‘Hornung … Willie Hornung.’ Oscar rolled the name around his mouth, as though it were an unfamiliar wine.
Doyle returned his handkerchief to his pocket and looked Oscar in the eye. ‘Perhaps I should advise Hornung to stay away. Willie’s not what you’d call a man of the world.’
‘Don’t be absurd, Arthur. How old is he?’
‘I don’t know. Twenty-six? Twenty-seven?’
‘Keats was dead at twenty-five, Arthur. It’ll do Mr Hornung good to live a little dangerously, take life as he finds it. It’s the possibility of the pearl or the poison in the oyster that make the prospect of opening it so enticing. Besides, we have to have him or we’ll be thirteen at table.’
‘Is Lord Alfred Douglas coming?’
‘Bosie? Of course.’ Oscar threw his head back and brushed his hands through his hair. ‘Bosie is coming, very much so. And he’s bringing his older brother, Francis, with him. You’ll like Lord Drumlanrig, Arthur. He’s about the same age as your young friend, Hornung, and sweet-natured, too. I’m all for feasting with panthers, but it’s good to have a few delicate-minded lambs at the trough as well. One can have too much of a bad thing.’ He looked around the room. ‘Where is Bosie? He should be here by now.’
The Wildes’ drawing room was beginning to empty. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the poetesses dressed as chimney-sweeps, were standing by the doorway blowing kisses towards Oscar. Miss Bradley, the taller of the two, had taken a huge bulrush out of a vase by the fireplace. She called to Oscar: ‘I’m stealing this, dearest one. I hope you don’t mind. Moses and Rebecca Salaman are coming to supper. This will make them feel so at home.’ Oscar nodded obligingly. Charles Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak, was handing Constance a cheque and grandiloquently saluting her for her charitable endeavours on behalf of humankind in general and the Rational Dress Society in particular. His wife, Margaret, a plain and patient woman, was pulling at his arm. ‘Will he ever stop talking?’ she asked.
‘Only if we start listening,’ answered Constance, with a kindly laugh, kissing her friend on the cheek. ‘Thank you both for coming. And thank you, Charles, for your generosity. Every one has been so kind, so good.’
‘It’s you, Mrs Wilde,’ said Edward Heron-Allen, stepping toward his hostess and lifting her hand to his lips. ‘You inspire us.’
Conan Doyle spluttered into his red handkerchief and whispered to Oscar, ‘The man’s intolerable.’
‘You inspire our devotion,’ Heron-Allen continued, still holding Constance’s hand and looking into her eyes. ‘We love you. It’s as simple as that.’
‘We love Oscar, too,’ said a voice from the landing. ‘But that’s more complicated, of course.’
‘Ah,’ said Oscar, clapping his hands, ‘Bosie is upon us.’
Lord Alfred Douglas appeared in the doorway of the Wildes’ drawing room and held his pose. Bosie was an arrestingly good-looking boy. I use the word ‘boy’ advisedly. He was twenty-one at the time, but he looked no more than a child. Indeed, he told me that, later that same summer, a society matron was quite put out when she invited him to her children’s tea party and discovered her mistake. Even at thirty-one, people would enquire whether he was still at school. Oscar used to say, ‘Bosie contained the very essence of youth. He never lost it. That is why I loved him.’
Oscar did indeed love Lord Alfred Douglas and made no bones about it. Slender as a reed, with a well-proportioned face, gently curling hair the colour of ripe corn and the complexion of a white peach, Bosie was an Adonis—even Conan Doyle and I could not deny that. Oscar loved him for his looks. He loved him for his intellect, also. Bosie had a good mind, a ready wit—he liked to claim credit for originating some of Oscar’s choicest quips—and a way with words and language that I envied. He was intelligent, but indolent. When he left Oxford the following year, he left without a degree. (As I had done. As Shelley and Swinburne did, too. Bosie’s poetry may not rank alongside theirs, but, nonetheless, the best of it has stood the test of time.)
Oscar Wilde also loved Lord Alfred Douglas because of who he was. Though he made wry remarks to suggest otherwise, Oscar was a snob. He liked a title. He was pleased to be on ‘chatting terms’ with the Prince of Wales. He was happy that his acquaintance encompassed at least a dozen dukes. And he was charmed to find that Bosie Douglas (with his perfect profile and manners to match) was the third son of an eighth marquess— albeit a marquess with a reputation.
