"It seems rather a pity to waste our tickets; so many wish to see the
play."

"We shall find someone to give them to," he said indifferently, stopping
by one of the pillars.

At that very moment as if under his hand appeared a boy of about fifteen
or sixteen, one of the gutter-snipe of Paris. To my amazement, he said:

"Bon soir, Monsieur Wilde."

Oscar turned to him smiling.

"Vous êtes Jules, n'est-ce pas?" (you are Jules, aren't you?) he
questioned.

"Oui, M. Wilde."

"Here is the very boy you want," Oscar cried; "let's give him the
tickets, and he'll sell them, and make something out of them," and Oscar
turned and began to explain to the boy how I had given two hundred
francs for the tickets, and how, even now, they should be worth a louis
or two.

"Des jaunets" (yellow boys), cried the youth, his sharp face lighting
up, and in a flash he had vanished with the tickets.

"You see he knows me, Frank," said Oscar, with the childish pleasure of
gratified vanity.

"Yes," I replied drily, "not an acquaintance to be proud of, I should
think."

"I don't agree with you, Frank," he said, resenting my tone, "did you
notice his eyes? He is one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen;
an exact replica of Emilienne D'Alençon,[24] I call him Jules D'Alençon,
and I tell her he must be her brother. I had them both dining with me
once and the boy is finer than the girl, his skin far more beautiful.

"By the way," he went on, as we were walking up the Avenue de l'Opera,
"why should we not see Emilienne; why should she not sup with us, and
you could compare them? She is playing at Olympia, near the Grand Hotel.
Let's go and compare Aspasia and Agathon, and for once I shall be
Alcibiades, and you the moralist, Socrates."

"I would rather talk to you," I replied.

"We can talk afterwards, Frank, when all the stars come out to listen;
now is the time to live and enjoy."

"As you will," I said, and we went to the Music Hall and got a box, and
he wrote a little note to Emilienne D'Alençon, and she came afterwards
to supper with us. Though her face was pretty she was pre-eminently dull
and uninteresting without two ideas in her bird's head. She was all
greed and vanity, and could talk of nothing but the hope of getting an
engagement in London: could he help her, or would Monsieur, referring to
me, as a journalist get her some good puffs in advance? Oscar promised
everything gravely.

While we were supping inside, Oscar caught sight of the boy passing
along the Boulevard. At once he tapped on the window, loud enough to
attract his attention. Nothing loth, the boy came in, and the four of us
had supper together--a strange quartette.

"Now, Frank," said Oscar, "compare the two faces and you will see the
likeness," and indeed there was in both the same Greek beauty--the same
regularity of feature, the same low brow and large eyes, the same
perfect oval.

"I am telling my friend," said Oscar to Emilienne in French, "how alike
you two are, true brother and sister in beauty and in the finest of
arts, the art of living," and they both laughed.

"The boy is better looking," he went on to me in English. "Her mouth is
coarse and hard; her hands common, while the boy is quite perfect."

"Rather dirty, don't you think?" I could not help remarking.

"Dirty, of course, but that's nothing; nothing is so immaterial as
colouring; form is everything, and his form is perfect, as exquisite as
the David of Donatello. That's what he's like, Frank, the David of
Donatello," and he pulled his jowl, delighted to have found the painting
word.

As soon as Emilienne saw that we were talking of the boy, her interest
in the conversation vanished, even more quickly than her appetite. She
had to go, she said suddenly; she was so sorry, and the discontented
curiosity of her look gave place again to the smirk of affected
politeness.

"_Au revoir, n'est-ce pas? à Charing Cross, n'est-ce-pas, Monsieur? Vous
ne m'oublierez pas?..._"

As we turned to walk along the boulevard I noticed that the boy, too,
had disappeared. The moonlight was playing with the leaves and boughs of
the plane trees and throwing them in Japanese shadow-pictures on the
pavement: I was given over to thought; evidently Oscar imagined I was
offended, for he launched out into a panegyric on Paris.

"The most wonderful city in the world, the only civilised capital; the
only place on earth where you find absolute toleration for all human
frailties, with passionate admiration for all human virtues and
capacities.

"Do you remember Verlaine, Frank? His life was nameless and terrible, he
did everything to excess, was drunken, dirty and debauched, and yet
there he would sit in a café on the Boul' Mich', and everybody who came
in would bow to him, and call him _maître_ and be proud of any sign of
recognition from him because he was a great poet.

"In England they would have murdered Verlaine, and men who call
themselves gentlemen would have gone out of their way to insult him in
public. England is still only half-civilised; Englishmen touch life at
one or two points without suspecting its complexity. They are rude and
harsh."

All the while I could not help thinking of Dante and his condemnation of
Florence, and its "hard, malignant people," the people who still had
something in them of "the mountain and rock" of their birthplace:--"_E
tiene ancor del monte e del macigno._"

"You are not offended, Frank, are you, with me, for making you meet two
caryatides of the Parisian temple of pleasure?"

"No, no," I cried, "I was thinking how Dante condemned Florence and its
people, its ungrateful malignant people, and how when his teacher,
Brunetto Latini, and his companions came to him in the underworld, he
felt as if he, too, must throw himself into the pit with them. Nothing
prevented him from carrying out his good intention (_buona voglia_)
except the fear of being himself burned and baked as they were. I was
just thinking that it was his great love for Latini which gave him the
deathless words:

    ... "Non dispetto, ma doglia
    La vostra condizion dentro mi fisse.

"Not contempt but sorrow...."

"Oh, Frank," cried Oscar, "what a beautiful incident! I remember it all.
I read it this last winter in Naples.... Of course Dante was full of
pity as are all great poets, for they know the weakness of human
nature."

But even "the sorrow" of which Dante spoke seemed to carry with it some
hint of condemnation; for after a pause he went on:

"You must not judge me, Frank: you don't know what I have suffered. No
wonder I snatch now at enjoyment with both hands. They did terrible
things to me. Did you know that when I was arrested the police let the
reporters come to the cell and stare at me. Think of it--the degradation
and the shame--as if I had been a monster on show. Oh! you knew! Then
you know, too, how I was really condemned before I was tried; and what a
farce my trial was. That terrible judge with his insults to those he was
sorry he could not send to the scaffold.

"I never told you the worst thing that befell me. When they took me from
Wandsworth to Reading, we had to stop at Clapham Junction. We were
nearly an hour waiting for the train. There we sat on the platform. I
was in the hideous prison clothes, handcuffed between two warders. You
know how the trains come in every minute. Almost at once I was
recognised, and there passed before me a continual stream of men and
boys, and one after the other offered some foul sneer or gibe or scoff.
They stood before me, Frank, calling me names and spitting on the
ground--an eternity of torture."

My heart bled for him.

"I wonder if any punishment will teach humanity to such people, or
understanding of their own baseness?"

After walking a few paces he turned to me:

"Don't reproach me, Frank, even in thought. You have no right to. You
don't know me yet. Some day you will know more and then you will be
sorry, so sorry that there will be no room for any reproach of me. If I
could tell you what I suffered this winter!"

"This winter!" I cried. "In Naples?"

"Yes, in gay, happy Naples. It was last autumn that I really fell to
ruin. I had come out of prison filled with good intentions, with all
good resolutions. My wife had promised to come back to me. I hoped she
would come very soon. If she had come at once, if she only had, it might
all have been different. But she did not come. I have no doubt she was
right from her point of view. She has always been right.

"But I was alone there in Berneval, and Bosie kept on calling me,
calling, and as you know I went to him. At first it was all wonderful.
The bruised leaves began to unfold in the light and warmth of
affection; the sore feeling began to die out of me.

"But at once my allowance from my wife was stopped. Yes, Frank," he
said, with a touch of the old humour, "they took it away when they
should have doubled it. I did not care. When I had money I gave it to
him without counting, so when I could not pay I thought Bosie would pay,
and I was content. But at once I discovered that he expected me to find
the money. I did what I could; but when my means were exhausted, the
evil days began. He expected me to write plays and get money for us both
as in the past; but I couldn't; I simply could not. When we were dunned
his temper went to pieces. He has never known what it is to want really.
You have no conception of the wretchedness of it all. He has a terrible,
imperious, irritable temper."

"He's the son of his father," I interjected.

"Yes," said Oscar, "I am afraid that's the truth, Frank; he is the son
of his father; violent, and irritable, with a tongue like a lash. As
soon as the means of life were straitened, he became sullen and began
reproaching me; why didn't I write? Why didn't I earn money? What was
the good of me? As if I could write under such conditions. No man,
Frank, has ever suffered worse shame and humiliation.

"At last there was a washing bill to be paid; Bosie was dunned for it,
and when I came in, he raged and whipped me with his tongue. It was
appalling; I had done everything for him, given him everything, lost
everything, and now I could only stand and see love turned to hate: the
strength of love's wine making the bitter more venomous. Then he left
me, Frank, and now there is no hope for me. I am lost, finished, a
derelict floating at the mercy of the stream, without plan or
purpose.... And the worst of it is, I know, if men have treated me
badly, I have treated myself worse; it is our sins against ourselves we
can never forgive.... Do you wonder that I snatch at any pleasure?"

He turned and looked at me all shaken; I saw the tears pouring down his
cheeks.

"I cannot talk any more, Frank," he said in a broken voice, "I must go."

I called a cab. My heart was so heavy within me, so sore, that I said
nothing to stop him. He lifted his hand to me in sign of farewell, and I
turned again to walk home alone, understanding, for the first time in my
life, the full significance of the marvellous line in which Shakespeare
summed up his impeachment of the world and his own justification: the
only justification of any of us mortals:

     "A man more sinn'd against than sinning."

FOOTNOTES:

[22] This was the sum promised by the whole Queensberry family and by
Lord Alfred Douglas in particular to Oscar to defray the costs of that
first action for libel which they persuaded him to bring against Lord
Queensberry. Ross has since stated in court that it was never paid. The
history of the monies promised and supplied to Oscar at that time is so
extraordinary and so characteristic of the age that it might well
furnish a chapter to itself. Here it is enough just to say that those
who ought to have supplied him with money evaded the obligation, while
others upon whom he had no claim, helped him liberally; but even large
sums slipped through his careless fingers like water.

[23] Cfr. Appendix: "Criticisms by Robert Ross."

[24] One of the prettiest daughters of the game to be found in Paris at
the time.

CHAPTER XXI

The more I considered the matter, the more clearly I saw, or thought I
saw, that the only chance of salvation for Oscar was to get him to work,
to give him some purpose in life, and the reader should remember here
that at this time I had not read "De Profundis" and did not know that
Oscar in prison had himself recognised this necessity. After all, I said
to myself, nothing is lost if he will only begin to write. A man should
be able to whistle happiness and hope down the wind and take despair to
his bed and heart, and win courage from his harsh companion. Happiness
is not essential to the artist: happiness never creates anything but
memories. If Oscar would work and not brood over the past and study
himself like an Indian Fakir, he might yet come to soul-health and
achievement. He could win back everything; his own respect, and the
respect of his fellows, if indeed that were worth winning. An artist, I
knew, must have at least the self-abnegation of the hero, and heroic
resolution to strive and strive, or he will never bring it far even in
his art. If I could only get Oscar to work, it seemed to me everything
might yet come right. I spent a week with him, lunching and dining and
putting all this before him, in every way.

I noticed that he enjoyed the good eating and the good drinking as
intensely as ever. He was even drinking too much I thought, was
beginning to get stout and flabby again, but the good living was a
necessity to him, and it certainly did not prevent him from talking
charmingly. But as soon as I pressed him to write he would shake his
head:

"Oh, Frank, I cannot, you know my rooms; how could I write there? A
horrid bedroom like a closet, and a little sitting room without any
outlook. Books everywhere; and no place to write; to tell you the truth
I cannot even read in it. I can do nothing in such miserable poverty."

Again and again he came back to this. He harped upon his destitution, so
that I could not but see purpose in it. He was already cunning in the
art of getting money without asking for it. My heart ached for him; one
goes down hill with such fatal speed and ease, and the mire at the
bottom is so loathsome. I hastened to say:

"I can let you have a little money; but you ought to work, Oscar. After
all why should anyone help you, if you will not help yourself? If I
cannot aid you to save yourself, I am only doing you harm."

"A base sophism, Frank, mere sophistry, as you know: a good lunch is
better than a bad one for any living man."

I smiled, "Don't do yourself injustice: you could easily gain thousands
and live like a prince again. Why not make the effort?"

"If I had pleasant, sunny rooms I'd try.... It's harder than you think."

"Nonsense, it's easy for you. Your punishment has made your name known
in every country in the world. A book of yours would sell like wildfire;
a play of yours would draw in any capital. You might live here like a
prince. Shakespeare lost love and friendship, hope and health to
boot--everything, and yet forced himself to write 'The Tempest.' Why
can't you?"

"I'll try, Frank, I'll try."

