The Master (11 page)

Sturges was the first to arrive with the news of what the Marquess of Queensberry intended to tell the court.

‘He has, I’ve been told, witnesses. Witnesses who will not spare us any detail.’

Henry looked at Sturges’s young face and his wide-eyed expression. He wanted to pat him on the shoulder and tell him that he was eager to hear the detail, all of it, as soon as it was
known, he wanted to be spared nothing.

The story of Wilde filled Henry’s days now. He read whatever came into print about the case and waited for news. He wrote to William about the trial, making clear that he had no respect
for Wilde, he disliked both his work and his activities on the stage of London society. Wilde, he insisted, had never been interesting to him, but now, as Wilde threw caution away and seemed ready
to make himself into a public martyr, the Irish playwright began to interest him enormously.

‘I
HAVE HEARD
news of the greatest import.’ Gosse did not wait to sit down before he spoke, and moved as though he were standing on the deck
of a ship.

‘I believe that Douglas’s father will produce a number of scallywags. Young unwashed boys will give evidence against Wilde and, I have been told, their evidence will be
irrefutable.’

Henry knew that there was no need to ask questions. He did not, in any case, quite know how to frame the question that needed to be asked.

‘I have seen the names of the witnesses,’ Gosse said dramatically, ‘and they include a number of worms. Wilde, it seems, has been consorting with worms, with thieves and
blackmailers. The price must have seemed cheap at the time, but it seems now it will cost him dear.’

‘And Douglas?’ Henry asked.

‘I am told that he is up to his neck in this. But Wilde wants him kept out of it. It seems when Wilde was finished with his filthy young purchases he passed them on to Douglas, and God
knows who else. It appears there is a list of those who rented these boys.’

Henry noticed that Gosse was watching him, waiting for his response.

‘It is a dreadful business,’ he said.

‘Yes, a list,’ Gosse said, as though Henry had not spoken.

N
EITHER
S
TURGES
nor Gosse went to the trial, yet they both seemed to know the exchanges by heart. Wilde, they said, was confident and arrogant. He
spoke, Sturges said, like someone who could burn his boats because he was about to go to France. He was witty and lofty, careless and contemptuous. Gosse heard from his usual sources one evening
that Wilde had already taken off, but the following day when it was clear that this had not happened, Gosse did not mention it. Nonetheless, both of Henry’s informants were sure that he would
go to France and both also had names for the boys who would give evidence and spoke of them as personages, each with his own different character and profile.

On the third day of the trial, Henry noticed a new intensity in the tone of both Gosse and Sturges. They had separately been up late the night before and discussing the case; had waited until
they knew that Wilde had turned up in court that day so that they could come with fresh news. Gosse had spent part of the previous evening with the poet Yeats, who, Gosse said, was alone among
those to whom he had spoken in his admiration for Wilde and had nothing but praise for his courage. The poet had attacked the public for its hypocrisy, Gosse said.

‘I was not aware,’ he added, ‘that the public had been trawling in the sewers and I told Yeats so.’

‘Does he know Wilde?’ Henry asked.

‘They’re all Irish together,’ Gosse said.

‘Does he know him well?’ Henry persisted.

‘He told me an extraordinary story,’ Gosse said. ‘He told me of a Christmas Day he spent with the Wildes. The house, he said, was more beautiful than anyone has mentioned,
everything white and full of strange and beautiful objects. Chief among them, he said, was Mrs Wilde herself, who is clever and quite beautiful, according to Yeats. And the two boys, he said, were
curly-headed pictures of innocence and sweetness, perfect creatures. It was all perfect, he said, a household of infinite perfection, not only great taste, but great warmth, he said, and great
beauty and great love.’

‘Obviously not enough,’ Henry said drily, ‘or perhaps too much.’

‘Yeats intends to call on him,’ Gosse said. ‘I wished him luck.’

Sturges listened carefully as Henry, for once, passed on what Gosse had told him.

‘It is all clear,’ Sturges said. ‘Bosie is the love of his life. He would give up anything for him. Wilde has found the love of his life.’

