The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

  45   “An extremely toxic alkaloid which is the active constituent of monkshood, Aconitum napellus, and some other plants” (OED)

  46   A small fancy box for holding sweets.

  47   “You bad fellow!” Lady Clementina’s conversation is peppered with fashionable French phrases. Like Wilde himself (who once remarked that there were only two languages in the world, French and Greek), Lady Clementina is an ardent Francophile.

  48   Silly things have been done for my sake.

  49   Wilde held American fiction in low regard, but he had a high opinion of Americans as occupying the vanguard of scientific and technological development: “A remarkable characteristic of the Americans is the manner in which they have applied science to modern life.… In England an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man.… In America an inventor is honored, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth” (Impressions of America, delivered orally 1883; published 1905).

  50   Compare with Lord Henry’s comparison of American novels to “dry goods” in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  51   “Park Lane is the upper Fifth Avenue of London,” wrote Burton Holmes: “To engrave the words ‘Park Lane’ upon a calling card is almost to transform that card into a social passport” (Travelogues, with Illustrations from Photographs by the Author: Volume Two [New York: McClure, 1910], 57–58). Park Lane is still one of the most prestigious addresses in London. In “Lady Alroy,” Lady Alroy also resides in Park Lane.

  52   Like Wilde’s comment that “His excellent common sense … soon asserted itself” several pages later, the comic irony of this sentence is biting. Lord Arthur’s enslavement to his social and romantic obligations has killed any larger moral sense. His conscience is entirely misplaced.

  53   A grove of tall pines growing near Ravenna “along the shore of the Adriatic for about forty miles, forming a belt of variable width between the great marsh and the tumbling sea” (John Addington Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy [London, 1879]).

  54   Venice’s most prestigious hotel.

  55   Charing Cross Station, London’s principal terminus to England’s south coast ports.

  56   Fruit lozenge.

  57   Lord Arthur’s decision to blow up his uncle, the Dean of Chichester, is a comic exaggeration of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia by anarchists in 1881. In the wake of Alexander’s assassination and a spate of Irish Fenian terrorism closer to home, fears of revolutionary violence were acute in England in the early 1880s. Many revolutionaries—archly described by Wilde a few sentences later as “the dynamite faction”—advocated a “propaganda of the deed,” promoting violence against political or symbolic enemies as a way of inspiring revolution. However, in 1886, the emigré Russian anarchist Count Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), a leading anarchist greatly admired by Wilde and other British intellectuals, distanced himself from such acts, writing in Le Révolté that “a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite.”

  58   Originally a guide to London streets and locales, the London Directory was by Wilde’s day treated principally as a social directory by the upper classes, since along with business names and addresses it listed London’s most fashionable and well-to-do residents. In The Romance of The London Directory, Charles W. Barsley writes: “The London Directory, to every one who has the key that unlocks its treasures, is at once an epitome of all antiquarian knowledge. In it I can trace the lives of my countrymen backwards for many a century. In it is furnished a full and detailed account of the habits and the customs of my ancestry—the dress they wore, the food they ate, six hundred years ago.”

  “Scotland Yard” is a metonym for London’s metropolitan police headquarters, derived from the headquarters’ original location in Great Scotland Yard in Whitehall.

  59   Although he shares his name with a Tsarist courtier in Wilde’s play Vera, or The Nihilists, Count Rouvaloff has much in common with Count Peter Kropotkin (see n.57 above), one of the founding figures of modern Anarchism, who was of high intellectual and social standing in Victorian London.

  60   “So you are taking up politics seriously?” Upon revising the story for book publication in 1891, Wilde rendered Lord Arthur’s exchange with Count Rouvaloff in English, perhaps feeling that his criticism of Princess Sophia of Carlsrühe as “talking bad French at the top of her voice” hit too close to home.

  61   “Scotland Yard would give a good deal to know this address, my dear fellow. Don’t show it to anyone.”

  62   “Who do you take me for?” In 1891 Wilde replaced this phrase with “They shan’t have it” and deleted Lord Arthur’s next utterance.

  63   “It’s purely a family matter.”

  64   “The real birthplaces of modern British anarchism were the clubs of foreign workers which appeared in Soho as early as the 1840s” (George Woodcock, Anarchism [New York: Meridian, 1962], 440).

  65   Wilde is comically exploiting his early readers’ fears of Johann Most, a notorious, violent, revolutionary anarchist who spent four years in Britain—the first two of them living and working in Soho, the final two in jail—following his expulsion from Germany in 1878. Most was from “a wave of refugees [who] arrived in London from Germany after the passage of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1878,” and for some years after his arrival “London was … the major centre for the production of German revolutionary and Anarchist propaganda” (John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse [London: Paladin, 1978], 9, 13).

  66   An expensive German Riesling wine.

  67   Unlike the other papers mentioned in this sentence, the recently founded Evening News was a popular evening paper, whose democratic aspirations were reflected in its halfpenny price. The other four papers (three of them priced at one penny) had a smaller circulation and were pitched at genteel, cultivated readers residing in Central London’s wealthier districts. Colonel Goodchild is clearly conflicted in his politics: his radical proposal for black bishops is more likely to have been sympathetically reported in the Evening News than in the St. James’s Gazette or The Globe, both of which were highly conservative in outlook.

