الفصل الفصل 14 · At nine o’clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of

. At nine o’clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of

chocolate on a tray and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite

peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his

cheek. He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.

The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as

he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he

had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all.

His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. But

youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his

chocolate. The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The

sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was almost

like a morning in May.

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent,

blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there

with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had

suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for

Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came

back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still

sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was!

Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken

or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory

than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride

more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of

joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the

senses. But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out

of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might

strangle one itself.

When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and

then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual

care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and

scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once. He spent a long time

also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet

about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for the

servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence. At some of the

letters, he smiled. Three of them bored him. One he read several times

over and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face.

“That awful thing, a woman’s memory!” as Lord Henry had once said.

After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his lips slowly

with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait, and going over to the

table, sat down and wrote two letters. One he put in his pocket, the

other he handed to the valet.

“Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell

is out of town, get his address.”

As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon a

piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and

then human faces. Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew

seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward. He frowned, and

getting up, went over to the book-case and took out a volume at hazard.

He was determined that he would not think about what had happened until

it became absolutely necessary that he should do so.

When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page

of the book. It was Gautier’s “Émaux et Camées”, Charpentier’s

Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was of

citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted

pomegranates. It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton. As he

turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of

Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand “_du supplice encore mal lavée_,” with

its downy red hairs and its “_doigts de faune_.” He glanced at his own

white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and

passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:

Sur une gamme chromatique,

Le sein de perles ruisselant,

La Vénus de l’Adriatique

Sort de l’eau son corps rose et blanc.

Les dômes, sur l’azur des ondes

Suivant la phrase au pur contour,

S’enflent comme des gorges rondes

Que soulève un soupir d’amour.

L’esquif aborde et me dépose,

Jetant son amarre au pilier,

Devant une façade rose,

Sur le marbre d’un escalier.

How exquisite they were! As one read them, one seemed to be floating

down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black

gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked

to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as

one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him

of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the

tall honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through

the dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he

kept saying over and over to himself:

“Devant une façade rose,

Sur le marbre d’un escalier.”

The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn

that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to

mad delightful follies. There was romance in every place. But Venice,

like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true

romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had

been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret. Poor

Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He read

of the swallows that fly in and out of the little _café_ at Smyrna

where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned

merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each

other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps

tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by

the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red

ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small

beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood

over those verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell

of that curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the

“_monstre charmant_” that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre.

But after a time the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a

horrible fit of terror came over him. What if Alan Campbell should be

out of England? Days would elapse before he could come back. Perhaps he

might refuse to come. What could he do then? Every moment was of vital

importance.

They had been great friends once, five years before—almost inseparable,

indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end. When they met in

society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: Alan Campbell never

did.

He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real

appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the

beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian. His

dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had

spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken

a good class in the Natural Science Tripos of his year. Indeed, he was

still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his

own in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the

annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for

Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up

prescriptions. He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and

played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. In

fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray

together—music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be

able to exercise whenever he wished—and, indeed, exercised often

without being conscious of it. They had met at Lady Berkshire’s the

night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always

seen together at the opera and wherever good music was going on. For

eighteen months their intimacy lasted. Campbell was always either at

Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To him, as to many others, Dorian

Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in

life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever

knew. But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when they

met and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at

which Dorian Gray was present. He had changed, too—was strangely

melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music, and

would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called

upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in

which to practise. And this was certainly true. Every day he seemed to

become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice

in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain curious

experiments.

This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second he kept

glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly

agitated. At last he got up and began to pace up and down the room,

looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides.

His hands were curiously cold.

The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with

feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the

jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting

for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands

his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight

and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless. The brain

had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made

grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,

danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving

masks. Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind,

slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being

dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its

grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him

stone.

At last the door opened and his servant entered. He turned glazed eyes

upon him.

“Mr. Campbell, sir,” said the man.

A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back

to his cheeks.

“Ask him to come in at once, Francis.” He felt that he was himself

again. His mood of cowardice had passed away.

The man bowed and retired. In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in,

looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his

coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

“Alan! This is kind of you. I thank you for coming.”

“I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you said it

was a matter of life and death.” His voice was hard and cold. He spoke

with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt in the steady

searching gaze that he turned on Dorian. He kept his hands in the

pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the

gesture with which he had been greeted.

“Yes: it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one

person. Sit down.”

Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him. The

two men’s eyes met. In Dorian’s there was infinite pity. He knew that

what he was going to do was dreadful.

After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very

quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he

had sent for, “Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room

to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table.

He has been dead ten hours now. Don’t stir, and don’t look at me like

that. Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not

concern you. What you have to do is this—”

“Stop, Gray. I don’t want to know anything further. Whether what you

have told me is true or not true doesn’t concern me. I entirely decline

to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to yourself.

They don’t interest me any more.”

“Alan, they will have to interest you. This one will have to interest

you. I am awfully sorry for you, Alan. But I can’t help myself. You are

the one man who is able to save me. I am forced to bring you into the

matter. I have no option. Alan, you are scientific. You know about

chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments. What you

have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs—to destroy it

so that not a vestige of it will be left. Nobody saw this person come

into the house. Indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in

Paris. He will not be missed for months. When he is missed, there must

be no trace of him found here. You, Alan, you must change him, and

everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that I may

scatter in the air.”

“You are mad, Dorian.”

“Ah! I was waiting for you to call me Dorian.”

“You are mad, I tell you—mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to

help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. I will have nothing to

do with this matter, whatever it is. Do you think I am going to peril

my reputation for you? What is it to me what devil’s work you are up

to?”

