The Diabolist

Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element
of truth. Things that really happened have been mentioned,
such as meeting President Kruger or being thrown out of a cab.
What I have now to relate really happened; yet there was no
element in it of practical politics or of personal danger.
It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with another man.
But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing
that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long
ago that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue,
only of its main questions and answers; but there is one sentence
in it for which I can answer absolutely and word for word.
It was a sentence so awful that I could not forget it if I would.
It was the last sentence spoken; and it was not spoken to me.

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school.
An art school is different from almost all other schools or
colleges in this respect: that, being of new and crude creation
and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast
between the industrious and the idle. People at an art school
either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all.
I belonged, along with other charming people, to the latter class;
and this threw me often into the society of men who were very
different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different
from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied;
I was engaged about that time in discovering, to my own
extreme and lasting astonishment, that I was not an atheist.
But there were others also at loose ends who were engaged in
discovering what Carlyle called (I think with needless delicacy)
the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth.

I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a good
representative number of blackguards. In this connection there are
two very curious things which the critic of human life may observe.
The first is the fact that there is one real difference between men
and women; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk
in threes. The second is that when you find (as you often do)
three young cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk
together every day you generally find that one of the three cads and
idiots is (for some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot.
In these small groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is
almost always one man who seems to have condescended to his company;
one man who, while he can talk a foul triviality with his fellows,
can also talk politics with a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.

It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange,
perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was