"He had a house in Park Lane and owned _The Sat.u.r.day 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 Cafe 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pet.i.tions 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 G.o.ds 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 quant.i.ty, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion: 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sed 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.