THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890) by Oscar Wilde

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890)
Oscar Wilde






Chapter 1

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the
light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came
through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he
was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord
Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and
honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed
hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and
now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across
the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the
huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making
him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through
the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey
the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees
shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling
with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the
straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The
dim roar of London was like the burdon note of a distant organ.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal
beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the
artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some
years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise
to so many strange conjectures.
As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so
skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his
face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up,
and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though
he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which
he feared he might awake.
"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,"
said Lord Henry, languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to
the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I
have gone there, there have either been so many people that I have not
been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures
that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The
Grosvenor is really the only place."
"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his
head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him
at Oxford. "No; I won't send it anywhere."
Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement
through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful
whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette.
"Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason?
What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to
gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to
throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in
the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being
talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the
young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men
are ever capable of any emotion."
"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't
exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it."
Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.
"Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same."
"Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know
you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between
you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this
young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and
rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you- well,
of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But
beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the
harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes
all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful
men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!
Except, of course, in the church. But then in the church they don't
think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was
told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural
consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious
young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture
really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is
some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in
winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer
when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter
yourself, Basil, you are not in the least like him."
"You don't understand me, Harry," answered the artist. "Of course
I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be
sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the
truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual
distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history
the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from
one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this
world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know
nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of
defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and
without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever
receive it, from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my
brains, such as they are- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian
Gray's good looks- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given
us, suffer terribly."
"Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across
the studio towards Basil Hallward.
"Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you."
"But why not?"
"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell
their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have
grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make
modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is
delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my
people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is
a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great
deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully
foolish about it?"
"Not at all," answered Lord Henry, "not at all, my dear Basil. You
seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is
that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both
parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I
am doing. When we meet- we do meet occasionally, when we dine out
together, or go down to the Duke's- we tell each other the most absurd
stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it-
much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her
dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no
row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me."
"I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry," said Basil
Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "I
believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are
thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary
fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.
Your cynicism is simply a pose."
"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I
know," cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into
the garden together, and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat
that stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped
over the polished leaves. In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.
After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. "I am afraid I
must be going, Basil," he murmured, "and before I go, I insist on your
answering a question I put to you some time ago."
"What is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the
ground.
"You know quite well."
"I do not, Harry."
"Well, I will tell you what it is. I want you to explain to me why
you won't exhibit Dorian Gray's picture. I want the real reason."
"I told you the real reason."
"No, you did not. You said it was because there was too much of
yourself in it. Now, that is childish."
"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face,
"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the
artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the
occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather
the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I
will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in
it the secret of my own soul."
Lord Henry laughed. "And what is that?" he asked.
"I will tell you," said Hallward; but an expression of perplexity
came over his face.
"I am all expectation, Basil," continued his companion, glancing
at him.
"Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry," answered the
painter; "and I am afraid you will hardly understand it. Perhaps vou
will hardly believe it."
Lord Henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled
daisy from the grass, and examined it. "I am quite sure I shall
understand it," he replied, gazing intently at the little golden
white-feathered disk, "and as for believing things, I can believe
anything, provided that it is quite incredible."
The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy
lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the
languid air. A grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a
blue thread a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze
wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart
beating, and wondered what was coming.
"The story is simply this," said the painter after some time. "Two
months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon's. You know we poor
artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to
remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and
a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can
gain a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the
room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and
tedious Academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was
looking at me. I turned halfway round, and saw Dorian Gray for the
first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A
curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come
face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating
that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my
whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external
influence in my life. You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am
by nature. I have always been my own master; had at least always
been so, till I met Dorian Gray. Then- but I don't know how to explain
it to you. Something seemed to tell me that I was on the verge of a
terrible crisis in my life. I had a strange feeling that Fate had in
store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. I grew afraid,
and turned to quit the room. It was not conscience that made me do it:
it was a sort of cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to
escape."
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil.
Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
"I don't believe that, Harry, and I don't believe you do either.
However, whatever was my motive- and it may have been pride, for I
used to be very proud- I certainly struggled to the door. There, of
course, I stumbled against Lady Brandon. 'You are not going to run
away so soon, Mr. Hallward?' she screamed out. You know her
curiously shrill voice?"
"Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry,
pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers.
"I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to Royalties, and
people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras
and parrot noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend. I had only
met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. I
believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time,
at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is
the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found
myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so
strangely stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes
met again. It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to
introduce me to him. Perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. It was
simply inevitable. We would have spoken to each other without any
introduction. I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He,
too, felt that we were destined to know each other."
"And how did Lady Brandon describe this wonderful young man?"
asked his companion. "I know she goes in for giving a rapid precis
of all her guests. I remember her bringing me up to a truculent and
red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons,
and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been
perfectly audible to everybody in the room, the most astounding
details. I simply fled. I like to find out people for myself. But Lady
Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods.
She either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything
about them except what one wants to know."
"Poor Lady Brandon! You are hard on her, Harry!" said Hallward,
listlessly.
"My dear fellow, she tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in
opening a restaurant. How could I admire her? But tell me, what did
she say about Mr. Dorian Gray?"
"Oh, something like 'Charming boy- poor dear mother and I absolutely
inseparable. Quite forget what he does- afraid he- doesn't do
anything- oh, yes, plays the piano- or is it the violin, dear Mr.
Gray?' Neither of us could help laughing, and we became friends at
once."
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it
is far the best ending for one," said the young lord, plucking another
daisy.
Hallward shook his head. "You don't understand what friendship is,
Harry," he murmured- "or what enmity is, for that matter. You like
every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."
"How horribly unjust of you!" cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat
back, and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelled skeins
of glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of
the summer sky. "Yes, horribly unjust of you. I make a great
difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks,
my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their
good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his
enemies. I have not got one who is a fool, they are all men of some
intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that
very vain of me? I think it is rather vain."
"I should think it was, Harry. But according to your category I must
be merely an acquaintance."
"My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance."
"And much less than a friend. A sort of brother, I suppose?"
"Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't
die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."
"Harry!" exclaimed Hallward, frowning.
"My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can't help
detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none
of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. I
quite sympathize with the rage of the English democracy against what
they call the vices of the upper orders. The masses feel that
drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special
property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself he is
poaching on their preserves. When poor Southwark got into the
Divorce Court, their indignation was quite magnificent. And yet I
don't suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly."
"I don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is
more, Harry, I feel sure that you don't either."
Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard, and tapped the toe of
his patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane. "How English
you are, Basil! That is the second time you have made that
observation. If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman-
always a rash thing to do- he never dreams of considering whether
the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any
importance is whether one believes it oneself. Now, the value of an
idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who
expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere
the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in
that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or
his prejudices. However, I don't propose to discuss politics,
sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better than
principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything
else in the world. Tell me more about Mr. Dorian Gray. How often do
you see him?"
"Every day. I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day. He is
absolutely necessary to me."
"How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything
but your art."
"He is all my art to me now," said the painter, gravely. "I
sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance
in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium
for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art
also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the
face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian
Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him,
draw from him, sketch from him. Of course I have done all that. But he
is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't tell you that I
am dissatisfied with what I have done of him or that his beauty is
such that Art cannot express it. There is nothing that Art cannot
express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian
Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious
way- I wonder will you understand me?- his personality has suggested
to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style.
I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now
re-create life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'A dream of
form in days of thought:'- who is it who says that? I forget; but it
is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of
this lad- for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is
really over twenty- his merely visible presence- ah! I wonder can
you realize all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the
lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the
passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit
that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body- how much that is! We in
our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that
is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! if you only knew what
Dorian Gray is to me! You remember that landscape of mine, for which
Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with?
It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so?
Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me. Some
subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my
life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for,
and always missed."
"Basil, this is extraordinary! I must see Dorian Gray."
Hallward got up from his seat, and walked up and down the garden.
After some time he came back. "Harry," he said, "Dorian Gray is to
me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see
everything in him. He is never more present in my work than when no
image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new
manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness
and subtleties of certain colours. That is all."
"Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked Lord Henry.
"Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression
of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have
never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never
know anything about it. But the world might guess it; and I will not
bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be
put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the
thing, Harry- too much of myself!"
"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful
passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many
editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create
beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We
live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form
of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some
day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world
shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is
only the intellectually lost who ever argue. Tell me, is Dorian Gray
very fond of you?"
The painter considered for a few moments. "He likes me," he answered
after a pause; "I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him
dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I
know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to
me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. Now and
then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real
delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given
away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to
put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an
ornament for a summer's day."
"Days in summer, Basil, are apt to linger," murmured Lord Henry.
"Perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. It is a sad thing to think
of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That
accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate
ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have
something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and
facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly
well-informed man- that is the modern idea. And the mind of the
thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced
above its proper value. I think you will tire first, all the same.
Some day you will look at your friend and he will seem to you to be
a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or
something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and
seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time
he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a
great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a
romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a
romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic."
"Harry, don't talk like that. As long as I live, the personality
of Dorian Gray will dominate me. You can't feel what I feel. You
change too often."
"Ah, my dear Basil, that is exactly why I can feel it. Those who are
faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who
know love's tragedies." And Lord Henry struck a light on a dainty
silver case, and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious
and satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. There
was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the
ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass
like swallows. How pleasant it was in the garden! And how delightful
other people's emotions were!- much more delightful than their
ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's
friends- those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to
himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had
missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had he gone to his
aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and
the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the
poor, and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would
have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise
there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have
spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the
dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that! As he
thought of his aunt, an idea seemed to strike him. He turned to
Hallward, and said, "My dear fellow, I have just remembered."
"Remembered what, Harry?"
"Where I heard the name of Dorian Gray."
"Where was it?" asked Hallward, with a slight frown.
"Don't look so angry, Basil. It was at my aunt, Lady Agatha's. She
told me she had discovered a wonderful young man, who was going to
help her in the East End, and that his name was Dorian Gray. I am
bound to state that she never told me he was good-looking. Women
have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not. She
said that he was very earnest, and had a beautiful nature. I at once
pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair,
horribly freckled, and tramping about on huge feet. I wish I had known
it was your friend."
"I am very glad you didn't, Harry."
"Why?"
"I don't want you to meet him."
"You don't want me to meet him?"
"No."
"Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming
into the garden.
"You must introduce me now," cried Lord Henry, laughing.
The painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the
sunlight. "Ask Mr. Gray to wait, Parker: I shall be in in a few
moments." The man bowed, and went up the walk.
Then he looked at Lord Henry. "Dorian Gray is my dearest friend," he
said. "He has a simple and beautiful nature. Your aunt was quite right
in what she said of him. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence
him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many
marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who
gives to my art whatever charm it possesses; my life as an artist
depends on him. Mind, Harry, I trust you." He spoke very slowly, and
the words seemed wrung out of him almost against his will.
"What nonsense you talk!" said Lord Henry, smiling, and, taking
Hallward by the arm, he almost led him into the house.



Chapter 2

As they entered they saw Dorian Gray. He was seated at the piano,
with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of
Schumann's "Forest Scenes." "You must lend me these, Basil," he cried.
"I want to learn them. They are perfectly charming."
"That depends entirely on how you sit to-day, Dorian."
"Oh, I am tired of sitting, and I don't want a life-sized portrait
of myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool, in
a wilful, petulant manner. When he caught sight of Lord Henry, a faint
blush coloured his cheeks for a moment, and he started up. "I beg your
pardon, Basil, but I didn't know you had any one with you."
"This is Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian, an old Oxford friend of mine.
I have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now
you have spoiled everything."
"You have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Gray," said
Lord Henry, stepping forward and extending his hand. "My aunt has
often spoken to me about you. You are one of her favourites, and, I am
afraid, one of her victims, also."
"I am in Lady Agatha's black books at present," answered Dorian,
with a funny look of penitence. "I promised to go to a club in
Whitechapel with her last Tuesday, and I really forgot all about it.
We were to have played a duet together- three duets, I believe. I
don't know what she will say to me. I am far too frightened to call."
"Oh, I will make your peace with my aunt. She is quite devoted to
you. And I don't think it really matters about your not being there.
The audience probably thought it was a duet. When Aunt Agatha sits
down to the piano she makes quite enough noise for two people."
"That is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered
Dorian, laughing.
Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully
handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes,
his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one
trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as
all youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself
unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.
"You are too charming to go in for philanthropy, Mr. Gray- far too
charming." And Lord Henry flung himself down on the divan, and
opened his cigarette-case.
The painter had been busy mixing his colours and getting his brushes
ready. He was looking worried, and when he heard Lord Henry's last
remark he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said,
"Harry, I want to finish this picture to-day. Would vou think it
awfully rude of me if I asked you to go away?"
Lord Henry smiled, and looked at Dorian Gray. "Am I to go, Mr.
Gray?" he asked.
"Oh, please don't, Lord Henry. I see that Basil is in one of his
sulky moods; and I can't bear him when he sulks. Besides, I want you
to tell me why I should not go in for philanthropy."
"I don't know that I shall tell you that, Mr. Gray. It is so tedious
a subject that one would have to talk seriously about it. But I
certainly shall not run away, now that you have asked me to stop.
You don't really mind, Basil, do you? You have often told me that
you liked your sitters to have some one to chat to."
Hallward bit his lip. "If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay.
Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself."
Lord Henry took up his hat and gloves. "You are very pressing,
Basil, but I am afraid I must go. I have promised to meet a man at the
Orleans. Good-bye, Mr. Gray. Come and see me some afternoon in
Curzon Street. I am nearly always at home at five o'clock. Write to me
when you are coming. I should be sorry to miss you."
"Basil," cried Dorian Gray, "if Lord Henry Wotton goes I shall go
too. You never open your lips while you are painting, and it is
horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant.
Ask him to stay. I insist upon it."
"Stay, Harry, to oblige Dorian, and to oblige me," said Hallward,
gazing intently at his picture. "It is quite true, I never talk when I
am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious
for my unfortunate sitters. I beg you to stay."
"But what about my man at the Orleans?"
The painter laughed. "I don't think there will be any difficulty
about that. Sit down again, Harry. And now, Dorian, get up on the
platform, and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to
what Lord Henry says. He has a very bad influence over all his
friends, with the single exception of myself."
Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais, with the air of a young Greek
martyr, and made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he
had rather taken a fancy. He was so unlike Basil. They made a
delightful contrast. And he had such a beautiful voice. After a few
moments he said to him, "Have you really a very bad influence, Lord
Henry? As bad as Basil says?"
"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence
is immoral- immoral from the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He
does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural
passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such
things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's
music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim
of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly- that
is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves,
nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that
one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the
hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are
naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had
it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of
God, which is the secret of religion- these are the two things that
govern us. And yet--"
"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good
boy," said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a
look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.
"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with
that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of
him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man
were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to
every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream-
I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that
we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the
Hellenic ideal- to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal,
it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The
mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial
that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse
that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The
body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of
purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure,
or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation
is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing
for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its
monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that
the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the
brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place
also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your
rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid,
thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping
dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame-"
"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me. I don't know
what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.
Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think."
For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips,
and eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious that entirely
fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to
have come really from himself. The few words that Basil's friend had
said to him- words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox
in them- had touched some secret chord that had never been touched
before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious
pulses.
Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many
times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but
rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How
terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel. One could not
escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them.
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things,
and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of
lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
Yes, there had been things in his boyhood that he had not
understood. He understood them now. Life suddenly had become
fiery-coloured to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in
fire. Why had he not known it?
With his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him. He knew the precise
psychological moment when to say nothing. He felt intensely
interested. He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words
had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was
sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known
before, he wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through a
similar experience. He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had it
hit the mark? How fascinating the lad was!
Hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that
had the true refinement and perfect delicacy that in art, at any rate,
comes only from strength. He was unconscious of the silence.
"Basil, I am tired of standing," cried Dorian Gray, suddenly. "I
must go out and sit in the garden. The air is stifling here."
"My dear fellow, I am so sorry. When I am painting, I can't think of
anything else. But you never sat better. You were perfectly still. And
I have caught the effect I wanted- the half-parted lips and the bright
look in the eyes. I don't know what Harry has been saying to you,
but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression. I
suppose he has been paying you compliments. You mustn't believe a word
that he says."
"He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is
the reason that I don't believe anything he has told me."
"You know you believe it all," said Lord Henry, looking at him
with his dreamy, languorous eyes. "I will go out to the garden with
you. It is horribly hot in the studio. Basil, let us have something
iced to drink, something with strawberries in it."
"Certainly, Harry. Just touch the bell, and when Parker comes I will
tell him what you want. I have got to work up this background, so I
will join you later on. Don't keep Dorian too long. I have never
been in better form for painting than I am to-day. This is going to be
my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece as it stands."
Lord Henry went out to the garden, and found Dorian Gray burying his
face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their
perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him, and put his hand
upon his shoulder. "You are quite right to do that," he murmured.
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure
the senses but the soul."
The lad started and drew back. He was bare-headed, and the leaves
had tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded
threads. There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have
when they are suddenly awakened. His finely-chiselled nostrils
quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left
them trembling.
"Yes," continued Lord Henry, "that is one of the great secrets of
life- to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means
of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you
think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."
Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away. He could not help
liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. His
romantic olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. There
was something in his low, languid voice that was absolutely
fascinating. His cool, white, flower-like hands, even, had a curious
charm. They moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a
language of their own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being
afraid. Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to
himself? He had known Basil Hallward for months, but the friendship
between them had never altered him. Suddenly there had come some one
across his life who seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery.
And, yet, what was there to be afraid of? He was not a schoolboy or
a girl. It was absurd to be frightened.
"Let us go and sit in the shade," said Lord Henry. "Parker has
brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare you
will be quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again. You
really must not allow yourself to become sunburnt. It would be
unbecoming."
"What can it matter?" cried Dorian Gray, laughing, as he sat down on
the seat at the end of the garden.
"It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray."
"Why?"
"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one
thing worth having."
"I don't feel that, Lord Henry."
"No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and
wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its
lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you
will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you
charm the world. Will it always be so?... You have a wonderfully
beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And Beauty is a
form of Genius- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no
explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,
or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver
shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine
right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You
smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.... People say
sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at
least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the
wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by
appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the
invisible.... Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But
what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years
in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes,
your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover
that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself
with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more
bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to
something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your
lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and
dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while
you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the
tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your
life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly
aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that
is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new
sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism- that is what
our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your
personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to
you for a season.... The moment I met you I saw that you were quite
unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There
was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you
something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were
wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last-
such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom
again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a
month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after
year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But
we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at
twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We
degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions
of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that
we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is
absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"
Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac
fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed
round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval
stellated globe of its tiny blossoms. He watched it with that
strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when
things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some
new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some
thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls
on us to yield. After a time the bee flew away. He saw it creeping
into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus. The flower seemed to
quiver, and then swayed gently to and fro.
Suddenly the painter appeared at the door of the studio, and made
staccato signs for them to come in. They turned to each other, and
smiled.
"I am waiting," he cried. "Do come in. The light is quite perfect,
and you can bring your drinks."
They rose up, and sauntered down the walk together. Two
green-and-white butterflies fluttered past them, and in the
pear-tree at the corner of the garden a thrush began to sing.
"You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray," said Lord Henry, looking
at him.
"Yes, I am glad now. I wonder shall I always be glad?"
"Always! that is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear
it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by
trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The
only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that
the caprice lasts a little longer."
As they entered the studio, Dorian Gray put his hand upon Lord
Henry's arm. "In that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he
murmured, flushing at his own boldness, then stepped up on the
platform and resumed his pose.
Lord Henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair and watched
him. The sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound
that broke the stillness, except when, now and then, Hallward
stepped back to look at his work from a distance. In the slanting
beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was
golden. The heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything.
After about a quarter of an hour Hallward stopped painting, looked
for a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long time at the
picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes, and frowning.
"It is quite finished," he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote
his name in long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the
canvas.
Lord Henry came over and examined the picture. It was certainly a
wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well.
"My dear fellow, I congratulate you most warmly," he said. "It is
the finest portrait of modern times. Mr. Gray, come over and look at
yourself."
The lad started, as if awakened from some dream. "Is it really
finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform.
"Quite finished," said the painter. "And you have sat splendidly
to-day. I am awfully obliged to you."
"That is entirely due to me," broke in Lord Henry. "Isn't it, Mr.
Gray?"
Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture
and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks
flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his
eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He stood
there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was
speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The
sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never
felt it before. Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be
merely the charming exaggerations of friendship. He had listened to
them, laughed at them, forgotten them. They had not influenced his
nature. Then had come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric
on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. That had stirred him at
the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own
loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him.
Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizened,
his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and
deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold
steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar
his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like
a knife, and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. His eyes
deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He
felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.
"Don't you like it?" cried Hallward at last, stung a little by the
lad's silence, not understanding what it meant.
"Of course he likes it," said Lord Henry. "Who wouldn't like it?
It is one of the greatest things in modern art. I will give you
anything you like to ask for it. I must have it."
"It is not my property, Harry."
"Whose property is it?"
"Dorian's, of course," answered the painter.
"He is a very lucky fellow."
"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed
upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible,
and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never
be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the
other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture
that was to grow old! For that- for that- I would give everything!
Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would
give my soul for that!"
"You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil," cried Lord
Henry, laughing. "It would be rather hard lines on your work."
"I should object very strongly, Harry," said Hallward.
Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. "I believe you would, Basil.
You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you than a
green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say."
The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak
like that. What had happened? He seemed quite angry. His face was
flushed and his cheeks burning.
"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or
your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like
me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when
one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses
everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is
perfectly, right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find
that I am growing old, I shall kill myself."
Hallward turned pale, and caught his hand. "Dorian! Dorian!" he
cried, "don't talk like that. I have never had such a friend as you,
and I shall never have such another. You are not jealous of material
things, are you?- you who are finer than any of them!"
"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am
jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep
what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me,
and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the
picture could change. and I could be always what I am now! Why did you
paint it? It will mock me some day- mock me horribly!" The hot tears
welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself
on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was
praying.
"This is your doing, Harry," said the painter, bitterly.
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "It is the real Dorian Gray- that
is all."
"It is not."
"If it is not, what have I to do with it?"
"You should have gone away when I asked you," he muttered.
"I stayed when you asked me," was Lord Henry's answer.
"Harry, I can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but
between you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have
ever done, and I will destroy it. What is it but canvas and colour?
I will not let it come across our three lives and mar them."
Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with
pallid face and tear-stained eyes looked at him, as he walked over
to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained
window. What was he doing there? His fingers were straying about among
the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something. Yes,
it was for the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel.
He had found it at last. He was going to rip up the canvas.
With a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing
over to Hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to
the end of the studio. "Don't, Basil, don't!" he cried. "It would be
murder!"
"I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian," said the
painter, coldly, when he had recovered from his surprise. "I never
thought you would."
"Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I
feel that."
"Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed,
and sent home. Then you can do what you like with yourself." And he
walked across the room and rang the bell for tea. "You will have
tea, of course, Dorian? And so will you, Harry? Or do you object to
such simple pleasures?"
"I adore simple pleasures," said Lord Henry. "They are the last
refuge of the complex. But I don't like scenes, except on the stage.
What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was
defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition
ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. I am glad he
is not, after all: though I wish you chaps would not squabble over the
picture. You had much better let me have it, Basil. This silly boy
doesn't really want it, and I really do."
"If you let any one have it but me, Basil, I shall never forgive
you!" cried Dorian Gray; "and I don't allow people to call me a
silly boy."
"You know the picture is yours, Dorian. I gave it to you before it
existed."
"And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you
don't really object to being reminded that you are extremely young."
"I should have objected very strongly this morning, Lord Henry."
"Ah! this morning! You have lived since then."
There came a knock at the door, and the butler entered with a
laden tea-tray, and set it down upon a small Japanese table. There was
a rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted Georgian urn.
Two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page. Dorian Gray
went over and poured out the tea. The two men sauntered languidly to
the table, and examined what was under the covers.
"Let us go to the theatre to-night," said Lord Henry. "There is sure
to be something on, somewhere. I have promised to dine at White's, but
it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire to say that
I am ill, or that I am prevented from coming in consequence of a
subsequent engagement. I think that would be a rather nice excuse:
it would have all the surprise of candour."
"It is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered
Hallward. "And, when one has them on, they are so horrid."
"Yes," answered Lord Henry, dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth
century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only
real colour-element left in modern life."
"You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."
"Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or
the one in the picture?"
"Before either."
"I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry," said
the lad.
"Then you shall come; and you will come too, Basil, won't you?"
"I can't really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do."
"Well, then, you and I will go, Mr. Gray."
"I should like that awfully."
The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the
picture. "I shall stay with the real Dorian," he said, sadly.
"Is it the real Dorian?" cried the original of the portrait,
strolling across to him. "Am I really like that?"
"Yes; you are just like that."
"How wonderful, Basil!"
"At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter,"
sighed Hallward. "That is something."
"What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry.
"Why, even in love it is purely a question of physiology. It has
nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and
are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can
say."
"Don't go to the theatre to-night, Dorian," said Hallward. "Stop and
dine with me."
"I can't, Basil."
"Why?"
"Because I have promised Lord Henry Wotton to go with him."
"He won't like you any better for keeping your promises. He always
breaks his own. I beg you not to go."
Dorian Gray laughed and shook his head.
"I entreat you."
The lad hesitated, and looked over at Lord Henry, who was watching
them from the tea-table with an amused smile.
"I must go, Basil," he answered.
"Very well," said Hallward; and he went over and laid down his cup
on the tray. "It is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had
better lose no time. Good-bye, Harry. Good-bye, Dorian. Come and see
me soon. Come to-morrow."
"Certainly."
"You won't forget?"
"No, of course not," cried Dorian.
"And... Harry!"
"Yes, Basil?"
"Remember what I asked you, when we were in the garden this
morning?"
"I have forgotten it."
"I trust you."
"I wish I could trust myself," said Lord Henry, laughing. "Come, Mr.
Gray, my hansom is outside, and I can drop you at your own place.
Good-bye, Basil. It has been a most interesting afternoon."
As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on
a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.



