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... as to this series was decidedly less symmetrical than otherwise. In fact, he was a striking example of contradictions and inequations. He had studied hardest when in his school-courses just what came easiest... with the accustomed results of that sort of process. He was a bad, a perversely bad mathematician; an indifferent linguist, simply because he had found it "a hideous job to learn all those complicated verbs"; an excellent scholar in history; took delight in chemistry and in other physical sciences; and though so easily plagued by a simple sum in decimals, he had a passion for astronomy, and he knew not a little about it, at least theoretically. Physical science appealed to him, curiously; his small library was two-thirds full of books on those topics. He loved to read popular philosophy and biography and travel. For novels, as for poetry, he cared almost nothing. He would spare no pains to get to the bottom of some subject that interested him, a thing that "bit" him, as he called it; short of actually setting himself down to the calm and applicative study of it! Tactics did he, somehow deliberately learn; grimly, angrily, but with success. They were indispensable to his professional credit. Such a result showed plainly enough that he lacked resolution, concentration as a duty, but did not lack capability. Many a sound lecture from myself, as from other friends, including particularly, as I found out, from the much-married Karvaly, did Imre receive respecting this defect. A course in training in the Officers' Military School (Hadiskola) was involved in the difficulty, or perversity, so in evidence. This Hadiskola course is an indispensable in such careers as Imre's sort should achieve, willing or unwilling. When a young officer is so obstinately cold to what lies toward good work in the Hadiskola, and in his inmost soul desires almost anything rather than becoming even an major... why, what can one say severe enough to him?
Yet, with reference to what might be called Imre's aesthetic self-expression, I wish to record one thing at variance with much which was negative in him. At least it was in contradiction to his showing such modest "literary impulses", and to his relative aversion to belles-lettres, and so on. When Imre was deeply stirred over something or other that "struck home", by some question to open the mountains of innermost feeling in him, it was remarkable with what exactitude,—more than that, what genuine emotional eloquence of phrase—he could express himself! This even to losing that slight hesitancy of diction which was an ordinary characteristic. I was often surprised at the simple, direct beauty, sometimes downright poetic grace, in his language on such unexpected occasions. He seemed to become tinged with quite another personality, or to be following, in a kind of trance, the prompting of some voice audible to him only. I shall hardly so much as once attempt conveying this effect of sudden "ihletés", even in coming to the moments of our intercourse when it surged up. It must in most part be taken for granted; read between the lines now and then. 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. It is the Oriental quality, ever in the Magyar; now to be admired by us, now disliked, according to the application of the traits. Imre had his full share of Magyarism of temperament, and of its impromptu eloquence; taking the place of much of a literal acquaintance with Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and all the rhetorical and literary Parnassus in general.
He detested politics, as might be divined. He "loved" his Apostolic King and his country much as do some children their nearest relatives; that is to say, on general principles, and to the sustaining of a correct attitude before himself and the world. On this matter, also he and I had many passages-at-arms. He had not much "religion." But he was a firm believer in God; in helping one's neighbour, even to most injudicious generosity; in avoiding debts "when one could possibly do so" (a reserve that I regretted to find out was not his case any more than it is usually the case with young Hungarian officers living in a capital city, with small home-subventions); in honour; in womanly virtue; in a true tongue and a clean one. His sense of fun was not limited to the kind that may pass between a rector of the Establishment and his daughters over afternoon-tea. But Lieutenant Imre von N.... had no relish for the stupid-smutty sallies and stock racontars of the officers' mess and the barracks. Unless a "story" really possessed wit and humour, he had absolutely dull ears for it.
