"He frightened me, Frank, as much as he attracted me, and I held away from him. But he wouldn"t have it; he sought me out again and again and I couldn"t resist him. That is my only fault. That"s what ruined me. He increased my expenses so that I could not meet them; over and over again I tried to free myself from him; but he came back and I yielded--alas!"
Though this is Oscar"s later gloss on what actually happened, it is fairly accurate. He was never able to realise how his meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas had changed the world to him and him to the world.
The effect on the harder fibre of the boy was chiefly mental: to Alfred Douglas, Oscar was merely a quickening, inspiring, intellectual influence; but the boy"s effect on Oscar was of character and induced imitation. Lord Alfred Douglas" boldness gave Oscar _outrecuidance_, an insolent arrogance: artist-like he tried to outdo his model in aristocratic disdain. Without knowing the cause the change in Oscar astonished me again and again, and in the course of this narrative I shall have to notice many instances of it.
One other effect the friendship had of far-reaching influence. Oscar always enjoyed good living; but for years he had had to earn his bread: he knew the value of money; he didn"t like to throw it away; he was accustomed to lunch or dine at a cheap Italian restaurant for a few shillings. But to Lord Alfred Douglas money was only a counter and the most luxurious living a necessity. As soon as Oscar Wilde began to entertain him, he was led to the dearest hotels and restaurants; his expenses became formidable and soon outran his large earnings. For the first time since I had known him he borrowed heedlessly right and left, and had, therefore, to bring forth play after play with scant time for thought.
Lord Alfred Douglas has declared recently:
"I spent much more in entertaining Oscar Wilde than he did in entertaining me"; but this is preposterous self-deception. An earlier confession of his was much nearer the truth: "It was a sweet humiliation to me to let Oscar Wilde pay for everything and to ask him for money."
There can be no doubt that Lord Alfred Douglas" habitual extravagance kept Oscar Wilde hard up, and drove him to write without intermission.
There were other and worse results of the intimacy which need not be exposed here in so many words, though they must be indicated; for they derived of necessity from that increased self-a.s.surance which has already been recorded. As Oscar devoted himself to Lord Alfred Douglas and went about with him continually, he came to know his friends and his familiars, and went less into society so-called. Again and again Lord Alfred Douglas flaunted acquaintance with youths of the lowest cla.s.s; but no one knew him or paid much attention to him; Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, was already a famous personage whose every movement provoked comment. From this time on the rumours about Oscar took definite form and shaped themselves in specific accusations: his enemies began triumphantly to predict his ruin and disgrace.
Everything is known in London society; like water on sand the truth spreads wider and wider as it gradually filters lower. The "smart set"
in London has almost as keen a love of scandal as a cathedral town.
About this time one heard of a dinner which Oscar Wilde had given at a restaurant in Soho, which was said to have degenerated into a sort of Roman orgy. I was told of a man who tried to get money by blackmailing him in his own house. I shrugged my shoulders at all these scandals, and asked the talebearers what had been said about Shakespeare to make him rave as he raved again and again against "back-wounding calumny"; and when they persisted in their malicious stories I could do nothing but show disbelief. Though I saw but little of Oscar during the first year or so of his intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas, one scene from this time filled me with suspicion and an undefined dread.
I was in a corner of the Cafe Royal one night downstairs, playing chess, and, while waiting for my opponent to move, I went out just to stretch my legs. When I returned I found Oscar throned in the very corner, between two youths. Even to my short-sighted eyes they appeared quite common: in fact they looked like grooms. In spite of their vulgar appearance, however, one was nice looking in a fresh boyish way; the other seemed merely depraved. Oscar greeted me as usual, though he seemed slightly embarra.s.sed. I resumed my seat, which was almost opposite him, and pretended to be absorbed in the game. To my astonishment he was talking as well as if he had had a picked audience; talking, if you please, about the Olympic games, telling how the youths wrestled and were sc.r.a.ped with strigulae and threw the discus and ran races and won the myrtle-wreath. His impa.s.sioned eloquence brought the sun-bathed palaestra before one with a magic of representment. Suddenly the younger of the boys asked:
"Did you sy they was niked?"
"Of course," Oscar replied, "nude, clothed only in sunshine and beauty."
"Oh, my," giggled the lad in his unspeakable c.o.c.kney way. I could not stand it.
"I am in an impossible position," I said to my opponent, who was the amateur chess player, Montagu Gattie. "Come along and let us have some dinner." With a nod to Oscar I left the place. On the way out Gattie said to me:
"So that"s the famous Oscar Wilde."
