Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers (39 page)

I CAME TO PARIS AND FOUND YOU WERE NOT HERE. AM RETURNING TO LONDON BEFORE THE WEEK IS OUT. KISS OUR BOYS FOR ME AND TELL THEM THE EIFFEL TOWER IS AS HIDEOUS AS THEIR MOTHER IS LOVELY. OSCAR

72
From the journal of Arthur Conan Doyle

I am exhausted. I have barely slept in forty hours. And I have drunk too much.

The sky is dark and the English Channel at her least hospitable. Huge waves are crashing on to the deck above. I am sheltering below – wrapped in a blanket, wedged into a wicker deckchair in a corner of the first-class saloon. Around me, others with grey faces are tightly wrapped up, eyes closed, bent only on endurance. Oscar and Robert Sherard are rolled up in their blankets, lying on the wooden benches fixed to the saloon walls.

I am writing because I cannot sleep and I cannot see to read, but whether I shall ever be able to decipher what I am scrawling here only time will tell. My mood is oddly melancholy. Ten years ago, in the spring of 1880, on such a day as this, in such a storm as this, I set sail from Peterhead on the good ship
Hope
– a whaler bound for Greenland. I was twenty, a young ship’s doctor hungry for adventure, and the worse the tempest grew, the more I relished it. Today all I feel is deep weariness and faint apprehension.

As we crossed from the railway train to the
steamer at Calais, I told Oscar of my whaling days. Walking up the ramp on to the SS
Dover Castle
I boasted of my six months in the North Atlantic pitted against the elements.

Oscar told me, teasingly: ‘I went salmon fishing once, with my father, off the coast in Connemara. It was one of the most dispiriting days of my life. He talked of nothing but past triumphs and we returned home, cruelly sunburnt, with a desiccated bloater and an old brown boot.’

I said, grandly: ‘To play a salmon is a royal game, but when your fish weighs more than a suburban villa it dwarfs all other experience.’

‘I believe it, Arthur,’ he replied, and, suddenly, he seemed in earnest. (I do not quite understand him yet: his tone can change as swiftly as the turning of a coin.) ‘And when you caught and killed your Moby Dick,’ he asked, ‘what was it like?’

‘Not as I had expected. Amid all the excitement – and no one who has not held an oar in such a scene can tell how exciting it is – I found that my sympathy lay with the poor hunted creature.’

‘You were close to it?’

‘Our boat was right alongside. We were roped to it – our harpoons embedded in its flesh.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And you looked into the creature’s eyes?’

‘The whale has a small eye,’ I said, ‘little larger than that of a bullock, and I will never forget the silent sadness that I saw in it as it dimmed over in death within a hand’s touch of me.’

Before the wind rose and the rain came, while our ship remained moored, sheltered in the harbour, and Sherard went below deck in search of further refreshment, Oscar and I stood together at the stern, side by side, holding the ship’s rail, smoking our cigarettes, watching the men working on the quayside.

‘I wonder which is easier,’ said Oscar, ‘to kill a whale or send a man to the gallows?’

‘That’s a curious question.’

‘Tonight or tomorrow, we shall look into the eyes of our murderer, Arthur. What shall we do then?’

‘Hand him over to the police.’

‘Do you think so? Whoever he is?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Whoever he is. We will have no choice.’

‘Oh, we will have a choice, Arthur. There is always a choice.’

‘We will do what our conscience dictates,’ I said.

‘Oh, Arthur,’ he cried, throwing the butt of his cigarette into the black and white water below us, and turning towards me despairingly. ‘The spirit of Southsea really does run deep in you. In my experience, conscience and cowardice are the same things. Conscience is merely the trade-name of the firm.’

‘Let’s see if we get our man first,’ I said, trying to deflect him. ‘You imply that you know who the murderer is.’

‘We have evidence still to gather,’ he said, ‘and
issues to resolve – but, yes, on balance, I think that I do. Don’t you?’

‘I do,’ I said, emphatically. ‘Jane Avril was a convincing witness, don’t you think?’

‘She was drunk, of course,’ said Oscar.

‘Only towards the end – and, as we know, what’s said when drunk was thought when sober.’

Oscar laughed. ‘You and Harry Tyrwhitt Wilson should get together to exchange wise saws and modern instances.’

He turned up his collar against the growing wind.

‘But, yes, Mademoiselle Avril’s testimony rang true, even at the end. I found it most affecting, especially the story of her loveless childhood – and that of little Lulu Lavallois.’ He turned to look at me with the utmost seriousness. ‘You and I have been blessed in our mothers, Arthur. They have never betrayed us, never let us down. They have loved us from the start – and will love us at the finish.’