Chapter 3

At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from
Curzon Street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor,
a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside
world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from
him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people
who amused him. His father had been our ambassador at Madrid when
Isabella was young, and Prim unthought of, but had retired from the
Diplomatic Service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being
offered the Embassy at Paris, a post to which he considered that he
was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good
English of his despatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure.
The son, who had been his father's secretary, had resigned along
with his chief, somewhat foolishly as was thought at the time, and
on succeeding some months later to the title, had set himself to the
serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely
nothing. He had two large town houses, but preferred to live in
chambers as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his
club. He paid some attention to the management of his collieries in
the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on
the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a
gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth.
In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office,
during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of
Radicals. He was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to
most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn. Only England could
have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to
the dogs. His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal
to be said for his prejudices.
When Lord Henry entered the room, he found his uncle sitting in a
rough shooting coat, smoking a cheroot and grumbling over The Times.
"Well, Harry," said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so
early? I thought you dandies never got up until two, and were not
visible until five."
"Pure family affection, I assure you, Uncle George. I want to get
something out of you."
"Money, I suppose," said Lord Fermor, making a wry face. "Well,
sit down and tell me all about it. Young people, nowadays, imagine
that money is everything."
"Yes," murmured Lord Henry, settling his buttonhole in his coat;
"and when they grow older they know it. But I don't want money. It
is only people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and
I never pay mine. Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one
lives charmingly upon it. Besides, I always deal with Dartmoor's
tradesmen, and consequently they never bother me. What I want is
information; not useful information, of course; useless information."
"Well, I can tell you anything that is in an English Blue-book,
Harry, although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense. When I
was in the Diplomatic, things were much better. But I hear they let
them in now by examination. What can you expect? Examinations, sir,
are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he
knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is
bad for him."
"Mr. Dorian Gray does not belong to Blue-books, Uncle George,"
said Lord Henry, languidly.
"Mr. Dorian Gray? Who is he?" asked Lord Fermor, knitting his
bushy white eyebrows.
"That is what I have come to learn, Uncle George. Or rather, I
know who, he is. He is the last Lord Kelso's grandson. His mother
was a Devereux, Lady Margaret Devereux. I want you to tell me about
his mother. What was she like? Whom did she marry? You have known
nearly everybody in your time, so you might have known her. I am
very much interested in Mr. Gray at present. I have only just met
him."
"Kelso's grandson!" echoed the old gentleman. "Kelso's
grandson!... Of course.... I knew his mother intimately. I believe I
was at her christening. She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl,
Margaret Devereux, and made all the men frantic by running away with a
penniless young fellow, a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern in a foot
regiment, or something of that kind. Certainly. I remember the whole
thing as if it happened yesterday. The poor chap was killed in a
duel at Spa a few months after the marriage. There was an ugly story
about it. They said Kelso got some rascally adventurer, some Belgian
brute, to insult his son-in-law in public, paid him, sir, to do it,
paid him, and that the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a
pigeon. The thing was hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone
at the club for some time afterwards. He brought his daughter back
with him, I was told, and she never spoke to him again. Oh, yes; it
was a bad business. The girl died too, died within a year. So she left
a son, did she? I had forgotten that. What sort of a boy is he? If
he is like his mother he must be a good-looking chap."
"He is very good-looking," assented Lord Henry.
"I hope he will fall into proper hands," continued the old man.
"He should have a pot of money waiting for him if Kelso did the
right thing by him. His mother had money too. All the Selby property
came to her, through her grandfather. Her grandfather hated Kelso,
thought him a mean dog. He was, too. Came to Madrid once when I was
there. Egad, I was ashamed of him. The Queen used to ask me about
the English noble who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about
their fares. They made quite a story of it. I didn't dare show my face
at Court for a month. I hope he treated his grandson better than he
did the jarvies."
"I don't know," answered Lord Henry. "I fancy that the boy will be
well off. He is not of age yet. He has Selby, I know. He told me so.
And... his mother was very beautiful?"
"Margaret Devereux was one of the loveliest creatures I ever saw,
Harry. What on earth induced her to behave as she did, I never could
understand. She could have married anybody she chose. Carlington was
mad after her. She was romantic though. All the women of that family
were. The men were a poor lot, but, egad! the women were wonderful.
Carlington went on his knees to her. Told me so himself. She laughed
at him, and there wasn't a girl in London at the time who wasn't after
him. And by the way, Harry, talking about silly marriages, what is
this humbug your father tells me about Dartmoor wanting to marry an
American? Ain't English girls good enough for him?"
"It is rather fashionable to marry Americans just now, Uncle
George."
"I'll back English women against the world, Harry," said Lord
Fermor, striking the table with his fist.
"The betting is on the Americans."
"They don't last, I am told," muttered his uncle.
"A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a
steeplechase. They take things flying. I don't think Dartmoor has a
chance."
"Who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman. "Has she got any?"
Lord Henry shook his head. "American girls are as clever at
concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their
past," he said, rising to go.
"They are pork-packers, I suppose?"
"I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor's sake. I am told that
pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after
politics."
"Is she pretty?"
"She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It
is the secret of their charm."
"Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They
are always telling us that it is the Paradise for women."
"It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively
anxious to get out of it," said Lord Henry. "Good-bye, Uncle George. I
shall be late for lunch, if I stop any longer. Thanks for giving me
the information I wanted. I always like to know everything about my
new friends, and nothing about my old ones."
"Where are you lunching, Harry?"
"At Aunt Agatha's. I have asked myself and Mr. Gray. He is her
latest protege."
"Humph! Tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me with any more
of her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman
thinks that I have nothing to do but write cheques for her silly
fads."
"All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any
effect. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their
distinguishing characteristic."
The old gentleman growled approvingly, and rang the bell for his
servant. Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street,
and turned his steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.
So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage. Crudely as it
had been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a
strange, almost modern romance. A beautiful woman risking everything
for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a
hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a
child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to
solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes; it was an
interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as
it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was
something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower
might blow.... And how charming he had been at dinner the night
before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure
he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades
staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking
to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every
touch and thrill of the bow.... There was something terribly
enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like
it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry
there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back
to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey
one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a
strange perfume: there was a real joy in that- perhaps the most
satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our
own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its
aims.... He was a marvellous type, too, this lad, whom by so curious a
chance he had met in Basil's studio, or could be fashioned into a
marvellous type, at any rate. Grace was his, and the white purity of
boyhood, and beauty such as old Greek marbles have kept for us.
There was nothing that one could not do with him. He could be made a
Titan or a toy. What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to
fade!... And Basil? From a psychological point of view, how
interesting he was! The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking
at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of
one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim
woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself,
Dryad-like and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her
there had been awakened that wonderful vision to which alone are
wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things
becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value,
as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect
form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was! He
remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato, that artist
in thought, who had first analyzed it? Was it not Buonarotti who had
carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own
country it was strange.... Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray
what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned
the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him- had already,
indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.
There was something fascinating in this son of Love and Death.
Suddenly he stopped, and glanced up at the houses. He found that
he had passed his aunt's some distance, and smiling to himself, turned
back. When he entered the somewhat sombre hall the butler told him
that they had gone in to lunch. He gave one of the footmen his hat and
stick and passed into the dining-room.
"Late as usual, Harry," cried his aunt, shaking her head at him.
He invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next
to her, looked round to see who was there. Dorian bowed to him shyly
from the end of the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his
cheek. Opposite was the Duchess of Harley, a lady of admirable
good-nature and good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and
of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not
Duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness.
Next to her sat, on her right, Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical member
of Parliament, who followed his leader in public life and in private
life followed the best cooks, dining with the Tories, and thinking
with the Liberals, in accordance with a wise and well-known rule.
The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old
gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen,
however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to
Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was
thirty. His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur, one of his aunt's oldest
friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that
she reminded one of a badly bound hymn book. Fortunately for him she
had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged
mediocrity, as bad as a Ministerial statement in the House of Commons,
with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is
the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all
really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite
escape.
"We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry," cried the Duchess,
nodding pleasantly to him across the table. "Do you think he will
really marry this fascinating young person?"
"I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess."
"How dreadful!" exclaimed Lady Agatha. "Really, some one should
interfere."
"I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an
American dry-goods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking
supercilious.
"My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas."
"Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the Duchess, raising
her large hands in wonder, and accentuating the verb.
"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some
quail.
The Duchess looked puzzled.
"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means
anything that he says."
"When America was discovered," said the Radical member, and he began
to give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a
subject, he exhausted his listeners. The Duchess sighed, and exercised
her privilege of interruption. "I wish to goodness it never had been
discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance
nowadays. It is most unfair."
"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr.
Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
"Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the
Duchess, vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely
pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris.
I wish I could afford to do the same."
"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled
Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.
"Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?" inquired
the Duchess.
"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.
Sir Thomas frowned. "I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced
against that great country," he said to Lady Agatha. "I have travelled
all over it, in cars provided by the directors, who, in such
matters, are extremely civil. I assure you that it is an education
to visit it."
"But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?" asked
Mr. Erskine, plaintively. "I don't feel up to the journey."
Sir Thomas waved his hand. "Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on
his shelves. We practical men like to see things, not to read about
them. The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are
absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing
characteristic. Yes, Mr. Erskine, an absolutely reasonable people. I
assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans."
"How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but
brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about
its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
"I do not understand you," said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.
"I do, Lord Henry," murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile.
"Paradoxes are all very well in their way..." rejoined the Baronet.
"Was that a paradox?" asked Mr. Erskine. "I did not think so.
Perhaps it was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To
test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities
become acrobats we can judge them."
"Dear me!" said Lady Agatha, "how you men argue! I am sure I never
can make out what you are talking about. Oh! Harry, I am quite vexed
with you. Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to
give up the East End? I assure you he would be quite invaluable.
They would love his playing."
"I want him to play to me," cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked
down the table and caught a bright answering glance.
"But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.
"I can sympathize with everything, except suffering," said Lord
Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathize with that. It
is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something
terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should
sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said
about life's sores the better."
"Still, the East End is a very important problem," remarked Sir
Thomas, with a grave shake of the head.
"Quite so," answered the young lord. "It is the problem of
slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves."
The politician looked at him keenly. "What change do you propose,
then?" he asked.
Lord Henry laughed. "I don't desire to change anything in England
except the weather," he answered. "I am quite content with philosophic
contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt
through an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we
should appeal to Science to put us straight. The advantage of the
emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science
is that it is not emotional."
"But we have such grave responsibilities," ventured Mrs.
Vandeleur, timidly.
"Terribly grave," echoed Lady Agatha.
Lord Henry looked over at Mr. Erskine. "Humanity takes itself too
seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known
how to laugh; History would have been different."
"You are really very comforting," warbled the Duchess. "I have
always felt rather guilty when I came to see your dear aunt, for I
take no interest at all in the East End. For the future I shall be
able to look her in the face without a blush."
"A blush is very becoming, Duchess," remarked Lord Henry.
"Only when one is young," she answered. "When an old woman like
myself blushes, it is a very bad sign. Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you
would tell me how to become young again."
He thought for a moment. "Can you remember any great error that
you committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her
across the table.
"A great many, I fear," she cried.
"Then commit them over again," he said, gravely. "To get back
one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies."
"A delightful theory!" she exclaimed. "I must put it into practice."
"A dangerous theory," came from Sir Thomas's tight lips. Lady Agatha
shook her head, but could not help being amused. Mr. Erskine listened.
"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and
discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets
are one's mistakes."
A laugh ran round the room.
He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and
transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent
with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he
went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became
young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might
fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a
Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for
being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things.
Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the
seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple
bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping,
sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the
eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that
amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to
fascinate, seemed to give his wit keenness, and to lend colour to
his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He
charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe
laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one
under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips, and wonder
growing grave in his darkening eyes.
At last, liveried in the costume of the age, Reality entered the
room in the shape of a servant to tell the Duchess that her carriage
was waiting. She wrung her hands in mock despair. "How annoying!"
she cried. "I must go. I have to call for my husband at the club, to
take him to some absurd meeting at Willis's Rooms, where he is going
to be in the chair. If I am late he is sure to be furious, and I
couldn't have a scene in this bonnet. It is far too fragile. A harsh
word would ruin it. No, I must go, dear Agatha. Good-bye, Lord
Henry, you are quite delightful, and dreadfully demoralizing. I am
sure I don't know what to say about your views. You must come and dine
with us some night. Tuesday,? Are you disengaged Tuesday?"
"For you I would throw over anybody, Duchess," said Lord Henry, with
a bow.
"Ah! that is very nice, and very wrong of you," she cried; "so
mind you come;" and she swept out of the room, followed by Lady Agatha
and the other ladies.
When Lord Henry had sat down again, Mr. Erskine moved round, and
taking a chair close to him, placed his hand upon his arm.
"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?"
"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr.
Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that
would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is
no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers,
and encyclopaedies. Of all people in the world the English have the
least sense of the beauty of literature."
"I fear you are right," answered Mr. Erskine. "I myself used to have
literary ambitions, but I gave them up long ago. And now, my dear
young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you
really meant all that you said to us at lunch?"
"I quite forget what I said," smiled Lord Henry. "Was it all very
bad?"
"Very bad indeed. In fact I consider you extremely dangerous, and if
anything happens to our good Duchess we shall all look on you as being
primarily responsible. But I should like to talk to you about life.
The generation into which I was born was tedious. Some day, when you
are tired of London, come down to Treadley, and expound to me your
philosophy of pleasure over some admirable Burgundy I am fortunate
enough to possess."
"I shall be charmed. A visit to Treadley would be a great privilege.
It has a perfect host, and a perfect library."
"You will complete it," answered the old gentleman, with a courteous
bow. "And now I must bid good-bye to your excellent aunt. I am due
at the Athenaeum. It is the hour when we sleep there."
"All of you, Mr. Erskine?"
"Forty of us, in forty arm-chairs. We are practising for an
English Academy of Letters."
Lord Henry laughed, and rose. "I am going to the Park," he cried.
As he was passing out of the door Dorian Gray touched him on the
arm. "Let me come with you," he murmured.
"But I thought you had promised Basil Hallward to go and see him,"
answered Lord Henry.
"I would sooner come with you; yes, I feel I must come with you.
Do let me. And you will promise to talk to me all the time? No one
talks so wonderfully as you do."
"Ah! I have talked quite enough for to-day," said Lord Henry,
smiling. "All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look
at it with me, if you care to."



Chapter 4

One afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a
luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in
Mayfair. It was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high
panelled wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-coloured frieze
and ceiling of raised plaster-work, and its brick-dust felt carpet
strewn with silk long-fringed Persian rugs. On a tiny satinwood
table stood a statuette by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of "Les
Cent Nouvelles," bound for Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve, and
powdered with the gilt daisies that Queen had selected for her device.
Some large blue china jars and parrot-tulips were ranged on the
mantelshelf, and through the small leaded panes of the window streamed
the apricot-coloured light of a summer day in London.
Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his
principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. So the lad
was looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over
the pages of an elaborately-illustrated edition of "Manon Lescaut"
that he had found in one of the bookcases. The formal monotonous
ticking of the Louis Quatorze clock annoyed him. Once or twice he
thought of going away.
At last he heard a step outside, and the door opened. "How late
you are, Harry!" he murmured.
"I am afraid it is not Harry, Mr. Gray," answered a shrill voice.
He glanced quickly round, and rose to his feet. "I beg your
pardon. I thought--"
"You thought it was my husband. It is only his wife. You must let me
introduce myself. I know you quite well by your photographs. I think
my husband has got seventeen of them."
"Not seventeen, Lady Henry?"
"Well, eighteen, then. And I saw you with him the other night at the
Opera." She laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her
vague forget-me-not eyes. She was a curious woman, whose dresses
always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a
tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion
was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to
look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was
Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.
"That was at 'Lohengrin,' Lady Henry, I think?"
"Yes; it was at dear 'Lohengrin.' I like Wagner's music better
than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without
other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage: don't
you think so, Mr. Gray?"
The same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her
fingers began to play with a long tortoise-shell paper-knife.
Dorian smiled, and shook his head: "I am afraid I don't think so,
Lady Henry. I never talk during music- at least, during good music. If
one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation."
"Ah! that is one of Harry's views, isn't it, Mr. Gray? I always hear
Harry's views from his friends. It is the only way I get to know of
them. But you must not think I don't like good music. I adore it,
but I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic. I have simply
worshipped pianists- two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me. I don't
know what it is about them. Perhaps it is that they are foreigners.
They all are, ain't they? Even those that are born in England become
foreigners after a time, don't they? It is so clever of them, and such
a compliment to art. Makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it? You have
never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come.
I can't afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They
make one's rooms look so picturesque. But here is Harry!- Harry, I
came in to look for you, to ask you something- I forget what it was-
and I found Mr. Gray here. We have had such a pleasant chat about
music. We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite
different. But he has been most pleasant. I am so glad I've seen him."
"I am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said Lord Henry, elevating
his dark crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an
amused smile. "So sorry I am late, Dorian. I went to look after a
piece of old brocade in Wardour Street, and had to bargain for hours
for it. Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of
nothing."
"I am afraid I must be going," exclaimed Lady Henry, breaking an
awkward silence with her silly sudden laugh. "I have promised to drive
with the Duchess. Good-bye, Mr. Gray. Good-bye, Harry. You are
dining out, I suppose? So am I. Perhaps I shall see you at Lady
Thornbury's."
"I dare say, my dear," said Lord Henry, shutting the door behind
her, as, looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night
in the rain, she flitted out of the room, leaving a faint odour of
frangi-pani. Then he lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on the
sofa.
"Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, Dorian," he said,
after a few puffs.
"Why, Harry?"
"Because they are so sentimental."
"But I like sentimental people."
"Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women
because they are curious: both are disappointed."
"I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love.
That is one of your aphorisms. I am putting it into practice, as I
do everything that you say."
"Who are you in love with?" asked Lord Henry, after a pause.
"With an actress," said Dorian Gray, blushing.
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "That is a rather commonplace
debut."
"You would not say so if you saw her, Harry."
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Sibyl Vane."
"Never heard of her."
"No one has. People will some day, however. She is a genius."
"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They
never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women
represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the
triumph of mind over morals."
"Harry, how can you?"
"My dear Dorian, it is quite true. I am analyzing women at
present, so I ought to know. The subject is not so abstruse as I
thought it was. I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of
women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If
you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to
take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They
commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look
young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk
brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That is all over
now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own
daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. As for conversation, there are
only five women in London worth talking to and two of these can't be
admitted into decent society. However, tell me about your genius.
How long have you known her?"
"Ah! Harry, your views terrify me."
"Never mind that. How long have you known her?"
"About three weeks."
"And where did you come across her?"
"I will tell you, Harry; but you mustn't be unsympathetic about
it. After all, it never would have happened if I had not met you.
You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life. For
days after I met you, something seemed to throb in my veins. As I
lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at
every one who passed me, and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort
of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with
terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion
for sensations.... Well, one evening about seven o'clock, I determined
to go out in search of some adventure. I felt that this grey,
monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid
sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have
something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things. The mere
danger gave me a sense of delight. I remembered what you had said to
me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together, about the
search for beauty being the real secret of life. I don't know what I
expected, but I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way
in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares. About
half-past eight I passed by an absurd little theatre, with great
flaring gas-jets and gaudy playbills. A hideous Jew, in the most
amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the
entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an
enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. 'Have a
box, My Lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with
an air of gorgeous servility. There was something about him, Harry,
that amused me. He was such a monster. You will laugh at me, I know,
but I really went in and paid a whole guinea for the stage-box. To the
present day I can't make out why I did so; and yet if I hadn't- my
dear Harry, if I hadn't, I should have missed the greatest romance
of my life. I see you are laughing. It is horrid of you!"
"I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But
you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say
the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will
always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of
people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes
of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for
you. This is merely the beginning."
"Do you think my nature so shallow?" cried Dorian Gray, angrily.
"No; I think your nature so deep."
"How do you mean?"
"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are
really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their
fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of
imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is
to the life of the intellect- simply a confession of failure.
Faithfulness! I must analyze it some day. The passion for property
is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were
not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to
interrupt you. Go on with your story."
"Well, I found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with
a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. I looked out from behind
the curtain, and surveyed the house. It was a tawdry affair, all
Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake. The gallery
and pit were fairly full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were
quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what I suppose they
called the dress-circle. Women went about with oranges and
ginger-beer, and there was a terrible consumption of nuts going on."
"It must have been just like the palmy days of the British Drama."
"Just like, I should fancy, and very depressing. I began to wonder
what on earth I should do, when I caught sight of the play-bill.
What do you think the play was, Harry?"
"I should think 'The Idiot Boy, or Dumb but Innocent.' Our fathers
used to like that sort of piece, I believe. The longer I live, Dorian,
the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers
is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grandperes
ont toujours tort."
"This play was good enough for us, Harry. It was 'Romeo and Juliet.'
I must admit I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare
done in such a wretched hole of a place. Still, I felt interested,
in a sort of way. At any rate, I determined to wait for the first act.
There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who
sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the
drop-scene was drawn up, and the play began. Romeo was a stout elderly
gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure
like a beer-barrel. Mercutio was almost as bad. He was played by the
low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most
friendly terms with the pit. They were both as grotesque as the
scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a country-booth. But
Juliet! Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a
little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of
dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that
were like the petals of a rose. She was the loveliest thing I had ever
seen in my life. You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but
that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. I tell you,
Harry, I could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came
across me. And her voice- I never heard such a voice. It was very
low at first, with deep mellow notes, that seemed to fall singly
upon one's ear. Then it became a little louder, and sounded like a
flute or a distant haut-bois. In the garden-scene it had all the
tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales
are singing. There was moments, later on, when it had the wild passion
of violins. You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the
voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget. When I
close my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different.
I don't know which to follow. Why should I not love her? Harry, I do
love her. She is everything to me in life. Night after night I go to
see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening- she
is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb,
sucking the poison from her lover's lips. I have watched her wandering
through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and
doublet and dainty cap. She has been mad, and has come into the
presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs
to taste of. She has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy
have crushed her reed-like throat. I have seen her in every age and in
every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.
They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures
them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets.
One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them: they
ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the
afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable
manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an
actress is! Harry! why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth
loving is an actress?"
"Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian."
"Oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces."
"Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an
extraordinary charm in them, sometimes," said Lord Henry.
"I wish now I had not told you about Sibyl Vane."
"You could not have helped telling me, Dorian. All through your life
you will tell me everything you do."
"Yes, Harry, I believe that is true, I cannot help telling you
things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I
would come and confess it to you. You would understand me."
"People like you- the wilful sunbeams of life- don't commit
crimes, Dorian. But I am much obliged for the compliment, all the
same. And now tell me- reach me the matches, like a good boy: thanks:-
what are your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?"
Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning
eyes. "Harry! Sibyl Vane is sacred!"
"It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian," said
Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice. "But why
should you be annoyed? I suppose she will belong to you some day. When
one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one
always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a
romance. You know her, at any rate, I suppose?"
"Of course I know her. On the first night I was at the theatre,
the horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was
over, and offered to take me behind the scenes and introduce me to
her. I was furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead
for hundreds of years, and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in
Verona. I think, from his blank look of amazement, that he was under
the impression that I had taken too much champagne, or something."
"I am not surprised."
"Then he asked me if I wrote for any of the newspapers. I told him I
never even read them. He seemed terribly disappointed at that, and
confided to me that all the dramatic critics were in a conspiracy
against him, and that they were every one of them to be bought."
"I should not wonder if he was quite right there. But, on the
other hand, judging from their appearance, most of them cannot be at
all expensive."
"Well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means," laughed
Dorian. "By this time, however, the lights were being put out in the
theatre, and I had to go. He wanted me to try some cigars that he
strongly recommended. I declined. The next night, of course, I arrived
at the place again. When he saw me he made a low bow, and assured me
that I was a munificent patron of art. He was a most offensive
brute, though he had an extraordinary passion for Shakespeare. He told
me once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were
entirely due to 'The Bard,' as he insisted on calling him. He seemed
to think it a distinction."
"It was a distinction, my dear Dorian- a great distinction. Most
people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the
prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour. But
when did you first speak to Miss Sibyl Vane?"
"The third night. She had been playing Rosalind. I could not help
going round. I had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at
me; at least I fancied that she had. The old Jew was persistent. He
seemed determined to take me behind, so I consented. It was curious my
not wanting to know her, wasn't it?"
"No; I don't think so."
"My dear Harry, why?"
"I will tell you some other time. Now I want to know about the
girl."
"Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy, and so gentle. There is something of a
child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I
told her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite
unconscious of her power. I think we were both rather nervous. The old
Jew stood grinning at the doorway of the dusty greenroom, making
elaborate speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other
like children. He would insist on calling me 'My Lord,' so I had to
assure Sibyl that I was not anything of the kind. She said quite
simply to me, 'You look more like a prince. I must call you Prince
Charming.'"
"Upon my word, Dorian, Miss Sibyl knows how to pay compliments."
"You don't understand her, Harry. She regarded me merely as a person
in a play. She knows nothing of life. She lives with her mother, a
faded tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta
dressing-wrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had seen
better days."
"I know that look. It depresses me," murmured Lord Henry,
examining his rings.
"The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not
interest me."
"You were quite right. There is always something infinitely mean
about other people's tragedies."
"Sibyl is the only thing I care about. What is it to me where she
came from? From her little head to her little feet, she is
absolutely and entirely divine. Every night of my life I go to see her
act, and every night she is more marvellous."
"That is the reason, I suppose, that you never dine with me now. I
thought you must have some curious romance on hand. You have; but it
is not quite what I expected."
"My dear Harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and I
have been to the Opera with you several times," said Dorian, opening
his blue eyes in wonder.
"You always come dreadfully late."
"Well, I can't help going to see Sibyl play," he cried, "even if
it is only for a single act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I
think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory
body, I am filled with awe."
"You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can't you?"
He shook his head. "To-night she is Imogen," he answered, "and
to-morrow night she will be Juliet."
"When is she Sibyl Vane?"
"Never."
"I congratulate you."
"How horrid you are! She is all the great heroines of the world in
one. She is more than an individual. You laugh, but I tell you she has
genius. I love her, and I must make her love me. You, who know all the
secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I want to
make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our
laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their
dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. My God, Harry,
how I worship her!" He was walking up and down the room as he spoke.
Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. He was terribly excited.
Lord Henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure. How
different he was now from the shy, frightened boy he had met in
Basil Hallward's studio! His nature had developed like a flower, had
borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had
crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way.
"And what do you propose to do?" said Lord Henry, at last.
"I want you and Basil to come with me some night and see her act.
I have not the slightest fear of the result. You are certain to
acknowledge her genius. Then we must get her out of the Jew's hands.
She is bound to him for three years- at least for two years and
eight months- from the present time. I shall have to pay him
something, of course. When all that is settled, I shall take a West
End theatre and bring her out properly. She will make the world as mad
as she has made me."
"That would be impossible, my dear boy."
"Yes, she will. She has not merely art, consummate art-instinct,
in her but she has personality also; and you have often told me that
it is personalities, not principles, that move the age."
"Well, what night shall we go?"
"Let me see. To-day is Tuesday. Let us fix to-morrow. She plays
Juliet to-morrow."
"All right. The Bristol at eight o'clock; and I will get Basil."
"Not eight, Harry, please. Half-past six. We must be there before
the curtain rises. You must see her in the first act, where she
meets Romeo."
"Half-past six! What an hour! It will be like having a meat-tea,
or reading an English novel. It must be seven. No gentleman dines
before seven. Shall you see Basil between this and then? Or shall I
write to him?"
"Dear Basil! I have not laid eyes on him for a week. It is rather
horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful
frame, specially designed by himself, and, though I am a little
jealous of the picture for being a whole month younger than I am, I
must admit that I delight in it. Perhaps you had better write to
him. I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He
gives me good advice."
Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they
need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
"Oh, Basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a
bit of a Philistine. Since I have known you, Harry, I have
discovered that."
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into
his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his
prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I
have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists.
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are
perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great
poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets
are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more
picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of
second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the
poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they
dare not realize."
"I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, putting
some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large gold-topped bottle
that stood on the table. "It must be, if you say it. And now I'm
off. Imogen is waiting for me. Don't forget about to-morrow.
Good-bye."
As he left the room Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
to think. Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as
Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused
him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. He was pleased by
it. It made him a more interesting study. He had always been
enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject
matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And
so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting
others. Human life- that appeared to him the one thing worth
investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.
It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain
and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass,
nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making
the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had
to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass
through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet,
what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became
to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional
coloured life of the intellect- to observe where they met, and where
they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point
they were at discord- there was a delight in that. What matter what
the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
He was conscious- and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into
his brown agate eyes- that it was through certain words of his,
musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had
turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a
large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him
premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life
disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the
mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away.
Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of
literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the
intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and
assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art,
Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or
sculpture, or painting.
Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it
was yet spring. The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was
becoming self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him. With his
beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at.
It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. He was like
one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys
seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of
beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.
Soul and body, body and soul- how mysterious they were! There was
animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could
say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse
began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary
psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of
the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin?
Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The
separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of
spirit with matter was a mystery also.
He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so
absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed
to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely
understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely
the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule,
regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical
efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something
that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there
was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause
as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our
future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done
once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method
by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the
passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand,
and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results. His sudden mad love
for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest.
There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity
and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather
a very complex passion. What there was in it of the purely sensuous
instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the
imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself
to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more
dangerous. It was the passions about whose origin we deceived
ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives
were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that
when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really
experimenting on ourselves.
While Lord Henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the
door, and his valet entered, and reminded him it was time to dress for
dinner. He got up and looked out into the street. The sunset had
smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite.
The panes glowed like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a
faded rose. He thought of his friend's young fiery-coloured life,
and wondered how it was all going to end.
When he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a
telegram lying on the hall table. He opened it, and found it was
from Dorian Gray. It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married
to Sibyl Vane.

