Tavern, Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the body of
Sibyl Vane, a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre,
Holborn. A verdict of death by misadventure was returned. Considerable
sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly
affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of Dr. Birrell,
who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased.

He frowned, and tearing the paper in two, went across the room and flung
the pieces away. How ugly it all was! And how horribly real ugliness
made things! He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for having sent
him the report. And it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it
with red pencil. Victor might have read it. The man knew more than
enough English for that.

Perhaps he had read it and had begun to suspect something. And, yet,
what did it matter? What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's death?
There was nothing to fear. Dorian Gray had not killed her.

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was
it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal
stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange
Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung
himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few
minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever
read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate
sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before
him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him.
Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being,
indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who
spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his
own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through
which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere
artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue,
as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The
style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and
obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical
expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of
some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There
were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour.
The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical
philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the
spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of
a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense
seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere
cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as
it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced
in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of
reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling
day and creeping shadows.

Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed
through the windows. He read on by its wan light till he could read no
more. Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the
lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed
the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his bedside
and began to dress for dinner.

It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found
Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much bored.

"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your fault.
That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was
going."

"Yes, I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair.

"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a
great difference."

"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry. And they passed
into the dining-room.

CHAPTER 11

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this
book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought
to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than nine
large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different
colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing
fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost
entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom
the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended,
became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the
whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written
before he had lived it.

In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero. He
never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat
grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still water
which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was
occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once, apparently, been
so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy-- and perhaps in nearly
every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place--that
he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if
somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow and despair of one who
had himself lost what in others, and the world, he had most dearly valued.



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