The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Chapter 12

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, chapter twelve.
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

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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 awoke, and as he opened his eyes,
a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he
had been having some delightful dream. Yet he had not

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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 on his elbow, began to drink
his chalk. The mellow November sun was streaming into the room.

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The sky was bright blue, 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 a silent, blood stained feet into his brain and
reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the

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memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment,
the same curious feeling of loathing for a battle Hollward
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

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hidteingous 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
since 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

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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. He

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passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up
hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual attention,
giving a good deal of care to the selection of
his necktie and scarf pin, and had changed his rings
more than once. He spent a long time over breakfast,
tasting the various dishes, talking to us Valid about some

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new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for
the servants at Celeby, and going through his correspondence. Over
some of the letters he smiled. Three of them bored him.
One he read several times over and then tore it
up with a slight look of annoyance in his face.
That awful thing a woman's memory, as Lord Henry had

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once said. When he drank his coffee, he sat down
at the table and wrote two letters. One he put
in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet.
Take this round to one fifty two Herdford Street, Francis,
and if mister Campbell is out of town, get his address.

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As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette
and began sketching upon a piece of paper, drawing flowers
and bits of architecture, first and then faces. Suddenly he
remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have
an extraordinary likeness to Basil Hallward. He frowned, and, getting up,
went over to the bookcase and took out a volume

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at hazard. He was determined that he would not think
about what had happened till it became absolutely necessary to
do so. When he stretched himself on the sofa, he
looked at the title page of the book. It was
Gautier emmau Acam's, sharpened his Japanese paper edition with a

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Jacques Imart etching. The binding was citron green leather with
a design of guilt 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 la Seneur, the cold yellow hand

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du suplis encour ma levais, with its downy red hairs
and its dwart de fan. He glanced at his own
white taper fingers, and passed on till he came to
those lovely verses upon Venice sour ungame chromatic ly Saint
de Perre's roussillon La venus de lesdratique sort de lu

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Saint called rose e blanc lesdon sou l'azur, desns suevet
la fras apour contour se e fluen comte de gourgandequ
su levee on soupire des mort les squiffe aboard at
mesd'spose Gerton Son amer at Pillier de von falsarrose sur

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les marbre de unescalier. How exquisite they were. As one
read them, one seemed to be floating down the green
waterways of the pink and pearl city, lying in a
black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere

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lines look to him like those straight lines of turquoise
blue that follow as one pushes out to the leader.
The sudden flashes of color reminded him of the gleam
of the opal and iris, throoted birds that flutter round
the tall honeycomb campanale, or stalk with such stately grace
through the dim arcades. Leaning back with half closed eyes,

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he kept saying over and over to himself, de vont
fassalcos sur les marbre de unscalier. 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 delightful, fantastic follies. There was romance in

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every place, but Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background
for Romance, and background was everything, or almost everything. Basil
had been with him part of the time and had
gone wild over Tintoret. Poor Basil, in a horrible way
for a man to die. He sighed and took up

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the book again and tried to forget. He read of
the swallows that fly in and out of the little
cafe at Smyrna, where the hodgies sit counting their amber beans,
and their turbaned merchants smoke their long tasseled pipes and
talk gravely to each other. Of the obelisk in the
Palace de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in

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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. And of that curious statue there Gautier compares

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to a contralto voice the monstre charmon that couches in
the porphyry room at the Louver. 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

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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

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

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dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge, he had
spent a great deal of time working in the laboratory,
and had taken a 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

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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,

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it was music that had first brought him in Doring
Gray together, music and the 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 Rubinstein had played there, and
after that used to be always seen together at the

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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

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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 of any passionate character, and would never himself play,

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giving as an excuse when he was called upon that
he was so absorbed in science that he had no
time left to practice, 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

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the man that 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,
the door opened and his servant entered. Mister Allen Campbell, Sir.
A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and

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the color 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 good

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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 upon Dorian. He kept his hands in

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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, Allan, and
to more than one person, sit down. Gambell took a
chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him.
The two men's eyes met. In Dorian, there was infinite pity.