Chapter 5

"Mother, mother, I am so happy!" whispered the girl, burying her
face in the lap of the faded, tired-looking woman who, with back
turned to the shrill intrusive light, was sitting in the one arm-chair
that their dingy sitting-room contained. "I am so happy!" she
repeated, "and you must be happy too!"
Mrs. Vane winced, and put her thin bismuth-whitened hands on her
daughter's head. "Happy!" she echoed, "I am only happy, Sibyl, when
I see you act. You must not think of anything but your acting. Mr.
Isaacs has been very good to us, and we owe him money."
The girl looked up and pouted. "Money, mother?" she cried. "What
does money matter? Love is more than money."
"Mr. Isaacs has advanced us fifty pounds to pay off our debts, and
to get a proper outfit for James. You must not forget that, Sibyl.
Fifty pounds is a very large sum. Mr. Isaacs has been most
considerate."
"He is not a gentleman, mother, and I hate the way he talks to
me," said the girl, rising to her feet, and going over to the window.
"I don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder
woman, querulously.
Sibyl Vane tossed her head and laughed. "We don't want him any more,
mother. Prince Charming rules life for us now." Then she paused. A
rose shook in her blood, and shadowed her cheeks. Quick breaths parted
the petals of her lips. They trembled. Some southern wind of passion
swept over her, and stirred the dainty folds of her dress. "I love
him," she said, simply,.
"Foolish child! foolish child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in
answer. The waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave
grotesqueness to the words.
The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.
Her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance: then closed
for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the
mist of a dream had passed across them.
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at
prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the
name of common sense. She did not listen. She was free in her prison
of passion. Her prince, Prince Charming, was with her. She had
called on Memory to remake him. She had sent her soul to search for
him, and it had brought him back. His kiss burned again upon her
mouth. Her eyelids were warm with his breath.
Then Wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery.
This young man might be rich. If so, marriage should be thought of.
Against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning. The
arrows of craft shot by her. She saw the thin lips moving, and smiled.
Suddenly she felt the need to speak. The wordy silence troubled her.
"Mother, mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much? I know
why I love him. I love him because he is like what Love himself should
be. But what does he see in me? I am not worthy of him. And yet-
why, I cannot tell- though I feel so much beneath him, I don't feel
humble. I feel proud, terribly proud. Mother, did you love my father
as I love Prince Charming?"
The elder woman grew pale beneath the coarse powder that daubed
her cheeks, and her dry lips twitched with a spasm of pain. Sibyl
rushed to her, flung her arms round her neck, and kissed her. "Forgive
me, mother. I know it pains you to talk about our father. But it
only pains you because you loved him so much. Don't look so sad. I
am as happy to-day as you were twenty years ago. Ah! let me be happy
forever!"
"My child, you are far too young to think of falling in love.
Besides, what do you know of this young man. You don't even know his
name. The whole thing is most inconvenient, and really, when James
is going away to Australia, and I have so much to think of, I must say
that you should have shown more consideration. However, as I said
before, if he is rich..."
"Ah! mother, mother, let me be happy!"
Mrs. Vane glanced at her, and with one of those false theatrical
gestures that so often become a mode of second nature to a
stage-player, clasped her in her arms. At this moment the door opened,
and a young lad with rough brown hair came into the room. He was
thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large, and somewhat
clumsy in movement. He was not so finely bred as his sister. One would
hardly have guessed the close relationship that existed between
them. Mrs. Vane fixed her eyes on him, and intensified her smile.
She mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience. She
felt sure that the tableau was interesting.
"You might keep some of your kisses for me, Sibyl, I think," said
the lad, with a good-natured grumble.
"Ah! but you don't like being kissed, Jim," she cried. "You are a
dreadful old bear." And she ran across the room and hugged him.
James Vane looked into his sister's face with tenderness. "I want
you to come out with me for a walk, Sibyl. I don't suppose I shall
ever see this horrid London again. I am sure I don't want to."
"My son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured Mrs. Vane, taking
up a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch
it. She felt a little disappointed that he had not joined the group.
It would have increased the theatrical picturesqueness of the
situation.
"Why not, mother? I mean it."
"You pain me, my son. I trust you will return from Australia in a
position of affluence. I believe there is no society of any kind in
the Colonies, nothing that I would call society; so when you have made
your fortune you must come back and assert yourself in London."
"Society!" muttered the lad. "I don't want to know anything about
that. I should like to make some money to take you and Sibyl off the
stage. I hate it."
"Oh, Jim!" said Sibyl, laughing, "how unkind of you! But are you
really going for a walk with me? That will be nice! I was afraid you
were going to say good-bye to some of your friends- to Tom Hardy,
who gave you that hideous pipe, or Ned Langton, who makes fun of you
for smoking it. It is very sweet of you to let me have your last
afternoon. Where shall we go? Let us go to the Park."
"I am too shabby," he answered, frowning. "Only swell people go to
the Park."
"Nonsense, Jim," she whispered, stroking the sleeve of his coat.
He hesitated for a moment. "Very well," he said at last, "but
don't be to long dressing." She danced out of the door. One could hear
her singing as she ran upstairs. Her little feet pattered overhead.
He walked up and down the room two or three times. Then he turned to
the still figure in the chair. "Mother, are my things ready?" he
asked.
"Quite ready, James," she answered, keeping her eyes on her work.
For some months past she had felt ill at ease when she was alone
with this rough, stern son of hers. Her shallow secret nature was
troubled when their eyes met. She used to wonder if he suspected
anything. The silence, for he made no other observation, became
intolerable to her. She began to complain. Women defend themselves
by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. "I
hope you will be contented, James, with your sea-faring life," she
said. "You must remember that it is your own choice. You might have
entered a solicitor's office. Solicitors are a very respectable class,
and in the country often dine with the best families."
"I hate offices, and I hate clerks," he replied. "But you are
quite right. I have chosen my own life. All I say is, watch over
Sibyl. Don't let her come to any harm. Mother, you must watch over
her."
"James, you really talk very strangely. Of course I watch over
Sibyl."
"I hear a gentleman comes every night to the theatre, and goes
behind to talk to her. Is that right? What about that?"
"You are speaking about things you don't understand, James. In the
profession we are accustomed to receive a great deal of most
gratifying attention. I myself used to receive many bouquets at one
time. That was when acting was really understood. As for Sibyl, I do
not know at present whether her attachment is serious or not. But
there is no doubt that the young man in question is a perfect
gentleman. He is always most polite to me. Besides, he has the
appearance of being rich, and the flowers he sends are lovely."
"You don't know his name, though," said the lad, harshly.
"No," answered his mother, with a placid expression in her face. "He
has not yet revealed his real name. I think it is quite romantic of
him. He is probably a member of the aristocracy."
James Vane bit his lip. "Watch over Sibyl, mother," he cried, "watch
over her."
"My son, you distress me very much. Sibyl is always under my special
care. Of course, if this gentleman is wealthy, there is no reason
why she could not contract an alliance with him. I trust he is one
of the aristocracy. He has all the appearance of it, I must say. It
might be a most brilliant marriage for Sibyl. They would make a
charming couple. His good looks are really quite remarkable; everybody
notices them."
The lad muttered something to himself, and drummed on the windowpane
with his coarse fingers. He had just turned round to say something,
when the door opened, and Sibyl ran in.
"How serious you both are!" she cried. "What is the matter?"
"Nothing," he answered. "I suppose one must be serious sometimes.
Good-bye, mother. I will have my dinner at five o'clock. Everything is
packed, except my shirts, so you need not trouble."
"Good-bye, my son," she answered, with a bow of strained
stateliness.
She was extremely annoyed at the tone he had adopted with her, and
there was something in his look that had made her feel afraid.
"Kiss me, mother," said the girl. Her flower-like lips touched the
withered cheek, and warmed its frost.
"My child! my child!" cried Mrs. Vane, looking up to the ceiling
in search of an imaginary gallery.
"Come, Sibyl," said her brother, impatiently. He hated his
mother's affectations.
They went out into the flickering wind-blown sunlight, and
strolled down the dreary Euston Road. The passers-by glanced in wonder
at the sullen, heavy youth, who, in coarse, ill-fitting clothes, was
in the company of such a graceful, refined-looking girl. He was like a
common gardener walking with a rose.
Jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive
glance of some stranger. He had that dislike of being stared at
which comes on geniuses late in life, and never leaves the
commonplace. Sibyl, however, was quite unconscious of the effect she
was producing. Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. She was
thinking of Prince Charming, and, that she might think of him all
the more, she did not talk of him, but prattled on about the ship in
which Jim was going to sail, about the gold he was certain to find,
about the wonderful heiress whose life he was to save from the wicked,
red-shirted bushrangers. For he was not to remain a sailor, or a
super-cargo, or whatever he was going to be. Oh, no! A sailor's
existence was dreadful. Fancy being cooped up in a horrid ship, with
the hoarse, hump-backed waves trying to get in, and a black wind
blowing the masts down, and tearing the sails into long screaming
ribands! He was to leave the vessel at Melbourne, bid a polite
good-bye to the captain, and go off at once to the gold-fields. Before
a week was over he was to come across a large nugget of pure gold, the
largest nugget that had ever been discovered, and bring it down to the
coast in a waggon guarded by six mounted policemen. The bushrangers
were to attack them three times, and be defeated with immense
slaughter. Or, no. He was not to go to the gold-fields at all. They
were horrid places, where men got intoxicated, and shot each other
in bar-rooms, and used bad language. He was to be a nice sheep-farmer,
and one evening, as he was riding home, he was to see the beautiful
heiress being carried off by a robber on a black horse, and give
chase, and rescue her. Of course she would fall in love with him,
and he with her, and they would get married, and come home, and live
in an immense house in London. Yes, there were delightful things in
store for him. But he must be very good, and not lose his temper, or
spend his money foolishly. She was only a year older than he was,
but she knew so much more of life. He must be sure, also, to write
to her by every mail, and to say his prayers each night before he went
to sleep. God was very good, and would watch over him. She would
pray for him too, and in a few years he would come back quite rich and
happy.
The lad listened sulkily to her, and made no answer. He was
heart-sick at leaving home.
Yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose.
Inexperienced though he was, he had still a strong sense of the danger
of Sibyl's position. This young dandy who was making love to her could
mean her no good. He was a gentleman, and he hated him for that, hated
him through some curious race-instinct for which he could not account,
and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him. He was
conscious also of the shallowness and vanity of his mother's nature,
and in that saw infinite peril for Sibyl and Sibyl's happiness.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they
judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
His mother! He had something on his mind to ask her, something
that he had brooded on for many months of silence. A chance phrase
that he had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached
his ears one night as he waited at the stage-door, had set loose a
train of horrible thoughts. He remembered it as if it had been the
lash of a hunting-crop across his face. His brows knit together into a
wedge-like furrow, and with a twitch of pain he bit his under-lip.
"You are not listening to a word I am saying, Jim," cried Sibyl,
"and I am making the most delightful plans for your future. Do say
something."
"What do you want me to say?"
"Oh! that you will be a good boy, and not forget us," she
answered, smiling at him.
He shrugged his shoulders. "You are more likely to forget me, than I
am to forget you, Sibyl."
She flushed. "What do you mean, Jim?" she asked.
"You have a new friend, I hear. Who is he? Why have you not told
me about him? He means you no good."
"Stop, Jim!" she exclaimed. "You must not say anything against
him. I love him."
"Why, you don't even know his name," answered the lad. "Who is he? I
have a right to know."
"He is called Prince Charming. Don't you like the name? Oh! you
silly boy,! you should never forget it. If you only saw him, you would
think him the most wonderful person in the world. Some day you will
meet him: when you come back from Australia. You will like him so
much. Everybody likes him, and I... love him. I wish you could come to
the theatre to-night. He is going to be there, and I am to play
Juliet. Oh! how I shall play it! Fancy, Jim, to be in love and play
Juliet! To have him sitting there! To play for his delight! I am
afraid I may frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them. To be in
love is to surpass one's self. Poor dreadful Mr. Isaacs will be
shouting 'genius' to his loafers at the bar. He has preached me as a
dogma; to-night he will announce me as a revelation. I feel it. And it
is all his, his only, Prince Charming, my wonderful lover, my god of
graces. But I am poor beside him. Poor? What does that matter? When
poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. Our
proverbs want re-writing. They were made in winter, and it is summer
now; spring-time for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue
skies."
"He is a gentleman," said the lad, sullenly.
"A Prince!" she cried, musically. "What more do you want?"
"He wants to enslave you."
"I shudder at the thought of being free."
"I want you to beware of him."
"To see him is to worship him, to know him is to trust him."
"Sibyl, you are mad about him."
She laughed, and took his arm. "You dear old Jim, you talk as if you
were a hundred. Some day you will be in love yourself. Then you will
know what it is. Don't look so sulky. Surely you should be glad to
think that, though you are going away, you leave me happier than I
have ever been before. Life has been hard for us both, terribly hard
and difficult. But it will be different now. You are going to a new
world, and I have found one. Here are two chairs; let us sit down
and see the smart people go by."
They took their seats amidst a crowd if watchers. The tulip-beds
across the road flamed like throbbing rings of fire. A white dust,
tremulous cloud of orris-root it seemed, hung in the panting air.
The brightly-coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous
butterflies.
She made her brother talk of himself, his hopes, his prospects. He
spoke slowly and with effort. They passed words to each other as
players at a game pass counters. Sibyl felt pressed. She could not
communicate her joy. A faint smile curving that sullen mouth was all
the echo she could win. After some time she became silent. Suddenly
she caught a glimpse of golden hair and laughing lips, and in an
open carriage with two ladies Dorian Gray drove past.
She started to her feet. "There he is!" she cried.
"Who?" said Jim Vane.
"Prince Charming," she answered, looking after the victoria.
He jumped up, and seized her roughly by the arm. "Show him to me.
Which is he? Point him out. I must see him!" he exclaimed; but at that
moment the Duke of Berwick's four-in-hand came between, and when it
had left the space clear, the carriage had swept out of the Park.
"He is gone," murmured Sibyl, sadly. "I wish you had seen him."
"I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever
does you any wrong, I shall kill him."
She looked at him in horror. He repeated his words. They cut the air
like a dagger. The people round began to gape. A lady standing close
to her tittered.
"Come away, Jim; come away," she whispered. He followed her doggedly
as she passed through the crowd. He felt glad at what he had said.
When they reached the Achilles Statue she turned round. There was
pity in her eyes that became laughter on her lips. She shook her
head at him. "You are foolish, Jim, utterly foolish; a bad-tempered
boy, that is all. How can you say such horrible things? You don't know
what you are talking about. You are simply jealous and unkind. Ah! I
wish you would fall in love. Love makes people good, and what you said
was wicked."
"I am sixteen," he answered, "and I know what I am about. Mother
is no help to you. She doesn't understand how to look after you. I
wish now that I was not going to Australia at all. I have a great mind
to chuck the whole thing up. I would, if my articles hadn't been
signed."
"Oh, don't be so serious, Jim. You are like one of the heroes of
those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of acting in. I am
not going to quarrel with you. I have seen him, and oh! to see him
is perfect happiness. We won't quarrel. I know you would never harm
any one I love, would you?"
"Not as long as you love him, I suppose," was the sullen answer.
"I shall love him for ever!" she cried.
"And he?"
"For ever, too!"
"He had better."
She shrank from him. Then she laughed and put her hand on his arm.
He was merely a boy.
At the Marble Arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close
to their shabby home in the Euston Road. It was after five o'clock,
and Sibyl had to lie down for a couple of hours before acting. Jim
insisted that she should do so. He said that he would sooner part with
her when their mother was not present. She would be sure to make a
scene, and he detested scenes of every kind.
In Sibyl's own room they parted. There was jealousy in the lad's
heart, and a fierce, murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it
seemed to him, had come between them. Yet, when her arms were flung
around his neck, and her fingers strayed through his hair, he
softened, and kissed her with real affection. There were tears in
his eyes as he went downstairs.
His mother was waiting for him below. She grumbled at his
unpunctuality, as he entered. He made no answer, but sat down to his
meagre meal. The flies buzzed round the table, and crawled over the
stained cloth. Through the rumble of omnibuses, and the clatter of
street-cabs, he could hear the droning voice devouring each minute
that was left to him.
After some time, he thrust away his plate, and put his head in his
hands. He felt that he had a right to know. It should have been told
to him before, if it was as he suspected. Leaden with fear, his mother
watched him. Words dropped mechanically from her lips. A tattered lace
handkerchief twitched in her fingers. When the clock struck six, he
got up, and went to the door. When he turned back, and looked at
her. Their eyes met. In hers he saw a wild appeal for mercy. It
enraged him.
"Mother, I have something to ask you," he said. Her eyes wandered
vaguely about the room. She made no answer. "Tell me the truth. I have
a right to know. Were you married to my father?"
She heaved a deep sigh. It was a sigh of relief. The terrible
moment, the moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had
dreaded, had come at last, and yet she felt no terror. Indeed in
some measure it was a disappointment to her. The vulgar directness
of the question called for a direct answer. The situation had not been
gradually led up to. It was crude. It reminded her of a bad rehearsal.
"No," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life.
"My father was a scoundrel then!" cried the lad, clenching his
fists.
She shook her head. "I knew he was not free. We loved each other
very much. If he had lived, he would have made provision for us. Don't
speak against him, my son. He was your father, and a gentleman. Indeed
he was highly connected."
An oath broke from his lips. "I don't care for myself," he
exclaimed, "but don't let Sibyl... It is a gentleman, isn't it, who is
in love with her, or says he is? Highly connected, too, I suppose."
For a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman. Her
head drooped. She wiped her eyes with shaking hands. "Sibyl has a
mother," she murmured; "I had none."
The lad was touched. He went towards her, and stooping down he
kissed her. "I am sorry if I have pained you by asking about my
father," he said, "but I could not help it. I must go now. Good-bye.
Don't forget that you will have only one child now to look after,
and believe me that if this man wrongs my sister, I will find out
who he is, track him down, and kill him like a dog. I swear it."
The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that
accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more
vivid to her. She was familiar with the atmosphere. She breathed
more freely, and for the first time in many months she really
admired her son. She would have liked to have continued the scene on
the same emotional scale, but he cut her short. Trunks had to be
carried down, and mufflers looked for. The lodging-house drudge
bustled in and out. There was the bargaining with the cab-man. The
moment was lost in vulgar details. It was with a renewed feeling of
disappointment that she waved the tattered lace handkerchief from
the window, as her son drove away. She was conscious that a great
opportunity had been wasted. She consoled herself by telling Sibyl how
desolate she felt her life would be, now that she had only one child
to look after. She remembered the phrase. It had pleased her. Of the
threat she said nothing. It was vividly and dramatically expressed.
She felt that they would all laugh at it some day.



Chapter 6

"I suppose you have heard the news, Basil?" said Lord Henry that
evening, as Hallward was shown into a little private room at the
Bristol where dinner had been laid for three.
"No, Harry," answered the artist, giving his hat and coat to the
bowing waiter. "What is it? Nothing about politics, I hope? They don't
interest me. There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons
worth painting; though many of them would be the better for a little
whitewashing."
"Dorian Gray is engaged to be married," said Lord Henry, watching
him as he spoke.
Hallward started, and then frowned. "Dorian engaged to be
married!" he cried. "Impossible!"
"It is perfectly true."
"To whom?"
"To some little actress or other."
"I can't believe it. Dorian is far too sensible."
"Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my
dear Basil."
"Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry."
"Except in America," rejoined Lord Henry, languidly. "But I didn't
say he was married. I said he was engaged to be married. There is a
great difference. I have a distinct remembrance of being married,
but I have no recollection at all of being engaged. I am inclined to
think that I never was engaged."
"But think of Dorian's birth, and position, and wealth. It would
be absurd for him to marry so much beneath him."
"If you want to make him marry this girl tell him that, Basil. He is
sure to do it, then. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it
is always from the noblest motives."
"I hope the girl is good, Harry. I don't want to see Dorian tied
to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his
intellect."
"Oh, she is better than good- she is beautiful," murmured Lord
Henry, sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters. "Dorian says
she is beautiful; and he is not often wrong about things of that kind.
Your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal
appearance of other people. It has had that excellent effect,
amongst others. We are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget
his appointment."
"Are you serious?"
"Quite serious, Basil. I should be miserable if I thought I should
ever be more serious than I am at the present moment."
"But do you approve of it, Harry?" asked the painter, walking up and
down the room, and biting his lip. "You can't approve of it, possibly.
It is some silly infatuation."
"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd
attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air
our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people
say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a
personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that
personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. Dorian Gray
falls in love with a beautiful girl who acts Juliet, and proposes to
marry her. Why not? If he wedded Messalina he would be none the less
interesting. You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real
drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish
people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are
certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain
their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to
have more than one life. They become highly organized, and to be
highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence.
Besides, every experience is of value, and, whatever one may say
against marriage, it is certainly an experience. I hope that Dorian
Gray will make this girl his wife, passionately adore her for six
months, and then suddenly become fascinated by some one else. He would
be a wonderful study."
"You don't mean a single word of all that, Harry; you know you
don't. If Dorian Gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier
than yourself. You are much better than you pretend to be."
Lord Henry laughed. "The reason we all like to think so well of
others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of
optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we
credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are
likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may
overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the
hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have
said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled
life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want
to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of
course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting
bonds between men and women. I will certainly encourage them. They
have the charm of being fashionable. But here is Dorian himself. He
will tell you more than I can."
"My dear Harry, my dear Basil, you must both congratulate me!"
said the lad, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined
wings, and shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn. "I have
never been so happy. Of course it is sudden: all really delightful
things are. And yet it seems to me to be the one thing I have been
looking for all my life." He was flushed with excitement and pleasure,
and looked extraordinarily handsome.
"I hope you will always be very happy, Dorian," said Hallward,
"but I don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your
engagement. You let Harry know."
"And I don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in Lord
Henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder, and smiling as he
spoke. "Come, let us sit down and try what the new chef here is
like, and then you will tell us how it all came about."
"There is really not much to tell," cried Dorian, as they took their
seats at the small round table. "What happened was simply this.
After I left you yesterday evening, Harry, I dressed, had some
dinner at that little Italian restaurant in Rupert Street, you
introduced me to, and went down at eight o'clock to the theatre. Sibyl
was playing Rosalind. Of course the scenery was dreadful, and the
Orlando absurd. But Sibyl! You should have seen her! When she came
on in her boy's clothes she was perfectly wonderful. She wore a
moss-coloured velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves, slim brown
cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green cap with a hawk's feather
caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red. She had
never seemed to me more exquisite. She had all the delicate grace of
that Tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, Basil. Her hair
clustered round her face like dark leaves round a pale rose. As for
her acting- well, you shall see her to-night. She is simply a born
artist. I sat in the dingy box absolutely enthralled. I forgot that
I was in London and in the nineteenth century. I was away with my love
in a forest that no man had ever seen. After the performance was
over I went behind, and spoke to her. As we were sitting together,
suddenly there came into her eyes a look that I had never seen there
before. My lips moved toward hers. We kissed each other. I can't
describe to you what I felt at that moment. It seemed to me that all
my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-coloured joy.
She trembled all over, and shook like a white narcissus. Then she
flung herself on her knees and kissed my hands. I feel that I should
not tell you all this, but I can't help it. Of course our engagement
is a dead secret. She has not even told her own mother. I don't know
what my guardian will say. Lord Radley is sure to be furious. I
don't care. I shall be of age in less than a year, and then I can do
what I like. I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love
out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that
Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I
have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the
mouth."
"Yes, Dorian, I suppose you were right," said Hallward, slowly.
"Have you seen her to-day?" asked Lord Henry.
Dorian Gray shook his head. "I left her in the forest of Arden, I
shall find her in an orchard in Verona."
Lord Henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner. "At what
particular point did you mention the word marriage, Dorian? And what
did she say in answer? Perhaps you forgot all about it."
"My dear Harry, I did not treat it as a business transaction, and
I did not make any formal proposal. I told her that I loved her, and
she said she was not worthy to be my wife. Not worthy! Why, the
whole world is nothing to me compared with her."
"Women are wonderfully practical," murmured Lord Henry, "much more
practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to
say anything about marriage, and they always remind us."
Hallward laid his hand upon his arm. "Don't, Harry. You have annoyed
Dorian. He is not like other men. He would never bring misery upon any
one, His nature is too fine for that."
Lord Henry looked across the table. "Dorian is never annoyed with
me," he answered. "I asked the question for the best reason
possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any
question- simply curiosity. I have a theory that it is always the
women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women.
Except, of course, in the middle-class life. But then the middle
classes are not modern."
Dorian Gray laughed, and tossed his head. "You are quite
incorrigible, Harry; but I don't mind. It is impossible to be angry
with you. When you see Sibyl Vane you will feel that the man who could
wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart. I cannot
understand how any one can wish to shame the thing he loves. I love
Sibyl Vane. I want to place her on a pedestal of gold, and to see
the world worship the woman who is mine. What is marriage? An
irrevocable vow. You mock at it for that. Ah! don't mock. It is an
irrevocable vow that I want to take. Her trust makes me faithful,
her belief makes me good. When I am with her, I regret all that you
have taught me. I become different from what you have known me to
be. I am changed, and the mere touch of Sibyl Vane's hand makes me
forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful
theories."
"And those are...?" asked Lord Henry, helping himself to some salad.
"Oh, your theories about life, your theories about love, your
theories about pleasure. All your theories, in fact, Harry."
"Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about," he
answered, in his slow, melodious voice. "But I am afraid I cannot
claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature, not to me. Pleasure
is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are
always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."
"Ah! but what do you mean by good?" cried Basil Hallward.
"Yes," echoed Dorian, leaning back in his chair, and looking at Lord
Henry over the heavy clusters of purple-lipped irises that stood in
the centre of the table, "what do you mean by good, Harry?"
"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he replied,
touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed
fingers. "Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
One's own life- that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's
neighbors, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt
one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. Besides,
Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in
accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of
culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest
immorality."
"But, surely, if one lives merely for one's self, Harry, one pays
a terrible price for doing so?" suggested the painter.
"Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy
that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing
but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the
privilege of the rich."
"One has to pay in other ways but money."
"What sort of ways, Basil?"
"Oh! I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in... well, in the
consciousness of degradation."
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, mediaeval art is
charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can use them
in fiction, of course. But then the only things that one can use in
fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. Believe me,
no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man
ever knows what a pleasure is."
"I know what pleasure is," cried Dorian Gray. "It is to adore some
one."
"That is certainly better than being adored," he answered, toying
with some fruits. "Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just
as Humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering
us to do something for them."
"I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first
given to us," murmured the lad, gravely. "They create Love in our
natures. They have a right to demand it back."
"That is quite true, Dorian," cried Hallward.
"Nothing is ever quite true," said Lord Henry.
"This is," interrupted Dorian. "You must admit, Harry, that women
give to men the very gold of their lives."
"Possibly," he sighed, "but they invariably want it back in such
very small change. That is the worry. Women, as some witty Frenchman
once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always
prevent us from carrying them out."
"Harry, you are dreadful! I don't know why I like you so much."
"You will always like me, Dorian," he replied. "Will you have some
coffee, you fellows? Waiter, bring coffee, and fine-champagne, and
some cigarettes. No; don't mind the cigarettes; I have some. Basil,
I can't allow you to smoke cigars. You must have a cigarette. A
cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is
exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes,
Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins
you have never had the courage to commit."
"What nonsense you talk, Harry!" cried the lad, taking a light
from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on
the table. "Let us go down to the theatre. When Sibyl comes on the
stage you will have a new ideal of life. She will represent
something to you that you have never known."
"I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his
eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion. I am afraid,
however, that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing. Still,
your wonderful girl may thrill me. I love acting. It is so much more
real than life. Let us go. Dorian, you will come with me. I am so
sorry, Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham, You must
follow us in a hansom."
They got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing.
The painter was silent and preoccupied. There was a gloom over him. He
could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better
than many other things that might have happened. After a few
minutes, they all passed downstairs. He drove off by himself, as had
been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little
brougham in front of him. A strange sense of loss came over him. He
felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been
in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the
crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew
up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.



