Yet neither the cartoons nor the articles by or about the man nor yet his plays themselves (had we seen them) could have prepared us in the slightest for the living embodiment of Oscar Wilde.
After our stop at Dunhill’s we trudged ‘round to Piccadilly and presented ourselves at the Avondale, enquiring after the playwright.
“You’ll find him in the lounge,” the clerk informed us with a dour expression.
“I take it that is from whence all this noise emanates?”
asked Holmes politely. The man grunted by way of reply and busied himself behind the counter.
There was certainly a great deal of noise coming from the direction of the lounge, and Holmes and I followed it to its source, frankly curious. The clinking of glasses and the babble of animated, overlapping voices were discerned, the latter punctuated by sudden, shrill bursts and hoots of laughter.
My first impression, upon entering the room, was that I had journeyed backwards in Mr. Wells’s time machine and stumbled upon a Roman Saturnalia of some sort, peopled by satyrs, Pan-like cherubs, and elves. A second glance assured me that the dozen or so young men gathered there, singing, reciting poetry, and drinking each other’s health, were all dressed in the garb of the present century, albeit some of it rather askew. It took but a moment to realise who was chiefly responsible for this Attic impression. Standing in the centre of the room and towering over his guests both in size and stature was the leviathan Oscar Wilde himself. His odd long hair was wreathed with laurel or something very like it, and his deep, rich, and sonorous voice dominated the place as much as did his person.
Oblivious of the pandemonium, he was declaiming a poem having to do with Daphnis and Chloe (I was able to catch only a snatch here and there through the confusion of sound), with his arm draped over the shoulders of a slender young man whose blond curls framed the face of an angel.
After a moment or two our presence on the threshold made itself felt, and one by one all the revellers subsided, their songs and jests dying on their lips—save only Wilde himself. With his back to the door, he continued unaware of the intrusion, until the gradual halt in merriment caused him to turn and face us. One disagreeably flabby hand reached up and tugged the vine leaves from his tangled dark hair. His face was astonishingly comely and youthful, though I knew he must be forty. Too much food and too much drink had taken their toll and bloated his features. Nevertheless, his eyes were grey and clear and alert, his expression pleasing. Only his thick, sensual lips and his girth told of the dissipations in which he indulged.
As he focussed his gaze upon us, subdued whispers circulated, speculating about our business. More than once I caught the word policemen.
“Policemen?” Wilde echoed. His voice was soft as a caress and deep as a monastery bell. “Policemen?” He came forward slowly, carrying his coronet, and inspected us attentively. “No, no,” he concluded with a ravishing smile. “I think not By no means. There is nothing so unaesthetic on the planet as a policeman.”
This provoked a few titters in the background. I noticed that when he spoke he had the odd trick of covering his mouth with a crooked finger. He looked at Holmes with interest, and the detective returned his gaze with a steadfast regard of his own. Their grey eyes locked.
“We may be less aesthetic than you think,” Holmes told him without blinking, and reaching into his breast pocket, he presented his card. The urban Dionysus took in its contents with a careless glance.
“Dear me, dear me,” he murmured without surprise. “More detectives. Not a very aesthetic lot, you force me to agree. I shall not dissemble, however, and pretend I haven’t heard of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” The subdued revellers passed the name around behind him in reverential tones, a lone giggle marring the seriousness of the response. “And this must be Dr. Watson,” Wilde went on, swivelling his luminous eyes in my direction and taking inventory. “Yes, it must; it positively must. Well,” he sighed and collected himself with his charming smile, “what is it you gentlemen wish? Can I offer you some refreshment?”
“A minute or two of your time in private, sir, no more.”
“Is it about the Marquess?” he demanded, his voice rising and beginning to tremble. “If so, I must tell you the whole affair is now in the hands of my solicitor, Mr. Humphreys, and you must take the matter up with him.”
“It is about Jonathan McCarthy.”
The playwright’s dreamy eyes bulged briefly. “McCarthy? Then he has dared, after all—” his thick lips compressed with a show of annoyance coupled with resolve.
