dozen
individuals could have been sure that Imre von N... _hadnagy_, would
have doffed gladly, at any minute, the King's Coat for a blouse.
Ambition failed him, alas! just because he was at heart indifferent to
the reward. But he ran the race well. And for the matter of ambition
the advancement in the Magyar service is as deliberate as in other
armies in peace-times. Imre needed much stronger influence than what
was at his request, to hurry him beyond a lieutenancy.
With only one such contest in his soul, no wonder that Imre led his
life in Szent-Istvánhely so much to himself, however open to others it
seemed to be. Yet whatever depressed him, he was determined not to
be a man of moods to the cynical world's eyes. As a fact he was so
happily a creature of buoyant temperament, that his popularity was not
surprising, on the basis of comrade-intercourse and of the pleasantly
superficial side of a regimental life. Every man was Imre's friend!
Every woman was, such, that I ever heard speaking of him, or spoken-of
along with his name. The paradox of living to oneself while living
with everyone, the doors of an individuality both open and shut, could
no farther go than in his instance.
How fully was I to realize that, in a little time!
As to physique, Imre had fulfilled in his maturity the promise of
his boyhood. He was called "Handsome N...", right and left; and he
deserved the sobriquet. Of middle height, he possessed a slender
figure, faultless in proportions, a wonder of muscular development, of
strength, lightness and elegance. His athletic powers were renowned in
his regiment. He was among the crack gymnasts, vaulters and swimmers.
I have seen him, often, make a standing-leap over an ordinary
library-table, to land, like a cat, on the other side. I have seen
him, half-a-dozen times, spring out of a common barrel into another
one placed beside it, without touching his hands to either. He could
hold out a heavy garden-chair perfectly straight, with one hand;
break a stout penholder or leadpencil between his second and third
fingers; and bend a thick, brass curtain-rod by his leg-muscles. He
frequently swam directly across the wide Duna, making nothing of its
cross-currents at Szent-Istvánhely. He was a consummate fencer, and a
prize-shot. He could jump on and off a running horse, like a vaquero.
Yet all this force, this muscular address, was concealed by the
symmetry of his graceful, elastic frame. Not till he was nude, and one
could trace the ripple of muscle and sinew under the fine, hairless
skin, did one realize the machinery of such strength. I have never
seen any other man--unless Magyar, Italian or Arab--walk with such
elasticity and dignity. It was a pleasure simply to see Imre cross
the street.
His head, a small, admirably shaped one, with its close-cut golden
hair, carried out his Hellenic exterior. For it was really a small
head to be set on such broad shoulders and on as well-grown a figure.
As to his face (generally a detail of least relative importance in
the male type), I do not intend to analyze retrospectively certainly
one of the most engaging of manly countenances that I have ever
looked upon. The actual features were delicate enough, but without
womanishness. Imre was not a pretty man; but a beautiful man. And the
mixture of maturity and of almost boyish youth, the outlook of his
natural sincerity and warmth of nature, his self-unconsciousness and
self-respect... these entered into the matter of his good looks, quite
as much as his merely technical beauty. I did not wonder that not
only the women in Szent-Istvánhely but the street-children, aye,
the very dogs and cats it seemed to me, would look at him with
friendly interest. Those lustrous hazel eyes, with the white so clear
around the pupils... the indwelling laughter in them that nevertheless
could be overcast with so penetrating a seriousness...! It seems to me
that now, as I write, I meet their look. I lay down my pen for an
instant as my own eyes suddenly blur. Yet why? We should find tears
rising for a living grief, not a living joy!
United with all this capital of a man's physical attractiveness
was Imre's extraordinary modesty. He never seemed to think of his
appearance for so much as two minutes together. He never glanced into
a mirror when he happened to pass near that piece of furniture which
seems to inflict a sort of nervous disease of the eyes... occasionally
also of the imagination... on the average soldier of any rank and
uniform, the world round. "Thanks... but I don't trouble myself much
about looking-glasses, when I've once got my clothes on my back and am
certain that my face isn't dirty!" was his reply to me one morning
when I gave him an amused look because he had happened to plant his
chair exactly in front of the biggest pier-glass in the K... Café. He
never posed; never fussed as to his toilet, nor worried concerning the
ultrafitting of his clothes, nor studied with anxiety details of his
person. One day, another officer was lamenting the melancholy fact
that baldness was gaining ground slyly, pitilessly, on the speaker's
hyacinthine locks. He gave utterance to a sorrowful envy of Imre.
"Pooh, pooh," returned Imre, _hadnagy,_ scornfully, "It's in the
family... and such a convenience in warm weather! I shall be bald as a
cannon-shot by the time I am thirty!" He detested all jewellery in
the way of masculine adornments, and wore none: and his civilian
clothing was of the plainest.
* * * * *
The making-up of every man refers, or should do so, to a fourfold
development... his physical, mental, moral and temperamental equipment,
in which last-named class we can include the aesthetic individuality.
The endowment of Imre von N... as to this series was decidedly less
symmetrical than otherwise. In fact, he was a striking example of
contradictions and inequations. He had studied hardest when in his
school-courses just what came easiest... with the accustomed results of
that sort of process. He was a bad, a perversely bad mathematician; an
indifferent linguist, simply because he had found it "a hideous job
to learn all those complicated verbs"; an excellent scholar in
history; took delight in chemistry and in other physical sciences;
and though so easily plagued by a simple sum in decimals, he had
a passion for astronomy, and he knew not a little about it, at least
theoretically. Physical science appealed to him, curiously; his small
library was two-thirds full of books on those topics. He loved to read
popular philosophy and biography and travel. For novels, as for
poetry, he cared almost nothing. He would spare no pains to get to the
bottom of some subject that interested him, a thing that "bit" him, as
he called it; short of actually setting himself down to the calm and
applicative study of it! Tactics did he, somehow deliberately learn;
grimly, angrily, but with success. They were indispensable to his
professional credit. Such a result showed plainly enough that he
lacked resolution, concentration as a duty, but did not lack
capability. Many a sound lecture from myself, as from other friends,
including particularly, as I found out, from the much-married Karvaly,
did Imre receive respecting this defect. A course in training in
the Officers' Military School (_Hadiskola_) was involved in the
difficulty, or perversity, so in evidence. This _Hadiskola_ course
is an indispensable in such careers as Imre's sort should achieve,
willing or unwilling. When a young officer is so obstinately cold to
what lies toward good work in the _Hadiskola,_ and in his inmost soul
desires almost anything rather than becoming even an major... why, what
can one say severe enough to him?
Yet, with reference to what might be called Imre's aesthetic
self-expression, I wish to record one thing at variance with much
which was negative in him. At least it was in contradiction to his
showing such modest "literary impulses", and to his relative aversion
to belles-lettres, and so on. When Imre was deeply stirred over
something or other that "struck home", by some question to open the
mountains of innermost feeling in him, it was remarkable with what
exactitude,--more than that, what genuine emotional eloquence of
phrase--he could express himself! This even to losing that slight
hesitancy of diction which was an ordinary characteristic. I was often
surprised at the simple, direct beauty, sometimes downright poetic
grace, in his language on such unexpected occasions. He seemed to
become tinged with quite another personality, or to be following, in
a kind of trance, the prompting of some voice audible to him only. I
shall hardly so much as once attempt conveying this effect of sudden
"_ihletés_", even in coming to the moments of our intercourse when it
surged up. It must in most part be taken for granted; read between
the lines now and then. But... one must be mindful of its natural
explanation. For, after all, there was no miracle in it. Imre was a
Magyar; one of a race in which sentimental eloquence is always
lurking in the blood, even to a poetic passion in verbal utterance
that is often out of all measure with the mere formal education of a
man or a woman. He was a Hungarian: which means among other things
that a cowherd who cannot write his name, and who does not know
where London is, can be overheard making love to his sweetheart, or
lamenting the loss of his mother, in language that is almost of
Homeric beauty. It is the Oriental quality, ever in the Magyar; now
to be admired by us, now disliked, according to the application of the
traits. Imre had his full share of Magyarism of temperament, and of
its impromptu eloquence; taking the place of much of a literal
acquaintance with Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and all the rhetorical
and literary Parnassus in general.
He detested politics, as might be divined. He "loved" his Apostolic
King and his country much as do some children their nearest relatives;
that is to say, on general principles, and to the sustaining of a
correct attitude before himself and the world. On this matter, also
he and I had many passages-at-arms. He had not much "religion." But he
was a firm believer in God; in helping one's neighbour, even to most
injudicious generosity; in avoiding debts "when one could possibly do
so" (a reserve that I regretted to find out was not his case any more
than it is usually the case with young Hungarian officers living in a
capital city, with small home-subventions); in honour; in womanly
virtue; in a true tongue and a clean one. His sense of fun was
not limited to the kind that may pass between a rector of the
Establishment and his daughters over afternoon-tea. But Lieutenant
Imre von N.... had no relish for the stupid-smutty sallies and stock
_racontars_ of the officers' mess and the barracks. Unless a "story"
really possessed wit and humour, he had absolutely dull ears for it.
He wrote a shameful handwriting, with invariable hurry-scurry; he
could not draw a pot-hook straight, and he took uncertain because
untaught interest in painting. Sculpture, and architecture appealed
more to him, though also in an untaught way. But he was a most
excellent practical musician; playing the piano-forte superbly well,
as to general effect, with an amazingly bad technic of his own
evolution, got together without any teaching; and not reading well
and rapidly at sight. Indeed, his musical enthusiasm, his musical
insight and memory, they were all of a piece; the rich and perilous
endowment of the born son of Orpheus. His singing-voice was a full
baritone.... smooth and sweet, like his irresistible speaking-voice. He
would play or sing for hours together, quite alone in his rooms, of an
evening. He would go without his dinner (he often did) to pay for his
concert-ticket or standing-place in the Royal Opera. He did not care
for the society of professional musicians, or of the theaterfolk in
general. "They really are not worth while," he used to say... "art is
one thing to me and artists another--or nothing at all--off the
stage." As for more general society, why, he said frankly that
nowadays the N.... family simply were too poor to go into it, and
that he had no time for it. So he was to be met in only a few of the
Szent-Istvánhely drawing rooms. Yet he was passionately fond of
dancing.... anything from a waltz to a _csárdás_. But, à-propos of
Imre's amusement, let me note here (for I dare say, the incredulity
of persons who have stock-ideas of what belongs to soldier-life and
soldier-nature) that three usual pleasures were not his; for he
abominated cards, indeed never played them; he did not smoke; and he
seldom drank out his glass of wine or beer, having no taste for
liquors of any sort. This in a champion athlete and an "all-round"
active soldier... at least externally thoroughly such... in a smart
regiment, is not common. I should have mentioned above that he was
oddly indifferent to the theater, as the theater; declaring that he
never could find "any great illusion" in it. He much liked billiards,
and was invincible in them. His feeling for whatever was natural,
simple, out-of-doors was great. He loved to walk, to walk alone, in
the open country, in the woodlands and fields... to talk with peasants,
who invariably "took to" him at once. He loved children, and was a
born animal-friend; in fact, between him and beasts little and big,
there appeared to be a regular understanding. Never forthputting,
he could delight, in a quiet way in the liveliest company. That
buoyancy of his temperament, so in contrast with the other elements
of his nature, was a vast blessing to him. He certainly had a supply
of personal subjects sufficiently sobering for home-consumption, some
of which I soon knew; others not spoken till later. The gloom in his
parents' house, the various might-have-beens in his own young life,
the wearisome struggle to do his duty in a professional career whereto
he had been called without its being chosen by him; weightier still
the fact that he was in the hands of a couple of usurers on account
of his generous share of the deficit in a foolish brother officer's
finances, to the extent of some thousands of florins.... these were not
trifles for Imre's private meditations. I could quite well understand
his remarking... "I have tried to cultivate cheerfulness on just about
the same principle that when a man hasn't a _korona_ in his pocket he
does well to dress himself in his best clothes and swagger in the
Officers' Casino as if he were a millionaire. For the time, he forgets
that he isn't one... poor devil!"
But I am belated, I see, in alluding to two traits in our acquaintance,
_ab initio,_ which are of significance in my outline of Imre's
personality while new to me: and more than trifles in their weight.
There were two subjects as to which remarkably little was said between
us during the first ten days of my going-about so much with him.
"Remarkably little" I say, because of Imre's own frank references to
one matter, on our first meeting; and because we were both men, and
neither of us octogenarians, nor troubled with super-sensitiveness in
talking about all sorts of things. The first of these overpassed
topics was the friendship between Imre and the absent Karvaly Miklos.
Since the afternoon on which we had met, Imre referred so little
to Karvaly.... he seemed so indifferent to his absence, all at
once... indeed he appeared to be shunning the topic... that I avoided
it completely. It gradually was borne in upon me that he wished me
to avoid it. So no more expansiveness on the perfections and gifts
of the exile! Of Karvaly's young bride, on the other hand, the
fascinating Bohemian lady who sang Brahms' songs so beautifully, Imre
was still distinctly eloquent; alluding often to one or another of
her shining attributes... paragon that she may have been! I write
'may have been'; because to this day I know her, like Shakespeare's
Olivia,--"only by her good report".
The other matter of our reticence was an instance of the difference
between the general and the particular. Very early in my meeting with
Imre's more immediate circle of soldier-friends, I heard over and over
again that to Imre, as one of the officers most distinguished in all
the town for personal beauty, there attached a reputation of being an
ever-campaigning and ever-victorious Don Juan... if withal one of most
exceptional discretion. Right and left, he was referred to as a
wholesale enemy to the peace of heart and to the virtue of dozens of
the fair citizenesses of Szent-Istvánhely. Two of these romances, the
heroine of one of them being an extremely beautiful and refined
_déclassée_ whose sudden suicide had been the gossip of the clubs,
were heightened by the touch of the tragic. But along with them, and
the more ordinary chatter about a young man's _bonnes fortunes,_ or
what were taken to be them, there were surmises and assertions of
vague, aristocratic, deep, unconfessed ties and adventures. The
Germans use the terms "Weiberfreund" and "Weiberfeind" in rather
a special sense sometimes. Now, I knew that Imre von N... was no
woman-hater. He admired, and had a circle of admiring, women-friends
enough to dismiss at once such an ungallant accusation. Never was
there a sharper eye, not even in Magyarország, for an harmonious
female figure, a graceful carriage, a charming face.... he was a
_connaisseur de race!_
But when it came to his alluding, when we were by ourselves, to
anything like really intimate sentimental--I would best plainly say
amorous--relations with the other sex, Imre never opened his mouth
for a word of the least real significance! He referred to himself,
casually, now and then, and as it appeared to me in precisely the
right key, as one to whom woman was a sufficiently definite social
and physical attraction.... necessity... quite as essentially as is
to be expected with a young soldier of normal health and robust
constitution. When it suited his mixed society, he had as many
"discreet stories" as Poins. But when he and I were alone, no matter
whatever else he spoke of... so unreservedly, so temperamentally!--he
never did what is commonly called "talk women." He never so much
alluded to a light-o' love, to an "affair", to any distinctly sexual
interest in a ballerina or--a princess! And when third parties were
pleased to compliment him, or to question him, as to such a thing,
Imre "smiling put the question by." His special reserve concerning
these topics, so rare in men of his profession and age, was as
emphatic as in the instance of the average English gentleman. I
admired it, certainly not wishing it less. I often thought how well
it became Imre's general refinement of disposition, manners and
temperamental bias... most of all, suiting that surprising want of
vanity as to his person, his character, his entire individuality.
* * * * *
In this connection, came a bit of an incident that has its
significance... as things came to pass later in our acquaintance. One
evening, while I was dressing for dinner, with Imre making a random
visit, I lapsed into hearty irritation as to a marvellously ill-fitting
new garment, that was to be worn for the first time. Imre was pleased
to be facetious. "You ought to go into the tailoring-line yourself,"
he observed... "then you can adorn yourself as perfectly as you
would wish!" I threw out some sort of a return-banter that his own
carelessness as to his looks was "the pride that apes humility."
"One would really suppose," I remarked, "that you do not know why a
pretty woman makes eyes at you!... Are you under the impression that
you are admired on account of the Three Christian Graces and the Four
Theological Virtues?--all on sight! Come now, my dear fellow, you
really need not carry the pose so far!"
Imre opened his lips as if about to say something or other; and then
made no remark. Once more he gave me the idea that he was minded to
speak, but hesitated. So I suspended operations with my hairbrushes.
"You appear to be labouring with a remarkably difficult idea," said I.
He answered abruptly: "There are some things it is hard for a man to
judge of, even in another fellow... at least people say so. See here,
you! I wish... I wish you would tell me something.... you won't think me
a conceited ass? Do you... for instance... do you... find me _really_
specially good-looking... when you look around the lot of other men one
sees.... in comparison with _plenty_ of others, I mean?"
"Do you want an answer in chaff, or seriously?"
"Seriously."
"I most certainly think you 'specially' such, N...."
"And you are of the opinion that most people... women... men... sculptors,
for instance, or painters..: a photographer, if you like.... ought to be
of your opinion?"
