Chapter 2

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 fire. 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 door-step, 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