“He has dared nothing, Mr. Wilde. Jonathan McCarthy lies dead in his flat this day, the victim of a fatal assault by a person or persons unknown—some hours after his rendezvous with you at the Cafe Royal. I really think this interview might better be conducted elsewhere,” Holmes concluded in a low tone.
“Murdered?” It took Bacchus a moment or two to grasp the meaning of the word. In that instant I perceived the truth of Shaw’s observation. Wilde might antagonise people and defy convention, but he didn’t really mean it or understand it to be harmful. Underneath his carefully nurtured decadence and his depraved, perverse ideas, the man was an utter innocent, far more shocked by the idea of murder than I was—and I fancied myself a deal more conventional than he.
“Come this way,” he offered, composing himself, and on unsteady legs led us into the adjacent writing room. There was one elderly gentleman there, but his hat was over his eyes, his legs stretched before him, and it was clear that what the revelry next door had failed to accomplish, we need not even try. Holmes and I took seats, and Wilde threw himself heavily on to a sofa opposite. He made none of his public pretences to grace, but sat with his fat hands dangling between his knees, like a cabby’s on the box, wearily holding a pair of non-existent reins.
“I take it I am under suspicion in the matter?” he began.
“Dr. Watson and I do not represent the police. Where their suspicions may fall, we have no way of knowing, though I may say from past experience”—Holmes smiled—“they occasionally take some quaint directions. Can you account for your whereabouts after your meeting with Jonathan McCarthy?”
“Account for them?”
It may be helpful—for the police—should you be able to furnish them with an alibi,” I pointed out.
“An alibi, I see.” He leaned back with something like a smile. I caught another glimpse of him then, and I was reminded of Cassius’s “aweary of the world.” Despite an essentially humourous and sunny disposition, the man laboured under some terrible burden.
“Yes, that’s all right,” he brightened now without conviction, “I was with solicitor Humphreys. Tell me, how was it managed?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The murder, my dear fellow, the murder!” His eyes gleamed as he warmed to the topic. “Was there incense burning? Did you find the footprints of a naked woman who had danced in his blood?”
Ignoring his macabre associations, Holmes briefly outlined the circumstances of the critic’s death, omitting the business with the book and adding instead his own observation that no-one we had spoken with thus far appeared either surprised or grieved by the news.
Wilde shrugged. “I can’t imagine the West End will consider him a great loss, no.”
“What was the nature of your appointment with him yesterday?”
“Must I tell you?”
“We have no means to coerce testimony,” Holmes answered, “but the police are another matter. At the moment they do not know of your appointment”
Wilde’s eyes flashed with hope in an instant, and he sat up straight in his chair.
“Is that true?” he cried clasping his hands. “Is that really true?” Holmes assured him that it was. “Then all may yet be well!” He looked from one to the other of us, his elation subsiding as he realised we must still be dealt with. “Better you than the police, is that it?” he sighed. “How life sometimes resembles Sardou, don’t you find? What a pity! For Sardou.” He ch
uckled at his own wit and ran a chubby set of fingers through his unruly hair.
“Was your meeting connected with your visit to a solicitor this morning?” Holmes prompted.
“In a way, I suppose you might think so. You gentlemen did not know Jonathan McCarthy, did you? No, I can see you didn’t How can I explain to you what that man was?” He rubbed his lips meditatively with the crooked forefinger. “Have you heard ever of Charles Augustus Milverton?”
“The society blackmailer? Our paths have not yet crossed, but I know of him.”*
That simplifies matters. Jonathan McCarthy pursued a similar line of country.”
“He was engaged in blackmail?”
“Up to the neck, my dear Holmes, up to the very neck. He did not prey upon society, as Milverton does, but rather upon us denizens of the theatre. He had his sources, his little spies, and he squeezed hard. Of course the world of the theatre overlaps the social world now and again. At all events, I’ve had some experience of blackmailers and know how they must be dealt with. They get hold of letters I’ve written from time to time and threaten me with them. But I have a cure for that.”
