Imre
Imre
Badboy
Anonymous
$3.95
Imre
Badboy
Anonymous
$3.95
Excerpt:
Lieutenant Imre’s own personal story seemed to be an exceedingly simple matter. I was to learn later that it was far more complicated than I had originally believed. As he told it, his story was the everyday outline of the life of nine young Magyar officers in ten. He was twenty-five; the only son of an old Transylvanian family; a family poor now as never before, but evidently quite as proud as ever. He had had other notions, as a lad, of a calling. But the men of the N. line had always been in the army, ever since the days of Szigetvar and the Field of Mohcas. Soldiers, soldiers! Always soldiers! So Imre had graduated at the Military Academy. Since then? Oh, mostly routine life, routine work… a few professional journeyings in the provinces—no advancement and poor pay, in a country where an officer must live particularly like a gentleman, if too frequently only with the unhappy reliance on discreet loans from usurers. He sketched his happenings in the barracks or the field—and his own simple, social interests, when in Szent-Istvanhely. He did not live with his people, who were in too remote a quarter of the town for his duties. I could see that, even if he were rather removed from daily contact with the family-affairs, the present home atmosphere was a depressing one, weighing much on his spirits. And no wonder!
In the beginning of a brilliant career, his father had become blind and was now a pensioned officer, with a shattered, irritable mind as well as body, a burden to everyone about him. His mother had been a beauty and rich. Both her beauty and riches long ago had departed, and her health with them. Two sisters were dead, and two others had married officials in modest Government stations in distant cities. There were more dark shadows than lights in his life’s picture.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.