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."