Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (250 page)

‘Do you regret having given yourself to me?’ he asked, pressing me convulsively as if afraid to lose me.

My penis, which seemed to wish to give its own answer, wriggled within his body. I looked deep into his eyes.

‘Do you think it would have been more pleasant to be now lying in the slush of the river?’

He shuddered and kissed me, then eagerly,— ‘How can you think of such horrible things just now; it is real blasphemy to the Mysian god.’

Thereupon he began to ride a Priapean race with masterlvskill; from an amble he went on to a trot, then to a gallop, lifting himself on the tips of his toes, and coming down again quicker and ever quicker.

A rigid tension of the nerves took place. My heart was beating in such a way that I could hardly breathe. All the arteries seemed ready to burst. My skin was parched with a glowing heat; a subtle fire coursed through my veins instead of blood.

Still he went on, quicker and quicker. I writhed in a delightful torture. I was melting away, but he never stopped till he had quite drained me of the last drop of life-giving fluid there was in me. My eyes were swimming in their socketes. I felt my heavy lids half close themselves; an unbearable voluptuousness of mingled pain and pleasure shattered my body and blasted my very soul; then everything waned in me. He clasped me in his arms, and I swooned away while he was kissing my cold and languid lips.

CHAPTER
7

On the morrow the events of the night before seemed like a rapturous dream.

 
— Still, you must have felt rather seedy, after the many —

 
— Seedy? No, not at all. Nay, I felt the ‘clear keen joyance’ of the lark that loves, but ‘ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.’ Hitherto, the pleasure that women had given me had always jarred upon my nerves. It was, in fact, ‘a thing wherein we feel there is a hidden want.’ Lust was now the overflowing of the heart and of the mind — the pleasurable harmony of all the senses.

The world that had hitherto seemed to me so bleak, so cold, so desolate, was now a perfect paradise; the air, although the barometer had fallen considerably, was crisp, light, and balmy; the sun — a round, furbished, copper disc, and more like a red Indian’s backside than fair Apollo’s effulgent face — was shining gloriously for me; the murky fog itself, that brought on dark night at three o’clock in the afternoon, was only a hazy mist that veiled all that was ungainly, and rendered Nature fantastic, and home so snuq and cozv. Such is the power of the imagination.

“You laugh! Alas! Don Quixote was not the only man who took windmills for giants, or barmaids for princesses. If your sluggish- brained, thick-pated costermonger never falls into such a trance as to mistake apples for potatoes; if your grocer never turns hell into heaven, or heaven into hell — well, they are sane people who weigh everything in the well- poised scale of reason. Try and shut them up in nutshells, and you will see if they would deem themselves monarchs of the world. They, unlike Hamlet, always see things as they really are. I never did. But then, you know, my father died mad.

Anyhow, that overpowering weariness, that loathsomeness of life, had now quite passed away. I was blithe, merry, happy. Teleny was my lover; I was his.

Far from being ashamed of my crime, I felt that I should like to proclaim it to the world. For the first time in my life I understood that lovers could be so foolish as to entwine their initials together. I felt like carving his name on the bark of trees, that the birds seeing it might twitter it from morn till eventide; that the breeze might lisp it to the rustling leaves of the forest. I wished to write it on the shingle of the beach, that the ocean itself might know of my love for him, and murmur it everlastingly.

 
— Still I had thought that on the morrow — the intoxication passed — you would have shuddered at the thought of having a man for a lover?

 
— Why? Had I committed a crime against nature when my own nature found peace and happiness thereby? If I was thus, surely it was the fault of my blood, not myself. Who had planted nettles in my garden? Not I. They had grown there unawares, from my very childhood. I began to feel their carnal stings long before I could understand what conclusion they imported. When I had tried to bridle my lust, was it my fault if the scale of reason was far too light to balance that of sensuality? Was I to blame if I could not argue down my raging motion? Fate, lago-like, had clearly showed me that if I would damn myself, I could do so in a more delicate way than drowning. I yielded to my destiny, and encompassed my joy.

Withal, I never said with lago,— ‘Virtue, a fig!’ No, virtue is the sweet flavor of the peach; vice, the tiny droplet of prussic acid — its delicious savor. Life, without either, would be vapid.

