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STORY OF THE
DOOR
MR.
UTTERSON the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted
by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment;
lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and
when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beacon ed from his
eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke
not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and
loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he
was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre,
had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved
tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high
pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined
to help rather than to reprove.
‘I incline to, Cain’s heresy,’ he used to say. ‘I
let my brother go to the devil in his quaintly: ‘own way.’ In this character,
it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the
last good influence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as these, so
long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his
de-meanour.
No doubt the feat was easy to Mr.
Utterson; for he was
neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters,
well-polished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly
caught and pleased the eye of the passenger.
Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east,
the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain
sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two
stories high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower story and a
blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature,
the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with
neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into
the recess and struck matches on
the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the
school-boy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation,
no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their
ravages.
Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of
the by-street; but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up
his cane and pointed.
‘Did you ever remark that door?’ he asked; and when
his companion had replied in the affirmative, ‘It is connected in my mind,’
added he, ‘with a very odd story.’
‘Indeed?’ said Mr. Utterson, with
a slight change of voice,
‘and what was
that?’
‘Well, it was this way,’ returned Mr. Enfield: ‘I
was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’ clock
of a black winter morning, and my way lay through
a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street
after street, and all the folks asleep
—
street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as
a church — till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and
listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two
figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and
the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able
down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough
at the
corner; and then came the horrible part of the
thing; for the man trampled calmly over the, child’s body and left her screaming
on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t
like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a viewhalloa, took to
my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was
already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made
no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on
me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own family; and
pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his appearance.
Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the
Sawbones; and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there
was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first
sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case
was what struck me. He was the usual cut-and-dry apothecary, of no particular
age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent,
and
about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every
time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with the
desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in
mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the
man we could
and would make such a scandal out of this, as should
make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends
or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we
were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we
could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful
faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black, sneering
coolness — frightened too, I could see that — but carrying it off, sir, really
like Satan. ‘If you choose to make capital out of this accident,’ said he, ‘I
am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he.
‘Name your figure.’ Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s
family; he would have clearly liked to stick out; but there was something about
the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. The next thing was to
get the money; and where do you think he carried us but to that place with the
door? — whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back with the matter of
ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts’s, drawn payable to
bearer and signed with a name that I can’t mention, though it’s one of the
points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often
printed. The figure was stiff; but the signature was good for more than that,
business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not,
in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and come out of it
with another man’s cheque for close upon a hundred pounds. But he was quite
easy and sneering. ‘Set your mind at rest,’ says he, ‘I will stay with you till
the banks open and cash the cheque myself.’ So we all set off, the doc-tor, and
the child’s father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of the night
in my chambers; and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the
bank. I gave in the check myself, and said I had every reason to believe it was
a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine.’
‘Tut-tut,’ said Mr. Utterson.
‘I see you feel as I do,’ said Mr. Enfield. ‘Yes,
it’s a bad story. For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a
really damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of
the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows
who do what they call good. Black-mail, I suppose; an honest man paying
through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black-Mail House is what
I call that place with the door, in consequence. Though even that, you know, is
far from explaining all,’ he added, and with the words fell into a vein of
musing.
From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking
rather suddenly:’ And you don’t know if the drawer of the cheque lives there?’
‘A likely place, isn’t it?’
returned Mr. Enfield. ‘But I hap-
‘And you never asked about the — place with the
door?’ said Mr. Utterson.
‘No, sir: I had a delicacy,’ was the reply. ‘I feel
very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of
the day of judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You
sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and
presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked
on the head in his own back-garden and the family have to change their name.
No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the
less I ask.’
‘ A very good rule, too,’ said
the lawyer.
‘But I have studied the place for myself,’ continued
Mr. Enfield.’ It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody
goes in or out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my
adventure. There are three windows looking on the court on the first floor;
none below; the windows are always shut but they’re clean. And then there is a
chimney which is generally smoking; so somebody must live there. And yet it’s
not so sure; for the buildings are so packed together about that court, that
it’s hard to say where one ends and another begins.’
The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and
then, ‘Enfield,’ said Mr. Utterson, ‘that’s a good rule of yours.’
‘Yes, I think it is,’ returned
Enfield.
‘But for all that,’ continued the lawyer, ‘there’s
one point I want to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked
‘Well,’ said Mr. Enfield, ‘I can’t see what harm it
would do. It was a man of the name of Hyde.’
‘H’m,’ said Mr. Utterson. ‘What sort of a man is he
to see?’
‘He is not easy to describe. There is something
wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright
detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must
be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I
couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really
can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t
describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this
moment.’
Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and
obviously under a weight of consideration.
‘You are sure he used a key?’ he
inquired at last.
‘My
dear sir...’ began Enfield, surprised out of himself. ‘Yes, I know,’ said
Utterson; ‘I know it must seem strange.
The
fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is because I know
it already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been inexact
in any point, you had better correct it.’
‘I think you might have warned me,’ returned the other,
with a touch of sullenness. ‘But I have been pedantically ex-act, as you call
it. The fellow had a key; and what’s more, he has it still. I saw him use it,
not a week ago.
Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word;
and the young man presently resumed. ‘Here is another lesson
to say nothing,’ said
he. ‘I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to
this again.’
‘With all my heart,’ said the lawyer. ‘I shake hands
on that, Richard.’
THAT
evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat
down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal
was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his
reading-desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of
twelve, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however,
as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his
business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it
a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll’s Will, and sat down with a
clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson,
though he took charge of it now that it was made, had refused to lend the least
assistance in the making of it; it provided not only that, in case of the
decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., etc., all his possessions
were to pass into the hands of his ‘friend and benefactor Ed-ward Hyde,’ but
that in case of
Dr. Jekyll’s ‘disappearance or unexplained absence
for any period exceeding three calendar months,’ the said Ed-ward Hyde should
step into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free from any
burthen or obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members
of the doctor’s household. This document had
long
been the lawyer’s eyesore. It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of
the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest.
And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his
indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad
enough when the name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was
worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of
the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped
up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.
‘I thought it was madness,’ he said, as he replaced
the obnoxious paper in the safe, ‘and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.’
With that he blew out his candle, put on a great-
coat, and set forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of
medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received
his crowding patients. ‘If any one knows, it will be Lanyon,’ he had thought.
The solemn butler knew and
welcomed him;
he was subjected to no stage of delay, but ushered
direct from the door to the dining-room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone over his
wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of
hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr.
Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and welcomed him with both hands. The
geniality, as was the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but
it reposed on genuine feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both
at school and college, both thorough respecters of themselves
and of each other, and, what does not always follow,
men who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.
After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to
the sub-ject which so disagreeably preoccupied his mind.
‘I suppose, Lanyon,’ said he ‘you and I must be the
two oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has?’
‘I wish the friends were younger,’ chuckled Dr.
Lanyon. ‘But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now.’
Indeed?’ said Utterson. ‘I thought you had a bond of
common interest.’
