Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde
An aristocratic English family is selling up. They have lived for too long in a place filled with ghosts and spooks. The ghouls rattle their chains and make malicious hay. And the English nobles, they have had enough. Enough of their grandmothers being terrified in their beds and rendered so unwell by fear they must be more intensively (expensively) looked after. They are tired of their young bucks having encounters with the poltergeists at the gaming table so traumatic that afterwards, the men are so filled with trauma and awe that they can only repeat stock phrases. They are sick, sick, sick of it all. And so they are selling, and so they are off.
An American family is scheduled to move in; the father is the American ambassador to London. His wife is, of course, a society wife. He has two children, twins, that are little devils – as so many twins of course are. And his daughter Virginia, a little flaxen-haired thing, is a sweet a little girl, a kind of saint, with the seriousness and morality that seems to be embodied in some very young children. You can imagine her line-free face creasing in a frown as she contemplates the nature of ghosts and ghostliness.
And then it’s done. The house is sold. And the Americans have moved into a house which is, seriously and quite indisputably, haunted. Everything talks of the haunting, and the servant girls get spooked and give their notices early like some kind of unerring mechanism.
Here is where the blood pools in the morning, even if you attack it with detergent. Here is the place where the spooks would tap upon the window pane with bony fingers. Here is where sleepers would find their chests compressed as in a nightmare by the undead, or would feel cold hands on their shoulders while sitting up. It is a ghost’s world, after all, and the inhabitants of the house are just living in it.
But all spectators who might read this book expecting a nice cruel haunting are perhaps writing a story that this one is not. For this is a comedy, more than anything else: serio-comic, perhaps, but comic in a way that is accented, comic in italics. Because the ghost soon finds that with the Americans in residence, who are quite too modern and brash to be afraid as they rightly should be, he has painted himself – as with the blood – into a corner.
I’ll leave the reader of this review to imagine precisely how what inevitably follows will come on. And I would like to continue, if I may, by discussing the question of palmistry, or rather the reading of hands. Lord Arthur Savile is a smart young man; a young man quite unaware of life’s many awful tragedies. He has his beloved and his betrothed, and he is more than set to marry her – but first there is the question of a party thrown by Lady Windemere. One of those terrible bashes that are good enough in their way but where the need for entertainment makes guests restless, makes them charge from party to party in hope – often vain hope – of novelty.
But Lady Windermere has an ace. She has a palm-reader. He can tell all about you from your hands, dears. He can tell your future, even. And of course, he would – if he would be so kind – he would be delighted to look upon all those hands that are presented to him. He would be pleased to offer readings, indeed he should.
Lord Arthur is not the first to present his palm for examination. We already have seen, by the time the young man’s hand is thrust forward, some apparent demonstrations of the hand-reader’s art. Oh, they say, after the strange little man has offered his reading, his diagnoses, he does know me very well. He knows me very well, indeed!
When Lord Arthur appears, however, the palmist stiffens. He goes an odd colour. His voice never lets up – those people, catering to the hypochondriac, terminally bored rich, have a good line in chat. But he is scared. The man who can see the future seems quite definitely to be afraid. What is it he sees in Lord Arthur’s hand? He will not say. He will not say until Lord Arthur presents him with a cheque or a purse full of guineas, or the equivalent promise that his vast bill will soon be settled.
Then it is all down to business, and no mistake.
What is it you predict of me? Lord Arthur asks. And the strange man tells him that his future contains murder. Not the suffering of a murder – though that would be bad enough. Oh, no; the man says he sees something worse, something that implies to Lord Arthur that he will be the killer, his life an instrument of brutal, callous fate. It is a shock to the young man, a terrible shock.
How will he get out of it? How can he turn this fated, fatal thing to the good? And will this story be a funny one, like some of the others? I suppose you will have to read the rest to learn.
This is a fairly brief collection and most of the stories are either wholly comic or have a comic slant to them. They read, except for some of the Shakespearean speculations of ‘A Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ well enough and easily. I enjoyed ‘The Sphinx Without a Riddle’ a little and ‘The Model Millionaire’ more than that. A slight enough work, but I recommend. I recommend.