The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler by Reggie Oliver Read Free Book Online Page B

prevented me, but I don’t think so. I funked it, I guess, and it’s only now that I can look at my efficient shorthand notes—made, it seems, by a stranger—and set down my account. Maybe it’s because Death is looking me in the eye, just as, fifty years ago, He was looking at poor Oscar.
    Oscar used to say that when good Americans die they go to Paris. I don’t know about that—not just yet—but I do know that way back in 1900, there was quite a set of live Americans there who stuck together and prided themselves upon their cosmopolitan sophistication. They knew all about Oscar, though most of them kept their distance, as in those days he was still looked on as some kind of contagious disease. But someone put me in touch with the writer Vincent O’Sullivan who was American born, and he knew Wilde pretty well. He gave me some searching looks, but I told him I was an admirer who wanted to meet his hero. He just nodded: ‘You can usually find him every morning between eleven and one at the Café des Deux Magots on the Left Bank.’ So I thanked him and the next morning I headed off to that café.
    He was not hard to recognise, even though the figure I saw was very unlike the photographs of him in his gorgeous heyday. There was something about the way he sat at the table outside the café that alerted me to a presence before I could even make out his features, that ‘curious Babylonian sort of face’, as someone once described it to me. He was sitting very upright, a glass of greenish liquid—chartreuse or absinthe?—on the table in front of him, and he seemed to be looking intensely at the crowd. As I discovered later this was not the case: his eyes were turned inwards on his own unhappy dreams. His right arm was stretched out horizontally, his large, clumsy hand resting on the gold head of a stout malacca cane. The pose was regal. He was kind of portly and, but for his subtle air of distinction, one might have taken him for a banker, or a financier taking a morning off from the Bourse.
    I had expected someone shabby and down at heel, but he wasn’t. He was very tidily dressed, though not exactly smart. Only when you looked close did you see that his cuffs were frayed and there were one or two tiny patches in his frock coat. I approached him and introduced myself as Jonah P. Ellwood, a friend of Vincent O’Sullivan (not strictly true), and a fervent admirer of Oscar Wilde (not strictly true either).
    ‘Any admirer of Oscar Wilde is a friend of mine,’ he said.
    I duly laughed and I could tell he was pleased, but did not flatter myself that it was anything to do with me personally. I was company, that was all.
    ‘Mr Wilde, I would like to invite you to have dinner with me,’ I said.
    ‘My dear Mr Ellwood, you look far too young and indigent to be taking Oscar Wilde out to dinner at an expensive restaurant. I will take you out to dinner.’
    Just imagine my delight!
    ‘However,’ he went on. ‘In order for me to do so, I shall require a small loan from you of a thousand francs.’
    I hesitated for a moment. A thousand francs was a lot of dough, but I knew I could get a good return on my investment, so I arranged to meet him at the café that evening with the thousand francs. I may have been a greenhorn, but I wasn’t such a greenhorn as to expect that I would ever get the loan back. As Oscar said when we took our temporary leave: ‘Your reward will be in heaven, my boy.’ Then he added, characteristically: ‘Where mine will be is rather more problematic.’
    That evening we met at the Café des Deux Magots where I handed him the one thousand francs. As soon as I had done so he became anxious that we should be on our way.
    ‘We will not go to Maxim’s or anywhere like that,’ said Oscar. ‘I know a place that is quite exquisite and even more costly: Bignon’s. We shall have a private room. They know me well there: in fact they know me so well that, out of courtesy, they always fail to recognise me.