‘We had,’ was the reply. ‘But it is more than ten
years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong,
wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for
old sake’s sake, as they say,
I see and I have seen devilish little of the man.
Such unscientific balderdash,’ added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple,
‘would have estranged Damon and Pythias.’
This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a
relief to Mr. Utterson. ‘They have only differed on some point of science,’ he
thought; and being a man of no scientific passions (except in the matter of
conveyancing), he even added: ‘It is nothing worse than that!’ He gave his
friend a few seconds to recover his composure, and then approached the
question he had come to put. ‘Did you ever come across a protege of his — one
Hyde?’ he asked.
‘Hyde?’ repeated Lanyon. ‘No. Never heard of him.
Since my time.’
That was the amount of
information that the lawyer car-
ried
back with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro, until the
small hours of the morning began to grow large. It was a night of little ease
to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions.
Six o ‘clock struck on the bells of the church that
was so conveniently near to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was digging
at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but
now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay and
tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s
tale went by
before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He
would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the
figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s;
and then these met, and that human
Juggernaut
trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would
see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling
at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of
the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his
side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must
rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all
night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more
stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more
swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and
at every street-corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the
figure had no face by which he might know
it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that
baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up
and grew apace in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate,
curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once
set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll
altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious
things when well examined. He might see a reason for
his friend’s strange preference or bondage (call it which you please) and even
for the startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth seeing:
the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy: a face which had but to show
itself to raise up, in the mind of the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of
enduring hatred.
From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt
the door in the by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon
when business was plenty, and time scarce, at night under the face of the
fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the
law-yer was to be found on his chosen post.
‘If he be Mr. Hyde,’ he
had thought, ‘I shall be Mr. Seek.’ And at last his patience was rewarded. It
was a fine dry night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom
floor; the lamps, unshaken, by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light and
shadow. By ten o’clock, when the shops were closed, the by-street was very
solitary and, in spite of the low growl of London from all round, very silent.
Small sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly
audible on either side of the roadway; and the ru-
mour of the approach of any passenger preceded him
by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some minutes at his post, when he was
aware of an odd, light footstep drawing near. In the
course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the quaint
effect with which the footfalls of a single per-son, while he is still a great
way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the
city. Yet his attention had never before been so sharply and decisively
arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious prevision of success that he
withdrew into the entry of the court.
The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out
suddenly louder as they turned the end of the street. The lawyer, looking
forth from the entry, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with. He
was small and very plainly dressed, and the look of him, even at that distance,
went somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination. But he made straight
for the door, crossing the roadway to save time; and as he came, he drew a key
from his pocket like one approaching home.
Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the
shoul-der as he passed.’ Mr. Hyde, I think?’
Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the
breath. But his fear was only momentary; and though he did not look the lawyer
in the face, he answered coolly enough:
‘That is my
name. What do you want?’
‘I see you are going in,’ returned the lawyer. ‘I am
an old friend of Dr. Jekyll’s — Mr. Utter-
son of Gaunt Street — you must
have heard my name;
‘You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home,’
replied Mr. Hyde, blowing in the key. And then suddenly, but still without
looking up, ‘How did you know me?’ he asked.
‘On your side,’ said Mr. Utterson, ‘will you do me a
favour?’
‘With
pleasure,’ replied the other. ‘What shall it be?’ ‘Will you let me see your
face?’ asked the lawyer.
Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon
some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair
stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. ‘Now I shall know you
again,’ said Mr. Utterson.’ It may be useful.’
‘Yes,’ returned Mr. Hyde, ‘it is as well we have,
met; and a propos, you should have my address.’ And he gave a number of a
street in Soho.
‘Good God!’ thought Mr. Utterson,’ can he, too, have
been thinking of the will?’ But he kept his feelings to him-self and only
grunted in acknowledgment of the address.
‘And
now,’ said the other, ‘how did you know me?’ ‘By description,’ was the reply.
‘Whose description?’
‘We
have common friends, said Mr. Utterson. ‘Common friends?’ echoed Mr. Hyde, a
little hoarsely.’
Who are they?’
‘Jekyll, for instance,’ said the
lawyer.
‘He never told you,’ cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of
anger.’ I did not think you would have lied.’
‘Come,’
said Mr. Utterson, ‘that is not fitting language.’ The other snarled aloud into
a savage laugh; and the next
moment,
with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and disappeared into the
house.
The lawyer stood a while when Mr. Hyde had left him,
the picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing
every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental
perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a class
that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of
deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he
had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity
and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice;
all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain
the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson
regarded him. ‘There must be some-
thing else,’ said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is
some-thing more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems
hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story
of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires
through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my
poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it Is on
that of your new friend.’
Round the corner from the by-street, there was a
square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their
high estate and let in flats and chambers
to all sorts and conditions of men: map-engravers,
architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house,
however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of
this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged
in darkness except for the fan-light, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A
well-dressed, elderly servant opened the door.
Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?’
asked the lawyer.
‘I will see, Mr. Utterson,’ said Poole, admitting
the visitor, as he spoke, into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall, paved
with flags, warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by a bright, open
fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak. ‘Will you wait here by the
fire, sir? or shall I give you a
light in the dining room?’
‘Here, thank you,’ said the lawyer, and he drew near
and leaned on the tall fender. This hall, in which he was now left alone, was a
pet fancy of his friend the doctor’s; and Utter-son himself was wont to speak
of it as the pleasantest room in London. But to-night there was a shudder in
his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his memory; he felt (what was rare
with him) a nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his spirits, he
seemed to read a menace in the flickering of the firelight on the polished
cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed of
his relief, when Poole presently returned to announce that Dr. Jekyll was gone
out.
‘I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting-room
door, Poole,’ he said. ‘Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home?’
‘Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust
in that young man, Poole,’ resumed the other musingly.
‘Yes, sir, he do indeed,’ said Poole. ‘We have all
orders to obey him.’
‘I
do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde?’ asked Utterson. O, dear no, sir. He never
dines here,’ replied the butler.
‘Indeed we see
very little of
him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and
goes by the laboratory.’
‘Well, good-night, Poole.’
‘Good-night, Mr. Utterson.’ And the lawyer set out
homeward with a very heavy heart.’ Poor Harry Jekyll,’ he thought, ‘my mind
misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while
ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay,
it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed
disgrace: punishment coming, PEDE CLAUDO, years after memory has forgotten and
self-love condoned the fault.’ And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded a
while on his own past, groping in all the corners of mem-ory, lest by chance
some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past
was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less
apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had
done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many that
he had come so near to doing, yet avoided. And then by a return on his former
subject,
he conceived a spark of hope. ‘This Master Hyde, if
he were studied,’ thought he, ‘must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by
the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Jekyll’s worst would be like
sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of
this creature stealing like a
thief to Harry’s bedside; poor Harry, what a
wakening! And the danger of it; for if this Hyde suspects the existence of the
will, he may grow impatient to inherit. Ay, I must put my shoulder to the wheel
if Jekyll will but let me,’ he added, ‘if Jekyll will only let me.’ For once
more he saw before his mind’s eye, as clear as a transparency, the strange
clauses of the will.