I may just mention here that any praise of another man, even of
Shakespeare, was sure to move Oscar to emulation. He acknowledged no
superior. In some articles in _The Saturday Review_ I had said that no
one had ever given completer record of himself than Shakespeare. "We
know him better than we know any of our contemporaries," I went on, "and
he is better worth knowing." At once Oscar wrote to me objecting to this
phrase. "Surely, Frank, you have forgotten me. Surely, I am better
worth knowing than Shakespeare?"

The question astonished me so that I could not make up my mind at once;
but when he pressed me later I had to tell him that Shakespeare had
reached higher heights of thought and feeling than any modern, though I
was probably wrong in saying that I knew him better than I knew a living
man.

I had to go back to England and some little time elapsed before I could
return to Paris; but I crossed again early in the summer, and found he
had written nothing.

I often talked with him about it; but now he changed his ground a
little.

"I can't write, Frank. When I take up my pen all the past comes back: I
cannot bear the thoughts ... regret and remorse, like twin dogs, wait to
seize me at any idle moment. I must go out and watch life, amuse,
interest myself, or I should go mad. You don't know how sore it is about
my heart, as soon as I am alone. I am face to face with my own soul; the
Oscar of four years ago, with his beautiful secure life, and his
glorious easy triumphs, comes up before me, and I cannot stand the
contrast.... My eyes burn with tears. If you care for me, Frank, you
will not ask me to write."

"You promised to try," I said somewhat harshly, "and I want you to try.
You haven't suffered more than Dante suffered in exile and poverty; yet
you know if he had suffered ten times as much, he would have written it
all down. Tears, indeed! the fire in his eyes would have dried the
tears."

"True enough, Frank, but Dante was all of one piece whereas I am drawn
in two different directions. I was born to sing the joy and pride of
life, the pleasure of living, the delight in everything beautiful in
this most beautiful world, and they took me and tortured me till I
learned pity and sorrow. Now I cannot sing the joy, heartily, because I
know the suffering, and I was never made to sing of suffering. I hate
it, and I want to sing the love songs of joy and pleasure. It is joy
alone which appeals to my soul; the joy of life and beauty and love--I
could sing the song of Apollo the Sun-God, and they try to force me to
sing the song of the tortured Marsyas."

This to me was his true and final confession. His second fall after
leaving prison had put him "at war with himself." This is, I think, the
very heart of truth about his soul; the song of sorrow, of pity and
renunciation was not his song, and the experience of suffering prevented
him from singing the delight of life and the joy he took in beauty. It
never seemed to occur to him that he could reach a faith which should
include both self-indulgence and renunciation in a larger acceptance of
life.

In spite of his sunny nature he had a certain amount of jealousy and
envy in him which was always brought to light by the popular success of
those whom he had known and measured. I remember his telling me once
that he wrote his first play because he was annoyed at the way Pinero
was being praised--"Pinero, who can't write at all: he is a
stage-carpenter and nothing else. His characters are made of dough; and
never was there such a worthless style, or rather such a complete
absence of style: he writes like a grocer's assistant."

I noticed now that this trait of jealousy was stronger in him than ever.
One day I showed him an English illustrated paper which I had bought on
my way to lunch. It contained a picture of George Curzon (I beg his
pardon, Lord Curzon) as Viceroy of India. He was photographed in a
carriage with his wife by his side: the gorgeous state carriage drawn by
four horses, with outriders, and escorted by cavalry and cheering
crowds--all the paraphernalia and pomp of imperial power.

"Do you see that?" cried Oscar angrily; "fancy George Curzon being
treated like that. I know him well; a more perfect example of plodding
mediocrity was never seen in the world. He had never a thought or phrase
above the common."

"I know him pretty well, too," I replied. "His incurable commonness is
the secret of his success. He 'voices,' as he would say himself, the
opinion of the average man on every subject. He might be a leader-writer
on the _Mail_ or _Times_. What do you know of the average man or of his
opinions? But the man in the street, as he is called to-day, can only
learn from the man who is just one step above himself, and so the George
Curzons come to success in life. That, too, is the secret of the
popularity of this or that writer. Hall Caine is an even larger George
Curzon, a better endowed mediocrity."

"But why should he have fame and state and power?" Oscar cried
indignantly.

"State and power, because he is George Curzon, but fame he never will
have, and I suspect if the truth were known, in the moments when he too
comes face to face with his own soul, as you say, he would give a good
deal of his state and power for a very little of your fame."

"That is probably true, Frank," cried Oscar, "that is almost certainly
the crumpled rose-leaf of his couch, but how grossly he is
over-estimated and over-rewarded.... Do you know Wilfred Blunt?"

"I have met him," I replied, "but don't know him. We met once and he
bragged preposterously about his Arab ponies. I was at that time editor
of _The Evening News_: and Mr. Blunt tried hard to talk down to my
level."

"He is by way of being a poet, and he has a very real love of
literature."

"I know," I said; "I really know his work and a good deal about him and
have nothing but praise for the way he championed the Egyptians, and for
his poetry when he has anything to say."

"Well, Frank, he had a sort of club at Crabbett Park, a club for poets,
to which only poets were invited, and he was a most admirable and
perfect host. Lady Blunt could never make out what he was up to. He used
to get us all down to Crabbett, and the poet who was received last had
to make a speech about the new poet--a speech in which he was supposed
to tell the truth about the new-comer. Blunt took the idea, no doubt,
from the custom of the French Academy. Well, he asked me down to
Crabbett Park, and George Curzon, if you please, was the poet picked to
make the speech about me."

"Good God," I cried, "Curzon a poet. It's like Kitchener being taken for
a great captain, or Salisbury for a statesman."

"He writes verses, Frank, but of course there is not a line of poetry in
him: his verses are good enough though, well-turned, I mean, and sharp,
if not witty. Well, Curzon had to make this speech about me after
dinner. We had a delightful dinner, quite perfect, and then Curzon got
up. He had evidently prepared his speech carefully, it was bristling
with innuendoes; sneering side-hits at strange sins. Everyone looked at
his fellow and thought the speech the height of bad taste.

"Mediocrity always detests ability, and loathes genius; Curzon wanted to
prove to himself that at any rate in the moralities he was my superior.

"When he sat down I had to answer him. That was the programme. Of course
I had not prepared a speech, had not thought about Curzon, or what he
might say, but I got up, Frank, and told the kindliest truth about him,
and everyone took it for the bitterest sarcasm, and cheered and cheered
me, though what I said was merely the truth. I told how difficult it was
for Curzon to work and study at Oxford. Everyone wanted to know him
because of his position, because he was going into Parliament, and
certain to make a great figure there; and everyone tried to make up to
him, but he knew that he must not yield to such seduction, so he sat in
his room with a wet towel about his head, and worked and worked without
ceasing.

"In the earlier examinations, which demand only memory, he won first
honours. But even success could not induce him to relax his efforts; he
lived laborious days and took every college examination seriously; he
made out dates in red ink, and hung them on his wall, and learnt pages
of uninteresting events and put them in blue ink in his memory, and at
last came out of the 'Final Schools' with second honours. And now, I
concluded, 'this model youth is going into life, and he is certain to
treat it seriously, certain to win at any rate second honours in it, and
have a great and praiseworthy career.'

"Frank, they roared with laughter, and, to do Curzon justice, at the end
he came up to me and apologised, and was charming. Indeed, they all made
much of me and we had a great night.

"I remember we talked all the night through, or rather I talked and
everyone else listened, for the great principle of the division of
labour is beginning to be understood in English Society. The host gives
excellent food, excellent wine, excellent cigarettes, and
super-excellent coffee, that's his part, and all the men listen, that's
theirs: while I talk and the stars twinkle their delight.

"Wyndham was there, too; you know George Wyndham, with his beautiful
face and fine figure: he is infinitely cleverer than Curzon but he has
not Curzon's push and force, or perhaps, as you say, he is not in such
close touch with the average man as Curzon; he was charming to me.

"In the morning we all trooped out to see the dawn, and some of the
young ones, wild with youth and high spirits, Curzon of course among the
number, stripped off their clothes and rushed down to the lake and began
swimming and diving about like a lot of schoolboys. There is a great
deal of the schoolboy in all Englishmen, that is what makes them so
lovable. When they came out they ran over the grass to dry themselves,
and then began playing lawn tennis, just as they were, stark naked, the
future rulers of England. I shall never forget the scene. Wilfred Blunt
had gone up to his wife's apartments and had changed into some fantastic
pyjamas; suddenly he opened an upper window and came out and perched
himself, cross-legged, on the balcony, looking down at the mad game of
lawn tennis, for all the world like a sort of pink and green Buddha,
while I strolled about with someone, and ordered fresh coffee and talked
till the dawn came with silent silver feet lighting up the beautiful
greenery of the park....

"Now George Curzon plays king in India: Wyndham is on the way to power,
and I'm hiding in shame and poverty here in Paris, an exile and outcast.
Do you wonder that I cannot write, Frank? The awful injustice of life
maddens me. After all, what have they done in comparison with what I
have done?

"Close the eyes of all of us now and fifty years hence, or a hundred
years hence, no one will know anything about Curzon or Wyndham or Blunt:
whether they lived or died will be a matter of indifference to everyone;
but my comedies and my stories and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' will be
known and read by millions, and even my unhappy fate will call forth
world-wide sympathy."

It was all true enough, and good to keep in mind; but even when Oscar
spoke of greater men than himself, he took the same attitude: his
self-esteem was extraordinary. He did not compare his work with that of
others; was not anxious to find his true place, as even Shakespeare was.
From the beginning, from youth on, he was convinced that he was a great
man and going to do great things. Many of us have the same belief and
are just as persuaded, but the belief is not ever present with us as it
was with Oscar, moulding all his actions. For instance, I remarked once
that his handwriting was unforgettable and characteristic. "I worked at
it," he said, "as a boy; I wanted a distinctive handwriting; it had to
be clear and beautiful and peculiar to me. At length I got it but it
took time and patience. I always wanted everything about me to be
distinctive," he added, smiling.

He was proud of his physical appearance, inordinately pleased with his
great height, vain of it even. "Height gives distinction," he declared,
and once even went so far as to say, "One can't picture Napoleon as
small; one thinks only of his magnificent head and forgets the little
podgy figure; it must have been a great nuisance to him: small men have
no dignity."

All this utterly unconscious of the fact that most tall men have no ever
present-sense of their height as an advantage. Yet on the whole one
agrees with Montaigne that height is the chief beauty of a man: it gives
presence.

Oscar never learned anything from criticism; he had a good deal of
personal dignity in spite of his amiability, and when one found fault
with his work, he would smile vaguely or change the subject as if it
didn't interest him.

Again and again I played on his self-esteem to get him to write; but
always met the same answer.

"Oh, Frank, it's impossible, impossible for me to work under these
disgraceful conditions."

"But you can have better conditions now and lots of money if you'll
begin to work."

He shook his head despairingly. Again and again I tried, but failed to
move him, even when I dangled money before him. I didn't then know that
he was receiving regularly more than £300 a year. I thought he was
completely destitute, dependent on such casual help as friends could
give him. I have a letter from him about this time asking me for even
£5[25] as if he were in extremest need.

On one of my visits to Paris after discussing his position, I could not
help saying to him:

"The only thing that will make you write, Oscar, is absolute, blank
poverty. That's the sharpest spur after all--necessity."

"You don't know me," he replied sharply. "I would kill myself. I can
endure to the end; but to be absolutely destitute would show me suicide
as the open door."

Suddenly his depressed manner changed and his whole face lighted up.

"Isn't it comic, Frank, the way the English talk of the 'open door,'
while their doors are always locked, and barred, and bolted, even their
church doors? Yet it is not hypocrisy in them; they simply cannot see
themselves as they are; they have no imagination."

A long pause, and he went on gravely:

"Suicide, Frank, is always the temptation of the unfortunate, a great
temptation."

"Suicide is the natural end of the world-weary," I replied; "but you
enjoy life intensely. For you to talk of suicide is ridiculous."

"Do you know that my wife is dead, Frank?"[26]

"I had heard it," I said.

"My way back to hope and a new life ends in her grave," he went on.
"Everything I do, Frank, is irrevocable."

He spoke with a certain grave sincerity.

"The great tragedies of the world are all final and complete; Socrates
would not escape death, though Crito opened the prison door for him. I
could not avoid prison, though you showed me the way to safety. We are
fated to suffer, don't you think? as an example to humanity--'an echo
and a light unto eternity.'"

"I think it would be finer, instead of taking the punishment lying down,
to trample it under your feet, and make it a rung of the ladder."

"Oh, Frank, you would turn all the tragedies into triumphs, you are a
fighter. My life is done."

"You love life," I cried, "as much as ever you did; more than anyone I
have ever seen."

"It is true," he cried, his face lighting up quickly, "more than anyone,
Frank. Life delights me. The people passing on the Boulevards, the play
of the sunshine in the trees; the noise, the quick movement of the cabs,
the costumes of the _cochers_ and _sergents-de-ville_; workers and
beggars, pimps and prostitutes--all please me to the soul, charm me, and
if you would only let me talk instead of bothering me to write I should
be quite happy. Why should I write any more? I have done enough for
fame.

"I will tell you a story, Frank," he broke off, and he told me a slight
thing about Judas. The little tale was told delightfully, with eloquent
inflections of voice and still more eloquent pauses....