Chapter 7

For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and
the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to
ear with an oily, tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box
with sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands, and
talking at the top of his voice. Dorian Gray loathed him more than
ever. He felt as if he had come to look for Miranda and had been met
by Caliban. Lord Henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him. At
least he declared he did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand, and
assuring him that he was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real
genius and gone bankrupt over a poet. Hallward amused himself with
watching the faces in the pit. The heat was terribly oppressive, and
the huge sunlight flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow
fire. The youths in the gallery had taken off their coats and
waistcoats and hung them over the side. They talked to each other
across the theatre, and shared their oranges with the tawdry girls who
sat beside them. Some women were laughing in the pit. Their voices
were horribly shrill and discordant. The sound of the popping of corks
came from the bar.
"What a place to find one's divinity in!" said Lord Henry.
"Yes!" answered Dorian Gray. "It was here I found her, and she is
divine beyond all living things. When she acts you will forget
everything. These common, rough people, with their coarse faces and
brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. They
sit silently and watch her. They weep and laugh as she wills them to
do. She makes them as responsive as a violin. She spiritualizes
them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's
self."
"The same flesh and blood as one's self! Oh, I hope not!"
exclaimed Lord Henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery
through his opera-glass.
"Don't pay an attention to him, Dorian," said the painter. "I
understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl. Any one you love
must be marvellous, and any girl that has the effect you describe must
be fine and noble. To spiritualize one's age- that is something
worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived
without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose
lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their
selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own,
she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the
world. This marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first,
but I admit it now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her
you would have been incomplete."
"Thanks, Basil," answered Dorian Gray, pressing his hand. "I knew
that you would understand me. Harry is so cynical, he terrifies me.
But here is the orchestra. It is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for
about five minutes. Then the curtain rises, and you will see the
girl to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given
everything that is good in me."
A quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil
of applause, Sibyl Vane stepped on the stage. Yes, she was
certainly, lovely to look at- one of the loveliest creatures, Lord
Henry thought, that he had ever seen. There was something of the
fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes. A faint blush, like the
shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she
glanced at the crowded, enthusiastic house. She stepped back a few
paces, and her lips seemed to tremble. Basil Hallward leaped to his
feet and began to applaud. Motionless, and as one in a dream, sat
Dorian Gray, gazing at her. Lord Henry peered through his glasses,
murmuring, "Charming! charming!"
The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his
pilgrim's dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The
band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance
began. Through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily-dressed actors, Sibyl
Vane moved like a creature from a finer world. Her body swayed,
while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. The curves of her
throat were the curves of the white lily. Her hands seemed to be
made of cool ivory.
Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of love when
her eyes rested on Romeo. The few words she had to speak-

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this'
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss-

with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly
artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view
of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took
away all life from the verse. It made the passion unreal.
Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her. He was puzzled and anxious.
Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. She seemed to
them to be absolutely incompetent. They were horribly disappointed.
Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony
scene of the second act. They waited for that. If she failed there,
there was nothing in her.
She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. That could not
be denied. But the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew
worse as she went on. Her gestures became absurdly artificial. She
overemphasized everything that she had to say. The beautiful passage-

Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night-

was declaimed with the painful precision of a school-girl who has been
taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. When
she leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines-

Although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night;
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say, "It lightens." Sweet, good-night!
This bud of love by summer's ripening breath
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet-

she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. It
was not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she was
absolutely self-contained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete
failure.
Even the common, uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost
their interest in the play. They got restless, and began to talk
loudly and to whistle. The Jew manager, who was standing, at the
back of the dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. The only person
unmoved was the girl herself.
When the second act was over there came a storm of hisses, and
Lord Henry got up from his chair and put on His coat. "She is quite
beautiful, Dorian," he said, "but she can't act. Let us go."
"I am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard,
bitter voice. "I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an
evening, Harry. I apologize to you both."
"My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill," interrupted
Hallward. "We will come some other night."
"I wish she were ill," he rejoined. "But she seems to me to be
simply callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she
was a great artist. This evening she is merely a conmmon-place,
mediocre actress."
"Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more
wonderful thing than Art."
"They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry. "But
do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not
good for one's morals to see bad acting. Besides, I don't suppose
you will want your wife to act. So what does it matter if she plays
Juliet like a wooden doll? She is very lovely, and if she knows as
little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful
experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really
fascinating- people who know absolutely everything, and people who
know absolutely nothing. Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so
tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that
is unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke
cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful.
What more can you want?"
"Go away, Harry," cried the lad. "I want to be alone. Basil, you
must go. Ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?" The hot tears
came to his eyes. His lips trembled, and rushing to the back of the
box, he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.
"Let us go, Basil," said Lord Henry, with a strange tenderness in
his voice; and the two young men passed out together.
A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up, and the curtain
rose on the third act. Dorian Gray went back to his seat. He looked
pale, and proud, and indifferent. The play ragged on, and seemed
interminable. Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy
boots, and laughing. The whole thing was a fiasco. The last act was
played to almost empty benches. The curtain went down on a titter, and
some groans.
As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into
the greenroom. The girl was standing there alone, with a look of
triumph on her face. Her eyes lit with an exquisite fire. There was
a radiance about her. Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of
their own.
When he entered, she looked at him and an expression of infinite joy
came over her. "How badly I acted to-night, Dorian!" she cried.
"Horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement, "horribly! It
was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was. You have no
idea what I suffered."
The girl smiled. "Dorian," she answered, lingering over his name
with long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than
honey to the red petals of her mouth- "Dorian, you should have
understood. But you understand now, don't you?"
"Understand what?" he asked angrily.
"Why I was so bad to-night. Why I shall always be bad. Why I shall
never act well again."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You are ill, I suppose. When you are ill
you shouldn't act. You make yourself ridiculous. My friends were
bored. I was bored."
She seemed not to listen to him. She was transfigured with joy. An
ecstasy of happiness dominated her.
"Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the
one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I
thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the
other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia
were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who
acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my
world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You
came- oh, my beautiful love!- and you freed my soul from prison. You
taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my
life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the
empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first
time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and
painted, and that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the
scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal,
were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me
something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.
You had made me understand what love really is. My love! my love!
Prince Charming! Prince of life! I have grown sick of shadows. You are
more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with the
puppets of a play? When I came on to-night, I could not understand how
it was that everything had gone from me. I thought that I was going to
be wonderful. I found that I could do nothing. Suddenly it dawned on
my soul what it all meant. The knowledge was exquisite to me. I
heard them hissing, and I smiled. What could they know of love such as
ours? Take me away, Dorian- take me away with you, where we can be
quite alone. I hate the stage. I might mimic a passion that I do not
feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. Oh, Dorian,
Dorian, you understand now what it signifies? Even if I could do it,
it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made
me see that."
He flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face. "You
have killed my love," he muttered.
She looked at him in wonder, and laughed. He made no answer. She
came across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his hair.
She knelt down and pressed his hands to her lips. He drew them away,
and a shudder ran through him.
Then he leaped up, and went to the door. "Yes," he cried, "you
have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't
even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you
because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect,
because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and
substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You
are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool
I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again.
I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don't
know what you were to me, once. Why, once... Oh, I can't bear to think
of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the
romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it
mars your art! Without your art you are nothing. I would have made you
famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you,
and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate
actress with a pretty face."
The girl grew white, and trembled. She clenched her hands
together, and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "You are not
serious, Dorian?" she murmured. "You are acting."
"Acting! I leave that to you. You do it so well," he answered,
bitterly.
She rose from her knees, and, with a piteous expression of pain in
her face, came across the room to him. She put her hand upon his
arm, and looked into his eyes. He thrust her back. "Don't touch me!"
he cried.
A low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet, and
lay there like a trampled flower. "Dorian, Dorian, don't leave me!"
she whispered. "I am so sorry I didn't act well. I was thinking of you
all the time. But I will try- indeed, I will try. It came so
suddenly across me, my love for you. I think I should never have known
it if you had not kissed me- if we had not kissed each other. Kiss
me again, my love. Don't go away from me. I couldn't bear it. Oh!
don't go away from me. My brother... No; never mind. He didn't mean
it. He was in jest... But you, oh! can't you forgive me for
to-night? I will work so hard, and try to improve. Don't be cruel to
me because I love you better than anything in the world. After all, it
is only once that I have not pleased you. But you are quite right,
Dorian. I should have shown myself more of an artist. It was foolish
of me; and yet I couldn't help it. Oh, don't leave me, don't leave
me." A fit of passionate sobbing choked her. She crouched on the floor
like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked
down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There
is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one
has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly
melodromatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.
"I am going," he said at last, in his calm, clear voice. "I don't
wish to be unkind, but I can't see you again. You have disappointed
me."
She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer. Her
little hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for
him. He turned on his heel, and left the room. In a few moments he was
out of the theatre.
Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through
dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking
houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after
him. Drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves
like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon
doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.
As the dawn was just breaking he found himself close to Covent
Garden. The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky
hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding
lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was
heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to
bring him an anodyne for His pain. He followed into the market, and
watched the men unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter
offered him some cherries. He thanked him, wondered why he refused
to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They
had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered
into them. A long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips,
and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading
their way through the huge jade-green piles of vegetables. Under the
portico, with its grey sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of
draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over.
Others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffee-house in the
piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough
stones, shaking their bells and trappings. Some of the drivers were
lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked, and pink-footed, the
pigeons ran about picking up seeds.
After a little while, he hailed a hansom, and drove home. For a
few moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent
Square with its blank close-shuttered windows, and its staring blinds.
The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened
like silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of
smoke was rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the
nacre-coloured air.
In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge,
that hung from the ceiling of the great oak-panelled hall of entrance,
lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals
of flame they seemed, trimmed with white fire. He turned them out,
and, having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the
library towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber
on the ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had
just had decorated for himself, and hung with some curious Renaissance
tapestries that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby
Royal. As he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the
portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in
surprise. Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled.
After he had taken the buttonhole out of his coat, he seemed to
hesitate. Finally he came back, went over to the picture, and examined
it. In the dim arrested light that struggled through the
cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little
changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that
there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.
He turned round, and, walking to the window, drew up the blind.
The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into
dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression
that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger
there, to be more intensified even. The quivering, ardent sunlight
showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he
been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced, and taking up from the table an oval glass framed in
ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced
hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red
lips. What did it mean?
He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it
again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the
actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole
expression had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The
thing was horribly apparent.
He threw himself into a chair, and began to think. Suddenly there
flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio
the day the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it
perfectly. He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain
young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be
untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his
passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the
lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the
delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.
Surely his wish had not been fulfilled? Such things were impossible.
It seemed monstrous even to think of them. And, yet, there was the
picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth.
Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. He had
dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he
had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been
shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over
him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little
child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had
he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But
he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play
had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture.
His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a moment, if he
had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better suited to
bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only
thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to
have some one with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told
him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble
about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now.
But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of
his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own
beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever
look at it again?
No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The
horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it.
Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck
that makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to think
so.
Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its
cruel smile. Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue
eyes met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for
the painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already,
and would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and
white roses would die. For every sin that he committed, a stain
would fleck and wreck its fairness. But he would not sin. The picture,
changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of
conscience. He would resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry
any more- would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous
theories that in Basil Hallward's garden had first stirred within
him the passion for impossible things. He would go back to Sibyl Vane,
make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his
duty to do so. She must have suffered more than he had. Poor child! He
had been selfish and cruel to her. The fascination that she had
exercised over him would return. They would be happy together. His
life with her would be beautiful and pure.
He got up from his chair, and drew a large screen right in front
of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "How horrible!" he
murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it.
When he stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. The
fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. He
thought only of Sibyl. A faint echo of his love came back to him. He
repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing
in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.



Chapter 8

It was long past noon when he awoke. His valet had crept several
times on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring, and had
wondered what made his young master sleep so late. Finally his bell
sounded, and Victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile of
letters, on a small tray of old Sevres china, and drew back the
olive-satin curtains, with, their shimmering blue lining, that hung in
front of the three tall windows.
"Monsieur has slept well this morning," he said, smiling.
"What o'clock is it, Victor?" asked Dorian Gray, drowsily.
"One hour and a quarter, Monsieur."
How late it was! He sat up, and, having sipped some tea, turned over
his letters. One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought
by hand this morning. He hesitated for a moment, and then put it
aside. The others he opened listlessly. They contained the usual
collection of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views,
programmes of charity concerts, and the like, that are showered on
fashionable young men every morning during the season. There was a
rather heavy bill, for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set, that
he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were
extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in
an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there
were several very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street
money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's
notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest.
After about ten minutes he got up, and, throwing on an elaborate
dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the
onyx-paved bathroom. The cool water refreshed him after his long
sleep. He seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through. A dim
sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once or
twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it.
As soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down
to a light French breakfast, that had been laid out for him on a small
round table close to the open window. It was an exquisite day. The
warm air seemed laden with spices. A bee flew in, and buzzed round the
blue-dragon bowl that, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, stood
before him. He felt perfectly happy.
Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of
the portrait, and he started.
"Too cold for Monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the
table. "I shut the window?"
Dorian shook his head. "I am not cold," he murmured.
Was it all true? Had the portrait really changed? Or had it been
simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil
where there had been a look of joy? Surely a painted canvas could
not alter? The thing was absurd. It would serve as a tale to tell
Basil some day. It would make him smile.
And, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing! First
in the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the
touch of cruelty round the warped lips. He almost dreaded his valet
leaving the room. He knew that when he was alone he would have to
examine the portrait. He was afraid of certainty. When the coffee
and cigarettes had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a
wild desire to tell him to remain. As the door was closing behind
him he called him back. The man stood waiting for his orders. Dorian
looked at him for a moment. "I am not at home to any one, Victor,"
he said, with a sigh. The man bowed and retired.
Then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette and flung himself
down on a luxuriously-cushioned couch that stood facing the screen.
The screen was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and
wrought with a rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern. He scanned it
curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a
man's life.
Should he move it aside, after all? Why not let it stay there?
What was the use of knowing? If the thing was true, it was terrible.
If it was not true, why trouble about it? But what if, by some fate or
deadlier chance, eyes other than his spied behind, and saw the
horrible change? What should he do if Basil Hallward came and asked to
look at his own picture? Basil would be sure to do that. No; the thing
had to be examined, and at once. Anything would be better than this
dreadful state of doubt.
He got up, and locked both doors. At least he would be alone when he
looked upon the mask of his shame. Then he drew the screen aside,
and saw himself face to face. It was perfectly true. The portrait
had altered.
As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small
wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a
feeling of almost scientific interest. That such a change should
have taken place was incredible to him. And yet it was a fact. Was
there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped
themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was
within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized?-
that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, more
terrible reason? He shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the
couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror.
One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. It had made
him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane. It was
not too late to make reparation for that. She could still be his wife.
His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence,
would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that
Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through
life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to
others, and the fear of God to us all. There were opiates for remorse,
drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible
symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the
ruin men brought upon their souls.
Three o'clock struck, and four, and the half-hour rang its double
chime, but Dorian Gray did not stir. He was trying to gather up the
scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his
way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was
wandering. He did not know what to do, or what to think. Finally, he
went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he
had loved, imploring her forgiveness, and accusing himself of madness.
He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow, and wilder words
of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves
we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the
confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. When Dorian
had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.
Suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard Lord Henry's
voice outside. "My dear boy, I must see you. Let me in at once. I
can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."
He made no answer at first, but remained quite still. The knocking
still continued, and grew louder. Yes, it was better to let Lord Henry
in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to
quarrel with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting
was inevitable. He jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the
picture, and unlocked the door.
"I am so sorry for it all, Dorian," said Lord Henry, as he
entered. "But you must not think too much about it."
"Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?" asked the lad.
"Yes, of course," answered Lord Henry, sinking into a chair, and
slowly pulling off his yellow gloves. "It is dreadful, from one
point of view, but it was not your fault. Tell me, did you go behind
and see her, after the play was over?"
"Yes."
"I felt sure you had. Did you make a scene with her?"
"I was brutal, Harry, perfectly brutal. But it is all right now. I
am not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to
know myself better."
"Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it in that way! I was afraid I
would find you plunged in remorse, and tearing that nice curly hair of
yours."
"I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head, and
smiling. "I am perfectly happy now. I know what conscience is, to
begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest
thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more- at least not before
me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being
hideous."
"A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate
you on it. But how are you going to begin?"
"By marrying Sibyl Vane."
"Marrying Sibyl Vane! " cried Lord Henry, standing up, and looking
at him in perplexed amazement. "But, my dear Dorian--"
"Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say. Something dreadful
about marriage. Don't say it. Don't ever say things of that kind to me
again. Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me. I am not going to break
my word to her. She is to be my wife."
"Your wife! Dorian!... Didn't you get my letter? I wrote to you this
morning, and sent the note down, by my own man."
"Your letter? Oh, yes, I remember. I have not read it yet, Harry.
I was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like.
You cut life to pieces with your epigrams."
"You know nothing, then?"
"What do you mean?"
Lord Henry walked across the room, and, sitting down by Dorian Gray,
took both his hands in his own, and held them tightly. "Dorian," he
said, "my letter- don't be frightened- was to tell you that Sibyl Vane
is dead."
A cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his
feet, tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp. "Dead! Sibyl
dead! It is not true! It is a horrible lie! How dare you say it?"
"It is quite true, Dorian," said Lord Henry, gravely. "It is in
all the morning papers. I wrote down to you to ask you not to see
any one till I came. There will have to be an inquest, of course,
and you must not be mixed up in it. Things like that make a man
fashionable in Paris. But in London people are so prejudiced. Here,
one should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve
that to give an interest to one's old age. I suppose they don't know
your name at the theatre? If they don't, it is all right. Did any
one see you going round to her room? That is an important point."
Dorian did not answer for a few moments. He was dazed with horror.
Finally he stammered, in a stifled voice, "Harry, did you say an
inquest? What did you mean by that? Did Sibyl--? Oh, Harry, I can't
bear it! But be quick. Tell me everything at once."
"I have no doubt it was not an accident, Dorian, though it must be
put in that way to the public. It seems that as she was leaving the
theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she
had forgotten something upstairs. They waited some time for her, but
she did not come down again. They ultimately found her lying dead on
the floor of her dressing room. She had swallowed something by
mistake, some dreadful thing they use at theatres. I don't know what
it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. I should
fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously."
"Harry, Harry, it is terrible!" cried the lad.
"Yes; it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself
mixed up in it. I see by The Standard that she was seventeen. I should
have thought she was almost younger than that. She looked such a
child, and seemed to know so little about acting. Dorian, you
mustn't let this thing get on your nerves. You must come and dine with
me, and afterwards we will look in at the Opera. It is a Patti
night, and everybody will be there. You can come to my sister's box.
She has got some smart women with her."
"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to
himself, "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat
with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. The
birds sing just as happily in my garden. And to-night I am to dine
with you, and then go on to the Opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose,
afterwards. How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all
this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now
that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful
for tears. Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever
written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter
should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder,
those white silent people we call the dead? Sibyl! Can she feel, or
know, or listen? Oh, Harry, how I loved her once! It seems years ago
to me now. She was everything to me. Then came that dreadful night-
was it really only last night?- when she played so badly, and my heart
almost broke. She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic.
But I was not moved a bit. I thought her shallow. Suddenly something
happened that made me afraid. I can't tell you what it was, but it was
terrible. I said I would go back to her. I felt I had done wrong.
And now she is dead. My God! my God! Harry, what shall I do? You don't
know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She
would have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It
was selfish of her."
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his
case, and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman
can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all
possible interest in life. If you had married this girl you would have
been wretched. Of course you would have treated her kindly. One can
always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would
have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And
when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes
dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other
woman's husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social
mistake, which would have been abject, which, of course, I would not
have allowed, but I assure you that in any case the whole thing
would have been an absolute failure."
"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the
room, and looking horribly pale. "But I thought it was my duty. It
is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what
was right. I remember your saying once that there is a fatality
about good resolutions- that they are always made too late. Mine
certainly were."
"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with
scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is
absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious
sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all
that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on
a bank where they have no account."
"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I
don't think I am heartless. Do you?"
"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight
to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord
Henry, with his sweet, melancholy smile.
The lad frowned. "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he
rejoined, "but I am glad you don't think I'm heartless. I am nothing
of the kind. I know I am not. And yet I must admit that this thing
that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to
be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all
the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a
great part, but by which I have not been wounded."
"It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an
exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism- "an
extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is
this. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence,
their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire
lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They
give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against
that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements
of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that
has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I
wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me
in love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have
adored me- there have not been very many, but there have been some-
have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for
them, or they to care for me. They have become stout and tedious,
and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences. That
awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter
intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of
life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always
vulgar."
"I must sow poppies in my garden," sighed Dorian.
"There is no necessity," rejoined his companion. "Life has always
poppies in her hands. Of course, now and then things linger. I once
wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic
mourning for a romance that would not die. Ultimately, however, it did
die. I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to
sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It
fills one with the terror of eternity. Well- would you believe it?-
a week ago, at Lady Hampshire's, I found myself seated at dinner
next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole
thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future. I
had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. She dragged it out
again, and assured me that I had spoiled her life, I am bound to state
that she ate an enormous dinner, so I did not feel any anxiety. But
what a lack of taste she showed! The one charm of the past is that
it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They
always want a sixth act, and as soon the interest of the play is
entirely over they propose to continue it. If they were allowed
their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every
tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial,
but they have no sense of art. You are more fortunate than I am. I
assure you, Dorian, that not one of the women I have known would
have done for me what Sibyl Vane did for you. Ordinary women always
console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental
colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be,
or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always
means that they have a history. Others find a great consolation in
suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. They flaunt
their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most
fascinating of sins. Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all
the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can quite
understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that
one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. Yes; there is
really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life.
Indeed, I have not mentioned the most important one."
"What is that, Harry?" said the lad, listlessly.
"Oh, the obvious consolation. Taking some one else's admirer when
one loses one's own. In good society that always whitewashes a
woman. But really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been
from all the women one meets! There is something to me quite beautiful
about her death. I am glad I am living in a century when such
wonders happen. They make one believe in the reality of the things
we all play with, such as romance, passion, and love."
"I was terribly cruel to her. You forget that."
"I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty,
more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We
have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their
masters, all the same. They love being dominated. I am sure you were
splendid. I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can
fancy how delightful you looked. And, after all, you said something to
the me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be
merely fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it
holds the key to everything."
"What was that, Harry?"
"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the
heroines of romance- that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the
other; that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."
"She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying
his face in his hands.
"No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part.
But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room
simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a
wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl
never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at
least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through
Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed
through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy.
The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred
her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes
on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven
because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears
over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are."
There was silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly,
and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. The
colours faded wearily out of things.
After some time Dorian Gray looked up. "You have explained me to
myself, Harry," he murmured, with something of a sigh of relief. "I
felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I
could not express it to myself. How well you know me! But we will
not talk again of what has happened. It has been a marvellous
experience. That is all. I wonder if life has still in store for me
anything as marvellous."
"Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that
you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do."
"But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? What
then?"
"Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go, "then, my dear Dorian,
you would have to fight for your victories. As it is, they are brought
to you. No, you must keep your good looks. We live in an age that
reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
We cannot spare you. And now you had better dress, and drive down to
the club. We are rather late, as it is."
"I think I shall join you at the Opera, Harry. I feel too tired to
eat anything. What is the number of your sister's box?"
"Twenty-seven, I believe. It is on the grand tier. You will see
her name on the door. But I am sorry you won't come and dine."
"I don't feel up to it," said Dorian, listlessly. "But I am
awfully obliged to you for all that you have said to me. You are
certainly my best friend. No one has ever understood me as you have."
"We are only at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered
Lord Henry, shaking him by the hand. "Good-bye. I shall see you before
nine-thirty, I hope. Remember, Patti is singing."
As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell,
and in a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the
blinds down. He waited impatiently for him to go. The man seemed to
take an interminable time over everything.
As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen, and drew it back.
No; there was no further change in the picture. It had received the
news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself. It was
conscious of the events of life as they occurred. The vicious
cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt,
appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison,
whatever it was. Or was it indifferent to results? Did it merely
take cognizance of what passed within the soul? He wondered, and hoped
that some day he would see the change taking place before his very
eyes, shuddering as he hoped it.
Poor Sibyl! what a romance it had all been! She had often mimicked
death on the stage. Then Death himself had touched her, and taken
her with him. How had she played that dreadful last scene, Had she
cursed him, as she died? No; she had died for love of him, and love
would always be a sacrament to him now. She had atoned for everything,
by the sacrifice she had made of her life. He would not think any more
of what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the
theatre. When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic
figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of
Love. A wonderful tragic figure? Tears came to his eyes as he
remembered her childlike look and winsome fanciful ways and shy
tremulous grace. He brushed them away hastily, and looked again at the
picture.
He felt that the time had really come for making his choice. Or
had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for
him- life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth,
infinite passion, pleasure subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder
sins- he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the
burden of his shame: that was all.
A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration
that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish
mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted
lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had
sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of
it, as it seemed to him at times. Was it to alter now with every
mood to which he yielded? Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome
thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the
sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving
wonder of its hair? The pity of it! the pity of it!
For a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that
existed between him and the picture might cease. It had changed in
answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain
unchanged. And, yet, who, that knew anything about Life, would
surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that
chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be
fraught? Besides, was it really under his control? Had it indeed
been prayer that had produced the substitution? Might there not be
some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise
its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an
influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or
conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in
unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret
love or strange affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He
would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture
was to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely
into it?
For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be
able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be
to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his
own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. And when winter came
upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge
of summer. When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a
pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of
boyhood. Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one
pulse of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he
would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what
happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That
was everything.
He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the
picture, smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where
his valet was already waiting for him. An hour later he was at the
Opera, and Lord Henry was leaning over his chair.



