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The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde · English · Gutenberg #174 · 448,657 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde


        
Release date: October 1, 1994 [eBook #174]
                Most recently updated: September 17, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/174

Credits: Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ***




The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde


Contents

 THE PREFACE
 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.




THE PREFACE


The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and
conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate
into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful
things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom
beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing
his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of
the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in
the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove
anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has
ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable
mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express
everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an
art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the
point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the
musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the
type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the
surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their
peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with
himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he
does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE




CHAPTER I.


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 Tokyo 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 bourdon 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 been either 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 be always 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 you 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 half-way 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 so: 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 _précis_ 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 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 recreate 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 the 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 ideal. And the mind of the
thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
_bric-à-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 a 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 II.


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 entirely depends 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 you 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 mediævalism, 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 became 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 bareheaded, 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, flowerlike 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 the 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 for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only
difference between a caprice and a lifelong 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 exaggeration 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 wizen, 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 alone, 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 for 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 the 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 III.


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 dispatches,
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 till two, and were not visible till
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 button-hole 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 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
_protégé_.”

“Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with
her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that
I have nothing to do but to 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 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,
Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there
had been wakened 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 century 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 bald 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 to 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 table.

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 encyclopaedias. 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 IV.


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 plasterwork, and its brickdust 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 book-cases. 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
frangipanni. 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
_début_.”

“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 analysing 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 play-bills. 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
analyse 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 grandpères ont
toujours tort_.”

“This play was good enough for us, Harry. It was Romeo and Juliet. I
must admit that 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, flowerlike 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 hautboy. In the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy
that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. There
were 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 reedlike
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 me 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 am 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 been always 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 V.


“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 breath 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. Sybil 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 for ever!”

“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
too 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 should 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 window-pane
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 flowerlike 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 passersby 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 supercargo, 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 of 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 underlip.

“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 rewriting.
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 of 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 oppressed. 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 Sybil’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 round 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. Then 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 for 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 cabman. 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 VI.


“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 more
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 towards 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 guardians 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—simple 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 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 neighbours,
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, mediæval art is
charming, but mediæval 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 VII.


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 a 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 any 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 who 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 to 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 a
white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.

Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy 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 the 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 schoolgirl 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 commonplace 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 dragged 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 were 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, 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 melodramatic. 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 door-steps,
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, rimmed 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 button-hole 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 had 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 VIII.


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 well slept 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
that 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 _début_ 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 am 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 as 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 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 a 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 thi

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