I agreed. ‘Mothers are everything,’ I said.

‘With good mothering, a man won’t turn to murder,’ he added. ‘It’s well known. It’s why, in the long annals of crime, there have been so few Jewish murderers.’

‘We are indeed blessed,’ I said. ‘We have good mothers – and good wives.’

‘Oh, Arthur,’ he exclaimed. ‘Leave wives out of this. It’s the wives that drive most men to murder. It’s a good mother that counts. You get only one mother. You can always get another wife.’

I laughed. ‘I will never get another wife.’

He put his hand on my shoulder and laughed, too. ‘You will, Arthur, you will. Or, if not another wife, at least “a friend”. It’s that bewitching moustache of yours. In due course, some young filly will come along and seduce you from the path of righteousness.’

‘No,’ I protested. ‘I am a happily married man. I will be good. Always.’

‘When we are happy we are always good,’ he replied. ‘But when we are good we are not always happy.’

He tried to light another cigarette, but the wind would not allow him.

‘Time will tell, Arthur. In my experience, all ways end at the same point – disillusion.’

‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘Shall we go below? It’s about to rain. The heavens are darkening. There’s a storm brewing.’

Oscar looked up at the black sky and pocketed his cigarette case. ‘Perhaps Robert will have found some rum to comfort us. We are on a ship, after all.’

‘What time will we reach London now?’ I wondered.

‘Too late for dinner, too early for bed,’ he said.

‘I saw the telegram you sent from Paris. You are not going home to Constance tonight?’

‘No, not tonight, Arthur. I’ll come with you to the Langham. We’ll drop Robert off at his digs on the way. If there’s no word from Yarborough, I’ll leave you to go to bed while I take a wander
through Soho. I am minded to call on Rex LaSalle. He keeps late hours – as we know. And he’s very handsome – as you’ll agree. And even men of the noblest possible moral character are susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others – as you will discover one day. Note it in your journal, Arthur, lest you forget that it was I who told you so. I want the credit when it’s due.’

73
From the diary of Rex LaSalle

‘The English Channel is awash with French devils. Our native sea nymphs have all swum south. The crossing was hell.’

Oscar arrived at my room at midnight. His face was grey as slate; he was unshaven; his clothes were damp; he had about him the aroma of tar and soot and sea. He told me that he had been to Paris and back in under twenty-four hours and was too exhausted to speak – and then took off his clothes, lay on my bed, and spoke, volubly, with barely a moment’s pause, for at least an hour.

‘Who would be a mere Nereid – anonymous and tempest-tossed? One needs to command the tide, not follow it. One needs to be Neptune or nobody. Am I not right, Rex? Is that not your view?’

At first I thought he was delirious (he was certainly a little drunk), but gradually a thread of sorts became discernible in his meanderings.

‘Wouldn’t it be awful to be one of the chorus?’ he cried, reaching out and holding me by the wrist. ‘I could not bear it – and neither could you. You need to be centre stage, Rex, don’t you? In the limelight, where it counts. Where they see you. Where you’re
someone important, noticed, valued –
different.
That’s why you affect to be a vampire, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t need to believe that I’m a vampire, Oscar, if you don’t want to.’

‘I want to believe it,’ he said, turning his head towards me on the pillow. ‘I yearn to believe it. Who would not want a vampire among his close acquaintance? But I cannot believe it, Rex – not for a moment. You must remember that my mother is an authority on the folklore of the undead. She has already written one huge volume on the subject. A second is set for publication any day now. I was reared on tales of vampires and werewolves. I am a friend of Bram Stoker who talks of little else. I know about vampires, Rex – while you, dear friend, seem to know next to nothing. You have no hair growing in the palms of your hands. Even as I lie here I can clearly see your reflection in the looking-glass – and, if I turn this way, I can see your shadow cast against the wall. You have a crucifix above your bed and a rosary on your side table. Show me your teeth. Exactly – they are beautifully white and wonderfully even. You are no more a vampire than I am a Hottentot.’

I stood my ground. ‘What your mother has written and Bram Stoker has researched are myths and legends, Oscar – tall tales and garbled half-truths. Might I not be the real thing – the whole truth, for once, unadorned?’

‘I do not believe that you are a vampire,’ he said simply.

‘You do not have to,’ I replied. ‘A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.’

‘That’s another of my lines, Rex. You have adopted the persona of a vampire and the philosophy of Oscar Wilde. Why, I wonder? To make yourself somebody, I suppose. You don’t know who you really are, do you?’

‘I know who I am, Oscar.’