A
FORTNIGHT later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one of his pleasant
dinners to some five or six old cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all
judges of good wine; and Mr. Utterson so contrived that he remained behind
after the others had departed. This was no new arrangement, but a thing that
had befallen many scores of times. Where Utterson was liked, he was liked well.
Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and the
loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit a
while in his unobtrusive company, practising for solitude, sobering their
minds in the man’s rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety. To this
rule, Dr. Jekyll was no exception; and as he now sat on the opposite side of
the fire — a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a
slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness — you could see by
his looks that he cherished for Mr. Utterson a sincere and warm affection.
‘I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll,’ began
the latter. ‘You know that will of yours?’
A close observer might have gathered that the topic
was distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. ‘My poor Ut-
terson,’ said he, ‘you are unfortunate in such a
client. I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were
that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies. Oh, I
know he’s a good fellow — you needn’t frown — an excellent fellow, and I always
mean to see more of him; but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant,
blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon.’
‘You know I never approved of it,’ pursued Utterson,
ruthlessly disregarding the fresh topic.
‘My will? Yes, certainly, I know that,’ said the
doctor, a trifle sharply. ‘You have told me so.’
‘Well, I tell you so again,’ continued the lawyer.
‘I have been learning something of young Hyde.’
The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to
the very lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes. ‘I do not care to
hear more,’ said he. ‘This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop.’
‘What
I heard was abominable,’ said Utterson. ‘It can make no change. You do not
under-
stand my position,’ returned the doctor, with a
certain incoherency of manner. ‘I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position
is a very strange — a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot
be mended by talking.’
‘Jekyll,’ said Utterson, ‘you know me: I am a man to
be trusted. Make a clean breast of this in confidence; and I make no doubt I
can get you out of it.’
‘My good Utterson,’ said the doctor, ‘this is very
good of you, this is downright good of you, and I cannot find words
to thank you in. I believe you fully; I would trust
you before any man alive, ay, before myself, if I could make the choice; but
indeed it isn’t what you fancy; it is not so bad as that; and just to put your
good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be
rid of Mr. Hyde. I give you my hand upon that; and I thank you again and again;
and I will just add one little word, Utterson, that I’m sure you’ll take in
good part: this is a private matter, and I beg of you to let it sleep.’
Utterson reflected a little,
looking in the fire.
‘I have no doubt you are perfectly right,’ he said
at last, getting to his feet.
‘Well, but since we have touched upon this business,
and for the last time I hope,’ continued the doctor, ‘there is one point I
should like you to understand. I have really a very great interest in poor
Hyde. I know you have seen
him; he told me so; and I fear he was rude. But, I
do sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man; and if I
am taken away, Utterson, I wish you to promise me that you will bear with him
and get his rights for him. I think you would, if you knew all; and it would be
a weight off my mind if you would promise.’
‘I can’t pretend that I shall ever like him,’ said
the law-yer.
‘I don’t ask that,’ pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand
upon the other’s arm; ‘I only ask for justice; I only ask you to help him for
my sake, when I am no longer here.’
Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. ‘Well,’ said
he, ‘I promise.’
NEARLY
a year later, in the month of October, 18 — , Lon-don was startled by a crime
of singular ferocity and rendered all the more notable by the high position of
the victim. The details were few and startling. A maid servant living alone in
a house not far from the river, had gone up-stairs to bed about eleven.
Although a fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of the
night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maid’s window overlooked, was
brilliantly lit by the full moon. It seems she was romantically given, for she
sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into
a dream of musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she
narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or
thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat she became aware of an aged
and beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing
to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she
paid less attention. When they had come within
speech (which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed and accosted
the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the
subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it
some-times appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but
the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl
was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world
kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded
self-content. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to
recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for
whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which
he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an
ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great
flame of anger, stamping with his foot, bran-dishing the cane, and carrying on
(as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back,
with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde
broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with
ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm
of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon
the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.
It was two o’clock when she came to herself and
called for the police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim
in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed
had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had
broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one
splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter
—
the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and a
gold watch were found upon the
victim: but no cards or papers, except a sealed and
stamped envelope, which he had been probably carrying to the post, and which
bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson.
This was brought to the lawyer the next morning,
before he was out of bed; and he had no sooner seen it, and been told the
circumstances, than he shot out a solemn lip. ‘I shall say nothing till I have
seen the body,’ said he; ‘this may be very serious. Have the kindness to wait
while I dress.’ And with the same grave countenance he hurried through his
breakfast and drove to the police station, whither the body had been carried.
As soon as he came into the cell, he nodded.
‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I recognise him. I am sorry to say
that this is Sir Danvers Carew.’
‘Good God, sir,’ exclaimed the officer, ‘is it
possible?’ And the next moment his eye
lighted up with professional ambition. ‘This will
make a deal of noise,’ he said. ‘And perhaps you can help us to the man.’ And
he briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken stick.
Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of
Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer; broken
and battered as it was, he recognised it for one that he had himself presented
many years before to Henry Jekyll.
‘Is
this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?’ he inquired. ‘Particularly small and
particularly wicked-looking, is
what the maid
calls him,’ said the officer.
Mr. Utterson reflected; and then,
raising his head, ‘If you
It was by this time about nine in the morning, and
the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over
heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled
vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld
a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark
like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown,
like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog
would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft
of daylight would glance in between the swirling
wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with
its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been
extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of
darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a
nightmare. The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and
when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch
of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the
most honest.
As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the
fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French
eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many
ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of different
nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the
next
moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut
him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry
Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling.
An ivory-faced and silvery-haired
old woman opened the door. She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her
manners were excellent. Yes, she said, this was Mr. Hyde’s, but he was not at
home; he had been in that night very late, but had gone away again in less than
an hour; there was nothing strange in that; his habits were very irregular, and
he was often absent; for instance, it was nearly two months
since she had
seen him till yesterday.
‘Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms,’ said
the lawyer; and when the woman began to declare it was impossible, ‘I had
better tell you who this person is,’ he added.
‘This is
Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard.’
A flash of odious joy appeared upon the woman’s
face. ‘Ah!’ said she, ‘he is in trouble! What has he done?
‘Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances.
‘He don’t seem a very popular character,’ observed the latter. ‘And now, my
good woman, just let me and this gentleman have a look about us.’
In the whole extent of the house, which but for the
old woman remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms;
but these were furnished with luxury and good taste. A closet was filled with
wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a good picture hung upon the
walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who was much of a
connoisseur; and the carpets were of
many plies and agreeable in colour. At this moment,
however, the rooms bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly
ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside out;
lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the hearth
there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From
these embers the inspector disinterred the butt-end of a green cheque-book,
which had resisted the action of the fire; the other half of the stick was
found behind the door. and as this clinched his suspicions, the officer
declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank, where several thousand pounds
were found to be lying to the murderer’s credit, completed his gratification.