"Yes," I replied, "that"s Oscar, but I never saw him in such company before."
"Didn"t you?" remarked Gattie quietly; "he was well known at Oxford. I was at the "Varsity with him. His reputation was always rather--"_high_," shall we call it?"
I wanted to forget the scene and blot it out of my memory, and remember my friend as I knew him at his best. But that c.o.c.kney boy would not be banned; he leered there with rosy cheeks, hair plastered down in a love-lock on his forehead, and low cunning eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I would not think of it. I recalled the fact that in all our talks I had never heard Oscar use a gross word. His mind, I said to myself, is like Spenser"s, vowed away from coa.r.s.eness and vulgarity: he"s the most perfect intellectual companion in the world.
He may have wanted to talk to the boys just to see what effect his talk would have on them. His vanity is greedy enough to desire even such applause as theirs.... Of course, that was the explanation--vanity. My affection for him, tormented by doubt, had found at length a satisfactory solution. It was the artist in him, I said to myself, that wanted a model.
But why not boys of his own cla.s.s? The answer suggested itself; boys of his own cla.s.s could teach him nothing; his own boyhood would supply him with all the necessary information about well-bred youth.
But if he wanted a gutter-snipe in one of his plays, he would have to find a gutter-lad and paint him from life. That was probably the truth, I concluded. So satisfied was I with my discovery that I developed it to Gattie; but he would not hear of it.
"Gattie has nothing of the artist in him," I decided, "and therefore cannot understand." And I went on arguing, if Gattie were right, why _two_ boys? It seemed evident to me that my reading of the riddle was the only plausible one. Besides it left my affection unaffected and free. Still, the giggle, the plastered oily hair and the venal leering eyes came back to me again and again in spite of myself.
CHAPTER XI
There is a secret apprehension in man counselling sobriety and moderation, a fear born of expediency distinct from conscience, which is ethical; though it seems to be closely connected with conscience acting, as it does, by warnings and prohibitions. The story of Polycrates and his ring is a symbol of the instinctive feeling that extraordinary good fortune is perilous and can not endure.
A year or so after the first meeting between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas I heard that they were being pestered on account of some amorous letters which had been stolen from them. There was talk of blackmail and hints of an interesting exposure.
Towards the end of the year it was announced that Lord Alfred Douglas had gone to Egypt; but this "flight into Egypt," as it was wittily called, was gilded by the fact that a little later he was appointed an honorary attache to Lord Cromer. I regarded his absence as a piece of good fortune, for when he was in London, Oscar had no time to himself, and was seen in public with a.s.sociates he would have done better to avoid. Time and again he had praised Lord Alfred Douglas to me as a charming person, a poet, and had grown lyrical about his violet eyes and honey-coloured hair. I knew nothing of Lord Alfred Douglas, and had no inkling of his poetic talent. I did not like several of Oscar"s particular friends, and I had a special dislike for the father of Lord Alfred Douglas. I knew Queensberry rather well. I was a member of the old Pelican Club, and I used to go there frequently for a talk with Tom, d.i.c.k or Harry, about athletics, or for a game of chess with George Edwards. Queensberry was there almost every night, and someone introduced me to him. I was eager to know him because he had surprised me. At some play,[11] I think it was "The Promise of May," by Tennyson, produced at the Globe, in which atheists were condemned, he had got up in his box and denounced the play, proclaiming himself an atheist. I wanted to know the Englishman who could be so contemptuous of convention. Had he acted out of aristocratic insolence, or was he by any possibility high-minded? To one who knew the man the mere question must seem ridiculous.
Queensberry was perhaps five feet nine or ten in height, with a plain, heavy, rather sullen face, and quick, hot eyes. He was a ma.s.s of self-conceit, all bristling with suspicion, and in regard to money, prudent to meanness. He cared nothing for books, but liked outdoor sports and under a rather abrupt, but not discourteous, manner hid an irritable, violent temper. He was combative and courageous as very nervous people sometimes are, when they happen to be strong-willed--the sort of man who, just because he was afraid of a bull and had pictured the dreadful wound it could give, would therefore seize it by the horns.
