Edward Prime-Stevenson

“ Andrew, to thy king do I commit thee. Live thou for him—die thou for him as do I, if need be. Lean over—kiss my forehead. Ah, thy face looks like thy mother's, boy, when I wedded her under the green holms at Dunmorar. So!—my lord, with this Mouse's Nest we defy Danforth——Quick, Mistress Janet, bring the candles!—we must not lose a moment! It is life and death! Captain Jermain, Captain Jermain, you can not lodge in the Purple Chamber!"——And then, with a few more muttered incoherencies in his delirium, the heroic soul of the Master of Windlestrae fled. ”

“ Oh, we cannot change, not through all our lives! Not in death, not in anything! Oh, Oswald! that thou couldst think, for an instant, that I—I—would dream of turning away from thee... suffer a break for us two... because thou art made in thy nature as God makes mankind—as each and all, or not as each and all! We are what we are!... This terrible life of ours... this existence that men insist on believing is almost all to be understood nowadays—probed through and through—decided!... but that ever was and will be just mystery, all!...... Friendship between us? ”

“ My name is Geoffry Armitage—Lord Armitage I am oftenest called. Windlestrae, said you? Then I speak to one of those to whom I am sent on an errand from which yonder villainous tree did its best to let me. Are you Peter—no, Andrew Boyd, the son of Gilbert Boyd, who owns the manor of Windlestrae?"
"I am, sir," replied Andrew, in deepening surprise: "this very nook of the woodland we stand in belongs to my father and is within our farm. The manor house and fields are but half-an-hour from this spot; below the hill-foot yonder."
"Fortune favors me at last!" ”

“ Life—Love—Death!...
"Oswald, you will never go away from me!"
"Imre, I will never go away from thee. Thy people shall be mine. Thy King shall be mine. Thy country shall be mine,—thy city mine! My feet are fixed! We belong together. We have found what we had despaired of finding... 'the friendship which is love, the love which is friendship'. Those who cannot give it—accept it—let them live without it. It can be 'well, and very well' with them. Go they their ways without it! But for Us, who for our happiness or unhappiness cannot think life worth living if lacking it... ”

“ Here!" continued Jermain, snatching a candle from the elder Boyd, and bestowing it in Andrew's unwilling grasp; "you shall head the exploring party! Huzzah!"
With one arm about Boyd's neck, and holding Andrew between Roxley and himself, Jermain set the unsteady procession on the march from the dining-parlor and out into the hall, the three shouting boisterously: "Above-stairs, all of us! Huzzah!" and singing, like the caricature of a death-hymn, as they approached the first step, that roystering refrain:
"King George, God bless him forever! ”

“ I am not as you, the Uranian who is too much man! I am more feminine in impulse—of weaker stuff... I feel it with shame. You know how the woman says 'no' when she means 'yes' with all her soul! How she draws back from the arms of the man that she loves when she dreams every night of throwing herself into them? How she finds herself doing, over and over, just that which is against her thought, her will, her duty! I tell you, there is something of that in me, Oswald! I must make it less... you must help me. It must be one of the good works of your friendship, of your love, for me. ”

“ No Lord Armitage at bay, desperate, yet faced them. And they moved on—on—now to the very end of the narrow apartment, where were placed the mothy stag-skins and the two stools. Everything seemed undisturbed, as if during the lapse of decades.
"Well, 'tis a dull discovery after all, so far, I admit," said Jermain, peering now to the right, now to the left, or glancing toward the cornice, all a black void some twenty-five feet overhead, in such wretched illumination. "Not worth while to have so hot a question with—ha, ha—friend Boyd, over it! Yes, here we are at its end, I declare. ”

“ A jewel that others must yearn for, in disappointment and folly, and with the taste of aloes, and the white of the egg, for the pomegranate and the honeycomb! I sighed.
"Oh, courage, courage, my well beloved friend!" exclaimed Imre, hearing the sigh and apparently quite misreading my innermost thoughts. "Don't be downhearted again as to leaving Szent-Istvánhely tomorrow; not to speak of being cheerful even if you must part from your most obedient servant. Such is life!... unless we are born sultans and kaisers... and if we are that, we must die to slow music in the course of time." ”

