Part 5

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."