The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER 16
A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly
in the dripping mist. The public-houses were just closing, and dim
men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors.
From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. In others,
drunkards brawled and screamed.
Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead,
Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame
of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself
the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day
they had met,
"To cure the soul by means of the senses,
and the senses by means of the soul."
Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were
opium dens where one could buy
oblivion, dens of
horror where the memory of old
sins could be destroyed by the
madness of sins that were new.
The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time
a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.
The gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy.
Once the man lost his way and had to drive back half a mile.
A steam rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles.
The side windows of the hansom were clogged with a grey-flannel mist.
"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul!"
How the words rang in his ears! His soul, certainly, was
sick to death. Was it true that the senses could cure it?
Innocent blood had been spilled.
What could atone for that? Ah! for that there was no atonement;
but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was
possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp
the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that
had stung one.
Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken
to him as he had done? Who had made him a judge over others?
He had said things that were dreadful, horrible, not to
be endured.
On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him,
at each step. He thrust up the trap and called to the man
to drive faster. The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw
at him. His throat burned and his delicate hands twitched
nervously together. He struck at the horse madly with his stick.
The driver laughed and whipped up. He laughed in answer,
and the man was silent.
The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black
web of some sprawling spider. The monotony became unbearable,
and as the mist thickened, he felt afraid.
Then they passed by lonely brickfields. The fog was lighter here, and he could see the strange, bottle-shaped kilns with their orange,
fanlike tongues of fire. A dog barked as they went by,
and far away in the darkness some wandering sea-gull screamed.
The horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside and broke into
a gallop.
After some time they left the clay road and rattled again
over rough-paven streets. Most of the windows were dark,
but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against
some lamplit blind. He watched them curiously. They moved
like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things.
He hated them. A dull rage was in his heart. As they turned
a corner, a woman yelled something at them from an open door,
and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards.
The driver beat at them with his whip.
It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.
Certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray
shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul
and sense, till he had found in them the full expression,
as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval,
passions that without such justification would still have
dominated his temper.
From cell to cell of his brain crept
the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible
of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling
nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful
to him because it made things real, became dear to him
now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.
The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence
of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast,
were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression,
than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song.
They were what he needed for forgetfulness. In three days he would
be free.
Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane.
Over the low roofs and jagged chimney-stacks of the houses rose
the black masts of ships. Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly
sails to the yards.
"Somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?"
he asked huskily through the trap.
Dorian started and peered round.
"This will do,"
he answered,
and having got out hastily and given the driver the extra
fare
he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the
quay.
Here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman.
The light shook and splintered in the puddles. A red glare came from
an outward-bound steamer that was coaling. The slimy pavement looked like a wet mackintosh.
He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see
if he was being followed. In about seven or eight minutes he reached
a small shabby house that was wedged in between two gaunt factories.
In one of the top-windows stood a lamp. He stopped and gave a
peculiar knock.
After a little time he heard steps in the passage and the chain
being unhooked. The door opened quietly, and he went in without
saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened
itself into the shadow as he passed. At the end of the hall
hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in
the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street.
He dragged it aside and entered a long low room which looked
as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. Shrill
flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the fly-blown mirrors
that faced them, were ranged round the walls. Greasy reflectors
of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering disks of light.
The floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here
and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor.
Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with
bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered.
In one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled
over a table, and by the tawdrily painted bar that ran across one
complete side stood two haggard women, mocking an old man who was
brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust.
"He thinks he's got red ants on him,"
laughed one of them,
as Dorian passed by. The man looked at her in
terror and began to whimper.
At the end of the room there was a little staircase,
leading to a darkened chamber. As Dorian hurried up its
three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him.
He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure.
When he entered, a young man with smooth yellow hair, who was
bending over a lamp lighting a long thin pipe, looked up at him
and nodded in a hesitating manner.
"You here, Adrian?"
muttered Dorian.
"Where else should I be?"
he answered, listlessly.
"None of the chaps
will speak to me now."
"I thought you had left England."
"Darlington is not going to do anything. My brother paid the bill at last. George doesn't speak to me either. . . . I don't care,"
he added
with a sigh.
"As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends. I think I have had too many friends."
Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that
lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses.
The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes,
fascinated him. He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering,
and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy.
They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought.
Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. From time
to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him.
Yet he felt he could not stay. The presence of Adrian Singleton
troubled him. He wanted to be where no one would know who he was.
He wanted to escape from himself.
"I am going on to the other place,"
he said after a pause.
"On the wharf?"
"Yes."
"That mad-cat is sure to be there. They won't have her in this place now."
Dorian shrugged his shoulders.
"I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. Besides, the stuff is better."
"Much the same."
"I like it better. Come and have something to drink.
I must have something."
"I don't want anything,"
murmured the young man.
"Never mind."
Adrian Singleton rose up wearily and followed Dorian to the bar.
A half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a
hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers
in front of them. The women sidled up and began to chatter.
Dorian turned his back on them and said something in a low voice to
Adrian Singleton.
A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one
of the women.
"We are very proud tonight,"
she sneered.
"For God's sake don't talk to me,"
cried Dorian, stamping his
foot on the ground.
"What do you want? Money? Here it is.
Don't ever talk to me again."
Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes,
then flickered out and left them dull and glazed. She tossed
her head and raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers.
Her companion watched her enviously.
"It's no use,"
sighed Adrian Singleton.
"I don't care to go back.
What does it matter? I am quite happy here."
"You will write to me if you want anything, won't you?"
said Dorian,
after a pause.
"Perhaps."
"Good night, then."
"Good night,"
answered the young man, passing up the steps and wiping
his parched mouth with a handkerchief.
Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face.
As he drew the curtain aside, a hideous laugh broke from
the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money.
"There goes the devil's bargain!"
she hiccoughed, in a
hoarse voice.
"Curse you!"
he answered,
"don't call me that."
She snapped her fingers.
"Prince Charming is what you like to be called, ain't it?"
she yelled after him.
The drowsy sailor leaped to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly round. The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear. He rushed out as if in pursuit.
Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain.
His meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door,
as Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult.
He bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad.
Yet, after all, what did it matter to him? One's days were too
brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders.
Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.
The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.
One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man,
destiny never closed her accounts.
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for
what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will.
They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins,
as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience.
When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was
as a rebel that he fell.
Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul
hungry for rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his
step as he went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway,
that had served him often as a short cut to the ill-famed place
where he was going, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind,
and before be had time to defend himself, he was thrust back
against the wall, with a brutal hand round his throat.
He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched
the tightening fingers away. In a second he heard the click
of a revolver, and saw the gleam of a polished barrel,
pointing straight at his head, and the dusky form of a short,
thick-set man facing him.
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