"But yes, assuredly," I replied, laughing at what seemed the naiveté
and uncalled-for earnestness in his tone. "You do not need to put me
on oath, such a newcomer, too, into your society, to give you the
conviction. Or, stay... how would you like me to draft you a kind of
technical schedule, my dear fellow, stating how and why you are--not
repulsive? I could give it to you, if I thought it would be good for
you, and if you would listen to it. For you are one of those lucky
ones in the world whose good-looks can be demonstrated, categorically,
so to say--trait by trait--passport-style. Come, come, N--! Don't be
so depressed because you are so beautiful! Cheer up! Probably there
will always be somebody in the wide world who will not care to bestow
even an half-eye on you!... some being who remains, first and last,
totally unimpressed, brutally unmoved, by all your manly charms! I
dare say that if you consult that individual you will be assured that
you are the most ordinary-looking creature in creation."
As I spoke, Imre who had been sitting, three-quarters turned from me,
over at a window, whisked himself about quickly and gave me what I
thought was a most inexplicable look. "Have I offended him?" I asked
myself; ridiculous to me, even at so early a stage of our intimacy,
as was the notion. But I saw that his look was not one of surprised
irritation. It was not one of dissent. He continued looking at
me... ah, his serious eyes!... whatever else he was seeing in his
perturbed mind.
"Well," I continued, "isn't that probable? Have I made you angry by
hinting at such a stupidity.... such an aesthetic tragedy?"
"No, no," he returned hastily,--"of course not!" And then with a
laugh as curious as that look of his, for it was not his real, his
cheerful and heart-glad laugh, but one that rang false even to being
ill-humored, he added... "By God, you have spoken the truth! Yes, to
the dot on the _i_!"
I did not pursue the subject. I saw that it was one, whatever else
was part of it, that was better left for Imre himself to take up at
some other time; or not at all. Apparently, I had stumbled on one
little romance; possibly on a _grande passion_! In either case it
was a matter not dead, if moribund it might be. Imre could open
himself to me thereon, or not: I was not curious, nor a purveyor of
reading-matter to fashionable London journals.
* * * * *
Two matters more in this diagnosis... shall I call it so?... of my
friend. Let me rather say that it is a memorandum and guidebook of
Imre's emotional topography.
Something has been said of the spontaneous warmth of his
temperament, and of his enthusiasm for his closer friends. But his
undemonstrativeness also mentioned, seemed to me more and more
curiously accentuated. Imre might have been an Englishman, if it came
to outward signs of his innermost feelings. He neither embraced,
kissed, caressed nor what else his friends; and, as I had surmised,
when first being with him and them, he did not appear to like what in
his part of the world are ordinary degrees of "demonstrativeness". He
never invited nor returned (to speak as Brutus)--"the shows of love in
other men". There was a certain captain in the A.... Regiment, a
man that Imre much liked and, what is more, had more than once
admired in good set terms, when with me. ("He is as beautiful as
a statue, I think!") This brother-soldier being suddenly returned to
Szent-Istvánhely, after a couple of years of absence, hurried up to
Imre and fairly threw his arms about him. Imre was cordiality itself.
But after Captain R.... had left him, Imre made a wry face at me, and
said... "The best fellow in the world! and generally speaking, most
rational! But I do wish he had forgotten to kiss men! It is so
hideously womanish!" Another time we were talking of letters between
intimate friends. "I hate... I absolutely hate... to write letters, even
to my nearest friends", he protested, "in fact, I never write unless
there is no getting-out of it! Five words on a post-card, once a month
or so... two or three months, maybe... and lucky if they get that! How
do I write? Something like this... 'I am here and well. How are you.
We are very busy. I saw your cousin, Csodaszép Kisasszony yesterday.
No time to-day for more! Kindest regards. _Alá szolgája!_ N....'.
Now there you have my style to a dot. What more in the world is
really called-for? As for sentiment... sentiment! in letters to my
friends!... well, I simply cannot squeeze _that_ out, or in. Nobody need
expect it from your most obedient servant! My correspondence is like
telegrams."
"Thanks much," I returned, smiling, "your remarks are most timely,
considering that you and I have agreed to keep in touch with each
other by post, after I leave here. Forewarned is forearmed! Might I
ask, by the by, whether you are as laconic in writing, to--say, your
friend Karvaly, over there in China? And if he is satisfied?"
"Karvaly? Certainly. He happens to like precisely that sort of
communications particularly well. I never give him ten words where
five will do." To which statement I retorted that it was a vast
blessing that some persons were easily pleased, as well as so
likeminded; and that perhaps it would be quite as wise under such
conditions, not to write at all; except maybe on All-Souls Day!
"Perhaps," assented Imre.
So much, then, of your outward individuality and environment, with
somewhat of your inner self, my dear Imre!... chiefly as I looked upon
you and strove to sum you up during those first days. But was there
not one thing more, one most special point of personal interest?... of
peculiar solicitude?.. one supreme undercurrent of query and wondering
in my mind, as we were thus thrown together, and as I felt my thoughts
more and more busied with what was our mutual liking and instinctive
trust? Surely there was! I should find myself turning aside from the
path of straightest truth which I would hold-to in these pages, if I
did not find _that_ question written down early and frankly here, with
the rest. It _must_ be written, or be this record broken now and here!
Was Imre von N... what is called among psychiaters of our day, an
homosexual? an Urning?--in his instincts and feelings and life?--in
his psychic and physical attitude toward women and men? Was he an
Uranian? Or was he sexually entirely normal and Dionian? Or, a blend
of the two types, a Dionian-Uranian? Or what,... or what not? For that
something of a special sexual attitude, hidden, instinctive, was
maintained by him, no matter what might be the outward conduct of his
life--this I could not help believing, at least at times.
Uranian? Similisexual? Homosexual? Dionian?
Profound and often all too oppressive, even terrible, can be
the significance of those cold psychic-sexual terms to the man
who.... _"knows." To the man who "knows!"_ Even more terrible to those
who understand them not, may be the human natures of which they are
but new and clumsy technical symbols, the mere labels of psychiatric
study, within a few decades of medical explorers.
What, then, was my new friend?
* * * * *
I could not determine! The more I reflected, the less I perceived.
It is so easy to be deceived by just such a mingling of psychic and
physic and temperamental traits; easy to dismiss too readily the
counterbalancing qualities. I had learned that much. Long before now,
I had found it out as a practical psychiater, in my own interests and
necessities, by painful experience. Precisely how suggestive, and yet
how adverse... where quite vaguely?.. where with a fairly clear
accent?.. was inference in Imre's case to be drawn or thrown aside,
those who are intelligent in the subtle problems of Uranianism or its
absence, can appreciate best. I had been a good deal struck with the
passionate--as it seemed--note in Imre's friendship for the absentee,
Karvaly Mihály. I noticed the dominance that men, simply as men,
seemed to maintain in Imre's daily life and ideals. I studied his
reserved relations toward the other sex; the general scope of his
tastes, likes and dislikes, his emotional constitution. But all these
suffice not to prove... to _prove_... the deeply-buried mystery of a
heart's uranistic impulses, the mingling in the firm, manly nature
of another inborn sexual essence which can be mercifully dormant; or
can wax unquiet even to a whole life's unbroken anguish!...
And, after all, why should I... I... seek to drag out from him such a
secret of his individuality? Was that for me? Hardly, even if I,
probably, of all those who now stood near to Imre von N.... But there!
I had _no_ right! Even if I..... But there! I swore to myself that I
had _no_ wish!
It was Imre himself who gave me a sort of determinative, just
as--after the oaths at which love laughs--I was querying with myself
what I might do believe.
One evening, we were walking home, after an hour or so with his father
and mother. As we turned the corner of a certain brilliantly-lighted
café, a man of perhaps forty years, with the unmistakeable suggestion
of a soldier about him, and of much distinction of person along with
it, but in civilian's dress, came out and passed us. He looked at Imre
as if almost startled. Then he bowed. Imre returned his salutation
with so particular a coldness, an immediate change of expression, that
I noticed it.
"Who is he?" I asked. "Somehow I fancy he is not in your best books."
"No, I can't say that he is," responded Imre. After a moment of
silence he went on. "That gentleman used to be a captain in our
regiment. He was asked to leave the service. So he left it--about
three years ago."
"Why?"
"On account of..." here Imre's voice took on a most disagreeable
sneer.. "of a little love-affair."
"Really? Since when was a little love-affair a topic for the action
of a regimental Ehrenrath?"
"It happened to be his little love-affair with a.... cadet. You
understand?"
"Ah, yes, now I understand. A great scandal, I presume?"
"Scarcely any at all. In fact, nobody, to this day, knows how far
the... intimacy really went. But gradually some sort of a story got
about... as to the discovery of "relations"... perhaps really amounting
to only a trifling incident... But, the man's character was smirched.
The regiment's Council didn't go into details... didn't even ask for
the facts. He simply was requested privately to give up his charge.
You know, or perhaps you do not know, how specially sensitive... indeed
implacable.. the Service is on _that_ topic. Anything but a hint of
_it_! There mustn't be a suspicion, a breath! One is simply ruined!"
I stopped to pay our tolls for the long Suspension Bridge. As we
pursued our walk, Imre said:
"Do you have any such affairs in England?"
"Yes. Certainly."
"In military life?"
"In military and civil life. In every kind of life."
"Indeed. And.. how do _you_ understand that sort of thing?"
"What sort of thing?"
"A... a man's feeling _that_ way for another man? What's the
explanation?--the excuse for it?"
"Oh, I don't pretend to understand it. There are things we would
better not try to _understand_..."
Ah, had I only finished that the sentence as I certainly meant to do
in beginning it!... with some such words as "--so much as often to
pardon." But the sentence remained open; and I know that it sounded as
if it was meant to end with some such phrase as "... because they are
so beyond any understanding, beyond any excuse!"
Imre walked on beside me, whistling softly. Just two or three notes,
over and over, no tune. Then he remarked abruptly:
"Did you ever happen to meet with... that sort of a man... _person_...
yourself... in your own circle of friends?"
Again the small detail, this time one of commission, not omission, on
my part! Through it this narrative is, I suspect, twice as long as
otherwise it would have been. "Did I ever know such a man... a
'person'... in my own circle of friends?" Irony could no farther go! I
laughed, not in mirth, not in contempt, but in sheer bitterness of
retrospect. There are instants when it may be said of other men than
Cassius:
"And when he smiles, he smiles in such a sort
As if he mocked himself..."
Yes, I laughed. And unfortunately Imre von N... thought that I
sneered; that I sneered at my fellow-men!
"Yes," I replied, "I knew such a man, such a 'person.' On the whole,
pretty well. He had other rather acceptable qualities, you see; so I
didn't allow myself to be too much stirred up by... that remarkably
queer one."
"Lately?" Imre asked.
"Oh, yes, very lately," I returned flippantly.
Imre spoke no word for several steps. Then, hesitatingly...
"Perhaps you didn't know him quite as thoroughly as you supposed.
Were you quite sure?"
"Quite sure." Then, sharply in another sentence that was uttered on
impulse and with more of the equivocal in it which afterward I
understood, I added, "I think we will not talk any more about him: I
mean in that respect... Imre."
Again silence. One-two, one-two--on we went, step and step, over the
resonant, deserted bridge. I had an impression that Imre turned his
head, looking sharply at me in the fluttering gas-light... then
glancing quickly away. I had other thoughts, far, far removed from
him! I had well-nigh forgot when I was!--forgot him, forgot
Szent-Istvánhely........!
But now he laughed out, too, as if in angry derision.
"I say! I knew such a fellow, too.. two or three years ago. And I beg
to tell you that he fell in love with.. me! No less! He was absolutely
_bódult_ over your humble servant. Did you ever!"
"Really? What did you do? Slap his face, and give him the address of
a... doctor of nervous diseases?"
"Oh, Lord, no! I merely declined with thanks the.... honour of his
farther acquaintance. I told him never to speak me. He left town. I
had rather liked him. But I heard he had been compromised already. I
have no use for that particular brand of fool!"
Are there perverse demons, demons delighting to make mortal men
blunderers in simplest word and action... that haunt the breezy
Lánczhíd in Szent-Istvánhely? If so, some of us would better cross
that long bridge in haste and solitary silence after nightfall. For:
"You surprise me," I said lightly. I was thinking of one of his own
jests as well of his unbelief in his personal attractions. "How
inconsistent for _you_! Now _you_ are just the very individual I
should suspect!...... yes, yes, I _am_ surprised!"
To my astonishment, Imre stopped full in his steps, drew himself up,
and faced me with instant formality.
"Will you be so good as to tell me _why_ you are surprised?" asked he,
in a tone that was--I will not write sharp, but which suggested to me
immediately that I had spoken mal-à-propos or misleadingly; the more
so in view of what Imre had mentioned of his _ex professio_ and
personal sensitiveness to the general topic. "Do you observe anything
particularly womanish--abnormal--about me, if you please?"
Now, as it happened my remark, as I have said, was made in consequence
of an impersonal and amusing incident, which I had supposed Imre would
at once remember.
"Womanish? Abnormal? Certainly not. But you seem to forget what
you yourself said to Captain Molten this afternoon... in the
billiard-room... about the menage-cooks... don't you remember?"
Imre burst into laughter. He remembered! (There is no need of my
writing out here a piece of humour not transferable with the least
_esprit_ into English, though mighty funny in Magyar.) His mood
changed at once. He took my arm, a rare attention from him, and
we said no more till the Bridge was past, and the corner which
divided our lodgings by a street's breadth was reached. We said
"Good-night!... till tomorrow!"... the _házmester_ opened his door.
Imre waved his hand gaily and vanished.
* * * * *
I got to bed, concluding among other things that so far from
Imre's being homosexual--as Uranian, or Dionian-Uranian, or
Uranian-Dionian... or what else of that kind of juggling terminology
in homosexual analysis--my friend was no sort of an Uranistic example
at all. No! he was, instead, a thorough-going Dionian, whatever the
fine fusions of his sensitive and complex nature! A complete Dionian,
capable of warm friendship, yes--but a man to whom warm, even
passionate, friendship with this or that other man never could
transform itself into the bitter and burning mystery of Uranistic
Love,--the fittest names for which so often should be written Torment,
Shame, and Despair!
Fortunate Imre! Yet, as I said so to myself, altruistically glad for
his sake, I sighed... and surely that night I thought long, long
thoughts till I finally slept.
II.
MASKS AND--A FACE.
"My whole life was a contest since the day
That gave me being, gave me that which marred
The gift....
"A silent suffering and intense....
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show....
Which speaks it in its loneliness.
BYRON
A couple of miles out of Szent-Istvánhely, one finds the fine old
seat, or what was such, of the Z... family, with its deserted chateau
and neglected park. The family is a broken and dispersed one. The
present owner of the premises lives in Paris. He visits them no
oftener, and spends no more for their care than he cannot help. The
park itself is almost a forest, so large it is and so stately are the
trees. Long, wide alleys wind through the acacias and chestnuts. You
do not go far from the very house without hares running by you, and
partridges and pheasant fluttering; so left to itself is the whole
demesne. Like most old estates near Szent-Istvánhely, it has its
legends, plentifully. One of these tales, going back to the days of
the Turkish sieges of the city, tells how a certain Count Z..., a
young soldier of only twenty-six years, during the investment of 1565,
was sitting at dinner, in the citadel, when word was brought that a
Turkish skirmishing-party had captured his cousin, to whom he was
deeply attached; and had cruelly murdered the young man here, in the
park of this same chateau, which during some days the lines of the
enemy had approached. The officer sprang up from the table. He held up
his sword, and swore by it, and Saint Stephen of Hungary, that he
would not put the sword back into its sheath, nor sit down to a table,
nor lie in a bed, till he had avenged his cousin's fate. He collected
a little troop--in an hour. Before another one had passed, he made a
sortie, under a pretext, toward his invaded estate. He forced its
defences. He drove out the enemy's post. He found and buried his
cousin's mutilated body. Then, before dawn, he himself was surprised
by a fresh force of Turks. He was shot, standing by his friend's
grave... in which he too eventually was buried. Their monument is
there to-day, with the story on it, beginning: "To The Unforgettable
Memory of _Z_... Lorand, and _Z_... Egon", after the customary Magyar
name-inversion.
The public was not admitted to this old bit of the Szent-Istvánhely
suburbs. But persons known to the caretakers were welcome. Lieutenant
Imre and I had been out there once before, with the more freedom
because a certain family-connection existed between the Z--s and the
N--s. So was it that about a week after the little incident closing
the preceding portion of this narrative, we planned to go out to Z....
for the end of the afternoon. A suburban electric tramway passed near
the gates.
For two days, I had been superstitiously.... absurdly... irresistibly
oppressed with the idea that some disagreeable thing was coming my
way. We all have such fits; sometimes justifiably, if often, thank
Heaven! proving them quite groundless. I had laughed at mine, with
Imre. I could think of no earthly reason for expecting ill to befall
me. To myself, I accounted for the mood as a simple reaction of
temperament. For, I had been extremely happy lately; and now there
was the ebb, not of the happiness, but of the hyper-sensitiveness to
it all. The balance would presently be found, and I would be neither
too glad nor too gloomy.
"But why.. _why_... have you found yourself so wonderfully happy
lately?" had asked Imre, curiously. "You haven't inherited a million?
Nor fallen in love?"
No--I had not inherited a million.......
It was on my way to the tram, to meet Imre, that same afternoon, that
I found, from my letters from England, why justly I should exclaim:
"My soul hath felt a secret weight,
A warning of approaching fate...."