  68   Mudie’s Circulating Library, England’s leading lending library. Mudie’s, associated with the “triple-decker” or three-volume novel (a form of fiction to which Miss Prism aspires in The Importance of Being Earnest), was conservative in outlook and acted as an unofficial censor on the publication of British fiction. By Wilde’s day its influence was starting to wane, in part as a result of the explosive growth of magazines as vehicles for short fiction.

  69   Named after a woman mentioned in Acts 9:36, the Dorcas Society was a Christian ladies’ association, dedicated to making and providing clothes for the poor.

  70   The paragraph wittily parodies ideas about liberty and revolutionary violence that Wilde treated seriously in his 1881 play Vera, whose militant heroine proclaims: “Methinks that if I stood face to face with one of the crowned men my eye would see more clearly, my aim be more sure, my whole body gain a strength and power that was not my own! Oh, to think what stands between us and freedom in Europe! A few old men, wrinkled, feeble, tottering dotards whom a boy could strangle for a ducat, or a woman stab in a night-time. And these are the things that keep us from democracy, that keep us from liberty.”

  71   In the 1860s and early 1870s, a nearly four-mile stretch of the north bank of London’s River Thames, between Chelsea and Blackfriars Bridge, was reclaimed from marshland and replaced with a massive river wall. Completed in 1874, the Thames Embankment incorporates a modern roadway, an underground railway, and a state-of-the-art underground sewer. The most fashionable portion—the Victoria Embankment, a one-and-a-half-mile stretch running from the Houses of Parliament to Blackfriars Bridge—was officially opened by the Prince of
Wales in 1870 and incorporates several public gardens as well as a wide, elegant promenade with seating overlooking the river.

  72   Wilde’s impressionistic prose here and in the next paragraph is inspired by the painter James McNeill Whistler, whose “nocturnes” and cityscapes frequently depict the River Thames at nightfall. In his 1885 “Ten O’Clock” lecture, which Wilde reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette, Whistler insisted on seeing the city at night with the eyes of an artist: “And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home …” (Mr. Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” [privately printed London, 1888], 15). By 1887 Wilde had been battling Whistler for some years about whether the painter or the writer could best convey the poetry of the city.

  73   Ancient Egyptian obelisk, named after Cleopatra, gifted to the United Kingdom in 1819 by Muhammad Ali, ruler of Egypt and Sudan, erected on the newly built Thames Embankment in 1878.

  74   Podgers’s murder obliges us to reconsider the “strange signs of agitation” that had appeared on his face when he first read Lord Arthur’s palm (see p. 47 above). Had Podgers realized that he was examining the hand of a murderer, or had he foreseen his own death?

  75   Compare with The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which immediately following his murder of Basil Hallward, Dorian Gray sees a “policeman going his rounds and flashing a bull’s-eye lantern.” In both instances, Wilde’s protagonist escapes the law’s surveillance.

  76   Lord Arthur possesses—and suppresses—a guilty conscience.

  77   In 1891 Wilde added “at the Gaiety” after “last comic song,” clarifying that Surbiton is a habitué of music-halls.

  78   The St. James’s Gazette, a fashionable and politically conservative London evening paper. After the paper attacked Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde characterized the St. James’s Gazette as occupying “the gutter of English journalism” (CL 533).

  79   Greenwich is about eight miles downstream from the Embankment on London’s River Thames. It was not uncommon in the London of Wilde’s day for people to go missing only for their corpses to wash up later on the banks of the river. The Thames has been called “the locus classicus of self-determined death” (John Stokes, “ ‘Tired of Life’: Letters, Literature, and the Suicide Craze,” in Stokes, In the Nineties [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 142) and in Wilde’s day many Londoners were convinced they were witnessing an epidemic of suicides. News reports of coroners’ inquests played a central part: “suicides were eminently reportable because reports of coroners’ inquests were invariably compact and dramatic,” although coroners’ verdicts of “mental derangement” and “unsound mind” were legal fictions designed “to protect relatives of the deceased from anachronistic laws which held that suicides could be denied proper burial and have their estates seized after death” (Stokes, 128, 119). Wilde’s fictional report of Podgers’s “suicide” contains many ironies, not least since Lord Arthur knows that he murdered Podgers. But the circumstances of Savile’s fateful encounter with Podgers—2:00 a.m. on the Thames Embankment, with the sleeping city all around—are extremely dubious, suggesting that Podgers had indeed intended his own self-destruction. As Stokes observes, “Lord Arthur never stops to ask himself why Podgers … might be there at that moment” (Stokes, 142).

