him into the bright light of the consulting-room, I kept my hand ready
on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had
never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I
have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his
face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and
great apparent debility of constitution, and--last but not least--with
the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore
some resemblance to incipient rigor, and was accompanied by a marked
sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic,
personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms;
but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in
the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle
of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck
in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in
a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable: his
clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric,
were enormously too large for him in every measurement--the trousers
hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the
waist of the coat below his haunches and the collar sprawling wide upon
his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far
from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and
misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced
me--something seizing, surprising, and 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 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 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 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.
HENRY JEKYLL'S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE
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 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 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 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 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 that fleshy 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 for 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 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 bore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at
first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was
because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good
and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive
experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had
lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a
house that was no longer mine; and, hurrying back to my cabinet, I once
more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of
dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the
stature, and the face of Henry Jekyll.
That night I had come to the fatal cross roads. Had I approached my
discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while
under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been
otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth I had come forth an
angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was
neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the
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 towards the elderly man, this
incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this
side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to
drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to
assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion;
it seemed to me at the time to be humorous; and I made my preparations
with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho, to
which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as 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 familiar object, in my
second character. I next drew up that will to which you so much
objected; so that if anything befell me in the person of Doctor 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 leadings 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 towards 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 conscience slumbered.
Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I
can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I
mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which
my chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought
on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a
child aroused against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the
other day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child's
family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at
last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to
bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of
Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by
opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself;
and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with
a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.
Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one
of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in
bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in
vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the
square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed-curtains and
the design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I
was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in
the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of
Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and, in my psychological way, began
lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even
as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still
so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eye 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,
corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor, and thickly shaded with a swart
growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.
I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the
mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden
and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed, I
rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes my blood was changed
into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry
Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I
asked myself; and then, with another bound of terror--how was it to be
remedied? It was well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my
drugs were in the cabinet--a long journey, down two pairs of stairs,
through the back passage, across the open court and through the
anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horror-struck. It
might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that,
when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? And then,
with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon my mind that
the servants were already used to the coming and going of my second
self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in clothes of my own
size: had soon passed through the house, where Bradshaw stared and drew
back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a strange array; and
ten minutes later Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape, and was
sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of breakfasting.