I was wanted in London within four days! I must start within less than
twenty-four hours! A near relative was in uncertainty and anxiety as
to some special personal affairs. And not only was my entire programme
for the next few weeks completely broken up; worse still, was a
strong probability that I might be hindered from setting foot on the
Continent for indefinite time. In any case, a return to Hungary under
less than a full twelvemonth was not now to be thought-of.
With this fall of the proverbial bolt out of a clear sky, in the shape
of that letter in my pocket, from Onslow Square, I hurried toward the
tram and Imre. All my pleasure in the afternoon and in everything else
was paralyzed. Astonishing was it how heavy-hearted I had become in
course of glancing through that communication from Mrs L..., between
the Ipar-Bank and the street-corner.
Heavy-hearted? Yes, miserably heavy-hearted!...
Why so? Was it because of the worriments of Mrs. L...? Because I could
not loiter, as a travelling idler, in pleasant Szent-Istvánhely?--could
not go on studying Magyar there; and anon set out for the Herkules-Baths?
Hardly any of these were good and sufficient reasons for suddenly
feeling as if life were not worth living! that a world where
departings, and partings along with them, seemed to be the main reason
for one's comings and meetings, was a deceitful and joyless kind of
planet.
Well then, was my grey humour just because I was under the need of
shaking hands with Imre von N..., and saying, "A viszontlátásra!"
("Auf Wiedersehen!") or, more sensibly, saying to him "Goodbye?" Was
_that_ the real weight in my breast? I, a man--strong-willed, firm of
temper and character! Surely I had other friends, many and warm ones,
old ones, in a long row of places between Constantinople and London;
in France, Germany, Austria, England. O dear, yes!... there were A..,
and B..., and C... and so, on very decently through a whole alphabet
of amities. Why should I feel so fierce a hatred at this interrupting
of a casual, pleasant but not extraordinary intimacy, quite one
_de voyage_ on its face, between two men, who, no matter how
companionable, were of absolutely diverse races, unlike objects in
life and wide-removed environments?... who could not even understand
each other's mother-tongues? Why did existence itself seem so
ironical, so full of false notes, so capricious in its kindness... seem
allowed us that we might _not_ be glad in it as... Elsewhere? The reply
to each of these queries was close to another answer to another
question; that one which Imre von N... had asked,.. "And why, pray,
have you found yourself so wonderfully happy _lately_?" That I should
find myself so wonderfully unhappy now? Perhaps so.
Imre was at the tram, and in high spirits.
"We shall have a beautiful afternoon, my dear fellow.... Beautiful!" he
began. Then... "What the mischief is the matter with you? You look as
if you had lost your soul!"
In a few words, I told him of my summons North.
"Nonsense!" he exclaimed. "You are making a bad joke!"
"Unfortunately I never have been less able to joke in my life!
Tomorrow afternoon I must be off, as surely as Saint-Stephen's Crown
has the Crooked Cross."
Imre "looked right, looked left, looked straight before". For an
instant his look was almost painfully serious. Then it changed to an
amused bewilderment. "Well... sudden things come by twos! You have got
to start off for God knows where, tomorrow afternoon: I have got to be
up at dawn, to rush my legs off! For, about noon I go out by a pokey
special-train, to the Summer-Camp at P... And I must stay there five,
six, ten mortal days, drilling Slovaks, and other such cattle! No
wonder we have had a fine time of it here together! Too beautiful to
last! But, Lord, how I envy you! Won't you change places with me?
You're such an obliging fellow, Oswald! You go to the Camp: let me go
to London?"
At this moment, up came the tram. It was packed with an excursion-party.
We were hustled and separated during our leisurely transit. Imre met
some fair acquaintances, and made himself exceedingly lively company
to them, till we reached the Z... cross-road. We stepped out alone.
I did not break the silence as the noisy tram vanished, and the
country's quietness closed us in.
"Well?" said Imre, after fully five minutes, as we approached the
Z.... gateway.
"Well," I replied quite as laconically.
"Oh come, come," he began, "even if it is I routing out of bed by
sunrise tomorrow, to start in for all that P.. Camp drudgery, and you
to go spinning along in the afternoon to England... why, what of it! We
mustn't let the tragedy spoil our last afternoon. Eh?... Philosophy,
philosophy, my dear Oswald! I have grown so trained, as a soldier, to
having every sort of personal plan and pleasure, great or small,
simply blown to the winds on half-an-hour's notice, that I have ceased
to get into bad humour over any such contretemps. What profits it?
Life isn't at all a plaything for a good lot of us, more's the pity!
We've got to suffer and be strong; or else learn not to suffer. That
on the whole is decidedly preferable. Permit me to recommend it; a
superior article for the trade, patent applied for, take only the
genuine."
I was not in tune for being philosophic, in that moment. And, from the
very first words and demeanour with which Imre had received the
announcement that so cruelly preyed on my spirits, I was... shall I
write piqued--by what seemed to be his indifference; nay more, by his
complete nonchalance. Whether Imre as a soldier, or through possessing
a colder nature than I had inferred.... at least, colder than some
other natures... had indeed learned to sustain life's disagreeable
surprises with equanimity, was nothing now to me. Or, stay, it was a
good deal that just then came crosswise to my mood; so wholly
_intransigéant._ Angry irritation waxed hot in me all at once, along
with increasing bitterness of heart. It is edifying to observe what
successive and sheer stupidities a man will perpetrate under such
circumstances... edifying and pitiable!
"I don't at all envy you your philosophy, my dear friend," I said
sharply. "I believe a good deal in the old notion as to philosophic
people being pretty often unfeeling people... much too often. I think
I'd rather not become a stoic. Stoic means a stock. I'm not so far
along as you."
"Really? Oh, you try it and you'll like it... as the cannibals said to
the priest who had to watch them eat up the bishop. It is far better
to feel nothing than to feel unpleasant things too much... so much more
comfortable and cheap in the end.... _Ei_! you over there!" he called
out to a brown-skinned _czigány_ lad, suddenly appearing out of a
coppice, with something suspiciously like a snap-shot in his hand,
"don't you let the _házmester_ up at the house catch you with that
thing about you, or you'll get yourself into trouble! Young poacher!"
he added angrily... "those snap-shots when a gipsey handles them are as
bad as a fowling-piece. The devil take the little rascal! And the
devil take everything else!"
We walked down an alley in silence. Neither of us had ever been in
this sort of a mood till this afternoon. The atmosphere was a trifle
electric! Imre drew his sword and began giving slashes at trees and
weeds, an undesirable habit that he had, as we strolled onward.
Thought I, "A pleasing couple of hours truly we are likely to pass!"
I felt that I would better have stayed at home; to start my packing-up
for London. Then I pulled myself together. I found myself all at once
possessed of a decent stock of pride, if not "philosophy". I undertook
to meet Imre's manner, if not to match his sentiments. I began to
talk suavely of trifles, then of more serious topics... of wholly
general interests. I smiled much and laughed a little. I referred
to my leaving Szent-Istvánhely and him... more to the former
necessity... in precisely the neatest measure of tranquility and even
of humour. Imre's responsiveness to this delicate return for his own
indifference at once showed me that I had taken the right course not
to "spoil this last afternoon together".... probably the last such in
our lives!....
On one topic, most personal to Imre, I could speak with him at any
time without danger of its being talk-worn between us; could argue
with him about it even to forgetting any other matter in hand; if,
alas! Imre was ever satirical, or placidly unresponsive toward it.
That topic was his temperamental, obstinate indifference to making the
most of himself in his profession; to "going-on" in it, with all
natural energies or assumed ones. He was, as I have mentioned, a
perfectly satisfactory officer. But there it ended. He seemed to think
that he had done his duty, and must await such vague event as would
carry him, _motu proprio,_ further toward efficiency and distinction.
Or else, of all things foolish, not to say discreditable, he declared
he still would "keep his eyes open for a chance to enter civil
life"... would give himself up to some more or less aesthetic calling,
especially of a musical connection... become "free from this farce
of _playing_ soldier." He excused his plan by saying that his
position now was "disgracefully insincere." Insincere, yes; but not
disgraceful; and he was resting on his oars with the idea that he
ought not to try to row on, just when such conduct was fatal. A man
can remedy a good deal that he feels is an "insincere" attitude toward
daily life. And what is more, any worthy, any elevating profession,
and in the case of the soldier the sense of himself as a prop and
moral element in the State must not be insulted! The army-life even
if chosen merely from duty, and led in times of peace, is a good deal
like the marriage of respect. The man may never have loved the wife to
whom he is bound, he may never be able to love her, he may find her
presence lamentably _unsympathisch._ But mere self-respect and the
outward duty to her, and duty to those who are concerned in her honour
as in his, in her welfare as in his.... there comes in the unavoidable
and just demand! Honour and country are eloquent for a soldier,
always. It was on the indispensable, unwelcome, ever-postponed
_Hadiskolai_ course that, once more, this afternoon, I found myself
voluble with Imre. If I could not well speak of myself, I could of
him, in a parting appeal.
"You must go on! You have no right to falter now. For God's sake,
N.....! put by all these miserable dreams of quitting the service.
What in the world could you do out of it? You have plenty of time for
entertaining yourself with strumming and singing, and what not.
Everything is in your own hands. Oh, yes, I know perfectly well that
special help is needed to push one along fast... friends at court. But
you are not wholly without them. For your father's sake and yours!....
You have shown already what you can do! If you will only work a bit
harder! The War-School, Imre, the War-School! That must come. If you
care for your own credit, success... stop, I forbid you to sneer... get
into the School, hate it as much as you will!"
"I hate it! I hate it all, I tell you! I am sick of pretending to like
it. Especially just lately... more so than ever!"
"Very possibly. But what of that? Is there anything else in the wide
world that you feel you can do any better?... beginning such an
experiment at twenty-five years of age.... with no training for so much
as digging a ditch? Do you wish to become a dance-music strummer in
the Városliget? Or a second-class acrobat in the Circus Wulff? Or will
you throw off your uniform, to take flight to America... Australia... to
be a riding-master or a waiter in a restaurant, or a vagabond, like
some of the Habsburg arch-dukes? Imre, Imre! Instead be... a man! A man
in this, as in all else. You trifle with your certainty of a career.
Be a man in this matter!"
He sighed. Then softly, with a strange despair of life in his tone:
"Be a man? In this, as in _all_? God! how I wish I could be so."
"Wish you could be so! I don't know what you mean. A manlier fellow
one need not be! Only this damnable neglect of your career! You surely
wish to succeed in life?"
"I wish. But I cannot _will_..... Do not talk any more about it just
now. You can... _teremtette!_ you will write me quite enough about it.
You are exactly like Karvaly, once that topic comes into your mind!
Yes, like him to half-a-word... and I certainly am no match for either
of you."
"I should think," returned I, coldly, "that if you possess any
earnest, definite regard for such a zealous friend as Herr Karvaly, or
for _any_ true friend, you would prove it by just this very effort to
make the most of yourself... for their sakes if not for your own."
I waited a second or so, as we stood there looking across an opening
of the woodland. Then I added,--"For his sake, if not for--for such a
newcomer's sake as--mine. But I begin to believe that your heart does
not so easily stir really, warmly, as... as I supposed. At least, not
for me. Possibly for nobody, my dear N...! Odd--for you have so many
friends. I confess I don't see now just why. You are a strange fellow,
Imre. Such a row of contradictions!"
One, two... one, two... again was Imre walking along in silence, exactly
as on the evening when we came over the long Suspension Bridge in town
together. And once more was he whistling softly, as if either wholly
careless or buried in thought, those same two or three melancholy
notes of what I had discovered was a little Bakony peasant-song, "O,
jaj! az álom nelkül"--! ("Alas, I am sleepless,--I fear to dream!")
So passed more than an hour. We spoke less and less. My moods of
self-forgetfulness, of philosophy, passed with it. I could not
recover either.
We had made a detour around the lonelier portion of the park. The sun
was fairly setting as we came out before the open lawn, wide, and
uncropped save by two cows and a couple of farm-horses. There were
trees on either border. At farther range, was the long, low mansion,
three stories high, with countless white-painted _croisées_, and
lime-blanched chimneys; an odd Austro-Magyar-style dwelling, of
a long-past fashion, standing up solid and sharp against that
silver-saffron sky. Not a sign of life, save those slow-moving
beasts, far off in the middle of the lawn. No smoke from the
yet more removed old homestead. Not a sound, except a gentle
wind... melancholy and fitful. We two might have been remote, near
a village in the Siebenbürgen; not within twenty minutes of a great
commercial city.
Instead of going on toward the avenue which led to the exit--the hour
being yet early--we sat down on a stone bench, much beaten by weather.
A few steps away, rose the monument I have mentioned... "To the
Unforgettable Memory" of Lorand and Egon Z...
Neither Imre nor I spoke immediately; each of us was a trifle
leg-weary, I once more was sad and... angry. As we sat there, I read
over for yet another time... the last time?... those carved words which
reminded a reader, whether to his gladness of soul or dolour, that
love, a _love_ indeed strong as death, between two manly souls was no
mere ideal; but instead, a possible crown of existence, a glory of
life, a realizable unity that certain fortunate sons of men attained!
A jewel that others must yearn for, in disappointment and folly, and
with the taste of aloes, and the white of the egg, for the pomegranate
and the honeycomb! I sighed.
"Oh, courage, courage, my well beloved friend!" exclaimed Imre,
hearing the sigh and apparently quite misreading my innermost
thoughts. "Don't be downhearted again as to leaving Szent-Istvánhely
tomorrow; not to speak of being cheerful even if you must part from
your most obedient servant. Such is life!... unless we are born
sultans and kaisers... and if we are that, we must die to slow music
in the course of time."
I vouchsafed no comment. Could this be Imre von N...? Certainly I had
made the acquaintance of a new and extremely uncongenial Imre; in
exactly the least appropriate circumstances to lose sight of the
sympathetic, gentler-natured friend, whom I had begun to consider as
one well understood, and had found responsive to a word, a look. Did
all his closer friends meet, sooner or later, with this under-half of
his temperament--this brusqueness which I had hitherto seen in his
bearing with only his outside associates? Did they admire it... if
caring for him? Bitterness came over me in a wave, it rose to my lips
in a burst.
"It is just as well that one of us should show some feeling.... a
trifle... when our parting is so near."
A pause. Then Imre:
"The 'one of us', that is to say the only one, who has any 'feeling'
being yourself, my dear Oswald?"
"Apparently."
"Don't you think that perhaps you rather take things for granted? Or
that, perhaps, you feel too much? That is, in supposing that I feel
too little?"
My reply was quick and acid enough:
"Have you any sentiments in the matter worth calling by such a name,
at all? I've not remarked them so far! Are friends that love you and
value you only worth their day with you?... have they no real, lasting
individuality for you? Your heart is not so difficult to please as
mine; nor so difficult to occupy."
Again a brief interval. Imre was beating a tattoo on his braided cap,
and examining the top of that article with much attention. The sky
was less light now. The long, melancholy house had grown pallid
against the foliage. Still the same fitful breeze. One of the cows
lowed.
He looked up. He began speaking gravely... kindly.. not so much as if
seeking his words for their exactness, but rather as if he were
fearful of committing himself outwardly to some innermost process of
thought. Afraid, more than unwilling.
"Listen, my dear friend. We must not expect too much of one another in
this world... must we? Do not be foolish. You know well that one of the
last things that I regard as 'of a day' is _our_ friendship.. however
suddenly grown. No matter what you think now... for just these few
moments... when something disturbs us both... _that_ you know. Why, dear
friend! did I not believe it myself; had I not so soon after our
meeting believed it..... do you think I would have shown you so much of
my real self, happy or unhappy, for better or worse? Sides of my
nature unknown to others. Traits that you like, along with traits that
I see you do not like? Why Oswald, you understand _me_... the real
_me!_--better than anybody else that I have ever met. Because I wished
it... I hoped it. Because I--I could not help it. Just that. But you
see the trouble is that, in spite of all... you do not _wholly_
understand me. And... and the worst of the reason is that I am the one
most to blame for it! And I... I cannot better it now."
"When do we understand one another in this life of half-truths...
half-intimacies?"
"Yes... all too-often half... whether it is with one's wife, one's
mistress, one's friend! And I am not easy... ah, how I have had to
learn the way to keep myself so--to study it till it is a second
nature to me!--I am not easy to know! But, Oswald, Oswald, _ich kann
nicht anders, nein, nein, ich kann nicht anders!_"
And then, in his own language, dull and doggedly he added to
himself--"_Mit használ, mit használ az én nekem?_"--(What matters
it to _me_?)
He took my hand now, that was lying on the settle beside his own, and
held it while he spoke; unconsciously clasping it tighter and tighter
till it was in pain, or would have been so, had it not been, like his
own, cold from sheer nervousness. He continued:
"One thing more. You seem to forget sometimes that I am a man, and
that you too are a man. Not either of us a--woman. Forgive me--I speak
frankly. We are both of us, you and I, a bit over-sensitive...
_exalté_... in type. Isn't that so? You often suggest a... a...
regard... so... what shall I call it?... so romantic,... heroic...
passionate--a _love_ indeed (and here his voice was suddenly
broken)--something that I cannot accept from anybody without warning
him back.. back! I mean back coming to me from any other _man._
Sometimes you have troubled me... frightened me. I cannot,--will not,
try to tell you why this is so. But so it is. Our friendship must be
friendship as the world of today accepts friendship! Yes--as the world
of _our_ day does. God! What else could it be to-day.. friendship?
