Ten minutes later,
with face blanched by terror, and eyes wild with grief Lord Arthur Savile
rushed from Bentinck House, crushing his way through the crowd of fur-coated
footmen that stood round the large striped awning, and seeming not to see or
hear anything. The night was bitter cold, and the gas-lamps round the square flared
and flickered in the keen wind; but his hands were hot with fever, and his
forehead burned like lire. On and on he went, almost with the gait of a drunken
man. A policeman looked curiously at him as he passed, and a beggar, who
slouched from an archway to ask for alms, grew frightened, seeing misery
greater than his own. Once he stopped under a lamp, and looked at his hands. He
thought he could detect the stain of blood already upon them, and a faint cry
broke from his trembling lips.
Murder! that is what the cheiromantist
had seen there. Murder! The very night seemed to know it, and the desolate wind
to howl it in his ear. The dark corners of the streets were full of it. It
grinned at him from the roofs of the houses.
First he came to the Park, whose sombre woodland seemed to
fascinate him. He leaned wearily up against the railings, cooling his brow
against the wet metal, and listening to the tremulous silence of the trees.
`Murder! murder!' he kept repeating, as though iteration could dim the horror of
the word. The sound of his own voice made him shudder, yet he almost hoped that
Echo might hear him, and wake the slumbering city from its dreams. He felt a
mad desire to stop the casual passer-by, and tell him everything.
Then he wandered across Oxford Street into narrow, shameful
alleys. Two women with painted faces mocked at him as he went by. From a dark
courtyard came a sound of oaths and blows, followed by shrill screams, and,
huddled upon a damp doorstep, he saw the crook-backed forms of poverty and eld.
A strange pity came over him. Were these children of sin and misery predestined
to their end, as he to his? Were they, like him, merely the puppets of a
monstrous show?
And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering
that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How
incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the
discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of
existence. He was still very young.
After a time he found himself in front of Marylebone Church.
The silent roadway looked like a long riband of polished silver, flecked here
and there by the dark arabesques of waving shadows. Far into the distance
curved the line of flickering gas-lamps, and outside a little walled-in house
stood a solitary hansom, the driver asleep inside. He walked hastily in the
direction of Portland Place, now and then looking round, as though he feared
that he was being followed. At the corner of Rich Street stood two men, reading
a small bill upon a hoarding. An odd feeling of curiosity stirred him, and he
crossed over. As he came near, the word `Murder,' printed in black letters, met
his eye. He started, and a deep flush came into his cheek. It was an
advertisement offering a reward for any information leading to the arrest of a
man of medium height, between thirty and forty years of age, wearing a
billy-cock hat, a black coat, and check trousers, and with a scar upon his
right cheek. He read it over and over again, and wondered if the wretched man
would be caught, and how he had been scarred. Perhaps, some day, his own name
might be placarded on the walls of London. Some day, perhaps, a price would be
set on his head also.
The thought made him sick with horror. He turned on his heel,
and hurried on into the night.
Where he went he hardly knew. He had a dim memory of
wandering through a labyrinth of sordid houses, of being lost in a giant web of
sombre streets, and it was bright dawn when he found himself at last in
Piccadilly Circus. As he strolled home towards Belgrave Square, he met the
great waggons on their way to Covent Garden. The white-smocked carters, with
their pleasant sunburnt faces and coarse curly hair, strode sturdily on,
cracking their whips, and calling out now and then to each other; on the back
of a huge grey horse, the leader of a jangling team, sat a chubby boy, with a
bunch of primroses in his battered hat, keeping tight hold of the mane with his
little hands, and laughing; and the great piles of vegetables looked like
masses of jade against the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the
pink petals of some marvellous rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he
could not tell why. There was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that
seemed to him inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break
in beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough, good-
humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange London they saw! A
London free from the sin of night and the smoke of day, a pallid, ghost-like
city, a desolate town of tombs! He wondered what they thought of it, and
whether they knew anything of its splendour and its shame, of its fierce,
fiery-coloured joys, and its horrible hunger, of all it makes and mars from
morn to eve. Probably it was to them merely a mart where they brought their
fruits to sell, and where they tarried for a few hours at most, leaving the
streets still silent, the houses still asleep. It gave him pleasure to watch
them as they went by. Rude as they were, with their heavy, hobnailed shoes, and
their awkward gait, they brought a little of Arcady with them. He felt that
they had lived with Nature, and that she had taught them peace. He envied them
all that they did not know.
By the time he had reached Belgrave Square the sky was a
faint blue, and the birds were beginning to twitter in the gardens.
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