"He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much: you won't mind his dining with us, will you?"
"Of course not," I replied. But when I saw M—— I thought him an insignificant, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration for Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for he had hardly any brains of his own. He had, however, a certain liking for the poetry and literature of passion.[28]
To my astonishment Oscar was charming to him, chiefly I think because he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at some place he had in Switzerland. This support made Oscar recalcitrant to any influence I might have had over him. When I asked him if he had written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually:
"No, Frank, I don't think I shall be able to write any more. What is the good of it? I cannot force myself to write."
"And your 'Ballad of a Fisher Boy'?" I asked.
"I have composed three or four verses of it," he said, smiling at me, "I have got them in my head," and he recited two or three, one of which was quite good, but none of them startling.
Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout again: the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze out of him; he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the catastrophe.
One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried:
"Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison. You do not know how I abhor even the memory of it: it was degrading, inhuman!"
"Prison was the making of you," I could not help retorting, irritated by what seemed to me a mere excuse. "You came out of it better in health and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why you wrote those superb letters to the 'Daily Chronicle,' and the 'Ballad of Reading Gaol'; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep you there."