What else--_to-day?_"
"Not the friendship which is love, the love which is friendship?" I
said in a low voice; indeed, as I now remember more than half to
myself.
Imre was looking at the darkened sky, the grey lawn--into the vague
distance... at whatsoever was visible save myself. Then his glance was
caught by the ghostly marble of the monument to the young Z....
heroes, at which I too was staring. A tone of appeal came as he
continued:
"Once more, I beg, I implore you, not to make the mistake of--of--thinking
me cold-natured. I, cold-natured?.. Ah, ah! If you knew me better,
you'd not pack that notion into your trunks for London! Instead,
believe that I value unspeakably all your friendship for me, dear
Oswald. Time will prove that. I have had no friend like you, I
believe. But though friendship can be a passion... can cast a spell
over us that we cannot comprehend nor unbind"... here he withdrew his
hand and pointed to the memorial-stone set up for those two human
hearts that after so ardently beating for each other, were now but
dust... "it must be only a spiritual, manlike regard! The world thought
otherwise once. The world thinks--_as_ it thinks--now. And the world,
our to-day's world, must decide for us all! Friendship now--now--must
stay as the _man_ of our day understands it, Oswald. That is, if the
man deserves the name, and is not to be classed as some sort of an
incomprehensible... womanish... outcast... counterfeit.... a miserable
puzzle--born to be every genuine man's contempt!"
We had come, once more, suddenly, fully, and because of me, on the
topic which we had touched on, that night of our Lánczhid walk! But
this time I faced it, in a sense of fatality and finality; in a rash,
desperate desire to tear a secret out of myself, to breathe free, to
be true to myself, to speak out the past and the present, so strangely
united in these last few weeks, to reserve nothing, cost what it
might! My hour had come!
"You have asked me to listen to you!" I cried. Even now I feel the
despair, I think I hear the accent of it, with which I spoke. "I have
heard you! Now I want you to listen to me! I wish to tell you a story.
It is out of one man's deepest yet daily life... my own life. Most of
what I wish to tell happened long before I knew you. It was far away,
it was in what used to be my own country. After I tell it, you will be
one of very few people in all the world who have known... even
suspected... what happened to me. In telling you, I trust you with my
social honour... with all that is outwardly and inwardly myself. And I
shall probably pay a penalty... just because _you_ hear the wretched
history, Imre... _you_! For, before it ends, it has to do with you; as
well as with something that you have just spoken of--so fiercely! I
mean--how far a man, deserving to be called a man, refusing, as surely
as God lives and has made him, to believe that he is.... what did you
call him?... 'a miserable, womanish, counterfeit... outcast'... even if
he be incomprehensible to himself... how such a being can suffer and be
ruined in his innermost life and peace, by a soul-tragedy which he
nevertheless can hide--_must_ hide! I could have told you all on the
night that we talked, as we crossed the Lánczhid. No, that is not
true! I could not then. But I can now. For I may never see you again.
You talk of our 'knowing each other'! I wish you to know me. And I
could never write you this, never! Will you hear me, Imre?--patiently?"
"I will hear you patiently--yes, Oswald--if you think it best to tell
me. Of _that_ pray think, carefully."
"It is best! I am tired of thinking of it. It is time you knew."
"And I am really concerned in it?"
"You are immediately concerned. That is to say, before it ends. You
will see how."
"Then you would better go on... of course."
He consented thus, in the constrained but decided tone which I have
indicated as so often recurring during the evening, adding--"I am
ready, Oswald."
* * * * *
"From the time when I was a lad, Imre... a little child... I felt
myself unlike other boys in one element of my nature. That one matter
was my special sense, my passion, for the beauty, the dignity, the
charm... the... what shall I say?... the loveableness of my own sex. I
hid it, at least so far as, little by little, I came to realize its
force. For, I soon perceived that most other lads had no such
passionate sentiment, in any important measure of their natures, even
when they were fine-strung, impressionable youths. There was nothing
unmanly about me; nothing really unlike the rest of my friends in
school, or in town-life. Though I was not a strong-built, or
rough-spirited lad, I had plenty of pluck and muscle, and was as
lively on the playground, and fully as indefatigable, as my chums.
I had a good many friends; close ones, who liked me well. But I felt
sure, more and more, from one year to another even of that boyhood
time, that no lad of them all ever could or would care for me as much
as I could and did care for one or another of them! Two or three
episodes made that clear to me. These incidents made me, too, shyer
and shyer of showing how my whole young nature, soul and body
together, Imre--could be stirred with a veritable adoration for some
boy-friend that I elected.. an adoration with a physical yearning in
it--how intense was the appeal of bodily beauty, in a lad, or in a
man of mature years."
"And yet, with that beauty, I looked for manliness, poise, will-power,
dignity and strength in him. For, somehow I demanded those traits,
always and clearly, whatever else I sought along with them. I say
'sought'; I can say, too, won--won often to nearness. But this other,
more romantic, emotion in me... so strongly physical, sexual, as well
as spiritual... it met with a really like and equal and full response
once only. Just as my school-life was closing, with my sixteenth year
(nearly my seventeenth) came a friendship with a newcomer into my
classes, a lad of a year older than myself, of striking beauty of
physique, and uncommon strength of character. This early relation
embodied the same precocious, absolutely vehement _passion_ (I can
call it nothing else) on both sides. I had found my ideal! I had
realized for the first time, completely, a type; a type which had
haunted me from first consciousness of my mortal existence, Imre; one
that is to haunt me till my last moment of it. All my immature but
intensely ardent regard was returned. And then, after a few months
together, my schoolmate, all at once, became ill during an epidemic in
the town, was taken to his home, and died. I never saw him after he
left me."
"It was my first great misery, Imre. It was literally unspeakable!
For, I could not tell to anyone, I did not know how to explain even to
myself, the manner in which my nature had gone out to my young mate,
nor how his being spontaneously so had blent itself with mine. I was
not seventeen years old, as I said. But I knew clearly now what it
was to _love_ thus, so as to forget oneself in another's life and
death! But also I knew better than to talk of such things. So I never
spoke of my dead mate."
"I grew older, I entered my professional studies, and I was very
diligent with them. I lived in a great capital, I moved much in
general society. I had a large and lively group of friends. But
always, over and over, I realized that, in the kernel, at the very
root and fibre of myself, there was the throb and glow, the ebb and
the surge, the seeking as in a vain dream to realize again that
passion of friendship which could so far transcend the cold modern
idea of the tie; the Over-Friendship, the Love-Friendship of
Hellas--which meant that between man and man could exist--the
sexual-psychic love. That was still possible! I knew that now! I
had read it in the verses or the prose of the Greek and Latin and
Oriental authours who have written out every shade of its beauty or
unloveliness, its worth or debasements--from Theokritos to Martial, or
Abu-Nuwas, to Platen, Michel Angelo, Shakespeare. I had learned it
from the statues of sculptors, with those lines so often vivid with a
merely physical male beauty--works which beget, which sprang from,
the sense of it in a race. I had half-divined it in the music of a
Beethoven and a Tschaikowsky before knowing facts in the life-stories
of either of them--or of an hundred other tone-autobiographists."
"And I had recognized what it all meant to most people today!--from
the disgust, scorn and laughter of my fellow-men when such an emotion
was hinted at! I understood perfectly that a man must wear the Mask,
if he, poor wretch! could neither abide at the bound of ordinary
warmth of feeling for some friend of friends, that drew on his
innermost nature; or if he were not content because the other stayed
within that bound. Love between two men, however absorbing, however
passionate, must not be--so one was assured--solemnly or in disgusted
incredulity--a sexual love, a physical impulse and bond. _That_ was
now as ever, a nameless horror--a thing against all civilization,
sanity, sex, Nature, God! Therefore, _I_ was, of course... what then
was I? Oh, I perceived it! I was that anachronism from old--that
incomprehensible incident in God's human creation... the man-loving
man! The man-loving man! whose whole heart can be given only to
another man, and who when his spirit is passing into his beloved
friend's keeping would demand, would surrender, the body with it. The
man-loving man! He who seeks not merely a spiritual unity with him
whom he loves, but seeks the embrace that joins two male human beings
in a fusion that no woman's arms, no woman's kisses can ever realize.
No woman's embrace? No, no!... for instead of that, either he cares not
a whit for it, is indifferent to it, is smilingly scornful of it: or
else he tolerates it, even in the wife he has married (not to speak of
any less honourable ties) as an artifice, a mere quietus to that
undeceived sexual passion burning in his nature; wasting his really
_unmated_ individuality, years-long. Or else he surrenders himself to
some woman who bears his name, loves him--to her who perhaps in
innocence and ignorance believes that she dominates every instinct of
his sex!--making her a wife that she may bear to him children; or
thinking that marriage may screen him, or even (vain hope) 'cure' him!
But oftenest, he flies from any woman, as her sexual self; wholly
shrinks from her as from nothing else created; avoids the very touch
of a woman's hand in his own, any physical contact with woman, save in
a calm cordiality, in a sexless and fraternal reserve, a passionless
if yet warm... friendship! Not seldom he shudders (he may not know why)
in something akin to dread and to loathing, though he may succeed in
hiding it from wife or mistress, at any near approach of his strong
male body to a woman's trivial, weak, feminine one, however fair,
however harmonious in lines! Yes, even were she Aphrodite herself!"
"And yet, Imre, thousands, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of such
human creatures as I am, have not in body, in mind, nor in all the
sum of our virility, in all the detail of our outward selves, any
openly womanish trait! Not one! It is only the ignoramus and the
vulgar who nowadays think or talk of the homosexual as if he were
an--hermaphrodite! In every feature and line and sinew and muscle, in
every movement and accent and capability, we walk the world's ways as
men. We hew our ways through it as men, with vigour, success,
honour... _one_ master-instinct unsuspected by society for, it may be,
our lives long! We plough the globe's roughest seas as men, we rule
its States as men, we direct its finance and commerce as men, we forge
its steel as men, we grapple with all its sciences, we triumph in all
its arts as men, we fill its gravest professions as men, we fight in
the bravest ranks of its armies as men, or we plan out its fiercest
and most triumphant battles as men.... in all this, in so much more, we
are men! Why, (in a bitter paradox) one can say that we always have
been, we always are, always will be, too much _men_! So super-male, so
utterly unreceptive of what is not manly, so aloof from any feminine
essences, that we cannot tolerate woman at all as a sexual factor! Are
we not the extreme of the male? its supreme phase, its outermost
phalanx?--its climax of the aristocratic, the All-Man? And yet, if
love is to be only what the narrow, modern, Jewish-Christian ethics of
today declare it, if what they insist be the only _natural_ and pure
expression of 'the will to possess, the wish to surrender'.. oh, then
is the flouting world quite right! For then we are indeed _not_ men!
But if not so, what are we? Answer that, who can!"
"The more perplexed I became in all this wretchedness (for it had
grown to that by the time I had reached my majority).. the more
perplexed I became because so often in books, old ones or new, nay, in
the very chronicles of the criminal-courts, I came face to face with
the fact that though tens of thousands of men, in all epochs, of
noblest natures, of most brilliant minds and gifts, of intensest
energies.. scores of pure spirits, deep philosophers, bravest
soldiers, highest poets and artists, had been such as myself in this
mystic sex-disorganization.... that nevertheless of this same Race,
the Race-Homosexual, had been also, and apparently ever would
be, countless ignoble, trivial, loathesome, feeble-souled and
feeble-bodied creatures!... the very weaklings and rubbish of
humanity!"
"Those, _those,_ terrified me, Imre! To think of them shamed me; those
types of man-loving-men who, by thousands, live incapable of any noble
ideals or lives. Ah, those patently depraved, noxious, flaccid, gross,
womanish beings! perverted and imperfect in moral nature and in
even their bodily tissues! Those homosexual legions that are the
straw-chaff of society; good for nothing except the fire that purges
the world of garbage and rubbish! A Heliogabalus, a Gilles de Rais, a
Henri Trois, a Marquis de Sade; the painted male-prostitutes of the
boulevards and twilight-glooming squares! The effeminate artists, the
sugary and fibreless musicians! The Lady Nancyish, rich young men of
higher or lower society; twaddling aesthetic sophistries; stinking
with perfume like cocottes! The second-rate poets and the neurasthenic,
_précieux_ poetasters who rhyme forth their forged literary passports
out of their mere human decadence; out of their marrowless shams of
all that is a man's fancy, a man's heart, a man's love-life! The
cynical debauchers of little boys; the pederastic perverters of
clean-minded lads in their teens; the white-haired satyrs of clubs
and latrines!"
"What a contrast are these to great Oriental princes and to the heroes
and heroic intellects of Greece and Rome! To a Themistocles, an
Agesilaus, an Aristides and a Kleomenes; to Socrates and Plato, and
Saint Augustine, to Servetus and Beza; to Alexander, Julius Caesar,
Augustus, and Hadrian; to Prince Eugene of Savoy, to Sweden's Charles
the Twelfth, to Frederic the Great, to indomitable Tilly, to the
fiery Skobeleff, the austere Gordon, the ill-starred Macdonald;
to the brightest lyrists and dramatists of old Hellas and Italia;
to Shakespeare, (to Marlowe also, we can well believe) Platen,
Grillparzer, Hölderlin, Byron, Whitman; to an Isaac Newton, a Justus
Liebig--to Michel-Angelo and Sodoma; to the masterly Jerome Duquesnoy,
the classic-souled Winckelmann, to Mirabeau, Beethoven, Bavaria's
unhappy King Ludwig;--to an endless procession of exceptional men,
from epoch to epoch! Yet as to these and innumerable others, facts of
their hidden, inner lives have proved without shadow of doubt (however
rigidly suppressed as 'popular information') or inferences vivid
enough to silence scornful denial, have pointed out that they belonged
to Us."
"Nevertheless, did not the widest overlook of the record of
Uranianism, the average facts about one, suggest that the most part
of homosexual humanity had always belonged, always would belong, to
the worthless or the wicked? Was our Race gold or excrement!--as
rubies or as carrion? If _that_ last were one's final idea, why then
all those other men, the Normalists, aye, our severest judges, those
others whether good or bad, whether vessels of honour or dishonour,
who are not in their love-instincts as are we... the millions against
our tens of thousands, even if some of us are to be respected.... why,
they do right to cast us out of society; for, after all, we must be
just a vitiated breed!... We must be judged by our commoner mass.
"And yet, the rest of us! The Rest, over and over! men so high-minded,
often of such deserved honour from all that world which has either
known nothing of their sexual lives, or else has perceived vaguely,
and with a tacit, a reluctant pardon! Could one really believe in God
as making man to live at all, and to love at all, and yet at the same
time believe that _this_ love is not created, too, by God? is not of
God's own divinest Nature, rightfully, eternally--in millions of
hearts?... Could one believe that the eternal human essence is in its
texture today so different from itself of immemorial time before now,
whether Greek, Latin, Persian, or English? Could one somehow
find in his spirit no dread through _this,_ none, at the idea of
facing God, as his Judge, at any instant?... could one feel at
moments such strength of confidence that what was in him _so_
was righteousness... oh, could all this be?--and yet must a man
shudder before himself as a monster, a solitary and pernicious
being--diseased, leprous, gangrened--one that must stagger along on
the road of life, ever justly shunned, ever justly bleeding and ever
the more wearied, till Death would meet him and say 'Come--enough!--Be
free of all!--be free of _thyself_ most of all!'"
* * * * *
I paused. Doing so, I heard from Imre, who had not spoken so much as a
word--was it a sigh? Or a broken murmur of something coming to his
lips in his own tongue? Was it--no, impossible!... was it a sort of
sob, strangled in his throat? The evening had grown so dark that I
could not have seen his face, even had I wished to look into it.
However... absorbed now in my own tenebrous retrospect, almost
forgetting that anyone was there, at my side, I went on:
* * * * *
"You must not think that I had not had friendships of much depth,
Imre, which were not, first and last, quite free from this _other_
accent in them. Yes, I had had such; and I have many such now;
comradeships with men younger, men of my own age, men older, for whom
I feel warm affection and admiration, whose company was and is a true
happiness for me. But somehow they were not and, no matter what
they are they still are not, of _the_ Type; of that eternal,
mysteriously-disturbing cruel Type, which so vibrates sexually against
my hidden Self."
"How I dreaded, yet sought that Type!... how soon was I relieved, or
dull of heart, when I knew that this or that friend was not enough
dear to me, however dear he was, to give me that hated sexual stir and
sympathy, that inner, involuntary thrill! Yet I sought it ever, right
and left, since none embodied it for me; while I always _feared_ that
some one might embody it! There were approaches to it. Then, then, I
suffered or throbbed with a wordless pain or joy of life, at one and
the same time! But fortunately these encounters failed of full
realization. Or what might have been my fate passed me by on the
other side. But I learned from them how I could feel toward the
man who could be in his mind and body my ideal; my supremest
Friend. Would I ever meet him?... meet him _again_?... I could say to
myself--remembering that episode of my schooldays. Or would I never
meet him! God forbid that! For to be all my life alone, year after
year, striving to content myself with pleasant shadow instead of
glowing verity!... Ah, I could well exclaim in the cry of Platen:
"O, weh Dir, der die Welt verachtet, allein zu sein
Und dessen ganze Seele schmachtet allein zu sein!"
