"Did I ask too much? By the God that made mankind, Imre—that made it not only male or female but also as We are... I do not think I did!"
"But he, he thought otherwise! He heard my confession through with ever more hostile eyes, with an astonished unsympathy... disgust... curling his lips. Then, he spoke—slowly—pitilessly: '... I have heard that such creatures as you describe yourself are to be found among mankind. I do not know, nor do I care to know, whether they are a sex by themselves, a justified, because helpless, play of Nature; or even a kind of logically essential link, a between-step.... as you seem to have persuaded yourself. Let all that be as it may be. I am not a man of science nor keen to such new notions! From this moment, you and I are strangers! I took you for my friend because I believed you to be a... man. You chose me for your friend because you believed me.... stay, I will not say that!... because you wished me to be.... a something else, a something more or less like to yourself, whatever you are! I loathe you!... I loathe you! When I think that I have touched your hand, have sat in the same room with you, have respected you!.. Farewell!...... 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. For he was called to London a few days after that last interview; and he was obliged to remain in the capital for months. Meantime I had changed my life to meet its new conditions; to avoid gossip. I had removed my lodgings to a suburb. I had taken up a new course in professional work. It needed all my time. Then, a few months later, I started quietly on a long travel-route on the Continent, under excuse of ill-health. I was far from being a stranger to life in at least half a dozen countries of Europe, east or west. But now, now, I knew that it was to be a refuge, an exile!"
"For so began those interminable, those mysterious, restless pilgrimages, with no set goals for me; those roamings alone, of which even the wider world, not to say this or that circle of friends, has spoken with curiosity and regret. My unexplained and perpetual exile from all that earlier meant home, sphere, career, life! My wandering and wandering, ever striving to forget, ever struggling to be beguiled intellectually at least; to be diverted from so profound a sense of loss. Or to attain a sort of emotional assoupissement, to feel myself identified with new scenes, to achieve a new identity. Little by little, my birth-land, my people, became strange to me. I grew wholly indifferent to them. I turned my back fuller on them, evermore. The social elements, the grades of humanity really mine, the concerns of letters, of arts,... from these I divorced myself utterly. They knew me no more. In some of them, already I had won a certain repute; but I threw away its culture as one casts aside some plant that does not seem to him worth watering and tending."
"And indeed the zest of these things, their reason for being mine, seemed dead.... asphyxiated! For, they had grown to be so much a part of what had been the very tissue of intimacy, of life, with him! I fled them all. Never now did my foot cross the threshold of a picture-gallery, never did I look twice at the placard of a theater, never would I enter a concert-room or an opera-house, never did I care to read a romance, a poem, or to speak with any living creature of aesthetics that had once so appealed to me! Above all did my aversion to music (for so many years a peculiar interest for me)—become now a dull hatred,..... a detestation, a contempt, a horror!... super-neurotic, quintessently sexual, perniciously homosexual art—mystery—that music is! For me, no more symphonies, no more sonatas, no more songs!... No more exultations, elegies, questions to Fate of any orchestra!... Nevermore!"
"And yet, involuntarily, sub-consciously, I was always hoping... seeking—something. Hoping..., seeking.... what? Another such man as I? Sometimes I cried out as to that, 'God forbid it!' For I dreaded such a chance now; realizing the more what it would most likely not offer me. 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. Yet I was hoping—seeking—I say: even if there was no vigour of expectancy, but rather in my mind the melancholy lines of the poet:
"And are there found two souls, that each the other
Wholly shall understand? Long must man search
In that deep riddle—seek that Other soul
Until he dies! Seeking, despairing—dies!"