"The end of all this is," I said before going back to London, "that you
will not write?"

"No, no, Frank," he said, "that I cannot write under these conditions.
If I had money enough; if I could shake off Paris, and forget those
awful rooms of mine and get to the Riviera for the winter and live in
some seaside village of the Latins with the blue sea at my feet, and the
blue sky above, and God's sunlight about me and no care for money, then
I would write as naturally as a bird sings, because I should be happy
and could not help it....

"You write stories taken from the fight of life; you are careless of
surroundings, I am a poet and can only sing in the sunshine when I am
happy."

"All right," I said, snatching at the half-promise. "It is just possible
that I may get hold of some money during the next few months, and, if I
do, you shall go and winter in the South, and live as you please without
care of money. If you can only sing when the cage is beautiful and
sunlight floods it, I know the very place for you."

With this sort of vague understanding we parted for some months.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] _Cfr._ Appendix.

[26] See Appendix.

CHAPTER XXII

"A GREAT ROMANTIC PASSION"

There is no more difficult problem for the writer, no harder task than
to decide how far he should allow himself to go in picturing human
weakness. We have all come from the animal and can all without any
assistance from books imagine easily enough the effects of unrestrained
self-indulgence. Yet it is instructive and pregnant with warning to
remark that, as soon as the sheet anchor of high resolve is gone, the
frailties of man tend to become master-vices. All our civilisation is
artificially built up by effort; all high humanity is the reward of
constant striving against natural desires.

In the fall of this year, 1898, I sold _The Saturday Review_ to Lord
Hardwicke and his friends, and as soon as the purchase was completed, I
think in November, I wired to Oscar that I should be in Paris in a short
time, and ready to take him to the South for his holiday. I sent him
some money to pave the way.

A few days later I crossed and wired to him from Calais to dine with me
at Durand's, and to begin dinner if I happened to be late.

While waiting for dinner, I said:

"I want to stay two or three days in Paris to see some pictures. Would
you be ready to start South on Thursday next?" It was then Monday, I
think.

"On Thursday?" he repeated. "Yes, Frank, I think so."

"There is some money for anything you may want to buy," I said and
handed him a cheque I had made payable to self and signed, for he knew
where he could cash it.

"How good of you, Frank, I cannot thank you enough. You start on
Thursday," he added, as if considering it.

"If you would rather wait a little," I said, "say so: I'm quite
willing."

"No, Frank, I think Thursday will do. We are really going to the South
for the whole winter. How wonderful; how gorgeous it will be."

We had a great dinner and talked and talked. He spoke of some of the new
Frenchmen, and at great length of Pierre Louÿs, whom he described as a
disciple:

"It was I, Frank, who induced him to write his 'Aphrodite' in prose." He
spoke, too, of the Grand Guignol Theatre.

"Le Grand Guignol is the first theatre in Paris. It looks like a
nonconformist chapel, a barn of a room with a gallery at the back and a
little wooden stage. There you see the primitive tragedies of real life.
They are as ugly and as fascinating as life itself. You must see it and
we will go to Antoine's as well: you must see Antoine's new piece; he is
doing great work."

We kept dinner up to an unconscionable hour. I had much to tell of
London and much to hear of Paris, and we talked and drank coffee till
one o'clock, and when I proposed supper Oscar accepted the idea with
enthusiasm.

"I have often lunched with you from two o'clock till nine, Frank, and
now I am going to dine with you from nine o'clock till breakfast
to-morrow morning."

"What shall we drink?" I asked.

"The same champagne, Frank, don't you think?" he said, pulling his jowl;
"there is no wine so inspiring as that dry champagne with the exquisite
_bouquet_. You were the first to say my plays were the champagne of
literature."

When we came out it was three o'clock and I was tired and sleepy with my
journey, and Oscar had drunk perhaps more than was good for him. Knowing
how he hated walking I got a _voiture de cercle_ and told him to take
it, and I would walk to my hotel. He thanked me and seemed to hesitate.

"What is it now?" I asked, wanting to get to bed.

"Just a word with you," he said, and drew me away from the carriage
where the _chasseur_ was waiting with the rug. When he got me three or
four paces away he said, hesitatingly:

"Frank, could you ... can you let me have a few pounds? I'm very hard
up."

I stared at him; I had given him a cheque at the beginning of the
dinner: had he forgotten? Or did he perchance want to keep the hundred
pounds intact for some reason? Suddenly it occurred to me that he might
be without even enough for the carriage. I took out a hundred franc note
and gave it to him.

"Thank you, so much," he said, thrusting it into his waistcoat pocket,
"it's very kind of you."

"You will turn up to-morrow at lunch at one?" I said, as I put him into
the little brougham.

"Yes, of course, yes," he cried, and I turned away.

Next day at lunch he seemed to meet me with some embarrassment:

"Frank, I want to ask you something. I'm really confused about last
night; we dined most wisely, if too well. This morning I found you had
given me a cheque, and I found besides in my waistcoat pocket a note for
a hundred francs. Did I ask you for it at the end? 'Tap' you, the French
call it," he added, trying to laugh.

I nodded.

"How dreadful!" he cried. "How dreadful poverty is! I had forgotten that
you had given me a cheque, and I was so hard up, so afraid you might go
away without giving me anything, that I asked you for it. Isn't poverty
dreadful?"

I nodded; I could not say a word: the fact told so much.

The chastened mood of self-condemnation did not last long with him or go
deep; soon he was talking as merrily and gaily as ever.

Before parting I said to him:

"You won't forget that you are going on Thursday night?"

"Oh, really!" he cried, to my surprise, "Thursday is very near; I don't
know whether I shall be able to come."

"What on earth do you mean?" I asked.

"The truth is, you know, I have debts to pay, and I have not enough."

"But I will give you more," I cried, "what will clear you?"

"Fifty more I think will do. How good you are!"

"I will bring it with me to-morrow morning."

"In notes please, will you? French money. I find I shall want it to pay
some little things at once, and the time is short."

I thought nothing of the matter. The next day at lunch I gave him the
money in French notes. That night I said to him:

"You know we are going away to-morrow evening: I hope you'll be ready? I
have got the tickets for the _Train de Luxe_."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" he cried, "I can't be ready."

"What is it now?" I asked.

"Well, it's money. Some more debts have come in."

"Why will you not be frank with me, and tell me what you owe? I will
give you a cheque for it. I don't want to drag it out of you bit by bit.
Tell me a sum that will make you free, and I will give it to you. I want
you to have a perfect six months, and how can you if you are bothered
with debts?"

"How kind you are to me! Do you really mean it?"

"Of course I do."

"Really?" he said.

"Yes," I said, "tell me what it is."

"I think, I believe ... would another fifty be too much?"

"I will give it you to-morrow. Are you sure that will be enough?"

"Oh, yes, Frank; but let's go on Sunday. Sunday is such a good day for
travelling, and it's always so dull everywhere, we might just as well
spend it on the train. Besides, no one travels on Sunday in France, so
we are sure to be able to take our ease in our train. Won't Sunday do,
Frank?"

"Of course it will," I replied laughing; but a day or two later he was
again embarrassed, and again told me it was money, and then he confessed
to me that he was afraid at first I should not have paid all his debts,
if I had known how much they were, and so he thought by telling me of
them little by little, he would make sure at least of something. This
pitiful, pitiable confession depressed me on his account. It showed
practice in such petty tricks and all too little pride. Of course it did
not alter my admiration of his qualities; nor weaken in any degree my
resolve to give him a fair chance. If he could be saved, I was
determined to save him.

We met at the Gare de Lyons on Sunday evening. I found he had dined at
the buffet: there was a surprising number of empty bottles on the table;
he seemed terribly depressed.

"Someone was dining with me, Frank, a friend," he offered by way of
explanation.

"Why did he not wait? I should like to have seen him."

"Oh, he was no one you would have cared about, Frank," he replied.

I sat with him and took a cup of coffee, whilst waiting for the train.
He was wretchedly gloomy; scarcely spoke indeed; I could not make it
out. From time to time he sighed heavily, and I noticed that his eyes
were red, as if he had been crying.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"I will tell you later, perhaps. It is very hard; parting is like
dying," and his eyes filled with tears.

We were soon in the train running out into the night. I was as
light-hearted as could be. At length I was free of journalism, I
thought, and I was going to the South to write my Shakespeare book, and
Oscar would work, too, when the conditions were pleasant. But I could
not win a single smile from him; he sat downcast, sighing hopelessly
from time to time.

"What on earth's the matter?" I cried. "Here you are going to the
sunshine, to blue skies, and the wine-tinted Mediterranean, and you're
not content. We shall stop in a hotel near a little sun-baked valley
running down to the sea. You walk from the hotel over a carpet of pine
needles, and when you get into the open, violets and anemones bloom
about your feet, and the scent of rosemary and myrtle will be in your
nostrils; yet instead of singing for joy the bird droops his feathers
and hangs his head as if he had the 'pip.'"

"Oh, don't," he cried, "don't," and he looked at me with tears filling
his eyes; "you don't know, Frank, what a great romantic passion is."

"Is that what you are suffering from?"

"Yes, a great romantic passion."

"Good God!" I laughed; "who has inspired this new devotion?"

"Don't make fun of me, Frank, or I will not tell you; but if you will
listen I will try to tell you all about it, for I think you should know,
besides, I think telling it may ease my pain, so come into the cabin and
listen.

"Do you remember once in the summer you wired me from Calais to meet you
at Maire's restaurant, meaning to go afterwards to Antoine's Theatre,
and I was very late? You remember, the evening Rostand was dining at the
next table. Well, it was that evening. I drove up to Maire's in time,
and I was just getting out of the victoria when a little soldier passed,
and our eyes met. My heart stood still; he had great dark eyes and an
exquisite olive-dark face--a Florentine bronze, Frank, by a great
master. He looked like Napoleon when he was first Consul, only--less
imperious, more beautiful....

"I got out hypnotised, and followed him down the Boulevard as in a
dream; the _cocher_ came running after me, I remember, and I gave him a
five franc piece, and waved him off; I had no idea what I owed him; I
did not want to hear his voice; it might break the spell; mutely I
followed my fate. I overtook the boy in a short time and asked him to
come and have a drink, and he said to me in his quaint French way:

"'_Ce n'est pas de refus!_' (Too good to refuse.)

"We went into a café, and I ordered something, I forget what, and we
began to talk. I told him I liked his face; I had had a friend once like
him; and I wanted to know all about him. I was in a hurry to meet you,
but I had to make friends with him first. He began by telling me all
about his mother, Frank, yes, his mother." Oscar smiled here in spite of
himself.

"But at last I got from him that he was always free on Thursdays, and he
would be very glad to see me then, though he did not know what I could
see in him to like. I found out that the thing he desired most in the
world was a bicycle; he talked of nickel-plated handle bars, and
chains--and finally I told him it might be arranged. He was very
grateful and so we made a rendezvous for the next Thursday, and I came
on at once to dine with you."

"Goodness!" I cried laughing. "A soldier, a nickel-plated bicycle and a
great romantic passion!"

"If I had said a brooch, or a necklace, some trinket which would have
cost ten times as much, you would have found it quite natural."

"Yes," I admitted, "but I don't think I'd have introduced the necklace
the first evening if there had been any romance in the affair, and the
nickel-plated bicycle to me seems irresistibly comic."

"Frank," he cried reprovingly, "I cannot talk to you if you laugh; I am
quite serious. I don't believe you know what a great romantic passion
is; I am going to convince you that you don't know the meaning of it."

"Fire away," I replied, "I am here to be convinced. But I don't think
you will teach me that there is any romance except where there is
another sex."

"Don't talk to me of the other sex," he cried with distaste in voice and
manner. "First of all in beauty there is no comparison between a boy and
a girl. Think of the enormous, fat hips which every sculptor has to tone
down, and make lighter, and the great udder breasts which the artist
has to make small and round and firm, and then picture the exquisite
slim lines of a boy's figure. No one who loves beauty can hesitate for a
moment. The Greeks knew that; they had the sense of plastic beauty, and
they understood that there is no comparison."

"You must not say that," I replied; "you are going too far; the Venus of
Milo is as fine as any Apollo, in sheer beauty; the flowing curves
appeal to me more than your weedy lines."

"Perhaps they do, Frank," he retorted, "but you must see that the boy is
far more beautiful. It is your sex-instinct, your sinful sex-instinct
which prevents you worshipping the higher form of beauty. Height and
length of limb give distinction; slightness gives grace; women are
squat! You must admit that the boy's figure is more beautiful; the
appeal it makes far higher, more spiritual."

"Six of one and half-a-dozen of the other," I barked. "Your sculptor
knows it is just as hard to find an ideal boy's figure as an ideal
girl's; and if he has to modify the most perfect girl's figure, he has
to modify the most perfect boy's figure as well. If he refines the
girl's breasts and hips he has to pad the boy's ribs and tone down the
great staring knee-bones and the unlovely large ankles; but please go
on, I enjoy your special pleading and your romantic passion interests
me; though you have not yet come to the romance, let alone the passion."