"One day a book came to my hand. It was a serious work, on abnormalisms
in mankind: a book partly psychologic, partly medico-psychiatric;
of the newest 'school'. It had much to say of homosexualism,
of Uranianism. It considered and discussed especially researches
by German physicians into it. It described myself, my secret,
unrestful self, with an unsparing exactness! The writer was a
famous specialistic physician in nervous diseases, abnormal conditions
of the mind, and so on--an American. For the first time I understood
that responsible physicians, great psychologists--profound students
of humanities, high jurists, other men in the world besides obscene
humourists of a club-room, and judges and juries in police-courts--knew
of men like myself and took them as serious problems for study,
far from wholly despicable. This doctor spoke of my kind as
simply--diseased. 'Curable', absolutely 'curable'; so long as the
mind was manlike in all else, the body firm and normal. Certainly that
was my case! Would I not therefore do well to take one step which was
stated to be most wise and helpful toward correcting as perturbed a
relation as mine had become to ordinary life? That step was--to marry.
To marry immediately!"
"The physician who had written that book happened to be in England at
the time. I had never thought it possible that I could feel courage to
go to any man... save that one vague sympathizer, my dream-friend,
he who some day would understand all!.. and confess myself; lay
bare my mysterious nature. But if it were a mere disease, oh,
that made a difference! So I visited the distinguished specialist
at once. He helped me urbanely through my embarrassing story of
my... 'malady'.... 'Oh, there was nothing extraordinary, not at all
extraordinary in it, from the beginning to the end,' the doctor
assured me, smiling. In fact, it was 'exceedingly common... All
confidential specialists in nervous diseases knew of hundreds of just
such cases. Nay, of much worse ones, and treated and cured them... A
morbid state of certain sexual-sensory nerve-centers'... and so on,
in his glib professional diagnosis."
--"'So I am to understand that I am curable?'--'Curable? Why, surely.
Exactly as I have written in my work; as Doctor So-and-So, and the
great psychiatric Professor Such-a-One, proved long ago... Your case my
dear sir, is the easier because you suffer in a sentimental and sexual
way from what we call the obsession of a set, distinct Type, you
see; instead of a general... h'm... how shall I style it... morbidity
of your inclinations. It is largely mere imagination! You say you
have never really "realized" this haunting masculine Type which
has given you such trouble? My dear sir, don't think any more
about such nonsense!... you never will "realize" it in any way to
be... h'm... disturbed. Probably had you married and settled down
pleasantly, years ago, you often would have laughed heartily at the
whole story of such an illusion of your nature now. Too much _thought_
of it all, my dear friend! too much introspection, idealism, sedentary
life, dear sir! Yes, yes, you must _marry_--God bless you!'"
"I paid my distinguished specialist his fee and came away, with a far
lighter heart than I had had in many a year."
"Marry! Well, that was easily to be done. I was popular enough with
women of all sorts. I was no woman-hater. I had many true and charming
and most affectionate friendships with women. For, you must know,
Imre, that such men as I am are often most attractive to women, most
beloved by them.. I mean by good women... far more than through being
their relatives and social friends. They do not understand the reason
of our attraction for them, of their confidence, their strengthening
sentiment. For we seldom betray to them our secret, and they seldom
have knowledge, or instinct, to guess its mystery. But alas! it is the
irony of _our_ nature that we cannot return to any woman, except by a
lie of the body and the spirit, (often being unable to compass or to
endure that wretched subterfuge) a warmer glow than affection's
calmest pulsations. Several times, before my consulting Dr. D... I had
had the opportunity of marrying 'happily and wisely'--if marriage with
any woman could have meant only a friendship. Naught physical, no
responsibility of sex toward the wife to whom one gives oneself. But
'the will to possess, the desire to surrender', the negation of what
is ourself which comes with the arms of some one other human creature
about us--ours about _him_--long before, had I understood that the
like of this joy was not possible for me with wife or mistress. It
had seemed to me hopeless of attempt. If marriage exact _that_
effort.. good God! then it means a growing wretchedness, riddle and
mystery for two human beings, not for one. Stay! it means worse still,
should they not be childless......"
"But now I had my prescription, and I was to be cured. In ten days,
Imre, I was betrothed. Do not be surprised. I had known a long while
earlier that I was loved. My betrothed was the daughter of a valued
family friend, living in a near town. She was beautiful, gifted,
young, high-souled and gentle. I had always admired her warmly; we
had been much thrown together. I had avoided her lately however,
because--unmistakeably--I had become sure of a deeper sentiment on her
part than I could exchange."
"But now, now, I persuaded myself that I did indeed return it; that I
had not understood myself. And confidently, even ardently, I played my
new role so well, Imre, that I was deceived myself. And she? She never
felt the shade of suspicion. I fancied that I loved her. Besides, my
betrothed was not exacting, Imre. In fact, as I now think over those
few weeks of our deeper intimacy, I can discern how I was favoured in
my new relationship to her by her sensitive, maidenly shrinking from
the physical nearness, even the touch, of the man who was dear to
her... how troubling the sense of any man's advancing physical
dominancy over her. Yet do not make the mistake of thinking that she
was cold in her calm womanliness; or would have held herself aloof as
a wife. It was simply virginal, instinctive reserve. She loved me; and
she would have given herself wholly to me, as my bride."
"The date for our marriage was set. I tried to think of nothing but
it and her; of how calmly, securely happy I should soon be, and of
all the happiness that, God willing, I would bring into her young
life. I say 'tried' to think of nothing else. I almost succeeded.
But... nevertheless... in moments..."
"It was not to be, however, this deliverance, this salvation for me!"
"One evening, I was asked by a friend to come to his lodgings to dine,
to meet some strangers, his guests. I went. Among the men who came was
one... I had never seen him before... newly arrived in my city.. coming
to pass the winter. From the instant that set me face to face with
him... that let me hear his voice in only a greeting... that put us to
exchanging a few commonplace sentences... I thrilled with joy and
trembled to my innermost soul with a sudden anguish. For, Imre, it was
as if that dead schoolmate of mine, not merely as death had taken him;
but matured, a man in his beauty and charm... it was as if every
acquaintance that ever had quickened within me the same unspeakable
sense of a mysterious bond of soul and of body... the Man-Type which
owned me and ever must own me, soul and body together--had started
forth in a perfect avatar. Out of the slumberous past, out of the
kingdom of illusions, straying to me from the realm of banished
hopes, it had come to me! The Man, the Type, that thing which meant
for me the fires of passion not to be quenched, that subjection of my
whole being to an ideal of my own sex... that fatal 'nervous illusion',
as the famous doctor's book so summarily ranged it for the world.. all
had overtaken me again! My peace was gone--if ever I had had true
peace. I was lost, with it!..."
"From that night, I forgot everything else except him. My former,
unchanged, unchangeable self, in all its misery and mystery reverted.
The temperament which I had thought to put to sleep, the invisible
nature I had believed I could strangle--it had awakened with the
lava-seethe of a volcano. It burned in my spirit and body, like a
masked crater."
"Imre, I sought the friendship of this man, of my ideal who had
re-created for me, simply by his existence, a world of feeling; one of
suffering and yet of delight. And I won his friendship! Do not suppose
that I dared to dream, then or ever, of more than a commonplace,
social intimacy. Never, never! Merely to achieve his regard toward
myself a little more than toward others; merely that he would care to
give me more of his society, would show me more of his inner self
than he inclined to open to others. Just to be accounted by him
somewhat dearer, in such a man's vague often elusive degree, than the
majority for whom he cared at all! Only to have more constant leave to
delight my spirit in silence with his physical beauty while guarding
from him in a sort of terror the psychic effects it wrought in
me..... My hopes went no further than these. And, as I say, I won
them. As it kindly happened, our tastes, our interests in arts and
letters, our temperaments, the fact that he came to my city with few
acquaintances in it and was not a man who readily seeks them... the
chance that he lived almost in the same house with me... such
circumstances favored me immediately. But I did not deceive myself
once, either as to what was the measure or the kind of my emotion for
him, any more than about what (if stretched to its uttermost) would be
his sentiment for me, for any man. He could not love a man _so._ He
could love... passionately, and to the completing of his sexual
nature... only a woman. He was the normal, I the abnormal. In that,
alone, he failed to meet all that was I:
"O, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less.. and what worlds away!"
"Did I keep my secret perfectly from him? Perfectly, Imre! You will
soon see that clearly. There were times when the storm came full over
me... when I avoided him, when I would have fled from myself, in the
fierce struggle. But I was vigilant. He was moved, now and then, at a
certain inevitable tenderness that I would show him. He often spoke
wonderingly of the degree of my 'absorbing friendship'. But he was a
man of fine and romantic ideals, of a strong and warm temper. His life
had been something solitary from his earliest youth... and he was no
psychologist. Despite many a contest with our relationship, I never
allowed myself to complain of him. I was too well aware how fortunate
was my bond with him. The man esteemed me, trusted me, admired
me... all this thoroughly. I had more; for I possessed what in such a
nature as his proves itself a manly affection. I was an essential
element in his daily life all that winter; intimate to a depth that
(as he told me, and I believe it was wholly true) he had never
expected another man could attain. Was all _that_ not enough for me?
Oh, yes! and yet... and yet..."
"I will not speak to you more of that time which came to pass for me,
Imre. It was for me, verily, a new existence! It was much such a daily
life, Imre, as you and I might lead together, had fate allowed us the
time for it to ripen. Perhaps we yet might lead it... God knows!... I
leave you tomorrow!"
"But, you ask,--what of my marriage-engagement?"
"I broke it. I had broken it within a week after I met him, so far as
shattering, it to myself went. I knew that no marriage, of any kind
yet tolerated in our era, would 'cure' me of my 'illusion', my
'nervous disease', could banish this 'mere psychic disturbance', the
result of 'too much introspection.' I had no disease! No... I was
simply what I was born!--a complete human being, of firm, perfect
physical and mental health; outwardly in full key with all the man's
world: but, in spite of that, a being who from birth was of a vague,
special sex; a member of the sex _within_ the most obvious sexes, or
apart from them. I was created as a man perfectly male, save in the
one thing which keeps such a 'man' back from possibility of ever
becoming integrally male--his terrible, instinctive demand for a
psychic and a physical union with a man--not with a woman."
"Presently, during that same winter, accident opened my eyes wider to
myself. From then, I have needed no further knowledge from the Tree of
my Good and Evil. I met with a mass of serious studies, German,
Italian, French, English, from the chief European specialists and
theorists on the similisexual topic: many of them with quite other
views than those of my well-meaning but far too conclusive Yankee
doctor. I learned of the much-discussed theories of 'secondary
sexes' and 'intersexes'. I learned of the theories and facts of
homosexualism, of the Uranian Love, of the Uranian Race, of 'the Sex
within a Sex'. I could, at last, inform myself fully of its mystery,
and of the logical, inevitable and necessary place in sexualism, of
the similisexual man, and of the similisexual woman".
"I came to know their enormous distribution all over the world today;
and of the grave attention that European scientists and jurists have
been devoting to problems concerned with homosexualism. I could pursue
intelligently the growing efforts to set right the public mind as to
so ineradicable and misunderstood a phase of humanity. I realized that
I had always been a member of that hidden brotherhood and Sub-Sex, or
Super-Sex. In wonder, too I informed myself of its deep, instinctive,
freemasonries--even to organized ones--in every social class, every
land, every civilization: of the signs and symbols and safeguards of
concealment. I could guess that my father, my grandfather and God
knows how many earlier forerunners of my unhappy Ego, had been of it!
'Cure?' By marriage? By marriage, when my blood ran cold at the
thought!...... The idea was madness, in a double sense. Better a
pistol-shot to my heart! So first, I found pretexts to excuse meetings
with my bride-not-to-be, avoiding thus a comedy which now was odious
as a lie and insupportable as a nervous demand. Next, I pleaded
business-worries. So the marriage was postponed for three months
further. Then I discovered a new obstacle to bring forward. With that,
the date of the wedding was made indefinite. Then came some idle
gossip, unjust reflections on my betrothed and on myself. I knew well
where blame enough should fall, but not that sort of blame. An end had
to be! I wrote my betrothed, begging my freedom, giving no reason. She
released me, telling me that she would never marry any other man. She
keeps her word to-day. I drew my breath in shame at my deliverance.
"Any other _man_!"
"So seldom had I referred to my betrothal in talking with my new
friend that he asked me no questions when I told him it was ended.
He mistook my reserve; and respected it rigidly."
"During that winter, I was able to prove myself a friend in deed and
need to him. Twice, by strange fatality, a dark cloud came over his
head. I might not dare to show him that he was dearer than myself; but
I could protect and aid him. For, do not think that he had no faults.
He had more than few; he was no hero, no Galahad. He was careless, he
was foolishly obstinate, he made missteps; and punishment came. But
not further than near. For I stood between! At another time his
over-confidence in himself, his unsuspiciousness, almost brought him
to ruin, with a shameful scandal! I saved him, stopping the mouths of
the dogs that were ready to howl, as well as to tear. I did so at the
cost of impairing my own material welfare; worse still, alas! with a
question of duty to others. Then, once again, as that year passed, he
became involved in a difference, in which certain of my own relatives,
along with some near friends of my family were concerned; directors in
a financial establishment in our city. I took his part. By that step,
I sacrificed the good-will and the longtime intimacy of the others.
What did I care? 'The world well lost!' thought I."
"Then, from that calm sky, thickened and fell on me the storm; and for
my goodly vineyard I had Desolation!"
"One holiday, he happened to visit some friends in the town where was
living my betrothed.. that had been. He heard there, in a club's
smoking-room, a tale 'explaining'--positively and circumstantially,
why my engagement had been broken. The story was a silly falsehood;
but it reflected on my honour. He defended me instantly and warmly.
That I heard. But his host, after the sharp passing altercation was
over, the evening ended, took him aside to tell him privately that,
while friendship for me made it a credit to stand out for me, the
tale was 'absolutely true'. He returned to me late that night. He was
thoroughly annoyed and excited. He asked me, as I valued my good name
and his public defence of it, to give him, then and there, the real,
the decisive reason for my withdrawing from my engagement. He would
not speak of it to anyone; but he would be glad to know, now, on what
ground he rested. I admitted that my betrothed had not wished the
withdrawing."
"That was the first thing counter to what he had insisted at the club.
He frowned in perplexity. Ah, so the matter was wholly from myself? I
assented. Would I further explain?... so that at least he could get rid
of one certain local statement... of that other one. An argument rose
between us that grew to a sharp altercation. It was our first one, as
well as our last. We became thoroughly angry, I the more so, because
of what I felt was a manifest injustice to myself. Finally there was
no other thing left than for me to meet his appeal--his demand. 'No
matter what was the root of the mystery, no matter what any attitude
toward me because of it, he must _know_'... Still I hung back. Then,
solemnly, he pledged me his word that whatever I might disclose, he
'would forgive it'; it should 'never be mentioned between us two
again'; only provided that it bore out his defence of my relation to a
faithful and pure woman."
"So--I yielded! Lately, the maddening wish to tell him all at any
risks, the pressure of passion and its concealment... they had never so
fiercely attacked me! In a kind of exalted shame, but in absolute
sincerity, I told him all! I asked nothing from him, except his
sympathy, his belief in whatever was my higher and manlier nature... as
the world judges any man... and the toleration of our friendship on the
lines of its past. Nothing more: not a handclasp, not a look, not a
thought more; the mere continued sufferance of my regard. Never again
need pass between us so much as a syllable or a glance to remind him
of this pitiable confession from me, to betray again the mysterious
fire that burned in me underneath our intimacy. He had not suspected
anything of it before. It could be forgotten by him from now, onward."
"Did I ask too much? By the God that made mankind, Imre--that made it
not only male or female but also as We are... I do not think I did!"
"But he, _he_ thought otherwise! He heard my confession through with
ever more hostile eyes, with an astonished unsympathy... disgust... curling
his lips. Then, he spoke--slowly--pitilessly: '... I have heard that
such creatures as you describe yourself are to be found among mankind.
I do not know, nor do I care to know, whether they are a sex by
themselves, a justified, because helpless, play of Nature; or even a
kind of _logically_ essential link, a between-step.... as you seem to
have persuaded yourself. Let all that be as it may be. I am not a man
of science nor keen to such new notions! From this moment, you and I
are strangers! I took you for my friend because I believed you to be
a... man. You chose me for your friend because you believed me.... stay,
I will not say _that!_... because you wished me to be.... a something
else, a something more or less like to yourself, whatever you
_are!_ I loathe you!... I loathe you! When I think that I have
touched your hand, have sat in the same room with you, have respected
you!.. Farewell!...... If I served you as a man should serve such beings
as you, this town should know your story tomorrow! Society needs more
policemen than it has, to protect itself from such lepers as you! I
will keep your hideous secret. Only remember never to speak to
me!... never to look my way again! Never! From henceforward I have
never known you and never will think of you!--if I can forget anything
so monstrous in this world!'"
"So passed he out of my life, Imre. Forever! Over the rupture of our
friendship not much was said, nevertheless. For he was called to
London a few days after that last interview; and he was obliged to
remain in the capital for months. Meantime I had changed my life to
meet its new conditions; to avoid gossip. I had removed my lodgings to
a suburb. I had taken up a new course in professional work. It needed
all my time. Then, a few months later, I started quietly on a long
travel-route on the Continent, under excuse of ill-health. I was far
from being a stranger to life in at least half a dozen countries of
Europe, east or west. But now, now, I knew that it was to be a refuge,
an exile!"
