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."