XV

And now, hypocritical reader, I will answer the questions which have

been agitating you this long while, which you have asked at every stage

of this long narrative of a sinful life.[2] Shake not your head, lift

not your finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader; you can deceive me in

nothing. I know the base and unworthy soul. This is a magical

_tête-à-tête_, such a one as will never happen in your life again;

therefore I say let us put off all customary disguise, let us be frank:

you have been angrily asking, exquisitely hypocritical reader, why you

have been _forced_ to read this record of sinful life; in your exquisite

hypocrisy, you have said over and over again what good purpose can it

serve for a man to tell us of his unworthiness unless, indeed, it is to

show us how he may rise, as if on stepping stones of his dead self, to

higher things, etc. You sighed, O hypocritical friend, and you threw the

magazine on the wicker table, where such things lie, and you murmured

something about leaving the world a little better than you found it, and

you went down to dinner and lost consciousness of the world[3] in the

animal enjoyment of your stomach. I hold out my hand to you, I embrace

you, you are my brother, and I say, undeceive yourself, you will leave

the world no better than you found it. The pig that is being slaughtered

as I write this line will leave the world better than it found it, but

you will leave only a putrid carcase fit for nothing but worms. Look

back upon your life, examine it, probe it, weigh it, philosophise on it,

and then say, if you dare, that it has not been a very futile and

foolish affair. Soldier, robber, priest, Atheist, courtesan, virgin, I

care not what you are, if you have not brought children into the world

to suffer your life has been as vain and as harmless as mine has been. I

hold out my hand to you, we are brothers; but in my heart of hearts I

think myself a cut above you, because I do not believe in leaving the

world better than I found it; and you, exquisitely hypocritical reader,

think that you are a cut above me because you say you would leave the

world better than you found it. The one eternal and immutable delight of

life is to think, for one reason or another, that we are better than our

neighbours. This is why I wrote this book, and this is why it is

affording you so much pleasure, O exquisitely hypocritical reader, my

friend, my brother, because it helps you to the belief that you are not

so bad after all. Now to resume.

The knell of my thirtieth year has sounded, in three or four years my

youth will be as a faint haze on the sea, an illusive recollection; so

now while standing on the last verge of the hill, I will look back on

the valley I lingered in. Do I regret? I neither repent nor do I regret;

and a fool and a weakling I should be if I did. I know the worth and the

rarity of more than ten years of systematic enjoyment. Nature provided

me with as perfect a digestive apparatus, mental and physical, as she

ever turned out of her workshop; my stomach and brain are set in the

most perfect equipoise possible to conceive, and up and down they went

and still go with measured movement, absorbing and assimilating all that

is poured into them without friction or stoppage. This book is a record

of my mental digestions; but it would take another series of confessions

to tell of the dinners I have eaten, the champagne I have drunk! and the

suppers! seven dozen of oysters, pâté-de-foie-gras, heaps of truffles,

salad, and then a walk home in the early morning, a few philosophical

reflections suggested by the appearance of a belated street-sweeper,

then sleep, quiet and gentle sleep.

I have had the rarest, the finest friends. I have loved my friends; the

rarest wits of my generation were my boon companions; everything

conspired to enable me to gratify my body and my brain; and do you think

this would have been so if I had been a good man? If you do you are a

fool, good intentions and bald greed go to the wall, but subtle

selfishness with a dash of unscrupulousness pulls more plums out of

life's pie than the seven deadly virtues.[4] If you are a good man you

want a bad one to convert; if you are a bad man you want a bad one to

go out on the spree with. And you, my dear, my exquisite reader, place

your hand upon your heart, tell the truth, remember this is a magical

_tête-à-tête_ which will happen never again in your life, admit that you

feel just a little interested in my wickedness,[5] admit that if you

ever thought you would like to know me that it is because I know a good

deal that you probably don't; admit that your mouth waters when you

think of rich and various pleasures that fell to my share in happy

Paris; admit that if this book had been an account of the pious books I

had read, the churches I had been to, and the good works I had done,

that you would not have bought it or borrowed it. Hypocritical reader,

think, had you had courage, health and money to lead a fast life, would

you not have done so? You don't know, no more do I; I have done so, and

I regret nothing except that some infernal farmers and miners will not

pay me what they owe me and enable me to continue the life that was once

mine, and of which I was so bright an ornament. How I hate this

atrocious Strand lodging-house, how I long for my apartment in _Rue de

la Tour des Dames_, with all its charming adjuncts, palms and pastels,

my cat, my python, my friends, blond hair and dark.

