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"That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You
should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before
midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in the fear
of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor foreseen, but
because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what
will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone
in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man
who will present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer
that you will have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will have
played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes
afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood
that these arrangements are of capital importance; and that by the neglect
of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your
conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason.
"Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my
heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a
possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under
a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware
that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like
a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save
"Your friend,
"H.J.
"P.S.-I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my
soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this letter not
come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon,
do my errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the
day; and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be
too late; and if that night passes without event, you will know that you
have seen the last of Henry Jekyll."
Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane;
but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to
do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was
in a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could
not be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from
table, got into a hansom, and drove straight to Jekyll's house. The butler
was awaiting my arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a
registered letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and
a carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved
in a body to old Dr. Denman's surgical theatre, from which (as you are
doubtless aware) Jekyll's private cabinet is most conveniently entered.
The door was very strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he
would have great trouble and have to do much damage, if force were to be
used; and the locksmith was near despair. But this last was a handy
fellow, and after two hour's work, the door stood open. The press marked E
was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with straw and
tied in a sheet, and returned with it to Cavendish Square.
Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly
enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that
it was plain they were of Jekyll's private manufacture: and when I opened
one of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of
a white colour. The phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have
been about half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to
the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some
volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The book
was an ordinary version book and contained little but a series of dates.
These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the entries
ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark
was appended to a date, usually no more than a single word: "double"
occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries; and
once very early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation,
"total failure!!!" All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me
little that was definite. Here were a phial of some salt, and the record
of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll's
investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence
of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the
life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why
could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why was
this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I reflected the
more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease;
and though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that
I might be found in some posture of self-defence.
Twelve o'clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker
sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a
small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.
"Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?" I asked.
He told me "yes" by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him
enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the
darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with
his bull's eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and
made greater haste.
These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I
followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand
ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I
had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I
have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face,
with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great
apparent debility of constitution, and-last but not least-with the odd,
subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some
resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking
of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal
distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have
since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of
man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance,
struck in me what I can only, describe as a disgustful curiosity) was
dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable;
his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric,
were enormously too large for him in every measurement-the trousers
hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist
of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his
shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from
moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and
misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced
me-something seizing, surprising and revoltingthis fresh disparity seemed
but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the
man's nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin,
his life, his fortune and status in the world.
These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set
down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on
fire with sombre excitement.
"Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so lively was his
impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.
I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my
blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not yet the pleasure
of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please." And I showed him an
example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an
imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour,
the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would
suffer me to muster.
"I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon," he replied civilly enough. "What you
say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my
politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry
Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood ..." He
paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his
collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the
hysteria-"I understood, a drawer ..."
But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some perhaps on my
own growing curiosity.
"There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on
the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.
He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart: I
could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his
face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and
reason.
"Compose yourself," said I.
He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of
despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he uttered one
loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment,
in a voice that was already fairly well under control, "Have you a
graduated glass?" he asked.
I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he
asked.
He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the
red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first
of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten
in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour.
Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound
changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green.
My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled,
set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with
an air of scrutiny.
"And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will
you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go
forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of
curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall
be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were
before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered
to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the
soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge
and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this
room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to
stagger the unbelief of Satan."
"Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I
hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far
in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end."
"It is well," replied my visitor. "Lanyon, you remember your vows:
what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so
long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied
the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your
superiors-behold!"
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed;
he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with
injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I
thought, a change-he seemed to swellhis face became suddenly black and the
features seemed to melt and alter-and the next moment, I had sprung to my
feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from
that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there before
my eyes-pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with
his hands, like a man restored from death-there stood Henry Jekyll!
What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on
paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it;
and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I
believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has
left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and
night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet
I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to
me, even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in memory, dwell on it
without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that
(if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The
creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll's own
confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of
the land as the murderer of Carew.
HASTIE LANYON
I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of
the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been
supposed, with every guarantee of an honorurable and distinguished future.
And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of
disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found
it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and
wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it
came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of
reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and
position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity
of me. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was
guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded
and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the
exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my
faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in
the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which
divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was driven to
reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at
the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress.
Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both
sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside
restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day,
at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And
it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly
towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light
on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every
day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial
discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not
truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge
does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip
me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately
known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent
denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly
in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and
in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive
duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field
of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was
only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the
course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a
beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If
each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be
relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way,
delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and
the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the
good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to
disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the
curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound
together-that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins
should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light
began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to
perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling
immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in
which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake
and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the
curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into
this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made
to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man's
shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns
upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because, as
my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were incomplete.
