The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde [best fiction novels to read TXT] 📗

how do you know that Hetty isn’t floating at the present moment in some mill-pond, with water-lilies round her, like Ophelia?’

‘I can’t bear this, Harry! You mock at everything, and then suggest the most serious tragedies. I am sorry I told you now. I don’t care what you say to me, I know I was right in acting as I did. Poor Hetty! As I rode past the farm this morning, I saw her white face at the window, like a spray of jasmine. Don’t let me talk about it any more, and don’t try to persuade me that the first good action I have done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever known, is really a sort of sin. I want to be better. I am going to be better. Tell me something about yourself.

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What is going on in town? I have not been to the club for days.’

‘The people are still discussing poor Basil’s disappearance.’

‘I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time,’ said Dorian, pouring himself out some wine, and frowning slightly.

‘My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and the public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months.

They have been very fortunate lately, however. They have had my own divorce-case, and Alan Campbell’s suicide.

Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist. Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the gray ulster who left Victoria by the midnight train on the 7th of November was poor Basil, and the French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris at all. I suppose in about a fortnight we will be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.’

‘What do you think has happened to Basil?’ asked Dorian, holding up his Burgundy against the light, and 236 of 250

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wondering how it was that he could discuss the matter so calmly.

‘I have not the slightest idea. If Basil chooses to hide himself, it is no business of mine. If he is dead, I don’t want to think about him. Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. One can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Let us have our coffee in the music-room, Dorian. You must play Chopin to me. The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely. Poor Victoria! I was very fond of her. The house is rather lonely without her.’

Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and, passing into the next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the keys. After the coffee had been brought in, he stopped, and, looking over at Lord Henry, said, ‘Harry, did it ever occur to you that Basil was murdered?’

Lord Henry yawned. ‘Basil had no enemies, and always wore a Waterbury watch. Why should he be murdered?

He was not clever enough to have enemies. Of course he had a wonderful genius for painting. But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as possible. Basil was 237 of 250

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really rather dull. He only interested me once, and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you.’

‘I was very fond of Basil,’ said Dorian, with a sad look in his eyes. ‘But don’t people say that he was murdered?’

‘Oh, some of the papers do. It does not seem to be probable. I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them. He had no curiosity. It was his chief defect. Play me a nocturne, Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your youth. You must have some secret. I am only ten years older than you are, and I am wrinkled, and bald, and yellow. You are really wonderful, Dorian. You have never looked more charming than you do to-night. You remind me of the day I saw you first. You were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary. You have changed, of course, but not in appearance. I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people whose opinions I listen to now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has 238 of 250

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revealed to them her last wonder. As for the aged, I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in 1820, when people wore high stocks and knew absolutely nothing.

How lovely that thing you are playing is! I wonder did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa, and the salt spray dashing against the panes? It is marvelously romantic. What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! Don’t stop. I want music to-night. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you. I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. Ah, Dorian, how happy you are! What an exquisite life you have had! You have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. But it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the same.

‘I wonder what the rest of your life will be. Don’t spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type.

Don’t make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless 239 of 250

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now. You need not shake your head: you know you are.

Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play,—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us.

There are moments when the odor of heliotrope passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest year of my life over again.

‘I wish I could change places with you, Dorian. The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It always will worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your 240 of 250

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art. You have set yourself to music. Your days have been your sonnets.’

Dorian rose up from the piano, and passed his hand through his hair. ‘Yes, life has been exquisite,’ he murmured, ‘but I am not going to have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these extravagant things to me. You don’t know everything about me. I think that if you did, even you would turn from me. You laugh. Don’t laugh.’

‘Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and play the nocturne over again. Look at that great honey-colored moon that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth. You won’t? Let us go to the club, then. It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly.

There is some one at the club who wants immensely to know you,—young Lord Poole, Bournmouth’s eldest son.

He has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite delightful, and rather reminds me of you.’

‘I hope not,’ said Dorian, with a touch of pathos in his voice. ‘But I am tired to-night, Harry. I won’t go to the club. It is nearly eleven, and I want to go to bed early.’

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‘Do stay. You have never played so well as to-night.

There was something in your touch that was wonderful. It had more expression than I had ever heard from it before.’

‘It is because I am going to be good,’ he answered, smiling. ‘I am a little changed already.’

‘Don’t change, Dorian; at any rate, don’t change to me.

We must always be friends.’

‘Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm.’

‘My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize.

You will soon be going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. Come round tomorrow. I am going to ride at eleven, and we might go together. The Park is quite lovely now. I don’t think there have been such lilacs since the year I met you.’

‘Very well. I will be here at eleven,’ said Dorian.

‘Good-night, Harry.’ As he reached the door he hesitated for a moment, as if he had something more to say. Then he sighed and went out.

It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm, and did not even put his silk scarf round his 242 of 250

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throat. As he strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. He heard one of them whisper to the other, ‘That is Dorian Gray.’ He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. He had told the girl whom he had made love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and told him that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. What a laugh she had!—

just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some