Even in 1892, Bosie’s father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, was notorious. Ill-favoured, squat, hot-tempered, aggressive, Lord Queensberry was a brute, a bully, a spendthrift and a womaniser. His one strength was that he was fearless. His one unsullied claim to fame was that, with a university friend, John Graham Chambers, he had codified the rules of conduct for the sport of boxing. He was himself a lightweight boxer of tenacity and skill. He was also a daring and determined jockey (he rode his own horses in the Grand National) and a huntsman noted for ruthlessness in the field. He carried his riding whip with him at all times. He was said to use it with equal ease on his horses, his dogs and his women. In 1887, Lady. Queensberry, the mother of his five children, divorced him on the grounds of his adultery.
Bosie despised his father and adored his mother. In Bosie’s eyes, Sybil Queensberry could do no wrong. ‘My father has given me nothing,’ he said. ‘My mother has given me everything, including my name.’ Lady Queensberry had called him ‘Boysie’ when he was a baby. Oscar called him ‘my own dear boy’ from the moment they met, early in the summer of 1891. They became firm friends almost at once. By the summer of 1892, they were near inseparable. Where Oscar went, Bosie came too. I liked him. Constance liked him, also. Conan Doyle had his reservations.
As he stood, posed, in the drawing-room doorway, with his head thrown to one side, like a martyred saint upon a cross, Bosie looked straight towards Constance. ‘Mrs Wilde,’ he cried, ‘peccavi. I have missed your party and I didn’t want to miss it for the world. Will you forgive me?’ From behind his back he produced a small bunch of primroses tied together with blue ribbon. He stepped forward and presented them to her.
She kissed him, as she might have done a child, and said, ‘What a sweet thought, Bosie. Thank you. I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure Oscar was getting anxious.’
Bosie, nodding to Edward Heron-Allen, went over to Oscar and Conan Doyle. I moved from my station by the window to join them. ‘I apologise, Oscar,’ said the young Adonis, furrowing his brow. ‘I’ve had a damnable afternoon. Arguing about money with my father. He’s been through £400,000, you know, and won’t advance me fifty. The man’s a monster. I’d like to murder him.’
Arthur Conan Doyle raised an eyebrow and sucked on his moustache.
‘I mean it,’ said Bosie seriously. ‘I’d like to murder him, in cold blood.’
‘Well, you can’t, Bosie,’ said Oscar, ‘leastways, not tonight.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Bosie petulantly.
‘It’s Sunday, Bosie,’ said Oscar, ‘and a gentleman never murders his father on a Sunday. You should know that. Did they teach you nothing at Winchester? Besides, it’s the first Sunday in the month and we are going to dinner at the Cadogan. You can’t have forgotten, surely?’
CHAPTER 2
THE SOCRATES CLUB
In the summer of 1892 Oscar was at the height of his fame and fortune. Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first theatrical triumph, had opened at the St James’s Theatre in February. He was the toast of the town and collecting royalties at the rate of £300 a week. And yet I sensed he was not content.
We had been friends for ten years. For a brief while, before his marriage and mine, we had shared lodgings in Mayfair. We found each other’s society easy: we were good companions. He was seven years my senior and indulged me as he might have done a younger brother. He did not sit in judgement: he accepted me as I was. When my first marriage began to unravel—I had not been as faithful to Marthe as I should have been—Oscar did not reproach me,
as my parents did. (As the world at large did, too. Make no mistake, in those far-off days, if your marriage failed, you were reckoned to have failed also.) Oscar simply said, ‘Poor Robert!’ adding, ‘I’m not sure that any marriage should be expected to last more than seven years.’ This was that same summer of 1892, when he and Constance had been married for almost eight years.
‘But you love Constance still, do you not?’ I asked, somewhat shocked. I was the younger brother: the Wildes were lodestars in my firmament. ‘That has not changed?’
‘No, that has not changed,’ he said—but he said it with a melancholy diffidence. ‘She has changed, however. When I married her, Robert, 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, after our boys were born, the flowerlike grace had vanished. She became heavy, shapeless, deformed.’
‘You do not mean it, Oscar,’ I protested. Constance, in truth, was none of those things. Constance was always lovely. But, inevitably, she was older than she had been—she was now thirty-four—and Oscar equated age with decay. And, to her husband at least, she was not as amusing as she once had seemed. ‘She never speaks and I am always wondering what her thoughts are like,’ he said.