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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 the man he had sent for. Allan,
in a locked room at the top of this house,
a room to which nobody but myself has access, a

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dead man is seated at a table. He has been
ten hours now. Don't 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

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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, Ah Allan. They will have to interest you.
This one will have to interest you. I am awfully

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sorry for you, Allan, 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, Allan. You are a scientist. You know
about chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments.
What you've got to do is destroy the thing that
is upstairs, to destroy it so that not a vessage

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will be left of it. 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, Allan, you must change
him and everything that belongs to him into a handful
of ashes that I may scatter in the air. You

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are mad, Dorian h. 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

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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 a suicide, Allan, 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

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do with it. I don't care what shame comes upon you.
You deserve it all. I should not be sorry to
see you disgrace 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 Wooten can't have

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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, Alleyne, it was murder.
I killed him. You don't know what he made me suffer.

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Whatever my life is. He had more to do with
the making or the marring of it than poor Harry
has said. He may have not intended it, by the
result is the same murder. Good God, dorrit is that
what you have come to I shall not inform upon you.
It is not my business. Besides, you are certain to

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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

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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,
you'd simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You
would not turn a hair, You would not believe that
you are doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you would

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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 less horrible than what

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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.

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It is nothing to do with me, Allan. I entreat you.
Think of the position I'm in. Just before you came,
I almost fainted with terror. No, don't 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

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will better men come from. Don't inquire now. I've told
you too much as it is, But I beg of
you to do this. We were once friends, Allan. Don't
speak of those days, Dorian. They are dead the dead linger.
Sometimes the man upstairs will not go away. He is

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sitting at the table with a bowed head and outstretched arms, Allan, Allan,
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 refuse absolutely to
do anything in the matter. It is insane of you

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to ask me. You refuse absolutely. Yes. The same look
of pity came into Dorian'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,
pushed it across the table. Having done this, he got up.

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I 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

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was beating itself to death in some empty hollow. After
two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned around
and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon
his shoulder. I am so sorry, Allan, he murmured. But
you leave me no alternative. I have a letter written

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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

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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 the terms. Campbell buried
his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him. Yes,
it is my turn to dictate terms. Allan, you know

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what they are. The thing is quite simple. Calm, don't
work yourself into this fever. This 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

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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, and as
if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already
come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like

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a hand of lead. It was intolerable. It seemed to
crush him. Come, Allan, you must decide at once. He hesitated,
for a moment. Is there a fire in the room upstairs?

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He murmured, yes, there is a gas fire with asbestos.
I will have to go home and get some things
from the laboratory. No, Allan, you need not leave the house.
Write on a sheet of notepaper what you want, and
my servant will take a cab and bring the things

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back to you. Campbell wrote 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,

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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 a beat of a hammer. As

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the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and, looking at
Dorrian 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. Ash Allan, you've saved my life,

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said Dorian, your life, at heavens, what a life that is.
You've gone from corruption to corruption, and now you've culminated
in crime in doing what I am going to do,
what you force me to do. It is not your
life that I am thinking. Well, Allan murmured Dorian with

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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 servanted carrying
a mahogany chest of chemicals with a small electric battery

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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 Dorrian. And I'm afraid, Francis that

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I have another errand for you. What is the name
of the man at Richmond who supplies Selby with orchids?
Harden sir, yes, Harden, he must go down to Richmond
at once see Harden personally and tell him to send
it twice as many orchids as I ordered, and to
have as few white ones as possible. In fact, in fact,

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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, And what time
shall I be back? Dorrian looked at Campbell. How long
will your experiment take, Allan, he said in calm, indifferent voice.

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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 in half
past seven, francs or stay, just leave my things out

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for dressing. Ay, 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, Allan,
there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy
this chest is, un I'll take it for you. You'll
bring the other things. He spoke rapidly, and in authoritative manner.

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Gampbell 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,

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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 the 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

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it when he crept out of the room. But what
was that loathsome red shwe 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,

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misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it
had not stirred, but was still there. As he left it.
He opened the door a little wider, and walked quickly
in with half closed eyes and an averted head, determined
that he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then,

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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

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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 as conscious that the dead man had been thrust
back into the chair and sitting in it, with Campbell
gazing into the glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs,

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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.

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You have saved me from ruin, Ellen, 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. End of Chapter twelve.