Chapter 9

As he was sitting at breakfast next morning, Basil Hallward was
shown into the room.
"I am glad I have found you, Dorian," he said gravely. "I called
last night, and they told me you were at the Opera. Of course I knew
that was impossible. But I wish you hid left word where you had really
gone to. I passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy
might be followed by another. I think you might have telegraphed for
me when you heard of it first. I read of it quite by chance in a
late edition of The Globe, that I picked up at the club. I came here
at once, and was miserable at not finding you. I can't tell you how
heartbroken I am about the whole thing. I know what you must suffer.
But where were you? Did you go down and see the girl's mother? For a
moment I thought of following you there. They gave the address in
the paper. Somewhere in the Euston Road, isn't it? But I was afraid of
intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten. Poor woman! What a
state she must be in! And her only child, too! What did she say
about it all?"
"My dear Basil, how do I know?" murmured Dorian Gray, sipping some
pale-yellow wine from a delicate gold-beaded bubble of Venetian glass,
and looking dreadfully bored. "I was at the Opera. You should have
come on there. met Lady Gwendolyn, Harry's sister, for the first time.
We were in her box. She is perfectly charming; and Patti sang
divinely. Don't talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn't talk
about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as
Harry says, that gives reality to things. I may mention that she was
not the woman's only child. There is a son, a charming fellow, I
believe. But he is not on the stage. He is a sailor, or something. And
now, tell me about yourself and what you are painting."
"You went to the Opera?" said Hallward, speaking very slowly, and
with a strained touch of pain in his voice. "You went to the Opera
while Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? You can talk
to me of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely,
before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in?
Why, man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of
hers!"
"Stop, Basil! I won't hear it!" cried Dorian, leaping to his feet.
"You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is past
is past."
"You call yesterday the past?"
"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only
shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who
is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a
pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to
use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
"Dorian, this is horrible! Something has changed you completely. You
look exactly like the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to
come down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple,
natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature
in the whole world. Now, I don't know what has come over you. You talk
as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry's influence. I
see that."
The lad flushed up, and, going to the window, looked out for a few
moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden. "I owe a great
deal to Harry, Basil," he said, at last, "more than I owe to you.
You only taught me to be vain."
"Well, I am punished for that, Dorian- or shall be some day."
"I don't know what you mean, Basil," he exclaimed, turning round. "I
don't know what you want. What do you want?"
"I want the Dorian Gray I used to paint," said the artist, sadly.
"Basil," said the lad, going over to him, and putting his hand on
his shoulder, "you have come too late. Yesterday when I heard that
Sibyl Vane had killed herself--"
"Killed herself! Good heavens! is there no doubt about that?"
cried Hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror.
"My dear Basil! Surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident?
Of course she killed herself."
The elder man buried his face in his hands. "How fearful," he
muttered, and a shudder ran through him.
"No," said Dorian Gray, "there is nothing fearful about it. It is
one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people
who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or
faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean-
middle-class virtue, and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl
was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The
last night she played- the night you saw her- she acted badly
because she had known, the reality of love. When she knew its
unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again
into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her.
Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its
wasted beauty. But as I was saying, you must not think I have not
suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment- about
half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six- you would have found
me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in
fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then
it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except
sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here
to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and
you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a
story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty
years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some
unjust law altered- I forget exactly what it was. Finally he
succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had
absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed
misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really want to
console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see
it from a proper artistic point of view. Was it not Gautier who used
to write about la consolation des arts? I remember picking up a little
vellum-covered book in our studio one day and chancing on that
delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man you told me of
when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say
that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I
love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades,
green bronzes, lacquerwork, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings,
luxury, pomp, there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic
temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more
to me. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to
escape the suffering of life. I know you are surprised at my talking
to you like this. You have not realized how I have developed. I was
a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions, new
thoughts, new ideas. I am different, but you must not like me less.
I am changed, but you must always be my friend. Of course I am very
fond of Harry. But I know that you are better than he is. You are
not stronger- you are too much afraid of life- but you are better. And
how happy we used to be together! Don't leave me, Basil, and don't
quarrel with me. I am what I am. There is nothing more to be said."
The painter felt strangely moved. The lad was infinitely dear to
him, and his personality had been the great turning-point in his
art. He could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. After
all, his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away.
There was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble.
"Well, Dorian," he said, at length, with a sad smile, "I won't speak
to you again about this horrible thing, after to-day. I only trust
your name won't be mentioned in connection with it. The inquest is
to take place this afternoon. Have they summoned you?"
Dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his
face at the mention of the word "inquest." There was something so
crude and vulgar about everything of the kind. "They don't know my
name," he answered.
"But surely she did?"
"Only my Christian name, and that I am quite sure she never
mentioned to any one. She told me once that they were all rather
curious to learn who I was, and that she invariably told them my
name was Prince Charming. It was pretty of her. You must do me a
drawing of Sibyl, Basil. I should like to have something more of her
than the memory of a few kisses and some broken pathetic words."
"I will try and do something, Dorian, if it would please you. But
you must come and sit to me yourself again. I can't get on without
you."
"I can never sit to you again, Basil. It is impossible!" he
exclaimed, starting back.
The painter stared at him. "My dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried.
"Do you mean to say you don't like what I did for you? Where is it?
Why, have you pulled the screen in front of it? Let me look at it?
It is the best thing I have ever done. Do take the screen away,
Dorian. It is simply, disgraceful of your servant hiding my work
like that. I felt the room looked different as I came in."
"My servant has nothing to do with it, Basil. You don't imagine I
let him arrange my room for me? He settles my flowers for me
sometimes- that is all. No; I did it myself. The light was too
strong on the portrait."
"Too strong! Surely not, my dear fellow? It is an admirable place
for it. Let me see it." And Hallward walked towards the corner of
the room.
A cry of terror broke from Dorian Gray's lips, and he rushed between
the painter and the screen. "Basil," he said, looking very pale,
"you must not look at it. I don't wish you to."
"Not look at my own work! you are not serious. Why shouldn't I
look at it?" exclaimed Hallward, laughing.
"If you try to look at it, Basil, on my word of honour I will
never speak to you again as long as I live. I am quite serious. I
don't offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any. But,
remember, if you touch this screen, everything is over between us."
Hallward was thunderstruck. He looked at Dorian Gray in absolute
amazement. He had never seen him like this before. The lad was
actually pallid with rage. His hands were clenched, and the pupils
of his eyes were like disks of blue fire. He was trembling all over.
"Dorian!"
"Don't speak!"
"But what is the matter? Of course I won't look at it if you don't
want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel, and going
over towards the window. "But, really, it seems rather absurd that I
shouldn't see my own work. especially as I am going to exhibit it in
Paris in the autumn. I shall probably have to give it another coat
of varnish before that, so I must see it some day, and why not
to-day?"
"To exhibit it! You want to exhibit it;" exclaimed Dorian Gray, a
strange sense of terror creeping over him. Was the world going to be
shown his secret? Were people to gape at the mystery of his life? That
was impossible. Something- he did not know what- had to be done at
once.
"Yes; I don't suppose you will object to that. Georges Petit is
going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in
the Rue de Seze, which will open the first week in October. The
portrait will only be away a month. I should think you could easily
spare it for that time. In fact, you are sure to be out of town. And
if you keep it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it."
Dorian Gray passed his hand over his forehead. There were beads of
perspiration there. He felt that he was on the brink of a horrible
danger. "You told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it,"
he cried. "Why have you changed your mind? You people who go in for
being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only
difference is that your moods are rather meaningless. You can't have
forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the
world would induce you to send it to any exhibition. You told Harry
exactly the same thing." He stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light
came into his eyes. He remembered that Lord Henry had said to him
once, half seriously, and half in jest, "If you want to have a strange
quarter of an hour, get Basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your
picture. He told me why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me."
Yes, perhaps, Basil, too, had his secret. He would ask him and try.
"Basil," he said, coming over quite close, and looking him
straight in the face, "we have each of us a secret. Let me know yours,
and I shall tell you mine. What was your reason for refusing to
exhibit my picture?"
The painter shuddered in spite of himself. "Dorian, if I told you,
you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at
me. I could not bear your doing either of those two things. If you
wish me never to look at your picture again, I am content. I have
always you to look at. If you wish the best work I have ever done to
be hidden from the world, I am satisfied. Your friendship is dearer to
me than any fame or reputation."
"No, Basil, you must tell me," insisted Dorian Gray. "I think I have
a right to know." His feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity
had taken its place. He was determined to find out Basil Hallward's
mystery.
"Let us sit down, Dorian," said the painter, looking troubled.
"Let us sit down. And just answer me one question. Have you noticed in
the picture something curious?- something that probably at first did
not strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?"
"Basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with
trembling hands, and gazing at him with wild, startled eyes.
"I see you did. Don't speak. Wait till you hear what I have to
say. Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the
most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain,
and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that
unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I
worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I
wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with
you. When you were away from me you were still present in my art....
Of course I never let you know anything about this. It would have been
impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it
myself. I only, knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that
the world had become wonderful to my eyes- too wonderful, perhaps, for
in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less
than the peril of keeping them.... Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew
more and more absorbed in you. Then came a new development. I had
drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's
cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you
had sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing across the green
turbid Nile. You had leaned over the still pool of some Greek
woodland, and seen in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own
face. And it had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal,
and remote. One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to
paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the
costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time.
Whether it was the Realism of the method or the mere wonder of your
own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or veil, I
cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it, every flake and film
of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that
others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told
too much, that I had put too much of myself into it. Then it was
that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a
little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to
me. Harry, to whom I talked about it, laughed at me. But I did not
mind that. When the picture was finished, and I sat alone with it, I
felt that I was right.... Well, after a few days the thing left my
studio, and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of
its presence it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that
I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely
good-looking and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling
that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation
is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more
abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-
that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far
more completely than it ever reveals him. And so when I got this offer
from Paris I determined to make your portrait the principal thing in
my exhibition. It never occurred to me that you would refuse. I see
now that you were right. The picture cannot be shown. You must not
be angry with me, Dorian, for what I have told you. As I said to
Harry, once, you are made to be worshipped."
Dorian Gray drew a long breath. The colour came back to his
cheeks, and a smile played about his lips. The peril was over. He
was safe for the time. Yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for
the painter who had just made this strange confession to him, and
wondered if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality
of a friend. Lord Henry had the charm of being very dangerous. But
that was all. He was too clever and too cynical to be really fond
of. Would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange
idolatry? Was that one of the things that life had in store?
"It is extraordinary, to me, Dorian," said Hallward, "that you
should have seen this in the portrait. Did you really see it?"
"I saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed to me
very curious."
"Well, you don't mind my looking at the thing now?"
Dorian shook his head. "You must not ask me that, Basil. I could not
possibly let you stand in front of that picture."
"You will some day, surely?"
"Never."
"Well, perhaps you are right. And now good-bye, Dorian. You have
been the one person in my life who has really influenced my art.
Whatever I have done that is good, I owe to you. Ah! you don't know
what it cost me to tell you all that I have told you."
"My dear Basil," said Dorian, "what have you told me? Simply that
you felt that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment."
"It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now
that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps
one should never put one's worship into words."
"It was a disappointing confession."
"Why, what did you expect, Dorian? You didn't see anything else in
the picture, did you? There was nothing else to see?"
"No; there was nothing else to see. Why do you ask? But you
mustn't talk about worship. It is foolish. You and I are friends,
Basil, and we must always remain so."
"You have got Harry," said the painter, sadly.
"Oh, Harry,?" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. "Harry
spends his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in
doing what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to
lead. But still I don't think I would go to Harry if I were in
trouble. I would sooner go to you, Basil."
"You will sit to me again?"
"Impossible!"
"You spoil my life as an artist by refusing, Dorian. No man came
across two ideal things. Few come across one."
"I can't explain it to you, Basil, but I must never sit to you
again. There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its
own. I will come and have tea with you. That will be just as
pleasant."
"Pleasanter for you, I am afraid," murmured Hallward, regretfully.
"And now good-bye. I am sorry you won't let me look at the picture
once again. But that can't be helped. I quite understand what you feel
about it."
As he left the room, Dorian Gray smiled to himself. Poor Basil!
how little he knew of the true reason! And how strange it was that,
instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had
succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend! How
much that strange confession explained to him! The painter's absurd
fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his
curious reticences- he understood them all now, and he felt sorry.
There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured
by romance.
He sighed and touched a bell. The portrait must be hidden away at
all costs. He could not run such a risk of discovery again. It had
been mad of him to have allowed the thing to remain, even for an hour,
in a room to which any of his friends had access.



Chapter 10

When his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly, and wondered
if he had thought of peering behind the screen. The man was quite
impassive, and waited for his orders. Dorian lit a cigarette, and
walked over to the glass and glanced into it. He could see the
reflection of Victor's face perfectly. It was like a placid mask of
servility. There was nothing to be afraid of, there. Yet he thought it
best to be on his guard.
Speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the housekeeper that he
wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker and ask him to
send two of his men round at once. It seemed to him that as the man
left the room his eyes wandered in the direction of the screen. Or was
that merely his own fancy?
After a few moments, in her black silk dress with old-fashioned
thread mittens on her wrinkled hands, Mrs. Leaf bustled into the
library. He asked for the key of the schoolroom.
"The old schoolroom, Mr. Dorian," she exclaimed. "Why, it is full of
dust. I must get it arranged, and put it straight before you go into
it. It is not fit for you to see, sir. It is not, indeed."
"I don't want it put straight, Leaf. I only want the key."
"Well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it. Why,
it hasn't been opened for nearly five years, not since his lordship
died."
He winced at the mention of his grandfather. He had hateful memories
of him. "That does not matter," he answered. "I simply want to see the
place- that is all. Give me the key."
"And here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over the
contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "Here is the
key. I'll have it off the bunch in a moment. But you don't think of
living up there, sir, and you so comfortable here?"
"No, no," he cried, petulantly. "Thank you, Leaf. That will do."
She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail
of the household. He sighed, and told her to manage things as she
thought best. She left the room, wreathed in smiles.
As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket, and looked
round the room. His eye fell on a large purple satin coverlet
heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late
seventeenth-century Venetian work that his grandfather had found it
a convent near Bologna. Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful
thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. Now it
was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the
corruption of death itself- something that would breed horrors and yet
would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to
the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat
its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the
thing would still live on. It would be always alive.
He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told
Basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away.
Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence, and
the still more poisonous influences that came from his own
temperament. The love that he bore him- for it was really love- had
nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that
mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and
that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had
known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes,
Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now. The past could
always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that.
But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would
find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their
evil real.
He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that
covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen.
Was the face on the canvas viler than before, it seemed to him that it
was unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified. Gold
hair, blue eyes, and rose-red lips- they all were there. It was simply
the expression that had altered. That was horrible in its cruelty.
Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow
Basil's reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been!- how shallow, and of
what little account! His own soul was looking out at him from the
canvas and calling him to judgment. A look of pain came across him,
and he flung the rich pall over the picture. As he did so, a knock
came to the door. He passed out as his servant entered.
"The persons are here, Monsieur."
He felt that the man must be got rid of at once. He must not be
allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. There was
something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes.
Sitting down at the writing-table, he scribbled a note to Lord
Henry, asking him to send him round something to read, and reminding
him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.
"Wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the
men in here."
In two or three minutes there was another knock, and Mr. Hubbard
himself, the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street, came in
with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant. Mr. Hubbard was a
florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was
considerably tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the
artists who dealt with him. As a rule, he never left his shop. He
waited for people to come to him. But he always made an exception in
favor of Dorian Gray. There was something about Dorian that charmed
everybody. It was a pleasure even to see him.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled
hands. "I thought I would do myself the honour of coming round in
person. I have just got a beauty of a frame, sir. Picked it up at a
sale. Came from Fonthill, I believe. Admirably suited for a
religious subject, Mr. Gray."
"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming
round, Mr. Hubbard. I shall certainly drop in and look at the frame-
though I don't go in much at present for religious art- but to-day,
I only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me. It is
rather heavy, so I thought I would ask you to lend me a couple of your
men."
"No trouble at all, Mr. Gray. I am delighted to be of any service to
you. Which is the work of art, sir?"
"This," replied Dorian, moving the screen back. "Can you move it,
covering and all, just as it is? I don't want it to get scratched
going upstairs."
"There will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker,
beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from
the long brass chains by which it was suspended. "And, now, where
shall we carry it to, Mr. Gray?"
"I will show you the way, Mr. Hubbard, if you will kindly follow me.
Or perhaps you had better go in front. I am afraid it is right at
the top of the house. We will go up by the front staircase, as it is
wider."
He held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall
and began the ascent. The elaborate character of the frame had made
the picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the
obsequious protests of Mr. Hubbard, who had the true tradesman's
spirited dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, Dorian
put his hand to it so as to help them.
"Something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man, when
they reached the top landing. And he wiped his shiny forehead.
"I am afraid it is rather heavy," murmured Dorian, as he unlocked
the door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the
curious secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.
He had not entered the place for more than four years- not,
indeed, since he had used it first as a playroom when he was a
child, and then as a study when he grew somewhat older. It was a
large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the
last Lord Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his
strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had
always hated and desired to keep at a distance. It appeared to
Dorian to have but little changed. There was the huge Italian cassone,
with its fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt
mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy. There the
satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks. On the
wall behind it was hanging the same ragged Flemish tapestry where a
faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden, while a company
of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted
wrists. How well he remembered it all! Every moment of his lonely
childhood came back to him as he looked round. He recalled the
stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him
that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. How
little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store
for him!
But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes
as this. He had the key, and no one else could enter it. Beneath its
purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial,
sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He
himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption
of his soul? He kept his youth- that was enough. And, besides, might
not his nature grow finer, after all? There was no reason that the
future should be so full of shame. Some love might come across his
life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be
already stirring in spirit and in flesh- those curious unpictured sins
whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm.
Perhaps, some day, the cruel look would have passed away from the
scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to the world Basil
Hallward's masterpiece.
No; that was impossible. Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing
upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of
sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks
would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's-feet would creep round
the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its
brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or
gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled
throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he
remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his
boyhood. The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it.
"Bring it in, Mr. Hubbard, please," he said, wearily, turning round.
"I am sorry I kept you waiting so long. I was thinking of something
else."
"Always glad to have a rest, Mr. Gray," answered the frame-maker,
who was still gasping for breath. "Where shall we put it, sir?"
"Oh, anywhere. Here: this will do. I don't want to have it hung
up. Just lean it against the wall. Thanks."
"Might one look at the work of art, sir?"
Dorian started. "It would not interest you, Mr. Hubbard," he said,
keeping his eye on the man. He felt ready to leap upon him and fling
him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that
concealed the secret of his life. "I shan't trouble you any more
now. I am much obliged for your kindness in coming round."
"Not at all, not at all, Mr. Gray. Ever ready to do anything for
you, sir." And Mr. Hubbard tramped downstairs, followed by the
assistant, who glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder in his
rough, uncomely face. He had never seen any one so marvellous.
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Dorian locked the
door, and put the key in his pocket. He felt safe now. No one would
ever look upon the horrible thing. No eye but his would ever see his
shame.
On reaching the library he found that it was just after five
o'clock, and that the tea had been already brought up. On a little
table of dark perfumed wood thickly encrusted with nacre, a present
from Lady Radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty professional
invalid, who had spent the preceding winter in Cairo, was lying a note
from Lord Henry, and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper, the
cover slightly torn and the edges soiled. A copy of the third
edition of The St. James Gazette had been placed on the tea-tray. It
was evident that Victor had returned. He wondered if he had met the
men in the hall as they were leaving the house, and had wormed out
of them what they had been doing. He would be sure to miss the
picture- had no doubt missed it already, while he had been laying
the tea-things. The screen had not been set back, and a blank space
was visible on the wall. Perhaps some night he might find him creeping
upstairs and trying to force the door of the room. It was a horrible
thing to have a spy in one's house. He had heard of rich men who had
been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a
letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an
address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of
crumpled lace.
He sighed, and, having poured himself out some tea, opened Lord
Henry's note. It was simply to say, that he sent him round the evening
paper, and book that might interest him, and that he would be at the
club at eight-fifteen. He opened The St. James languidly, and looked
through it. A red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye. It
drew attention to the following paragraph:
"INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS.- An inquest was held this morning at the
Bell Tavern, Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the
body of Sibyl Vane, a young actress recently engaged at the Royal
Theatre, Holborn. A verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased,
who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence and
that of Dr. Birrell, who had made the postmortem examination of the
deceased."
He frowned, and, tearing the paper in two went across the room and
flung the pieces away. How ugly it all was! And how horribly real
ugliness made things! He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for
having sent him the report. And it was certainly stupid of him to have
marked it with red pencil. Victor might have read it. The man knew
more than enough English for that.
Perhaps he had read it, and had begun to suspect something. And,
yet, what did it matter, What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl
Vane's death? There was nothing to fear. Dorian Gray had not killed
her.
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What
was it, he wondered. He went towards the little pearl-coloured
octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some
strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the
volume, flung himself into an armchair, and began to turn over the
leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest
book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite
raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world
were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed
of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never
dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being
indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian,
who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except
his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods
through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their
mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called
virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call
sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled
style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of
technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes
the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of
Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and
as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms
of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was
reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the
morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The
heavy odor of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble
the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of
their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements
elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed
from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that
made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.
Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky
gleamed through the windows. He read on by its wan light till he could
read no more. Then, after his valet had reminded him several times
of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and, going into the next room,
placed the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at
his bedside, and began to dress for dinner.
It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he
found Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much
bored.
"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your
fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the
time was going."
"Yes: I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from
his chair.
"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a
great difference."
"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry. And they passed
into the dining-room.

Chapter 11

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence
of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he
never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less
than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them
bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various
moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at
times, to have almost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful
young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments
were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of
himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the
story of his own life, written before he had lived it.
In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic
hero. He never knew- never, indeed, had any cause to know- that
somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces,
and still waters, which came upon the young Parisian so early in his
life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had
once, apparently, been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy-
and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure,
cruelty has its place- that he used to read the latter part of the
book, with its really tragic, if somewhat over-emphasized, account
of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in
others, and in the world, he had most dearly valued.
For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward,
and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him. Even those who
had heard the most evil things against him, and from time to time
strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became
the chatter of the clubs, could not believe anything to his
dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had
kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became
silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the
purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to
recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.
They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have
escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual.
Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and
prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among
those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself
would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key
that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the
portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the
evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that
laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the
contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and
more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the
corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and
sometimes with monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines
that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual
mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs
of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside
the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the
misshapen body and the failing limbs.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his
own delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little
ill-famed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and
in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the
ruin he had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more
poignant because it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were
rare. That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred
in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed
to increase with gratification. The more he knew, the more he
desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he
fed them.
Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to
society. Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each
Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to
the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians
of the day to charm his guests with the wonder's of their art. His
little dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted
him, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those
invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the
table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and
embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. Indeed,
there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or
fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type
of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that
was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all
the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the
world. To them he seemed to be of the company of those whom Dante
describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the
worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom "the visible
world existed."
And certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of
the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a
preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for
a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt
to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their
fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles
that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on
the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall Club
windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to
reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only
half-serious fopperies.
For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was
almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found,
indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become
to the London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author
of the "Satyricon" once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired
to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted
on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the
conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that
would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and
find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of
existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of
the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained
savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them
into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making
them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for
beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon
man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So
much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had
been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and
self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation
infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which,
in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature, in her
wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild
animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field
as his companions.
Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonisim
that was to re-create life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely
Puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was
to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet, it was never
to accept any theory, or system that would involve the sacrifice of
any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be
experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter
as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the
vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it
was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life
that is itself but a moment.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn,
either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost
enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen
joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more
terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that
lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring
vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those
whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually
white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to
tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the
corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the
stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to
their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the
hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to
wake the steepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple
cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees
the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the
dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get
back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left
them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been
studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the
letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night
comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where
we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the
necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of
stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids
might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in
the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have
fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a
world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive,
at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the
remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of
pleasure their pain.
It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian
Gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of like;
and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and
delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so
essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought
that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to
their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their
colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with
that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real
ardour of temperament, and that indeed, according to certain modern
psychologists, is often a condition of it.
It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman
Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a
great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really
than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by
its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive
simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy
that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble
pavement, and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly
and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or
raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that
pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "panis
caelestis," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the
Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice, and smiting his
breast for his sins. The fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their
lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had
their subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look
with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim
shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through
the worn grating the true story of their lives.
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable
for the sojourn of a night or for a few hours of a night in which
there are no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its
marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a
season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of
the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in
tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the
brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception
of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical
conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been
said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any
importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of
how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from
action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul,
have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their
manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums
from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had
not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to
discover their true relations, wondering what there was in
frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred
one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead
romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in Champak that
stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real
psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of
sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic
balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of
hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to
expel melancholy from the soul.
At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a
long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of
olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad
gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled
Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while
grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, and, crouching
upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of
reed or brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes
and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of
barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and
Chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven
himself, fell unheeded on his ear. He collected together from all
parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found,
either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes
that have survived contact with Western civilizations, and loved to
touch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro
Indians, that women are not allowed to look at, and that even youths
may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging,
and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries of
birds, and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in
Chile, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near Cuzco and
give forth a note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourds
filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long
clarin of the Mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but
through which he inhales the air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes,
that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees,
and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the
teponaztli, that has two vibrating tongues of wood, has her
monsters, things of bestial shape and with an elastic gum obtained
from the milky juice of plants; the Yotl-bells of the Aztecs, that are
hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered
with the skins of great serpents, like the one that Bernal Diaz saw
when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful
sound he has left us so vivid a description. The fantastic character
of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight
in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of
bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet, after some time, he
wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the Opera, either alone
or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser," and
seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of
the tragedy of his own soul.
On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a
costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered
with five hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for
years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. He would often
spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various
stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that
turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of
silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow
topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed
stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and
amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby, and sapphire. He
loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly
whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. He procured
from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of
colour, and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that was the envy of
all the connoisseurs.
He discovered wonderful stories, also about jewels. In Alphonso's
"Clericalis Disciplina" a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real
jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of
Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan, snakes "with
collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." There was a gem in
the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and "by the
exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could
be thrown into a magical sleep, and slain. According to the great
alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible,
and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased
anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away
the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus
deprived the moon of her colour. The selenite waxed and waned with the
moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only
by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone
taken from the brain of a newly-killed toad, that was certain antidote
against poison. The bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian
deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. In the nests of
Arabian birds was the aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept
the wearer from his city with fire.
The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his
hand, at the ceremony of his coronation. The gates of the palace of
John the Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned
snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." Over the
gable were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so
that the gold might shine by day, and the carbuncles by night. In
Lodge's strange romance "A Margarite of America" it was stated that in
the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of
the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrors of
chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." Marco
Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in
the mouths of the dead. A sea monster had been enamoured of the
pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief,
and mourned for seven moons over its loss. When the Huns lured the
king into the great pit, he flung it away- Procopius tells the
story- nor was it ever found again, though the Emperor Anastasius
offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it. The King of Malabar
had shown to a certain Venetian a rosary of three hundred and four
pearls, one for every god that he worshipped.
When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI., visited Louis
XII. of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to
Brantome, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great
light. Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four
hundred and twenty-one diamonds. Richard II. had a coat, valued at
thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies. Hall
described Henry VIII., on his way to the Tower previous to his
coronation, as wearing "a jacket of raised gold, the placard
embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike
about his neck of large balasses." The favourites of James I. wore
earrings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. Edward II. gave to Piers
Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar
of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parseme
with pearls. Henry II. wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and
had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two great
orients. The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of
Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls, and studded
with sapphires.
How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and
decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
Then he turned his attention to embroideries, and to the
tapestries that performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of
the Northern nations of Europe. As he investigated the subject- and he
always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed
for the moment in whatever he took up- he was almost saddened by the
reflection of the ruin that Time brought on beautiful and wonderful
things. He, at any rate, had escaped that. Summer followed summer, and
the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of
horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged. No
winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom. Flow
different it was with material things! Where had they passed to? Where
was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods had fought
against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the
pleasure of Athena? Where, the huge velarium that Nero had stretched
across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail of purple on which was
represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by
white gilt-reined steeds? He longed to see the curious table-napkins
wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were displayed all the
dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary
cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; the
fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
Pontus, and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs,
forests, rocks, hunters- all, in fact, that a painter can copy from
nature;"- and the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the
sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning
"Madame, je suis tout joyeux," the musical accompaniment of the
words being wrought in gold thread, and each note, of square shape
in those days, formed with four pearls. He read of the room that was
prepared at the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of
Burgundy, and was decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one
parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's arms, and five
hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly
ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold."
Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of black velvet
powdered with crescents and suns. Its curtains were of damask, with
leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver ground, and
fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it stood in a
room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon
cloth of silver. Louis XIV. had gold embroidered caryatides fifteen
feet high in his apartment. The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland,
was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with
verses from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully
chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. It
had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard
of Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy.
And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite
specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work,
getting the dainty Delhi muslines, finely wrought with gold with
gold thread palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles'
wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the
East as "wovenair," and "running water," and "evening dew"; strange
figured cloths from Java; elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books
bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks, and wrought with fleurs de
lys, birds and images: veils of lacis worked in Hungary point;
Sicilian brocades, and stiff Spanish velvets; Georgian work with its
gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas with their green-toned golds and
their marvellously plumaged birds.
He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as
indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church.
In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he
had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really
the raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels
and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is
worn by the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by
self-inflicted pain. He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk
and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden
pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on
either side was the pineapple device wrought in seed-pearls. The
orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of
the Virgin, and the coronation of the Virgin was figured in coloured
silks upon the hood. This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.
Another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with Heart-shaped groups
of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the
details of which were picked out with silver thread and coloured
crystals. The morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work.
The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were
starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St.
Sebastian, He has chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue
silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold,
figured with representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ,
and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics
of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and
dolphins and fleurs de lys; altar frontals of crimson velvet and
blue linen; and many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the
mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that
quickened his imagination.
For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his
lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which
he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at
times to be almost too great to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely
locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung
with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features
showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had
draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. For weeks he would not
go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his
light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in
mere existence. Then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the
house, go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay
there, day after day, until he was driven away. On his return he would
sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but
filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is
half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the
misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his
own.
After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and
gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry,
as well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they
had more than once spent the winter. He hated to be separated from the
picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that
during his absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of
the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.
He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing. It was
true that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and
ugliness of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could
they learn from that? He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt
him. He had not painted it. What was it to him how vile and full of
shame it looked? Even if he told them, would they believe it?
Yet he was afraid. Sometimes when he was down at his great house
in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his
own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by
the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendor of his mode of life, he
would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that
the door had not been tampered with, and that the picture was still
there. What if it should be stolen? The mere thought made him cold
with horror. Surely the world would know his secret then. Perhaps
the world already suspected it.
For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted
him. He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his
birth and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and
it was said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into
the smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another
gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. Curious stories
became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. It
was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in
a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted
with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. His
extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear
again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or
pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold, searching eyes, as
though they were determined to discover his secret.
Of such insolences and attempted slights, he, of course, took no
notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank debonnair
manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that
wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a
sufficient answer to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were
circulated about him. It was remarked, however, that some of those who
had been most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.
Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all
social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to grow
pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.
Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many, his
strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain element of
security. Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready
to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and
fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more
importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest
respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good
chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that
the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is
irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot
atone for half-cold entrees, as Lord Henry remarked once, in a
discussion on the subject; and there is possibly a good deal to be
said for his view. For the canons of good society are, or should be,
the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality,
and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the
wit and beauty that makes such plays delightful to us. Is
insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a
method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at
the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing
simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a
being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform
creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and
passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous
maladies of the dead. He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold
picture-gallery of his country house and look at the various portraits
of those whose blood flowed in his veins. Here was Philip Herbert,
described by Francis Osborne, in his "Memoires on the Reigns of
Queen Elizabeth and King James," as one who was "caressed by the Court
for his handsome face, which kept him not long company." Was it
young Herbert's life that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous
germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? Was it
some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and
almost without cause, give utterance, in Basil Hallward's studio, to
the mad prayer that had so changed his life? Here, in gold-embroidered
red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wrist-bands,
stood Sir Anthony Sherard, with his silver-and-black armour piled at
his feet. What had this man's legacy been? Had the lover of Giovanna
of Naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame? Were his
own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to
realize? Here, from the fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux,
in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves. A flower
was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar of
white and damask roses. On a table by her side lay a mandolin and an
apple. There were large green rosettes upon her little pointed
shoes. He knew her life, and the strange stories that were told
about her lovers. Had he something of her temperament in him? These
oval heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. What of George
Willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches? How evil
he looked! The face was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips
seemed to be twisted with disdain. Delicate lace ruffles fell over the
lean yellow hands that were so overladen with rings. He had been a
macaroni of the eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of
Lord Ferrars. What of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of
the Prince Regent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the
secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he
was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose! What passions had he
bequeathed? The world had looked upon him as infamous. He had led
the orgies at Carlton House. The star of the Garter glittered upon his
breast. Beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid,
thin-lipped woman in black. Her blood, also, stirred within him. How
curious it all seemed! And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face, and
her moist wine-dashed lips- he knew what he had got from her. He had
got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty of others. She
laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress. There were vine leaves in
her hair. The purple spilled from the cup she was holding. The
carnations of the painting had withered, but the eyes were still
wonderful in their depth and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to
follow him wherever he went.
Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There
were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history
was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act
and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it
had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known
them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of
subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
been his own.
The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life
had himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he
tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he
had sat, as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri reading the shameful
books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him
and the flute-player mocked the swagger of the censer, and, as
Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their
stables, and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted
horse; and, as Domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with
marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection
of the digger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that
terrible taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies
nothing: and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of
the Circus, and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by
silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates
to a House of Gold, and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed
by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied
the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage, and
given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter,
and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some
curious tapestries or cunningly-wrought enamels, were pictured the
awful and beautiful forms of those whom Vice and Blood and Weariness
had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his
wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover
might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the
Venetian, known as Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to assume
the title of Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand
florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria
Visconti, who used hounds to chase living men, and whose murdered body
was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on
his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle
stained with the blood of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal
Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV., whose beauty
was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora of
Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and
centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as
Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by
the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as
other men have for red wine- the son of the Fiend, as was reported,
and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him
for his own soul: Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of
Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was
infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta,
and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy
of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison
to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful
passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI., who
had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of
the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had
sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards
painted with the images of Love and Death and Madness; and, in his
trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthus-like curls, Grifonetto
Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his
page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the
yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but
weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.
There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them at
night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. The Renaissance
knew of strange manners of poisoning- poisoning by a helmet and a
lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded
pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a
book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode
through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.



