by Oscar Wilde
“All through the season I saw a great deal of her, and the atmosphere of mystery never left her. Sometimes I thought that she was in the power of some man, but she looked so unapproachable that I could not believe it. It was really very difficult for me to come to any conclusion, for she was like one of those strange crystals that one sees in museums, which are at one moment clear, and at another clouded. At last I determined to ask her to be my wife: I was sick and tired of the incessant secrecy that she imposed on all my visits, and on the few letters I sent her. I wrote to her at the library to ask her if she could see me the following Monday at six. She answered yes, and I was in the seventh heaven of delight. I was infatuated with her: in spite of the mystery, I thought then—in consequence of it, I see now.12
“When Monday came round I went to lunch with my uncle, and about four o’clock found myself in the Marylebone Road. My uncle, you know, lives in Regent’s Park. I wanted to get to Piccadilly, and took a short cut through a lot of shabby little streets. Suddenly I saw in front of me Lady Alroy, deeply veiled and walking very fast. On coming to the last house in the street, she went up the steps, took out a latch-key,13 and let herself in. ‘Here is the mystery,’ I said to myself; and I hurried on and examined the house. It seemed a sort of place for letting lodgings. On the doorstep lay her handkerchief, which she had dropped. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then I began to consider what I should do. I came to the conclusion that I had no right to spy on her, and I drove down to the club. At six I called to see her. She was lying on a sofa, in a tea-gown of silver tissue looped up by some strange moonstones that she always wore. She was looking quite lovely. ‘I am so glad to see you,’ she said, ‘I have not been out all day.’ I looked at her in amazement, and pulling the handkerchief out of my pocket, handed it to her. ‘You dropped this in Cumnor Street this afternoon, Lady Alroy,’ I said very calmly. She looked at me in terror, but made no attempt to take the handkerchief. ‘What were you doing there?’ I asked. ‘What right have you to question me?’ she answered. ‘The right of a man who loves you,’ I replied. ‘I came here to ask you to be my wife.’ She hid her face in her hands, and burst into floods of tears. ‘You must tell me,’ I continued. She stood up, and, looking me straight in the face, said, ‘Lord Murchison, there is nothing to tell you.’ ‘You went to meet some one,’ I cried, ‘this is your mystery.’ She grew dreadfully white, and said, ‘I went to meet no one.’ ‘Can’t you tell the truth?’ I exclaimed. ‘I have told it,’ she replied. I was mad, frantic; I don’t know what I said. I called her horrible names. Finally I rushed out of the house. She wrote me a letter the next day; I sent it back unopened, and started for Norway with Alan Colville. After a month I came back, and the first thing I saw in the Morning Post was the death of Lady Alroy. She had caught a chill at the Opera, and had died in five days of congestion of the lungs.14 I shut myself up and saw no one. I had loved her so much.15
“One day I went to Cumnor Street. I could not help it; I was tortured with doubt. I knocked at the door, and a respectable looking woman opened it to me. I asked her if she had any rooms to let. ‘Well, sir,’ she replied, ‘the drawing-rooms are let; but I have not seen the lady for three months, and as rent is owing on them, you can have them.’ ‘Is this the lady?’ I said, showing the photograph. ‘That’s her, sure enough,’ she exclaimed, ‘and when is she coming back, sir?’ ‘The lady is dead,’ I replied. ‘Lor, sir, I hope not!’ said the woman, ‘she was my best lodger. She paid me three guineas a week merely to sit in my drawing-rooms now and then.’ ‘She met some one here?’ I said; but the woman assured me that it was not so, that she always came alone, and saw no one. ‘What on earth did she do here?’ I cried. ‘She simply sat in the drawing-room, sir, and sometimes had tea,’16 the woman answered. I did not know what to say, so I gave her a sovereign and went away. Now, what do you think it all meant? You don’t believe the woman was telling the truth?”
“I do.”17
“Then why did Lady Alroy go there?”
“My dear Arthur,” I answered, “Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I am sure of it,” I replied.18
He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph. “I wonder?” he said at last.
* First published in the series “Town and Country Tales” in The World: A Journal for Men and Women, 25 May 1887; republished with revisions under the title “The Sphinx Without a Secret: An Etching” in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891).
1 The setting establishes the unnamed narrator as a flaneur and cosmopolitan man of the world. The Café de la Paix, overlooking the Place de l’Opéra, was the hub of Parisian café life in the 1880s. The English Illustrated Magazine described it as the “most cosmopolitan” of all Parisian cafes, where “the gilded youth of Paris, the gommeux [dandies] and the viveurs [those who enjoy the good things of life] … are interspersed with rastacouères [exotic and ostentatious people] and foreigners of all nations” (Theodore Child, “Out-door Paris,” English Illustrated Magazine 6 [1889]: 820). It was one of Wilde’s favorite cafes.
