“I treated you badly in my book!” protested Le Gallienne in amazement. “You must be confusing my book with somebody else’s. My last book was The Religion of a Literary Man. I’m sure you can’t have read it, or you wouldn’t say I had treated you badly.”
“That’s the very book; I have read every word of it,” persisted Wilde, “and your treatment of me in that book is infamous and brutal. I couldn’t have believed it of you, Richard—such friends as we have been too!”
“I treated you badly in my Religion of a Literary Man?” said Le Gallienne impatiently. “You must be dreaming, man. Why, I never so much as mentioned you in it.”
“That’s just it, Richard,” said Wilde, smilingly.
Here is a recollection of another sort. About the time when Wilde’s star was culminating, he boarded a Rhine steamer on the deck of which I was sitting. The passengers included a number of Americans, one of whom instantly recognised Wilde, and seating himself beside the new-comer, inquired:
“Guess, sir, you are the great Mr. Oscar Wilde about whom every one is talking?”
Smilingly, but not without an assumption of the bland boredom which he occasionally adopted toward strangers of whom he was uncertain, Wilde assented. The other, an elderly man wearing a white cravat, may or may not at some time have been connected with a church. Possibly he was then editing some publication, religious or otherwise, and in his time may have done some interviewing, for he plied Wilde with many curious and even over-curious questions concerning his movements, views, and projects. The latter, amused at first, soon tired. His eyes wandered from his interviewer to scan the faces of the passengers, and catching sight of me made as if to rise and join me.
The interviewer, who had not yet done with him, and was something of a strategist, cut off Wilde’s retreat by a forward movement of himself and the deck-chair, in which he was sitting, so as to block the way. It was apparently merely the unconscious hitching of one’s seat a little nearer to an interesting companion, the better to carry on the conversation, but it was adroitly followed by a very flattering remark in the form of a question, and Wilde relapsed lumpily into his seat to answer. For the next few minutes I could have imagined myself watching a game of “living chess.” Wilde, evidently wearying, wished to move his king, as represented by himself, across the board and into the square adjacent to myself, but for every “move” he made his adversary pushed forward another conversational “piece” to call a check. At last, shaking his head in laughing remonstrance, Wilde rose, and the other, seeing the game was up, did the same.
“It has been a real pleasure and honour to meet you, sir,” he said. “Guess when I get home and tell my wife I’ve talked to the great Oscar Wilde she won’t believe me. If you would just write your autograph there, I’d take it as a kindness.” He had been searching his pockets while speaking for a sheet of paper, but finding none opened his Baedeker where there was a blank sheet and thrust it into Wilde’s hand.
The latter, with a suggestion in his manner of the condescension which is so becoming to greatness, scrawled his name—a big terminal Greek “e” tailing off into space at the end—in the book, and bowing a polite, in response to the other’s effusive, farewell, made straight for a deck-chair next to me, and plumping himself heavily in it began to talk animatedly.