‘Then why can he not take him to France?’ Henry asked. ‘That is where such people are normally taken.’

‘He may still go to France,’ Sturges said.

‘The fact that he has not yet gone is inexplicable,’ Henry said.

‘I think I know why he has not gone,’ Sturges said. ‘I have spent much time discussing it with those who know him, or at least think they do, and I think I might
know.’

‘Do pray tell,’ Henry said, placing himself in a chair by the window.

‘In one short month,’ Sturges said, speaking slowly as though thinking ahead to the next phrase, ‘he has sat in an audience for two of his plays and witnessed triumph,
universal praise and his name in large letters. For any man it would be unsettling. No man should make a judgement who has recently published a book or put on a play.’

Henry did not say anything.

‘In this time,’ Sturges went on, ‘he has also been to Algeria, if you can imagine, and news of some of his activities there has filtered back. It seems that neither he nor
Douglas was shy in making himself known to the local tribes, and the excitement must have been unsettling for Wilde and, indeed, for the tribes, if for no one else.’

‘I can imagine,’ Henry said.

‘And when he returned, he was homeless, he has lived in hotels. And also, he has no money.’

‘That is not the case,’ Henry said. ‘I have calculated his income from the theatre. It is very high.’

‘Bosie has spent it for him,’ Sturges replied, ‘and he had debts to match. I believe that he has not enough money to pay his hotel bill and the manager has captured his
belongings, such as they are.’

‘That does not prevent him from going to France,’ Henry said. ‘He can acquire some belongings there, perhaps even make significant improvements to them.’

‘He has lost his moorings, lost his judgement,’ Sturges said. ‘He is incapable of making a decision. The success and the love and the hotel rooms have been too much for him.
Also, he believes that it will be a blow for Ireland but I can make nothing of that.’

O
NCE THE TRIAL
was over, it was clear to Gosse that Wilde, if he did not flee, would be arrested. As each hour went by, since the police knew where he
was, his being charged with indecency and worse was more and more likely, with witnesses appearing from the sewers of London, Gosse said.

‘There is a list, as I told you, and there is great fear in the city and a great determination on the government’s side, I am told with some authority, that rampant indecency will be
stamped out. I fear there will be other arrests. I have heard names. It is rather shocking.’

Henry studied Gosse and paid attention to his tone. Suddenly, his old friend had become a rabid supporter of the stamping out of indecency. He wished there were someone French in the room to
calm Gosse down, his friend having joined forces, apparently, with the English public in one of their moments of self-righteousness. He wanted to warn him that this would not help his prose
style.

‘Perhaps a period of solitary confinement will help Wilde,’ Henry said. ‘But not the martyrdom. One would wish that on no one.’

‘Apparently, the Cabinet has discussed the list,’ Gosse went on. ‘The police, it seems, have already questioned people and many have been advised to cross the channel. And I
believe that many are crossing as we speak.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘and besides the moral climate I think they will find the diet rather better over there too.’

‘It is unclear who is under suspicion, but there are many rumours and suggestions,’ Gosse continued.

Henry noticed Gosse watching him.

‘It is advised, I think, that anyone who has been, as it were, compromised should arrange to travel as soon as possible. London is a large city and much can go on here quietly and
secretly, but now the secrecy has been shattered.’

Henry stood up and went to the bookcase between the windows and studied the books.

‘I wondered if you, if perhaps …’ Gosse began.

‘No.’ Henry turned sharply. ‘You do not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about.’

‘Well that is a relief, if I may say so,’ Gosse said quietly, standing up.

‘Is that what you came here to ask?’ Henry kept his eyes fixed on Gosse, his gaze direct and hostile enough to prevent any reply.

S
TURGES CONTINUED
to visit in the period leading up to Wilde’s trial, when Wilde was in custody and all possibility of going to France had
faded.

‘His mother, I am told, is jubilant,’ Sturges said. ‘She believes he has delivered a great blow against the Empire.’

‘It is difficult to imagine him having a mother,’ Henry said.

Henry asked his two visitors and anybody else whom he saw in these weeks if they knew anything about Wilde’s two golden children whose very name was disgraced for ever. It was Gosse who
came with the news.