‘You may depend upon it, sir,’ he told Mr. Utterson:
‘I have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left
the stick or, above all, burned the cheque-book. Why, money’s life to the man.
We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills.’
This last, however, was not so easy of
accomplishment; for Mr. Hyde had numbered few familiars — even the master of
the servant-maid had only seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced;
he had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely,
as common observers will. Only on one point, were they agreed; and that was
the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed
his beholders.
IT
was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way to Dr. Jekyll’s
door, where he was at once admitted by Poole, and carried down by the kitchen
offices and across a yard which had once been a garden, to the building which
was indifferently known as the laboratory or the dissecting-rooms. The doctor
had bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes
being rather chemical than anatomical, had changed the destination of the block
at the bottom of the garden. It was the first time that the law-yer had been
received in that part of his friend’s quarters; and he eyed the dingy,
windowless structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense
of strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and
now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the
floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and the light falling
dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further end, a flight of stairs mounted
to a door covered with red baize;
and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received
into the doctor’s cabinet. It was a large room, fitted round with glass
presses, furnished, among other things, with a chevalglass and a business
table, and looking out upon the court by three dusty windows barred with iron.
A fire burned in the grate; a lamp was set lighted on the chimney shelf, for
even
in the houses the fog began to lie thickly; and
there, close up to the warmth, sat Dr. Jekyll, looking deadly sick. He did not
rise to meet his visitor, but held out a cold hand and bade him welcome in a
changed voice.
‘And now,’ said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had
left them, ‘you have heard the news?’
The doctor shuddered.’ They were crying it in the
square,’ he said. ‘I heard them in my dining-room.’
‘One word,’ said the lawyer. ‘Carew was my client,
but so are you, and I want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad
enough to hide this fellow?’
‘Utterson, I swear to God, ‘ cried the doctor,’ I
swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I
am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not
want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark
my words, he will never more be heard of.’
The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his
friend’s feverish manner. ‘You seem pretty
sure of him,’ said he; ‘and for your sake, I hope
you may be right. If it came to a trial, your name might appear.’
‘I am quite sure of him,’ replied Jekyll; ‘I have
grounds for certainty that I cannot share with any one. But there is one thing
on which you may advise me. I have — I have received a letter; and I am at a
loss whether I should show it to the police. I should like to leave it in your
hands, Utterson; you would judge wisely, I am sure; I have so great a trust in
you.’
‘You
fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection?’ asked the lawyer.
‘No,’ said the other.’
I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was
thinking of my own character, which this hateful business has rather exposed.’
Utterson ruminated a while; he was surprised at his
friend’s selfishness, and yet relieved by it. ‘Well,’ said he, at last, ‘let me
see the letter.’
The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and
signed ‘Edward Hyde”: and it signified, briefly enough, that the writer’s
benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a thousand
generosities, need labour under no alarm for his safety, As he had means of
escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked this letter well
enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for; and he
blamed himself for some of his past suspicions.
‘Have you the envelope?’ he
asked.
‘I burned it,’ replied Jekyll,’ before I thought
what I was about. But it bore no postmark. The note was handed in.’
‘Shall I keep this and sleep upon
it?’ asked Utterson.
‘I wish you to judge for me entirely,’ was the
reply. ‘I have lost confidence in myself.’
‘Well, I shall consider,’ returned the lawyer. ‘And
now one word more: it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that
disappearance?’
The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness:
he shut his mouth tight and nodded.
‘I knew it,’ said Utterson. ‘He meant to murder you.
You have had a fine escape.’
‘I have had what is far more to
the purpose,’ returned the
doctor solemnly: ‘I have had a lesson — O God,
Utterson, what a lesson I have had!’ And he covered his face for a mo-ment with
his hands.
On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or
two with Poole. ‘By the by,’ said he, ‘there was a letter handed in to-day:
what was the messenger like?’ But Poole was positive nothing had come except
by post;’ and only circulars by that,’ he added.
This news sent off the visitor with his fears
renewed. Plainly the letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly, indeed,
it had been
written in the cabinet; and if that were so, it must
be differently judged, and handled with the more caution. The newsboys, as he
went, were crying themselves hoarse along the footways: ‘Special edition.
Shocking murder of an M. P.’
That
was the funeral oration of one friend and client; and he could not help a
certain apprehension lest the good name of another should be sucked down in the
eddy of the scandal. It was, at least, a ticklish decision that he had to make;
and self-reliant as he was by habit, he began to cherish a longing for advice.
It was not to be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for.
Presently after, he sat on one side of his own
hearth, with Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway be-tween, at
a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine
that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The fog still
slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like
carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these
fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was
still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind.
But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago
resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, As the colour grows richer
in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards
was ready to be set free
and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the
lawyer melted. There was no man from whom he kept fewer secrets than Mr. Guest;
and he was not always sure that he kept as many as he meant. Guest had often
been on business to the doctor’s; he knew Poole; he could scarce have failed to
hear of Mr. Hyde’s familiarity about the house; he might draw conclusions: was
it not as well, then, that he should see a letter which put that mystery to
rights? and above all since Guest, being a great student and critic of
handwriting, would consider the step natural and obliging? The clerk, besides,
was a man of counsel; he would scarce read so strange a document without dropping
a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utter-son might shape his future course.
‘This is a sad business about Sir
Danvers,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of
public feeling,’ returned Guest. ‘The man, of course, was mad.’
‘I should like to hear your views on that,’ replied
Utterson. ‘I have a document here in his handwriting; it is between ourselves,
for I scarce know what to do about it; it is an ugly business at the best. But
there it is; quite in your way a murderer’s autograph.’
Guest’s eyes brightened, and he
sat down at once and
‘And
by all accounts a very odd writer,’ added the lawyer. Just then the servant
entered with a note.
‘Is that from Dr. Jekyll, sir?’ inquired the clerk.
‘I thought I knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. Utterson?’
‘Only an invitation to dinner.
Why? Do you want to see
it?’
‘One moment. I thank you, sir”; and the clerk laid
the two sheets of paper alongside and sedulously compared their contents.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said at last, returning both; ‘it’s a very interesting
autograph.’
There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson
struggled with himself. ‘Why did you compare them, Guest?’ he inquired
suddenly.
‘Well, sir,’ returned the clerk, ‘there’s a rather
singular re-semblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only differently
sloped.’
‘Rather quaint,’ said Utterson.
‘It is, as you say, rather
quaint,’ returned Guest.
‘I
wouldn’t speak of this note, you know,’ said the master. ‘No, sir,’ said the
clerk. ‘I understand.’
But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night than
he locked the note into his safe, where it reposed from that time forward.
‘What!’ he thought.’ Henry Jekyll forge for a mur-derer!’ And his blood ran
cold in his veins.