“ The pursued refugee, for whose sake Windlestrae lay a ruin, for whose sake its owner and his son were sheltered with him in the hidden stronghold of the Seven Men of Glenmoriston, might be no better able to make amends for such calamities, nor defend himself and them from further mischiefs. But under the veil of Lord Geoffry Armitage, Charles Stewart, the adored Prince of Scotland, had seen fit to hide himself in Windlestrae; and if it was the man that Andrew and his father had learned to love, it was also their sovereign whom they had entertained unawares. ”

“ Imre, I sought the friendship of this man, of my ideal who had re-created for me, simply by his existence, a world of feeling; one of suffering and yet of delight. And I won his friendship! Do not suppose that I dared to dream, then or ever, of more than a commonplace, social intimacy. Never, never! Merely to achieve his regard toward myself a little more than toward others; merely that he would care to give me more of his society, would show me more of his inner self than he inclined to open to others. ”

“ Danforth was there, too. My father and I kept back what we could, until they wrung from us your being at Windlestrae and flying with the outlaw. They fettered my father—beat me—have burnt Windlestrae. We were being borne to Neith by them."
"O God!" cried Prince Charles, raising his eyes to the blue sky above, and then casting them in grief and pity on the father and son; "what misery do I bring upon men wherever I set my foot! Reward such faithful hearts, O Lord, for all the sorrow I breed among them! ”

“ 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... ”

“ Stillness, stillness, all through the Manor House. Dull comes the sound of one o'clock. Jermain sleeps; Roxley and Dawkin sleep; Saville and Tracey sleep. Boyd and Andrew are hidden in the garret until an appointed signal; the lad's eyes shut involuntarily from pure fatigue. Geoffry, Lord Armitage, in what of peril thou must yet meet before this wonderful night shall give place to dawn, may the Lord of the defenceless be thy helper! ”

“ If I served you as a man should serve such beings as you, this town should know your story tomorrow! Society needs more policemen than it has, to protect itself from such lepers as you! I will keep your hideous secret. Only remember never to speak to me!... never to look my way again! Never! From henceforward I have never known you and never will think of you!—if I can forget anything so monstrous in this world!'"
"So passed he out of my life, Imre. Forever! Over the rupture of our friendship not much was said, nevertheless. ”

“ Lord Geoffry's strong clasp about him and exclamation of caution saved him.
"Oh, my lord, my lord! Have you heard? Do you know it all? It is not Danforth!" Andrew whispered, still clasped in the imperiled young nobleman's arms.
"Yes, yes, dear lad! I have been listening. I stole out from the Mouse's Nest and the Purple Chamber—I can retreat to it again at an instant's warning, you see! Be calm, dear Andrew. Do not tremble so. I am yet safe."
"But, my lord, they may discover that you are here!"
"I do not know how," whispered the fugitive. "We have no traitors, and walls have not tongues." ”

“ 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." ”

“ Lord Armitage's self-extrication from the Nest had been dangerously prompt. Andrew hurried up the staircase and came upon Lord Geoffry creeping about in the dark hall; through the boy's suggestion this uppermost retreat had been gained, and hither, too, hastened Gilbert from the festivities recommenced in the dining-parlor.
"Miracle? Ay—it seems a trifle like one," responded Lord Armitage, laughing already; "what's the verse of Holy Writ about they who shall bear up the righteous in their arms? Surely, I may count myself a better man than I dared, and take courage forever." ”

“ But the call to the Camp came. I had not a moment. I could not write what I wished. There was nothing to do but to wait."
"The waiting has done no harm, Imre."
"And there is another reason, Oswald, why I found it hard to be frank with you. At least, I think so. It is—what shall call it?—the psychic trace of the woman in me. Yes, after all, the woman! The counter-impulse, the struggle of the weakness that is womanishness itself, when one has to face any sharp decision... to throw one's whole being into the scale! ”

