“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 L50 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 L50 if he would promise to write the first act; he promised and I gave him the money.[33]

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 L15,000 or L20,000, “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 L150 a year and I wanted him to make it up to L300.[34] 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.”