The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (8 page)

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his
entrance, struck in me what I can only, describe as a disgustful
curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an
ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although
they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for
him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and
rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat
below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his
shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far
from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something
abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that
now faced me—something seizing, surprising and 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
fortune and status in the world.

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to
be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor
was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.

"Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so
lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm
and sought to shake me.

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang
along my blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not
yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please."
And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary
seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a
patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my
preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer
me to muster.

"I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon," he replied civilly enough.
"What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown
its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your
colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some
moment; and I understood ..." He paused and put his hand to his
throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he
was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria—"I
understood, a drawer ..."

But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some
perhaps on my own growing curiosity.

"There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, where it
lay on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his
heart: I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of
his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed
both for his life and reason.

"Compose yourself," said I.

He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision
of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he
uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified.
And the next moment, in a voice that was already fairly well under
control, "Have you a graduated glass?" he asked.

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him
what he asked.

He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of
the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which
was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the
crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and
to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same
moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark
purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My
visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye,
smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and
looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.

"And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be
wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in
my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or
has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before
you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide,
you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor
wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal
distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if
you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new
avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this
room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a
prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan."

"Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder
that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I
have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause
before I see the end."

"It is well," replied my visitor. "Lanyon, you remember your
vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now,
you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material
views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine,
you who have derided your superiors—behold!"

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry
followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on,
staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I
looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to 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 arms raised to shield me from that
prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there
before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping
before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there
stood Henry Jekyll!

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to
set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul
sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my
eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life
is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror
sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my
days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die
incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me,
even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in memory, dwell on
it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson,
and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more
than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was,
on Jekyll's own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted
for in every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.

HASTIE LANYON

I was born in the year 18— to a large fortune, endowed besides
with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the
respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as
might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an 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 me. Many a man would have even blazoned
such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views
that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost
morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of
my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that
made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the
majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill
which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was
driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of
life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most
plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a
double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me
were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside
restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye
of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and
suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific
studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this
consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every
day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose
partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck:
that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the
state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others
will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I
hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere
polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I,
for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in
one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral
side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the
thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two
natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I
could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was
radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of
my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with
pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation
of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in
separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was
unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the
aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just
could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the
good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed
to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were
thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness,
these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then
were they dissociated?

I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side
light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table.
I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated,
the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this
seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents
I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly
vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion.
For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific
branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn
that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man's
shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but
returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my
discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only
recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of
certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to
compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from
their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted,
none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and
bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of
practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so
potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity,
might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least
inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that
immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the
temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last
overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my
tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists,
a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my
experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one
accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and
smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided,
with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones,
deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded
at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly
to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness.
There was something strange in my sensations, something
indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I
felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of
a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images
running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of
obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I
knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more
wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and
the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I
stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these
sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost
in stature.

There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which
stands beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for
the very purpose of these transformations. The night however, was
far gone into the morning—the morning, black as it was, was
nearly ripe for the conception of the day—the inmates of my
house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I
determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in
my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein
the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with
wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping
vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the
corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I
saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.