  80   Compare with Lord Arthur’s earlier hasty exit from Bentinck House.

  81   By the mid-1880s telepathy and mesmerism had become fashionable at society gatherings, partly through the respectability lent them by the Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882 to put the study of supernatural phenomena on a scientific basis. See Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  LADY ALROY*

  ·   ·   ·   ONE AFTERNOON I WAS SITTING outside the Café de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before me, when I heard some one call my name.1 I turned round, and saw Lord Murchison. We had not met since we had been at college together, nearly ten years before, so I was delighted to come across him again, and we shook hands warmly. At Oxford we had been great friends. I had liked him immensely, he was so handsome, so high-spirited, and so honourable. We used to say of him that he would be the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth, but I think we really admired him all the more for his frankness. I found him a good deal changed. He looked anxious and puzzled, and seemed to be in doubt about something. I felt it could not be modern scepticism, for Murchison was the stoutest of Tories, and believed in the Pentateuch2 as firmly as he believed in the House of Peers; so I concluded that it was women, and asked him if he was married yet.3

  “I don’t understand women well enough,” he answered.

  “My dear Arthur,” I said, “women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”

  “I cannot love where I cannot trust,” he replied.

  “I believe you have a mystery in your life, Arthur,” I exclaimed, “tell me about it.”

  “Let us go for a drive,” he answered, “it is too crowded here. No, not a yellow carriage, any other colour4—there, that dark-green one will do;” and in a few moments we were trotting down the boulevard in the direction of the Madeleine.

  “Where shall we go to?” I said.

  “Oh, anywhere you like!” he answered, “to the restaurant in the Bois; we will dine there, and you shall tell me all about yourself.”

  “I want to hear about you first,” I said. “Tell me your mystery.”

  He took from his pocket a little morocco case with silver clasps, and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside there was the photograph of a woman.5 She was tall and slight, and strangely picturesque with her large vague eyes and loosened hair. She looked like a clairvoyante, and was wrapped in rich furs.

  Café de la Paix, Paris. Line engraving, 1893.

  “What do you think of that face?” he said, “is it truthful?”

  I examined it carefully. It seemed to me the face of some one who had a secret, but whether that secret was good or evil I could not say. Its beauty was a beauty moulded out of many mysteries—the beauty, in fact, which is psychological, not plastic6—and the faint smile that just played across the lips was far too subtle to be really sweet.

  “Well,” he cried impatiently, “what do you say?”

  “She is a Sphinx in sables,”7 I answered. “Let me know all about her.”

  “Not now,” he said; “after dinner;” and began to talk of other things.

  When the waiter brought us our coffee and cigarettes I reminded Arthur of his promise. He rose from his seat, walked two or three times up and down the room, and, sinking into an armchair, told me the following story:

  “One evening,” he said, “I was walking down Bond Street8 about five o’clock. There was a terrific crush of carriages, and the traffic was almost stopped. Close to the pavement was standing a little yellow brougham, which, for some reason or other, attracted my attention. As I passed by there looked out from it the face I showed you this afternoon. It fascinated me immediately. All that night I kept thinking of it, and all the next day. I wandered up and down that wretched Row, peering into every carriage, and waiting for the yellow brougham; but I could not find ma belle inconnue,9 and at last I began to think she was merely a dream. About a week afterwards I was dining with Madame de Rastail. Dinner was for eight o’clock; but at half past eight we were still waiting in the drawing-room. Finally the servant threw open the door, and announced Lady Alroy. It was the woman I had been looking for. She came in very slowly, looking like a moonbeam in gray lace
, and, to my intense delight, I was asked to take her in to dinner. After we had sat down I remarked quite innocently, ‘I think I caught sight of you in Bond Street some time ago, Lady Alroy.’ She grew very pale, and said to me in a low voice, ‘Pray do not talk so loud; you may be overheard.’ I felt miserable at having made such a bad beginning, and plunged recklessly into the subject of the French plays. She spoke very little, always in the same low musical voice, and seemed as if she was afraid of some one listening. I fell passionately, stupidly in love, and the indefinable atmosphere of mystery that surrounded her excited my most ardent curiosity. When she was going away, which she did very soon after dinner, I asked her if I might call and see her. She hesitated for a moment, glanced round to see if any one was near us, and then said, ‘Yes; to-morrow at a quarter to six.’ I begged Madame de Rastail to tell me about her; but all that I could learn was that she was a young widow with a house in Park Lane,10 and as some scientific bore began a dissertation on widows, as exemplifying the survival of the matrimonially fittest, I left and went home.

  Park Lane, London, early 1900s.

  “The next day I arrived at Park Lane punctual to the moment, but was told by the butler that Lady Alroy had just gone out. I went down to the club quite unhappy and very much puzzled, and after long consideration wrote her a letter, asking if I might be allowed to try my chance some other afternoon. I had no answer for several days, but at last I got a little note saying she would be at home on Sunday at five, and with this extraordinary postscript: ‘Please do not write to me here again; I will explain when I see you.’ On Sunday she received me, and was perfectly charming; but when I was going away she begged of me, if I ever had occasion to write to her again, to address my letter to ‘Mrs. X,11 care of Whittaker’s Library, Green Street.’ ‘There are reasons,’ she said, ‘why I cannot receive letters in my own house.’