Chapter 12

It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth
birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.
He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's, where he
had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was
cold and foggy. At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley
Street a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast, and with the
collar of his grey ulster turned up. He had a bag in his hand.
Dorian recognized him. It was Basil Hallward. A strange sense of fear,
for which he could not account, came over him. He made no sign of
recognition, and went on quickly, in the direction of his own house.
But Hallward had seen him. Dorian heard him first stopping on the
pavement and then hurrying after him. In a few moments his hand was on
his arm.
"Dorian! What an extraordinary piece of luck! I have been waiting
for you in your library ever since nine o'clock. Finally I took pity
on your tired servant, and told him to go to bed, as he let me out.
I am off to Paris by the midnight train, and I particularly wanted
to see you, before I left. I thought it was you, or rather your fur
coat, as you passed me. But I wasn't quite sure. Didn't you
recognize me?"
"In this fog, my dear Basil? Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor
Square, I believe my house is somewhere about here, but I don't feel
at all certain about it. I am sorry you are going away, as I have
not seen you for ages. But I suppose you will be back soon?"
"No: I am going to be out of England for six months. I intend to
take a studio in Paris, and shut myself up till I have finished a
great picture I have in my head. However, it wasn't about myself I
wanted to talk. Here we are at your door. Let me come in for a moment.
I have something to say to you."
"I shall be charmed. But won't you miss your train?" said Dorian
Gray, languidly, as he passed up the steps and opened the door with
his latch-key.
The lamp-light struggled out through the fog, and Hallward looked at
his watch.
"I have heaps of time," he answered. "The train doesn't go till
twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven. In fact, I was on my way
to the club to look for you, when I met you. You see, I sha'n't have
any delay about luggage, as I have sent on my heavy things. All I have
with me is in this bag, and I can easily get to Victoria in twenty
minutes."
Dorian looked at him and smiled. "What a way for a fashionable
painter to travel! A Gladstone bag and an ulster! Come in, or the
fog will get into the house. And mind you don't talk about anything
serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be."
Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the
library. There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open
hearth. The lamps were lit, and an open Dutch silver spirit-case
stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers,
on a little marqueterie table.
"You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian. He gave me
everything I wanted, including your best gold-tipped cigarettes. He is
a most hospitable creature. I like him much better than the
Frenchman you used to have. What has become of the Frenchman, by the
bye?"
Dorian shrugged his shoulders. "I believe he married Lady Radley's
maid, and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.
Anglomanie is very fashionable over there now, I hear. It seems
silly of the French, doesn't it? But- do you know?- he was not at
all a bad servant. I never liked him, but I had nothing to complain
about. One often imagines things that are quite absurd. He was
really very devoted to me, and seemed quite sorry when he went away.
Have another brandy-and-soda? Or would you like hock-and-seltzer? I
always take hock-and-seltzer myself. There is sure to be some in the
next room."
"Thanks, I won't have anything more," said the painter, taking his
cap and coat off, and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in
the corner. "And now, my dear fellow, I want to speak to you
seriously. Don't frown like that. You make it so much more difficult
for me."
"What is it all about?" cried Dorian, in his petulant way,
flinging himself down on the sofa. "I hope it is not about myself. I
am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else."
"It is about yourself," answered Hallward, in his grave, deep voice,
"and I must say it to you. I shall only keep you half an hour."
Dorian sighed, and lit a cigarette. "Half an hour!" he murmured.
"It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your
own sake that I am speaking. I think it right that you should know
that the most dreadful things are being said against you in London."
"I don't wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about
other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have
not got the charm of novelty."
"They must interest you, Dorian. Every gentleman is interested in
his good name. You don't want people to talk of you as something
vile and degraded. Of course you have your position, and your
wealth, and all that kind of thing. But position and wealth are not
everything. Mind you, I don't believe these rumours at all. At
least, I can't believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes
itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk
sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man
has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of
his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. Somebody- I won't mention
his name, but you know him- came to me last year to have his
portrait done. I had never seen him before, and had never heard
anything about him at the time, though I have heard a good deal since.
He offered an extravagant price. I refused him. There was something in
the shape of his fingers that I hated. I know now that I was quite
right in what I fancied about him. His life is dreadful. But you,
Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous
untroubled youth- I can't believe anything against you. And yet I
see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and
when I am away from you, and I hear all these hideous things that
people are whispering about you, I don't know what to say. Why is
it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a
club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London
will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? You used to be
a friend of Lord Staveley. I met him at dinner last week. Your name
happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures
you have lent to the exhibition at the Dudley. Staveley curled his
lip, and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that
you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and
whom no chaste woman would sit in the same room with. I reminded him
that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. He told me.
He told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your
friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the
Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir
Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and
he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful
end? What about Lord Kent's only son, and his career? I met his father
yesterday in St. James's Street. He seemed broken with shame and
sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he
got now? What gentleman would associate with him?"
"Stop, Basil. You are talking about things of which you know
nothing," said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of
infinite contempt in his voice. "You ask me why Berwick leaves a
room when I enter it. It is because I know everything about his
life, not because he knows anything about mine. With such blood as
he has in his veins, how could his record be clean? You ask me about
Henry Ashton and young Perth. Did I teach the one his vices, and the
other his debauchery? If Kent's silly son takes his wife from the
streets, what is that to me? If Adrian Singleton writes his friend's
name across a bill, am I his keeper? I know how people chatter in
England. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their
gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies
of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart
society, and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this
country it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for
every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do
these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear
fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite."
"Dorian," cried Hallward, "that is not the question. England is
bad enough I know, and English society is all wrong. That is the
reason why I want you to be fine. You have not been fine. One has a
right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours
seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have
filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into
the depths. You led them there. Yes: you led them there, and yet you
can smile, as you are smiling now. And there is worse behind. I,
know you and Harry are inseparable. Surely for that reason, if for
none other, you should not have made his sister's name a byword."
"Take care, Basil. You go too far."
"I must speak, and you must listen. You shall listen. When you met
Lady Gwendolyn, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her. Is there
a single decent woman in London now who would drive with her in the
Park? Why, even her children are not allowed to live with her. Then
there are other stories- stories that you have been seen creeping at
dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the
foulest dens in London. Are they true? Can they be true? When I
first heard them, I laughed. I hear them now, and they make me
shudder. What about your country house, and the life that is led
there? Dorian, you don't know what is said about you. I won't tell you
that I don't want to preach to you. I remember Harry saying once
that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the
moment always begin by saying that, and then proceeded to break his
word. I do want to preach to you. I want you to lead such a life as
will make the world respect you. I want you to have a clean name and a
fair record. I want you to get rid of the dreadful people you
associate with. Don't shrug your shoulders like that. Don't be so
indifferent. You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not
for evil. They say that you corrupt every one with whom you become
intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house,
for shame of some kind to follow after. I don't know whether it is
or not. How should I know? But it is said of you. I am told things
that it seems impossible to doubt. Lord Gloucester was one of my
greatest friends at Oxford. He showed me a letter that his wife had
written to him when she was dying alone in her villa at Mentone.
Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever
read. I told him that it was absurd- that I knew you thoroughly, and
that you were incapable of anything of the kind. Know you? I wonder do
I know you? Before I could answer that, I should have to see your
soul."
"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa
and turning almost white from fear.
"Yes," answered Hallward, gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his
voice, "to see your soul. But only God can do that."
A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man.
"You shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from
the table. "Come: it is your own handiwork. Why shouldn't you look
at it? You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you
choose. Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they
would like me all the better for it. I know the age better than you
do, though you will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You
have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it
face to face."
There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. He
stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner. He
felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his
secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the
origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life
with the hideous memory of what he had done.
"Yes," he continued, coming closer to him, and looking steadfastly
into his stern eyes, "I shall show you my soul. You shall see the
thing that you fancy only God can see."
Hallward started back. "This is blasphemy, Dorian!" he cried. "You
must not say things like that. They are horrible, and they don't
mean anything."
"You think so?" he laughed again.
"I know so. As for what I said to you to-night, I said it for your
good. You know I have always been a staunch friend to you."
"Don't touch me. Finish what you have to say."
A twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face. He paused
for a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him. After all,
what right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray? If he had
done a tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have
suffered! Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the
fireplace, and stood there, looking at the burning logs with their
frost-like ashes and their throbbing cores of flame.
"I am waiting, Basil," said the young man, in a hard, clear voice.
He turned round. "What I have to say is this," he cried. "You must
give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against
you. If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning
to end, I shall believe you. Deny them, Dorian, deny them! Can't you
see what I am going through? My God! don't tell me that you are bad,
and corrupt, and shameful."
Dorian Gray smiled. There was a curl of contempt in his lips.
"Come upstairs, Basil," he said, quietly. "I keep a diary of my life
from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is
written. I shall show it to you if you come with me."
"I shall come with you, Dorian, if you wish it. I see I have
missed my train. That makes no matter. I can go to-morrow. But don't
ask me to read anything to-night. All I want is a plain answer to my
question."
"That shall be given to you upstairs. I could not give it here.
You will not have to read long."



Chapter 13

He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward
following close behind. They walked softly, as men do instinctively at
night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A
rising wind made some of the windows rattle.
When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the
floor and taking out the key turned it in the lock. "You insist on
knowing, Basil?" he asked, in a low voice.
"Yes."
"I am delighted," he answered, smiling. Then he added, somewhat
harshly: "You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know
everything about me. You have had more to do with my life than you
think:" and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. A
cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in
a flame of murky orange. He shuddered. "Shut the door behind you,"
he whispered, as he placed the lamp on the table.
Hallward glanced around him, with a puzzled expression. The room
looked as if it had not been lived in for years. A faded Flemish
tapestry, a curtained picture, an old Italian cassone, and an almost
empty bookcase- that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a
chair and a table. As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle
that was standing on the mantelshelf he saw that the whole place was
covered with dust, and that the carpet was in holes. A mouse ran
scuffling behind the wainscoting. There was a damp odour of mildew.
"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil? Draw
that curtain back, and you will see mine."
The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "You are mad, Dorian, or
playing a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.
"You won't? Then I must do it myself," said the young man; and he
tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw
in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There
was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and
loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was
looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely
spoiled that marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the
thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes
had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves
had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from
plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He
seemed to recognize his own brush-work, and the frame was his own
design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the
lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left-hand corner
was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. He had never
done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as
if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His
own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned, and
looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched,
and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. He passed his hand
across his forehead. It was dank with clammy sweat.
The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with
that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are
absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither
real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the
spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. He had taken
the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do
so.
"What does this mean?" cried Hallward, at last. His own voice
sounded shrill and curious in his ears.
"Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian Gray, crushing the flower
in his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my
good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who
explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me
that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment, that,
even now, I don't know whether I regret or not, I made a wish, perhaps
you would call it a prayer...."
"I remember it! Oh, how well I remember it! No! the thing is
impossible. The room is damp. Mildew has got into the canvas. The
paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them. I tell you the
thing is impossible."
"Ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to
the window, and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained
glass.
"You told me you had destroyed it."
"I was wrong. It has destroyed me."
"I don't believe it is my picture."
"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian, bitterly.
"My ideal, as you call it...."
"As you called it."
"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such
an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."
"Is it the face of my soul."
"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a
devil."
"Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian, with a
wild gesture of despair.
Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. "My God!
if it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with
your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you
fancy you to be!" He held the light up again to the canvas, and
examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had
left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and
horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the
leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a
corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.
His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor,
and lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out.
Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by
the table and buried his face in his hands.
"Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!" There was
no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window.
"Pray, Dorian, pray," he murmured. "What is it that one was taught
to say in one's boyhood? 'Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us
our sins. Wash away our iniquities.' Let us say that together. The
prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your
repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am
punished for it. You worshipped yourself too. We are both punished."
Dorian Gray turned slowly around, and looked at him with tear-dimmed
eyes. "It is too late, Basil," he faltered.
"It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we
cannot remember a prayer. Isn't there a verse somewhere, 'Though
your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow'?"
"Those words mean nothing to me now."
"Hush! don't say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My
God! Don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"
Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable
feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had
been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his
ear by those grinning lips. The mad passions of a hunted animal
stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the
table, more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything. He
glanced wildly around. Something glimmered on the top of the painted
chest that faced him. His eye fell on it. He knew what it was. It
was a knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece
of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him. He moved slowly
towards it, passing Hallward as he did so. As soon as he got behind
him, he seized it, and turned round. Hallward stirred in his chair
as if he was going to rise. He rushed at him, and dug the knife into
the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on
the table, and stabbing again and again.
There was a stifled groan, and the horrible sound of some one
choking with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up
convulsively, waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air. He
stabbed him twice more, but the man did not move. Something began to
trickle on the floor. He waited for a moment, still pressing the
head down. Then he threw the knife on the table, and listened.
He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare
carpet. He opened the door and went out on the landing. The house
was absolutely quiet. No one was about. For a few seconds he stood
bending over the balustrade, and peering down into the black
seething well of darkness. Then he took out the key and returned to
the room, locking himself in as he did so.
The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table
with bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms. Had it
not been for the red, jagged tear in the neck, and the clotted black
pool that was slowly widening on the table, one would have said that
the man was simply asleep.
How quickly it had all been done! He felt strangely calm, and,
walking over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the
balcony. The wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a
monstrous peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. He
looked down, and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing the
long beam of his lantern on the doors of the silent houses. The
crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner, and then
vanished. A woman in a fluttering shawl was creeping slowly by the
railings, staggering as she went. Now and then she stopped, and
peered back. Once, she began to sing in a hoarse voice. The
policeman strolled over and said something to her. She stumbled
away, laughing. A bitter blast swept across the Square. The gas
lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their
black iron branches to and fro. He shivered, and went back, closing
the window behind him.
Having reached the door, he turned the key, and opened it. He did
not even glance at the murdered man. He felt that the secret of the
whole thing was not to realize the situation. The friend who had
painted the fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due, had
gone out of his life. That was enough.
Then he remembered the lamp. It was a rather curious one of
Moorish workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of
burnished steel, and studded with coarse turquoises. Perhaps it
might be missed by his servant, and questions would be asked. He
hesitated for a moment, then he turned back and took it from the
table. He could not help seeing the dead thing. How still it was!
How horribly white the long hands looked! It was like a dreadful wax
image.
Having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs.
The woodwork creaked, and seemed to cry out as if in pain. He
stopped several times, and waited. No: everything was still. It was
merely. the sound of his own footsteps.
When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the
corner. They must be hidden away somewhere. He unlocked a secret press
that was in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own
curious disguises, and put them into it. He could easily burn them
afterwards. Then he pulled out his watch. It was twenty minutes to
two.
He sat down and began to think. Every year- every month, almost- men
were strangled in England for what he had done. There had been a
madness of murder in the air. Some red star had come too close to
the earth.... And yet what evidence was there against him? Basil
Hallward had left the house at eleven. No one had seen him come in
again. Most of the servants were at Selby Royal. His valet had gone to
bed.... Paris? Yes. It was to Paris that Basil had gone, and by the
midnight train, as he had intended. With his curious reserved
habits, it would be months before any suspicions would be aroused.
Months! Everything could be destroyed long before then.
A sudden thought struck him. He put on his fur coat and hat, and
went out into the hall. There he paused, hearing the slow, heavy tread
of the policeman on the pavement outside, and seeing the flash of
the bull's-eye reflected in the window. He waited, and held his
breath.
After a few moments he drew back the latch, and slipped out,
shutting the door very gently behind him. Then he began ringing, the
bell. In about five minutes his valet appeared, half dressed, and
looking very drowsy.
"I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said,
stepping in; "but I had forgotten my latchkey. What time is it?"
"Ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the
clock and blinking.
"Ten minutes past two? How horribly late! You must wake me at nine
to-morrow. I have some work to do."
"All right, sir."
"Did any one call this evening?"
"Mr. Hallward, sir. He stayed here till eleven, and then he went
away to catch his train."
"Oh! I am sorry I didn't see him. Did he leave any message?"
"No, sir, except that he would write to you from Paris, if he did
not find you at the club."
"That will do, Francis. Don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow."
"No, sir."
The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.
Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table, and passed into
the library. For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room
biting his lip, and thinking. Then he took down the Blue Book from one
of the shelves, and began to turn over the leaves. "Alan Campbell,
152, Hertford Street, Mayfair." Yes; that was the man he wanted.



Chapter 14

At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of
chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping
quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath
his cheek. He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or
study.
The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and
as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as
though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not
dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images of
pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of
its chiefest charms.
He turned round, and, leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his
chocolate. The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The
sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was
almost like a morning in May.
Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent
bloodstained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there
with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had
suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for
Basil Hallward, that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair,
came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was
still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that
was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.
He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would
sicken or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in
the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that
gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the
intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than a joy they brought,
or could ever bring, to the senses. But this was not one of them. It
was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with
poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself.
When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead,
and then got up hastily, and dressed himself with even more than his
usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his
necktie and scarf-pin, and changing his rings more than once. He spent
a long time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking
to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting
made for the servants at Selby, and going through his
correspondence. At some of the letters he smiled. Three of them
bored him. One he read several times over, and then tore up with a
slight look of annoyance in his face. "That awful thing, a woman's
memory!" as Lord Henry had once said.
After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his lips slowly
with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait, and going over to
the table sat down and wrote two letters. One he put in his pocket,
the other he handed to the valet.
"Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr.
Campbell is out of town, get his address."
As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette, and began sketching
upon a piece of paper, drawing first flowers, and bits of
architecture, and then human faces. Suddenly he remarked that every
face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil
Hallward. He frowned, and getting up, went over to the bookcase and
took out a volume at hazard. He was determined that he would not think
about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that he
should do so.
When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the
title-page of the book. It was Gautier's "Emaux et Camees,"
Charpentier's Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The
binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt
trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. It had been given to him by
Adrian Singleton. As he turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem
about the hand of Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "du supplice
encore mal lavee," with its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune."
He glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in
spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely
stanzas upon Venice;

"Sur une gamme chromatique,
Le sein de perles ruisselant,
La Venus de l'Adriatique
Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

L'esquif aborde et me depose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

How exquisite they were! As one read them, one seemed to be floating
down the green waterways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black
gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines
looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that
follow one as one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour
reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that
flutter round the tall honey-combed Campanile, or stalk, with such
stately grace, through the dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back
with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself:

"Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn
that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to
mad, delightful follies. There was romance in every place. But Venice,
like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true
romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had
been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret.
Poor Basil! what a horrible way for a man to die!
He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He
read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at
Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the
turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely
to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that
weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be
back by the hot lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and
rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles,
with small beryl eyes, that crawl over the green steaming mud; he
began to brood over those verses which, drawing music from
kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that Gautier compares
to a contralto voice, the "monstre charmant" that couches in the
porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a time the book fell from his
hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him.
What if Alan Campbell should be out of England? Days would elapse
before he could come back. Perhaps he might refuse to come. What could
he do then? Every moment was of vital importance.
They had been great friends once, five years before- almost
inseparable, indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.
When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled; Alan
Campbell never did.
He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real
appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the
beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian.
His dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had
spent a great deal of his time working in the Laboratory, and had
taken a good class in the Natural Science Tripos of his year.
Indeed, he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a
laboratory of his own, in which he used to shut himself up all day
long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on
his standing for parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was
a person who made up prescriptions. He was an excellent musician,
however, as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than
most amateurs. In fact, it was music that had first brought him and
Dorian Gray together- music and that indefinable attraction that
Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed
exercised often without being conscious of it. They had met at Lady
Berkshire's the night that Rubinstein played there, and after that
used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good
music was going on. For eighteen months their intimacy lasted.
Campbell was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To
him, as to many others, Dorian Dorian Gray was the type of
everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life. Whether or not a
quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew. But suddenly
people remarked that they scarcely spoke when they met, and that
Campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which Dorian
Gray was present. He had changed, too- was strangely melancholy at
times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music, and would never
himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he
was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to
practise. And this was certainly true. Every day he seemed to become
more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in
some of the scientific reviews, in connection with certain curious
experiments.
This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second he kept
glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly
agitated. At last he got up, and began to pace up and down the room,
looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides.
His hands were curiously cold.
The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling
with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards
the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was
waiting for him there; saw it indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with
dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very
brain of sight, and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was
useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the
imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a
living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand, and
grinned through moving masks. Then, suddenly, Time stopped for him.
Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible
thoughts, Time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a
hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at
it. Its very horror made him stone.
At last the door opened, and his servant entered. He turned glazed
eyes upon him.
"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.
A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came
back to his cheeks.
"Ask him to come in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself
again. His mood of cowardice had passed away.
The man bowed, and retired. In a few moments Alan Campbell walked
in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified
by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.
"Alan! this is kind of you. I thank you for coming."
"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you
said it was a matter of life and death." His voice was hard and
cold. He spoke with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt in
the steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian. He kept his
hands in the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have
noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.
"Yes: it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one
person. Sit down."
Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to
him. The two men's eyes met. In Dorian's there was infinite pity. He
knew that what he was going to do was dreadful.
After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said,
very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of
him he had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house,
a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated
at a table. He has been dead ten hours now. Don't stir, and don't look
at me like that. Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters
that do not concern you. What you have to do is this-"
"Stop, Gray. I don't want to know anything further. Whether what you
have told me is true or not true, doesn't concern me. I entirely
decline to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to
yourself. They don't interest me any more."
"Alan, they will have to interest you. This one will have to
interest you. I am awfully sorry for you, Alan. But I can't help
myself. You are the one mark who is able to save me. I am forced to
bring you into the matter. I have no option. Alan, you are scientific.
You know about chemistry, and things of that kind. You have made
experiments. What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is
upstairs- to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left.
Nobody saw this person come into the house. Indeed, at the present
moment he is supposed to be in Paris. He will not be missed for
months. When he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here.
You, Alan, you must change him, and everything that belongs to him,
into a handful of ashes that I may scatter in the air."
"You are mad, Dorian."
"Ah! I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."
"You are mad, I tell you- mad to imagine that I would raise a finger
to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. I will have
nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is. Do you think I am
going to peril my reputation for you? What is it to me what devil's
work you are up to?"
"It was suicide, Alan."
"I am glad of that. But who drove him to it? You, I should fancy."
"Do you still refuse to do this for me?"
"Of course I refuse. I will have absolutely nothing to do with it. I
don't care what shame comes on you. You deserve it all. I should not
be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. How dare you ask
me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? I should
have thought you knew more about people's characters. Your friend Lord
Henry Wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever
else he has taught you. Nothing will induce me to stir a step to
help you. You have come to the wrong man. Go to some of your
friends. Don't come to me."
"Alan, it was murder. I killed him. You don't know what he had
made me suffer. Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making
or marring of it than poor Harry has had. He may not have intended it,
the result was he same."
"Murder! Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to? I shall
not inform upon you. It is not my business. Besides, without my
stirring in the matter, you are certain to be arrested. Nobody ever
commits a crime without doing something stupid. But I will have
nothing to do with it."
"You must have something to do with it. Wait, wait a moment;
listen to me. Only listen, Alan. All I ask of you is to perform a
certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses,
and the horrors that you do there don't affect you. If in some hideous
dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a
leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to
flow through you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject.
You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing
anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were
benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the
world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that
kind. What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.
Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you
are accustomed to work at. And, remember, it is the only piece of
evidence against me. If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to
be discovered unless you help me."
"I have no desire to help you. You forget that. I am simply
indifferent to the whole thing. It has nothing to do with me."
"Alan, I entreat you. Think of the position I am in. Just before you
came I almost fainted with terror. You may know terror yourself some
day. No! don't think of that. Look at the matter purely from the
scientific point of view. You don't inquire where the dead things on
which you experiment come from. Don't inquire now. I have told you too
much as it is. But I beg of you to do this. We were friends once,
Alan."
"Don't speak about those days, Dorian: they are dead."
"The dead linger sometimes. The man upstairs will not go away. He is
sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. Alan!
Alan! if you don't come to my assistance I am ruined. Why, they will
hang me, Alan! Don't you understand? They will hang me for what I have
done."
"There is no good in prolonging this scene. I absolutely refuse to
do anything in the matter. It is insane of you to ask me."
"You refuse?"
"Yes."
"I entreat you, Alan."
"It is useless."
The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray's eyes. Then he
stretched out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something
on it. He read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it
across the table. Having done this, he got up, and went over to the
window.
Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper,
and opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale, and he
fell back in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him. He
felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.
After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round,
and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.
"I am so sorry for you, Alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no
alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see
the address. If you don't help me, I must send it. If you don't help
me, I will send it. You know what the result will be. But you are
going to help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to
spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern,
harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me-
no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate
terms."
Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed
through him.
"Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they
are. The thing is quite simple. Come, don't work yourself into this
fever. The thing has to be done. Face it, and do it."
A groan broke from Campbell's lips, and he shivered all over. The
ticking of the clock on the mantel-piece seemed to him to be
dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too
terrible to be borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly
tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was
threatened had already come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder
weighed like a band of lead. It was intolerable. It seemed to crush
him.
"Come, Alan, you must decide at once."
"I cannot do it," he said mechanically, as though words could
alter things.
"You must. You have no choice. Don't delay."
He hesitated a moment. "Is there a fire in the room upstairs?"
"Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos."
"I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."
"No, Alan, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet of
notepaper what you want, and my servant will take a cab and bring
the things back to you."
Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an
envelope to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it
carefully. Then he rang the bell, and gave it to his valet, with
orders to return as soon as possible, and to bring the things with
him.
As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and, having got
up from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering
with a kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men
spoke. A fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the
clock was like the beat of a hammer.
As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and, looking at
Dorian Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was
something in the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to
enrage him. "You are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered.
"Hush, Alan: you have saved my life," said Dorian.
"Your life? Good heavens! what a life that is. You have gone from
corruption to corruption, and you have culminated in crime. In doing
what I am going to do, what you force me to do, it is not of your life
that I am thinking."
"Ah, Alan," murmured Dorian, with a sigh, "I wish you had a
thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you." He turned
away as he spoke, and stood looking out at the garden. Campbell made
no answer.
After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant
entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long
coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously-shaped iron
clamps.
"Shall I leave the things here, sir?" he asked Campbell.
"Yes," said Dorian. "And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another
errand for you. What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies
Selby with orchids?"
"Harden, sir."
"Yes- Harden. You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden
personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,
and to have as few white ones as possible. In fact, I don't want any
white ones. It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty
place, otherwise I wouldn't bother you about it."
"No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?"
Dorian looked at Campbell. "How long will your experiment take,
Alan?" he said, in a calm, indifferent voice. The presence of a
third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.
Campbell frowned, and bit his lip. "It will take about five
hours," he answered.
"It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven,
Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You can
have the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall
not want you."
"Thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room.
"Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest
is! I'll take it for you. You bring the other things." He spoke
rapidly, and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by
him. They left the room together.
When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and
turned it in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came
into his eyes. He shuddered. "I don't think I can go in, Alan," he
murmured.
"It is nothing to me. I don't require you," said Campbell, coldly.
Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of his
portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn
curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had
forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas,
and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.
What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on
one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible
it was!- more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the
silent thing he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose
grotesque misshapen shadow, on the spotted carpet showed him that it
had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.
He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with
half-closed eyes and averted head walked quickly in, determined that
he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down,
and taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over
the picture.
There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed
themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard
Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other
things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to
wonder if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they
had thought of each other.
"Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.
He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
thrust back into the chair, and that Campbell was gazing into a
glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs he heard the key
being turned in the lock.
It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He
was pale, but absolutely calm. "I have done what you asked me to
do," he muttered. "And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other
again."
"You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that," said
Dorian, simply.
As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been
sitting at the table was gone.

