The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (10 page)

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a
transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight
from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to
succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium,
struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A mist
dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene
of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the
topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance
doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the
lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on
my crime, light-headedly devising others in the future, and yet
still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for the steps of
the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the
draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of
transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon
his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of
self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a
whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had
walked with my father's hand, and through the self-denying toils
of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same
sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I
could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to
smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my
memory swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the
ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the acuteness
of this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of
joy. The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth
impossible; whether I would or not, I was now confined to the
better part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced to think of
it! with what willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions
of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I locked the door
by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under
my heel!

The next day, came the news that the murder had not been
overlooked, that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and
that the victim was a man high in public estimation. It was not
only a crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to
know it; I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus
buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was
now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the
hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can
say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You
know yourself how earnestly, in the last months of the last year,
I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for
others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for
myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and
innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more
completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and
as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me,
so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for
licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea
of that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person
that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it
was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the
assaults of temptation.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure
is filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally
destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the
fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had
made my discovery. It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under
foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the
Regent's Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring
odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking
the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed,
promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After
all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled,
comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will
with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment
of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid
nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and
left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began
to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater
boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of
obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my
shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy.
I was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of
all men's respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in
the dining-room at home; and now I was the common quarry of
mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the
gallows.

My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have
more than once observed that in my second character, my faculties
seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic;
thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have
succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs
were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them?
That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set
myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought
to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the
gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon.
How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped
capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his
presence? and how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor,
prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his
colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original
character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and
once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must
follow became lighted up from end to end.

Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and
summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street,
the name of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which
was indeed comical enough, however tragic a fate these garments
covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my
teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile
withered from his face—happily for him—yet more happily for
myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from
his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so
black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did
they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led
me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde
in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with
inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to
inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with
a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters,
one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual
evidence of their being posted, sent them out with directions that
they should be registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the
fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined,
sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before
his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth
in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the
streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of
Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.
And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow
suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in
his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into
the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions
raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his
fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented
thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided him from
midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of
lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.

When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend
perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a
drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon
these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the
fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked
me. I received Lanyon's condemnation partly in a dream; it was
partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into
bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent
and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me
could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened,
but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute
that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the
appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home,
in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape
shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness
of hope.

I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast,
drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized
again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the
change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet,
before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of
Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to
myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the
fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.
In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as
of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all
hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory
shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my
chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of
this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which
I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought
possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up
and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and
solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But
when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would
leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation
grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming
with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and
a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging
energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with
the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided
them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital
instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature
that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and
was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of
community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his
distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking
thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices;
that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was
dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And
this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than
a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard
it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of
weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him,
and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of
a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him
continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed
the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was
now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself
regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me,
scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books,
burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and
indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago
have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his
love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at
the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion
of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut
him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that
suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not
alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain
acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for
years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which
has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision
of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the
first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply
and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first
change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without
efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London
ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first
supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which
lent efficacy to the draught.

About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement
under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then,
is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think
his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in
the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an
end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has
been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck.
Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde
will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after
I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription
to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of
his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us
both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now,
when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I
know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or
continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of
listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge)
and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the
scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last
moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death,
and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as
I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring
the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.