“ Lord Geoffry was indeed so exhausted, and the homespun sheets of Mistress Annan's purveyance seemed so cool, that he fell back into them, asleep, almost as he touched them.
That sound repose lasted far into the afternoon of the next day. The Manor House was kept quiet by the master's order, lest word or foot-fall should waken the young knight out of season. He left his chamber, on Andrew's arm, as the tall clock on the landing of the staircase struck four.
"Ha! you look like a new man!" exclaimed Gilbert; "your color has come back; your eye sparkles like a live coal!" ”

“ Australia... to be a riding-master or a waiter in a restaurant, or a vagabond, like some of the Habsburg arch-dukes? Imre, Imre! Instead be... a man! A man in this, as in all else. You trifle with your certainty of a career. Be a man in this matter!"
He sighed. Then softly, with a strange despair of life in his tone:
"Be a man? In this, as in all? God! how I wish I could be so."
"Wish you could be so! I don't know what you mean. A manlier fellow one need not be! Only this damnable neglect of your career! You surely wish to succeed in life?" ”

“ I am not one to groundlessly accuse. I have lodged with Mr. Boyd overnight. I charge him with promoting the escape of a Jacobite prisoner whom I bestowed in yonder strong-room under his direction."
"And I charge that young soldier with behavior unworthy a gentleman and an officer—drunkenness, abuse, and assault, and I throw his accusation back into his face," returned Boyd, speaking clearly and decidedly. But he drew Andrew closer as he uttered his brave defiance. The worst had come to the worst; and it was now simply a question of manly behavior and the end appointed by Providence. ”

“ For, Imre, it was as if that dead schoolmate of mine, not merely as death had taken him; but matured, a man in his beauty and charm... it was as if every acquaintance that ever had quickened within me the same unspeakable sense of a mysterious bond of soul and of body... the Man-Type which owned me and ever must own me, soul and body together—had started forth in a perfect avatar. Out of the slumberous past, out of the kingdom of illusions, straying to me from the realm of banished hopes, it had come to me! ”

“ The captain suddenly gave up the task with a spasm of profanity that horrified Boyd, and drew from him a stern rebuke.
"They both deserve to be court-martialled and shot," declared Jermain. "Wait until we get to Neith! No, I don't care how informal their service is, Roxley. They shall be hung up by the thumbs for this—Dawkin, too."
"What—what's to be done, captain?" demanded Roxley, in a sudden attempt to hide his own dubious condition that was ludicrous to behold.
"To be done? Why, those fellows must be let lie where they are—no use trying to stir them. We must get him above-stairs ourselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In spite of the ingratiating tone, a command of a sort common enough to all the region at the time, lurked unmistakably in the dragoon-captain's smooth words. Gilbert recognized this. At the precise hour when he was sheltering a proscribed and hunted Jacobite, he must entertain, as best he could, a handful of the very men who, did they suspect the other's nearness, would delight to drag him forth to his death, as, very possibly, they were preparing to do with their prisoner out yonder! ”

“ Imre was not a pretty man; but a beautiful man. And the mixture of maturity and of almost boyish youth, the outlook of his natural sincerity and warmth of nature, his self-unconsciousness and self-respect... these entered into the matter of his good looks, quite as much as his merely technical beauty. I did not wonder that not only the women in Szent-Istvánhely but the street-children, aye, the very dogs and cats it seemed to me, would look at him with friendly interest. ”

“ Particularly was Boyd impressed with Sir Geoffry's strange insistence that "the prisoner might have that to utter which could be said best or only to him."
"So be it, my lord," he said; "your blood be upon your own head; and yet, good sooth, I know not what else to attempt. Danforth! Danforth! The name makes me tremble for you. I will go and await the fittest moment to proffer your services to Jermain, and, if he accept it, I will do my best to apprise the prisoner that something is in store for him. Andrew, my son, this is no hour for you to be awake. You aid us at your own cost. ”

