Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/393

 "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, to-day's world, must decide for us! 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 not 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 Lánczhíd 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, who have 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 neverthless [sic] can hide—must hide! I could have told you all on