by Oscar Wilde
This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for, pacing up and down the room, glancing every moment at the clock, and becoming horribly agitated as the minutes went by. 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. At last the door opened, and his servant entered.
“Mr. Alan Campbell, Sir.”
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.”
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 appeared not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.
“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, you are certain to be arrested, without my stirring in the matter. Nobody ever commits a murder without doing something stupid. But I will have nothing to do with it.”
“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 simply 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. 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, 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 absolutely?”
“Yes.”
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. 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 h
ad 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.”
He hesitated a moment. “Is there a fire in the room upstairs?” he murmured.
“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.
When the hall door shut, Campbell started, and, having got up from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with a sort 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 small electric battery set on top of it. He placed it on the table, and went out again, returning 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 grinning in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying. He remembered that, the night before, for the first time in his life, he had forgotten to hide it, when he crept out of the room.
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 opened the door a little wider, and walked quickly in, with half-closed eyes and averted head, 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 over the picture.
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 Campbell.
He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been thrust back into the chair and was sitting up in it, with Campbell gazing into the glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs he heard the key being turned in the lock.
It was long after seven o’clock 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 chemicals in the room. But the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone.
XIII
“There is no good telling me that you are going to be good, Dorian,” cried Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water. “You are quite perfect. Pray don't change.”
Dorian Gray shook his head. “No, Harry, I have done too many dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began my good actions yesterday.”
“Where were you yesterday?”
“In the country, Harry. I was staying at a little inn by myself.”
“My dear boy,” said Lord Henry, smiling, “anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so uncivilized. There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country-people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.”
“Culture and corruption,” murmured Dorian. “I have known something of both. It seems to me curious now that they should ever be found together. For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I think I have altered.”
“You have not yet told me what your good action was. Or did you say you had done more than one?”
“I can tell you, Harry. It is not a story I could tell to any one else. I spared somebody. It sounds vain, but you understand what I mean. She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane. I think it was that which first attracted me to her. You remember Sibyl, don't you? How long ago that seems! Well, Hetty was not one of our own class, of course. She was simply a girl in a village. But I really loved her. I am quite sure that I loved her. All during this wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her two or three times a week. Finally she promised to come with me to town. I had taken a house for her, and arranged everything. Yesterday she met me in a little orchard. The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing. We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn. Suddenly I said to myself ‘I won’t ruin this girl. I won’t bring her to shame.’ And I determined to leave her as flowerlike as I had found her.”
“I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real ple
asure, Dorian,” interrupted Lord Henry. “But I can finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice, and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation.”
“Harry, you are horrible! You mustn't say these dreadful things. Hetty's heart is not broken. Of course she cried, and all that. But there is no disgrace on it. She can live, like Perdita, in her garden.”
