Imre: A Memorandum

by Edward Prime-Stevenson

"Great Árpád!", he exclaimed, smiling sleepily, "is it so late? You are dressing for the evening!"

"It is five o'clock," I answered. "But what difference does that make? Don't budge. Go to sleep again, if you choose. You need not think of getting supper at home. We will go to the F— Restaurant."

"So be it. And perhaps I shall ask you to keep me till morning, my dear fellow! I am no longer sleepy, but somehow or other I do feel most frightfully knocked-out! Those country roads are misery..... And I am a poor sleeper often,.... that it is, in a way. I get to worrying... to wondering over all sorts of things that there's no good in studying about... in daylight or dark."

"You never told me till lately, in one of your letters, that you were so much of an insomniac, Imre. Is it new?"

"Not in the least new. I have not wished to say anything about it to anybody. What's the use! Oh, there many are things that I haven't had time to tell you—things I have not spoken about with anyone—just as is the case with most men of sense in this world... eh? But do you know," he went on, sitting up and continuing with a manner more and more reposeful, thoughtful, strikingly unlike his ordinary nervous self, ".. but do you know that I have come back from the Camp to you, my dear Oswald, certain that I shall never be so restless and troubled a creature again. Thanks to you. For you see, so much that I have shut into myself I know now that I can trust to your heart. But give me a little time. To have a friend to trust myself to wholly—that is new to me."

I was deeply touched. I felt certain again that a change of some sort—mysterious, profound—had come over Imre, during those few days at the Camp. Something had happened. I recognized the mood of his letters. But what had evolved or disclosed it?

"Yes, my dear von N..." I returned, "your letters have said that, in a way, to me. How shall I thank you for your confidence, as well as for your affection?"

"Ah, my letters! Bother my letters! They said nothing much! You know I cannot write letters at all. What is more, you have been believing that I wrote you as... as a sort of duty. That whatever I said—or a lot of it—well, there were things which you fancied were not really I. I understood why you could think it."

"I never said that, Imre," I replied, sitting down beside him on the sofa.

"Not in so many words. But my guilty conscience prompted me. I mean that word, 'conscience', Oswald. For—I have not been fair to you, not honest. 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."