TIME
ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for the death of Sir
Danvers was resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of
the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was
unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of the man’s cruelty,
at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of
the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his present
whereabouts, not a whisper. From the time he had left the house in Soho on the
morning of the murder, he was simply blotted out; and gradually, as time drew
on, Mr. Utterson began to recover from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow
more at quiet with himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of thinking,
more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil
influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of
his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their
familiar guest
and entertainer; and whilst he had always been,
known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was
busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and
brighten, as if with an inward con-
On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the
doctor’s with a small party; Lanyon had been there; and the face of the host
had looked from one to the other as in the old days when the trio were
inseparable friends. On the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door was shut
against the lawyer. ‘The doctor was confined to the house,’ Poole said, ‘and saw
no one.’ On the 15th, he tried again, and was again refused; and having now
been used for the last two months to see his friend almost daily, he found this
return of solitude to weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night he had in Guest
to dine with him; and the sixth he betook himself to Dr. Lanyon’s.
There at least he was not denied admittance; but
when he came in, he was shocked at the change which had taken place in the
doctor’s appearance. He had his death-warrant written legibly upon his face.
The rosy man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder
and older; and yet it was not so much, these tokens of a swift physical decay
that arrested the lawyer’s notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner
that seemed to testify to
some deep-seated terror of the mind. It was unlikely
that the doctor should fear death; and yet that was what Utter-son was tempted
to suspect. ‘Yes,’ he thought; ‘he is a doctor, he must know his own state and
that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear.’ And yet
when Utterson remarked on his ill-looks, it was with an air of greatness that
Lanyon declared himself a doomed man.
‘I have had a shock,’ he said,
‘and I shall never recover. It
is a question of weeks. Well, life has been
pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew
all, we should be more glad to get away.’
‘Jekyll is ill, too,’ observed Utterson. ‘Have you
seen him?’
But Lanyon’s face changed, and he held up a
trembling hand. ‘I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll,’ he said in a
loud, unsteady voice. ‘I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you
will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead.’
‘Tut-tut,’ said Mr. Utterson; and then after a
considerable pause,’ Can’t I do anything?’ he inquired. ‘We are three very old
friends, Lanyon; we shall not live to make others.’
‘Nothing
can be done,’ returned Lanyon; ‘ask himself.’ He will not see me,’ said the
lawyer.
‘I am not surprised at that,’ was the reply. ‘Some
day, Utterson, after I am dead, you may
perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I
can-not tell you. And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other
things, for God’s sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep clear of this
accursed topic, then, in God’s name, go, for I cannot bear it.’
As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote
to Jekyll, complaining of his exclusion from the house, and asking the cause of
this unhappy break with Lanyon; and the next day brought him a long answer,
often very pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious in drift. The
quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. ‘I do not blame our old friend,’ Jekyll
wrote, ‘but I share his view that we must never
meet.
I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be
surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to
you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a
punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am
the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a
place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing,
Utter-son, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence.’
Utterson was amazed; the dark influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor
had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, the prospect had smiled
with every promise of a cheerful and an honoured age;
and now in a moment, friendship, and peace of mind,
and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked. So great and unprepared a change
pointed to madness; but in view of Lanyon’s manner and words, there must lie
for it some deeper ground.
A week afterwards Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in
something less than a fortnight he was dead. The night after the funeral, at
which he had been sadly affected, Utterson locked the door of his business
room, and sitting there by the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set
before him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of his
dead friend. ‘PRIVATE: for the hands of G. J. Utterson ALONE and in case of
his predecease to be destroyed unread,’ so it was emphatically superscribed;
and the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. ‘I have buried one friend
to-day,’ he thought: ‘what if this should cost me another?’ And
then he condemned the fear as a disloyalty, and
broke the seal. Within there was another enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked
upon the cover as ‘not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr.
Henry Jekyll.’ Utterson could not trust his eyes. Yes, it was disappearance;
here again, as in the mad will which he had long ago restored to its author,
here again were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll
bracketed. But in the will, that idea had sprung from the sinister suggestion
of
the man Hyde; it was set there with a purpose all
too plain and horrible. Written by the hand of Lanyon, what should it mean? A
great curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard the prohibition and dive at
once to the bottom of these mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his
dead friend were stringent obligations; and the packet slept in the inmost
corner of his private safe.
It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to
conquer it; and it may be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson desired the
society of his surviving friend with the same eagerness. He thought of him
kindly; but his thoughts were disquieted and fearful. He went to call indeed;
but he was perhaps relieved to be denied admittance; perhaps, in his heart, he
preferred to speak with Poole upon the doorstep and surrounded by the air and
sounds of the open city, rather than to be admitted into that house of
voluntary bondage, and to sit and speak with its inscrutable recluse. Poole
had, indeed, no very pleasant news to communicate. The doc-tor, it appeared,
now more than ever confined himself to the cabinet over the laboratory, where
he would sometimes
IT
chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his usual walk with Mr. Enfield,
that their way lay once again through the by-street; and that when they came in
front of the door, both stopped to gaze on it.
‘Well,’ said Enfield, ‘that story’s at an end at
least. We shall never see more of Mr. Hyde.’
‘I hope not,’ said Utterson. ‘Did I ever tell you
that I once saw him, and shared your feeling of repulsion?’
‘It was impossible to do the one without the other,’
re-turned Enfield. ‘And by the way, what an ass you must have thought me, not
to know that this was a back way to Dr. Jekyll’s! It was partly your own fault
that I found it out, even when I did.’
‘So you found it out, did you?’ said Utterson. ‘But
if that be so, we may step into the court and take a look at the win-dows. To
tell you the truth, I am uneasy about poor Jekyll; and even outside, I feel as
if the presence of a friend might do him good.’
The court was very cool and a little damp, and full
of premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright
with sunset. The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and
sitting close beside it, taking
‘What! Jekyll!’ he cried. ‘I
trust you are better.’
‘I am very low, Utterson,’ replied the doctor,
drearily, ‘very low. It will not last long, thank God.’
‘You stay too much indoors,’ said the lawyer. ‘You
should be out, whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my
cousin — Mr. Enfield — Dr. Jekyll.) Come, now; get your hat and take a quick
turn with us.’
‘You are very good,’ sighed the other. ‘I should
like to very much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not. But
indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see you; this is really a great pleasure; I
would ask you and Mr. Enfield up, but the place is really not fit.’
‘Why then,’ said the lawyer, goodnaturedly, ‘the
best thing we can do is to stay down here and speak with you from where we
are.’
‘That is just what I was about to venture to
propose,’ re-turned the doctor with a smite. But the words were hardly uttered,
before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded
by an expression of such abject terror and despair,
as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a
glimpse, for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been
sufficient, and they turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too,
they traversed the by-street; and it was not until they had come into a
neighbouring thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there were still some
stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at
last turned and looked
at his companion. They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in
their eyes.
‘God forgive us, God forgive us,’
said Mr. Utterson.
But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously
and walked on once more in silence.
MR.
UTTERSON was sitting by his fireside one evening after dinner, when he was
surprised to receive a visit from Poole.