I asked him what that might be, and he smiled behind the crooked finger.
“I publish them.”
“Was McCarthy threatening you with a letter?” Holmes asked.
“With several. He’d heard about the business at the Albemarle† earlier in the day and sent me an earnest of his intentions.”
“You will have to speak more plainly, I’m afraid.”
Wilde sat back, pale, astonishment writ large upon his features.
“But you’ve heard! Surely you’ve heard! It must be across all of London by now!”
“Everywhere but Baker Street,” Holmes assured him drily.
Wilde licked his purplish thick lips and eyed us nervously. “The Marquess of Queensberry,” he began in a voice hoarse with emotion, “the father of that splendid young man back there in the lounge—but no more like him than Hyperion’s like Hercules—left a card for me at the Albemarle, yesterday. I do not propose to tell you the words the barbarian wrote on that card—beside the fact that he misspelled them—only that having read the words, I was not prepared to ignore them.‡ I was advised by several friends to do so, but I did not. I went ‘round to Mr. Humphreys after dinner (he was referred to me by my friend Mr. Ross), and this morning he accompanied me to Bow Street, where I swore out a complaint for criminal libel. By this time tomorrow, the Marquess of Queensberry will have been arrested and charged, and soon I shall be rid for ever of that monster in human clothing. Hence the little celebration next door,” he concluded with a sheepish grin.
“And McCarthy, you say, heard of the incident at the Albemarle?”
Wilde nodded.
“I believe he knew of Queensberry’s intentions beforehand. He notified me and arranged a meeting at the Cafe” Royal, where he declared his willingness to furnish certain correspondence of mine to the Marquess and his solicitors. He felt these documents would certainly prejudice my case.”
“And were you of that opinion?”
“It was not necessary yesterday, nor is it necessary today that I answer that question. I had cards of my own to play, and I played them.”
“I think it may be as well to lay them on the table now.”
“As you like. To be brief, I am the repository of a great many secrets myself, concerning alarums and excursions in the West End. Theatre people are so colorful, don’t you find? I know, for example, that George Grossmith, who does the patter songs for Gilbert (he played me, you know!), has been taking drugs. Gilbert scares him so at rehearsals that he has had recourse to them. I know that Bram Stoker keeps a fiat in Soho, the existence of which neither his wife nor Henry Irving is aware. I cannot explain to what use he puts it, but my intuition tells me it isn’t to play chess. Then again, I know about Sullivan’s games of chemin de fer with—”
“And what did you know of Jonathan McCarthy?” Holmes interrupted, concealing his distaste.
Wilde replied without hesitation, “He was keeping a mistress. Her name is Jessie Rutland, and she is an ingenue at the Savoy. For a man who played the part of middle-class British rectitude to hypocritical perfection, such a disclosure would mean instant ruin. He understood that at once,” Wilde added as an afterthought, “and very shortly we discovered that we had nothing to say to one another. A sordid story, I fear, but mine own.”
Holmes stared at him for some moments, his face devoid of expression. He rose abruptly, and I followed suit.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Wilde,” said he. “You are certainly a font of information.”
The poet looked up at him. There was something so ingenuous and pleasant in his countenance that I found myself charmed despite everything he had said.
“We are all of us as God made us, Mr. Holmes—and many of us much worse.”
“Is that yours?” I enquired.
“No, Doctor-” he smiled slightly-“but it will be.” He turned again and faced the detective. “You do not approve of me, I fear.”
“Not altogether.”
Wilde would not relinquish his eyes. “I find myself wishing that you did.”
“It may be that one day I shall.”
* Holmes’s path crossed Milverton’s right before the farter’s murder in January 1899.
† Wilde’s club.
‡ Written on the card by Queensberry: To Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite.” Watson must have known the contents of this notorious message when he set down the case but tactfully omitted them.
