X. 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 toward the mystic and the transcendental,
re-acted 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
delivered from the aspirations might go his way, 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? 1
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 back that fleshly vestment, even
as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For
two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this
scientific branch of my confession. First, because I
have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of
our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and
when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but
returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful
pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will
make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were
incomplete. Enough, then, that I not only recognised
my natural body 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. 2
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. 3
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. 4
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. 5
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
wore 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. 6
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. 7
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. 8
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 toward 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 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. 9
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 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 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. 10
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,
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. 11
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. 12
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 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 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. 13
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. 14
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 been always 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. 15
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.
16
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
struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of
moral weakness, I once again compounded and
swallowed the transforming draught. 17
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. 18
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! 19
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. 20
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 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 vain-glorious 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. 21
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. 22
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. 23
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. 24
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. 25
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 tenor 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. 26
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. 27
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
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. 28
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