‘Bless me, Poole, what brings you here?’ he cried;
and then taking a second look at him, ‘What ails you?’ he added; ‘is the doctor
ill?’
‘Mr. Utterson,’ said
the man,’ there is something wrong.’ Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine
for you,’ said the lawyer. ‘Now, take your time, and tell me plainly what you
want.’
‘You know the doctor’s ways, sir,’ replied Poole, ‘and
how he shuts himself up. Well, he’s shut up again in the cabinet; and I don’t
like it, sir I wish I may die if I like it. Mr. Utter-son, sir, I’m afraid.’
‘Now, my good man,’ said the lawyer, ‘be explicit.
What are you afraid of?’
‘I’ve been afraid for about a week,’ returned Poole,
doggedly disregarding the question, ‘and I can bear it no more.’
The man’s appearance amply bore
out his
words; his manner was altered for the worse; and
except for the moment when he had first announced his terror, he had not once
looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he sat with the glass of wine untasted
on his knee, and his eyes
‘Come,’ said the lawyer, ‘I see you have some good
reason, Poole; I see there is something seriously amiss. Try to tell me what
it is.’
‘I
think there’s been foul play,’ said Poole, hoarsely. ‘Foul play!’ cried the
lawyer, a good deal frightened and
rather
inclined to be irritated in consequence. ‘What foul play? What does the man
mean?’
‘I daren’t say, sir’ was the answer; ‘but will you come
along with me and see for yourself?’
Mr. Utterson’s only answer was to rise and get his
hat and great-coat; but he observed with wonder the greatness of the relief
that appeared upon the butler’s face, and perhaps with no less, that the wine
was still untasted when he set it down to follow.
It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with
a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying
wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking
difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the
streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for
Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He
could have wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious of so
sharp a wish to see and touch his fellow-creatures; for struggle as he might,
there was borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The
square, when they got there, was all full of wind and dust, and the thin trees
in the garden were lash-
ing themselves along the railing. Poole, who had
kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now pulled up in the middle of the
pavement, and in spite of the biting weather, took off his hat and mopped his
brow with a red pockethandkerchief. But for all the hurry of his cowing, these
were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but the moisture of some
strangling anguish; for his face was white and his voice, when he spoke, harsh
and broken.
‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘here we are, and God grant
there be nothing wrong.’
‘Amen, Poole,’ said the lawyer.
Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded
manner; the door was opened on the chain; and a voice asked from within, ‘Is
that you, Poole?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Poole. ‘Open the door.’ The
hall, when they entered it, was brightly lighted up; the fire was built high;
and about the hearth the whole of the servants, men and
women, stood huddled together like a flock of sheep.
At the sight of Mr. Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysteri-cal whimpering;
and the cook, crying out, ‘Bless God! it’s Mr. Utterson,’ ran forward as if to
take him in her arms.
‘What, what? Are you all here?’ said the lawyer
peevishly. ‘Very irregular, very unseemly; your master would be far from
pleased.’
‘They’re all afraid,’ said Poole.
Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the
maid lifted up her voice and now wept loudly.
‘Hold your tongue!’ Poole said to
her, with a ferocity of
accent that testified to his own jangled nerves; and
indeed, when the girl had so suddenly raised the note of her lamentation, they
had all started and turned toward the inner door with faces of dreadful
expectation. ‘And now,’ continued the butler, addressing the knife-boy, ‘reach
me a candle, and we’ll get this through hands at once.’ And then he begged Mr.
Utterson to follow him, and led the way to the back-garden.
‘Now, sir,’ said he, ‘you come as gently as you can.
I want you to hear, and I don’t want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if by
any chance he was to ask you in, don’t go.’
Mr. Utterson’s nerves, at this unlooked for
termination, gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he
re-collected his courage
and followed the butler into the laboratory building
and through the surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to the
foot of the stair. Here Poole motioned him to stand on one side and listen;
while he himself, setting down the candle and making a great and obvious call
on his resolution, mounted the steps and knocked with a somewhat uncertain
hand on the red baize of the cabinet door.
‘Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you, ‘he called;
and even as he did so, once more violently signed to the lawyer to give ear.
A voice answered from within: ‘Tell him I cannot see
any one,’ it said complainingly.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Poole, with a note of
something like triumph in his voice; and taking up his candle, he led Mr.
Utterson back across the yard and into the great kitchen,
‘Sir,’ he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes,’
was that my master’s voice?’
‘It seems much changed,’ replied the lawyer, very
pale, but giving look for look.
‘Changed? Well, yes, I think so,’ said the butler.
‘Have I been twenty years in this man’s house, to be deceived about his voice?
No, sir; master’s made away with; he was made, away with eight days ago, when
we heard him cry out upon the name of God; and who’s in there instead of him,
and why it stays there, is a thing that cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson!’
‘This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather
a wild tale, my man,’ said Mr. Utterson, biting his finger. ‘Suppose it were as
you suppose, supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been
— well, murdered, what
could induce the murderer to stay? That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend
itself to reason.’ ‘Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, but I’ll
do it yet,’ said Poole. ‘All this last week (you must know) him, or it, or
whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for
some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind. It was sometimes his way —
the master’s, that is — to write his orders on a sheet of paper and throw it on
the stair. We’ve had nothing else this week back; nothing but papers, and a
closed door, and the very meals left there to be smuggled in when nobody was
looking. Well, sir, every day, ay, and twice and thrice in the same day, there
have been orders and complaints, and I have been
sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in town.
Every time I brought the stuff back, there would be another paper tell-ing me
to return it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different firm.
This drug is wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for.’
‘Have
you any of these papers?’ asked Mr. Utterson. Poole felt in his pocket and
handed out a crumpled note,
which the
lawyer, bending nearer
to the candle, carefully examined. Its contents ran
thus: ‘Dr. Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw. He assures them
that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his present purpose. In
the year 18 — , Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large quantity from Messrs. M. He
now begs them to search with the most sedulous care, and should any of the same
quality be left, to forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration.
The importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated.’ So far the letter
had run composedly enough, but here with a sudden splutter of the pen, the
writer’s emotion had broken loose. ‘For God’s sake,’ he had added, ‘find me
some of the old.’
‘This is a strange note,’ said Mr. Utterson; and
then sharply, ‘How do you come to have it open?’
‘The man at Maw’s was main angry, sir, and he threw
it back to me like so much dirt,’ returned Poole.
‘This is unquestionably the doctor’s hand, do you
know?’ resumed the lawyer.
‘I thought it looked like it,’ said the servant
rather sulkily; and then, with another voice, ‘But what matters hand-of-write?
‘ he said. ‘I’ve seen him!’
‘That’s it!’ said Poole. ‘It was this way. I came
suddenly into the theatre from the
garden. It seems he had slipped out to look for this
drug or whatever it is; for the cabinet door was open, and there he was at the
far end of the room digging among the crates. He looked up when I came in, gave
a kind of cry, and whipped up-stairs into the cabinet. It was but for one
minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if
that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face? If it was my master, why
did he cry out like a rat, and run from me? I have served him long enough. And
then...’ The man paused and passed his hand over his face.
