“What did you do to Oscar?” I asked.
“The day before his arrival in Denver, where I was doing the Tribune Primer, I impersonated Oscar in the mask of Bunthorne of Patience, driving through Denver in an elegant landau and pair, and creating a riot of mirth. Oscar thought it a good advertisement for his lecture, and as a matter of fact it was, but as to the humor of the thing, he hadn’t the slightest notion, and treated me, who had made hundreds for him, with studied coldness.”
“Yet,” continued Gene, “for all I know he may be living on the proceeds of my joke even now, for they say he earns next to nothing and depends on the money he saved in the United States, from the proceeds of his tour. But give the devil his due, Oscar does the Prince-chap business in great style. His game is to impress ordinary folks, the grocer and the glovemaker, that a litterateur is not necessarily a Bohemian living in a garret, sporting frayed collars, having no money for cigarettes in the morning and no dinner money in the evening. And to demonstrate, he dines at the swellest hotels and restaurants and tries to cut a big swath everywhere.”
On another occasion, Gene told a few things about Oscar that he had heard at the Herald office. “Our fine American girl, Mary Anderson, has given that fop Oscar a commission, duly signed, to write a drama for her. It’s going to be called ‘The Duchess of Padua.’ Oscar may make five or ten thousand dollars out of it. If I wasn’t by nature so much inclined to humor, I might get an honorable commission like that. But people think I am only fit for cracking jokes and writing jocular and sentimental poetry.”
“Well,” I said, “Gene, everybody to his groove. While Oscar does the highfalutin’, you make people laugh. If you really want to make money you ought to go on the stage. There your gift of mimicry and imitation ought to get you big returns, for you could hold your own with Goodwin and Henry Dixey.”
“I have been told that before,” said Gene; “they drummed it into my head in Denver and in Chicago, but somehow or other I prefer the writing game to any other, even if it keeps one on a level with proletarians.”
Though not mixing with Oscar Wilde’s crowd, Gene heard a lot of gossip concerning the author of “Salome,” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” Likewise some stories about Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, a most eccentric woman, whose motto was said to be: “Only shopkeepers are respectable.”
“Why, in his own mother’s house, Oscar started a ‘Society for the Suppression of Virtue,’” vowed Gene.
Then there was the famous yarn about original sin that we heard right off the griddle. It ran this way:
Said a Famous Beauty, friend of the Prince of Wales, to Wilde: