27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 | {% for chapter in site.chapters %}
32 |
33 |
34 |
{{ chapter.title }}
35 |
36 | {{ chapter.content }}
37 |
38 |
39 | {% endfor %}
40 |
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/css/style.scss:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | ### note: will result in an all-in-one-file stylesheet e.g. style.css
3 | ---
4 |
5 |
6 | @import 'settings';
7 |
8 |
9 | html {
10 | font-family: $font-family;
11 | font-size: 20px;
12 | line-height: 1.5;
13 | }
14 |
15 | body {
16 | color: $body-color;
17 | background-color: $body-background-color;
18 | }
19 |
20 | //////////////
21 | // Links
22 |
23 | a {
24 | color: $link-color;
25 | text-decoration: none;
26 |
27 | strong {
28 | color: inherit;
29 | }
30 |
31 | &:hover,
32 | &:focus {
33 | text-decoration: underline;
34 | }
35 | }
36 |
37 |
38 | ////////////////////////////
39 | // Headings
40 |
41 | h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
42 | margin-bottom: .5rem;
43 | font-weight: bold;
44 | line-height: 1.25;
45 | color: $headings-color;
46 | text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
47 | }
48 | h1 {
49 | font-size: 2rem;
50 | }
51 | h2 {
52 | margin-top: 1rem;
53 | font-size: 1.5rem;
54 | }
55 | h3 {
56 | margin-top: 1.5rem;
57 | font-size: 1.25rem;
58 | }
59 | h4, h5, h6 {
60 | margin-top: 1rem;
61 | font-size: 1rem;
62 | }
63 |
64 | /////////////
65 | // Body text
66 |
67 | p {
68 | margin-top: 0;
69 | margin-bottom: 1rem;
70 | }
71 |
72 | strong {
73 | color: $strong-color;
74 | }
75 |
76 |
77 | /////////////
78 | // Lists
79 |
80 | ul, ol, dl {
81 | margin-top: 0;
82 | margin-bottom: 1rem;
83 | }
84 |
85 | /////////////////////
86 | // Quotes
87 |
88 | blockquote {
89 | padding: .5rem 1rem;
90 | margin: .8rem 0;
91 | color: $blockquote-color;
92 | border-left: .25rem solid $blockquote-border-color;
93 |
94 | p:last-child {
95 | margin-bottom: 0;
96 | }
97 | }
98 |
99 |
100 | img {
101 | display: block;
102 | max-width: 100%;
103 | margin: 0 0 1rem;
104 | border-radius: 5px;
105 | }
106 |
107 |
108 | ////////////////////////////////
109 | // Container
110 | // -- centers page content
111 |
112 | .container {
113 | max-width: 38rem;
114 | padding-left: 1rem;
115 | padding-right: 1rem;
116 | margin-left: auto;
117 | margin-right: auto;
118 | }
119 |
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/_chapters/07.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | title: Incident at the Window
3 | ---
4 |
5 | It chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his usual walk
6 | with Mr. Enfield, that their way lay once again through the
7 | by-street; and that when they came in front of the door, both
8 | stopped to gaze on it.
9 |
10 | "Well," said Enfield, "that story's at an end at least. We shall
11 | never see more of Mr. Hyde."
12 |
13 | "I hope not," said Utterson. "Did I ever tell you that I once saw
14 | him, and shared your feeling of repulsion?"
15 |
16 | "It was impossible to do the one without the other," returned
17 | Enfield. "And by the way, what an ass you must have thought me,
18 | not to know that this was a back way to Dr. Jekyll's! It was
19 | partly your own fault that I found it out, even when I did."
20 |
21 | "So you found it out, did you?" said Utterson. "But if that be
22 | so, we may step into the court and take a look at the windows. To
23 | tell you the truth, I am uneasy about poor Jekyll; and even
24 | outside, I feel as if the presence of a friend might do him
25 | good."
26 |
27 | The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of premature
28 | twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright
29 | with sunset. The middle one of the three windows was half-way
30 | open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an
31 | infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner,
32 | Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll.
33 |
34 | "What! Jekyll!" he cried. "I trust you are better."
35 |
36 | "I am very low, Utterson," replied the doctor, drearily, "very
37 | low. It will not last long, thank God."
38 |
39 | "You stay too much indoors," said the lawyer. "You should be out,
40 | whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my
41 | cousin--Mr. Enfield--Dr. Jekyll.) Come, now; get your hat and
42 | take a quick turn with us."
43 |
44 | "You are very good," sighed the other. "I should like to very
45 | much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not. But
46 | indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see you; this is really a
47 | great pleasure; I would ask you and Mr. Enfield up, but the place
48 | is really not fit."
49 |
50 | "Why then," said the lawyer, good-naturedly, "the best thing we
51 | can do is to stay down here and speak with you from where we
52 | are."
53 |
54 | "That is just what I was about to venture to propose," returned
55 | the doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly uttered,
56 | before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded
57 | by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the
58 | very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a
59 | glimpse, for the window was instantly thrust down; but that
60 | glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court
61 | without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the by-street;
62 | and it was not until they had come into a neighbouring
63 | thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there were still some
64 | stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at
65 | his companion. They were both pale; and there was an answering
66 | horror in their eyes.
67 |
68 | "God forgive us, God forgive us," said Mr. Utterson.
69 |
70 | But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously and walked on
71 | once more in silence.
72 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/README.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | # What's `jekyll-book-theme`?
2 |
3 | It's another Jekyll static site generator theme for classic books
4 | (e.g. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A Tale of Two Cities, The Trial, etc.)
5 | that is, a ready-to-fork template pack.
6 |
7 | For example:
8 |
9 | ```
10 | ├── _config.yml # book configuration
11 | ├── _chapters # sample chapters
12 | | ├── 01.md
13 | | ├── 02.md
14 | | ├── ...
15 | | └── 10.md
16 | ├── _layouts
17 | | └── default.html # master layout template
18 | ├── css
19 | | ├── _settings.scss # style settings (e.g. variables)
20 | | └── style.scss # master style page
21 | └── index.html # all-in-one page book template
22 | ```
23 |
24 | will result in an all-in-one book page:
25 |
26 | ```
27 | └── _site # output build folder; site gets generated here
28 | ├── css
29 | | └── style.css # styles for pages (copied 1:1 as is)
30 | └── index.html # all-in-one book page
31 | ```
32 |
33 | ## How-to Build Your Own Book
34 |
35 | ### Step 1: Add your chapters to the `_chapters/` folder
36 |
37 | Replace all text files in the `_chapters` folder with your own.
38 |
39 |
40 | ### Step 2: Add the book title and author in the `_config.yml` file
41 |
42 | Next change the book title and author in the `_config.yml` file:
43 |
44 | ~~~
45 | title: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
46 | author:
47 | name: Robert Louis Stevenson
48 | ~~~
49 |
50 | with your own book title and author name. That's it. Happy reading.
51 |
52 | ### Live Demo
53 |
54 | See a live demo @ [`henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme` »](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme)
55 |
56 |
57 | ### More Themes
58 |
59 | See the [Dr. Jekyll's Themes](https://drjekyllthemes.github.io) directory.
60 |
61 | ### More Quick Starter Wizard Scripts
62 |
63 | See the [Mr. Hyde's Scripts](https://github.com/mrhydescripts/scripts) library.
64 |
65 |
66 |
67 | ## Example Classic
68 |
69 | ### Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
70 |
71 | by Robert Louis Stevenson
72 |
73 | > Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was
74 | > never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in
75 | > discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and
76 | > yet somehow lovable.
77 |
78 |
81 |
82 | - [Story of the Door](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/01.md)
83 | - [Search for Mr. Hyde](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/02.md)
84 | - [Dr. Jekyll was Quite at Ease](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/03.md)
85 | - [The Carew Murder Case](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/04.md)
86 | - [Incident of the Letter](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/05.md)
87 | - [Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/06.md)
88 | - [Incident at the Window](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/07.md)
89 | - [The Last Night](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/08.md)
90 | - [Dr. Lanyon's Narrative](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/09.md)
91 | - [Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case](http://henrythemes.github.io/jekyll-book-theme/#) - [(Source)](_chapters/10.md)
92 |
93 |
94 |
95 | ### More Free World Classics in Plain Text (.txt)
96 |
97 | - [worldclassics @ GitHub](https://github.com/worldclassics) - more ready-to-use free world (literature) classics e.g. The Trial by Franz Kafka, etc.
98 | - [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org) - the world's biggest free classics book library in plain text; more than 40,000+ books collected since 1971
99 |
100 |
101 |
102 | ## Meta
103 |
104 | **License**
105 |
106 | The theme is dedicated to the public domain.