‘These are all very strange circumstances,’ said Mr.
Utterson, ‘but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master,
Poole,
is plainly seised with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the
sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask
and the avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to find this drug, by
means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery — God
grant that he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad enough,
Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well
together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms.’
‘Sir,’ said the butler, turning
to a sort of mottled pallor,
‘that
thing was not my master, and there’s the truth. My master’ here he looked round
him and began to whisper — ‘is
a tall, fine build of a man, and
this was more of a dwarf.’
Utterson attempted to protest. ‘O, sir,’ cried
Poole, ‘do you think I do not know my master after twenty years? Do you think I
do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door, where I saw him every
morning of my life? No, Sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll — God
knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll; and it is the belief of my
heart that there was murder done.’
‘Poole,’ replied the lawyer, ‘if you say that, it
will become my duty to make certain. Much as I desire to spare your master’s
feelings, much as I am puzzled by this note which seems to prove him to be
still alive, I shall consider it my duty to break in that door.’
Ah Mr. Utterson, that’s talking!’
cried the butler.
‘And now comes the second question,’ resumed
Utter-son: ‘Who Is going to do it?’
‘Why, you and me,’ was the
undaunted reply.
‘That’s very well said,’ returned the lawyer; ‘and
what-ever comes of it, I shall make it my business to see you are no loser.’
‘There is an axe in the theatre, continued Poole;
‘and you might take the kitchen poker for yourself.’
The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrument
into his hand, and balanced it. ‘Do you know, Poole,’ he said, looking up,
‘that
you and I are about to place ourselves in a position
of some peril?’
‘You may say so, sir, indeed,’
returned the butler.
‘It
is well, then, that we should be frank,’ said the other. ‘We both think more
than we have said; let us make a clean
‘Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was
so doubled up, that I could hardly swear to that,’ was the answer. ‘But if you
mean, was it Mr. Hyde? — why, yes, I think it was! You see, it was much of the
same bigness; and it had the same quick, light way with it; and then who else
could have got in by the laboratory door? You have not forgot, sir that at the
time of the murder he had still the key with him? But that’s not all. I don’t
know, Mr. Utterson, if ever you met this Mr. Hyde?’
‘Yes,’ said the lawyer, ‘I once
spoke with him.’
‘Then you must know as well as the rest of us that
there was something queer about that gentleman — something that gave a man a
turn — I don’t know rightly how to say it, sir, beyond this: that you felt it
in your marrow kind of cold and thin.’
‘I own I felt something of what you describe,’ said
Mr. Utterson.
‘Quite so, sir,’ returned Poole.
‘Well, when
that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among
the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. Oh,
I know it’s not evidence, Mr. Utter-son. I’m book-learned enough for that; but
a man has his, feelings, and I give you my Bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!’
‘Ay, ay,’ said the lawyer. ‘My fears incline to the
same point. Evil, I fear, founded — evil was sure to come — of that connection.
Ay, truly, I believe you; I believe poor Harry is killed; and I believe his
murderer (for what purpose, God
alone can tell) is still lurking in his victim’s
room. Well, let our name be vengeance. Call Bradshaw.’
The footman came at the summons, very white and
nervous.
Pull yourself together, Bradshaw,’ said the lawyer.
‘This suspense, I know, is telling upon all of you; but it is now our intention
to make an end of it. Poole, here, and I are going to force our way into the
cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear the blame.
Meanwhile, lest anything should really be amiss, or any malefactor seek to
escape by the back, you and the boy must go round the corner with a pair of
good sticks and take your post at the laboratory door. We give you ten minutes
to get to your stations.’
As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch.
‘And now, Poole, let us get to ours,’
he said; and taking the poker under his arm, led the
way into the yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite
dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that deep well of
building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about their steps, until
they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they sat down silently to
wait. London hummed solemnly all around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was
only broken by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet
floor.
‘So it will walk all day, Sir,’ whispered Poole;
‘ay, and the better part of the night. Only when a new sample comes from the
chemist, there’s a bit of a break. Ah, it’s an ill con-science that’s such an
enemy to rest! Ah, sir, there’s blood foully shed in every step of it! But hark
again, a little closer
The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain
swing, for all they went so slowly; it was different indeed from the heavy
creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. ‘Is there never anything
else?’ he asked.
Poole
nodded. ‘Once,’ he said. ‘Once I heard it weeping!’ ‘Weeping? how that?’ said
the lawyer, conscious of a sud-
den chill of
horror.
‘Weeping like a woman or a lost
soul,’ said
the butler. ‘I came away with that upon my heart,
that I could have wept too.’
But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole
disinterred the axe from under a stack of packing straw; the candle was set
upon the nearest table to light them to the attack; and they drew near with
bated breath to where that patient foot was still going up and down, up and
down, in the quiet of the night.
‘Jekyll,’ cried Utterson, with a loud voice, ‘I
demand to see you.’ He paused a moment, but there came no reply. ‘I give you
fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see you,’ he resumed;
‘if not by fair means, then by foul! if not of your consent, then by brute
force!’
‘Utterson,’
said the voice, ‘for God’s sake, have mercy!’ Ah, that’s not Jekyll’s voice —
it’s Hyde’s!’ cried Utterson.
‘Down with the
door, Poole!’
Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow
shook the building, and the red baise door leaped against the lock and hinges.
A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang
from the cabinet. Up went the axe again, and again
the panels crashed and the frame bounded; four times the blow fell; but the
wood was tough and the fittings were of excellent workmanship; and it was not
until the fifth, that the lock burst in sunder and the wreck of the door fell
inwards on the carpet.
The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the
stillness that had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the
cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and
chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer or two
open, papers neatly set forth on the business-table, and nearer the fire, the
things laid out for tea: the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for
the glased presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in
London.
Right in the midst there lay the body of a man
sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on
its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too
large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still
moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed
phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air,
Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.
‘We have come too late,’ he said sternly, ‘whether
to save or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains for us to
find the body of your master.’
The
far greater proportion of the building was occupied by the theatre, which
filled almost the whole ground sto-
ry and was lighted from above, and by the cabinet,
which formed an upper story at one end and looked upon the
court. A corridor joined the theatre to the door on
the by-street; and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second
flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a spacious cellar.
All these they now thoroughly examined. Each closet needed but a glance, for
all were empty, and all, by the dust that fell from their doors, had stood long
unopened. The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from
the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll’s predecessor; but even as they opened
the door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall
of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere
was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive.
Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. ‘ He
must be buried here,’ he said, hearkening to the sound.
‘Or he may have fled,’ said Utterson, and he turned
to examine the door in the by-street. It was locked; and lying near by on the
flags, they found the key, already stained with rust.
‘This does not look like use,’
observed the lawyer.
‘Use!’ echoed Poole. ‘Do you not see, sir, it is
broken? much as if a man had stamped on it.’
