Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (19 page)

On the following morning, when, through the cracks around the hatches in our cell doors, we were having what he now termed ‘our daily chinwag’, Private Luck said to me, playfully, ‘I hear that you have been talking to our little monkey?’

‘Do you mean Tom? Yes, I saw him in the garden. How do you know?’

‘He is a pretty boy, isn’t he?’

‘He is young.’

‘You like young boys, Mr Wilde, I know that.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you want him?’ he whispered.

‘What?’ I answered, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want the boy?’

‘He is a child!’ I hissed, outraged.

‘It will not be easy, Mr Wilde. It will cost money.’

15
Execution

B
etween me and life there has always been a mist of words
.
Since my boyhood, language has enveloped me. When I was young I liked to do all the talking myself, of course – it saved time and prevented arguments. It was the sound of my own voice that thrilled me.
Je parle donc je suis.
I would throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase and for the sake of an epigram I would willingly desert truth. In time, I learnt to listen as well as to speak and discovered the beauty of reciprocity and the consolation of the give-and-take of conversation. Discourse, I know now, is everything.

But in Reading Gaol, apart from my daily ‘chinwag’ with Private Luck – which lasted between three and eight minutes, never more – I had no sustained conversations of any kind during the spring and early summer of 1896. I spoke that one time with the boy prisoner, Tom, at Warder Braddle’s graveside. With Warder Stokes, now and then, when he came to my cell, I attempted inconsequential small talk, but the poor fellow was so guarded in his responses, so desperately watchful of all he said, that I quickly understood that my well-intended pleasantries were a burden to him. With the other turnkeys my exchanges were rarely more than monosyllabic.

Late one afternoon in May, by the potting sheds, I saw a prisoner standing alone leaning against a wall, with his head thrown back and his jaw thrust upwards towards the setting sun. There were no warders in sight, so, hungry for a friend to speak to, I went over to him. I saw from the badge on his uniform that it was C.3.5. – the poisoner, Atitis-Snake. His cap was pushed back a little on his head, so for the first time I saw his mouth and chin. In his hand he held a lighted cigarette. ‘By all that’s wonderful,’ I cried, ‘where did you get that?’

He turned his shrouded head towards the potting sheds and nodded. There, sitting on the step by an open door, also with a lighted cigarette in hand, was the boy, Tom. I laughed and set down my wheelbarrow. The pair of them, man and boy, convicts at Reading Gaol, looked for all the world like a farmer and his lad enjoying an evening smoke at the end of a hard day’s labour in the fields. ‘What must I do to beg a cigarette?’ I asked.

As I spoke, in the distance I heard a woman’s voice calling, ‘E.1.1., where are you? Come here now.’ I looked along the pathway that led back to the main prison buildings. I could see no one. The voice, louder and more urgent than before, repeated its call – not angrily but as a clear command. The boy got lightly to his feet and ran off towards it.

‘It was the wardress,’ I said. I smiled. ‘Her face has an unexpected grace that her voice most surely lacks.’ I turned back to Sebastian Atitis-Snake, but he was gone.

By the wall where he had been standing and on the step where the boy had sat, I foraged for the remains of their cigarettes, but there was nothing to be found.

Not long after this, on a day when I had learnt from Warder Stokes that my neighbour the dwarf had once been a circus tumbler and assistant to the Great Voltare, the celebrated mesmerist, I attempted to speak to him as we trudged around the exercise yard, one after the other, five paces apart.

‘You worked in the circus, my friend,’ I whispered when we were at the farthest point from the watching turnkey. ‘Have you ever thought that we are like elephants pacing around the ring?’ I was excited to fill the air with sound.

The dwarf made no reply, but I sensed from a slight motion of his head that he had heard me. ‘In America,’ I continued, ‘I met P. T. Barnum and he did me the honour of presenting me to the mighty Jumbo.’

I spoke absurdly, but not simply for the sake of speaking. I spoke to make contact with a fellow soul in torment.

‘He won’t answer,’ hissed another voice in the ring. It was the prisoner who paced ahead of him, Atitis-Snake. ‘He won’t speak. He is silent as the grave. We are buried here. This is our grave. There is no escape for us – except death.’

Before my incarceration, I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy.

My mother, amid the troubles of her later life, used to quote to me Goethe’s famous lines:

Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

Who never spent the midnight hours

Weeping and waiting for the morrow,

– He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.

I heard the lines from my mother’s lips – time and again – and absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn. I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else.

On the anniversary of my imprisonment – Monday, 25 May 1896 – the Reverend Friend, chaplain of Reading Gaol, came to call on me in my cell. Warder Stokes had forewarned me of the visit and I was resolved to receive the reverend gentleman courteously, and not as I had done previously, with rancour and ill-disguised hostility. He, too, it seemed, had come to call in a spirit of conciliation.

