A little later Miss Nethersole presented herself, and when I would not yield to her demands, went to Paris, and Oscar wrote to me saying she ought to stage the piece as she would do it splendidly, or at least I should repay her the money she had advanced to him.

This letter showed me that Oscar had not only deceived me, but, for some cause or other, some pricking of vanity I couldn’t understand, was willing to embarrass me as much as possible without any scruple.

Finally Smithers, the publisher of three of Oscar’s books, whom I knew to be a real friend of Oscar, came to me with a still more appealing story.  When Oscar was in Italy, and in absolute need, Smithers got a man named Roberts to advance L100 on the scenario.  I found that Oscar had written out the whole scenario for him and outlined the characters of his drama.  This was evidently the completest claim that had yet been brought before me:  it was also, Smithers proved, the earliest, and Smithers himself was in dire need.  I wrote to Oscar that I thought Smithers had the best claim because he was the first buyer, and certainly ought to have something.  Oscar replied, begging me not to be a fool:  to send him the money and tell Smithers to go to Sheol.  Thereupon I told Smithers I could not afford to give him any money at the moment; but if the play was a success he should have something out of it.

The play was a success:  it was stopped for a week by Queen Victoria’s death, in January, and was, I think, the only play that survived that ordeal.  Mrs. Patrick Campbell was good enough to allow me to rewrite the first act for the fiftieth performance, and it ran, if I remember rightly, some 130 nights.  About the twentieth representation I paid Smithers.

For the first weeks of the run I was bombarded with letters from Oscar, begging money and demanding money in every tone.  He made nothing of the fact that I had already paid him three times the price agreed upon, and paid Smithers to boot, and lost through his previous sales of the scenario whatever little repute the success of the piece might have brought me.  Nine people out of ten believed that Oscar had written the play and that I had merely lent my name to the production in order to enable him, as a bankrupt, to receive the money from it.  Even men of letters deceived themselves in this way.  George Moore told Bernard Shaw that he recognised Oscar’s hand in the writing again and again, though Shaw himself was far too keen-witted to be so misled.  As a matter of fact Oscar did not write a word of the play and the characters he sketched for Smithers and Roberts were altogether different from mine and were not known to me when I wrote my story.

I have set forth the bare facts of the affair here because Oscar managed to half-persuade Ross and Turner and other friends that I owed him money which I would not pay; though Ross had discounted most of his complaints, even before hearing my side.