"Oh, Frank," he cried, "the story is full of romance; every meeting was
an event in my life. You have no idea how intelligent he is; every
evening we spent together he was different; he had grown, developed. I
lent him books and he read them, and his mind opened from week to week
like a flower, till in a short time, a few months, he became an
exquisite companion and disciple. Frank, no girl grows like that; they
have no minds, and what intelligence they have is all given to wretched
vanities, and personal jealousies. There is no intellectual
companionship possible with them. They want to talk of dress, and not of
ideas, and how persons look and not of what they are. How can you have
the flower of romance without a brotherhood of soul?"

"Sisterhood of soul seems to me infinitely finer," I said, "but go on."

"I shall convince you," he declared; "I must be able to, because all
reason is on my side. Let me give you one instance. Of course my boy had
his bicycle; he used to come to me on it and go to and fro from the
barracks on it. When you came to Paris in September, you invited me to
dine one night, one Thursday night, when he was to come to me. I told
him I had to go and dine with you. He didn't mind; but was glad when I
said I had an English editor for a friend, glad that I should have
someone to talk to about London and the people I used to know. If it had
been a woman I loved, I should have been forced to tell lies: she would
have been jealous of my past. I told him the truth, and when I spoke
about you he grew interested and excited, and at last he put a wish
before me. He wanted to know if he might come and leave his bicycle
outside and look through the window of the restaurant, just to see us at
dinner. I told him there might possibly be women-guests. He replied that
he would be delighted to see me in dress-clothes talking to gentlemen
and ladies.

"Might he come?" he persisted.

"Of course I said he could come, and he came, but I never saw him.

"The next time we met he told me all about it; how he had picked you out
from my description of you, and how he knew Baüer from his likeness to
Dumas _père_, and he was delightful about it all.

"Now, Frank, would any girl have come to see you enjoying yourself with
other people? Would any girl have stared through the window and been
glad to see you inside amusing yourself with other men and women? You
know there's not a girl on earth with such unselfish devotion. There is
no comparison, I tell you, between the boy and the girl; I say again
deliberately, you don't know what a great romantic passion is or the
high unselfishness of true love."

"You have put it with extraordinary ability," I said, "as of course I
knew you would. I think I can understand the charm of such
companionship; but only from the young boy's point of view, not from
yours. I can understand how you have opened to him a new heaven and a
new earth, but what has he given you? Nothing. On the other hand any
finely gifted girl would have given you something. If you had really
touched her heart, you would have found in her some instinctive
tenderness, some proof of unselfish, exquisite devotion that would have
made your eyes prickle with a sense of inferiority.

"After all, the essence of love, the finest spirit of that companionship
you speak about, of the sisterhood of soul, is that the other person
should quicken you, too; open to you new horizons, discover new
possibilities; and how could your soldier boy help you in any way? He
brought you no new ideas, no new feelings, could reveal no new thoughts
to you. I can see no romance, no growth of soul in such a connection.
But the girl is different from the man in all ways. You have as much to
learn from her as she has from you, and neither of you can come to
ideal growth in any other way: you are both half-parts of
humanity--complements, and in need of each other."

"You have put it very cunningly, Frank, as I expected you would, to
return your compliment, but you must admit that with the boy, at any
rate, you have no jealousy, no mean envyings, no silly inanities. There
it is, Frank, some of us hate 'cats.' I can give reasons for my dislike,
which to me are conclusive."

"The boy who would beg for a bicycle is not likely to be without mean
envyings," I replied. "Now you have talked about romance and
companionship," I went on, "but can you really feel passion?"

"Frank, what a silly question! Do you remember how Socrates says he felt
when the chlamys blew aside and showed him the limbs of Charmides? Don't
you remember how the blood throbbed in his veins and how he grew blind
with desire, a scene more magical than the passionate love-lines of
Sappho?

"There is no other passion to be compared with it. A woman's passion is
degrading. She is continually tempting you. She wants your desire as a
satisfaction for her vanity more than anything else, and her vanity is
insatiable if her desire is weak, and so she continually tempts you to
excess, and then blames you for the physical satiety and disgust which
she herself has created. With a boy there is no vanity in the matter, no
jealousy, and therefore none of the tempting, not a tenth part of the
coarseness; and consequently desire is always fresh and keen. Oh, Frank,
believe me, you don't know what a great romantic passion is."

"What you say only shows how little you know women," I replied. "If you
explained all this to the girl who loves you, she would see it at once,
and her tenderness would grow with her self-abnegation; we all grow by
giving. If the woman cares more than the man for caresses and kindness,
it is because she feels more tenderness, and is capable of intenser
devotion."

"You don't know what you are talking about, Frank," he retorted. "You
repeat the old accepted commonplaces. The boy came to the station with
me to-night. He knew I was going away for six months. His heart was like
lead, tears gathered in his eyes again and again in spite of himself,
and yet he tried to be gay and bright for my sake; he wanted to show me
how glad he was that I should be happy, how thankful he was for all I
had done for him, and the new mental life I had created in him. He did
his best to keep my courage up. I cried, but he shook his tears away.
'Six months will soon be over,' he said, 'and perhaps you will come
back to me, and I shall be glad again.' Meantime he will write charming
letters to me, I'm sure.

"Would any girl take a parting like that? No; she would be jealous and
envious, and wonder why you were enjoying yourself in the South while
she was condemned to live in the rainy, cold North. Would she ask you to
tell her of all the beautiful girls you met, and whether they were
charming and bright, as the boy asked me to tell him of all the
interesting people I should meet, so that he, too, might take an
interest in them? A girl in his place would have been ill with envy and
malice and jealousy. Again I repeat, you don't know what a high romantic
passion is."

"Your argument is illogical," I cried, "if the girl is jealous, it is
because she has given herself more completely: her exclusiveness is the
other side of her devotion and tenderness; she wants to do everything
for you, to be with you and help you in every way, and in case of
illness or poverty or danger, you would find how much more she had to
give than your red-breeched soldier."

"That's merely a rude gibe and not an argument, Frank."

"As good an argument as your 'cats,'" I replied; "your little soldier
boy with his nickel-plated bicycle only makes me grin," and I grinned.

"You are unpardonable," he cried, "unpardonable, and in your soul you
know that all the weight of argument is on my side. In your soul you
must know it. What is the food of passion, Frank, but beauty, beauty
alone, beauty always, and in beauty of form and vigour of life there is
no comparison. If you loved beauty as intensely as I do, you would feel
as I feel. It is beauty which gives me joy, makes me drunk as with wine,
blind with insatiable desire...."

CHAPTER XXIII

He was an incomparable companion, perfectly amiable, yet vivid, and
eager as a child, always interested and interesting. We awoke at Avignon
and went out in pyjamas and overcoats to stretch our legs and get a bowl
of coffee on the platform in the pearly grey light of early morning.
After coffee and cigarettes he led the way to the other end of the
platform, that we might catch a glimpse of the town wall which, though
terribly restored, yet, when seen from a distance, transports one back
five hundred years to the age of chivalry.

"How I should have loved to be a troubadour, or a _trouvère_, Frank;
that was my true _métier_, to travel from castle to castle singing love
songs and telling romantic stories to while away the tedium of the lives
of the great. Fancy the reception they would have given me for bringing
a new joy into their castled isolation, new ideas, new passions--a
breath of gossip and scandal from the outside world to relieve the
intolerable boredom of the middle ages. I should have been kept at the
Court of Aix: I think they would have bound me with flower-chains, and
my fame would have spread all through the sunny vineyards and grey
olive-clad hills of Provence."

When we got into the train again he began:

"We stop next at Marseilles, don't we, Frank? A great historic town for
nearly three thousand years. One really feels a barbarian in comparison,
and yet all I know of Marseilles is that it is famous for
_bouillabaisse_. Suppose we stop and get some?"

"_Bouillabaisse_," I replied, "is not peculiar to Marseilles or the _Rue
Cannebière_. You can get it all along this coast. There is only one
thing necessary to it and that is _rascasse_, a fish caught only among
the rocks: you will get excellent _bouillabaisse_ at lunch where we are
going."

"Where are we going? You have not told me yet."

"It is for you to decide," I answered. "If you want perfect quiet there
are two places in the Esterel mountains, Agay and La Napoule. Agay is in
the middle of the Esterel. You would be absolutely alone there except
for the visit of an occasional French painter. La Napoule is eight or
ten miles from Cannes, so that you are within reach of a town and its
amusements. There is still another place I had thought of, quieter than
either, in the mountains behind Nice."

"Nice sounds wonderful, Frank, but I should meet too many English people
there who would know me, and they are horribly rude. I think we will
choose La Napoule."

About ten o'clock we got out at La Napoule and installed ourselves in
the little hotel, taking up three of the best rooms on the second or top
floor, much to the delight of the landlord. At twelve we had breakfast
under a big umbrella in the open air, looking over the sea. I had put
the landlord on his mettle, and he gave us a fry of little red mullet,
which made us understand how tasteless whitebait are: then a plain
beefsteak _aux pommes_, a morsel of cheese, and a sweet omelette. We
both agreed that we had had a most excellent breakfast. The coffee left
a good deal to be desired, and there was no champagne on the list fit to
drink; but both these faults could be remedied by the morrow, and were
remedied.

We spent the rest of the day wandering between the seashore and the
pine-clad hills. The next morning I put in some work, but in the
afternoon I was free to walk and explore. On one of my first tramps I
discovered a monastery among the hills hundreds of feet above the sea,
built and governed by an Italian monk. I got to know the Père
Vergile[27] and had a great talk with him. He was both wise and strong,
with ingratiating, gentle manners. Had he gone as a boy from his little
Italian fishing village to New York or Paris, he would have certainly
come to greatness and honour. One afternoon I took Oscar to see him: the
monastery was not more than three-quarters of an hour's stroll from our
hotel; but Oscar grumbled at the walk as a nuisance, said it was miles
and miles; the road, too, was rough, and the sun hot. The truth was, he
was abnormally lazy. But he fascinated the Italian with his courteous
manner and vivid speech, and as soon as we were alone the Abbé asked me
who he was.

"He must be a great man," he said, "he has the stamp of a great man, and
he must have lived in courts: he has the charming, graceful, smiling
courtesy of the great."

"Yes," I nodded mysteriously, "a great man--incognito."

The Abbé kept us to dinner, made us taste of his oldest wines, and a
special liqueur of his own distilling; told us how he had built the
monastery with no money, and when we exclaimed with wonder, reproved us
gently:

"All great things are built with faith, and not with money; why wonder
that this little building stands firmly on that everlasting
foundation?"

When we came out of the monastery it was already night, and the
moonlight was throwing fantastic leafy shadows on the path, as we walked
down through the avenue of forest to the sea shore.

"You remember those words of Vergil, Frank--_per amica silentia
lunæ_--they always seem to me indescribably beautiful; the most magic
line about the moon ever written, except Browning's in the poem in which
he mentioned Keats--'him even.' I love that 'amica silentia.' What a
beautiful nature the man had who could feel 'the _friendly_ silences of
the moon.'"

When we got down the hill he declared himself tired.

"Tired after a mile?" I asked.

"Tired to death, worn out," he said, laughing at his own laziness.

"Shall we get a boat and row across the bay?"

"How splendid! of course, let's do it," and we went down to the landing
stage. I had never seen the water so calm; half the bay was veiled by
the mountain, and opaque like unpolished steel; a little further out,
the water was a purple shield, emblazoned with shimmering silver. We
called a fisherman and explained what we wanted. When we got into the
boat, to my astonishment, Oscar began calling the fisher boy by his
name; evidently he knew him quite well. When we landed I went up from
the boat to the hotel, leaving Oscar and the boy together....

A fortnight taught me a good deal about Oscar at this time; he was
intensely indolent: quite content to kill time by the hour talking to
the fisher lads, or he would take a little carriage and drive to Cannes
and amuse himself at some wayside café.

He never cared to walk and I walked for miles daily, so that we spent
only one or at most two afternoons a week together, meeting so seldom
that nearly all our talks were significant. Several times contemporary
names came up and I was compelled to notice for the first time that
really he was contemptuous of almost everyone, and had a sharp word to
say about many who were supposed to be his friends. One day we spoke of
Ricketts and Shannon; I was saying that had Ricketts lived in Paris he
would have had a great reputation: many of his designs I thought
extraordinary, and his intellect was peculiarly French--_mordant_ even.
Oscar did not like to hear praise of anyone.

"Do you know my word for them, Frank? I like it. I call them 'Temper and
Temperament.'"

Was his punishment making him a little spiteful or was it the temptation
of the witty phrase?

"What do you think of Arthur Symons?" I asked.

"Oh, Frank, I said of him long ago that he was a sad example of an
Egoist who had no Ego."

"And what of your compatriot, George Moore? He's popular enough," I
continued.

