The Knife

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 03

Wide autumn hunting scene; a small lone rider sits slack on his horse on a rise while a distant figure folds into ochre bracken beneath a thin smear of gun-smoke against a pale sky. — He had been afraid for eighteen years of a man who could not read.

Intimate interior; seen from behind, a young man in dark evening dress drives a slim knife upward into a lamp-lit gilt-framed portrait on the wall. — He thrust the knife upward into the painted heart of his own conscience.

Mid shot of pale servants with candles at a doorway; a withered body in evening dress lies on the floor with a knife in its chest, while a radiant, youthfully restored gilt-framed portrait glows on the wall above. — It was only when they looked up at the wall that the household understood which of their two masters had died.

Autumn came to the country house like a polite assassin, and the guns went off in the bracken one bright morning and did the thing Dorian had been too timid to arrange himself. James Vane, that patient hater, that sailor with vengeance in his pockets, was gathered into the season's bag by a stranger's careless finger. A whip-crack of sound, a cry swallowed by the wind, a body folded into the ferns, and Dorian Gray, watching from his horse, felt the leash about his throat finally go slack. He had been afraid for eighteen years of a man who could not read, who carried his sister's kiss like a warrant, and now that man was carrion for the keeper's cart. Dorian smiled. Then he hated himself for smiling. Then he hated himself for hating himself, and in that tidy little spiral of disgust he found something almost like a vocation. He would be good. He would become, at last, the kind of man one could introduce to one's portrait.

He began, as reformed men do, with a stranger. In the lamplit lanes of an unfamiliar town, he followed a girl young enough to mistake attention for affection, and beautiful enough to make the mistake seem forgivable. He had ruined her sister once in a fit of curiosity; now, with James Vane cooling under the turf, he offered the younger one his chance to keep her name unspotted. He gave her money he did not earn, advice he could not follow, and a small lecture on the wages of sin delivered with the gravity of a man who has signed his own contract with the devil and is now recommending the firm to a friend. She went away grateful, and he walked home through the wet streets feeling, for a span of minutes, almost clean. Vanity, he did not yet know, is the most honest of the vices; it simply refuses to dress itself up as anything else. He mistook the prickle of self-approval for the warmth of grace.

ImaRead2

ImaReadFolio 03 — 03

Yes, life had decided that for him—life, and his own forgetfulness of his aims.

ImaRead3

He climbed the stairs to the locked room with the haste of a lover. The canvas stood where it had always stood, the varnished surface catching the lamp like a pool of dark water. He wanted absolution, the way a child wants a sweet after a beating; he wanted the painted face to have softened, the sneer to have melted, the knuckles of the clenched hands to have uncurled into something like a father's open palm. Instead, the picture offered him the new and exquisite cruelty of a mirror that had been paying better attention. Between the eyes of the portrait, a new line had appeared — not cruelty this time, nor lust, nor the slack mouth of satiety, but the fine, dry wrinkle of a man congratulating himself for not being worse. Hypocrisy, dressed for the opera in the costume of virtue. Dorian stared, and the painted stare came back worse than any sermon he had ever slept through. In a single movement, so quick that the servants below did not hear him rise, he crossed the room, pulled from the wall the very knife he had once driven into Basil Hallward's shoulder, and thrust it upward into the painted heart of his own conscience.

There was a cry — some say his, some say the house's, some say nothing at all but the settling of timber in an old building — and then the long, theatrical silence that follows a murder. The servants, climbing with candles, found the room in a strange state: the portrait radiant again, all its first impossible youth restored, the gold frame unmarked, the lips curved in the insolent sweetness they had worn before a single sin had been committed on their owner's behalf. On the floor, in the posture of a marionette whose strings have been cut by a careful hand, lay a thing they did not at first recognise as a man. Withered, wrinkled, loathsome of aspect, with a knife to the heart and a ring on a finger that still bore a name no one in the household now dared to speak, it was only when they looked up at the wall that the household understood which of their two masters had died, and which had come back into the world, blushing and unhurt, to begin again.