He wrote a shameful handwriting, with invariable hurry-scurry; he could not draw a pot-hook straight, and he took uncertain because untaught interest in painting. Sculpture, and architecture appealed more to him, though also in an untaught way. But he was a most excellent practical musician; playing the piano-forte superbly well, as to general effect, with an amazingly bad technic of his own evolution, got together without any teaching; and not reading well and rapidly at sight. Indeed, his musical enthusiasm, his musical insight and memory, they were all of a piece; the rich and perilous endowment of the born son of Orpheus. His singing-voice was a full baritone.... smooth and sweet, like his irresistible speaking-voice. He would play or sing for hours together, quite alone in his rooms, of an evening. He would go without his dinner (he often did) to pay for his concert-ticket or standing-place in the Royal Opera. He did not care for the society of professional musicians, or of the theaterfolk in general. "They really are not worth while," he used to say... "art is one thing to me and artists another—or nothing at all—off the stage." As for more general society, why, he said frankly that nowadays the N.... family simply were too poor to go into it, and that he had no time for it. So he was to be met in only a few of the Szent-Istvánhely drawing rooms. Yet he was passionately fond of dancing.... anything from a waltz to a csárdás. 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; declaring that he never could find "any great illusion" in it. He much liked billiards, and was invincible in them. His feeling for whatever was natural, simple, out-of-doors was great. He loved to walk, to walk alone, in the open country, in the woodlands and fields... to talk with peasants, who invariably "took to" him at once. He loved children, and was a born animal-friend; in fact, between him and beasts little and big, there appeared to be a regular understanding. Never forthputting, he could delight, in a quiet way in the liveliest company. That buoyancy of his temperament, so in contrast with the other elements of his nature, was a vast blessing to him. He certainly had a supply of personal subjects sufficiently sobering for home-consumption, some of which I soon knew; others not spoken till later. The gloom in his parents' house, the various might-have-beens in his own young life, the wearisome struggle to do his duty in a professional career whereto he had been called without its being chosen by him; weightier still the fact that he was in the hands of a couple of usurers on account of his generous share of the deficit in a foolish brother officer's finances, to the extent of some thousands of florins.... these were not trifles for Imre's private meditations. 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. There were two subjects as to which remarkably little was said between us during the first ten days of my going-about so much with him. "Remarkably little" I say, because of Imre's own frank references to one matter, on our first meeting; and because we were both men, and neither of us octogenarians, nor troubled with super-sensitiveness in talking about all sorts of things. The first of these overpassed topics was the friendship between Imre and the absent Karvaly Miklos. Since the afternoon on which we had met, Imre referred so little to Karvaly.... he seemed so indifferent to his absence, all at once... indeed he appeared to be shunning the topic... that I avoided it completely. It gradually was borne in upon me that he wished me to avoid it. So no more expansiveness on the perfections and gifts of the exile! Of Karvaly's young bride, on the other hand, the fascinating Bohemian lady who sang Brahms' songs so beautifully, Imre was still distinctly eloquent; alluding often to one or another of her shining attributes... paragon that she may have been! I write 'may have been'; because to this day I know her, like Shakespeare's Olivia,—"only by her good report".
The other matter of our reticence was an instance of the difference between the general and the particular. Very early in my meeting with Imre's more immediate circle of soldier-friends, I heard over and over again that to Imre, as one of the officers most distinguished in all the town for personal beauty, there attached a reputation of being an ever-campaigning and ever-victorious Don Juan... if withal one of most exceptional discretion. Right and left, he was referred to as a wholesale enemy to the peace of heart and to the virtue of dozens of the fair citizenesses of Szent-Istvánhely. Two of these romances, the heroine of one of them being an extremely beautiful and refined déclassée whose sudden suicide had been the gossip of the clubs, were heightened by the touch of the tragic. But along with them, and the more ordinary chatter about a young man's bonnes fortunes, or what were taken to be them, there were surmises and assertions of vague, aristocratic, deep, unconfessed ties and adventures. The Germans use the terms "Weiberfreund" and "Weiberfeind" in rather a special sense sometimes. Now, I knew that Imre von N... was no woman-hater. He admired, and had a circle of admiring, women-friends enough to dismiss at once such an ungallant accusation. Never was there a sharper eye, not even in Magyarország, for an harmonious female figure, a graceful carriage, a charming face.... he was a connaisseur de race!
But when it came to his alluding, when we were by ourselves, to anything like really intimate sentimental—I would best plainly say amorous—relations with the other sex, Imre never opened his mouth for a word of the least real significance! He referred to himself, casually, now and then, and as it appeared to me in precisely the right key, as one to whom woman was a sufficiently definite social and physical attraction.... necessity... quite as essentially as is to be expected with a young soldier of normal health and robust constitution. When it suited his mixed society, he had as many "discreet stories" as Poins. But when he and I were alone, no matter whatever else he spoke of... so unreservedly, so temperamentally!—he never did what is commonly called "talk women." He never so much alluded to a light-o' love, to an "affair", to any distinctly sexual interest in a ballerina or—a princess! And when third parties were pleased to compliment him, or to question him, as to such a thing, Imre "smiling put the question by." His special reserve concerning these topics, so rare in men of his profession and age, was as emphatic as in the instance of the average English gentleman. I admired it, certainly not wishing it less. I often thought how well it became Imre's general refinement of disposition, manners and temperamental bias... most of all, suiting that surprising want of vanity as to his person, his character, his entire individuality.
In this connection, came a bit of an incident that has its significance... as things came to pass later in our acquaintance. One evening, while I was dressing for dinner, with Imre making a random visit, I lapsed into hearty irritation as to a marvellously ill-fitting new garment, that was to be worn for the first time. Imre was pleased to be facetious. "You ought to go into the tailoring-line yourself," he observed... "then you can adorn yourself as perfectly as you would wish!" I threw out some sort of a return-banter that his own carelessness as to his looks was "the pride that apes humility."
"One would really suppose," I remarked, "that you do not know why a pretty woman makes eyes at you!... Are you under the impression that you are admired on account of the Three Christian Graces and the Four Theological Virtues?—all on sight! Come now, my dear fellow, you really need not carry the pose so far!"