107 | Use it as you please with no restrictions whatsoever.
108 |
109 | **Questions? Comments?**
110 |
111 | Post them to the [wwwmake forum](http://groups.google.com/group/wwwmake). Thanks!
112 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/_chapters/03.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | title: Dr. Jekyll was Quite at Ease
3 | ---
4 |
5 | A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one
6 | of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all
7 | intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine; and Mr.
8 | Utterson so contrived that he remained behind after the others had
9 | departed. This was no new arrangement, but a thing that had
10 | befallen many scores of times. Where Utterson was liked, he was
11 | liked well. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the
12 | light-hearted and the loose-tongued had already their foot on the
13 | threshold; they liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company,
14 | practising for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich
15 | silence after the expense and strain of gaiety. To this rule, Dr.
16 | Jekyll was no exception; and as he now sat on the opposite side of
17 | the fire--a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with
18 | something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and
19 | kindness--you could see by his looks that he cherished for Mr.
20 | Utterson a sincere and warm affection.
21 |
22 | "I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll," began the latter.
23 | "You know that will of yours?"
24 |
25 | A close observer might have gathered that the topic was
26 | distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. "My poor
27 | Utterson," said he, "you are unfortunate in such a client. I never
28 | saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that
29 | hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies.
30 | Oh, I know he's a good fellow--you needn't frown--an excellent
31 | fellow, and I always mean to see more of him; but a hide-bound
32 | pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more
33 | disappointed in any man than Lanyon."
34 |
35 | "You know I never approved of it," pursued Utterson, ruthlessly
36 | disregarding the fresh topic.
37 |
38 | "My will? Yes, certainly, I know that," said the doctor, a trifle
39 | sharply. "You have told me so."
40 |
41 | "Well, I tell you so again," continued the lawyer. "I have been
42 | learning something of young Hyde."
43 |
44 | The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to the very lips,
45 | and there came a blackness about his eyes. "I do not care to hear
46 | more," said he. "This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop."
47 |
48 | "What I heard was abominable," said Utterson.
49 |
50 | "It can make no change. You do not understand my position,"
51 | returned the doctor, with a certain incoherency
52 | of manner. "I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very
53 | strange--a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that
54 | cannot be mended by talking."
55 |
56 | "Jekyll," said Utterson, "you know me: I am a man to be trusted.
57 | Make a clean breast of this in confidence; and I make no doubt I
58 | can get you out of it."
59 |
60 | "My good Utterson," said the doctor, "this is very good of you,
61 | this is downright good of you, and I cannot find words to thank you
62 | in. I believe you fully; I would trust you before any man alive, ay,
63 | before myself, if I could make the choice; but indeed it isn't what
64 | you fancy; it is not so bad as that; and just to put your good heart
65 | at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be
66 | rid of Mr. Hyde. I give you my hand upon that; and I thank you again
67 | and again; and I will just add one little word, Utterson, that I'm
68 | sure you'll take in good part: this is a private matter, and I beg
69 | of you to let it sleep."
70 |
71 |
72 | Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire.
73 |
74 | "I have no doubt you are perfectly right," he said at last, getting
75 | to his feet.
76 |
77 | "Well, but since we have touched upon this business, and for the
78 | last time I hope," continued the doctor, "there is one point I
79 | should like you to understand. I have really a very great interest
80 | in poor Hyde. I know you have seen
81 | him; he told me so; and I fear he was rude. But, I do sincerely
82 | take a great, a very great interest in that young man; and if I am
83 | taken away, Utterson, I wish you to promise me that you will bear
84 | with him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if you knew
85 | all; and it would be a weight off my mind if you would promise."
86 |
87 | "I can't pretend that I shall ever like him," said the lawyer.
88 |
89 | "I don't ask that," pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand upon the
90 | other's arm; "I only ask for justice; I only ask you to help him
91 | for my sake, when I am no longer here."
92 |
93 | Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. "Well," said he, "I
94 | promise."