2 The first five books of the Bible, representing the Hebrew Torah, the foundation of Judaic thought and belief.
3 Wilde’s narrator differentiates himself sharply from Lord Murcheson, not least by his implicit suggestion that he would never be anxious over a woman.
4 We will soon discover that Lady Alroy rides in a yellow brougham. Yellow was widely associated with decadence and untraditional sexual values. As the staid masculine narrator of Mona Caird’s 1892 story “The Yellow Drawing Room” remarks, yellow is “radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed” and not in the least “ladylike” (Caird, “The Yellow Drawing Room,” in Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914,ed. Angelique Richardson [London: Penguin, 2002], 22).
5 One of many enigmatic portraits in Wilde’s fiction. Portraits feature prominently too—for what they conceal as much as what they reveal—in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” and “The Model Millionaire.” See Nicholas Frankel, “Portraiture in Oscar Wilde’s Fiction,” Etudes Anglaises 69, no.1 (2016): 49–61.
6 Wilde means that Lady Alroy possessed beauty of character, thought, and feeling, as opposed to shapely or “plastic” beauty, apprehended in the contours of the face or the body. The opposition between “psychological” and “plastic” beauty was one that preoccupied Wilde. He once characterized the artistic spirit of Greek literature as entirely plastic, whereas “modern art appeals directly to the emotions, aims at reaching the spiritual reality of things, cares more for feelings than for form” (Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Phillip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 138–139).
7 Altered in 1891 to “La Gioconda in sables,” a phrase that recalls Walter Pater’s description in The Renaissance (Wilde’s “golden book”) of Leonardo’s portrait “La Gioconda” as “etched and moulded [with] … the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome … the return of the Pagan world, [and] the sins of the Borgias” (The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], 98–99). “A Sphinx in sables” anticipates the narrator’s later assertion that Lady Alroy is “a Sphinx without a secret.”
8 Still one of London’s most elegant shopping streets and home to many private art galleries, in the heart of London’s affluent Mayfair district.
9Ma belle inconnue means “My beautiful stranger.” The “wretched Row” is Rotten Row (from the French Route du Roi, meaning “Road of the King”), a strip of land on the south side of London’s Hyde Park still maintained today as an eque
strian track. In the nineteenth century, to be seen in “the Row” riding on horseback or in a carriage was an important society ritual. According to Wilde’s contemporary Edward Walford, Rotten Row was “during the London season … the very maze and centre of fashion. Here … the pride and beauty of England may be seen upon their own stage, and on a fine day in ‘the season’ no other spot in the world can outrival in rich display and chaste grandeur the scene” (Walford, Old and New London: Volume 4 Westminster and The Western Suburbs [1878; new ed. London: Cassell, 1891], 397).
10 See p. 68 n.51 above.
11 Altered to “Mrs. Knox” in 1891. “Mrs. X” allies Lady Alroy with Virginie Gautreau, the subject of John Singer Sargent’s notoriously sensual portrait “Madame X,” originally titled “Madame XXX,” which had shocked the art world on being exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1884. Shortly before exhibiting the portrait, Sargent privately invited Wilde to his studio to view the portrait’s completion.
12 The following was added here in 1891: “No; it was the woman herself I loved. The mystery troubled me, maddened me. Why did chance put me in its track?’ ‘You discovered it, then?’ I cried. ‘I fear so,’ he answered. ‘You can judge for yourself.’ ”
13 A latch-key, allowing freedom of movement outside the house, became a virtual symbol of the New Woman of the 1890s.
14 A conventional falsity uttered to disguise more questionable modes of death. When Jack decides to “kill” his alter-ego Ernest, in The Importance of Being Earnest, he announces that Ernest has died of “a severe chill.” For the Morning Post, see p. 46 n.15 above.
15 “I had loved her so madly. Good God! how I had loved that woman!” added 1891. Also the following exchange added before the following paragraph:
“ ‘You went to the street, to the house in it?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he answered.”
16 The landlady’s explanation, like the location of her rooms, suggests that Lady Alroy sought to escape from her social class as much as the conventional expectations upon her gender.
17 “If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out,” Wilde observes in “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.”
18 By retitling the story “The Sphinx Without a Secret” on republication in 1891, Wilde appears to have endorsed the narrator’s explanation. However, like Lord Murcheson, we might want to question it. Lady Alroy certainly took rooms for her own pleasure, but that she imagined she was a heroine and “had a passion for secrecy” may reflect aspects of the narrator’s own character, rather than any truth about Lady Alroy herself. When pressed by Murcheson, Wilde’s narrator says unflinchingly that the landlady is telling the truth in her account of Lady Alroy’s doings. But his statement contrasts sharply with his earlier remarks that Murcheson might have been “the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth,” and that Lady Alroy’s face “seemed to me the face of some one who had a secret.” Wilde implies that the narrator secretly believes that there is more to Lady Alroy’s story than is good for Lord Murcheson to understand, and perhaps also that the narrator has secrets of his own. See too Introduction, p. 15, and Note on the Text, pp. 33–34, above.
