Part 8

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.