95 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/_chapters/06.md:
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1 | ---
2 | title: Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon
3 | ---
4 |
5 | Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for the
6 | death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde
7 | had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never
8 | existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all
9 | disreputable: tales came out of the man's cruelty, at once so
10 | callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates,
11 | of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his
12 | present whereabouts, not a whisper. From the time he had left the
13 | house in Soho on the morning of the murder, he was simply blotted
14 | out; and gradually, as time drew on, Mr. Utterson began to recover
15 | from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow more at quiet with
16 | himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of thinking, more
17 | than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil
18 | influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He
19 | came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends,
20 | became once more their familiar guest
21 | and entertainer; and whilst he had always been known for
22 | charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was
23 | busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to
24 | open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service;
25 | and for more than two months, the doctor was at peace.
26 |
27 | On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the doctor's with a
28 | small party; Lanyon had been there; and the face of the host had
29 | looked from one to the other as in the old days when the trio were
30 | inseparable friends. On the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door
31 | was shut against the lawyer. "The doctor was confined to the
32 | house," Poole said, "and saw no one." On the 15th, he tried again,
33 | and was again refused; and having now been used for the last two
34 | months to see his friend almost daily, he found this return of
35 | solitude to weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night he had in Guest
36 | to dine with him; and the sixth he betook himself to Dr. Lanyon's.
37 |
38 | There at least he was not denied admittance; but when he came in,
39 | he was shocked at the change which had taken place in the doctor's
40 | appearance. He had his death-warrant written legibly upon his face.
41 | The rosy man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was
42 | visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much, these tokens
43 | of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyer's notice, as a
44 | look in the eye and quality of manner that seemed to testify to
45 | some deep-seated terror of the mind. It was unlikely that the
46 | doctor should fear death; and yet that was what Utterson was
47 | tempted to suspect. "Yes," he thought; "he is a doctor, he must
48 | know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge
49 | is more than he can bear." And yet when Utterson remarked on his
50 | ill-looks, it was with an air of greatness that Lanyon declared
51 | himself a doomed man.
52 |
53 | "I have had a shock," he said, "and I shall never recover. It is a
54 | question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes,
55 | sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we should
56 | be more glad to get away."
57 |
58 | "Jekyll is ill, too," observed Utterson. "Have you seen him?"
59 |
60 | But Lanyon's face changed, and he held up a trembling hand. "I wish
61 | to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll," he said in a loud, unsteady
62 | voice. "I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you will
63 | spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead."
64 |
65 | "Tut-tut," said Mr. Utterson; and then after a considerable pause,
66 | "Can't I do anything?" he inquired. "We are three very old friends,
67 | Lanyon; we shall not live to make others."
68 |
69 | "Nothing can be done," returned Lanyon; "ask himself."
70 |
71 | "He will not see me," said the lawyer.
72 |
73 | "I am not surprised at that," was the reply. "Some day, Utterson,
74 | after I am dead, you may
75 | perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell
76 | you. And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other
77 | things, for God's sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep clear
78 | of this accursed topic, then, in God's name, go, for I cannot bear
79 | it."
80 |
81 | As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote to Jekyll,
82 | complaining of his exclusion from the house, and asking the cause
83 | of this unhappy break with Lanyon; and the next day brought him a
84 | long answer, often very pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly
85 | mysterious in drift. The quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. "I do
86 | not blame our old friend," Jekyll wrote, "but I share his view
87 | that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of
88 | extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt
89 | my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must
90 | suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a
91 | punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of
92 | sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that
93 | this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so
94 | unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten
95 | this destiny, and that is to respect my silence." Utterson was
96 | amazed; the dark influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor
97 | had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, the
98 | prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful and an
99 | honoured age;
100 | and now in a moment, friendship, and peace of mind, and the whole
101 | tenor of his life were wrecked. So great and unprepared a change
102 | pointed to madness; but in view of Lanyon's manner and words,
103 | there must lie for it some deeper ground.