SIX
THE SECOND MURDER
It was twilight when Holmes and I left the Avondale and joined the rush-hour crowds in Piccadilly. The wind had risen, and it cut our faces, biting our throats, too, as we walked. Cabs were not to be had for love or money, but the Savoy Theatre was no great distance from the hotel. We simply trudged in that direction, elbowing our way amidst the throng and avoiding as best we could the dirty piles of snow shoveled up next to the kerbs.
I remarked as we walked that I could not remember encountering a more singular set of people than those we had met in connection with the murder of Jonathan McCarthy.
The theatre is a singular calling,” Holmes concurred. “A noble art but a dreary profession and one that reveres that which the rest of society condemns.” He favoured me with a sidelong glance. “Deception. The ability to dissemble and deceive, to pass for what you are not. You will find it better expressed in Plato. These, however, are the actor’s stock in trade.”
“And the stock in trade of those who write their speeches for them,” I noted in addition.
“You will find that in Plato, as well.”
We walked for a time in silence.
The chief difficulty with this case,” he observed at length, as we entered the Strand, “besides the fact that our client cannot afford to pay for his meals, let alone our expenses—the chief difficulty, I say, is the superfluity of motives. Jonathan McCarthy was not a well-liked individual, that much seems clear, which only serves to complicate matters. If half the tales Wilde told us just now are true, there may be upwards of a dozen people whose interests would be well served by eliminating him. And they all dwell within that circumscribed world of the theatre, where passions—real and feigned—abound.”
“What is more,” I pointed out, “their professional gifts are likely to render their complicity in a crime rather more difficult than usual to detect.”
Holmes said nothing, and we walked in silence a few paces more.
“Has it occurred to you,” I went on, “that McCarthy’s use of Shakespeare was meant to be taken generally?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, your friend Shaw—our client—cannot abide Shakespeare. The Morning Courant, for which McCarthy wrote, is well known as a rival to the Saturday Review. There can be little doubt that with McCarthy out of the way, Bernard Shaw’s star and literary following would rise more or less togethe
r. Could McCarthy’s reference to Romeo and Juliet possibly mean not the Montagues and Capulets but rather the two periodicals? Doesn’t Mercutio, dying, refer to ‘a plague on both your houses’?” I continued, warming to my theme. “At the same time, the use of Shakespeare, whom Shaw detests, might serve to point an unerring finger in his direction as the assassin.”
“Watson, what a devious mind you possess!” Holmes stopped, his eyes twinkling. “That is positively brilliant. Brilliant! Of course, you have neglected all the evidence, but I cannot fault your imagination.” He resumed his steps. “No, I’m afraid it won’t do. Can you honestly envision our Shaw drinking brandy? Or smoking a cigar? Or running his rival through—apparently on impulse—with a letter opener?”
“He’s almost the right height,” I contended feebly, not wishing to abandon my theory without a struggle. “Besides, his objections to drink and smoke might merely have been lodged for our benefit.”
“They might,” he agreed, “though I have known of his prejudices in those directions for some time. In any event, why would he come to me at all if he wished to remain undetected?”
“Perhaps his vanity was flattered by the prospect of deceiving you.”
He considered this briefly in silence.
“No, Watson, no. It is clever but rather too cumbersome, and what is more, his footwear does not match the impressions left by the assassin. Shaw’s shoes are quite old—it pains me to think of his walking about with them in this weather—whereas our man wore new boots, purchased, as I think I said, in the Strand. Oscar Wilde, at least, was wearing the right shoes.”
“What of Wilde, men? Did you notice that when he spoke, he continually covered his mouth with his finger? Do you accept at face value his story of having checkmated McCarthy’s blackmail scheme with knowledge of the man’s illicit liaison?”
“I neither accept it nor reject it at the moment,” he returned, undaunted. That is why we are at the Savoy. As for Wilde’s peculiar habit of covering his mouth, you surely observed that his teeth are ugly. It is merely improbable vanity on his part to conceal them in conversation.”
The West End Horror Page 5