THE MODEL MILLIONAIRE*
· · · UNLESS ONE IS WEALTHY there is no good in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. These are the great truths of modern life which Hughie Erskine never realised.1 Poor Hughie! Intellectually, we must admit, he was not of much importance. He never said either a brilliant or an illnatured thing in his life. But then he was wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his gray eyes. He was as popular with men as he was with women, and he had every accomplishment except that of making money. His father had bequeathed him his cavalry sword, and a History of the Peninsular War in fifteen volumes.2 Hughie hung the first over his looking-glass, put the second on a shelf between Ruff’s Guide and Bailey’s Magazine,3 and lived on two hundred a-year that an old aunt allowed him. He had tried everything. He had gone on the Stock Exchange for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears? He had been a tea-merchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe and souchong. Then he had tried selling dry sherry. That did not answer.4 Ultimately he became nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession.5
To make matters worse, he was in love. The girl he loved was Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his digestion in India, and had never found either of them again. Laura adored him, and he was ready to kiss her shoe-strings. They were the handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them. The Colonel was very fond of Hughie, but would not hear of any engagement.
“Come to me, my boy, when you have got ten thousand pounds of your own, and we will see about it,” he used to say; and Hughie looked very glum on those days, and had to go to Laura for consolation.6
One morning, as he was on his way to Holland Park, where the Mertons lived, he dropped in to see a great friend of his, Alan Trevor. Trevor was a painter. Indeed, few people escape that nowadays. But he was also an artist, and artists are rather rare.7 Personally he was a strange, rough fellow, with a freckled face and red hair. However, when he took up the brush he was a real master, and his pictures were eagerly sought after. He had been very much attracted by Hughie at first, it must be acknowledged, entirely on account of his good looks.8 “The only people a painter should know,” he used to say, “are people who are bête and beautiful, people who are an artistic pleasure to look at and an intellectual repose to talk to. Dandies and darlings rule the world!”9 However, after he got to know Hughie better, he liked him quite as much for his bright buoyant spirits and his generous reckless nature, and had given him the permanent entrée to his studio.
When Hughie came in he found Trevor putting the finishing touches to a wonderful life-size picture of a beggar-man. The beggar himself was standing on a raised platform in a corner of the studio. He was a wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous expression. Over his shoulders was flung a coarse brown cloak, all tears and tatters; his thick boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand he leant on a rough stick, while with the other he held out his battered hat for alms.
“What an amazing model!” whispered Hughie, as he shook hands with his friend.
“An amazing model?” shouted Trevor at the top of his voice; “I should think so! Such beggars as he are not to be met with every day. A trouvaille, mon cher;10 a living Velasquez! My stars! what an etching Rembrandt would have made of him!”
“Poor old chap!” said Hughie, “how miserable he looks! But I suppose, to you painters, his face is his fortune?”
“Certainly,” replied Trevor, “you don’t want a beggar to look happy, do you?”
“How much does a model get for sitting?” asked Hughie, as he found himself a comfortable seat on a divan.
“A shilling an hour.”11
“And how much do you get for your picture, Alan?”
“O, for this I get a thousand!”12
“Pounds?”
“Guineas. Painters, poets, and physicians always get guineas.”13
“Well, I think the model should have a percentage,” said Hughie, laughing; “they work quite as hard as you do.”
“Nonsense, nonsense! Why, look at the trouble of laying on the paint alone, and standing all day long at one’s easel! It’s all very well, Hughie, for you to talk, but I assure you that there are moments when Art approaches the dignity of manual labour. But you mustn’t chatter; I’m very busy. Smoke a cigarette, and keep quiet.”
After some time the servant came in, and told Trevor that the frame-maker wanted to speak to him.
“Don’t run
away, Hughie,” he said, as he went out, “I will be back in a moment.”
The old beggar-man took advantage of Trevor’s absence to rest for a moment on a wooden bench that was behind him. He looked so forlorn and wretched that Hughie could not help pitying him, and felt in his pockets to see what money he had. All he could find was a sovereign and some coppers. “Poor old fellow,” he thought to himself, “he wants it more than I do, but it means no hansoms for a fortnight;” and he walked across the studio and slipped the sovereign into the beggar’s hand.
The old man started, and a faint smile flitted across his withered lips. “Thank you, sir,” he said, in a foreign accent.
Then Trevor arrived, and Hughie took his leave, blushing a little at what he had done. He spent the day with Laura, got a charming scolding for his extravagance, and had to walk home.
That night he strolled into the Palette Club about eleven o’clock, and found Trevor sitting by himself in the smoking-room drinking hock and seltzer.
“Well, Alan, did you get the picture finished all right?” he said, as he lit his cigarette.
“Finished and framed, my boy!” answered Trevor, “and, by-the-bye, you have made a conquest. That old model you saw is quite devoted to you. I had to tell him all about you—who you are, where you live, what your income is, what prospects you have—”