The insane temper of the man got him into rows at the Pelican more than once. I remember one evening he insulted a man whom I liked immensely. Haseltine was a stockbroker, I think, a big, fair, handsome fellow who took Queensberry"s insults for some time with cheerful contempt. Again and again he turned Queensberry"s wrath aside with a fair word, but Queensberry went on working himself into a pa.s.sion, and at last made a rush at him. Haseltine watched him coming and hit out in the nick of time; he caught Queensberry full in the face and literally knocked him heels over head. Queensberry got up in a sad mess: he had a swollen nose and black eye and his shirt was all stained with blood spread about by hasty wiping. Any other man would have continued the fight or else have left the club on the spot; Queensberry took a seat at a table, and there sat for hours silent. I could only explain it to myself by saying that his impulse to fly at once from the scene of his disgrace was very acute, and therefore he resisted it, made up his mind not to budge, and so he sat there the b.u.t.t of the derisive glances and whispered talk of everyone who came into the club in the next two or three hours. He was just the sort of person a wise man would avoid and a clever one would use--a dangerous, sharp, ill-handled tool.
Disliking his father, I did not care to meet Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar"s newest friend.
I saw Oscar less frequently after the success of his first play; he no longer needed my editorial services, and was, besides, busily engaged; but I have one good trait to record of him. Some time before I had lent him 50; so long as he was hard up I said nothing about it; but after the success of his second play, I wrote to him saying that the 50 would be useful to me if he could spare it. He sent me a cheque at once with a charming letter.
He was now continually about again with Lord Alfred Douglas who, it appeared, had had a disagreement with Lord Cromer and returned to London. Almost immediately scandalous stories came into circulation concerning them: "Have you heard the latest about Lord Alfred and Oscar? I"m told they"re being watched by the police," and so forth and so on interminably. One day a story came to me with such wealth of weird detail that it was manifestly at least founded on fact. Oscar was said to have written extraordinary letters to Lord Alfred Douglas: a youth called Alfred Wood had stolen the letters from Lord Alfred Douglas" rooms in Oxford and had tried to blackmail Oscar with them.
The facts were so peculiar and so precise that I asked Oscar about it.
He met the accusation at once and very fairly, I thought, and told me the whole story. It puts the triumphant power and address of the man in a strong light, and so I will tell it as he told it to me.
"When I was rehearsing "A Woman of No Importance" at the Haymarket,"
he began, "Beerbohm Tree showed me a letter I had written a year or so before to Alfred Douglas. He seemed to think it dangerous, but I laughed at him and read the letter with him, and of course he came to understand it properly. A little later a man called Wood told me he had found some letters which I had written to Lord Alfred Douglas in a suit of clothes which Lord Alfred had given to him. He gave me back some of the letters and I gave him a little money. But the letter, a copy of which had been sent to Beerbohm Tree, was not amongst them.
"Some time afterwards a man named Allen called upon me one night in t.i.te Street, and said he had got a letter of mine which I ought to have.
"The man"s manner told me that he was the real enemy. "I suppose you mean that beautiful letter of mine to Lord Alfred Douglas," I said.
"If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy of it to Mr.
Beerbohm Tree, I should have been glad to have paid you a large sum for it, as I think it is one of the best I ever wrote." Allen looked at me with sulky, cunning eyes and said:
""A curious construction could be put upon that letter."
""No doubt, no doubt," I replied lightly; "art is not intelligible to the criminal cla.s.ses." He looked me in the face defiantly and said:
""A man has offered me 60 for it."
""You should take the offer," I said gravely; "60 is a great price. I myself have never received such a large sum for any prose work of that length. But I am glad to find that there is someone in England who will pay such a large sum for a letter of mine. I don"t know why you come to me," I added, rising, "you should sell the letter at once."
"Of course, Frank, as I spoke my body seemed empty with fear. The letter could be misunderstood, and I have so many envious enemies; but I felt that there was nothing else for it but bluff. As I went to the door Allen rose too, and said that the man who had offered him the money was out of town. I turned to him and said:
""He will no doubt return, and I don"t care for the letter at all."
"At this Allen changed his manner, said he was very poor, he hadn"t a penny in the world, and had spent a lot trying to find me and tell me about the letter. I told him I did not mind relieving his distress, and gave him half a sovereign, a.s.suring him at the same time that the letter would shortly be published as a sonnet in a delightful magazine. I went to the door with him, and he walked away. I closed the door; but didn"t shut it at once, for suddenly I heard a policeman"s step coming softly towards my house--pad, pad! A dreadful moment, then he pa.s.sed by. I went into the room again all shaken, wondering whether I had done right, whether Allen would hawk the letter about--a thousand vague apprehensions.
"Suddenly a knock at the street door. My heart was in my mouth, still I went and opened it: a man named Cliburn was there.
""I have come to you with a letter of Allen"s."
""I cannot be bothered any more," I cried, "about that letter; I don"t care twopence about it. Let him do what he likes with it."
"To my astonishment Cliburn said:
""Allen has asked me to give it back to you," and he produced it.