 Chapter 9 of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde On the 9th 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 blank. 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. I, even if you are 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. Pool, my butler, has his orders. You'll find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be forced, you are to go in alone. To open the glazed press, letter E, on the left hand. Break 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 bottom. In my extreme distress of mind 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 file and 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 foreseen, 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, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason. 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, laboring 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 post office may fail me, and this letter not come into your hands until tomorrow 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 ferago, 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 the table, got into a handsome, and drove straight to Henry 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 it once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The tradesman 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 file 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 gas. 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 perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries, and once very early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation, total failure. All this, though it wedded my curiosity, told me little that was definite. Here were a file of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments that had led, like too many of Jekyll's investigations, to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence of these artifacts in my house affect either the honour, 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 servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver that I might be found in some posture of self-defense. Twelve o'clock had scarce wrung 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 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, 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 ability 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, though 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 somber 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 his fair enimitation 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 insistence 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 draw. But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some perhaps on my own growing curiosity. There it is, sir. I said, pointing to the draw, 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 color, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapor. Suddenly, and at the same moment, the abolition 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, sat 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 parlay? Or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before your 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, a 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. Lanyan, 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. In the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leapt back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy. My mind submerged in terror. Oh God! I screamed. And oh 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 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 Karoo. The strange case of Dr. Jekyll in Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. CHAPTER X Henry Jekyll's full statement of the case. I was born in the year 18 Blank 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 around 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 part of 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 a 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 labored, 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, retracted 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 had been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck, that a 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 recognize 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 agonized womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they disassociated? I was so far in my reflections, when, as I have said, a sidelight 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 mis-like 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 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 burden of our life is bound forever 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 will not only recognize my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that make up my spirit, but manage 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 pains 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 here 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 supposed 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 opposed. 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, sleighter, 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 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 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 for 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 crossroads. 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. But it 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 in Congress 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 conquered my aversions 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 a housekeeper a creature whom I knew well 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 mishap, 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 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 in reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could 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 draft 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 it 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 know more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against me the anger of a passer-by whom I recognized 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 check 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 recognized the pattern of the bed-curtains and the design of the mahogany frame. Some things 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 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-dose. 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 sunlight of a mid-London morning, lying half-shot on the bed-clothes, was lean, quarter, 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 symbols, 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 courtyard 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 alterations 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 the 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 faint 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 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 Jackal, 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. Jackal, 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 Jackal. Or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jackal had more than a father's interest. Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast my lot with Jackal 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 forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal, but there was still another consideration in the scales. For while Jackal would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would not even be 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 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's struggling after freedom, and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draft. 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 draft, 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 enraged. 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 misdispersed, 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 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 harkening in my wake for the steps of the Avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draft, 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 a 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 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 in high 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. Jackal 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 labored 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 license. 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 underfoot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead. And the regents' park was full of winter chirpings and sweet with spring odors. 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 neighbors. 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 vinglorious 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 in Harry. 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 lightened up from end to end. Thereupon I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a passing handsome, 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 of 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 attendance 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. Hide in danger of his life was a creature new to me, shaken with an ordinate 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. Thence forward 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 eyes, 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 hide that wracked 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 woke 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 shown so strong in my soul that it almost rivaled 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 hide. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to myself, and a last six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be readministered. 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 Jackal. 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 hide that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom, and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, I, 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 in both 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 hide seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jackal, and certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jackal, 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 hide, 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, could usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye, likeaged 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 hide for Jackal was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and returned to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person. But he loathed the necessity. He loathed the despondency into which Jackal was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he himself was 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 objection and passion of his 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 is 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 draft. The abolition 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 draft. 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 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.