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CHAPTER 7
For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat Jew manager
who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily tremulous smile.
He escorted them to their box with 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
*** 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.