“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: