finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_9_part_0.txt
The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 14
chapter 14
{"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210421171214/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/study-guide/summary-chapter-14", "summary": "Dorian awakes from a dreamless sleep and gradually remembers the terrible events of the previous night. He writes a letter summoning Alan Campbell, and sends his servant to deliver it. While he is waiting, he distracts himself from his guilt by reading poetry from a book given to him by a man named Adrian Singleton, and reflects on the course of his friendship with Alan Campbell. The two men first met at a party. Alan was a man of science, a chemist, but the two initially bonded over their shared love of music. Alan \"was an extremely clever young man,\" but \"whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian.\" For a while the two were inseparable, but for unspecified reasons Alan began leaving parties whenever Dorian showed up and refusing to speak with him or interact with him in any way. Alan withdrew from society almost entirely, immersing himself in his experiments. The long wait nags at Dorian, but Alan eventually arrives. Dorian speaks cordially, but his guest is cold, curt, and suspicious of his host's motives. Cutting to the chase, Dorian tells him that he needs him to get rid of a dead body, the result of a suicide. Alan refuses and wants nothing to do with the situation - or with Dorian at all, for that matter. Dorian, hoping to win Alan's sympathy, confesses that it was murder, and says that he only needs Alan to pretend to carry out an experiment. It becomes clear that Alan is determined to resist all of Dorian's tactics. Reluctantly, Dorian turns to blackmail, showing him a letter that he promises to send unless the scientist agrees to help. Alan succumbs to \"the disgrace with which he was threatened,\" and writes a letter for his assistant, detailing the tools to be brought at once to Dorian's house. The tools are delivered, and Dorian dismisses his servant for the evening so that he does not become suspicious. The two men haul the heavy trunk of tools upstairs. Dorian realizes that for the first time he has forgotten to cover the painting before leaving the attic. He rushes to throw the curtain over it, but before he does so he notices the sickening gleam of red blood on the hands of his doppelganger. Alan arrives with the trunk, locks himself in the attic, and goes to work. Around seven in the evening, the deed is done. Basil's body has been incinerated, and Alan leaves with the words \"Let us never see each other again.\"", "analysis": "Until now, we have heard the names Alan Campbell and Adrian Singleton mentioned on the list of names of those Dorian has corrupted, but this chapter contains the first instance of a face-to-face interaction with one of them.  Aside from Sibyl, these two are the only people whose lives Dorian has ruined who actually appear in the book.  Once again, the narrator refuses to state the reasons for the bitterness Alan displays towards Dorian, or the content of Dorian's blackmail letter, but these omissions only heighten our sense of how allegedly unspeakable their transgressions must have been.  We learn that Alan no longer wishes to show his face in public, and we have learned in earlier chapters that Adrian is likewise ostracized.  The likeliest causes for this shame - homosexual encounters - are, however, only tacitly present. When Wilde himself stood trial for accusations of sodomy in the years following this book's publication, he wrote of \"the note of doom that...runs through...Dorian Gray\"; it was instances such as these that Wilde was referring to.  Wilde revised later editions of the book in an effort to reduce the prominence of the homosexual undertones, but they were too integral an aspect of the interactions between the main characters to be eliminated entirely. Dorian's cordiality towards Alan when his guest first arrives is a facade.  His seeming reluctance to blackmail the man is insincere, an indication that Dorian actually takes pleasure from the manipulative power he holds over Alan.  Alan is not fooled by Dorian's pretense of kindness, but has no choice but to comply with his wishes.  In this interaction, we witness how refined Dorian's capacity for social persuasion has become during the 18 years glossed over in chapter 11.  He has been a good student of Lord Henry, now equalling, or parhaps surpassing, the older man's powers of manipulation. The poem that Dorian reads while waiting for Alan is significant for several reasons.  First, it is from a book given to him by Adrian Singleton.  Dorian relies on the gift of a man that he has somehow betrayed for comfort. The lines that he repeats over and over to himself, \"Devant une facade rose/ Sur le marbre d'un escalier,\" are translated as \"Upon a red-faced town/ On the marble of a stairway.\"  These lines seem to encapsulate Venice for Dorian, who has visited the city with Basil.  Remembering the painter, however, only leads him to remark \"Poor Basil! What a horrible way to die!\"  Dorian is unwilling to openly admit that he is directly responsibile for Basil's death.  In fact, Dorian instead blames Basil for the suffering caused by the painting.  This is, of course, highly delusional behavior.  It would make more sense to blame Lord Henry, his corruptor, but even this would be inaccurate.  Dorian himself is responsible for wishing the enchantment into existence.  However, the genuine acceptance of responsibility for his misdeeds is well beyond Dorian's ethical capacities at this point."}

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 Emaux et Camees, 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 lavee_," 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 Venus de l'Adriatique
       Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

     Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
       Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
     S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
       Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

     L'esquif aborde et me depose,
       Jetant son amarre au pilier,
     Devant une facade 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 facade 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 _cafe_ 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.