Enough then, that I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura
and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but
managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from
their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the
less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of
lower elements in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I
knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled
and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of an
overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,
utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to
change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last
overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture;
I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity
of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last
ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the
elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the
ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the
potion.
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly
nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of
birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to
myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my
sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty,
incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was
conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images
running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of
obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew
myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold
more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that
moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands,
exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was
suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands
beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very purpose
of these transformations. The night however, was far gone into the
morning-the morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception
of the day-the inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours
of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to
venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard,
wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with
wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance
had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my
own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance
of Edward Hyde.
I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but
that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to
which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and
less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the
course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of
effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much less
exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so
much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone
upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on
the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the
lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and
decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was
conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was
myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image
of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and
divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so
far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance
of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible
misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings,
as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde,
alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive
experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had
lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a
house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once
more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of
dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the stature
and the face of Henry Jekyll.
That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my
discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under
the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise,
and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel
instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither
diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my
disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within
ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by
ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that
was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as
well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the
old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and
improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly
toward the worse.
Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of
a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my
pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well
known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this
incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this
side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to
drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to
assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion;
it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my preparations
with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho, to
which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a housekeeper a
creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other
side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described) was to
have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to parry
mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in my second
character. I next drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that
if anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that
of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed,
on every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position.
Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their
own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did
so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye
with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy,
strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But
for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safely was complete. Think of it-I
did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but
a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing
ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the
stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home,
trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh
at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I
have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands
of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would
come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder
at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul,
and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently
malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self;
drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to
another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times
aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from
ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was
Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he
woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make
haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his
conscience slumbered.
Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now
I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I
mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my
chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on
no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child
aroused against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other
day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child's family
joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at last, in
order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them
to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of Henry Jekyll.
But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by opening an
account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by
sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I
thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.
Some two months before the, murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for
one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day
in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in
vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the
square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and the
design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I was
not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the
little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward
Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological way, began lazily to
inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I did
so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged
when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now
the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in
shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I
now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning,
lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder, knuckly, of a dusky
pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of
Edward Hyde.
I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in
the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden
and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed I rushed
to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into
something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I
had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself;
and then, with another bound of terror-how was it to be remedied? It was
well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs were in the
cabinet-a long journey down two pairs of stairs, through the back passage,
across the open court and through the anatomical theatre, from where I was
then standing horror-struck. It might indeed be possible to cover my face;
but of what use was that, when I was unable to conceal the alteration in
my stature? And then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came
back upon my mind that the servants were already used to the coming and
going of my second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in
clothes of my own size: had soon passed through the house, where Bradshaw
stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a
strange array; and ten minutes later, Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own
shape and was sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of
breakfasting.
Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this
reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on
the wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to
reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities of
my double existence. That part of me which I had the power of projecting,
had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late
as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I
wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of blood; and I
began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my
nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be
forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine. The
power of the drug had not been always equally displayed. Once, very early
in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I had been obliged on
more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of death,
to treble the amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the
sole shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light of that
morning's accident, I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning,
the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late
gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things
therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my
original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second
and worse.
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had
memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared
between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive
apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the
pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or
but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he
conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest;
Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll,
was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had
of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand
interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised
and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still
another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer
smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of
all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this
debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and
alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out
with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose
the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by
friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the
liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and
secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this
choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up
the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still
lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true to my
determination; for two months, I led a life of such severity as I had
never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an approving
conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my
alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I
began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after
freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again
compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he
runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I
had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral
insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading
characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My
devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when
I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill.
It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of
impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I
declare, at least, before God, no man morally sane could have been guilty
of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more
reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything.
But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by
which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of
steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however
slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport
of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow;
and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly,
in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill
of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from
the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg.
I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure) destroyed
my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in the same
divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly devising
others in the future, and yet still hastening and still hearkening in my
wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he
compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The
pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees
and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was rent
from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the
days of childhood, when I had walked with my father's hand, and through
the self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again,
with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I
could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down
the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed
against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity
stared into my soul. As the acuteness of this remorse began to die away,
it was succeeded by a sense of joy. The problem of my conduct was solved.
Hyde was thenceforth impossible; whether I would or not, I was now
confined to the better part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced to
think of it! with what willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions
of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I locked the door by which
I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under my heel!
The next day, came the news that the murder had been overlooked, that
the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim was a man
high in public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic
folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my better
impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold.
Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and
the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.