‘Good morning, my friend,’ he said, smiling as he entered my cell. ‘May I sit with you a while?’

‘By all means,’ I replied, getting to my feet and offering him my wooden chair to sit upon. ‘Warder Stokes told me that you might come to see me today. I am glad. I am grateful. I have not spoken at any length with another human being since the day in February when my wife came to tell me of my mother’s death. That was three months ago. It was the day that Warder Braddle died.’

‘I remember,’ said the Reverend Friend, settling into the chair and laying his prayer book carefully on the table before him. I noticed his fingernails, clean and neatly cut: a novelty at Reading Gaol. ‘You will sit also?’ he said, pursing his lips and waving a delicate hand towards my bed. I perched on the edge of it and looked steadily into his pale blue eyes. They told me nothing.

‘Did Warder Braddle’s death surprise you?’ I asked.

‘Your question does, my friend,’ he answered. ‘Why do you think of Warder Braddle?’

‘Because he died outside my door,’ I said, ‘and now I tend his grave.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the chaplain, half closing his eyes, as if to picture it. ‘In the Garden of Remembrance.’

‘Is it unconsecrated ground?’ I asked.

The chaplain looked at me, surprised. ‘Yes, it is – but it was a Christian burial. Suicide is a mortal sin in the eyes of God and a punishable offence in the eyes of the Law, but the soul of the man who takes his own life is not necessarily doomed to damnation.’

‘You believe Warder Braddle took his own life?’ I asked.

‘It is possible,’ he answered quietly, running his fingers around the rim of his prayer book. ‘I saw him at the last, leaning over the balustrade. I know the governor is certain it was an accident – and I trust the governor’s judgement – but Braddle did not seem drunk to me.’

‘Did he have cause to kill himself?’

The Reverend Friend looked directly at me and smiled. ‘We are all sinners, C.3.3.’

‘You were his priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you also his confessor? Did you know the nature of his sins?’

The chaplain pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. ‘I have not come here to speak ill of the dead. I have come to bring comfort to the living.’ He held out his hand, as if offering a benediction. ‘How are you?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘As today you are my confessor, I will tell you. I am in pain,’ I answered.

The chaplain adopted a look of concern. ‘Is it your ear?’ he asked. ‘I know you’ve had trouble with your ear.’

‘My ear does bleed at night sometimes. My heart bleeds also. The pain is overwhelming.’

The chaplain sighed. ‘Suffering is a mystery, is it not?’

‘A mystery and a revelation,’ I answered. ‘I have discovered lately that we can learn more from pain than we can from pleasure.’

‘I am moved to hear you say so,’ said the Reverend Friend, furrowing his brow. His face was featureless, his age difficult to determine. ‘Perhaps your year has not been wasted.’

‘When I was at Oxford,’ I said, holding the clergyman’s gaze, ‘I remember telling one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul.’

‘And so, indeed, you went out, and so you lived,’ said the prison chaplain, nodding his head sagaciously. ‘I have read much about you, my friend. There has been much to read.’

‘My only mistake,’ I continued, ‘was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.’

‘Ah, yes,’ murmured the chaplain.

‘Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall . . .’

‘All these were things of which you were afraid?’ he asked.

‘Yes, and as I had determined to know nothing of them, in due course I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.’

The chaplain sat back, folded his arms across his chest and considered me carefully. ‘Do you regret having lived for pleasure?’ he asked.

‘Not for a single moment,’ I cried, leaning towards him eagerly. ‘I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.’

‘But to have continued the same life would have been wrong—’

‘Yes,’ I interrupted, ‘because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. And now I find that the other half of the garden has its secrets for me also.’

The Reverend Friend patted his prayer book gently, as he might have patted my head had I been a child. ‘You have done well. You should be happy with what you have learnt. I am happy for you.’

‘I must learn how to be happy,’ I said. ‘Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart. My temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine. Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.’ I looked about my cell and spread out my fingers on either side of me on the hard board that was my bed. ‘Despair is my bedfellow here.’

‘Despair is a sin,’ said the chaplain.

‘I know. I must not wilfully live in melancholy. But there are times here when I think I will go mad.’

‘Are the warders cruel to you?’

‘No, some are harsh, but none is cruel.’

‘Is it your fellow prisoners?’

‘My neighbour torments me,’ I said. ‘I will go mad.’

‘The dwarf? You surprise me.’

‘No,’ I said, laughing, ‘not the dwarf. C.3.2. – Private Luck.’