"Popular, Frank, as if that counted. George Moore has conducted his
whole education in public. He had written two or three books before he
found out there was such a thing as English grammar. He at once
announced his discovery and so won the admiration of the illiterate. A
few years later he discovered that there was something architectural in
style, that sentences had to be built up into a paragraph, and
paragraphs into chapters and so on. Naturally he cried this revelation,
too, from the housetops, and thus won the admiration of the journalists
who had been making rubble-heaps all their lives without knowing it. I'm
much afraid, Frank, in spite of all his efforts, he will die before he
reaches the level from which writers start. It's a pity because he has
certainly a little real talent. He differs from Symons in that he has an
Ego, but his Ego has five senses and no soul."

"What about Bernard Shaw?" I probed further, "after all he's going to
count."

"Yes, Frank, a man of real ability but with a bleak mind. Humorous
gleams as of wintry sunlight on a bare, harsh landscape. He has no
passion, no feeling, and without passionate feeling how can one be an
artist? He believes in nothing, loves nothing, not even Bernard Shaw,
and really, on the whole, I don't wonder at his indifference," and he
laughed mischievously.

"And Wells?" I asked.

"A scientific Jules Verne," he replied with a shrug.

"Did you ever care for Hardy?" I continued.

"Not greatly. He has just found out that women have legs underneath
their dresses, and this discovery has almost wrecked his life. He writes
poetry, I believe, in his leisure moments, and I am afraid it will be
very hard reading. He knows nothing of love; passion to him is a
childish illness like measles--poor unhappy spirit!"

"You might be describing Mrs. Humphry Ward," I cried.

"God forbid, Frank," he exclaimed with such mock horror I had to laugh.
"After all, Hardy is a writer and a great landscape painter."

"I don't know why it is," he went on, "but I am always match-making when
I think of English celebrities. I should so much like to have introduced
Mrs. Humphry Ward blushing at eighteen or twenty to Swinburne, who
would of course have bitten her neck in a furious kiss, and she would
have run away and exposed him in court, or else have suffered agonies of
mingled delight and shame in silence.

"And if one could only marry Thomas Hardy to Victoria Cross he might
have gained some inkling of real passion with which to animate his
little keepsake pictures of starched ladies. A great many writers, I
think, might be saved in this way, but there would still be left the
Corellis and Hall Caines that one could do nothing with except bind them
back to back, which would not even tantalise them, and throw them into
the river, a new _noyade_: the Thames at Barking, I think, would be
about the place for them...."

"Where do you go every afternoon?" I asked him once casually.

"I go to Cannes, Frank, and sit in a café and look across the sea to
Capri, where Tiberius used to sit like a spider watching, and I think of
myself as an exile, the victim of one of his inscrutable suspicions, or
else I am in Rome looking at the people dancing naked, but with gilded
lips, through the streets at the _Floralia_. I sup with the _arbiter
elegantiarum_ and come back to La Napoule, Frank," and he pulled his
jowl, "to the simple life and the charm of restful friendship."

More and more clearly I saw that the effort, the hard work, of writing
was altogether beyond him: he was now one of those men of genius,
talkers merely, half artists, half dreamers, whom Balzac describes
contemptuously as wasting their lives, "talking to hear themselves
talk"; capable indeed of fine conceptions and of occasional fine
phrases, but incapable of the punishing toil of execution; charming
companions, fated in the long run to fall to misery and destitution.

Constant creation is the first condition of art as it is the first
condition of life.

I asked him one day if he remembered the terrible passage about those
"eunuchs of art" in "La Cousine Bette."

"Yes, Frank," he replied; "but Balzac was probably envious of the
artist-talker; at any rate, we who talk should not be condemned by those
to whom we dedicate our talents. It is for posterity to blame us; but
after all I have written a good deal. Do you remember how Browning's
Sarto defends himself?

           "Some good son
    Paint my two hundred pictures--let him try."

He did not see that Balzac, one of the greatest talkers that ever lived
according to Théophile Gautier, was condemning the temptation to which
he himself had no doubt yielded too often. To my surprise, Oscar did not
even read much now. He was not eager to hear new thoughts, a little
rebellious to any new mental influence. He had reached his zenith, I
suppose: had begun to fossilise, as men do when they cease to grow.

One day at lunch I questioned him:

"You told me once that you always imagined yourself in the place of
every historic personage. Suppose you had been Jesus, what religion
would you have preached?"

"What a wonderful question!" he cried. "What religion is mine? What
belief have I?

"I believe most of all in personal liberty for every human soul. Each
man ought to do what he likes, to develop as he will. England, or rather
London, for I know little of England outside London, was an ideal place
to me, till they punished me because I did not share their tastes. What
an absurdity it all was, Frank: how dared they punish me for what is
good in my eyes? How dared they?" and he fell into moody thought.... The
idea of a new gospel did not really interest him.

It was about this time he first told me of a new play he had in mind.

"It has a great scene, Frank," he said. "Imagine a _roué_ of forty-five
who is married; incorrigible, of course, Frank, a great noble who gets
the person he is in love with to come and stay with him in the country.
One evening his wife, who has gone upstairs to lie down with a
headache, is behind a screen in a room half asleep; she is awakened by
her husband's courting. She cannot move, she is bound breathless to her
couch; she hears everything. Then, Frank, the husband comes to the door
and finds it locked, and knowing that his wife is inside with the host,
beats upon the door and will have entrance, and while the guilty ones
whisper together--the woman blaming the man, the man trying to think of
some excuse, some way out of the net--the wife gets up very quietly and
turns on the lights while the two cowards stare at her with wild
surmise. She passes to the door and opens it and the husband rushes in
to find his hostess as well as the host and his wife. I think it is a
great scene, Frank, a great stage picture."

"It is," I said, "a great scene; why don't you write it?"

"Perhaps I shall, Frank, one of these days, but now I am thinking of
some poetry, a 'Ballad of a Fisher Boy,' a sort of companion to 'The
Ballad of Reading Gaol,' in which I sing of liberty instead of prison,
joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution. I shall do this
joy-song much better than I did the song of sorrow and despair."

"Like Davidson's 'Ballad of a Nun,'" I said, for the sake of saying
something.

"Naturally Davidson would write the 'Ballad of a Nun,' Frank; his talent
is Scotch and severe; but I should like to write 'The Ballad of a Fisher
Boy,'" and he fell to dreaming.

The thought of his punishment was oft with him. It seemed to him
hideously wrong and unjust. But he never questioned the right of society
to punish. He did not see that, if you once grant that, the wrong done
to him could be defended.

"I used to think myself a lord of life," he said. "How dared those
little wretches condemn me and punish me? Everyone of them tainted with
a sensuality which I loathe."

To call him out of this bitter way of regret I quoted Shakespeare's
sonnet:

    "For why should others' false adulterate eyes
      Give salutation to my sportive blood?
    Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
      Which in their wills count bad what I think good?"

"His complaint is exactly yours, Oscar."

"It's astonishing, Frank, how well you know him, and yet you deny his
intimacy with Pembroke. To you he is a living man; you always talk of
him as if he had just gone out of the room, and yet you persist in
believing in his innocence."

"You misapprehend me," I said, "the passion of his life was for Mary
Fitton, to give her a name; I mean the 'dark lady' of the sonnets, who
was Beatrice, Cressida and Cleopatra, and you yourself admit that a man
who has a mad passion for a woman is immune, I think the doctors call
it, to other influences."

"Oh, yes, Frank, of course; but how could Shakespeare with his beautiful
nature love a woman to that mad excess?"

"Shakespeare hadn't your overwhelming love of plastic beauty," I
replied; "he fell in love with a dominant personality, the complement of
his own yielding, amiable disposition."

"That's it," he broke in, "our opposites attract us irresistibly--the
charm of the unknown!"

"You often talk now," I went on, "as if you had never loved a woman; yet
you must have loved--more than one."

"My salad days, Frank," he quoted, smiling, "when I was green in
judgment, cold of blood."

"No, no," I persisted, "it is not a great while since you praised Lady
So and So and the Terrys enthusiastically."

"Lady ----," he began gravely (and I could not but notice that the mere
title seduced him to conventional, poetic language), "moves like a lily
in water; I always think of her as a lily; just as I used to think of
Lily Langtry as a tulip, with a figure like a Greek vase carved in
ivory. But I always adored the Terrys: Marion is a great actress with
subtle charm and enigmatic fascination: she was my 'Woman of no
importance,' artificial and enthralling; she belongs to my theatre--"

As he seemed to have lost the thread, I questioned again.

"And Ellen?"

"Oh, Ellen's a perfect wonder," he broke out, "a great character. Do you
know her history?" And then, without waiting for an answer, he
continued:

"She began as a model for Watts, the painter, when she was only some
fifteen or sixteen years of age. In a week she read him as easily as if
he had been a printed book. He treated her with condescending courtesy,
_en grand seigneur_, and, naturally, she had her revenge on him.

"One day her mother came in and asked Watts what he was going to do
about Ellen. Watts said he didn't understand. 'You have made Ellen in
love with you,' said the mother, and it is impossible that could have
happened unless you had been attentive to her.'

"Poor Watts protested and protested, but the mother broke down and
sobbed, and said the girl's heart would be broken, and at length, in
despair, Watts asked what he was to do, and the mother could only
suggest marriage.

"Finally they were married."

"You don't mean that," I cried, "I never knew that Watts had married
Ellen Terry."

"Oh, yes," said Oscar, "they were married all right. The mother saw to
that, and to do him justice, Watts kept the whole family like a
gentleman. But like an idealist, or, as a man of the world would say, a
fool, he was ashamed of his wife; he showed great reserve to her, and
when he gave his usual dinners or receptions, he invited only men and
so, carefully, left her out.

"One evening he had a dinner; a great many well-known people were
present and a bishop was on his right hand, when, suddenly, between the
cheese and the pear, as the French would say, Ellen came dancing into
the room in pink tights with a basket of roses around her waist with
which she began pelting the guests. Watts was horrified, but everyone
else delighted, the bishop in especial, it is said, declared he had
never seen anything so romantically beautiful. Watts nearly had a fit,
but Ellen danced out of the room with all their hearts in her basket
instead of her roses.

"To me that's the true story of Ellen Terry's life. It may be true or
false in reality, but I believe it to be true in fact as in symbol; it
is not only an image of her life, but of her art. No one knows how she
met Irving or learned to act, though, as you know, she was one of the
best actresses that ever graced the English stage. A great personality.
Her children even have inherited some of her talent."

It was only famous actresses such as Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt and
great ladies that Oscar ever praised. He was a snob by nature; indeed
this was the chief link between him and English society. Besides, he had
a rooted contempt for women and especially for their brains. He said
once, of some one: "he is like a woman, sure to remember the trivial and
forget the important."

It was this disdain of the sex which led him, later, to take up our
whole dispute again.

"I have been thinking over our argument in the train," he began; "really
it was preposterous of me to let you off with a drawn battle; you should
have been beaten and forced to haul down your flag. We talked of love
and I let you place the girl against the boy: it is all nonsense. A girl
is not made for love; she is not even a good instrument of love."

"Some of us care more for the person than the pleasure," I replied, "and
others--. You remember Browning:

    Nearer we hold of God
    Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe."

"Yes, yes," he replied impatiently, "but that's not the point. I mean
that a woman is not made for passion and love; but to be a mother.

"When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily,
with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so
the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless,
deformed: she dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with
drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love.
It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and
kiss her; but she was sick always, and--oh! I cannot recall it, it is
all loathsome.... I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse
my lips in the pure air. Oh, nature is disgusting; it takes beauty and
defiles it: it defaces the ivory-white body we have adored, with the
vile cicatrices of maternity: it befouls the altar of the soul.

"How can you talk of such intimacy as love? How can you idealise it?
Love is not possible to the artist unless it is sterile."

"All her suffering did not endear her to you?" I asked in amazement;
"did not call forth that pity in you which you used to speak of as
divine?"

"Pity, Frank," he exclaimed impatiently; "pity has nothing to do with
love. How can one desire what is shapeless, deformed, ugly? Desire is
killed by maternity; passion buried in conception," and he flung away
from the table.

At length I understood his dominant motive: _trahit sua quemque
voluptas_, his Greek love of form, his intolerant cult of physical
beauty, could take no heed of the happiness or well-being of the
beloved.

"I will not talk to you about it, Frank; I am like a Persian, who lives
by warmth and worships the sun, talking to some Esquimau, who answers me
with praise of blubber and nights spent in ice houses and baths of foul
vapour. Let's talk of something else."

FOOTNOTES:

[27] He lived till November, 1910.

CHAPTER XXIV

A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days,
leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly happy, with good food, excellent
champagne, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.

When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered
for the worse. There was an Englishman of a good class named M----
staying at the hotel. He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or
eighteen whom he called his servant. Oscar wanted to know if I minded
meeting him.

"He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much: you
won't mind his dining with us, will you?"

"Of course not," I replied. But when I saw M---- I thought him an
insignificant, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration for
Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for
he had hardly any brains of his own. He had, however, a certain liking
for the poetry and literature of passion.[28]

To my astonishment Oscar was charming to him, chiefly I think because
he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at
some place he had in Switzerland. This support made Oscar recalcitrant
to any influence I might have had over him. When I asked him if he had
written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually:

"No, Frank, I don't think I shall be able to write any more. What is the
good of it? I cannot force myself to write."

