of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on the
wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to
reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities
of my double existence. That part of me which I had the power of
projecting had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed
to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as
though (when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide
of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged,
the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of
voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become
irrevocably mine. The power of the drug had not always been equally
displayed. Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed me;
since then I had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, and
once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount; and these rare
uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole shadow on my contentment. Now,
however, and in the light of that morning's accident, I was led to
remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw
off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly
transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore seemed to
point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better
self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory
in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between
them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive
apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the
pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or
but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which
he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's
interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot
with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly
indulged, and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was
to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow
and for ever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal;
but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while
Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be
not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances
were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much
the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and
trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a
majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part, and was found
wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by
friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the
liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping pulses, and
secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made
this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither
gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde,
which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true
to my determination; for two months I led a life of such severity as I
had never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an
approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the freshness
of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of
course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde
struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I
once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that
he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long
as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete
moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the
leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was
punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was
conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more
furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that
stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to
the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare at least, before God, no
man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a
provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in
which a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped
myself of all those balancing instincts, by which even the worst of us
continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and
in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of
glee I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow: and
it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in
the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of
terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the
scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of evil
gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg. I
ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure) destroyed
my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in the same
divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly devising
others in the future, and yet still hastening and still hearkening in my
wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he
compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The
pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees
and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was
rent from head to foot, I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from
the days of childhood, when I had walked with my father's hand, and
through the self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again
and again, with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of
the evening. I could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and
prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with
which my memory swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions,
the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the acuteness of
this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of joy. The
problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth impossible;
whether I would or not, I was now confined to the better part of my
existence; and 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 quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I
wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I
daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality
of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower
side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl
for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of
that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was
once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an
ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of
temptation.
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled
at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the
balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural,
like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It was a
fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but
cloudless overhead; and the Regent's Park was full of winter chirrupings
and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal
within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little
drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.
After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled,
comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the
lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that
vainglorious thought a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most
deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then, as in
its turn 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 murderer, thrall to the gallows.
My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once
observed that, in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to
a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that,
where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance
of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how
was I to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in
my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I
sought to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the
gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How
was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in
the streets, how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should
I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician
to rifle the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that
of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own
hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must
follow became lighted up from end to end.
Thereupon I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a passing
hansom, drove to a hotel in Portland Street, the name of which I chanced
to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical enough, however
tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could not conceal his
mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the
smile withered from his face--happily for him--yet more happily for
myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from his
perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so black a
countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did they exchange
in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led me to a private
room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his life
was a creature new to me: shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the
pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute;
mastered his fury with a great effort of the will; composed his two
important letters, one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might
receive actual evidence of their being posted, sent them out with
directions that they should be registered.
Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing
his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter
visibly quailing before his eye; and then, when the night was fully
come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and
fro about the streets of the city. He, I say--I cannot say, I. That
child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and
hatred. And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow
suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his
misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst
of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him
like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to
himself, skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting
the minutes that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to
him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and
she fled.
When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend perhaps
affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in the
sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A
change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it
was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon's
condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came
home to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of
the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the
nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning
shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of
the brute that slept within me, and I had not, of course, forgotten the
appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my
own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so
strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the
chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those
indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the
time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging
and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a
double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat
looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be
re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great
effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of
the day and night I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above
all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always
as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending
doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even
beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a
creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and
mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.
But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would
leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew
daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images
of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed
not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of
Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly
the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it
was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of
that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links
of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his
distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing;
that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the
amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no
shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that
insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye;
lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to
be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of
slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred
of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows
drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the
necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen,
and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence
the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand
blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying
the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of
death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in
the ruin. But his love of 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 acquiescence of despair; and my
punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which
has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and
nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the
date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh
supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first
change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without
efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked;
it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure,
and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the
draught.
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the
influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time,
short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see
his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too
long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto
escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and
great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of
writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have
elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and
circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the
action of his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us
both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I
shall again and 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 fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this
room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace.
Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the 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.
THRAWN JANET
THRAWN JANET
The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative
or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the
Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye
was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on
1st Peter v. and 8th, "The devil as a roaring lion," on the Sunday after
every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself
upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror
of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits,
and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day,
full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it
stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw
overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish
hill-tops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of
Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued
themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan
alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by
that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular,
which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the
high-road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was
towards the kirktown of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of
it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the
river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms
on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path,
or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other
by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was
this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of
Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after
dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers;
and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more
daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to "follow my leader"
across that legendary spot.
This atmosphere of terror, surrounding, as it did, a man of God of
spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and
subject of inquiry among the few strangers who were led by chance or
business into that unknown, outlying country. But many even of the
people of the parish were ignorant of the strange events which had
marked the first year of Mr. Soulis's ministrations; and among those who
were better informed, some were naturally reticent, and others shy of
that particular topic. Now and again, only, one of the older folk would
warm into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the
minister's strange looks and solitary life.