“ We must help each other Imre. But do not speak so of woman, my brother! Sexually, we may not value her. We may not need her, as do those Others. But think of the joy that they find in her to which we are cold; the ideals from which we are shut out! Think of your mother, Imre; as I think of mine! Think of the queens and peasants who have been the light and the glory of races and peoples. Think of the gentle, noble sisters and wives, the serene, patient rulers of myriad homes. Think of the watching nurses in the hospitals... of the spirits of mercy who walk the streets of plague and foulness!... ”

“ Roxley, roaring and gasping, released Gilbert; then strove to clutch this puissant enemy. The mêlée might have become general, for the room rang with exclamations and threats and the scuffle of feet. But Boyd snatched Andrew to his side, waved away the servants, and cried, "Peace! peace, I say! This is no time for a brawl over a boy. Captain Jermain, command yonder fellow to keep his hands for men, not children. Andrew, leave the room." ”

“ 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... ”

“ What a stinking hole!" The lever, to outside persuasion, offered no reluctance to move. The door, truly, was wide open. Blackness of darkness—a rush of chill, malodorous wind. But no outrushing or defiant figure!
"Give me one candle, boy," said Jermain—"hold the other before us. So. Watch well your feet, lads. These odd nooks often have holes and traps in their floors." With these words he stepped inside the Nest.
Face the worst, within that pit of gloom, Andrew must. But he contrived, in obeying the command to accompany the three, audaciously to stumble against the captain on the very sill. ”

“ As a fact he was so happily a creature of buoyant temperament, that his popularity was not surprising, on the basis of comrade-intercourse and of the pleasantly superficial side of a regimental life. Every man was Imre's friend! Every woman was, such, that I ever heard speaking of him, or spoken-of along with his name. The paradox of living to oneself while living with everyone, the doors of an individuality both open and shut, could no farther go than in his instance. ”

“ What have you to say for yourself?"
"Captain Jermain, you shall use no such tone to me! I deny the need of my replying to you, sir. Remember that, soldier or not, you have been and you are my guest!"
"Oh, you do well to remind me of that! It is no moment for me to be overawed by trumpery Highland dignity, sir. If I am forced to violate the code of hospitality, it is because I have reason to believe that I have been tricked and deluded—with many other people. I propose to sift this occurrence at once, Mr. Boyd." ”

“ It ever will evade. We are drawn together because we are drawn. We are content to abide together just because we are content. We feel that we have reached a certain harbour, after much or little drifting, just because it is for that haven, after all, that we have been moving on and on; with all the irresistible pilotry of the wide ocean-wash friendly to us. It is as foolish to make too much of the definite in friendship as it is in love—which is the highest expression of companionship. Friendship?—love? ”

“ I noticed traces of weakness in just the ordinary armour a man needs in making the most of his environment, or in holding-out against its tyrannies. I saw the irresolution, the doubts of the value of life's struggle, the sense of fatality as not only a hindrance but as excuse. Not in mere curiosity so much as in sympathy, I traced or divined such things; and then in looking at him, I partly understood why, at only about five-and-twenty, Lieutenant Imre von N.....'s forehead showed those three or four lines that were incongruous with as sunny a face. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And really unless a miracle of miracles were to be wrought just for me, unless I should light upon another human creature who in sympathies, idealisms, noble impulses, manliness and a virile life could fill, and could wish to fill, the desolate solitudes of mine, could confirm all that was deepest fixed in my soul as the concept of true similisexual masculinity.... oh, far better meet none! For such a miracle of miracles I should not hope. Even traversing all the devious ways of life may not bring us face to face with such a friend. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Yes, and a strange matter in my immediately passionate interest in you... another one of the coincidences in our interest for each other... is the racial blood that runs in your veins. You are a Magyar. You have not now to be told of the unexplainable, the mysterious affinity between myself and your race and nation; of my sensitiveness, ever since I was a child, to the chord which Magyarország and the Magyar sound in my heart. Years have only added to it, till thy land, thy people, Imre, are they not almost my land, my people? ”