Imre

“ 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! ”

“ Again, contrary-wise, Lieutenant Imre was zealous in informing himself on matters and things pertaining to my own country and to its system of social and military life, as well as concerning a great deal more; even to my native language, of which he could speak precisely seven words, four of them too forcible for use in general polite society. Never was there a quicker, a more aggressively intelligent mind than his; the intellect that seeks to take in a thing as swiftly yet as fully as possible.... provided, as Imre confessed, with complete absence of shame, the topic "attracted" him. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Regiment, a man that Imre much liked and, what is more, had more than once admired in good set terms, when with me. ("He is as beautiful as a statue, I think!") This brother-soldier being suddenly returned to Szent-Istvánhely, after a couple of years of absence, hurried up to Imre and fairly threw his arms about him. Imre was cordiality itself. But after Captain R.... had left him, Imre made a wry face at me, and said... "The best fellow in the world! and generally speaking, most rational! But I do wish he had forgotten to kiss men! It is so hideously womanish!" ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But... one must be mindful of its natural explanation. For, after all, there was no miracle in it. Imre was a Magyar; one of a race in which sentimental eloquence is always lurking in the blood, even to a poetic passion in verbal utterance that is often out of all measure with the mere formal education of a man or a woman. He was a Hungarian: which means among other things that a cowherd who cannot write his name, and who does not know where London is, can be overheard making love to his sweetheart, or lamenting the loss of his mother, in language that is almost of Homeric beauty. ”

“ Never has my dream given me what is this reality of thyself. I love this world now only because thou art in it. I respect thee wholly—I respect myself—certain, too, of that coming time, however far away now, when no man shall ever meet any intelligent civilization's disrespect simply because he is similisexual, Uranian! But—oh, Imre, Imre!—I love thee, as can love only the Uranian... once more helpless, and therewith hopeless!—but this time no longer silent, before the Friendship which is Love, the Love which is Friendship. ”

“ 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 had been a good deal struck with the passionate—as it seemed—note in Imre's friendship for the absentee, Karvaly Mihály. I noticed the dominance that men, simply as men, seemed to maintain in Imre's daily life and ideals. I studied his reserved relations toward the other sex; the general scope of his tastes, likes and dislikes, his emotional constitution. But all these suffice not to prove... to prove... the deeply-buried mystery of a heart's uranistic impulses, the mingling in the firm, manly nature of another inborn sexual essence which can be mercifully dormant ”

“ 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. ”

“ I lay down my pen for an instant as my own eyes suddenly blur. Yet why? We should find tears rising for a living grief, not a living joy!
United with all this capital of a man's physical attractiveness was Imre's extraordinary modesty. He never seemed to think of his appearance for so much as two minutes together. He never glanced into a mirror when he happened to pass near that piece of furniture which seems to inflict a sort of nervous disease of the eyes... occasionally also of the imagination... on the average soldier of any rank and uniform, the world round. ”

“ He gave utterance to a sorrowful envy of Imre. "Pooh, pooh," returned Imre, hadnagy, scornfully, "It's in the family... and such a convenience in warm weather! I shall be bald as a cannon-shot by the time I am thirty!" He detested all jewellery in the way of masculine adornments, and wore none: and his civilian clothing was of the plainest.
The making-up of every man refers, or should do so, to a fourfold development... his physical, mental, moral and temperamental equipment, in which last-named class we can include the aesthetic individuality. The endowment of Imre von N... ”

“ We kept on continually adjusting every other concern of the twenty-four hours toward our rendezvous, instinctively. We seemed to have grown so vaguely concerned with the rest of the world, our interests that were not in common now abode in such a curious suppression, they seemed so colourless, that we really appeared to have entered another and a removed sphere inhabited by only ourselves, with each meeting. As it chanced, Imre was for the nonce, free from any routine of duties of a regimental character. As for myself, I had come to Szent-Istvánhely with no set time-limit before me ”

“ 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 regimental friendship again! ”

“ But, à-propos of Imre's amusement, let me note here (for I dare say, the incredulity of persons who have stock-ideas of what belongs to soldier-life and soldier-nature) that three usual pleasures were not his; for he abominated cards, indeed never played them; he did not smoke; and he seldom drank out his glass of wine or beer, having no taste for liquors of any sort. This in a champion athlete and an "all-round" active soldier... at least externally thoroughly such... in a smart regiment, is not common. I should have mentioned above that he was oddly indifferent to the theater, as the theater ”