Chapter 15

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed, and wearing a
large button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into
Lady Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was
throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his
manner as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful
as ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has
to play a part. Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night
could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible
as any tragedy of our age. Those finely-shaped fingers could never
have clutched a knife of sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on
God and goodness. He himself could not help wondering at the calm of
his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a
double life.
It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough,
who was a very clever woman, with what Lord Henry used to describe
as the remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an
excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having
buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had
herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich, rather
elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures of French
fiction, French cookery, and French esprit when she could get it.
Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him
that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. "I
know, my dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you," she
used to say, "and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake.
It is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time. As it
was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in
trying to raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with
anybody. However, that was all Narborough's fault. He was dreadfully
short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who
never sees anything."
Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was, as she
explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married
daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. "I think
it is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered. "Of course I go and
stay with them every summer after I come from Homburg, but then an old
woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really
wake them up. You don't know what an existence they lead down there.
It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early, because they
have so much to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to
think about. There has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since
the time of Queen Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep
after dinner. You sha'n't sit next either of them. You shall sit by
me, and amuse me."
Dorian murmured a graceful compliment, and looked round the room.
Yes: it was certainly a tedious party. Two of the people he had
never seen before, and the others consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one
of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have
no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; Lady Roxton,
an overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was
always trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly
plain that to her great disappointment no one would ever believe
anything against her; Mrs. Erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a
delightful lisp, and Venetian-red hair; Lady Alice Chapman, his
hostess's daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of those
characteristic British faces, that, once seen are never remembered;
and her husband, a red-cheeked, white-whiskered creature who, like
so many of his class, was under the impression that inordinate
joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas.
He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough, looking at
the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the
mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed: "How horrid of Henry Wotton to be
so late! I sent round to him this morning on chance, and he promised
faithfully not to disappoint me."
It was some consolation that Harry was to be there, and when the
door opened and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to
some insincere apology, he ceased to feel bored.
But at dinner he could not eat anything. Plate after plate went away
untasted. Lady Narborough kept scolding him for what she called "an
insult to poor Adolphe, who invented the menu specially for you,"
and now and then Lord Henry looked across at him, wondering at his
silence and abstracted manner. From time to time the butler filled his
glass with champagne. He drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to
increase.
"Dorian," said Lord Henry, at last, as the chaudfroid was being
handed round, "what is the matter with you to-night? You are quite out
of sorts."
"I believe he is in love," cried Lady Narborough, "and that he is
afraid to tell me for fear I should be jealous. He is quite right. I
certainly should."
"Dear Lady Narborough," murmured Dorian, smiling, "I have not been
in love for a whole week- not, in fact, since Madame de Ferrol left
town."
"How you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old
lady. "I really cannot understand it."
"It is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl,
Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry. "She is the one link between us and
your short frocks."
"She does not remember my short frocks at all, Lord Henry. But I
remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago, and how
dicolletee she was then."
"She is still dicolletee," he answered, taking an olive in his
long fingers; "and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like
an edition de luxe of a bad French novel. She is really wonderful, and
full of surprises. Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary.
When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief."
"How can you, Harry!" cried Dorian.
"It is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess. "But her
third husband, Lord Henry! You don't mean to say Ferrol is the
fourth?"
"Certainly, Lady Narborough."
"I don't believe a word of it."
"Well, ask Mr. Gray. He is one of her most intimate friends."
"Is it true, Mr. Gray?"
"She assures me so, Lady Narborough," said Dorian. "I asked her
whether, like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and
hung at her girdle. She told me she didn't, because none of them had
had any hearts at all."
"Four husbands! Upon my word that is trop de zele."
"Trop d' audace, I tell her," said Dorian.
"Oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear. And what is
Ferrol like? I don't know him."
"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal
classes," said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.
Lady Narborough hit him with her fan. "Lord Henry, I am not at all
surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked."
"But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his
eyebrows. "It can only be the next world. This world and I are on
excellent terms."
"Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady,
shaking her head.
Lord Henry looked serious for some moments. "It is perfectly
monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying
things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and
entirely true."
"Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair.
"I hope so," said his hostess, laughing. "But really if you all
worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way, I shall have to marry
again so as to be in the fashion."
"You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord
Henry. "You were far too happy. When a woman marries again it is
because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it
is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk
theirs."
"Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady.
"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was
the rejoinder. "Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of
them they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. You will
never ask me to dinner again, after saying this, I am afraid, Lady
Narborough; but it is quite true."
"Of course it is true, Lord Henry. If we women did not love you
for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be
married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however,
that that would alter you much. Nowadays all the married men live like
bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men."
"Fin de siecle," murmured Lord Henry.
"Fin du globe," answered his hostess.
"I wish it were fin du globe," said Dorian, with a sigh. "Life is
a great disappointment."
"Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves,
"don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that
one knows that Life has exhausted him. Lord Henry is very wicked,
and I sometimes wish that I had been; but you are made to be good- you
look so good. I must find you a nice wife. Lord Henry, don't you think
that Mr. Gray should get married?"
"I am always telling him so, Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry, with
a bow.
"Well, we must look out for a suitable match for him. I shall go
through Debrett carefully to-night. and draw out a list of all the
eligible young ladies."
"With their ages, Lady Narborough?" asked Dorian.
"Of course, with their ages, slightly edited. But nothing must be
done in a hurry. I want it to be what The Morning Post calls a
suitable alliance, and I want you both to be happy."
"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord
Henry. "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love
her."
"Ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her
chair, and nodding to Lady Ruxton. "You must come and dine with me
soon again. You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what
Sir Andrew prescribes for me. You must tell me what people you would
like to meet, though. I want it to be a delightful gathering."
"I like men who have a future, and women who have a past," he
answered. "Or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?"
"I fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up. "A thousand
pardons, my dear Lady Ruxton," she added, "I didn't see you hadn't
finished your cigarette."
"Never mind, Lady Narborough. I smoke a great deal too much. I am
going to limit myself, for the future."
"Pray don't, Lady Ruxton," said Lord Henry. "Moderation is a fatal
thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a
feast."
Lady Ruxton glanced at him curiously. "You must come and explain
that to me some afternoon, Lord Henry. It sounds a fascinating
theory," she murmured, as she swept out of the room.
"Now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and
scandal," cried Lady Narborough from the door. "If you do, we are sure
to squabble upstairs."
The men laughed, and Mr. Chapman got up solemnly from the foot of
the table and came up to the top. Dorian Gray changed his seat, and
went and sat by Lord Henry. Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud
voice about the situation in the House of Commons. He guffawed at
his adversaries. The word doctrinaire- word full of terror to the
British mind- reappeared from time to time between his explosions.
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. He hoisted
the Union Jack on the pinnacles of Thought. The inherited stupidity of
the race- sound English common sense he jovially termed it- was
shown to be the proper bulwark for Society.
A smile curved Lord Henry's lips, and he turned round and looked
at Dorian.
"Are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked. "You seemed rather out
of sorts at dinner."
"I am quite well, Harry. I am tired. That is all."
"You were charming last night. The little Duchess is quite devoted
to you. She tells me she is going down to Selby."
"She has promised to come on the twentieth."
"Is Monmouth to be there too?"
"Oh, yes, Harry."
"He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her. She is very
clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of
weakness. It is the feet of clay that makes the gold of the image
precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay.
White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire,
and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences."
"How long has she been married?" asked Dorian.
"An eternity, she tells me. I believe, according to the peerage,
it is ten years, but ten years with Monmouth must have been like
eternity, with time thrown in. Who else is coming?"
"Oh, the Willoughbys, Lord Rugby and his wife, our hostess, Geoffrey
Clouston, the usual set. I have asked Lord Grotrian."
"I like him," said Lord Henry. "A great many people don't, but I
find him charming. He atones for being occasionally somewhat
over-dressed, by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very
modern type."
"I don't know if he will be able to come, Harry. He may have to go
to Monte Carlo with his father."
"Ah! what a nuisance people's people are! Try and make him come.
By the way, Dorian, you ran off very early last night. You left before
eleven. What did you do afterwards? Did you go straight home?"
Dorian glanced at him hurriedly, and frowned. "No, Harry," he said
at last, "I did not get home till nearly three."
"Did you go to the club?"
"Yes," he answered. Then he bit his lip. "No, I don't mean that. I
didn't go to the club. I walked about. I forget what I did.... How
inquisitive you are, Harry! You always want to know what one has
been doing. I always want to forget what I have been doing. I came
in at half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time. I had left my
latchkey at home, and my servant had to let me in. If you want any
corroborative evidence on the subject you can ask him."
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, as if I cared!
Let us go up to the drawing-room. No sherry, thank you, Mr. Chapman.
Something has happened to you, Dorian. Tell me what it is. You are not
yourself to-night."
"Don't mind me, Harry. I am irritable, and out of temper. I shall
come round and see you to-morrow or next day. Make my excuses to Lady.
Narborough. I sha'n't go upstairs. I shall go home. I must go home."
"All right, Dorian. I dare say I shall see you to-morrow at
tea-time. The Duchess is coming."
"I will try to be there, Harry," he said, leaving the room. As he
drove back to his own house he was conscious that the sense of
terror he thought he had strangled had come back to him. Lord
Henry's casual questioning had made him lose his nerves for the
moment, and he wanted his nerve still. Things that were dangerous
had to be destroyed. He winced. He hated the idea of even touching
them.
Yet it had to be done. He realized that, and when he had locked
the door of his library, he opened the secret press into which he
had thrust Basil Hallward's coat and bag. A huge fire was blazing.
He piled another log on it. The smell of singeing clothes and
burning leather was horrible. It took him three-quarters of an hour to
consume everything. At the end he felt faint and sick, and having
lit some Algerian pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his
hands and forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar.
Suddenly he started. His eyes grew strangely bright and he gnawed
nervously at his under-lip. Between two of the windows stood a large
Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony, and inlaid with ivory and
blue lapis. He watched it as though it were a thing that could
fascinate and make afraid, as though it held something that he
longed for and yet almost loathed. His breath quickened. A mad craving
came over him. He lit a cigarette and then threw it away. His
eyelids drooped till the long fringed lashes almost touched his cheek.
But he still watched the cabinet. At last he got up from the sofa on
which he had been lying, went over to it, and, having unlocked it,
touched some hidden spring. A triangular drawer passed slowly out. His
fingers moved instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on
something. It was a small Chinese box of black and gold-dust
lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides patterned with curved waves,
and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tasselled in plaited
metal threads. He opened it. Inside was a green paste waxy in
lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent.
He hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile
upon his face. Then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was
terribly hot, he drew himself up, and glanced at the clock. It was
twenty minutes to twelve. He put the box back, shutting the cabinet
doors as he did so, and went into his bedroom.
As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian
Gray, dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat,
crept quietly out of his house. In Bond Street he found a hansom
with a good horse. He hailed it, and in a low voice gave the driver an
address.
The man shook his head. "It is too far for me," he muttered.
"Here is a sovereign for you," said Dorian. "You shall have
another if you drive fast."
"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an
hour," and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round, and
drove rapidly towards the river.



Chapter 16

A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked
ghastly in the dripping mist. The public-houses were just closing, and
dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their
doors. From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. In
others, drunkards brawled and screamed.
Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead,
Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great
city, and now and then he repeated to himself the words that Lord
Henry had said to him on the first day they had met, "To cure the soul
by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." Yes,
that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again
now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of
horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the
madness of sins that were new.
The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to
time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.
The gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy. Once
the man lost his way, and had to drive back half a mile. A steam
rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles. The side-windows of
the hansom were clogged with a grey-flannel mist.
"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of
the soul!" How the words rang in his ears! His soul, certainly, was
sick to death. Was it true that the senses could cure it? Innocent
blood had been spilt. What could atone for that? Ah! for that there
was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness
was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the
thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung
one. Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken to him as he had
done? Who had made him a judge over others? He had said things that
were dreadful, horrible, not to be endured.
On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him, at
each step. He thrust up the trap, and called to the man to drive
faster. The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him. His
throat burned, and his delicate hands twitched nervously together.
He struck at the horse madly with his stick. The driver laughed, and
whipped up. He laughed in answer, and the man was silent.
The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black web of
some sprawling spider. The monotony became unbearable, and, as the
mist thickened, he felt afraid.
Then they passed by lonely brickfields. The fog was lighter here,
and he could see the strange bottle-shaped kilns with their orange
fan-like tongues of fire. A dog barked as they went by, and far away
in the darkness some wandering seagull screamed. The horse stumbled in
a rut, then swerved aside, and broke into a gallop.
After some time they left the clay road, and rattled again over
rough-paven streets. Most of the windows were dark, but now and then
fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamp-lit blind. He
watched them curiously. They moved like monstrous marionettes, and
made gestures like live things. He hated them. A dull rage was in
his heart. As they turned a corner a woman yelled something at them
from an open door, and two men ran after the hansom for about a
hundred yards. The driver beat at them with his whip.
It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. Certainly
with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray shaped and
reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he
had found in them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and
justified, by intellectual approval, passions that without such
justification would still have dominated his temper. From cell to cell
of his brain crept the one thought; and the wild desire to live,
most terrible of all man's appetites, quickened into force each
trembling nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful to
him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that
very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the
loathsome den, the crude vileness of disordered life, the very
vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense
actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the
dreamy shadows of Song. They were what he needed for forgetfulness. In
three days he would be free.
Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane. Over
the low roofs and jagged chimney-stacks of the houses rose the black
masts of ships. Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to
the yards.
"Somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through
the trap.
Dorian started, and peered round. "This will do," he answered,
and, having got out hastily, and given the driver the extra fare he
had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay. Here
and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman. The
light shook and splintered in the puddles. A red glare came from an
outward-bound steamer that was coaling. The slimy pavement looked like
a wet mackintosh.
He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if
he was being followed. In about seven or eight minutes he reached a
small shabby house, that was wedged in between two gaunt factories. In
one of the top windows stood a lamp. He stopped, and gave a peculiar
knock.
After a little while he heard steps in the passage, and the chain
being unhooked. The door opened quietly, and he went in without saying
a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself upon the
shadow as he passed. At the end of the hall hung a tattered green
curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him
in from the street. He dragged it aside, and entered a long, low
room which looked as if it had once been a third-rate
dancing-saloon. Shrill flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the
fly-blown mirrors that faced them, were ranged round the walls. Greasy
reflectors of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering discs of light.
The floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and
there into mud, and stained with rings of spilt liquor. Some Malays
were crouching by a little charcoal stove playing with bone
counters, and showing their white teeth as they chattered. In one
corner with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a
table, and by the tawdrily-painted bar that ran across one complete
side stood two haggard women mocking an old man who was brushing the
sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust. "He thinks he's got
red ants on him," laughed one of them, as Dorian passed by. The man
looked at her in terror, and began to whimper.
At the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a
darkened chamber. As Dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the
heavy odour of opium met him. He heaved a deep breath, and his
nostrils quivered with pleasure. When he entered, a young man with
smooth yellow hair, who was bending over a lamp lighting a long thin
pipe, looked up at him, and nodded in a hesitating manner.
"You here, Adrian?" muttered Dorian.
"Where else should I be?" he answered, listlessly. "None of the
chaps will speak to me now."
"I thought you had left England."
"Darlington is not going to do anything. My brother paid the bill at
last. George doesn't speak to me either.... I don't care," he added,
with a sigh. "As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends.
I think I have had too many friends."
Dorian winced, and looked around at the grotesque things that lay in
such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs,
the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He
knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull
hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy. They were
better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a
horrible malady, was eating his soul away. From time to time he seemed
to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him. Yet he felt he could
not stay. The presence of Adrian Singleton troubled him. He wanted
to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from
himself.
"I am going on to the other place," he said, after a pause.
"On the wharf?"
"Yes."
"That mad-cat is sure to be there. They won't have her in this place
now."
Dorian shrugged his shoulders. "I am sick of women who love one.
Women who hate one are much more interesting. Besides, the stuff is
better."
"Much the same."
"I like it better. Come and have something to drink. I must have
something."
"I don't want anything," murmured the young man.
"Never mind."
Adrian Singleton rose up wearily, and followed Dorian to the bar.
A half caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a
hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers in
front of them. The women sidled up, and began to chatter. Dorian
turned his back on them, and said something in a low voice to Adrian
Singleton.
A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one
of the women. "We're very proud to-night," she sneered.
"For God's sake don't talk to me," cried Dorian, stamping his foot
on the ground. "What do you want? Money? Here it is. Don't ever talk
to me again."
Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes, then
flickered out, and left them dull and glazed. She tossed her head, and
raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers. Her companion
watched her enviously.
"It's no use," sighed Adrian Singleton "I don't care to go back.
What does it matter? I am quite happy here."
"You will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said Dorian,
after a pause.
"Perhaps."
"Good-night, then."
"Good-night," answered the young man, passing up the steps, and
wiping his parched mouth with a handkerchief.
Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face. As he
drew the curtain aside a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips
of the woman who had taken the money. "There goes the devil's
bargain!" she hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice.
"Curse you," he answered, "don't call me that."
She snapped her fingers. "Prince Charming is what you like to be
called, ain't it?" she yelled after him.
The drowsy sailor leapt to his feet as she spoke, and looked
wildly round. The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his
ear. He rushed out as if in pursuit.
Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain. His
meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered
if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as
Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult. He bit
his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad. Yet, after all, what
did it matter to him? One's days were too brief to take the burden
of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life,
and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay
so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again,
indeed. In her dealings with man Destiny never closed her accounts.
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for
sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that
every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be
instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the
freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons
move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed,
or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination,
and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not
of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that
morning-star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he
fell.
Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul hungry
for rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his steps as he
went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him
often as a short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going, he
felt himself suddenly seized from behind, and before he had time to
defend himself he was thrust back against the wall, with a brutal hand
round his throat.
He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched the
tightening fingers away. In a second he heard the click of a revolver,
and saw the gleam of a polished barrel pointing straight at his
head, and the dusky form of a short thick-set man facing him.
"What do you want?" he gasped.
"Keep quiet," said the man. "If you stir, I shoot you."
"You are mad. What have I done to you?"
"You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," was the answer, "and Sibyl
Vane was my sister. She killed herself. I know it. Her death is at
your door. I swore I would kill you in return. For years I have sought
you. I had no clue, no trace. The two people who could have
described you were dead. I knew nothing of you but the pet name she
used to call you. I heard it to-night by chance. Make your peace
with God, for to-night you are going to die."
Dorian Gray grew sick with fear. "I never knew her," he stammered.
"I never heard of her. You are mad."
"You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane,
you are going to die." There was a horrible moment. Dorian did not
know what to say or do. "Down on your knees!" growled the man. "I give
you one minute to make your peace- no more. I go on board to-night for
India, and I must do my job first. One minute. That's all."
Dorian's arms fell to his side. Paralyzed with terror, he did not
know what to do. Suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain.
"Stop," he cried. "How long ago is it since your sister died? Quick,
tell me!"
"Eighteen years," said the man. "Why do you ask me? What do years
matter?"
"Eighteen years," laughed Dorian Gray, with a touch of triumph in
his voice. "Eighteen years! Set me under the lamp and look at my
face."
James Vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant.
Then he seized Dorian Gray and dragged him from the archway.
Dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to
show him the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen,
for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of
boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth. He seemed little more than
a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than
his sister had been when they had parted so many years ago. It was
obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed her life.
He loosened his hold and reeled back. "My God! my God!" he cried,
"and I would have murdered you!"
Dorian Gray drew a long breath. "You have been on the brink of
committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly.
"Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own
hands."
"Forgive me, sir," muttered James Vane. "I was deceived. A chance
word I heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track."
"You had better go home, and put that pistol away, or you may get
into trouble," said Dorian, turning on his heel, and going slowly down
the street.
James Vane stood on the pavement in horror. He was trembling from
head to foot. After a little while a black shadow that had been
creeping along the dripping wall, moved out into the light and came
close to him with stealthy footsteps. He felt a hand laid on his arm
and looked round with a start. It was one of the women who had been
drinking at the bar.
"Why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting her haggard
face quite close to his. "I knew you were following him when you
rushed out from Daly's. You fool! You should have killed him. He has
lots of money, and he's as bad as bad."
"He is not the man I am looking for," he answered, "and I want no
man's money. I want a man's life. The man whose life I want must be
nearly forty now. This one is little more than a boy. Thank God, I
have not got his blood upon my hands."
The woman gave a bitter laugh. "Little more than a boy!" she
sneered. "Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince
Charming made me what I am."
"You lie!" cried James Vane.
She raised her hand up to heaven. "Before God I am telling the
truth," she cried.
"Before God?"
"Strike me dumb if it ain't so. He is the worst one that comes here.
They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh
on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn't changed much since
then. I have though," she added with a sickly leer.
"You swear this?"
"I swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth. "But don't
give me away to him," she whined; "I am afraid of him. Let me have
some money for my night's lodging."
He broke from her with an oath, and rushed to the corner of the
street, but Dorian Gray had disappeared. When he looked back, the
woman had vanished also.



Chapter 17

A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby
Royal talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband,
a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests. It was tea-time,
and the mellow light of the huge lace-covered lamp that stood on the
table lit up the delicate china and hammered silver of the service
at which the Duchess was presiding. Her white hands were moving
daintily among the cups, and her full red lips were smiling at
something that Dorian had whispered to her. Lord Henry was lying
back in a silk-draped wicker chair looking at them. On a
peach-coloured divan sat Lady Narborough pretending to listen to the
Duke's description of the last Brazilian beetle that he had added to
his collection. Three young men in elaborate smoking-suits were
handing tea-cakes to some of the women. The house-party consisted of
twelve people, and there were more expected to arrive on the next day.
"What are you two talking about?" said Lord Henry, strolling over to
the table, and putting his cup down. "I hope Dorian has told you about
my plan for rechristening everything, Gladys. It is a delightful
idea."
"But I don't want to be rechristened, Harry," rejoined the
Duchess, looking up at him with her wonderful eyes. "I am quite
satisfied with my own name, and I am sure Mr. Gray should be satisfied
with his."
"My dear Gladys, I would not alter either name for the world. They
are both perfect. I was thinking chiefly of flowers. Yesterday I cut
an orchid, for my buttonhole. It was a marvellous spotted thing, as
effective as the seven deadly sins. In a thoughtless moment I asked
one of the gardeners what it was called. He told me that it was a fine
specimen of Rooinsoniana, or something dreadful of that kind. It is
a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to
things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one
quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in
literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled
to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."
"Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked.
"His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian.
"I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the Duchess.
"I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair.
"From a label there is no escape! I refuse the title."
"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.
"You wish me to defend my throne, then?"
"Yes."
"I give the truths of to-morrow."
"I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered.
"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her
mood.
"Of your shield, Harry: not of your spear."
"I never tilt against Beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand.
"That is your error, Harry, believe me. You value beauty far too
much."
"How can you say that, I admit that I think that it is better to
be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more
ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be
ugly?"
"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the Duchess.
"What becomes of your simile about the orchid?"
"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good
Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly
virtues have made our England what she is."
"You don't like your country, then?" she asked.
"I live in it."
"That you may censure it the better."
"Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he enquired.
"What do they say of us?"
"That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop."
"Is that yours, Harry?"
"I give it to you."
"I could not use it. It is too true."
"You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a
description."
"They are practical."
"They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their
ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."
"Still, we have done great things."
"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."
"We have carried their burden."
"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."
She shook her head. "I believe in the race," she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay fascinates me more."
"What of Art?" she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for Belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith."
"What are you?"
"To define is to limit."
"Give me a clue."
"Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth."
"You bewilder me. Let us talk of some one else."
"Our host is a delightful topic. Years ago he was christened
Prince Charming."
"Ah! don't remind me of that," cried Dorian Gray.
"Our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the Duchess,
colouring. "I believe he thinks that Monmouth married me on purely
scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern
butterfly."
"Well, I hope he won't stick pins into you, Duchess," laughed
Dorian.
"Oh! my maid does that already, Mr. Gray, when she is annoyed with
me."
"And what does she get annoyed with you about, Duchess?"
"For the most trivial things, Mr. Gray, I assure you. Usually
because I come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her that I must be
dressed by half-past eight."
"How unreasonable of her! You should give her warning."
"I daren't, Mr. Gray. Why, she invents hats for me. You remember the
one I wore at Lady Hilstone's garden-party? You don't, but it is
nice of you to pretend that you do. Well, she made it out of
nothing. All good hats are made out of nothing."
"Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry.
"Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular
one must be a mediocrity."
"Not with women," said the Duchess, shaking her head, "and women
rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women,
as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your
eyes, if you ever love at all."
"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured Dorian.
"Ah! then, you never really love, Mr. Gray," answered the Duchess,
with mock sadness.
"My dear Gladys!" cried Lord Henry. "How can you say that? Romance
lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an
art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever
loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It
merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at
best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as
often as possible."
"Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?" asked the Duchess,
after a pause.
"Especially when one has been wounded by it," answered Lord Henry.
The Duchess turned and looked at Dorian Gray with a curious
expression in her eyes. "What do you say to that, Mr. Gray?" she
enquired.
Dorian hesitated a moment. Then he threw back his head and
laughed. "I always agree with Harry, Duchess."
"Even when he is wrong?"
"Harry is never wrong, Duchess."
"And does his philosophy make you happy?"
"I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have
searched for pleasure."
"And found it, Mr. Gray?"
"Often. Too often."
The Duchess sighed. "I am searching for peace," she said, "and if
I don't go and dress, I shall have none this evening."
"Let me get you some orchids, Duchess," cried Dorian, starting to
his feet, and walking down the conservatory.
"You are flirting disgracefully with him," said Lord Henry to his
cousin. "You had better take care. He is very fascinating."
"If he were not, there would be no battle."
"Greek meets Greek then?"
"I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman."
"They were defeated."
"There are worse things than capture," she answered.
"You gallop with a loose rein."
"Pace gives life," was the riposte. "I shall write it in my diary
to-night."
"What?"
"That a burnt child loves the fire."
"I am not even singed. My wings are untouched."
"You use them for everything, except flight."
"Courage has passed from men to women. It is a new experience for
us."
"You have a rival."
"Who?"
He laughed. "Lady Narborough," he whispered. "She perfectly adores
him."
"You fill me with apprehension. The appeal to Antiquity is fatal
to us who are romanticists."
"Romanticists! You have all the methods of science."
"Men have educated us."
"But not explained you."
"Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.
"Sphinxes without secrets."
She looked at him, smiling. "How long Mr. Gray is!" she said. "Let
us go and help him. I have not yet told him the colour of my frock."
"Ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys."
"That would be a premature surrender."
"Romantic Art begins with its climax."
"I must keep an opportunity for retreat."
"In the Parthian manner?"
"They found safety in the desert. I could not do that."
"Women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had
he finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory
came a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall.
Everybody started up. The Duchess stood motionless in horror. And with
fear in his eves Lord Henry rushed through the flapping palms, to find
Dorian Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a death-like
swoon.
He was carried at once into the blue drawing-room, and laid upon one
of the sofas. After a short time he came to himself, and looked
round with a dazed expression.
"What has happened?" he asked. "Oh! I remember. Am I safe here,
Harry,?" He began to tremble.
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, "you merely fainted. That was
all. You must have overtired yourself. You had better not come down to
dinner. I will take your place."
"No, I will come down," he said, struggling to his feet. "I would
rather come down. I must not be alone."
He went to his room and dressed. There was a wild recklessness of
gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill
of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the
window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the
face of James Vane watching him.