"And your 'Ballad of a Fisher Boy'?" I asked.

"I have composed three or four verses of it," he said, smiling at me, "I
have got them in my head," and he recited two or three, one of which was
quite good, but none of them startling.

Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout
again: the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze out of him;
he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the
catastrophe.

One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited
to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried:

"Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison. You do not know how I
abhor even the memory of it: it was degrading, inhuman!"

"Prison was the making of you," I could not help retorting, irritated by
what seemed to me a mere excuse. "You came out of it better in health
and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours
and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why
you wrote those superb letters to the 'Daily Chronicle,' and the 'Ballad
of Reading Gaol'; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep
you there."

For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.

"You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank," he retorted. "Bad food is bad for
everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me. Chastity is
just as unnatural and devilish as hunger; I hate both. Self-denial is
the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity."

To all this M---- giggled applause, which naturally excited the
combative instincts in me--always too alert.

"All great artists," I replied, "have had to practise chastity; it is
chastity alone which gives vigour and tone to mind and body, while
building up a reserve of extraordinary strength. Your favourite Greeks
never allowed an athlete to go into the palæstra unless he had
previously lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year. Balzac,
too, practised it and extolled its virtues, and goodness knows he loved
all the mud-honey of Paris."

"You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next! You
are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend
chastity and 'skilly,' though I admit," he added laughing, "that your
'skilly' includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne,
Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too
puritanical. It's absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional
love against my ideal passion."

He provoked me: his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority. I
kept silent: I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M---- had
not been present.

But Oscar was determined to assert his peculiar view. One or two days
afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had
ever seen him.

"What do you think has happened, Frank?"

"I do not know. Nothing serious, I hope."

"I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes. I had taken out a
Vergil with me and had begun reading it. As I sat there reading, I
happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George
Alexander--George Alexander on a bicycle. I had known him intimately in
the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went
towards him. But he turned his head aside and pedalled past me
deliberately. He meant to cut me. Of course I know that just before my
trial in London he took my name off the bill of my comedy, though he
went on playing it. But I was not angry with him for that, though he
might have behaved as well as Wyndham,[29] who owed me nothing, don't
you think?

"Here there was nobody to see him, yet he cut me. What brutes men are!
They not only punish me as a society, but now they are trying as
individuals to punish me, and after all I have not done worse than they
do. What difference is there between one form of sexual indulgence and
another? I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites! Think of Alexander, who made
all his money out of my works, cutting me, Alexander! It is too ignoble.
Wouldn't you be angry, Frank?"

"I daresay I should be," I replied coolly, hoping the incident would be
a spur to him.

"I've always wondered why you gave Alexander a play? Surely you didn't
think him an actor?"

"No, no!" he exclaimed, a sudden smile lighting up his face; "Alexander
doesn't act on the stage; he behaves. But wasn't it mean of him?"

I couldn't help smiling, the dart was so deserved.

"Begin another play," I said, "and the Alexanders will immediately go on
their knees to you again. On the other hand, if you do nothing you may
expect worse than discourtesy. Men love to condemn their neighbours' pet
vice. You ought to know the world by this time."

He did not even notice the hint to work, but broke out angrily:

"What you call vice, Frank, is not vice: it is as good to me as it was
to Cæsar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was first of all
made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times,
by the Goths--the Germans and English--who have done little or nothing
since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity. They all damn the sins
they have no mind to, and that's their morality. A brutal race; they
overeat and overdrink and condemn the lusts of the flesh, while
revelling in all the vilest sins of the spirit. If they would read the
23rd chapter of St. Matthew and apply it to themselves, they would learn
more than by condemning a pleasure they don't understand. Why, even
Bentham refused to put what you call a 'vice' in his penal code, and you
yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it
carries no temptation with it. It may be a malady; but, if so, it
appears only to attack the highest natures. It is disgraceful to punish
it. The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment."

"Don't be too sure of that," I retorted.

"I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns it, Frank; I do
not believe such a reason exists."

"Don't forget," I said, "that this practice which you defend is
condemned by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of
mankind."

"Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank."

"And what is such a prejudice?" I asked. "It is the reason of a thousand
generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular experience that it
has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer
merely an argument. I would rather have one such prejudice held by men
of a dozen different races than a myriad reasons. Such a prejudice is
incarnate reason approved by immemorial experience.

"What argument have you against cannibalism; what reason is there why we
should not fatten babies for the spit and eat their flesh? The flesh is
sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at
once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it. What hinders
us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an
instinctive loathing at the bare idea?

"Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the
brute to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole
races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills
the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become
instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them
that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the
noblest form of passion. They shudder from you and hate and punish you,
and if you persist they will kill you. Who shall say they are wrong? Who
shall sneer at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of
successful endeavour?"

"Fine rhetoric, I concede," he replied, "but mere rhetoric. I never
heard such a defence of prejudice before. I should not have expected it
from you. You admit you don't share the prejudice; you don't feel the
horror, the instinctive loathing you describe. Why? Because you are
educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not
a low passion, because you know that Cæsar's weakness, let us say, or
the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If
the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it
is consistent with it."[30]

"I cannot admit that," I answered. "First of all, let us leave
Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs
of his guilt, and there are none. About the others there is this to be
said, it is not by imitating the vices and weaknesses of great men that
we shall get to their level. And suppose we are fated to climb above
them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded.

"I have not even tried to put the strongest reasons before you; I should
have thought your own mind would have supplied them; but surely you see
that the historical argument is against you. This vice of yours is
dropping out of life, like cannibalism: it is no longer a practice of
the highest races. It may have seemed natural enough to the Greeks, to
us it is unnatural. Even the best Athenians condemned it; Socrates took
pride in never having yielded to it; all moderns denounce it
disdainfully. You must see that the whole progress of the world, the
current of educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a 'sport,'
a peculiarity, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a 'sport'
that is, full of promise for the future, but a 'sport' of the dim
backward and abysm of time, an arrested development."

"You are bitter, Frank, almost rude."

"Forgive me, Oscar, forgive me, please; it is because I want you at long
last to open your eyes, and see things as they are."

"But I thought you were with us, Frank, I thought at least you condemned
the punishment, did not believe in the barbarous penalties."

"I disbelieve in all punishment," I said; "it is by love and not by hate
that men must be redeemed. I believe, too, that the time is already come
when the better law might be put in force, and above all, I condemn
punishment which strikes a man, an artist like you, who has done
beautiful and charming things as if he had done nothing. At least the
good you have accomplished should be set against the evil. It has always
seemed monstrous to me that you should have been punished like a Taylor.
The French were right in their treatment of Verlaine: they condemned the
sin, while forgiving the sinner because of his genius. The rigour in
England is mere puritanic hypocrisy, shortsightedness and racial
self-esteem."

"All I can say, Frank, is, I would not limit individual desire in any
way. What right has society to punish us unless it can prove we have
hurt or injured someone else against his will? Besides, if you limit
passion you impoverish life, you weaken the mainspring of art, and
narrow the realm of beauty."

"All societies," I replied, "and most individuals, too, punish what they
dislike, right or wrong. There are bad smells which do not injure
anyone; yet the manufacturers of them would be indicted for committing a
nuisance. Nor does your plea that by limiting the choice of passion you
impoverish life, appeal to me. On the contrary, I think I could prove
that passion, the desire of the man for the woman and the woman for the
man, has been enormously strengthened in modern times. Christianity has
created, or at least cultivated, modesty, and modesty has sharpened
desire. Christianity has helped to lift woman to an equality with man,
and this modern intellectual development has again intensified passion
out of all knowledge. The woman who is not a slave but an equal, who
gives herself according to her own feeling, is infinitely more desirable
to a man than any submissive serf who is always waiting on his will. And
this movement intensifying passion is every day gaining force.

"We have a far higher love in us than the Greeks, infinitely higher and
more intense than the Romans knew; our sensuality is like a river
banked in with stone parapets, the current flows higher and more
vehemently in the narrower bed."

"You may talk as you please, Frank, but you will never get me to believe
that what I know is good to me, is evil. Suppose I like a food that is
poison to other people, and yet quickens me; how dare they punish me for
eating of it?"

"They would say," I replied, "that they only punish you for inducing
others to eat it."

He broke in: "It is all ignorant prejudice, Frank; the world is slowly
growing more tolerant and one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous
treatment of me, as they are now ashamed of the torturings of the Middle
Ages. The current of opinion is making in our favour and not against
us."

"You don't believe what you say," I cried; "if you really thought
humanity was going your way, you would have been delighted to play
Galileo. Instead of writing a book in prison condemning your companion
who pushed you to discovery and disgrace, you would have written a book
vindicating your actions. 'I am a martyr,' you would have cried, 'and
not a criminal, and everyone who holds the contrary is wrong.'

"You would have said to the jury:

"'In spite of your beliefs, and your cherished dogmas; in spite of your
religion and prejudice and fanatical hatred of me, you are wrong and I
am right: the world does move.'

"But you didn't say that, and you don't think it. If you did you would
be glad you went into the Queensberry trial, glad you were accused, glad
you were imprisoned and punished because all these things must bring
your vindication more quickly; you are sorry for them all, because in
your heart you know you were wrong. This old world in the main is right:
it's you who are wrong."

"Of course everything can be argued, Frank; but I hold to my conviction:
the best minds even now don't condemn us, and the world is becoming more
tolerant.[31] I didn't justify myself in court because I was told I
should be punished lightly if I respected the common prejudices, and
when I tried to speak afterwards the judge would not let me."

"And I believe," I retorted, "that you were hopelessly beaten and could
never have made a fight of it, because you felt the Time-spirit was
against you. How else was a silly, narrow judge able to wave you to
silence? Do you think he could have silenced me? Not all the judges in
Christendom. Let me give you an example. I believe with Voltaire that
when modesty goes out of life it goes into the language as prudery. I am
quite certain that our present habit of not discussing sexual questions
in our books is bound to disappear, and that free and dignified speech
will take the place of our present prurient mealy-mouthedness. I have
long thought it possible, probable even, in the present state of society
in England, where we are still more or less under the heel of the
illiterate and prudish Philistinism of our middle class, that I might be
had up to answer some charge of publishing an indecent book. The current
of the time appears to be against me. In the spacious days of Elizabeth,
in the modish time of the Georges, a freedom of speech was habitual
which to-day is tabooed. Our cases, therefore, are somewhat alike. Do
you think I should dread the issue or allow myself to be silenced by a
judge? I would set forth my defence before the judge and before the jury
with the assurance of victory in me! I should not minimise what I had
written; I should not try to explain it away; I should seek to make it
stronger. I should justify every word, and finally I'd warn both judge
and jury that if they condemned and punished me they would only make my
ultimate triumph more conspicuous. 'All the great men of the past are
with me,' I would cry; 'all the great minds of to-day in other
countries, and some of the best in England; condemn me at your peril:
you will only condemn yourselves. You are spitting against the wind and
the shame will be on your own faces.'

"Do you believe I should be left to suffer? I doubt it even in England
to-day. If I'm right, and I'm sure I'm right, then about me there would
be an invisible cloud of witnesses. You would see a strange movement of
opinion in my favour. The judge would probably lecture me and bind me
over to come up for judgment; but if he sentenced me vindictively then
the Home Secretary[32] would be petitioned and the movement in my favour
would grow, till it swept away opposition. This is the very soul of my
faith. If I did not believe with every fibre in me that this poor stupid
world is honestly groping its way up the altar stairs to God, and not
down, I would not live in it an hour."

"Why do you argue against me, Frank? It is brutal of you."

"To induce you even now to turn and pull yourself out of the mud. You
are forty odd years of age, and the keenest sensations of life are over
for you. Turn back whilst there's time, get to work, write your ballad
and your plays, and not the Alexanders alone, but all the people who
really count, the best of all countries--the salt of the earth--will
give you another chance. Begin to work and you'll be borne up on all
hands: No one sinks to the dregs but by his own weight. If you don't
bear fruit why should men care for you?"

He shrugged his shoulders and turned from me with disdainful
indifference.

"I've done enough for their respect, Frank, and received nothing but
hatred. Every man must dree his own weird. Thank Heaven, life's not
without compensations. I'm sorry I cannot please you," and he added
carelessly, "M----has asked me to go and spend the summer with him at
Gland in Switzerland. _He_ does not mind whether I write or not."

"I assure you," I cried, "it is not my pleasure I am thinking about.
What can it matter to me whether you write or not? It is your own good I
am thinking of."

"Oh, bother good! One's friends like one as one is; the outside public
hate one or scoff at one as they please."

"Well, I hope I shall always be your friend," I replied, "but you will
yet be forced to see, Oscar, that everyone grows tired of holding up an
empty sack."

"Frank, you insult me."

"I don't mean to; I'm sorry; I shall never be so brutally frank again;
but you had to hear the truth for once."

"Then, Frank, you only cared for me in so far as I agreed with you?"

