some Esquimau, who answers me
with praise of blubber and nights spent in ice houses and baths of foul
vapour. Let's talk of something else."

FOOTNOTES:

[27] He lived till November, 1910.

CHAPTER XXIV

A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days,
leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly happy, with good food, excellent
champagne, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.

When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered
for the worse. There was an Englishman of a good class named M----
staying at the hotel. He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or
eighteen whom he called his servant. Oscar wanted to know if I minded
meeting him.

"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