Chapter 18

The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most
of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet
indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of being hunted, snared,
tracked down, had begun to dominate him. If the tapestry did but
tremble in the wind, he shook. The dead leaves that were blown against
the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and
wild regrets. When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's
face peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once
more to lay its hand upon his heart.
But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out
of the night, and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him.
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the
imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet
of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen
brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor
the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust
upon the weak. That was all. Besides, had any stranger been prowling
round the house he would have been seen by the servants or the
keepers. Had any footmarks been found on the flower-beds, the
gardeners would have reported it. Yes: it had been merely fancy. Sibyl
Vane's brother had not come back to kill him. He had sailed away in
his ship to founder in some winter sea. From him, at any rate, he
was safe. Why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who
he was. The mask of youth had saved him.
And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to
think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them
visible form, and make them move before one! What sort of life would
his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him
from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his
ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay
asleep! As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with
terror, and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder.
Oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How
ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each
hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black
cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his
sin. When Lord Henry came in at six o'clock, he found him crying as
one whose heart will break.
It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. There
was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning
that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for
life. But it was not merely the physical conditions of environment
that had caused the change. His own nature had revolted against the
excess of anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of
its calm. With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so.
Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the
man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The
loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
Besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a
terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with
something of pity and not a little of contempt.
After breakfast he walked with the Duchess for an hour in the
garden, and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. The
crisp frost lay like salt upon the grass. The sky was an inverted
cup of blue metal. A thin film of ice bordered the flat reed-grown
lake.
At the corner of the pine wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey
Clouston, the Duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of
his gun. He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take
the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered
bracken and rough undergrowth.
"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.
"Not very good, Dorian. I think most of the birds have gone to the
open. I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new
ground."
Dorian strolled along by his side. The keen aromatic air, the
brown and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of
the beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of
the guns that followed, fascinated him, and filled him with a sense of
delightful freedom. He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness,
by the high indifference of joy.
Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass, some twenty yards in
front of them, with black-tipped ears erect, and long hinder limbs
throwing it forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of
alders. Sir Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was
something in the animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed
Dorian Gray, and he cried out at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey.
Let it live."
"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare
bounded into the thicket he fired. There were two cries heard, the cry
of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which
is worse.
"Good heavens! I have hit a beater!" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey. "What
an ass the man was to get in front of the guns! Stop shooting
there!" he called out at the top of his voice. "A man is hurt."
The head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand.
"Where, sir? Where is he?" he shouted. At the same time the firing
ceased along the line.
"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
"Why on earth don't you keep your men back? Spoiled my shooting for
the day."
Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing
the lithe, swinging branches aside. In a few moments they emerged,
dragging a body after them into the sunlight. He turned away in
horror. It seemed to him that misfortune followed wherever he went. He
heard Sir Geoffrey ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative
answer of the keeper. The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly
alive with faces. There was the trampling of myriad feet, and the
low buzz of voices. A great copper-breasted pheasant came beating
through the boughs overhead.
After few moments, that were to him, in his perturbed state, like
endless hours of pain, he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He
started, and looked round.
"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting
is stopped for to-day. It would not look well to go on."
"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered, bitterly.
"The whole thing is hideous and cruel. Is the man...?"
He could not finish the sentence.
"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry. "He got the whole charge of
shot in his chest. He must have died almost instantaneously. Come; let
us go home."
They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly
fifty yards without speaking. Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry, and
said, with a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."
"What is?" asked Lord Henry. "Oh! this accident, I suppose. My
dear fellow, it can't be helped. It was the man's own fault. Why did
he get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is
rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper
beaters. It makes people think that one is a wild shot. And Geoffrey
is not; he shoots very straight. But there is no use talking about the
matter."
Dorian shook his head. "It is a bad omen, Harry. I feel as if
something horrible were going to happen to some of us. To myself,
perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes, with a gesture
of pain.
The elder man laughed. "The only horrible thing in the world is
ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no
forgiveness. But we are not likely to suffer from it, unless these
fellows keep chattering about this thing at dinner. I must tell them
that the subject is to be tabooed. As for omens, there is no such
thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or
too cruel for that. Besides, what on earth could happen to you,
Dorian? You have everything in the world that a man can want. There is
no one who would not be delighted to change places with you."
"There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry. Don't
laugh like that. I am telling you the truth. The wretched peasant
who has just died is better off than I am. I have no terror of
Death. It is the coming of Death that terrifies me. Its monstrous
wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me. Good heavens! don't
you see a man moving, behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for
me?"
Lord Henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved
hand was pointing. "Yes," he said, smiling, "I see the gardener
waiting for you. I suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish
to have on the table to-night. How absurdly nervous you are, my dear
fellow! You must come and see my doctor, when we get back to town."
Dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching.
The man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at Lord Henry in a
hesitating manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed to
his master. "Her Grace told me to wait for an answer," he murmured.
Dorian put the letter into his pocket. "Tell Her Grace that I am
coming in," he said, coldly. The man turned round, and went rapidly in
the direction of the house.
"How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord
Henry. "It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman
will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are
looking on."
"How fond you are of saying dangerous things, Harry! In the
present instance you are quite astray. I like the Duchess very much,
but I don't love her."
"And the Duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, as you
are so excellently matched."
"You are talking scandal, Harry, and there is never any basis for
scandal."
"The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said Lord
Henry, lighting a cigarette.
"You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."
"The world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer.
"I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray, with a deep note of pathos
in his voice. "But I seem to have lost the passion, and forgotten
the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality
has become a burden to me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget. It
was silly of me to come down here at all. I think I shall send a
wire to Harvey to have the yacht got ready. On a yacht one is safe."
"Safe from what, Dorian? You are in some trouble. Why not tell me
what it is? You know I would help you."
"I can't tell you, Harry," he answered, sadly. "And I dare say it is
only a fancy of mine. This unfortunate accident has upset me. I have a
horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me."
"What nonsense!"
"I hope it is, but I can't help feeling it. Ah! here is the Duchess,
looking the Artemis in a tailor-made gown. You see we have come
back, Duchess."
"I have heard all about it, Mr. Gray," she answered. "Poor
Geoffrey is terribly upset. And it seems that you asked him not to
shoot the hare. How curious!"
"Yes, it was very curious. I don't know what made me say it. Some
whim, I suppose. It looked the loveliest of little live things. But
I am sorry they told you about the man. It is a hideous subject."
"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry. "It has no
psychological value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on
purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one
who had committed a real murder."
"How horrid of you, Harry!" cried the Duchess. "Isn't it, Mr.
Gray? Harry, Mr. Gray is ill again. He is going to faint."
Dorian drew himself up with an effort, and smiled. "It is nothing,
Duchess," he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order. That is
all. I am afraid I walked too far this morning. I didn't hear what
Harry said. Was it very bad? You must tell me some other time. I think
I must go and lie down. You will excuse me, won't you?"
They had reached the great flight of steps that led from the
conservatory onto the terrace. As the glass door closed behind Dorian,
Lord Henry turned and looked at the Duchess with his slumberous
eyes. "Are you very much in love with him?" he asked.
She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
"I wish I knew," she said at last.
He shook his head. "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the
uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."
"One may lose one's way."
"All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."
"What is that?"
"Disillusion."
"It was my debut in life," she sighed.
"It came to you crowned."
"I am tired of strawberry leaves."
"They become you."
"Only in public."
"You would miss them," said Lord Henry.
"I will not part with a petal."
"Monmouth has cars."
"Old age is dull of hearing."
"Has he never been jealous?"
"I wish he had been."
He glanced about as if in search of something. "What are you looking
for?" she enquired.
"The button from your foil," he answered. "You have dropped it."
She laughed. "I have still the mask."
"It makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply.
She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet
fruit.
Upstairs, in his own room, Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa, with
terror in every tingling fibre of his body. Life had suddenly become
too hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death of the
unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed
to him to prefigure death for himself also. He had nearly swooned at
what Lord Henry had said in a chance mood of cynical jesting.
At five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant, and gave him
orders to pack his things for the night-express to town, and to have
the brougham at the door by eight-thirty. He was determined not to
sleep another night at Selby Royal. It was an ill-omened place.
Death walked there in the sunlight. The grass of the forest had been
spotted with blood.
Then he wrote a note to Lord Henry, telling him that he was going up
to town to consult his doctor, and asking him to entertain his
guests in his absence. As he was putting it into the envelope, a knock
came to the door, and his valet informed him that the head-keeper
wished to see him. He frowned, and bit his lip. "Send him in," he
muttered, after some moments' hesitation.
As soon as the man entered Dorian pulled his cheque-book out of a
drawer, and spread it out before him.
"I suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident of this
morning, Thornton?" he said, taking up a pen.
"Yes, sir," answered the game-keeper.
"Was the poor fellow married? Had he any people dependent on him?"
asked Dorian, looking bored. "If so, I should not like them to be left
in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary."
"We don't know who he is, sir. That is what I took the liberty of
coming to you about."
"Don't know who he is?" said Dorian, listlessly. "What do you
mean? Wasn't he one of your men?"
"No, sir. Never saw him before. Seems like a sailor, sir."
The pen dropped from Dorian Gray's hand, and he felt as if his heart
had suddenly stopped beating. "A sailor?" he cried out. "Did you say a
sailor?"
"Yes, sir. He looks as if he had been a sort of sailor; tattooed
on both arms, and that kind of thing."
"Was there anything found on him?" said Dorian, leaning forward
and looking at the man with startled eyes. "Anything that would tell
his name?"
"Some money, sir- not much, and a six-shooter. There was no name
of any kind. A decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. A sort of
sailor we think."
Dorian started to his feet. A terrible hope fluttered past him. He
clutched at it madly. "Where is the body?" he exclaimed. "Quick! I
must see it at once."
"It is in an empty stable in the Home Farm, sir. The folk don't like
to have that sort of thing in their houses. They say a corpse brings
bad luck."
"The Home Farm! Go there at once and meet me. Tell one of the grooms
to bring my horse round. No. Never mind. I'll go to the stables
myself. It will save time."
In less than a quarter of an hour Dorian Gray was galloping down the
long avenue as hard as he could go. The trees seemed to sweep past him
in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across
his path. Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly
threw him. He lashed her across the neck with his crop. She cleft
the dusky air like an arrow. The stones flew from her hoofs.
At last he reached the Home Farm. Two men were loitering in the
yard. He leapt from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them.
In the farthest stable a light was glimmering. Something seemed to
tell him that the body was there, and he hurried to the door, and
put his hand upon the latch.
There he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink of
a discovery that would either make or mar his life. Then he thrust the
door open, and entered.
On a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body of
a man dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers. A spotted
handkerchief had been placed over the face. A coarse candle, stuck
in a bottle, sputtered beside it.
Dorian Gray shuddered. He felt that his could not be the hand to
take the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants
to come to him.
"Take that thing off the face. I wish to see it," he said, clutching
at the door-post for support.
When the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward. A cry of
joy broke from his lips. The man who had been shot in the thicket
was James Vane.
He stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body. As he rode
home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew that he was safe.



Chapter 19

"There is no use your telling me that you are going to be good,"
cried Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl
filled with rose-water. "You are quite perfect. Pray, don't change."
Dorian Gray shook his head. "No, Harry, I have done too many
dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began
my good actions yesterday."
"Where were you yesterday?"
"In the country, Harry. I was staying at a little inn by myself."
"My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the
country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people
who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is
not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways
by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by
being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either,
so they stagnate."
"Culture and corruption," echoed Dorian. "I have known something
of both. It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found
together. For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I
think I have altered."
"You have not yet told me what your good action was. Or did you
say you had done more than one?" asked his companion, as he spilt into
his plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries, and through
a perforated shell-shaped spoon snowed white sugar upon them.
"I can tell you, Harry. It is not a story I could tell to any one
else. I spared somebody. It sounds vain, but you understand what I
mean. She was quite beautiful, and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane. I
think it was that which first attracted me to her. You remember Sibyl,
don't you? How long ago that seems! Well, Hetty was not one of our own
class, of course. She was simply a girl in a village. But I really
loved her. I am quite sure that I loved her. All during this wonderful
May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her two or
three times a week. Yesterday she met me in a little orchard. The
apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing.
We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn. Suddenly I
determined to leave her as flower-like as I had found her."
"I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a
thrill of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry. "But I can
finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice, and broke her
heart. That was the beginning of your reformation."
"Harry, you are horrible! You mustn't say these dreadful things.
Hetty's heart is not broken. Of course she cried, and all that. But
there is no disgrace upon her. She can live, like Perdita, in her
garden of mint and marigold."
"And weep over faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry, laughing, as he
leant back in his chair. "My dear Dorian, you have the most
curiously boyish moods. Do you think this girl will ever be really
contented now with any one of her own rank? I suppose she will be
married some day to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman. Well,
the fact of having met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise
her husband, and she will be wretched. From a moral point of view, I
cannot say that I think much of your great renunciation. Even as a
beginning, it is poor. Besides, how do you know that Hetty isn't
floating at the present moment in some star-lit mill-pond, with lovely
water-lilies round her, like Ophelia?
"I can't bear this, Harry! You mock at everything, and then
suggest the most serious tragedies. I am sorry I told you now. I don't
care what you say to me. I know I was right in acting as I did. Poor
Hetty! As I rode past the farm this morning, I saw her white face at
the window, like a spray of jasmine. Don't let us talk about it any
more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action I have
done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever
known, is really a sort of sin. I want to be better. I am going to be
better. Tell me something about yourself. What is going on in town?
I have not been to the club for days."
"The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."
"I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time,"
said Dorian, pouring himself out some wine, and frowning slightly.
"My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks,
and the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of
having more than one topic every three months. They have been very
fortunate lately, however. They have had my own divorce-case, and Alan
Campbell's suicide. Now they have got the mysterious disappearance
of an artist. Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the grey
ulster who left for Paris by the midnight train on the ninth of
November was poor Basil, and the French police declare that Basil
never arrived in Paris at all. I suppose in about a fortnight we shall
be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing,
but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It
must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next
world."
"What do you think has happened to Basil?" asked Dorian, holding
up his Burgundy against the light, and wondering how it was he could
discuss the matter so calmly.
"I have not the slightest idea. If Basil chooses to hide himself, it
is no business of mine. If he is dead, I don't want to think about
him. Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it."
"Why?" said the young man, wearily.
"Because," said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt
trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything
nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in
the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Let us have our
coffee in the music-room, Dorian. You must play Chopin to me. The
man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely. Poor
Victoria! I was very fond of her. The house is rather lonely without
her. Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then
one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets
them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality."
Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and, passing into
the next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray
across the white and black ivory of the keys. After the coffee had
been brought in, he stopped, and, looking over at Lord Henry, said,
"Harry, did it ever occur to you that Basil was murdered?"
Lord Henry yawned. "Basil was very popular, and always wore a
Waterbury watch. Why should he have been murdered? He was not clever
enough to have enemies. Of course he had a wonderful genius for
painting. But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as
possible. Basil was really rather dull. He only interested me once,
and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild
adoration for you, and that you were the dominant motive of his art."
"I was very fond of Basil," said Dorian, with a note of sadness in
his voice. "But don't people say that he was murdered?"
"Oh, some of the papers do. It does not seem to me to be at all
probable. I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not
the sort of man to have gone to them. He had no curiosity. It was
his chief defect."
"What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered
Basil?" said the younger man. He watched him intently after he had
spoken.
"I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character
that doesn't suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is
crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. I am sorry if I
hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true. Crime
belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don't blame them in the
smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is
to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations."
"A method of procuring sensations? Do you think, then, that a man
who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime
again? Don't tell me that."
"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried
Lord Henry, laughing. "That is one of the most important secrets of
life. I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One
should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
But let us pass from poor Basil. I wish I could believe that he had
come to such a really romantic end as you suggest; but I can't. I dare
say he fell into the Seine off an omnibus, and that the conductor
hushed up the scandal. Yes: I should fancy that was his end. I see him
now lying on his back under those dull-green waters with the heavy
barges floating over him, and long weeds catching in his hair. Do
you know, I don't think he would have done much more good work. During
the last ten years his painting had gone off very much."
Dorian heaved a sigh, and Lord Henry strolled across the room and
began to stroke the head of a curious Java parrot, a large
grey-plumaged bird, with pink crest and tail, that was balancing
itself upon a bamboo perch. As his pointed fingers touched it, it
dropped the white scurf of crinkled lids over black glass-like eyes,
and began to sway backwards and forwards.
"Yes," he continued, turning round, and taking his handkerchief
out of his pocket; "his painting had quite gone off. It seemed to me
to have lost something. It had lost an ideal. When you and he ceased
to be great friends, he ceased to be a great artist. What was it
separated you? I suppose he bored you. If so, he never forgave you.
It's a habit bores have. By the way, what has become of that wonderful
portrait he did of you? I don't think I have ever seen it since he
finished it. Oh! I remember your telling me years ago that you had
sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the
way. You never got it back? What a pity! It was really a
masterpiece. I remember I wanted to buy it. I wish I had now. It
belonged to Basil's best period. Since then, his work was that curious
mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man
to be called a representative British artist. Did you advertise for
it? You should."
"I forget," said Dorian. "I suppose I did. But I never really
liked it. I am sorry I sat for it. The memory of the thing is
hateful to me. Why do you talk of it? It used to remind me of those
curious lines in some play- 'Hamlet,' I think- how do they run?-

"'Like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart.'

Yes: that is what it was like."
Lord Henry laughed. "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is
his heart," he answered, sinking into an arm-chair.
Dorian Gray shook his head, and struck some soft chords on the
piano. "'Like the painting of a sorrow?'" he repeated, "'a face
without a heart.'"
The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes.
"By the way, Dorian," he said, after a pause, "'what does it profit
a man if he gain the whole world and lose'- how does the quotation
run?- 'his own soul?'"
The music jarred and Dorian Gray started, and stared at his
friend. "Why do you ask me that, Harry?"
"My dear fellow," said Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows in
surprise, "I asked you because I thought you might be able to give
me an answer. That is all. I was going through the Park last Sunday,
and close by the Marble Arch there stood a little crowd of
shabby-looking people listening to some vulgar street-preacher. As I
passed by, I heard the man yelling out that question to his
audience. It struck me as being rather dramatic. London is very rich
in curious effects of that kind. A wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in
a mackintosh, a ring of sickly white faces under a broken roof of
dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful phrase flung into the air by
shrill, hysterical lips- it was really very good in its way, quite a
suggestion. I thought of telling the prophet that Art had a soul,
but that man had not. I am afraid, however, he would not have
understood me."
"Don't, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and
sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is
a soul in each one of us. I know it."
"Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?"
"Quite sure."
"Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely
certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the
lesson of Romance. How grave you are! Don't be so serious. What have
you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up
our belief in the soul. Play me something. Play me a nocturne, Dorian,
and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your
youth. You must have some secret. I am only ten years older than you
are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. You are really
wonderful, Dorian. You have never looked more charming than you do
to-night. You remind me of the day I saw you first. You were rather
cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary. You have changed, of
course, but not in appearance. I wish you would tell me your secret.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take
exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Youth! There is nothing
like it. It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only
people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much
younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to
them her latest wonder. As for the aged, I always contradict the aged.
I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on something
that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current
in 1820, when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and
knew absolutely nothing. How lovely that thing you are playing is! I
wonder did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round
the villa, and the salt spray dashing against the panes? It is
marvellously romantic. What a blessing it is that there is one art
left to us that is not imitative! Don't stop. I want music to-night.
It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas
listening to you. I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you
know nothing of. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but
that one is young. I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. Ah,
Dorian, how happy you are! What an exquisite life you have had! You
have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against
your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been
to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are
still the same."
"I am not the same, Harry."
"Yes: you are the same. I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
Don't spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type.
Don't make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now. You need
not shake your head: you know you are. Besides, Dorian, don't
deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a
question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which
thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy
yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of
colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had
once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a
forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a
piece of music that you had ceased to play- I tell you, Dorian, that
it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes
about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us.
There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across
me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again. I
wish I could change places with you, Dorian. The world has cried out
against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It always will
worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and
what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never
done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or
produced anything outside yourself! Life has been your art. You have
set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets."
Dorian rose up from the piano, and passed his hand through his hair.
"Yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but I am not going to
have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these extravagant
things to me. You don't know everything about me. I think that if
you did, even you would turn from me. You laugh. Don't laugh."
"Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the
nocturne over again. Look at that great honey-coloured moon that hangs
in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play
she will come closer to the earth. You won't? Let us go to the club,
then. It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly.
There is some one at White's who wants immensely to know you- young
Lord Poole, Bournemouth's eldest son. He has already copied your
neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite
delightful, and rather reminds me of you."
"I hope not," said Dorian, with a sad look in his eyes. "But I am
tired to-night, Harry. I sha'n't go to the club. It is nearly
eleven, and I want to go to bed early."
"Do stay. You have never played so well as to-night. There was
something in your touch that was wonderful. It had more expression
than I had ever heard from it before."
"It is because I am going to be good," he answered, smiling. "I am a
little changed already."
"You cannot change to me, Dorian," said Lord Henry. "You and I
will always be friends."
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.
Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It
does harm."
"My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will soon be
going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people
against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too
delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we
are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book,
there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It
annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books
that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own
shame. That is all. But we won't discuss literature. Come round
to-morrow. I am going to ride at eleven. We might go together, and I
will take you to lunch afterwards with Lady Branksome. She is a
charming woman, and wants to consult you about some tapestries she
is thinking of buying. Mind you come. Or shall we lunch with our
little Duchess? She says she never sees you now. Perhaps you are tired
of Gladys? I thought you would be. Her clever tongue gets on one's
nerves. Well, in any case, be here at eleven."
"Must I really come, Harry?"
"Certainly. The Park is quite lovely now. I don't think there have
been such lilacs since the year I met you."
"Very well. I shall be here at eleven," said Dorian. "Good-night,
Harry." As he reached the door he hesitated for a moment, as if he had
something more to say. Then he sighed and went out.



Chapter 20

It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his
arm, and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he
strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress
passed him. He heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian
Gray." He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed
out, or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own
name now. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so
often lately was that no one knew who he was. He had often told the
girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had
believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had
laughed at him, and answered that wicked people were always very old
and very ugly. What a laugh she had!- just like a thrush singing.
And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large
hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.
When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He
sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library,
and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to
him.
Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild
longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood- his rose-white
boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had
tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to
his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others and had
experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had
crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise
that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was
there no hope for him?
Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed
that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep
the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due
to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its
sure, swift penalty along with it. There was purification in
punishment. Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our
iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just God.
The curiously-carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so
many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed
Cupids laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on
that night of horror, when he had first noted the change in the
fatal picture, and with wild tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished
shield. Once, some one who had terribly loved him, had written to
him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "The world is
changed because you are made of ivory, and gold. The curves of your
lips rewrite history." The phrases came back to his memory, and he
repeated them over and over to himself. Then he loathed his own
beauty, and flinging the mirror to the floor crushed it into silver
splinters beneath his heel. It was his beauty that had ruined him, his
beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for these two things,
his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him
but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A
green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.
Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.
It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that. It
was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. James
Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard. Alan Campbell
had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the
secret that he had been forced to know. The excitement, such as it
was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. It
was already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it
the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was
the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had
painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive
him that. It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said
things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with
patience. The murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for
Alan Campbell, his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do
it. It was nothing to him.
A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting
for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing,
at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in
the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it
had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel
every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil
had already gone away. He would go and look.
He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred
the door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking
face and lingered for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be
good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be
a terror to him. He felt as if the load had been lifted from him
already.
He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his
custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of
pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that
in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved
wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome- more
loathsome, if possible, than before- and the scarlet dew that
spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt.
Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his
one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had
hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that
sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps,
all these? And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It
seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled
fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing
had dripped- blood even on the hand that had not held the knife.
Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up, and
be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous.
Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was no
trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had
been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs.
The world would simply say that he was mad. They would shut him up
if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was his duty to confess, to
suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who
called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven.
Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own
sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward
seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was
an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at.
Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his
renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he
thought so. But who could tell?... No. There had been nothing more.
Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of
goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He
recognized that now.
But this murder- was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be
burdened by his past? Was he really to confess? Never. There was
only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself- that
was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it
had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of late
he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When
he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes
should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions.
Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like
conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil
Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left
upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter,
so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would
kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would
kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he
would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with
it.
There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its
agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms.
Two gentlemen, who were passing in the Square below, stopped, and
looked up at the great house. They walked on till they met a
policeman, and brought him back. The man rang the bell several
times, but there was no answer. Except for a light in one of the top
windows, the house was all dark. After a time, he went away, and stood
in an adjoining portico and watched.
"Whose house is that, constable?" asked the elder of the two
gentlemen.
"Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.
They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. One
of them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.
Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad
domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf
was crying, and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.
After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the
footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They
called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to
force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the
balcony. The windows yielded easily: their bolts were old.
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid
portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the
wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a
dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was
withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they
had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.


The End.