Oscar sought to distract himself from this ‘domestic ennui’ (as he termed it) by filling every waking hour with a relentless round of work and play. He posed as an idler, but he was never idle. By day, behind closed doors, seated at his favourite desk (once the property of the great Thomas Carlyle), in a haze of cigarette smoke, he read and wrote, hour upon hour. He had the gift Napoleon most admired: de fixer les objets longtemps sans être fatigué. [‘To concentrate on objectives at length, without wearying’.] He was one of the most hardworking men I ever knew. He laboured industriously and he played extravagantly. By night, he wined and dined and, then, he drank and ate some more. And between dinner and supper, he took in plays, operas, ballets, concerts and exhibitions. ‘What is it to be tonight, Robert? Henry Irving’s Wolsey at the Lyceum or Marie Lloyd’s flannelette at the Bedford Music Hall?’ He saw everything; he knew everybody. And, of course, everybody wanted to know him. Nobody, I believe, in late-Victorian society, had a wider circle of acquaintance than Oscar Wilde. From Monday to Saturday his engagement diary was full to overflowing. The one day in the week he found testing was Sunday. ‘Nothing happens on a Sunday,’ he complained. ‘Everything is closed. No one goes out. Nobody entertains. Even God has to go to church. There’s nothing else to do.’ That was why, early in 1892, he formed the Socrates Club.
The club was named in honour of the great Greek philosopher. Conan Doyle had suggested Diogenes, but Oscar said Diogenes was ‘a dull dog, a provincial, without an epigram to his name’, whereas Socrates was ‘a citizen of the world’ with whom Oscar had a fellow-feeling. ‘Socrates was one of the wisest men who ever lived,’ said Oscar, ‘but he claimed to know nothing except the fact of his own ignorance. He’s a man to drink to on a Sunday evening, is he not?’
The club was simply a supper club. It had no premises and only one purpose: to divert its founder on the first Sunday of every month. There were just six members: Oscar, Conan Doyle, Lord Alfred Douglas, myself, Bram Stoker and Walter Sickert.
Bram Stoker was Conan Doyle’s suggestion and Oscar welcomed it at once. Conan Doyle was not at ease with all of Oscar’s associates, but he felt comfortable with Abraham Stoker because, as he put it, Stoker was ‘sensible’ (Stoker was an older man, in his mid-forties), Stoker was ‘sound’ (at university, Stoker had been an athlete and, better still, a scientist). Stoker was also business manager, secretary and friend to Henry Irving, the greatest, most celebrated, actor of the age, and, as a young writer, it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s abiding ambition to create a role for Henry Irving. Oscar was pleased to assist in throwing Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker together. Oscar and Bram were fellow Dubliners. ‘We go back a long way,’ said Oscar. ‘We know one another’s secrets.’ In 1878, Bram had married Oscar’s first sweetheart, almond-eyed Florence Balcombe.
Walter Sickert, the artist, was another long-established friend. He was my age (thirty-one), but Oscar had known him since he was a boy. As a young man Oscar had holidayed with the Sickerts in Dieppe and though Wat, as a lad, had been suspicious of Oscar, as the years passed and their intimacy grew, the artist and the writer found that they had much in common. ‘We both hunger for laughter, outrage and applause,’ said Sickert. He agreed to join the Socrates Club on condition that he was not obliged to change for dinner and that smoking would be permitted even before the Loyal Toast. When Conan Doyle tut-tutted at this, Sickert pointed out that ‘Socrates’ was an anagram of ‘coarsest’ and won the point. Conan Doyle and Sickert found they shared a passion for word-play and Henry Irving. Before he became a full-time artist, Sickert had been a part-time actor. Aged eighteen, he had joined Irving’s company as a utility player, one of ‘the Lyceum young men’, as they were known. As well as carrying a spear and swelling the crowd, he was given the occasional line to declaim. ‘Irving seemed to like me because I was young and fair-haired,’ he told Conan Doyle. ‘I worshipped Irving because he was Irving and he noticed me.’
