As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air,Dorian Gray, dressed commonly,and with a muffler wrapped round his throat,crept quietly out of his house.In Bond Street he found a hansom with a good horse.He hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver an address.
The man shook his head. “It is too far for me, ” he muttered.
“Here is a sovereign for you,” said Dorian.“You shall have another if you drive fast.”
“All right, sir,” answered the man,“you will be there in an hour,” and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove rapidly towards the river.
CHAPTER XVI.
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 sidewindows 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.”