"Oh, that's not fair," I replied. "I have tried with all my strength to
prevent you committing soul-suicide, but if you are resolved on it, I
can't prevent you. I must draw away. I can do no good."

"Then you won't help me for the rest of the winter?"

"Of course I will," I replied, "I shall do all I promised and more; but
there's a limit now, and till now the only limit was my power, not my
will."

It was at Napoule a few days later that an incident occurred which gave
me to a certain extent a new sidelight on Oscar's nature by showing just
what he thought of me. I make no scruple of setting forth his opinion
here in its entirety, though the confession took place after a futile
evening when he had talked to M---- of great houses in England and the
great people he had met there. The talk had evidently impressed M----
as much as it had bored me. I must first say that Oscar's bedroom was
separated from mine by a large sitting-room we had in common. As a rule
I worked in my bedroom in the mornings and he spent a great deal of time
out of doors. On this especial morning, however, I had gone into the
sitting-room early to write some letters. I heard him get up and splash
about in his bath: shortly afterwards he must have gone into the next
room, which was M----'s, for suddenly he began talking to him in a loud
voice from one room to the other, as if he were carrying on a
conversation already begun, through the open door.

"Of course it's absurd of Frank talking of social position or the great
people of English society at all. He never had any social position to be
compared with mine!" (The petulant tone made me smile; but what Oscar
said was true: nor did I ever pretend to have such a position.)

"He had a house in Park Lane and owned _The Saturday Review_ and had a
certain power; but I was the centre of every party, the most honoured
guest everywhere, at Clieveden and Taplow Court and Clumber. The
difference was Frank was proud of meeting Balfour while Balfour was
proud of meeting me: d'ye see?" (I was so interested I was unconscious
of any indiscretion in listening: it made me smile to hear that I was
proud of meeting Arthur Balfour: it would never have occurred to me that
I should be proud of that: still no doubt Oscar was right in a general
way).

"When Frank talks of literature, he amuses me: he pretends to bring new
standards into it; he does: he brings America to judge Oxford and
London, much like bringing Macedon or Boeotia to judge Athens--quite
ridiculous! What can Americans know about English literature?...

"Yet the curious thing is he has read a lot and has a sort of vision:
that Shakespeare stuff of his is extraordinary; but he takes sincerity
for style, and poetry as poetry has no appeal for him. You heard him
admit that himself last night....

"He's comic, really: curiously provincial like all Americans. Fancy a
Jeremiad preached by a man in a fur coat! Frank's comic. But he's really
kind and fights for his friends. He helped me in prison greatly:
sympathy is a sort of religion to him: that's why we can meet without
murder and separate without suicide....

"Talking literature with him is very like playing Rugby football.... I
never did play football, you know; but talking literature with Frank
must be very like playing Rugby where you end by being kicked violently
through your own goal," and he laughed delightedly.

I had listened without thinking as I often listened to his talk for the
mere music of the utterance; now, at a break in the monologue, I went
into the next room, feeling that to listen consciously would be
unworthy. On the whole his view of me was not unkindly: he disliked to
hear any opinion that differed from his own and it never came into his
head that Oxford was no nearer the meridian of truth than Lawrence,
Kansas, and certainly at least as far from Heaven.

Some weeks later I left La Napoule and went on a visit to some friends.
He wrote complaining that without me the place was dull. I wired him and
went over to Nice to meet him and we lunched together at the Café de la
Regence. He was terribly downcast, and yet rebellious. He had come over
to stay at Nice, and stopped at the Hotel Terminus, a tenth-rate hotel
near the station; the proprietor called on him two or three days
afterwards and informed him he must leave the hotel, as his room had
been let.

"Evidently someone has told him, Frank, who I am. What am I to do?"

I soon found him a better hotel where he was well treated, but the
incident coming on top of the Alexander affair seemed to have frightened
him.

"There are too many English on this coast," he said to me one day, "and
they are all brutal to me. I think I should like to go to Italy if you
would not mind."

"The world is all before you," I replied. "I shall only be too glad for
you to get a comfortable place," and I gave him the money he wanted. He
lingered on at Nice for nearly a week. I saw him several times. He
lunched with me at the Reserve once at Beaulieu, and was full of delight
at the beauty of the bay and the quiet of it. In the middle of the meal
some English people came in and showed their dislike of him rudely. He
at once shrank into himself, and as soon as possible made some pretext
to leave. Of course I went with him. I was more than sorry for him, but
I felt as unable to help him as I should have been unable to hold him
back if he had determined to throw himself down a precipice.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Cfr. Appendix: "Criticisms by Robert Ross."

[29] The incident is worth recording for the honour of human nature. At
the moment of Oscar's trial Charles Wyndham had let his theatre, the
Criterion, to Lewis Waller and H.H. Morell to produce in it "An Ideal
Husband" which had been running for over 100 nights at the Haymarket.
When Alexander took Oscar's name off the bill, Wyndham wrote to the
young Managers, saying that, if under the altered circumstances they
wished to cancel their agreement, he would allow them to do so. But if
they "put on" a play of Mr. Wilde's, the author's name must be on all
the bills and placards as usual. He could not allow his theatre to be
used to insult a man who was on his trial.

[30] Cfr. end of Appendix:--A Last Word.

[31] Cfr. end of Appendix:--A Last Word.

[32] This was written years before a Home Secretary, Mr. Reginald
MacKenna, tortured women and girls in prison in England by forcible
feeding, because they tried to present petitions in favour of Woman's
Suffrage. He afterwards defended himself in Parliament by declaring that
"'forcible feeding' was not unpleasant." The torturers of the
Inquisition also befouled cruelty with hypocritical falsehood: they
would burn their victims; but would not shed blood.

CHAPTER XXV

    "The Gods are just and of our pleasant vices
    Make instruments to plague us."

It was full summer before I met Oscar again; he had come back to Paris
and taken up his old quarters in the mean little hotel in the Rue des
Beaux Arts. He lunched and dined with me as usual. His talk was as
humorous and charming as ever, and he was just as engaging a companion.
For the first time, however, he complained of his health:

"I ate some mussels and oysters in Italy, and they must have poisoned
me; for I have come out in great red blotches all over my arms and chest
and back, and I don't feel well."

"Have you consulted a doctor?"

"Oh, yes, but doctors are no good: they all advise you differently; the
best of it is they all listen to you with an air of intense interest
when you are talking about yourself--which is an excellent tonic."

"They sometimes tell one what's the matter; give a name and significance
to the unknown," I interjected.

"They bore me by forbidding me to smoke and drink. They are worse than
M----, who grudged me his wine."

"What do you mean?" I asked in wonder.

"A tragi-comic history, Frank. You were so right about M---- and I was
mistaken in him. You know he wanted me to stay with him at Gland in
Switzerland, begged me to come, said he would do everything for me. When
the weather got warm at Genoa I went to him. At first he seemed very
glad to see me and made me welcome. The food was not very good, the
drink anything but good, still I could not complain, and I put up with
the discomforts. But in a week or two the wine disappeared, and beer
took its place, and I suggested I must be going. He begged me so
cordially not to go that I stayed on; but in a little while I noticed
that the beer got less and less in quantity, and one day when I ventured
to ask for a second bottle at lunch he told me that it cost a great deal
and that he could not afford it. Of course I made some decent pretext
and left his house as soon as possible. If one has to suffer poverty,
one had best suffer alone. But to get discomforts grudgingly and as a
charity is the extremity of shame. I prefer to look on it from the other
side; M---- grudging me his small beer belongs to farce."

He spoke with bitterness and contempt, as he used never to speak of
anyone.

I could not help sympathising with him, though visibly the cloth was
wearing threadbare. He asked me now at once for money, and a little
later again and again. Formerly he had invented pretexts; he had not
received his allowance when he expected it, or he was bothered by a bill
and so forth; but now he simply begged and begged, railing the while at
fortune. It was distressing. He wanted money constantly, and spent it as
always like water, without a thought.

I asked him one day whether he had seen much of his soldier boy since he
had returned to Paris.

"I have seen him, Frank, but not often," and he laughed gaily. "It's a
farce-comedy; sentiment always begins romantically and ends in
laughter--_tabulae solvuntur risu_. I taught him so much, Frank, that he
was made a corporal and forthwith a nursemaid fell in love with his
stripes. He's devoted to her: I suppose he likes to play teacher in his
turn."

"And so the great romantic passion comes to this tame conclusion?"

"What would you, Frank? Whatever begins must also end."

"Is there anyone else?" I asked, "or have you learned reason at last?"

"Of course there's always someone else, Frank: change is the essence of
passion: the _reason_ you talk of is merely another name for impotence."

"Montaigne declares," I said, "that love belongs to early youth, 'the
next period after infancy,' is his phrase, but that is at the best a
Frenchman's view of it. Sophocles was nearer the truth when he called
himself happy in that age had freed him from the whip of passion. When
are you going to reach that serenity?"

"Never, Frank, never, I hope: life without desire would not be worth
living to me. As one gets older one is more difficult to please: but the
sting of pleasure is even keener than in youth and far more egotistic.

"One comes to understand the Marquis de Sade and that strange, scarlet
story of de Retz--the pleasure they got from inflicting pain, the
curious, intense underworld of cruelty--"

"That's unlike you, Oscar," I broke in. "I thought you shrank from
giving pain always: to me it's the unforgivable sin."

"To me, also," he rejoined instantly, "intellectually one may understand
it; but in reality it's horrible. I want my pleasure unembittered by any
drop of pain. That reminds me: I read a terrible, little book the other
day, Octave Mirbeau's 'Le Jardin des Supplices'; it is quite awful, a
_sadique_ joy in pain pulses through it; but for all that it's
wonderful. His soul seems to have wandered in fearsome places. You with
your contempt of fear, will face the book with courage--I--"

"I simply couldn't read it," I replied; "it was revolting to me,
impossible--"

"A sort of grey adder," he summed up and I nodded in complete agreement.

I passed the next winter on the Riviera. A speculation which I had gone
in for there had caused me heavy loss and much anxiety. In the spring I
returned to Paris, and of course, asked him to meet me. He was much
brighter than he had been for a long time. Lord Alfred Douglas, it
appeared, had come in for a large legacy from his father's estate and
had given him some money, and he was much more cheerful. We had a great
lunch at Durand's and he was at his very best. I asked him about his
health.

"I'm all right, Frank, but the rash continually comes back, a ghostly
visitant, Frank: I'm afraid the doctors are in league with the devil. It
generally returns after a good dinner, a sort of aftermath of champagne.
The doctors say I must not drink champagne, and must stop smoking, the
silly people, who regard pleasure as their natural enemies; whereas it
is our pleasures which provide them with a living!"

He looked fairly well, I thought; he was a little fatter, his skin a
little dingier than of old, and he had grown very deaf, but in every
other way he seemed at his best, though he was certainly drinking too
freely--spirits between times as well as wine at meals.

I had heard on the Riviera during the winter that Smithers had tried to
buy a play from him, so one day I brought up the subject.

"By the way, Smithers says that you have been working on your play; you
know the one I mean, the one with the great screen scene in it."

"Oh, yes, Frank," he remarked indifferently.

"Won't you tell me what you've done?" I asked. "Have you written any of
it?"

"No, Frank," he replied casually, "it's the scenario Smithers talked
about."

A little while afterwards he asked me for money. I told him I could not
afford any at the moment, and pressed him to write his play.

"I shall never write again, Frank," he said. "I can't, I simply can't
face my thoughts. Don't ask me!" Then suddenly: "Why don't you buy the
scenario and write the play yourself?"

"I don't care for the stage," I replied; "it's a sort of rude encaustic
work I don't like; its effects are theatrical!"

"A play pays far better than a book, you know--"

But I was not interested. That evening thinking over what he had said, I
realised all at once that a story I had in mind to write would suit
"the screen scene" of Oscar's scenario; why shouldn't I write a play
instead of a story? When we met next day I broached the idea to Oscar:

"I have a story in my head," I said, "which would fit into that scenario
of yours, so far as you have sketched it to me. I could write it as a
play and do the second, third and fourth acts very quickly, as all the
personages are alive to me. Could you do the first act?"

"Of course I could, Frank."

"But," I said, "will you?"

"What would be the good, you could not sell it, Frank."

"In any case," I went on, "I could try; but I would infinitely prefer
you to write the whole play if you would; then it would sell fast
enough."

"Oh, Frank, don't ask me."

The idea of the collaboration was a mistake; but it seemed to me at the
moment the best way to get him to do something. Suddenly he asked me to
give him £50 for the scenario at once, then I could do what I liked with
it.

After a good deal of talk I consented to give him the £50 if he would
promise to write the first act; he promised and I gave him the
money.[33]

A little later I noticed a certain tension in his relations with Lord
Alfred Douglas. One day he told me frankly that Lord Alfred Douglas had
come into a fortune of £15,000 or £20,000, "and," he added, "of course
he's always able to get money. He'll marry an American millionairess or
some rich widow" (Oscar's ideas of life were nearly all conventional,
derived from novels and plays); "and I wanted him to give me enough to
make my life comfortable, to settle enough on me to make a decent life
possible to me. It would only have cost him two or three thousand
pounds, perhaps less. I get £150 a year and I wanted him to make it up
to £300.[34] I lost that through going to him at Naples. I think he
ought to give me that at the very least, don't you? Won't you speak to
him, Frank?"