“It was suicide, Alan.”

“I am glad of that. But who drove him to it? You, I should fancy.”

“Do you still refuse to do this for me?”

“Of course I refuse. I will have absolutely nothing to do with it. I

don’t care what shame comes on you. You deserve it all. I should not be

sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. How dare you ask me, of

all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? I should have

thought you knew more about people’s characters. Your friend Lord Henry

Wotton can’t have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he

has taught you. Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you. You

have come to the wrong man. Go to some of your friends. Don’t come to

me.”

“Alan, it was murder. I killed him. You don’t know what he had made me

suffer. Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the

marring of it than poor Harry has had. He may not have intended it, the

result was the same.”

“Murder! Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to? I shall not

inform upon you. It is not my business. Besides, without my stirring in

the matter, you are certain to be arrested. Nobody ever commits a crime

without doing something stupid. But I will have nothing to do with it.”

“You must have something to do with it. Wait, wait a moment; listen to

me. Only listen, Alan. All I ask of you is to perform a certain

scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the

horrors that you do there don’t affect you. If in some hideous

dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a

leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow

through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You

would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing

anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were

benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the

world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind.

What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.

Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are

accustomed to work at. And, remember, it is the only piece of evidence

against me. If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to be

discovered unless you help me.”

“I have no desire to help you. You forget that. I am simply indifferent

to the whole thing. It has nothing to do with me.”

“Alan, I entreat you. Think of the position I am in. Just before you

came I almost fainted with terror. You may know terror yourself some

day. No! don’t think of that. Look at the matter purely from the

scientific point of view. You don’t inquire where the dead things on

which you experiment come from. Don’t inquire now. I have told you too

much as it is. But I beg of you to do this. We were friends once,

Alan.”

“Don’t speak about those days, Dorian—they are dead.”

“The dead linger sometimes. The man upstairs will not go away. He is

sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. Alan! Alan!

If you don’t come to my assistance, I am ruined. Why, they will hang

me, Alan! Don’t you understand? They will hang me for what I have

done.”

“There is no good in prolonging this scene. I absolutely refuse to do

anything in the matter. It is insane of you to ask me.”

“You refuse?”

“Yes.”

“I entreat you, Alan.”

“It is useless.”

The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray’s eyes. Then he stretched

out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. He read

it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table.

Having done this, he got up and went over to the window.

Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and

opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell back

in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him. He felt as if

his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.

After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and

came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.

“I am so sorry for you, Alan,” he murmured, “but you leave me no

alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see the

address. If you don’t help me, I must send it. If you don’t help me, I

will send it. You know what the result will be. But you are going to

help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to spare you.

You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern, harsh,

offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no

living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate

terms.”

Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through

him.

“Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they are. The

thing is quite simple. Come, don’t work yourself into this fever. The

thing has to be done. Face it, and do it.”

A groan broke from Campbell’s lips and he shivered all over. The

ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing

time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be

borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his

forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already

come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead.

It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him.

“Come, Alan, you must decide at once.”

“I cannot do it,” he said, mechanically, as though words could alter

things.

“You must. You have no choice. Don’t delay.”

He hesitated a moment. “Is there a fire in the room upstairs?”

“Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos.”

“I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory.”

“No, Alan, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet of

notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab and bring the

things back to you.”

Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope

to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it carefully. Then

he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as

soon as possible and to bring the things with him.

As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up

from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with a

kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. A

fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was

like the beat of a hammer.

As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and looking at Dorian

Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was something in

the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him.

“You are infamous, absolutely infamous!” he muttered.

“Hush, Alan. You have saved my life,” said Dorian.

“Your life? Good heavens! what a life that is! You have gone from

corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. In

doing what I am going to do—what you force me to do—it is not of your

life that I am thinking.”

“Ah, Alan,” murmured Dorian with a sigh, “I wish you had a thousandth

part of the pity for me that I have for you.” He turned away as he

spoke and stood looking out at the garden. Campbell made no answer.

After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant

entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil

of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps.

“Shall I leave the things here, sir?” he asked Campbell.

“Yes,” said Dorian. “And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another

errand for you. What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies

Selby with orchids?”

“Harden, sir.”

“Yes—Harden. You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden

personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,

and to have as few white ones as possible. In fact, I don’t want any

white ones. It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty

place—otherwise I wouldn’t bother you about it.”

“No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?”

Dorian looked at Campbell. “How long will your experiment take, Alan?”

he said in a calm indifferent voice. The presence of a third person in

the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.

Campbell frowned and bit his lip. “It will take about five hours,” he

answered.

“It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven,

Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You can have

the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not want

you.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the man, leaving the room.

“Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is!

I’ll take it for you. You bring the other things.” He spoke rapidly and

in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him. They left

the room together.

When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned

it in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his

eyes. He shuddered. “I don’t think I can go in, Alan,” he murmured.

“It is nothing to me. I don’t require you,” said Campbell coldly.

Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of his

portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn

curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had

forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas,

and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.

What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on

one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible

it was!—more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent

thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose

grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had

not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.

He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with

half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in, determined that

he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down and

taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the

picture.

There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed

themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard

Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other

things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder

if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had

thought of each other.

“Leave me now,” said a stern voice behind him.

He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been

thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing into a

glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs, he heard the key

being turned in the lock.

It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He

was pale, but absolutely calm. “I have done what you asked me to do,”

he muttered. “And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again.”

“You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that,” said Dorian

simply.

As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible

smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting

at the table was gone.