I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say
with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself
how earnestly, in the last months of the last year, I laboured to relieve
suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days
passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I
wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily
enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of
purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of
me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for
licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that
would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was once
more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary
secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is
filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed
the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed
natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It
was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted,
but cloudless overhead; and the Regent's Park was full of winter
chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the
animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little
drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After
all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing
myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty
of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a
qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These
passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness
subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a
greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of
obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken
limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more
Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of all men's respect,
wealthy, beloved-the cloth laying for me in the dining-room at home; and
now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known
murderer, thrall to the gallows.
My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than
once observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened
to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that,
where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of
the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I
to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands)
I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to
enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the gallows. I saw
I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How was he to be
reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets,
how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should I, an unknown
and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle the
study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original
character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and once I
had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow became
lighted up from end to end.
Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a
passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name of which I
chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical enough,
however tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could not conceal
his mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and
the smile withered from his face-happily for him-yet more happily for
myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from his perch.
At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so black a countenance as
made the attendants tremble; not a look did they exchange in my presence;
but obsequiously took my orders, led me to a private room, and brought me
wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me;
shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to
inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great
effort of the will; composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and
one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of their being
posted, sent them out with directions that they should be registered.
Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing
his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter
visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully
come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and
fro about the streets of the city. He, I say-I cannot say, I. That child
of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And
when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he
discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting
clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the
nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a
tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself,
skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes
that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering,
I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.
When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend
perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in
the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A
change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was
the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon's condemnation
partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own
house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a
stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me
could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened, but
refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept
within me, and I had not of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the
day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to my
drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it
almost rivalled the brightness of hope.
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking
the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those
indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time
to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and
freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose
to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly
in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.
In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of
gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I
was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and
night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I
slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that
I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the
sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had
thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up
and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely
occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or
when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without
transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into
the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling
with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to
contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have
grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now
divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital
instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared
with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him
to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made
the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his
energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was
the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and
voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was
dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again,
that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than
an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it
struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence
of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred
of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows
drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the
necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen,
and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the
ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand
blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying
the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of
death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the
ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and
freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion
of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off
by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and
yet even to these, habit brought-no, not alleviation-but a certain
callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment
might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now
fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My
provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the
first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply and
mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of
colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will
learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am
now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that
unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under
the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last
time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or
see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay
too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto
escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and
great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing
it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after
I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the
moment will probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like
spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed
and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever
reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and
weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck
ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly
refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the
scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment?
God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to
follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and
proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry
Jekyll to an end.
should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before
midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in the fear
of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor foreseen, but
because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what
will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone
in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man
who will present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer
that you will have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will have
played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes
afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood
that these arrangements are of capital importance; and that by the neglect
of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your
conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason.
"Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my
heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a
possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under
a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware
that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like
a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save
"Your friend,
"H.J.
"P.S.-I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my
soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this letter not
come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon,
do my errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the
day; and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be
too late; and if that night passes without event, you will know that you
have seen the last of Henry Jekyll."
Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane;
but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to
do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was
in a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could
not be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from
table, got into a hansom, and drove straight to Jekyll's house. The butler
was awaiting my arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a
registered letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and
a carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved
in a body to old Dr. Denman's surgical theatre, from which (as you are
doubtless aware) Jekyll's private cabinet is most conveniently entered.
The door was very strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he
would have great trouble and have to do much damage, if force were to be
used; and the locksmith was near despair. But this last was a handy
fellow, and after two hour's work, the door stood open. The press marked E
was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with straw and
tied in a sheet, and returned with it to Cavendish Square.
Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly
enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that
it was plain they were of Jekyll's private manufacture: and when I opened
one of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of
a white colour. The phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have
been about half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to
the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some
volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The book
was an ordinary version book and contained little but a series of dates.
These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the entries
ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark
was appended to a date, usually no more than a single word: "double"
occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries; and
once very early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation,
"total failure!!!" All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me
little that was definite. Here were a phial of some salt, and the record
of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll's
investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence
of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the
life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why
could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why was
this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I reflected the
more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease;
and though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that
I might be found in some posture of self-defence.
Twelve o'clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker
sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a
small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.
"Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?" I asked.
He told me "yes" by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him
enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the
darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with
his bull's eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and
made greater haste.
These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I
followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand
ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I
had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I
have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face,
with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great
apparent debility of constitution, and-last but not least-with the odd,
subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some
resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking
of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal
distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have
since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of
man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance,
struck in me what I can only, describe as a disgustful curiosity) was
dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable;
his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric,
were enormously too large for him in every measurement-the trousers
hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist
of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his
shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from
moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and
misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced
me-something seizing, surprising and revoltingthis fresh disparity seemed
but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the
man's nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin,
his life, his fortune and status in the world.
These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set
down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on
fire with sombre excitement.
"Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so lively was his
impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.
I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my
blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not yet the pleasure
of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please." And I showed him an
example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an
imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour,
the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would
suffer me to muster.
"I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon," he replied civilly enough. "What you
say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my
politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry
Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood ..." He
paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his
collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the
hysteria-"I understood, a drawer ..."
But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some perhaps on my
own growing curiosity.
"There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on
the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.
He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart: I
could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his
face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and
reason.
"Compose yourself," said I.
He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of
despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he uttered one
loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment,
in a voice that was already fairly well under control, "Have you a
graduated glass?" he asked.
I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he
asked.
He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the
red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first
of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten
in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour.
Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound
changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green.
My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled,
set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with
an air of scrutiny.
"And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will
you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go
forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of
curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall
be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were
before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered
to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the
soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge
and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this
room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to
stagger the unbelief of Satan."
"Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I
hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far
in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end."
"It is well," replied my visitor. "Lanyon, you remember your vows:
what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so
long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied
the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your
superiors-behold!"
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed;
he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with
injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I
thought, a change-he seemed to swellhis face became suddenly black and the
features seemed to melt and alter-and the next moment, I had sprung to my
feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from
that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there before
my eyes-pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with
his hands, like a man restored from death-there stood Henry Jekyll!
What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on
paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it;
and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I
believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has
left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and
night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet
I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to
me, even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in memory, dwell on it
without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that
(if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The
creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll's own
confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of
the land as the murderer of Carew.
HASTIE LANYON
I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of
the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been
supposed, with every guarantee of an honorurable and distinguished future.
And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of
disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found
it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and
wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it
came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of
reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and
position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity
of me. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was
guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded
and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the
exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my
faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in
the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which
divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was driven to
reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at
the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress.
Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both
sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside
restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day,
at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And
it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly
towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light
on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every
day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial
discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not
truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge
does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip
me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately
known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent
denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly
in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and
in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive
duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field
of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was
only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the
course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a
beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If
each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be
relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way,
delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and
the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the
good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to
disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the
curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound
together-that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins
should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light
began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to
perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling
immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in
which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake
and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the
curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into
this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made
to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man's
shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns
upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because, as
my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were incomplete.
Enough then, that I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura
and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but
managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from
their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the
less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of
lower elements in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I
knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled
and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of an
overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,
utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to
change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last
overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture;
I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity
of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last
ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the
elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the
ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the
potion.
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly
nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of
birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to
myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my
sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty,
incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was
conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images
running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of
obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew
myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold
more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that
moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands,
exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was
suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands
beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very purpose
of these transformations. The night however, was far gone into the
morning-the morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception
of the day-the inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours
of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to
venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard,
wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with
wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance
had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my
own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance
of Edward Hyde.
I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but
that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to
which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and
less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the
course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of
effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much less
exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so
much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone
upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on
the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the
lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and
decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was
conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was
myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image
of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and
divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so
far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance
of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible
misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings,
as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde,
alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive
experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had
lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a
house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once
more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of
dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the stature
and the face of Henry Jekyll.
That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my
discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under
the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise,
and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel
instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither
diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my
disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within
ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by
ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that
was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as
well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the
old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and
improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly
toward the worse.
Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of
a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my
pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well
known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this
incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this
side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to
drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to
assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion;
it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my preparations
with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho, to
which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a housekeeper a
creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other
side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described) was to
have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to parry
mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in my second
character. I next drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that
if anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that
of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed,
on every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position.
Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their
own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did
so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye
with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy,
strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But
for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safely was complete. Think of it-I
did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but
a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing
ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the
stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home,
trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh
at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I
have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands
of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would
come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder
at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul,
and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently
malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self;
drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to
another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times
aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from
ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was
Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he
woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make
haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his
conscience slumbered.
Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now
I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I
mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my
chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on
no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child
aroused against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other
day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child's family
joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at last, in
order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them
to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of Henry Jekyll.
But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by opening an
account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by
sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I
thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.
Some two months before the, murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for
one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day
in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in
vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the
square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and the
design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I was
not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the
little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward
Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological way, began lazily to
inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I did
so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged
when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now
the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in
shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I
now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning,
lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder, knuckly, of a dusky
pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of
Edward Hyde.
I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in
the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden
and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed I rushed
to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into
something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I
had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself;
and then, with another bound of terror-how was it to be remedied? It was
well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs were in the
cabinet-a long journey down two pairs of stairs, through the back passage,
across the open court and through the anatomical theatre, from where I was
then standing horror-struck. It might indeed be possible to cover my face;
but of what use was that, when I was unable to conceal the alteration in
my stature? And then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came
back upon my mind that the servants were already used to the coming and
going of my second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in
clothes of my own size: had soon passed through the house, where Bradshaw
stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a
strange array; and ten minutes later, Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own
shape and was sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of
breakfasting.
Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this
reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on
the wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to
reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities of
my double existence. That part of me which I had the power of projecting,
had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late
as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I
wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of blood; and I
began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my
nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be
forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine. The
power of the drug had not been always equally displayed. Once, very early
in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I had been obliged on
more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of death,
to treble the amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the
sole shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light of that
morning's accident, I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning,
the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late
gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things
therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my
original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second
and worse.
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had
memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared
between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive
apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the
pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or
but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he
conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest;
Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll,
was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had
of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand
interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised
and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still
another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer
smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of
all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this
debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and
alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out
with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose
the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by
friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the
liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and
secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this
choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up
the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still
lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true to my
determination; for two months, I led a life of such severity as I had
never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an approving
conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my
alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I
began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after
freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again
compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he
runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I
had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral
insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading
characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My
devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when
I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill.
It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of
impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I
declare, at least, before God, no man morally sane could have been guilty
of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more
reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything.
But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by
which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of
steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however
slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport
of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow;
and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly,
in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill
of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from
the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg.
I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure) destroyed
my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in the same
divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly devising
others in the future, and yet still hastening and still hearkening in my
wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he
compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The
pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees
and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was rent
from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the
days of childhood, when I had walked with my father's hand, and through
the self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again,
with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I
could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down
the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed
against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity
stared into my soul. As the acuteness of this remorse began to die away,
it was succeeded by a sense of joy. The problem of my conduct was solved.
Hyde was thenceforth impossible; whether I would or not, I was now
confined to the better part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced to
think of it! with what willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions
of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I locked the door by which
I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under my heel!
The next day, came the news that the murder had been overlooked, that
the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim was a man
high in public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic
folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my better
impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold.
Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and
the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.
I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say
with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself
how earnestly, in the last months of the last year, I laboured to relieve
suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days
passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I
wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily
enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of
purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of
me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for
licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that
would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was once
more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary
secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is
filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed
the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed
natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It
was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted,
but cloudless overhead; and the Regent's Park was full of winter
chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the
animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little
drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After
all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing
myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty
of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a
qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These
passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness
subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a
greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of
obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken
limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more
Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of all men's respect,
wealthy, beloved-the cloth laying for me in the dining-room at home; and
now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known
murderer, thrall to the gallows.
My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than
once observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened
to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that,
where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of
the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I
to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands)
I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to
enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the gallows. I saw
I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How was he to be
reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets,
how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should I, an unknown
and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle the
study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original
character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and once I
had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow became
lighted up from end to end.
Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a
passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name of which I
chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical enough,
however tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could not conceal
his mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and
the smile withered from his face-happily for him-yet more happily for
myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from his perch.
At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so black a countenance as
made the attendants tremble; not a look did they exchange in my presence;
but obsequiously took my orders, led me to a private room, and brought me
wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me;
shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to
inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great
effort of the will; composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and
one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of their being
posted, sent them out with directions that they should be registered.
Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing
his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter
visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully
come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and
fro about the streets of the city. He, I say-I cannot say, I. That child
of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And
when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he
discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting
clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the
nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a
tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself,
skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes
that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering,
I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.
When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend
perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in
the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A
change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was
the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon's condemnation
partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own
house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a
stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me
could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened, but
refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept
within me, and I had not of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the
day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to my
drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it
almost rivalled the brightness of hope.
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking
the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those
indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time
to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and
freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose
to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly
in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.
In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of
gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I
was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and
night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I
slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that
I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the
sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had
thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up
and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely
occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or
when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without
transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into
the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling
with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to
contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have
grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now
divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital
instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared
with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him
to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made
the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his
energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was
the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and
voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was
dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again,
that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than
an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it
struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence
of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred
of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows
drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the
necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen,
and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the
ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand
blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying
the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of
death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the
ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and
freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion
of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off
by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and
yet even to these, habit brought-no, not alleviation-but a certain
callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment
might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now
fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My
provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the
first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply and
mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of
colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will
learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am
now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that
unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under
the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last
time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or
see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay
too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto
escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and
great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing
it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after
I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the
moment will probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like
spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed
and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever
reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and
weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck
ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly
refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the
scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment?
God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to
follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and
proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry
Jekyll to an end.