- -
- 100%
- +
‘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, Dryad-like 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 analysed 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 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 sympathise with everything, except suffering,’ said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise 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 overexpenditure 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 demoralising. 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.’
4
ONE afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry’s house in Mayfair. It was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high-panelled wainscoting of olivestained oak, its cream-coloured frieze and ceiling of raised plaster-work, and its brick-dust felt carpet strewn with silk long-fringed Persian rugs. On a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of Les Cent Nouvelles, bound for Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve, and powdered with the gilt daisies that Queen had selected for her device. Some large blue china jars and parrot-tulips were arranged on the mantelshelf, and through the small leaded panels of the window streamed the apricotcoloured light of a summer day in London.
Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. So the lad was looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages of an elaborately-illustrated edition of Manon Lescaut that he had found in one of the bookcases. The formal monotonous ticking of the Louis Quartorze 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 into 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 frangipani. 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, Henry. 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 common-place début.’
‘You would not say so if you saw her, Harry.’