ic accusations: his
enemies began triumphantly to predict his ruin and disgrace.

Everything is known in London society; like water on sand the truth
spreads wider and wider as it gradually filters lower. The "smart set"
in London has almost as keen a love of scandal as a cathedral town.
About this time one heard of a dinner which Oscar Wilde had given at a
restaurant in Soho, which was said to have degenerated into a sort of
Roman orgy. I was told of a man who tried to get money by blackmailing
him in his own house. I shrugged my shoulders at all these scandals,
and asked the talebearers what had been said about Shakespeare to make
him rave as he raved again and again against "back-wounding calumny";
and when they persisted in their malicious stories I could do nothing
but show disbelief. Though I saw but little of Oscar during the first
year or so of his intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas, one scene from
this time filled me with suspicion and an undefined dread.

I was in a corner of the Cafe Royal one night downstairs, playing
chess, and, while waiting for my opponent to move, I went out just to
stretch my legs. When I returned I found Oscar throned in the very
corner, between two youths. Even to my short-sighted eyes they
appeared quite common: in fact they looked like grooms. In spite of
their vulgar appearance, however, one was nice looking in a fresh
boyish way; the other seemed merely depraved. Oscar greeted me as
usual, though he seemed slightly embarrassed. I resumed my seat, which
was almost opposite him, and pretended to be absorbed in the game. To
my astonishment he was talking as well as if he had had a picked
audience; talking, if you please, about the Olympic games, telling how
the youths wrestled and were scraped with strigulae and threw the
discus and ran races and won the myrtle-wreath. His impassioned
eloquence brought the sun-bathed palaestra before one with a magic of
representment. Suddenly the younger of the boys asked:

"Did you sy they was niked?"

"Of course," Oscar replied, "nude, clothed only in sunshine and
beauty."

"Oh, my," giggled the lad in his unspeakable Cockney way. I could not
stand it.

"I am in an impossible position," I said to my opponent, who was the
amateur chess player, Montagu Gattie. "Come along and let us have some
dinner." With a nod to Oscar I left the place. On the way out Gattie
said to me:

"So that's the famous Oscar Wilde."

"Yes," I replied, "that's Osca