"For so began those interminable, those mysterious, restless
pilgrimages, with no set goals for me; those roamings alone, of which
even the wider world, not to say this or that circle of friends, has
spoken with curiosity and regret. My unexplained and perpetual exile
from all that earlier meant home, sphere, career, life! My wandering
and wandering, ever striving to forget, ever struggling to be beguiled
intellectually at least; to be diverted from so profound a sense of
loss. Or to attain a sort of emotional _assoupissement,_ to feel
myself identified with new scenes, to achieve a new identity. Little
by little, my birth-land, my people, became strange to me. I grew
wholly indifferent to them. I turned my back fuller on them, evermore.
The social elements, the grades of humanity really mine, the concerns
of letters, of arts,... from these I divorced myself utterly. They knew
me no more. In some of them, already I had won a certain repute; but I
threw away its culture as one casts aside some plant that does not
seem to him worth watering and tending."
"And indeed the zest of these things, their reason for being mine,
seemed dead.... asphyxiated! For, they had grown to be so much a part
of what had been the very tissue of intimacy, of life, with _him_! I
fled them all. Never now did my foot cross the threshold of a
picture-gallery, never did I look twice at the placard of a theater,
never would I enter a concert-room or an opera-house, never did I
care to read a romance, a poem, or to speak with any living creature
of aesthetics that had once so appealed to me! Above all did my
aversion to music (for so many years a peculiar interest for
me)--become now a dull hatred,..... a detestation, a contempt, a
horror!... super-neurotic, quintessently sexual, perniciously
homosexual art--mystery--that music is! For me, no more symphonies, no
more sonatas, no more songs!... No more exultations, elegies, questions
to Fate of any orchestra!... Nevermore!"
"And yet, involuntarily, sub-consciously, I was always hoping...
seeking--_something._ Hoping..., seeking.... what? Another such man as
I? Sometimes I cried out as to _that,_ 'God forbid it!' For I dreaded
such a chance now; realizing the more what it would most likely _not_
offer me. And really unless a miracle of miracles were to be wrought
just for me, unless I should light upon another human creature who in
sympathies, idealisms, noble impulses, manliness and a virile life
could fill, and could wish to fill, the desolate solitudes of mine,
could confirm all that was deepest fixed in my soul as the concept of
true similisexual masculinity.... oh, far better meet none! For such a
miracle of miracles I should not hope. Even traversing all the devious
ways of life may not bring us face to face with such a friend. Yet I
was hoping--seeking--I say: even if there was no vigour of expectancy,
but rather in my mind the melancholy lines of the poet:
"And are there found two souls, that each the other
Wholly shall understand? Long must man search
In that deep riddle--seek that Other soul
Until he dies! Seeking, despairing--dies!"
"Or, how easy to meet such a man, he also 'seeking, despairing' and
not to recognize him, any more than he recognizes us! The Mask--the
eternal social Mask for the homosexual!--worn before our nearest and
dearest, or we are ruined and cast out! I resolved to be content with
tranquility... pleasant friendships. Something like a kindly apathy,
often possessed me."
"And nevertheless, the Type that still so stirred my nature? The man
that is.... inevitably.. to be _loved,_ not merely liked; to be feared
while yet sought; the friend from whom I can expect nothing, from
whom never again will I expect anything, more than calm regard,
his sympathy, his mere leave for my calling him '_barátom_'--my
brother-friend? He, by whom I should at least be respected as an
upright fellow-creature from the workshop of God, not from the hand of
the Devil; be taken into companionship because of what in me is
worthily companionable? The fellow-man who will accept what of good in
me is like the rest of men, nor draw away from me, as from a leper?
Have I really ceased to dream of this grace for me, this vision--as
years have passed?"
"Never, alas! I have been haunted by it; however suppressed in my
heart. And something like its embodiment has crossed my way, really
nearly granted me again; more than once. There was a young English
officer, with whom I was thrown for many weeks, in a remote Northern
city. We became friends; and the confidence between us was so great
that I trusted him with the knowledge of what I am. And therewith had
I in turn, a confession from him of a like misfortune, the story of
his passion for a brother-officer in a foreign service, that made him
one of the most wretched men on the face of the world--while everyone
in his circle of home-intimates and regimental friends fancied that he
had not a trouble in life! There was, too, one summer in Bosnia, a
meeting with a young Austrian architect; a fellow of noble beauty and
of high, rich nature. There was a Polish friend, a physician--now far
off in Galizien. There was an Italian painter in Rome. But such
incidents were not full in the key. Hence, they moved me only
so far and no farther. Other passings and meetings came. Warm
friendship often grew out of them; tranquil, lasting, sustaining
friendship!--that soul-bond not over-common with _us,_ but, when
really welded, so beautiful, so true, so enduring!..."
"But one thing I had sworn, Imre; and I have kept my word! That so
surely as ever again I may find myself even half-way drawn to a man by
the inner passion of an Uranian love--not by the mere friendship of a
colder psychic complexion--if that man really shows me that he cares
for me with respect, with intimate affection, with trust... then he
shall know absolutely what manner of man I am! He shall be shown
frankly with what deeper than common regard he has become a part of my
soul and life! He shall be put to a test!... with no shrinkings on my
part. Better break apart early, than later... if he say that we break!
Never again, if unquiet with such a passion, would I attempt to wear
to the end the mask, to fight out the lie, the struggle! I must be
taken as I am, pardoned for what I am; or neither pardoned nor taken.
I have learned my lesson once and well. But the need of my maintaining
such painful honesty has come seldom. I have been growing in to
expecting no more of life, no realizing whatever of the Type that had
been my undoing, that must mean always my peace or my deepest
unrest... till I met you, Imre! Till I met you!"
"Met you! Yes, and a strange matter in my immediately passionate
interest in you... another one of the coincidences in our interest for
each other... is the racial blood that runs in your veins. You are a
Magyar. You have not now to be told of the unexplainable, the
mysterious affinity between myself and your race and nation; of
my sensitiveness, ever since I was a child, to the chord which
Magyarország and the Magyar sound in my heart. Years have only added
to it, till thy land, thy people, Imre, are they not almost my land,
my people? Now I have met thee. Thou wert _to be;_ somewhat, at least,
to be for me! That thou wast ordained to come into the world that I
should love thee, no matter what thy race... that I believe! But, see!
Fate also has willed that thou shouldst be Magyar, one of the Children
of Emesa, one of the Folk of Árpád!"
"I cannot tell thee, Imre,... oh, I have no need now to try!.... what
_thou_ hast become for me. My Search ended when thou and I met. Never
has my dream given me what is this reality of thyself. I love this
world now only because thou art in it. I respect thee wholly--I
respect myself--certain, too, of that coming time, however far away
now, when no man shall ever meet any intelligent civilization's
disrespect simply _because_ he is similisexual, Uranian! But--oh,
Imre, Imre!--I _love_ thee, as can love only the Uranian... once more
helpless, and therewith hopeless!--but this time no longer silent,
before the Friendship which is Love, the Love which is Friendship."
"Speak my sentence. I make no plea. I have kept my pledge to confess
myself tonight. But I would have fulfilled it only a little later,
were I not going away from thee tomorrow. I ask nothing, except what
I asked long ago of that other, of whom I have told thee! Endure my
memory, as thy friend! Friend? That at least! For, I would say
farewell, believing that I shall still have the right to call thee
'friend'--even--O God!--when I remember tonight. But whether that
right is to be mine, or not, is for thee to say. Tell me!"
I stopped.
Full darkness was now about us. Stillness had so deepened that the
ceasing of my own low voice made it the more suspenseful. The sweep of
the night-wind rose among the acacias. The birds of shadow flitted
about us. The gloom seemed to have entered my soul--as Death into
Life. Would Imre ever speak?
His voice came at last. Never had I heard it so moved, so melancholy.
A profound tenderness was in every syllable.
"If I could... my God! if I only could!.. say to thee what I cannot.
Perhaps... some time.... Forgive me, but thou breakest my heart!.... Not
because I care less for thee as my friend.... no, above all else, not
that reason! We stay together, Oswald!... We shall always be what we
have become to each other! Oh, _we_ cannot change, not through all our
lives! Not in death, not in anything! Oh, Oswald! that thou couldst
think, for an instant, that I--I--would dream of turning away from
thee... suffer a break for us two... because thou art made in thy nature
as God makes mankind--as each and all, or not as each and all! We are
what we are!... This terrible life of ours... this existence that men
insist on believing is almost _all_ to be understood nowadays--probed
through and through--decided!... but that ever was and will be just
mystery, _all_!...... Friendship between us? Oh, whether we are near or
far! Forever! Forever, Oswald!... Here, take my hand! As long as I
live... and beyond _then_! Yes, by God above us, by God in us!... Only,
only, for the sake of the bond between us from this night, promise me
that thou wilt never speak again of what thou hast told me of
thyself--never, unless I break the silence. Nevermore a word of--of
thy--thy--feeling for me. There are other things for us to talk of,
my dear brother? Thou wilt promise?"
With his hand in mine, my heart so lightened that I was as a new
creature, forgetting even the separation before me, I promised.
Gladly, too. For, instead of loss, with this parting, what gain was
mine! Imre knew me now as myself!--he really knew me: and yet was now
rather the more my friend than less, so I could believe, after this
tale of mine had been told him! His sympathy--his respect--his
confidence--his affection--his continued and deeper share in my
strange and lonely life--even if lands and seas should divide us
two--ah, in those instants of my reaction and relief, it seemed to me
that I had everything that my heart had ever sought of him, or would
seek! I made the promise too, gladly with all my soul. Why should he
or I ever speak of any stranger emotions again?
Abruptly, after another long pressure of my hand, my friend started
up.
"Oswald we must go home!" he exclaimed. "It's nearly nine o'clock,
surely. I have a regimental report to look at before ten... this affair
of mine tomorrow."
Nearly the whole of our return-ride we were silent. The tram was full
as before with noisy pleasure-trippers. Even after quitting the
vehicle, neither of us said more than a few sentences... the beauty of
the night, the charm of the old Z... park, and so on. But again Imre
kept his arm in mine, all the way we walked. It was, I knew, not
accident. It was the slight sign of earnest thoughts, that he did not
care to utter in so many words.
We came toward my hotel.
"I shall not say farewell tonight, Oswald," said Imre, "you know how I
hate farewells at any time... hate them as much as you. There is more
than enough of such a business. Much better to be sensible.. to add as
few as one can to the list.... I will look in on you tomorrow... about
ten o'clock. I don't start till past midday."
I assented. I was no longer disturbed by any mortal concerns, not even
by the sense of the coming sundering. Distrust--loneliness--the one
was past, even if the other were to come!
The hotel-portier handed me a telegram, as we halted in the light of
the doorway.
"Wait till I read this," I said.
The dispatch ran: "Situation changed. Your coming unnecessary. Await
my letter. Am starting for Scotland."
I gave an exclamation of pleasure, and translated the words to Imre.
"What! Then you need not leave Szent-Istvánhely?" he asked quickly, in
the tone of heartiest pleasure that a friend could wish to hear.
"_Teremtette!_ I am as happy as you!.... What a good thing, too, that
we were so sensible as not to allow ourselves to make a dumpish,
dismal afternoon of it, over there at the Z.... You see, I am right,
my dear fellow.. I am always right!... Philosophy, divine philosophy!
Nothing like it! It makes all the world go round."......
With which Imre touched his _csákó_, laughed his jolliest laugh, and
hurried away to the Commando of the regiment.
I went upstairs, not aware of there being stairs to climb... unless
they might be steps to the stars. In fact the stars, it seemed to me,
could not only shine their clearest in Szent-Istvánhely; but, after
all, could take clement as well as unfriendly courses, in mortal
destiny.
III.
FACES--HEARTS--SOULS.
"Think'st thou that I could bear to part
With thee?--and learn to halve my heart?"
"No more reproach, no more despair!"
BYRON
".... Et deduxit eos in portum voluntatis sorum".
_Psalm._ CVI, 30.
Next morning, before I was dressed, came this note:
"I have just received word that I must take my company out to the
camp at once. Please excuse my not coming. It does not make so much
difference, now that you are to stay. Will write you from the Camp.
Only a few days absence. I shall think of you.
Imre.
P. S. Please write me."
I was amused, as well as pleased, at this characteristic missive.
My day passed rather busily. I had not time to send even a card to
Imre; I had no reason to do so. To my surprise, the omission was
noticed. For, on the following morning I was in receipt of a lively
military _Ansichtskarte_ with a few words scratched on it; and at
evening came the ensuing communication; which, by the by, was neither
begun with the "address of courtesy", as the "Complete Letter-Book"
calls it, nor ended with the "salute of ceremony", recommended by the
same useful volume; they being both of them details which Imre had
particularly told me he omitted with his intimate "friends who were
not prigs." He wrote:
"Well, how goes it with you? With me it is dull and fatiguing enough
out here. You know how I hate all this business, even if you and
Karvaly insist on my trying to like it. I have a great deal to say to
you this evening that I really cannot write. Today was hot and it
rained hard. Dear Oswald, you do not know how I value your friendship.
Yesterday I saw the very largest frog that ever was created. He looked
the very image of our big vis-a-vis in the Casino, Hofkapellan
Számbor. Why in God's name do you not write? The whole city is full of
_tiz-filléres_ picture-postcards! Buy one, charge it to my account,
write me on it.--
Imre.
P. S. I think of you often, Oswald."
This communication, like its predecessor, was written in a tenth-century
kind of hand, with a blunt lead-pencil! I sent its authour a few
lines, of quite as laconical a tone as he had given me to understand
he so much preferred.
The next day, yet another communication from the P... Camp! Three
billets in as many days, from a person who "hated to write letters,"
and "never wrote them when he could get out of it!" Clearly, Imre in
camp was not Imre in Szent-Istvánhely!
"Thank you, dear Oswald, for your note. Do not think too much of that
old nonsense (_azon régi bolondság_) about not writing letters. _It
depends._ I send my this in a spare moment. But I have nothing
whatever to say. Weather here warm and rainy. Oswald, you are a great
deal in my thoughts. I hope I am often in yours. I shall not return
tomorrow, but I intend to be with you on Sunday. Life is wearisome.
But so long as one has a friend, one can get on with much that is part
of the burden; or possibly with _all_ of it.--Yours ever--
Imre"
I have neglected to mention that the second person of intimate Magyar
address, the "thou" and "thee", was used in these epistles of Imre, in
my answers, with the same instinctiveness that had brought it to our
lips on that evening in the Z... park. I shall not try to translate
it systematically, however; any more than I shall note with system
its disused English equivalents in the dialogue that occurs in the
remainder of this record. More than once before the evening named,
Imre and I had exchanged this familiarity, half in fun. But now it
had come to stay. Thenceforth we adhered to it; a kind of serious
symbolism as well as intimate sweetness in it.
I looked at that note with attention: first, because it was so opposed
in tenor to the Imre von N... "model". Second, because there appeared
to have been a stroke under the commonplace words "Yours ever". That
stroke had been smirched out, or erased. Was it like Imre to be
sentimental, for an instant, in a letter?--even in the most ordinary
accent? Well, if he had given way to it, to try to conceal such a sign
of the failing, particularly without re-writing the letter... why, that
was characteristic enough! In sending him a newspaper-clipping, along
with a word or so, I referred to the unnecessary briskness of our
correspondence. ".... Pray do not trouble yourself, my dear N..., to
change your habits on my account. Do not write, now or ever, only
because a word from you is a pleasure to me. Besides I am not yet on
my homeward-journey. Save your postal artillery."
To the foregoing from me, Imre's response was this:
"It is three o'clock in the morning, and everybody in this camp must
be sound asleep, except your most humble servant. You know that I
sometimes do not sleep well, Lord knows why. So I sit here, and scrawl
this to thee, dear Oswald... All the more willingly because I am
_awfully_ out of sorts with myself..... I have nothing special to
write thee; and nevertheless how much I would _now_ be glad to _say_
to thee, were we together. See, dearest friend... thou hast walked
from that other world of thine into my life, and I have taken my place
in thine, because for thee and for me there shall be, I believe, a
happiness henceforth that not otherwise could come to us. I have known
what it is to suffer, just because there has been no man to whom I
could speak or write as to thee. Dear friend, we are much to one
another, and we shall be more and more... No, would not write if it
were not a pleasure to me to do it. I promise thee so. We had a great
regimental athletic contest this afternoon, and I took two prizes. I
will try to sleep now, for I must be on my feet very early. Good
night, or rather good-morning, and remember...
Thine own
Imre."
This letter gave me many reflections. There was no need for its
closing injunction. To tell the truth, Imre von N... was beginning to
bewilder me!--this Imre of the P... Camp and of the mail-bag, so
unlike the Imre of our daily conversations and moods when vis-à-vis.
There was certainly a curious, a growing psychic difference. The
naïveté, the sincerity of the speaking and of the acting Imre was
written into his lines spontaneously enough. But there was that
odd new touch of an equally spontaneous something, a suppressed
emotion--that I could not define. My own letters to Imre certainly
did not ring to the like key. On the contrary (I may as well mention
that it was not of mere accident, but in view of a resolution
carefully considered, and held-to) the few lines which I sent him
during those days were wholly lacking in any such personal utterances
as his. If Imre chose to be inconsistent, I would be steadfast.