104 |
105 | A week afterwards Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in something
106 | less than a fortnight he was dead. The night after the funeral,
107 | at which he had been sadly affected, Utterson locked the door of
108 | his business room, and sitting there by the light of a melancholy
109 | candle, drew out and set before him an envelope addressed by the
110 | hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend. "PRIVATE: for
111 | the hands of G. J. Utterson ALONE and in case of his predecease
112 | to be destroyed unread," so it was emphatically superscribed; and
113 | the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. "I have buried one
114 | friend to-day," he thought: "what if this should cost me
115 | another?" And then he condemned the fear as a disloyalty, and
116 | broke the seal. Within there was another enclosure, likewise
117 | sealed, and marked upon the cover as "not to be opened till the
118 | death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll." Utterson could not
119 | trust his eyes. Yes, it was disappearance; here again, as in the
120 | mad will which he had long ago restored to its author, here again
121 | were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll
122 | bracketed. But in the will, that idea had sprung from the
123 | sinister suggestion of
124 | the man Hyde; it was set there with a purpose all too plain and
125 | horrible. Written by the hand of Lanyon, what should it mean? A
126 | great curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard the prohibition
127 | and dive at once to the bottom of these mysteries; but
128 | professional honour and faith to his dead friend were stringent
129 | obligations; and the packet slept in the inmost corner of his
130 | private safe.
131 |
132 | It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it; and
133 | it may be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson desired the
134 | society of his surviving friend with the same eagerness. He
135 | thought of him kindly; but his thoughts were disquieted and
136 | fearful. He went to call indeed; but he was perhaps relieved to
137 | be denied admittance; perhaps, in his heart, he preferred to
138 | speak with Poole upon the doorstep and surrounded by the air and
139 | sounds of the open city, rather than to be admitted into that
140 | house of voluntary bondage, and to sit and speak with its
141 | inscrutable recluse. Poole had, indeed, no very pleasant news to
142 | communicate. The doctor, it appeared, now more than ever confined
143 | himself to the cabinet over the laboratory, where he would
144 | sometimes even sleep; he was out of spirits, he had grown very
145 | silent, he did not read; it seemed as if he had something on his
146 | mind. Utterson became so used to the unvarying character of these
147 | reports, that he fell off little by little in the frequency of
148 | his visits.
149 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/_chapters/05.md:
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1 | ---
2 | title: Incident of the Letter
3 | ---
4 |
5 | It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way to
6 | Dr. Jekyll's door, where he was at once admitted by Poole, and
7 | carried down by the kitchen offices and across a yard which had
8 | once been a garden, to the building which was indifferently known
9 | as the laboratory or the dissecting-rooms. The doctor had bought
10 | the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon; and his own
11 | tastes being rather chemical than anatomical, had changed the
12 | destination of the block at the bottom of the garden. It was the
13 | first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his
14 | friend's quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with
15 | curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness
16 | as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now
17 | lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus,
18 | the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and
19 | the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further
20 | end, a flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize;
21 | and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into the
22 | doctor's cabinet. It was a large room, fitted round with glass
23 | presses, furnished, among other things, with a cheval-glass and a
24 | business table, and looking out upon the court by three dusty
25 | windows barred with iron. A fire burned in the grate; a lamp was
26 | set lighted on the chimney shelf, for even in the houses the fog
27 | began to lie thickly; and there, close up to the warmth, sat Dr.
28 | Jekyll, looking deadly sick. He did not rise to meet his visitor,
29 | but held out a cold hand and bade him welcome in a changed voice.
30 |
31 | "And now," said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had left them, "you
32 | have heard the news?"
33 |
34 | The doctor shuddered. "They were crying it in the square," he said.
35 | "I heard them in my dining-room."
36 |
37 | "One word," said the lawyer. "Carew was my client, but so are you,
38 | and I want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad enough to
39 | hide this fellow?"
40 |
41 | "Utterson, I swear to God," cried the doctor, "I swear to God I
42 | will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am
43 | done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does
44 | not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is
45 | quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of."
46 |
47 |
48 | The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his friend's feverish
49 | manner. "You seem pretty
50 | sure of him," said he; "and for your sake, I hope you may be right.
51 | If it came to a trial, your name might appear."
52 |
53 | "I am quite sure of him," replied Jekyll; "I have grounds for
54 | certainty that I cannot share with any one. But there is one thing
55 | on which you may advise me. I have--I have received a letter; and
56 | I am at a loss whether I should show it to the police. I should like
57 | to leave it in your hands, Utterson; you would judge wisely, I am
58 | sure; I have so great a trust in you."
59 |
60 | "You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection?" asked
61 | the lawyer.
62 |
63 | "No," said the other. "I cannot say that I care what becomes of
64 | Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character,
65 | which this hateful business has rather exposed."
66 |
67 | Utterson ruminated a while; he was surprised at his friend's
68 | selfishness, and yet relieved by it. "Well," said he, at last, "let
69 | me see the letter."