"I could not possibly interfere," I replied.

"I gave him everything," he went on, in a depressed way. "When I had
money, he never had to ask for it; all that was mine was his. And now
that he is rich, I have to beg from him, and he gives me small sums and
puts me off. It is terrible of him; it is really very, very wrong of
him."

I changed the subject as soon as I could; there was a note of bitterness
which I did not like, which indeed I had already remarked in him.

I was destined very soon to hear the other side. A day or two later Lord
Alfred Douglas told me that he had bought some racehorses and was
training them at Chantilly; would I come down and see them?

"I am not much of a judge of racehorses," I replied, "and I don't know
much about racing; but I should not mind coming down one evening. I
could spend the night at an hotel, and see the horses and your stable in
the morning. The life of the English stable lads in France must be
rather peculiar."

"It is droll," he said, "a complete English colony in France. There are
practically no French jockeys or trainers worth their salt; it is all
English, English slang, English ways, even English food and of course
English drinks. No French boy seems to have nerve enough to make a good
rider."

I made an arrangement with him and went down. I missed my train and was
very late; I found that Lord Alfred Douglas had dined and gone out. I
had my dinner, and about midnight went up to my room. Half an hour later
there came a knocking at the door. I opened it and found Lord Alfred
Douglas.

"May I come in?" he asked. "I'm glad you've not gone to bed yet."

"Of course," I said, "what is it?" He was pale and seemed
extraordinarily excited.

"I have had such a row with Oscar," he jerked out, nervously moving
about (I noticed the strained white face I had seen before at the Café
Royal), "such a row, and I wanted to speak to you about it. Of course
you know in the old days when his plays were being given in London he
was rich and gave me some money, and now he says I ought to settle a
large sum on him; I think it ridiculous, don't you?"

"I would rather not say anything about it," I replied; "I don't know
enough about the circumstances."

He was too filled with a sense of his own injuries; too excited to catch
my tone or understand any reproof in my attitude.

"Oscar is really too dreadful," he went on; "he is quite shameless now;
he begs and begs and begs, and of course I have given him money, have
given him hundreds, quite as much as he ever gave me: but he is
insatiable and recklessly extravagant besides. Of course I want to be
quite fair to him: I've already given him back all he gave me. Don't you
think that is all anyone can ask of me?"

I looked at him in astonishment.

"That is for you and Oscar," I said, "to decide together. No one else
can judge between you."

"Why not?" he snapped out in his irritable way, "you know us both and
our relations."

"No," I replied, "I don't know all the obligations and the interwoven
services. Besides, I could not judge fairly between you."

He turned on me angrily, though I had spoken with as much kindness as I
could.

"He seemed to want to make you judge between us," he cried. "I don't
care who's the judge. I think if you give a man back what he has given
you, that is all he can ask. It's a d----d lot more than most people get
in this world."

After a pause he started off on a new line of thought:

"The first time I ever noticed any fault in Oscar was over that 'Salome'
translation. He's appallingly conceited. You know I did the play into
English. I found that his choice of words was poor, anything but good;
his prose is wooden....

"Of course he's not a poet," he broke off contemptuously, "even you must
admit that."

"I know what you mean," I replied; "though I should have to make a vast
reservation in favour of the man who wrote 'The Ballad of Reading
Gaol.'"

"One ballad doesn't make a man a poet," he barked; "I mean by poet one
to whom verse lends power: in that sense he's not a poet and I am." His
tone was that of defiant challenge.

"You are certainly," I replied.

"Well, I did the translation of 'Salome' very carefully, as no one else
could have done it," and he flushed angrily, "and all the while Oscar
kept on altering it for the worse. At last I had to tell him the truth,
and we had a row. He imagines he's the greatest person in the world, and
the only person to be considered. His conceit is stupid.... I helped[35]
him again and again with that 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' you're always
praising: I suppose he'd deny that now.

"He's got his money back; what more can he want? He disgusts me when he
begs."

I could not contain myself altogether.

"He seems to blame you," I said quietly, "for egging him on to that
insane action against your father which brought him to ruin."

"I've no doubt he'd find some reason to blame me," he whipped out. "How
did I know how the case would go?... Why did he take my advice, if he
didn't want to? He was surely old enough to know his own interest....
He's simply disgusting now; he's getting fat and bloated, and always
demanding money, money, money, like a daughter of the horse-leech--just
as if he had a claim to it."

I could not stand it any longer; I had to try to move him to kindness.

"Sometimes one gives willingly to a man one has never had anything from.
Misery and want in one we like and admire have a very strong claim."

"I do not see that there is any claim at all," he cried bitterly, as if
the very word maddened him, "and I am not going to pamper him any more.
He could earn all the money he wants if he would only write; but he
won't do anything. He is lazy, and getting lazier and lazier every day;
and he drinks far too much. He is intolerable. I thought when he kept
asking me for that money to-night, he was like an old prostitute."

"Good God!" I cried. "Good God! Has it come to that between you?"

"Yes," he repeated, not heeding what I said, "he was just like an old
fat prostitute," and he gloated over the word, "and I told him so."

I looked at the man but could not speak; indeed there was nothing to be
said. Surely at last, I thought, Oscar Wilde has reached the lowest
depth. I could think of nothing but Oscar; this hard, small, bitter
nature made Oscar's suffering plain to me.

"As I can do no good," I said, "do you mind letting me sleep? I'm simply
tired to death."

"I'm sorry," he said, looking for his hat; "will you come out in the
morning and see the 'gees'?"

"I don't think so," I replied, "I'm incapable of a resolution now, I'm
so tired I would rather sleep. I think I'll go up to Paris in the
morning. I have something rather urgent to do."

He said "Good night" and went away.

I lay awake, my eyes prickling with sorrow and sympathy for poor Oscar,
insulted in his misery and destitution, outraged and trodden on by the
man he had loved, by the man who had thrust him into the Pit....[36]

I made up my mind to go to Oscar at once and try to comfort him a
little. After all, I thought, another fifty pounds or so wouldn't make a
great deal of difference to me, and I dwelt on the many delightful hours
I had passed with him, hours of gay talk and superb intellectual
enjoyment.

I went up by the morning train to Paris, and drove across the river to
Oscar's hotel.

He had two rooms, a small sitting-room and a still smaller bedroom
adjoining. He was lying half-dressed on the bed as I entered. The rooms
affected me unpleasantly. They were ordinary, mean little French rooms,
furnished without taste; the usual mahogany chairs, gilt clock on the
mantelpiece and a preposterous bilious paper on the walls. What struck
me was the disorder everywhere; books all over the round table; books on
the chairs; books on the floor and higgledy-piggledy, here a pair of
socks, there a hat and cane, and on the floor his overcoat. The sense of
order and neatness which he used to have in his rooms at Tite Street was
utterly lacking. He was not living here, intent on making the best of
things; he was merely existing without plan or purpose.

I told him I wanted him to come to lunch. While he was finishing
dressing it came to me that his clothes had undergone much the same
change as his dwelling. In his golden days in London he had been a good
deal of a dandy; he usually wore white waistcoats at night; was
particular about the flowers in his buttonhole, his gloves and cane. Now
he was decently dressed and that was all; as far below the average as he
had been above it. Clearly, he had let go of himself and no longer took
pleasure in the vanities: it seemed to me a bad sign.

I had always thought of him as very healthy, likely to live till sixty
or seventy; but he had no longer any hold on himself and that depressed
me; some spring of life seemed broken in him. Bosie Douglas' second
betrayal had been the _coup de grâce_.

In the carriage he was preoccupied, out of sorts, and immediately began
to apologise.

"I shall be poor company, Frank," he warned me with quivering lips.

The fragrant summer air in the Champs Elysées seemed to revive him a
little, but he was evidently lost in bitter reflections and scarcely
noticed where he was going. From time to time he sighed heavily as if
oppressed. I talked as well as I could of this and that, tried to lure
him away from the hateful subject that I knew must be in his mind; but
all in vain. Towards the end of the lunch he said gravely:

"I want you to tell me something, Frank; I want you to tell me honestly
if you think I am in the wrong. I wish I could think I was.... You know
I spoke to you the other day about Bosie; he is rich now and he is
throwing his money away with both hands in racing.

"I asked him to settle £1,500 or £2,000 on me to buy me an annuity, or
to do something that would give me £150 a year. You said you did not
care to ask him, so I did. I told him it was really his duty to do it at
once, and he turned round and lashed me savagely with his tongue. He
called me dreadful names. Said dreadful things to me, Frank. I did not
think it was possible to suffer more than I suffered in prison, but he
has left me bleeding ..." and the fine eyes filled with tears. Seeing
that I remained silent, he cried out:

"Frank, you must tell me for our friendship's sake. Is it my fault? Was
he wrong or was I wrong?"

His weakness was pathetic, or was it that his affection was still so
great that he wanted to blame himself rather than his friend?

"Of course he seems to me to be wrong," I said, "utterly wrong." I could
not help saying it and I went on:

"But you know his temper is insane; if he even praises himself, as he
did to me lately, he gets into a rage in order to do it, and perhaps
unwittingly you annoyed him by the way you asked. If you put it to his
generosity and vainglory you would get it easier than from his sense of
justice and right. He has not much moral sense."

"Oh, Frank," he broke in earnestly, "I put it to him as well as I could,
quite quietly and gently. I talked of our old affection, of the good and
evil days we had passed together: you know I could never be harsh to
him, never.

"There never was," he burst out, in a sort of exaltation, "there never
was in the world such a betrayal. Do you remember once telling me that
the only flaw you could find in the perfect symbolism of the gospel
story was that Jesus was betrayed by Judas, the foreigner from Kerioth,
when he should have been betrayed by John, the beloved disciple; for it
is only those we love who can betray us? Frank, how true, how tragically
true that is! It is those we love who betray us with a kiss."

He was silent for some time and then went on wearily, "I wish you would
speak to him, Frank, and show him how unjust and unkind he is to me."

"I cannot possibly do that, Oscar," I said, "I do not know all the
relations between you and the myriad bands that unite you: I should only
do harm and not good."

"Frank," he cried, "you do know, you must know that he is responsible
for everything, for my downfall and my ruin. It was he who drove me to
fight with his father. I begged him not to, but he whipped me to it;
asked me what his father could do; pointed out to me contemptuously that
he could prove nothing; said he was the most loathsome, hateful creature
in the world, and that it was my duty to stop him, and that if I did
not, everyone would be laughing at me, and he could never care for a
coward. All his family, his brother and his mother, too, begged me to
attack Queensberry, all promised me their support and afterwards--

"You know, Frank, in the Café Royal before the trial how Bosie spoke to
you, when you warned me and implored me to drop the insane suit and go
abroad; how angry he got. You were not a friend of mine, he said. You
know he drove me to ruin in order to revenge himself on his father, and
then left me to suffer.

"And that's not the worst of it, Frank: I came out of prison determined
not to see him any more. I promised my poor wife I would not see him
again. I had forgiven him; but I did not want to see him. I had suffered
too much by him and through him, far too much. And then he wrote and
wrote of his love, crying it to me every hour, begging me to come,
telling me he only wanted me, in order to be happy, me in the whole
world. How could I help believing him, how could I keep away from him?
At last I yielded and went to him, and as soon as the difficulties began
he turned on me in Naples like a wild beast, blaming me and insulting
me.

"I had to fly to Paris, having lost everything through him--wife and
income and self-respect, everything; but I always thought that he was at
least generous as a man of his name should be: I had no idea he could be
stingy and mean; but now he is comparatively rich, he prefers to
squander his money on jockeys and trainers and horses, of which he knows
nothing, instead of lifting me out of my misery. Surely it is not too
much to ask him to give me a tenth when I gave him all? Won't you ask
him?"

"I think he ought to have done what you want, without asking," I
admitted, "but I am certain my speaking would not do any good. He shows
me hatred already whenever I do not agree with him. Hate is nearer to
him always than sympathy: he is his father's son, Oscar, and I can do
nothing. I cannot even speak to him about it."

"Oh, Frank, you ought to," said Oscar.

"But suppose he retorted and said you led him astray, what could I
answer?"

"Led him astray!" cried Oscar, starting up, "you cannot believe that.
You know better than that. It is not true. It is he who always led,
always dominated me; he is as imperious as a Cæsar. It was he who began
our intimacy: he who came to me in London when I did not want to see
him, or rather, Frank, I wanted to but I was afraid; at the very
beginning I was afraid of what it would all lead to, and I avoided him;
the desperate aristocratic pride in him, the dreadful bold, imperious
temper in him terrified me. But he came to London and sent for me to
come to him, said he would come to my house if I didn't. I went,
thinking I could reason with him; but it was impossible. When I told him
we must be very careful, for I was afraid of what might happen, he made
fun of my fears, and encouraged me. He knew that they'd never dare to
punish him; he's allied to half the peerage and he did not care what
became of me....