“ You know, or perhaps you do not know, how specially sensitive... indeed implacable.. the Service is on that topic. Anything but a hint of it! There mustn't be a suspicion, a breath! One is simply ruined!"
I stopped to pay our tolls for the long Suspension Bridge. As we pursued our walk, Imre said:
"Do you have any such affairs in England?"
"Yes. Certainly."
"In military life?"
"In military and civil life. In every kind of life."
"Indeed. And.. how do you understand that sort of thing?"
"What sort of thing?"
"A... a man's feeling that way for another man? ”

“ I could quite well understand his remarking... "I have tried to cultivate cheerfulness on just about the same principle that when a man hasn't a korona in his pocket he does well to dress himself in his best clothes and swagger in the Officers' Casino as if he were a millionaire. For the time, he forgets that he isn't one... poor devil!"
But I am belated, I see, in alluding to two traits in our acquaintance, ab initio, which are of significance in my outline of Imre's personality while new to me: and more than trifles in their weight. ”

“ THE EYES THAT COME FROM IRELAND Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland?
The grey-blue eyes so strangely grey and blue,
The fighting loving eyes,
The eyes that tell no lies—
Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland?
Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland?
The dreaming mocking eyes that see you through,
The eyes that smile and smile,
With the heart-break all the while,—
Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland?
Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland? ”

“ It seems so natural to write of England and of Englishmen, so stilted to put Great Britain and Ireland, that one may possibly forget that, comprehensive as we intend the terms to be, we may, perhaps, wound the susceptibilities of our fellow subjects and brother Britons across the Tweed. Let us then turn to a companion picture, and see how, with equal honour and devotion, the flags of our gallant Highlanders are borne to their rest. ”

“ Yes, among the nations of the earth, Ireland stands number one in the physical strength of her sons and in the beauty and purity of her daughters. Ireland, land of my forefathers, how my mind expands, and my spirit walks abroad in something of majesty, when I contemplate the high qualities, inestimable virtues, and true purity and piety and religious fidelity of the inhabitants of your green fields and productive mountains. ”

“ From the ideas I have formed of the primeval grandeur of Ireland, I should almost expect to see a Balbec or Palmyra arising amidst these stupendous mountains and picturesque scenes.”
“My dear sir,” he replied, “a country may be civilized, enlightened, and even learned and ingenious, without attaining to any considerable perfection in those arts, which give to posterity sensible memorials of its past splendour. The ancient Irish, like the modern, had more soul, more genius than worldly prudence, or cautious, calculating forethought. ”

“ By way of recreation I interest myself in my neighbours and acquaintances, in the actual men and women rather than in their affairs. No definition of the Irish people has yet been framed which would include me, though I am indubitably a person—I take “person” to be the singular of people which is a noun of multitude—and come of a family which held on to an Irish property for 300 years. ”

“ The gravity of the circumstances which attended the birth and early history of our Society, has given to its proceedings throughout its whole existence a peculiarly real and vital character. It has not occupied itself with dilettante statistics, collected with no special purpose, and tending to no definite conclusion. It has from the first applied itself, in the spirit of earnest inquiry, to the most important questions affecting the condition of the country; and the increasing accession of intelligent Irishmen to its ranks indicates their belief that it has not laboured in vain. ”

“ None who has ever breathed the air of Ireland can breathe in another land without memory of the ancient harp of Ireland. But it is as a memory-deep, wonderful, and abiding, yet a memory. I sometimes think I have forgotten, and then I hear coming through this Virginia the notes of some old Irish melody, the song of some wayfarer of Mayo or Connemara, and I know then that Ireland is persuasive and perpetual ”

“ The name of Ireland reads as fair as England; its sons are as brave and politic, able to defend, to rule themselves: blot England from the world, and Ireland stands free and glorious, sufficing to herself. ”

“ Nor should we scorn the profit that comes to us therefrom.”
“That may all be,” said Irmy; “everything in its proper place and manner; but as to your liking for the French, it does not please me. We are still citizens of the German Empire; and deeply as the house of Austria has injured us, we should not forget from what stock we spring, and that cat and dog will sooner be friends than a German and a Frenchman. In individual cases it might happen,—there are good men in both countries,—but in our hearts and in our politics we shall never be one with France.” ”