The Socrates Club met in the private dining room on the ground floor of the recently opened Cadogan Hotel, on the corner of Sloane Street and Pont Street, a few minutes’ walk from Oscar’s house in Tite Street. The hotel had once been the home of Oscar’s particular friend (and the Prince of Wales’s sometime mistress), Lillie Langtry, and Mrs Langtry (who retained a suite at the hotel) was occasionally to be seen in the hotel foyer, by the porter’s desk, wearing one of her famous hats and engaging the notorious hotel parrot, the predictably named Captain Flint, in brittle conversation. The parrot was a vile creature, noisy and noisome. Why Mrs Langtry found him so fascinating none of us could fathom. Why every man who ever met her was taken with ‘the Jersey Lillie’ was not so difficult to comprehend. She was bewitching, and a survivor. Conan Doyle, who was especially smitten, said she had ‘the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.’
The club ‘secretary’ was Alphonse Byrd, the resident night manager at the Cadogan, a man in his mid-fifties, who was so thin and pale and bald that he looked like a walking skeleton. His appearance was memorable, but, so far as I could tell, he had no personality to speak of. He rarely uttered a word or looked one in the eye, but Oscar liked him and found his faded appearance strangely comforting. As a young man, Byrd had worked the halls as a conjuror and illusionist, and failed. ‘There’s mildew in his soul,’ said Oscar. ‘Failure is so much more interesting than success. I’d much rather read Napoleon’s biography than Wellington’s, wouldn’t you?’
In fairness to Byrd, as club secretary he did a first-class job. He was responsible for the menus, the wines and the table setting and given the relatively modest cost of the meal—half a crown per diner, all in—he did us proud. Oscar insisted on six courses. As well as the customary soup, fish, roast meats and desserts, Byrd laid on a selection of hors d’oeuvres invariably including Russian caviar, Dutch herrings, prawns, lobster, pickled tunny, smoked salmon and smoked ham—and both savoury and sweet, vegetable and fruit entremets. Each member of the Club was allowed to invite one guest to each dinner—gentlemen only, or, by permission of the founder, certain actresses. Mrs Langtry came twice, and Wat Sickert sometimes arrived late, bringing one of his theatrical lady friends in tow.
On the evening of 1 May 1892, Oscar’s dinner guest was Constance’s married admirer, the young solicitor Edward Heron-Allen. Bosie’s guest was his eldest brother, Lord Drumlanrig, then very much the ‘coming’ young man at Westminster, protégé of Lord Rosebery, sometime Foreign Secretary and soon to be Foreign Secretary again.
My guest was also a scion of the aristocracy, though not one with either the promise or the connections of Francis Drumlanrig. The Hon. the Reverend George Daubeney, youngest son of the Earl of Bridgwater, was known, if at all, merely as the man who abandoned his bri
de-to-be a week before the wedding day and paid the price. I did not know Daubeney intimately, but I felt for him. I married Marthe in haste when we were both too young. Had I left her in the lurch at the altar, it would have saved us both much anguish in the years that followed.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s guest that evening was his ‘delicate-minded’ friend, Willie Hornung. According to Arthur, the young man was a journalist newly returned from Australia, but Hornung’s slight frame, wan look, lank hair and pince-nez suggested a nervous country curate rather than a newshound fresh from the Antipodes. ‘He’s a little shy,’ said Arthur. ‘I shall speak to him in a little voice,’ replied Oscar, in a whisper.
Walter Sickert and Bram Stoker each brought an actor as his guest. Sickert came with Bradford Pearse, a barrel-chested boomer of the old school, a big man with a naval beard and a ruddy face, who seemed much older than his years (he was not yet forty). Sickert and Pearse had first met as juniors in Irving’s company and Pearse’s claim to fame was that he had understudied Irving in the Scottish play and had even ‘gone on’ for the great man once at the Lyceum… the Lyceum, Sunderland.
Charles Brookfield, Bram Stoker’s invitee that evening, had never understudied anyone in his life. He was, I imagine, a leading man from the cradle, enviably blessed with doting parents, admiring older sisters and not a nuance of self-doubt. He was gifted—at Cambridge he was awarded the Winchester Reading Prize—and he was versatile. He played in pantomime and Shakespeare: Ellen Terry rated him, so did Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. He was blessed with energy, ambition, an undeniable presence and what we now call matinée idol looks. Humour and humility, however, were not his long suits. I did not warm to him. I don’t believe Oscar much liked him either. I think, bizarrely, Brookfield considered himself, in some way, as Oscar’s rival. He was a writer as well as an actor. He arrived at the Cadogan Hotel that evening full of news of his latest enterprise: a play he had written called The Poet and the Puppets.
Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death Page 2