All such cogitations as to Imre's letters were however soon unnecessary,
inasmuch as on the tenth day of his Camp-service, he wrote:
"Expect me tomorrow. I am well. I have much to tell thee. After all, a
camp is not a bad place for reflections. It is a tiresome, rainy day
here. I took the second prize for shooting at long range today.
Imre."
Now, I did not suppose that Imre's pent-up communicativeness was
likely to burst out on the topic of the Hungarian local weather, much
less with reference to his feats with a rifle, or in lifting heavy
weights. I certainly could not fancy just what meditations promoted
that remark about the Camp! So far as I knew anything, of such
localities, camps were not favourable to much consecutive thinking
except about the day's work.
I did not expect him till the afternoon should close. I was busy
with my English letters. It was a warm August noon, and even when
coat and waistcoat had been thrown aside, I was oppressed. My
high-ceiled, spacious room was certainly amongst the cooler corners
of Szent-Istvánhely; but the typical ardour of any Central-Hungary
midsummer is almost Italian. Outside, in the hotel-court, the fountain
trickled sleepily. Even the river steamers seemed too torpid to signal
loudly. But suddenly there came a most wide-awake sort of knock; and
Imre, with an exclamation of delight--Imre, erect, bronzed, flushed,
with eyes flashing--with that smile of his which was almost as
flashing as his eyes--Imre, more beautiful than ever, came to me, with
both hands outstretched.
"At last.... and really!" I exclaimed as he hurried over the wide
room, fairly beaming, as with contentment at being once more out of
camp-routine. "And back five hours ahead of time!"
"Five hours ahead of time indeed!" he echoed, laughing. "Thou art
glad? I know I am!"
"Dear Imre, I am immeasurably happy", I replied.
He leaned forward, and lightly kissed my cheek.
What!--he Imre von N--, who so had questioned the warm-hearted
greetings of his friend--Captain M--! An odd lapse indeed!
"I am in a state of regular shipwreck," he exclaimed; standing
up particularly straight again, after a demonstration that so
confounded me as to leave me wordless!--"I have had no breakfast,
no luncheon, nothing to eat since five o'clock. I am tired as a dog,
and hungry--_oh, mint egy vén Kárpáti medve!"_ [Literally, "as an old
Carpathian bear".] "I stopped to have a bath at the Officers'
Baths.. you should see the dust between here and the Camp... and to
change, and write a note to my father. So, if you don't mind, the
sooner I have something to eat and perhaps a nap, why the better. I
am done up!"
In a few moments we were at table. Imre manifestly was not too fagged
to talk and laugh a great deal; with a truly Homeric exhibition of his
appetite. The budget of experiences at the Camp was immediately drawn
upon, with much vivacity. But as luncheon ended, my guest admitted
that the fatigues of the hot morning-march with his troop, from P....
(during which several sunstrokes had occurred, those too-ordinary
incidents of Hungarian army-movements in summer) were reacting on him.
So I went to the Bank, as usual, for letters; transacted some other
business on the way; and left Imre to himself. When I returned to my
room an hour or so later, he was stretched out, sound asleep, on the
long green sofa. His sword and his close-fitting fatigue-blouse were
thrown on a chair. The collarless, unstarched shirt (that is so much
an improvement on our civilian garment) was unbuttoned at the throat;
the sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, in unconscious emphasizing of
the deepened sun-tan of his fine skin. The long brown eye-lashes lying
motionless, against his cheek, his physical abandonment, his deep,
regular, soundless breathing... all betokened how the day had spent
itself on his young strength. Once left alone, he had fallen asleep
where he had sat down.
A great and profoundly human poet, in one famous scene, speaks of
those emotions that come to us when we are watching, in his sleep, a
human being that we love. Such moments are indeed likely to be
subduing to many a sensitive man and woman. They bring before our eyes
the effect of a living statue; of a beauty self-unconscious, almost
abstract, if the being that we love be beautiful. Strongly, suddenly,
comes also the hint at helplessness; the suggestion of protection from
_us_, however less robust. Or the idea of the momentary but actual
absence of that other soul from out of the body before us, a vanishing
of that spirit to whom we ourselves cling. We feel a subconscious
sense of the inevitable separation forever, when there shall occur the
Silence of "the Breaker of Bonds, the Sunderer of Companionships, the
Destroyer of Fellowships, the Divider of Hearts"--as (like a knell of
everything earthly and intimate!) the old Arabian phrases lament the
merciless divorce of death!
I stood and watched Imre a moment, these things in my mind. Then,
moving softly about the room, lest he should be aroused, I began
changing my clothes for the afternoon. But more than once the spell of
my sleeping guest drew me to his side. At last, scarce half dressed, I
sat down before him, to continue to look at him. Yes.. his face had the
same expression now, as he slumbered there, that I had often remarked
in his most silent moments of waking. There were not only the calm
regular beauty, the manly uprightness, his winning naïveté of
character written all through such outward charm for me; but along
with that came again the appealing hint of an inward sadness; the
shadow of some enrooted, hidden sorrow that would not pass, however
proudly concealed.
"God bless thee, Imre!" my heart exclaimed in benediction, "God bless
thee, and make thee happy!... happier than I! Thou hast given me thy
friendship. I shall never ask of God... of Fate... anything more...
save that the gift endure till we two endure not!"
The wish was like an echo from the Z... park. Or, rather, it was an
echo from a time far earlier in my life. Once again, with a mystic
certainty, I realized that _those_ days of Solitude were now no longer
of any special tyranny upon my moods. That was at an end for me,
verily! O, my God! _That_ was at an end!....
Imre opened his eyes.
"Great Árpád!", he exclaimed, smiling sleepily, "is it so late? You
are dressing for the evening!"
"It is five o'clock," I answered. "But what difference does that make?
Don't budge. Go to sleep again, if you choose. You need not think of
getting supper at home. We will go to the F-- Restaurant."
"So be it. And perhaps I shall ask you to keep me till morning, my
dear fellow! I am no longer sleepy, but somehow or other I do feel
most frightfully knocked-out! Those country roads are misery..... And
I am a poor sleeper often,.... that it is, in a way. I get to
worrying... to wondering over all sorts of things that there's no good
in studying about... in daylight or dark."
"You never told me till lately, in one of your letters, that you were
so much of an insomniac, Imre. Is it new?"
"Not in the least new. I have not wished to say anything about it to
anybody. What's the use! Oh, there many are things that I haven't had
time to tell you--things I have not spoken about with anyone--just as
is the case with most men of sense in this world... eh? But do you
know," he went on, sitting up and continuing with a manner more and
more reposeful, thoughtful, strikingly unlike his ordinary nervous
self, ".. but do you know that I have come back from the Camp to you,
my dear Oswald, certain that I shall never be so restless and troubled
a creature again. Thanks to you. For you see, so much that I have shut
into myself I know now that I can trust to your heart. But give me a
little time. To have a friend to trust myself to _wholly_--that is new
to me."
I was deeply touched. I felt certain again that a change of some
sort--mysterious, profound--had come over Imre, during those few days
at the Camp. Something had happened. I recognized the mood of his
letters. But what had evolved or disclosed it?
"Yes, my dear von N..." I returned, "your letters have said that, in a
way, to me. How shall I thank you for your confidence, as well as for
your affection?"
"Ah, my letters! Bother my letters! They said nothing much! You know
I cannot write letters at all. What is more, you have been believing
that I wrote you as... as a sort of duty. That whatever I said--or a
lot of it--well, there were things which you fancied were not really
I. I understood why you could think it."
"I never said that, Imre," I replied, sitting down beside him on the
sofa.
"Not in so many words. But my guilty conscience prompted me. I mean
that word, 'conscience', Oswald. For--I have not been fair to you,
not honest. The only excuse is that I have not been honest with
myself. You have thought me cold, reserved, abrupt... a fantastic sort
of friend to you. One who valued you, and yet could hardly speak out
his esteem--a careless fellow into whose life you have taken only
surface-root. That isn't all. You have believed that I... that
I... never could comprehend things... feelings... which you have lived
through to the full... have suffered from... with every beat of your
heart. But you are mistaken."
"I have no complaint against you, dear Imre." No, no! God knows that!
"No? But I have much against myself. That evening in the Z...
park... you remember... when you were telling me"...
I interrupted him sharply: "Imre!"
He continued--"That evening in the Z-- park when you were telling
me"--
"Imre, Imre! You forget our promise!"
"No, I do _not_ forget! It was a one-sided bargain, _I_ am free to
break it for a moment, _nem igaz?_ Well then, I break it! There! Dear
friend, if you have ever doubted that I have a heart,... that I would
trust you utterly, that I would have you know me as I am.... then from
this afternoon forget to doubt! I have hid myself from you, because I
have been too proud to confess myself _not enough for myself!_ I
have sworn a thousand times that I could and would bear anything
alone--alone--yes, till I should die. Oswald--for God's sake--for our
friendship's sake--do not care less for me because I am weary of
struggling on thus alone! I shall not try to play hero, even to
myself... not any longer. Oswald..., listen... you told me your story.
Well, I have a story to tell you... Then you will understand.
Wait... wait... one moment!... I must think how, where, to begin. My
story is short compared with yours, and not so bitter; yet it is no
pleasant one."
As he uttered the last few words, seated there beside me, whatever
sympathy I could ever feel for any human creature went out to
him, unspeakably. For, now, now, the trouble flashed into my
mind! Of course it was to be the old, sad tale--he loved, loved
unhappily--a woman!
The singer! The singer of Prag! That wife of his friend Karvaly. The
woman whose fair and magnetic personality, had wrought unwittingly or
wittingly, her inevitable spell upon him! One of those potent and
hopeless passions, in which love, and probably loyalty to Karvaly,
burdened this upright spirit with an irremediable misfortune!
"Well," I said very gently, "tell me all that you can, if there be one
touch of comfort and relief for you in speaking, Imre. I am wholly
yours, you know, for every word."
Instead of answering me at once, as he sat there so close beside me,
supporting his bowed head on one hand, and with his free arm across
my shoulder, he let the arm fall more heavily about me. Turning his
troubled eyes once--so appealingly, so briefly!--on mine, he laid his
face upon my breast. And then, I heard him murmur, as if not to me
only, but also to himself:
"O, thou dear friend! Who bringest me, as none have brought it before
thee... _rest_!"
Rest? Not rest for me! A few seconds of that pathetic, trusting
nearness which another man could have sustained so calmly... a few
instants of that unspeakable joy in realizing how much more I was in
his life than I had dared to conceive possible... just those few
throbs upon my heart of that weary spirit of my friend... and then the
Sex-Demon brought his storm upon my traitorous nature, in fire and
lava! I struggled in shame and despair to keep down the hateful
physical passion which was making nothing of all my psychic loyalty,
asserting itself against my angriest will. In vain! The defeat must
come; and, worse, it must be understood by Imre. I started up. I
thrust Imre from me--falling away from him, escaping from his
side--knowing that just in his surprise at my abruptness, I must
meet--his detection of my miserable weakness. No words can express my
self-disgust. Once on my feet, I staggered to the opposite side of
the round table between us. I dropped into a chair. I could not raise
my eyes to Imre. I could not speak. Everything was vanishing about me.
Of only one thing could I be certain; that now all was over between
us! Oh, this cursed outbreak and revelation of my sensual weakness!
this inevitable physical appeal of Imre to me! This damned and
inextricable ingredient in the chemistry of what ought to be wholly a
spiritual drawing toward him, but which meant that I--desired my
friend for his gracious, virile beauty--as well as loved him for his
fair soul! Oh, the shame of it all, the uselessness of my newest
resolve to be more as the normal man, not utterly the Uranian! Oh, the
folly of my oaths to love Imre _without_ that thrill of the plain
sexual Desire, that would be a sickening horror to him! All was over!
He knew me for what I was. He would have none of me. The flight of my
dreams, departing in a torn cloud together, would come with the first
sound of his voice!
But Imre did not speak. I looked up. He had not stirred. His hand was
still lying on the table, with its open palm to me! And oh, there
was that in his face... in the look so calmly bent upon me... that
was... good God above us!.. so kind!
"Forgive me," I said. "Forgive me! Perhaps you can do that. Only that.
You see... you know now. I have tried to change myself... to care for
you only with my soul. But I cannot change. I will go from you. I will
go to the other end of the world. Only do not believe that what I feel
for you is wholly base... that were you not outwardly--what you
are--had I less of my terrible sensitiveness to your mere beauty,
Imre--I would care less for your friendship. God knows that I love you
and respect you as a man loves and respects his friend. Yes, yes, a
thousand times! But... but... nevertheless... Oh, what shall I say...
You could never understand! So no use! Only I beg you not to despise
me too deeply for my weakness; and when you remember me, pardon me
for the sake of the friendship bound up in the love, even if you
shudder at the love which curses the friendship."
Imre smiled. There was both bitterness as well as sweetness in his
face now. But the bitterness was not for me. His voice broke the short
silence in so intense a sympathy, in a note of such perfect accord,
such unchanged regard, that I could scarcely master my eyes in hearing
him. He clasped my hand.
"Dear Oswald! Brother indeed of my soul and body! Why dost thou ask me
to forgive thee! Why should _I_ 'forgive'? For--oh, Oswald, Oswald! I
am just as art thou... I am just as art thou!"
"Thou! Just as _I_ am? I do not understand!"
"But that will be very soon, Oswald. I tell thee again that _I am as
thou art_... wholly.. wholly! Canst thou really not grasp the truth,
dear friend? Oh, I wish with all my heart that I had not so long held
back my secret from thee! It is I who must ask forgiveness. But at
least I can tell thee today that I came back to thee to give thee
confidence for confidence, heart for heart, Oswald! before this day
should end. With no loss of respect--no weakening of our friendship.
No, no! Instead of that, only with more--with... with _all!_"
"Imre... Imre! I do not understand--I do not dare... to understand."
"Look into thyself, Oswald! It is all _there._ I am an Uranian, as
thou art. From my birth I have been one. Wholly, wholly homosexual,
Oswald! The same fire, the same, that smoulders or flashes in thee! It
was put into _my_ soul and body too, along with whatever else is in
them that could make me wish to win the sympathy of _just_ such a
friend as thee, or make thee wish to seek mine. My youth was like
thine; and to become older, to grow up to be a man in years, a man in
every sinew and limb of my body, there was no changing of my nature in
_that._ There were only the bewilderments, concealments, tortures that
come to us. There is nothing, nothing, that any man can teach me of
what is one's life with it all. How well I know it! That inborn
mysterious, frightful sensitiveness to whatever is the _man_--that
eternal vague yearning and seeking for the unity that can never come
save by a love that is held to be a crime and a shame! The instinct
that makes us cold toward the woman, even to hating her, when one
thinks of her as a sex. And the mask, the eternal mask! to be worn
before our fellowmen for fear that they should spit in our faces in
their loathing of us! Oh God, I have known it all--I have understood
it all!"
It was indeed my turn to be silent now. I found myself yet looking at
him in incredulity--wordless.
"But that is not the whole of my likeness to thee, Oswald. For, I have
endured that cruellest of torments for us--which fell also to thy
lot. I believe it to be over now, or soon wholly so to be. But the
remembrance of it will not soon pass, even with thy affection to heal
my heart. For I too have loved a man, loved him--hiding my passion
from him under the coldness of a common friendship. I too have lived
side by side, day by day, with him; in terror, lest he should see
_what_ he was to me, and so drive me from him. Ah, I have been
unhappier, too, than thou, Oswald. For I must needs to watch his
heart, as something not merely impossible for me to possess (I
would have cast away my soul to possess it!)--but given over to a
woman--laid at her feet--with daily less and less of thought for what
was his life with me... Oh, Oswald!... the wretchedness of it is over
now, God be thanked! and not a little so because I have found thee,
and thou hast found me. But only to think of it again"....
He paused as if the memory were indeed wormwood. I understood now! And
oh, what mattered it that I could not yet understand or excuse the
part that he had played before me for so long?--his secrecy almost
inexplicable if he had had so much as a guess at my story, my feelings
for him! As in a dream, believing, disbelieving, fearing, rejoicing,
trembling, rapt, I began to understand Fate!
Yet, mastering my own exultant heart, I wished in those moments to
think only of him. I asked gently:
"You mean your friend Karvaly?"
"Even so... Karvaly."
"O, my poor, poor Imre! My brother indeed! Tell me all. Begin at the
beginning."
* * * * *
I shall not detail all of Imre's tale. There was little in it for the
matter of that, which could be set forth here as outwardly dramatic.
Whoever has been able, by nature or accident, to know, in a fairly
intimate degree, the workings of the similisexual and uranistic heart;
whoever has marvelled at them, either in sympathy or antipathy, even
if merely turning over the pages of psychiatric treatises dealing with
them--he would find nothing specially unfamiliar in such biography.
I will mention here, as one of the least of the sudden discoveries
of that afternoon, the fact that Imre had some knowledge of such
literature, whether to his comfort or greater melancholy, according
to his author. Also he had formally consulted one eminent Viennese
specialist who certainly was much wiser--far less positive--and not
less calming than my American theorist.