The daily article soon grows monotonous, even when you know it will be

printed, and this I did not know; my prose was very faulty, and my ideas

were unsettled, I could not go to the tap and draw them off, the liquor

was still fermenting; and partly because my articles were not very

easily disposed of, and partly because I was weary of writing on

different subjects, I turned my attention to short stories. I wrote a

dozen. Some were printed in weekly newspapers, some were returned to me.

There was a publisher in the neighbourhood of the Strand, who used to

frequent a certain bar, and this worthy man conducted his business as he

dressed himself, sloppily; a dear kind soul, quite witless and quite

_h_-less. From long habit he would make a feeble attempt to drive a

bargain, but he was duped generally. If a fashionable author asked two

hundred pounds for a book out of which he would be certain to make

three, it was ten to one that he would allow the chance to drift away

from him; but after having refused a dozen times the work of a Strand

loafer whom he was in the habit of "treating," he would say, "Send it

in, my boy, send it in, I'll see what can be done with it." There was a

long counter, and the way to be published by Mr B. was to straddle on

the counter and play with a black cat. There was an Irishman behind this

counter who, for three pounds a week, edited the magazine, read the MS.,

looked after the printer and binder, kept the accounts and entertained

the visitors. I did not trouble Messrs Macmillan and Messrs Longman with

polite requests to look at my MS., I straddled, played with the cat,

joked with the Irishman, drank with Mr. B., and in the natural order of

things my stories went into the magazine and were paid for. Strange were

the ways of this office; Shakespeare might have sent in prose and

poetry, but he would have gone into the wastepaper basket had he not

previously straddled. For those who were in the "know" this was a matter

of congratulation; straddling, we would cry, "We want no blooming

outsiders coming along interfering with our magazine. And you, Smith,

you devil, you had a twenty-page story in last month and cut me out.

O'Flanagan, do you mind if I send you in a couple of poems as well as

my regular stuff, that will make it all square?" "I'll try to manage it;

here's the governor." And looking exactly like the unfortunate Mr

Sedley, Mr B. used to slouch in; he would fall into his leather

armchair, the one in which he wrote the cheques--the last time I saw

that chair it was standing in the street in the hands of the brokers.

But conservative though we were in matters concerning "copy," though all

means were taken to protect ourselves against interlopers, one who had

not passed the preliminary stage of straddling would occasionally slip

through our defences. One hot summer's day, we were all on the counter,

our legs swinging, when an enormous young man entered. He must have been

six feet three in height. He was shown into Mr B.'s room, he asked him

to read a MS., and he fled, looking very frightened. "Wastepaper basket,

wastepaper basket," we shouted. "What an odd-looking fish he is--like a

pike!" said O'Flanagan; "I wonder what his MS. is like." "Very like a

pike," we cried. But O'Flanagan took the MS. home to read, and returned

next morning convinced he had discovered an embryo Dickens. The young

man was asked to call, his book was accepted, and we adjourned to the

bar.

This young man took rooms in the house next to me on the ground floor.

He had been to Oxford, and to Heidelberg, he drank beer and smoked long

pipes, he talked of nothing but tobacco. Soon, very soon, I began to see

that he thought me a simpleton; he pooh-poohed my belief in Naturalism

and declined to discuss the symbolist question. He curled his long legs

upon the rickety sofa and spoke of the British public as the "B.P.," and

of the magazine as the "mag," and in the office which I had marked down

as my own I saw him installed as a genius. He brought a little man about

five feet three to live with him, and when the two, the long and the

short, went out together, it was like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

setting forth in quest of adventures in the land of Strand. The short

man indulged in none of the loud, rasping affectation of humour that was

so maddening in the long; he was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did

join in the conversation it was like an empty nut between the

teeth--dusty and bitter. He kept a pocket-book, in which he held an

account of his reading. Holding the pocket-book between finger and

thumb, he would say, "Last year I read ten plays by Nash, twelve by

Peele, six by Greene, fifteen by Beaumont and Fletcher, and eleven

anonymous plays,--fifty-four in all."