 
— Still, not having, like most of us, been inured to sodomy from your schooldays, I should have thought that you would have been loath to have yielded your body to another man’s pleasure.

 
— Loath? Ask the virgin if she regrets having given up her maidenhood to the lover she dotes on, and who fully returns her love? She has lost a treasure that all the wealth of Golconda cannot buy again; she is no longer what the world calls a pure, spotless, immaculate lily, and not having had the serpent’s guile in her, society — the lilies — will brand her with an infamous name; profligates will leer at her, the pure will turn away in scorn. Still, does the girl regret having yielded her body for love — the only thing worth living for? No. Well, no more did I. Let ‘clay-cold heads and lukewarm hearts’ scourge me with their wrath if they will.

On the morrow, when we met again, all traces of fatigue had passed away. We rushed into each other’s arms and smothered ourselves with kisses, for nothing is more an incentive to love than a short separation. What is it that renders married ties unbearable? The too-great intimacy, the sordid cares, the triviality of everyday life. The young bride must love indeed if she feels no disappointment when she sees her mate just awakened from a fit of tough snoring, seedy, unshaven, with braces and slippers, and hears him clear his throat and spit — for men actually spit, even if they do not indulge in other rumbling noises.

The husband, likewise, must love indeed, not to feel an inward sinking when a few days after the wedding he finds his bride’s middle parts tightly tied up in foul and bloody rags. Why did not nature create us like birds — or rather, like midqes — to live but one summer day — a long day of love?

On the night of this next day Teleny surpassed himself at the piano; and when the ladies had finished waving their tiny handkerchiefs, and throwing flowers at him, he stole away from a host of congratulating admirers, and came to meet me in my carriage, waiting for him at the door of the theatre; then we drove away to his house. I passed that night with him, a night not of unbroken slumbers, but of inebriating bliss.

As true votaries of the Grecian god, we poured out seven copious libations to Priapus — for seven is a mystic, cabalistic, propitious number — and in the morning we tore ourselves from each other’s arms, vowing everlasting love and fidelity; but, alas! what is there immutable in the ever-changing world, except, perhaps, the sleep eternal in the eternal light.

 
— And your mother?

 
— She perceived that a great change had been wrought in me. Now, far from being crabbed and waspish, like an old maid that cannot find rest anywhere, I was even- tempered and good-humored. She, however, attributed the change to the tonics I was taking, little guessing the real nature of these tonics. Later, she thought I must have some kind of liaison or other, but did not interfere with my private affairs; she knew that the time for sowing my wild oats had come, and she left me complete freedom of action.

 
— Well, you were a lucky fellow.

— “Vfes, but perfect happiness cannot last long. Hell gapes on the threshold of heaven, and one step plunges us from ethereal light into Cerebian darkness. So it has ever been with me in this checkered life of mine. A fortnight after that memorable night of unbearable anguish and of thrilling delight, I awoke in the midst of felicity to find myself in thorough wretchedness.

One morning, as I went in to breakfast, I found on the table a note which the postman had brought the evening before. I never received letters at home, having hardly any correspondence, save a business one, which was always transacted at the office. The handwriting was unknown to me. It must be some tradesman, thought I, leisurely buttering my bread. At last I tore the envelope open. It was a card of two lines without any address or signature.

 
— And — ?

 
— Have you ever by accident placed your hand on a strong galvanic battery, and got through your fingers a shock that for a moment bereaves you of your very reason? If so, you can have but a faint impression of what that bit of paper produced on my nerves. I was stunned by it. Having read those few words I saw nothing more, for the room began to spin round me.

 
— Well, but what was there to terrify you in such a way?

 
— Only these few harsh, grating words that have remained indelibly engraved on my mind.

‘If you do not give up your lover T.... you shall be branded as an encule.’

This horrible, infamous, anonymous threat, in all its crude harshness, came so unexpectedly that it was, as the Italians express it, like a clap of thunder on a bright sunshiny day.

Little dreaming of its contents, I had opened it carelessly in my mother’s presence; but hardly had I perused it than a state of utter prostration came over me, so that I had not even strength enough to hold up that tiny bit of paper.

