“What was I wearing?”
“It was a sort of magical, pendulous dewlap, it was like… like… a shirt… and the clouds were flying beneath the moon, till I no longer knew whether it was the clouds that were moving or the moon itself… but don’t be afraid of me, Mary. There’s nothing wrong in this… somewhere out there, on the cosmic mountain tops, our souls have cast aside every veil and are yielding to their mutual caresses… forgive me… I just need your girdle… yes, that’s it… someone who can foretell the future… oo! oh!.. the unspeakable sadness before the moment of possession… oh, you!.. but sometimes the stars bring us unimaginable happiness… and then one has no right… no… no right to hold out… against the future… just abandon yourself to the waves of destiny… here, Mary, beside me… on the bearskin… yes… yes… yes…”
A few weeks later he met Lionel Johnson again, for the last time. It was just after the arrest of Oscar Wilde — not on account of the stable boys and hotel flunkeys but, more surprisingly, at the instigation of the blond young aristocrat’s father. Public opinion in England, as always on these occasions, had taken a united stand against their former favourite, and people who dared take his side in pubs were beaten senseless.
At this point Johnson called on Tyrconnel, bringing Dowson with him. Dowson was even more hypersensitive and silent than usual. Johnson declared grandiloquently that they simply had to do something for Oscar. To decide what that might be, they took themselves off to a small but well-known restaurant.
Tyrconnel ordered a white Bordeaux and poured a glass for everyone. Johnson knocked his back in one go, and promptly poured himself another…
“Well, it no longer matters, now,” he sighed. But he did not explain his remark.
For as long as the meal and the wine bore them up, one great plan for Wilde’s rescue followed another.
“We’ll produce a pamphlet in which we set out the merits of his writing, under twelve separate points, and have it signed by all the leading writers in England and France,” Tyrconnel suggested.
“I think, on the contrary, we should approach the Queen and propose that she offer Oscar her protection — she has such a motherly heart,” said Dowson. They also thought of enlisting the Prince of Wales’ support, urging the Irish representatives in Parliament to protest, and inciting the colonial regiments to mutiny. Lionel Johnson rather fancied the idea of shooting old Lord Douglas, who had brought the case. After all, St Thomas Aquinas considered assassination permissible in the case of tyrants, and indeed the Jesuit Mariana made it a requirement if the tyrant happened to be a Protestant.
But when dinner was over, the coffee drunk, and they had moved on to the cognac, certain misgivings, and a mood of dejection, took hold. They began to feel like kings in exile — as does anyone who has drunk a great deal of brandy — and the futility of it all became apparent. The stark vision rose up before them of an uncomprehending age, the base multitude, and the obtuse moralising tendency of the British public. In their misery they consumed ever more cognac. Lionel Johnson seemed to cope with this surprisingly well.
Wilde’s fate slowly faded before their own unspoken sorrows.
“Poor Oscar,” said Tyrconnel. “But properly speaking, he was never a really good poet. His work was always too highly polished, too wilfully classical and brilliant. He never understood the importance of what is left unsaid. Never quite attained the elegant pointlessness of true art.”
“The reason for that,” affirmed Dowson, “was his unfortunate upbringing. I hear that the best families in Dublin would have nothing to do with the Wildes. Oscar was equally a parvenu among words. He liked to caress them the way the nouveau riche like running their fingers through their money.”
“And the Church has condemned his crime even more strongly than the civil authorities,” Johnson added. “If he does end up in prison, it’ll give him the opportunity to repent his sins and start his life afresh.”
As night and the cognac weighed ever more heavily down upon them, they began to give increasing vent to their own long-suppressed personal grievances. Tyrconnel was the first. It was easier for him, not being English. He described his desperate, sometimes feverish struggles for self-expression, the battle to liberate his work from the merely prosaic. He told them how bleak his life really was, behind the free-flowing phrases; how there were times when he could think of nothing serious to say at all; and how, in point of fact, whatever he knew about love was simply taken from books. He had become deeply embittered, and found the whole struggle hopeless. (At that stage he had no idea that he would in time become a world-famous poet, and be awarded the Nobel Prize in his old age.)
“Oh, poetry,” said Dowson. “That’s not the problem. I’m like a tree torn up by the roots, or some such thing.”
It transpired that Miss Higgins had been unfaithful to him. The trouble began when the girl was suddenly and incomprehensibly seized with literary ambition. She poured out religious and patriotic verses, and ballads about the great English seafarers. Dowson, being so very discreet by nature, had never quite managed to reveal that he was a man of letters. Somehow he had also kept it hidden that his father was an Admiral of the Fleet and that his ancestors had fought against the Armada. He had always declared, rather evasively, that he worked in the flax and hemp business and was expecting a rise in salary “very soon”. Gradually the girl came more and more to despise him as an ignorant, common sort of man. The end result was that she ran off with the deputy chief sports reporter of a provincial newspaper. “The soul is what matters,” she declared. “I could never love the sort of man who is interested only in flax and hemp.”
“Oh, love,” said Johnson, with a dismissive wave of the hand, “and oh! to everything else in this world, and that includes all your great and sanctified ideas. In the final analysis there is only one true reality, and that is poverty.”
“Between ourselves, what do you know about poverty?” Tyrconnel asked irritably.
“A great deal more than you think. All this time I’ve been living on my capital. I’ve never invested a penny in anything, because I’m not a man of business. And anyway, the medieval Church expressly condemned investment for profit,” he went on, placing his hands together on his chest. “Catholicism has lost a great deal of its lustre since it quietly condoned usury. Anyway, I’ve always funded my spending from my capital, and this is the precise moment when it finally runs out. I shall pay the bill for my meal, and after that I shan’t have a penny in the world. At the very most, the honoraria for my poems, but we’d better not talk about that.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’ve no idea. I’ll give it some thought tonight. But in point of fact, it isn’t just my capital that’s finished. The game’s up with me too. I’ve already done everything I wanted to do, and had to do. I shall never write anything better than I already have. I won’t, because it can’t be done. I’ve come to the end of what is possible in the English language. I’ve written poetry as fine as Shakespeare’s and Keats’s. But I don’t want to brag about that, because it doesn’t amount to very much. The limits to human expression are in the end very narrow. I can’t progress any further, and I’m afraid of falling back. The only logical solution would be suicide. But the Church prohibits nothing so strongly as self-slaughter,” he said, and once again placed his hands together on his chest.