‘Although he is bankrupt, his wife is not. She has her own money and has moved to Switzerland, as far as I know. And she has changed her name and that of her sons. They no longer bear
their father’s name.’

‘Did she know about her husband before the trial?’ Henry asked.

‘No, I understand that she did not. It has been an enormous shock to her.’

‘And what do the boys know?’

‘I cannot tell you that. I have not heard,’ Gosse said.

For days he thought about them, watchful, beautiful creatures in a country where they could not understand a word of the language, their very names obliterated, their father responsible for some
dark, nameless crime. He thought of them in some turreted Swiss apartment house in high rooms with a view of the lake, their nurse refusing to explain why they had come all this way, why there was
so much silence, why their mother kept apart from them and then suddenly came close to them as though they were in danger. He thought of how little they would need to say to each other about the
demons that were around them, their new name, their great isolation, the upheaval which had resulted in their spending days alone together in those cold rooms, as though waiting for a catastrophe
to unfold, their father a ghostly memory, standing smiling at them on the bare half-lit landing as they climbed the staircase, beckoning in the shadows.

W
HEN
W
ILDE
had been sentenced and the scandal surrounding London’s dark underworld had died down, Henry’s relationship with Edmund Gosse
returned to what it had been, as Gosse himself underwent a restoration of his old self. Immediately after Wilde was imprisoned, Gosse ceased to sound like a member of the House of Lords.

One afternoon, as they sat in Henry’s study drinking tea, an old subject of theirs, which had been much on Henry’s mind, arose. The subject was John Addington Symonds, a friend and
correspondent of Gosse, who had died two years earlier. Of all the people, Henry said, who would have been fascinated by every moment of the Wilde case, surely JAS, as he called him, would have
been the most intrigued. It would almost have made him come back to England.

‘He would have loathed Wilde, of course,’ Gosse said, ‘the vulgarity and the filth.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said patiently, ‘but he would have been captured by what came into the open.’

Symonds had lived mainly in Italy and had written with great, perhaps too great sensuousness about the landscape and the art and the architecture. He became a connoisseur of Italian light and
colour, but he also became an expert on another more dangerous matter, what he called a problem in Greek ethics, the love between two men.

Ten years earlier, Henry and Gosse had discussed Symonds as avidly as they discussed Wilde during the trial. This was when Gosse moved less freely among the powerful, and there had been a tacit
understanding between them that these preoccupations of Symonds mattered to both of them personally, an understanding which had lessened as the years passed.

Throughout the 1880s Symonds, writing from Italy, made no secret of his own leanings. He wrote explicit letters to all his friends and many who were not his friends. He sent his book on the
matter to those in England whom he thought might initiate a debate. Many who received the book were infuriated and embarrassed. Symonds wanted it brought into the light, discussed openly, and this,
Henry remarked to Gosse at the time, was a sign of how long he had been out of England, how many years he had been basking in Italian sunshine. Gosse was interested in public life and wished to
discuss the implications of what Symonds was saying for legislation or public attitudes. Henry, on the other hand, became fascinated by Symonds. By this time Henry had received several letters from
Symonds about Italy, and had by chance, several years before, sat beside Symonds’s wife at dinner. He remembered her as mostly silent, quite dull, and he failed to recollect, when he became
interested in her case, a single word she had said.

Yet he brought away a sense of her, as someone with fixed opinions, hardened attitudes, and as Gosse continued to tell him more about Symonds, Henry began to work his imagination on Mrs Symonds,
as though he were a portrait painter. She was, Gosse said, in no sort of sympathy with what her husband wrote, she disapproved of his tone when he wrote about Italy, the hyper-aesthetic manner he
had developed appalled her, and then she loathed his entire concern with love between men. She was, to start with, Gosse said, of a narrow, cold, Calvinistic disposition, as morbid in her search
for moral purpose as her husband was in search of ultimate beauty. One of them, Gosse said, seemed to aggravate the other so that as time went by Mrs Symonds increasingly craved the sackcloth while
her husband longed for Greek love.