My hands were trembling like aspen leaves — nay, my whole body was quivering; so thoroughly was I cowed down with fear and appalled with shame.

All the blood fled from my cheeks, my lips were cold and clammy; an icy perspiration was on my brow; I felt myself growing pale, and I knew that my cheeks must have been of an ashen, livid hue.

Nevertheless, I tried to master my emotion. I lifted up a spoonful of coffee to my mouth; but, ere it had reached my lips, I gagged, and was ready to throw up. The pitching and tossing of a boat on the heaviest sea could not have brought about such a state of sinking sickness as that with which my body was then convulsed. Nor could Macbeth, upon seeing Banquo’s murdered ghost, have been more terrified than I was.

What was I to do? To be proclaimed a sodomite in the face of the world, or to give up the man who was dearer to me than life itself? No, death was preferable to either.

 
— And still, you said just now that you would have liked the whole world to know your love for the pianist.

 
— I admit that I did, and I do not deny it; but have you ever understood the contradictions of the human heart?

 
— Moreover, you did not consider sodomy a crime?

 
— No; had I done society any harm by it?

 
— Then why were you so terrified?

 
— Once a lady on her reception day asked her little boy — a lisping child of three — where his papa was?

‘In his room,’ said he.

‘What is he doing?’ asked the imprudent mother.

‘He is making proots,’ replied the urchin, innocently, in a high treble, loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room.

Can you imagine the feelings of the mother, or those of the wife, when, a few moments afterwards, her husband came into the room? Well, the poor man told me that he almost regarded himself as a branded man, when his blushing wife told him of his child’s indiscretion. Still, had he committed a crime?

Who is the man that, at least once in his lifetime, has not felt a perfect satisfaction in breaking wind, or, as the child onomatopoetically expressed it, making a ‘proof?’ What was there, then, to be ashamed of; that surely was no crime against nature?

The fact is, that nowadays we have got to be so mealy-mouthed, so over-nice, that Madame Eglantine, who ‘raught full semely after her meat’ would be looked upon, in spite of her stately manners, as something worse than a scullery-maid. We have become so demurelv prim that every member of Parliament will soon have to provide himself with a certificate of morality from the clergyman, or the Sabbath-school teacher, before he is allowed to take possession of his seat. At any cost, appearances must be saved; for ranting editors are jealous gods, and their wrath is implacable, for it pays well, as good people like to know what naughty folks do.

 
— And who was the person who had written those lines to you?

 
— Who? I cudgelled my brain, and it evoked a number of specters, all of which were as impalpable and as frightful as Milton’s death; all threatened to hurl at me a deadly dart. I even fancied for an instant, that it was Teleny, just to see the extent of my love for him.

 
— It was the Countess, was it not?

 
— I thought so, too. Teleny was not a man to be loved by halves, and a woman madly in love is capable of everything. Still, it seemed hardly probable that a lady would use such a weapon; and moreover, she was away. No, it was not, it could not be, the Countess. But who was it? Everybody and nobody.

For a few days I was tortured so incessantly that at times I felt as if I were growing mad. My nervousness increased to such a pitch that I was actually afraid to leave the house for fear of meeting the writer of that loathsome note.

Like Cain, it seemed as if I carried my crime written upon my brow. I saw a sneer upon the face of every man that looked at me. A finger was forever pointing at me; a voice, loud enough for all to hear, was whispering, The sodomite!’

Going to my office, I heard a man walking behind me. I went on quickly; he hastened his step. I almost began to run. All at once a hand was laid on my shoulder. I was about to faint with terror. At that moment I almost expected to hear the awful words,— ‘In the name of the law I arrest you, sodomite!’

The creaking of a door made me shiver; the sight of a letter appalled me.

Was I conscience-striken? No, it was simply fear — abject fear, not remorse. Moreover, is not a sodomite liable to be condemned to perpetual imprisonment?

“Vbu must think me a coward, but after all even the bravest man can only face an open foe. The thought that the occult hand of an unknown enemy is always uplifted against you, and ready to deal you a mortal blow, is unbearable Today you are a man of a spotless reputation; tomorrow, a single word uttered against you in the street by a hired ruffian, a paragraph in a ranting paper by one of the modern bravi of the press, and your fair name is blasted forevermore.