70 |
71 | The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed "Edward
72 | Hyde": and it signified, briefly enough, that the writer's
73 | benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a
74 | thousand generosities, need labour under no alarm for his safety, as
75 | he had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The
76 | lawyer liked this letter well enough; it put a better colour on the
77 | intimacy than he had looked for; and he blamed himself for some of
78 | his past suspicions.
79 |
80 | "Have you the envelope?" he asked.
81 |
82 | "I burned it," replied Jekyll, "before I thought what I was about.
83 | But it bore no postmark. The note was handed in."
84 |
85 | "Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?" asked Utterson.
86 |
87 | "I wish you to judge for me entirely," was the reply. "I have lost
88 | confidence in myself."
89 |
90 | "Well, I shall consider," returned the lawyer. "And now one word
91 | more: it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that
92 | disappearance?"
93 |
94 | The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness: he shut his
95 | mouth tight and nodded.
96 |
97 | "I knew it," said Utterson. "He meant to murder you. You have had a
98 | fine escape."
99 |
100 | "I have had what is far more to the purpose," returned the doctor
101 | solemnly: "I have had a lesson--O God, Utterson, what a lesson I
102 | have had!" And he covered his face for a moment with his hands.
103 |
104 | On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or two with
105 | Poole. "By the by," said he, "there was a letter handed in to-day:
106 | what was the messenger like?" But Poole was positive nothing had
107 | come except by post; "and only circulars by that," he added.
108 |
109 | This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed. Plainly the
110 | letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly, indeed, it had
111 | been
112 | written in the cabinet; and if that were so, it must be differently
113 | judged, and handled with the more caution. The newsboys, as he went,
114 | were crying themselves hoarse along the footways: "Special edition.
115 | Shocking murder of an M. P." That was the funeral oration of one
116 | friend and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest
117 | the good name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the
118 | scandal. It was, at least, a ticklish decision that he had to make;
119 | and self-reliant as he was by habit, he began to cherish a longing
120 | for advice. It was not to be had directly; but perhaps, he thought,
121 | it might be fished for.
122 |
123 | Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr.
124 | Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a
125 | nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular
126 | old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his
127 | house. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where
128 | the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and
129 | smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town's life
130 | was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a
131 | mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the
132 | acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with
133 | time, As the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of
134 | hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards was ready to be set free
135 | and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted.
136 | There was no man from whom he kept fewer secrets than Mr. Guest;
137 | and he was not always sure that he kept as many as he meant. Guest
138 | had often been on business to the doctor's; he knew Poole; he could
139 | scarce have failed to hear of Mr. Hyde's familiarity about the
140 | house; he might draw conclusions: was it not as well, then, that he
141 | should see a letter which put that mystery to rights? and above all
142 | since Guest, being a great student and critic of handwriting, would
143 | consider the step natural and obliging? The clerk, besides, was a
144 | man of counsel; he would scarce read so strange a document without
145 | dropping a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utterson might shape his
146 | future course.
147 |
148 | "This is a sad business about Sir Danvers," he said.
149 |
150 | "Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of public feeling,"
151 | returned Guest. "The man, of course, was mad."
152 |
153 | "I should like to hear your views on that," replied Utterson. "I
154 | have a document here in his handwriting; it is between ourselves,
155 | for I scarce know what to do about it; it is an ugly business at
156 | the best. But there it is; quite in your way a murderer's
157 | autograph."
158 |
159 | Guest's eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and studied it
160 | with passion. "No, sir," he said: "not mad; but it is an odd hand."
161 |
162 | "And by all accounts a very odd writer," added the lawyer.
163 |
164 | Just then the servant entered with a note.
165 |
166 | "Is that from Dr. Jekyll, sir?" inquired the clerk. "I thought I
167 | knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. Utterson?"
168 |
169 | "Only an invitation to dinner. Why? Do you want to see it?"
170 |
171 | "One moment. I thank you, sir"; and the clerk laid the two sheets
172 | of paper alongside and sedulously compared their contents. "Thank
173 | you, sir," he said at last, returning both; "it's a very
174 | interesting autograph."
175 |
176 | There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson struggled with
177 | himself. "Why did you compare them, Guest?" he inquired suddenly.
178 |
179 | "Well, sir," returned the clerk, "there's a rather singular
180 | resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only
181 | differently sloped."