Chapter 14
Dorian awakes from a dreamless sleep and gradually remembers the terrible events of the previous night. He writes a letter summoning Alan Campbell, and sends his servant to deliver it. While he is waiting, he distracts himself from his guilt by reading poetry from a book given to him by a man named Adrian Singleton, and reflects on the course of his friendship with Alan Campbell. The two men first met at a party. Alan was a man of science, a chemist, but the two initially bonded over their shared love of music. Alan "was an extremely clever young man," but "whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian." For a while the two were inseparable, but for unspecified reasons Alan began leaving parties whenever Dorian showed up and refusing to speak with him or interact with him in any way. Alan withdrew from society almost entirely, immersing himself in his experiments. The long wait nags at Dorian, but Alan eventually arrives. Dorian speaks cordially, but his guest is cold, curt, and suspicious of his host's motives. Cutting to the chase, Dorian tells him that he needs him to get rid of a dead body, the result of a suicide. Alan refuses and wants nothing to do with the situation - or with Dorian at all, for that matter. Dorian, hoping to win Alan's sympathy, confesses that it was murder, and says that he only needs Alan to pretend to carry out an experiment. It becomes clear that Alan is determined to resist all of Dorian's tactics. Reluctantly, Dorian turns to blackmail, showing him a letter that he promises to send unless the scientist agrees to help. Alan succumbs to "the disgrace with which he was threatened," and writes a letter for his assistant, detailing the tools to be brought at once to Dorian's house. The tools are delivered, and Dorian dismisses his servant for the evening so that he does not become suspicious. The two men haul the heavy trunk of tools upstairs. Dorian realizes that for the first time he has forgotten to cover the painting before leaving the attic. He rushes to throw the curtain over it, but before he does so he notices the sickening gleam of red blood on the hands of his doppelganger. Alan arrives with the trunk, locks himself in the attic, and goes to work. Around seven in the evening, the deed is done. Basil's body has been incinerated, and Alan leaves with the words "Let us never see each other again."
Until now, we have heard the names Alan Campbell and Adrian Singleton mentioned on the list of names of those Dorian has corrupted, but this chapter contains the first instance of a face-to-face interaction with one of them.  Aside from Sibyl, these two are the only people whose lives Dorian has ruined who actually appear in the book.  Once again, the narrator refuses to state the reasons for the bitterness Alan displays towards Dorian, or the content of Dorian's blackmail letter, but these omissions only heighten our sense of how allegedly unspeakable their transgressions must have been.  We learn that Alan no longer wishes to show his face in public, and we have learned in earlier chapters that Adrian is likewise ostracized.  The likeliest causes for this shame - homosexual encounters - are, however, only tacitly present. When Wilde himself stood trial for accusations of sodomy in the years following this book's publication, he wrote of "the note of doom that...runs through...Dorian Gray"; it was instances such as these that Wilde was referring to.  Wilde revised later editions of the book in an effort to reduce the prominence of the homosexual undertones, but they were too integral an aspect of the interactions between the main characters to be eliminated entirely. Dorian's cordiality towards Alan when his guest first arrives is a facade.  His seeming reluctance to blackmail the man is insincere, an indication that Dorian actually takes pleasure from the manipulative power he holds over Alan.  Alan is not fooled by Dorian's pretense of kindness, but has no choice but to comply with his wishes.  In this interaction, we witness how refined Dorian's capacity for social persuasion has become during the 18 years glossed over in chapter 11.  He has been a good student of Lord Henry, now equalling, or parhaps surpassing, the older man's powers of manipulation. The poem that Dorian reads while waiting for Alan is significant for several reasons.  First, it is from a book given to him by Adrian Singleton.  Dorian relies on the gift of a man that he has somehow betrayed for comfort. The lines that he repeats over and over to himself, "Devant une facade rose/ Sur le marbre d'un escalier," are translated as "Upon a red-faced town/ On the marble of a stairway."  These lines seem to encapsulate Venice for Dorian, who has visited the city with Basil.  Remembering the painter, however, only leads him to remark "Poor Basil! What a horrible way to die!"  Dorian is unwilling to openly admit that he is directly responsibile for Basil's death.  In fact, Dorian instead blames Basil for the suffering caused by the painting.  This is, of course, highly delusional behavior.  It would make more sense to blame Lord Henry, his corruptor, but even this would be inaccurate.  Dorian himself is responsible for wishing the enchantment into existence.  However, the genuine acceptance of responsibility for his misdeeds is well beyond Dorian's ethical capacities at this point.