The Last Hope Lost

“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.48

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 ￡300.49 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 R............