The great Viennese psychiater had not recommended marriage to Imre:
recognizing in Imre's "case" that inborn homosexualism that will not
be dissipated by wedlock; but perhaps only intensifies, and so is
surer to darken irretrievably the nuptial future of husband and wife,
and to visit itself on their children after them. But the Austrian
doctor had not a little comforted and strengthened Imre morally;
warning him away from despising himself: from thinking himself alone,
and a sexual Pariah; from over-morbid sufferings; from that bitterness
and despair which, year by year, all over the world, can explain, in
hundreds of cases, the depressed lives, the lonely existences, the
careers mysteriously interrupted--broken? What Asmodeus could look
into the real causes (so impenetrably veiled) of sudden and long
social exiles; of sundered ties of friendship or family; of divorces
that do not disclose their true ground? Longer still would be the
chronicle of ruined peace of mind, tranquil lives maddened, fortunes
shattered--by some merciless blackmailer who trades on his victim's
secret! Darker yet the "mysterious disappearances," the sudden
suicides "wholly inexplicable," the strange, fierce crimes--that are
part of the daily history of hidden uranianism, of the battle between
the homosexual man and social canons--or of the battle with just
himself! Ah, these dramas of the Venus Urania! played out into death,
in silent but terribly-troubled natures!--among all sorts and
conditions of men!
"C'est Venus, tout entière à sa proie attachée"...
Imre's youth had been, indeed, one long and lamentable obsession of
precocious, inborn homosexuality. Imre (just as in many instances) had
never been a weakling, an effeminate lad, nor cared for the society
of the girls about him on the playground or in the house. On the
contrary, his sexual and social indifference or aversion to them had
been always thoroughly consistent with the virile emotions of that
sort. But there had been the boy-friendships that were passions; the
sense of his being out of key with his little world in them; the
deepening certitude that there was a mystery in himself that "nobody
would understand"; some element rooted in him that was mocked by the
whole boy-world, by the whole man-world. A part of himself to be
crushed out, if it could be crushed, because base and vile. Or that,
at any rate, was to be forever hid.. hid.. hid.. for his life's sake
hid! So Imre had early put on the Mask; the Mask that millions never
lay by till death--and many not even then!
And in Imre's case there had come no self-justification till late in
his sorrowful young manhood. Not until quite newly, when he had
discovered how the uranistic nature is regarded by men who are wiser
and wider-minded than our forefathers were, had Imre accepted himself
as an excusable bit of creation.
Fortunately, Imre had not been born and brought up in an Anglo-Saxon
civilization; where is still met, at every side, so dense a blending
of popular ignorances; of century-old and century-blind religious
and ethical misconceptions, of unscientific professional conservatism
in psychiatric circles, and of juristic barbarisms; all, of course,
accompanied with the full measure of British or Yankee social
hypocrisy toward the daily actualities of homosexualism. By
comparison, indeed, any other lands and races--even those yet hesitant
in their social toleration or legal protection of the Uranian--seem
educative and kindly; not to distinguish peoples whose attitude is
distinctively one of national common-sense and humanity. But in this
sort of knowledge, as in many another, the world is feeling its way
forward (should one say _back_?) to intelligence, to justice and to
sympathy, so spirally, so unwillingly! It is not yet in the common
air.
Twice Imre had been on the point of suicide. And though there had been
experiences in the Military-Academy, and certain much later ones to
teach him that he was not unique in Austria-Hungary, in Europe, or the
world, still unluckily, Imre had got from them (as is too often the
hap of the Uranian) chiefly the sense of how widely despised, mocked,
and loathed is the Uranian Race. Also how sordid and debasing are the
average associations of the homosexual kind, how likely to be wanting
in idealism, in the exclusiveness, in those pure and manly influences
which ought to be bound up in them and to radiate from them! He had
grown to have a horror of similisexual types, of all contacts with
them. And yet, until lately, they could not be torn entirely out of
his life. Most Uranists know why!
Still, they had been so expelled, finally. The turning-point had come
with Karvaly. It meant the story of the development of a swift,
admiring friendship from the younger soldier toward the older. But
alas! this had gradually become a fierce, despairing homosexual love.
This, at its height, had been as destructive of Imre's peace as it was
hopeless. Of course, it was impossible of confession to its object.
Karvaly was no narrow intellect; his affection for Imre was warm. But
he would never have understood, not even as some sort of a diseased
illusion, this sentiment in Imre. Much less would he have tolerated it
for an instant. The inevitable rupture of their whole intimacy would
have come with Imre's betrayal of his passion. So he had done wisely
to hide every throb from Karvaly. How sharply Karvaly had on one
occasion expressed himself on masculine homosexuality, Imre cited to
me, with other remembrances. At the time of the vague scandal about
the ex-officer Clement, whom Imre and I had met, Imre had asked
Karvaly, with a fine carelessness,--"Whether he believed that there
was any scientific excuse for such a sentiment?" Karvaly answered,
with the true conviction of the dionistic temperament that has
never so much as paused to think of the matter as a question in
psychology... "If I found that you cared for another man that way,
youngster, I should give you my best revolver, and tell you to put a
bullet through your brains within an hour! Why, if I found that you
thought of me so, I should brand you in the Officers Casino tonight,
and shoot you myself at ten paces tomorrow morning. Men are not to
live when they turn beasts.... Oh, damn your doctors and scientists! A
man's a man, and a woman's a woman! You can't mix up their emotions
like _that._"
The dread of Karvaly's detection, the struggle with himself to subdue
passion, not merely to hide it, and along with these nerve-wearing
solicitudes, the sense of what the suspicion of the rest of the world
about him would inevitably bring on his head, had put Imre, little by
little, into a sort of panic. He maintained an exaggerated attitude of
safety, that had wrought on him unluckily, in many a valuable social
relation. He wore his mask each and every instant; resolving to make
it his natural face before himself! Having, discovered, through
intimacy with Karvaly how a warm friendship on the part of the
homosexual temperament, over and over takes to itself the complexion
of homosexual love--the one emotion constantly likely to rise in the
other and to blend itself inextricably into its alchemy--Imre had
simply sworn to make no intimate friendship again! This, without
showing himself in the least unfriendly; indeed with his being more
hail-fellow-well-met with his comrades than otherwise.
But there Imre stopped! He bound his warm heart in a chain, he
vowed indifference to the whole world, he assisted no advances
of warm, particular regard from any comrade. He became that friend
of everybody in general who is the friend of nobody in particular!
He lived in a state of perpetual defence in his regiment, and in
whatever else was social to him in Szent-Istvánhely. So surely as he
admired another man--would gladly have won his generous and virile
affection--Imre turned away from that man! He covered this morbid
state of self-inclusion, this solitary life (such it was, apart from
the relatively short intimacy with Karvaly) with laughter and a most
artistic semblance of brusqueness; of manly preoccupation with private
affairs. Above all, with the skilful cultivation of his repute as a
Lothario who was nothing if not sentimental and absorbed in--woman!
This is possibly the most common device, as it is the securest, on the
part of an Uranian. Circumstances favoured Imre in it; and he gave it
its full show of honourable mystery. The cruel irony of it was often
almost humorous to Imre.
"... They have given me the credit of being the most confirmed rake in
high life... think of that! I, and in high life!.. to be found in town.
The less they could trace as ground for it, why, so much the stronger
rumours!.. you know how that sort of a label sticks fast to one, once
pinned on. Especially if a man _is_ really a gentleman and holds his
tongue, ever and always, about his intimacies with women. Why, Oswald,
I have never felt that I could endure to be alone five minutes with
any woman... I mean in--_that_ way! Not even with a woman most dear to
me, as many, many women are. Not even with a wife that loved me. I
have never had any intimacies--not one--of _that_ sort... Merely
semblances of such! Queer experiences I've tumbled into with _them_,
too! You know."
Oh, yes... I knew!
Part of Imre's exaggerated, artificial bearing toward the outer world
was the nervous shrinking from commonplace social demonstrativeness on
the part of his friends. To that mannerism I have already referred.
It had become a really important accent, I do not doubt, in Imre's
acting-out of a friendly, cheerful, yet keep-your-distance sort of
personality. But there was more than that in it. It was a detail in
the effort toward his self-transformation; a minor article in his
compact with himself never to give up the struggle to "_cure_"
himself. He was convinced that this was the most impossible of
achievements. But he kept on fighting for it. And since one degree
of sentiment led so treacherously to another, why, away with all!
"But Imre, I do not yet see why you have not trusted me sooner. There
have been at least two moments in our friendship when you could have
done so; and one of them was when.. you _should_!"
"Yes, you are right. I have been unkind. But then, I have been as
unkind to myself. The two times you speak of, Oswald... you mean, for
one of them, that night that we met Clement... and spoke about such
matters for a moment while we were crossing the Lánczhid? And the
other chance was after you had told me your own story, over there in
the Z... park?"
"Yes. Of course, the fault is partly mine--once. I mean that time on
the Bridge... I fenced you off from me--I misled you--didn't help
you--I didn't help myself. But even so, you kept me at sword's length,
Imre! You wore your mask so closely--gave me no inch of ground to come
nearer to you, to understand you, to expect anything except scorn--our
parting! Oh, Imre! I have been blind, yes! but you have been dumb."
"You wonder and you blame me," he replied, after busying himself a few
seconds with his own perplexing thoughts. "Again, I say 'Forgive me.'
But you must remember that we played at cross-purposes too much (as I
now look back on what we said that first time) for me to trust myself
to you. I misunderstood you. I was stupid--nervous. It seemed to me
certain, at first, that you had me in your mind--that I was the friend
you spoke of--laughed at, in a way. But after I saw that I was
mistaken? Oh, well it appeared to me that, after all, you must be one
of the Despisers. Gentler-hearted than the most; broader minded, in a
way; but one who, quite likely, thought and felt as the rest of the
world. I was afraid to go a word farther! I was afraid to lose you. I
shivered afterward, when I remembered that I had spoken then of what
I did. Especially about that man... who cared for me once upon a
time... in that way... And so suddenly to meet Clement! I didn't know he
was in Szent-Istvánhely; the meeting took me by surprise. I heard next
morning that his mother had been very ill."
"But afterwards, Imre? You surely had no fear of what you call
'losing' me then? How could you possibly meet my story--in that hour
of such bitter confidence from me!--as you did? Could come no further
toward me? When you were certain that to find you my Brother in the
Solitude would make you the nearer-beloved and dearer-prized!"
"That's harder for me to answer. For one reason, it was part of that
long battle with myself! It was something against the policy of
my whole life!... as I had sworn to live it for all the rest of
it... before myself or the world. I had broken that pledge already in
our friendship, such as even then it was! Broken it suddenly,
completely... before realizing what I did. The feeling that I was
weak, that I cared for you, that I was glad that you sought my
friendship... ah, the very sense of nearness and companionship in
that... But I fought with all _that,_ I tell you! Pride, Oswald!... a
fool's pride! My determination to go on alone, alone, to make myself
sufficient for myself, to make my punishment my tyrant!--to be
martyred under it! Can you not understand something of that? You broke
down my pride that night, dear Oswald. Oh, _then_ I knew that I had
found the one friend in the world, out of a million-million men not
for me! And nevertheless I hung back! The thought of your going from me
had been like a knife-stroke in my heart all the evening long. But
_yet_ I could not speak out. All the while I understood how our
parting was a pain to you--I could have echoed every thought that
was in your soul about it!... but I would not let myself speak one
syllable to you that could show you that I cared! No!... _then_ I
would have let you go away in ignorance of everything that was most
myself... rather than have opened that life-secret, or my heart, as we
sat there. Oh, it was as if I was under a spell, a cursed enchantment
that would mean a new unhappiness, a deeper silence for the rest of my
life! But the wretched charm was perfect. Good God!... what a night I
passed! The mood and the moment had been so fit... yet both thrown
away! My heart so shaken, my tongue so paralyzed! But before morning
came, Oswald, that fool's hesitation was over. I was clear and
resolved, the devil of arrogance had left me. I was amazed at myself.
You would have heard everything from me that day. But the call to the
Camp came. I had not a moment. I could not write what I wished. There
was nothing to do but to wait."
"The waiting has done no harm, Imre."
"And there is another reason, Oswald, why I found it hard to be frank
with you. At least, I think so. It is--what shall call it?--the
psychic trace of the woman in me. Yes, after all, the woman! The
counter-impulse, the struggle of the weakness that is womanishness
itself, when one has to face any sharp decision... to throw one's whole
being into the scale! Oh, I know it, I have found it in me before now!
I am not as you, the Uranian who is too much man! I am more feminine
in impulse--of weaker stuff... I feel it with shame. You know how the
woman says 'no' when she means 'yes' with all her soul! How she draws
back from the arms of the man that she loves when she dreams every
night of throwing herself into them? How she finds herself doing, over
and over, just that which is _against_ her thought, her will, her
duty! I tell you, there is something of _that_ in me, Oswald! I must
make it less... you must help me. It must be one of the good works of
your friendship, of your love, for me. Oh, Oswald, Oswald!... you are
not only to console me for all that I have suffered, for anything in
my past that has gone wrong. For, you are to help me to make myself
over, indeed, in all that _is_ possible, whatever cannot be so."
"We must help each other Imre. But do not speak so of woman, my
brother! Sexually, we may not value her. We may not need her, as do
those Others. But think of the joy that they find in her to which we
are cold; the ideals from which we are shut out! Think of your mother,
Imre; as I think of mine! Think of the queens and peasants who have
been the light and the glory of races and peoples. Think of the
gentle, noble sisters and wives, the serene, patient rulers of myriad
homes. Think of the watching nurses in the hospitals... of the spirits
of mercy who walk the streets of plague and foulness!... think of the
nun on her knees for the world...!"
The shadows in the room were almost at their deepest. We were
still sitting face to face, almost without having stirred since
that moment when I had quitted his side so suddenly--to divine how
much closer I was to be drawn to him henceforth. Life!--Life and
Death!--Life--Love--Death! The sense of eternal kinship in their
mystery.... somehow it haunted one then! as it is likely to do when not
our unhappiness but a kind of over-joy swiftly oppresses us; making us
to feel that in some other sphere, and if less grossly "set within
this muddy vesture of decay," we might understand all three... might
find all three to be one! Life--Love--Death!...
"Oswald, you will never go away from me!"
"Imre, I will never go away from thee. Thy people shall be mine. Thy
King shall be mine. Thy country shall be mine,--thy city mine! My feet
are fixed! We belong together. We have found what we had despaired
of finding... 'the friendship which is love, the love which is
friendship'. Those who cannot give it--accept it--let them live
without it. It can be 'well, and very well' with them. Go they their
ways without it! But for Us, who for our happiness or unhappiness
cannot think life worth living if lacking it... for Us, through the
world's ages born to seek it in pain or joy... it is the highest,
holiest Good in the world. And for one of us to turn his back upon it,
were to find he would better never have been born!"......
* * * * *
It was eleven o'clock. Imre and I had supped and taken a stroll in the
yellow moonlight, along the quais, overlooking the shimmering Duna;
and on through the little Erzsébet-tér where we had met, a few weeks
ago--it seemed so long ago! I had heard more of Imre's life and
individuality as a boy; full of the fine and unhappy emotions of the
uranistic youth. We had laughed over his stock of experiences in the
Camp. We had talked of things grave and gay.
Then we had sauntered back. It was chance; but lo! we were on the
Lánczhid, once more! The Duna rippled and swirled below. The black
barges slumbered against the stone _rakpartok._ The glittering belts
of the city-lights flashed in long perspectives along the wide river's
sweeping course and twinkled from square to square, from terrace to
terrace. Across from us, at a garden-café, a cigány orchestra was
pulsating; crying out, weeping, asking, refusing, wooing, mocking,
inebriating, despairing, triumphant! All the warm Magyar night about
us was dominated by those melting chromatics, poignant cadences--those
harmonies eternally oriental, minor-keyed, insidious, nerve-thrilling.
The arabesques of the violins, the vehement rhythms of the clangorous
czimbalom!.... Ah, this time on the Lánczhid, neither for Imre nor
me was it the sombre Bakony song, "O jaj! az álom nelkül"--but
instead the free, impassioned leap and acclaim,--"Huszár legény
vagyok!--Huszár legény vagyok!"
We were back in the quiet room, lighted now only by the moon. Far up,
on the distant Pálota heights, the clear bell of Szent-Mátyás struck
the three-quarters. The slow notes filled the still night like a
benediction, keyed to that haunting, divine, prophetic triad,
Life--Love--Death! Benediction threefold and supreme to the world!
"Oh, my brother! Oh, my friend!" exclaimed Imre softly, putting
his arm about me and holding me to his heart. "Listen to me.
Perhaps.. perhaps even yet, canst thou err in one, only one thought. I
would have thee sure that when I am with thee here, now, I _miss_
nothing and no one--I seek nothing and no one! My quest, like thine,
is over!... I wish no one save thee, dear Oswald, no one else, even as
I feel thou wishest none save me, henceforth. I would have thee
believe that I am glad _just_ as thou art glad. Alike have we two been
sad because of our lonely hearts, our long restlessness of soul and
body, our vain dreams, our worship of this or that hope--vision--which
has been kept far from us--it may be, overvalued by us! We have
suffered so much thou and I!... because of what never could be! We
shall be all the happier now for what is real for us... I love thee, as
thou lovest me. I have found, as thou hast found, 'the friendship
which is love, the love which is friendship.'... Come then, O friend! O
brother, to our rest! Thy heart on mine, thy soul with mine! For us
two it surely is... Rest!"
"Truth? What is truth? Two human hearts
Wounded by men, by fortune tried.
Outwearied with their lonely parts.
Vow to beat henceforth side by side."*
THE END.
*Matthew Arnold
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
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