‘Ay,’ continued Utterson,’ and the fractures, too,
are rusty.’ The two men looked at each other with a scare. ‘This is beyond me,
Poole,’ said the
lawyer. ‘Let us go back to the cabinet.’ They mounted the stair in silence, and
still with an oc-
casional awe-struck glance at the dead body,
proceeded more thoroughly to examine the contents of the cabinet. At one table,
there were traces of chemical work, various measured heaps of some white salt
being laid on glass saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy
man had been prevented.
‘That is the same drug that I was always bringing
him,’ said Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling noise
boiled over.
This brought them to the fireside, where the
easy-chair was drawn cosily up, and the teathings stood ready to the sitter’s
elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay
beside the tea-things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a
pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem,
an-notated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies.
Next, in the course of their review of the chamber,
the searchers came to the cheval glass, into whose depths they looked with an
involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy
glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the
glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances
stooping to look in.
‘This glass have seen some strange things, sir,’
whispered Poole.
‘And surely none stranger than itself,’ echoed the
lawyer in the same tones. ‘For what did Jekyll’ — he caught himself up at the
word with a start, and then conquering the weakness — ‘what could Jekyll want
with it?’ he said.
‘You may say that!’
said Poole. Next they turned to the business-table. On the desk among the neat
array of papers, a large envelope was uppermost, and bore, in the doctor’s
hand, the name of Mr. Utterson. The lawyer unsealed it, and several enclosures
fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the same eccentric terms as
the one which he had returned six months before, to serve as a testament in
case of death and as a deed of gift in case of disappearance; but, in place of
the name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer, with in-describable amazement, read the
name of Gabriel John Utterson. He looked at Poole, and then back at the paper,
and last of all at the dead malefactor stretched upon the car-pet.
‘My head goes round,’ he said. ‘He has been all
these days in possession; he had no cause to like me; he must have raged to see
himself displaced; and he has not destroyed this document.’
He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in
the doctor’s hand and dated at the top.
‘O Poole!’ the lawyer cried, ‘he was alive and here
this day. He cannot have been disposed of in so short a space, he must be still
alive, he must have fled! And then, why fled? and how? and in that case, can we
venture to declare this suicide? Oh, we must be careful. I foresee that we may
yet involve your master in some dire catastrophe.’
‘Why don’t you read it, sir?’
asked Poole.
‘Because I fear,’ replied the lawyer solemnly. ‘ God
grant I have no cause for it!’ And with that he brought the paper to his eyes
and read as follows:
‘MY DEAR UTTERSON, —
When this shall fall into your hands, I shall have disappeared, under what
circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all
the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and
must be early. Go then, and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned me he
was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more, turn to the con-
fession of
Your unworthy and unhappy friend,
HENRY JEKYLL.’
‘There was a third enclosure?’
asked Utterson.
‘Here, sir,’ said Poole, and gave into his hands a
consider-able packet sealed in several places.
The lawyer put it in his pocket. ‘I would say
nothing of this paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save
his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these documents in quiet;
but I shall be back before midnight, when we shall send for the police.’
They went out, locking the door of the theatre
behind them; and Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the
fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in
which this mystery was now to be explained.
ON
the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the evening delivery a
registered envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague and old
school-companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised by this; for we
were by no means in the habit of correspondence; I had seen the man, dined with
him, indeed, the night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse
that should justify formality of registration. The contents increased my
wonder; for this is how the letter ran:
‘10th December, 18 —
‘DEAR LANYON, You are one of my oldest friends; and
although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot
remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a
day when, if you had said to me, ‘Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend
upon you,’ I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my
life, my honour my reason, are all at your mercy;
if you fail me to -night I am lost. You might
suppose, after this preface, that I am going to ask you for something
dishonourable to grant. Judge for yourself.
‘I want you to postpone all other engagements for
to-night — ay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take
a cab, unless your carriage should be
actually
at the door; and with this letter in your hand for consultation, to drive
straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has his orders; you will find, him
waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be
forced: and you are to go in alone; to open the glazed press (letter E) on the
left hand, breaking the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, with all its
contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same
thing) the third from the bot-tom. In my extreme distress of wind, I have a
morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you may know the
right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial and a paper book. This
drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Cavendish Square exactly as it
stands.
‘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 fore-
seen, 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,
‘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 postoffice 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 hours’ 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 per-haps six times in a
total of several hundred entries; and once very early in the list and followed
by several marks of ex-
clamation, ‘total failure!!!’ All this, though it
whetted my curiosity, told me little that was definite. Here were a phial of
some tincture, a paper of some salt, and the record of a series of experi-
ments 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 hon-our, 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
ser-vants 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,
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
re-late, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter.
Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbe-
gotten in the very essence of the creature that now
faced me — something seizing, surprising, and revolting — this 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 for-tune
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 pre-occupations, 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 under-
stood...’ 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 under-stood, 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 with-out 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 count-ed 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 ser-vices 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 swell — his 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 arm 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; 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
cannot, 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 fellow-men, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every
guarantee of an honourable 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 life. 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 furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and
suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which
led wholly toward the mystic and the transcenden-tal, re-acted 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, in-congruous, 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
conscious-ness, 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 day-dream, on the thought of the separation of these
elements. If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities,
life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust delivered from
the aspirations might go his way, 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 dis-grace and
penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind
that these incongruous fagots 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 mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid
body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to
shake and to 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
un-familiar 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 for the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that
made up my spirit, but managed to com-pound 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 can-not 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, hap-pier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a
current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race 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 com-mingled 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 prison-house 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 yet conquered my
aversion 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 toward 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 humorous; and I made my
prepara-tions with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in
Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as housekeeper a
creature whom I well knew 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 fa-miliar object, in my second character. I next drew
up that will to which you so much objected; so that if anything be-fell 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 thus 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 safety 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 centred 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 con-science 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, Ed-
ward 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 him-self; 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 psy-chological 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 bed- clothes, was
lean, cord-ed, 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 some-thing 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 be-come 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 uncertain-ties 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 for ever,
despised and friend-less. 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, lightheadedly 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 lift-ed 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 iniq-uity 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 oh, how I rejoiced to think 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 last year, I laboured to relieve
suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed
qui-etly, 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 peni-tence 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 as-saults
of temptation.
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious
measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to 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 discovery. It was a
fine, clear, Jan-uary 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 be-gin. After
all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself
with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their
neglect. And at the very moment of that vain-glorious 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 the 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
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 es-caped capture in the
streets, how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should I, an
unknown and dis-pleasing 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 Port-land Street, the name
of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical
enough, how-ever 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 an-other 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
slum-ber 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 grati-tude 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
break-fast, 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 tenor of the gallows drove him
continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station
of a part in-stead 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, scrawl-ing 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 life 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 ac-quiescence 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 re-newed 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 for ever re-indue that hated
personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or
continue, with the most strained and fear-struck 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.
96 The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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