182 |
183 | "Rather quaint," said Utterson.
184 |
185 | "It is, as you say, rather quaint," returned Guest.
186 |
187 | "I wouldn't speak of this note, you know," said the master.
188 |
189 | "No, sir," said the clerk. "I understand."
190 |
191 | But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night than he locked the
192 | note into his safe, where it reposed from that time forward.
193 | "What!" he thought. "Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!" And his
194 | blood ran cold in his veins.
195 |
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/_chapters/04.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | title: The Carew Murder Case
3 | ---
4 |
5 | Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18--, London was
6 | startled by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all the more
7 | notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and
8 | startling. A maid servant living alone in a house not far from the
9 | river, had gone up-stairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled
10 | over the city in the small hours, the early part of the night was
11 | cloudless, and the lane, which the maid's window overlooked, was
12 | brilliantly lit by the full moon. It seems she was romantically
13 | given, for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under
14 | the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she used to say,
15 | with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had
16 | she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the
17 | world. And as she so sat she became aware of an aged and beautiful
18 | gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and
19 | advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at
20 | first she
21 | paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was
22 | just under the maid's eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the
23 | other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as
24 | if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed,
25 | from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only
26 | inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and
27 | the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an
28 | innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something
29 | high too, as of a well-founded self-content. Presently her eye
30 | wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a
31 | certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she
32 | had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which
33 | he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen
34 | with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke
35 | out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing
36 | the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman.
37 | The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much
38 | surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all
39 | bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like
40 | fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a
41 | storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the
42 | body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and
43 | sounds, the maid fainted.
44 |
45 | It was two o'clock when she came to herself and called for the
46 | police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in
47 | the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the
48 | deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and
49 | heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this
50 | insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the
51 | neighbouring gutter--the other, without doubt, had been carried
52 | away by the murderer. A purse and a gold watch were found upon the
53 | victim: but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped
54 | envelope, which he had been probably carrying to the post, and which
55 | bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson.
56 |
57 | This was brought to the lawyer the next morning, before he was out
58 | of bed; and he had no sooner seen it, and been told the
59 | circumstances, than he shot out a solemn lip. "I shall say nothing
60 | till I have seen the body," said he; "this may be very serious. Have
61 | the kindness to wait while I dress." And with the same grave
62 | countenance he hurried through his breakfast and drove to the police
63 | station, whither the body had been carried. As soon as he came into
64 | the cell, he nodded.
65 |
66 | "Yes," said he, "I recognise him. I am sorry to say that this is
67 | Sir Danvers Carew."
68 |
69 | "Good God, sir," exclaimed the officer, "is it possible?" And the
70 | next moment his eye
71 | lighted up with professional ambition. "This will make a deal of
72 | noise," he said. "And perhaps you can help us to the man." And he
73 | briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken
74 | stick.
75 |
76 | Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the
77 | stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer; broken and
78 | battered as it was, he recognised it for one that he had himself
79 | presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.
80 |
81 | "Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?" he inquired.
82 |
83 | "Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking, is what the
84 | maid calls him," said the officer.
85 |
86 | Mr. Utterson reflected; and then, raising his head, "If you will
87 | come with me in my cab," he said, "I think I can take you to his
88 | house."
89 |
90 | It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of
91 | the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but
92 | the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled
93 | vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr.
94 | Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight;
95 | for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there
96 | would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some
97 | strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be
98 | quite broken up, and a haggard shaft
99 | of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The
100 | dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its
101 | muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had
102 | never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this
103 | mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like
104 | a district of some city in a nightmare. The thoughts of his mind,
105 | besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the
106 | companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that
107 | terror of the law and the law's officers, which may at times assail
108 | the most honest.
109 |
110 | As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a
111 | little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French
112 | eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny
113 | salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many
114 | women of different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a
115 | morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon
116 | that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly
117 | surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a
118 | man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling.
119 |
120 | An ivory-faced and silvery-haired old woman opened the door. She
121 | had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were
122 | excellent. Yes, she said, this was Mr. Hyde's, but he was not at
123 | home; he had been in that night very late,
124 | but had gone away again in less than an hour; there was nothing
125 | strange in that; his habits were very irregular, and he was often
126 | absent; for instance, it was nearly two months since she had seen
127 | him till yesterday.
128 |
129 | "Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms," said the lawyer; and
130 | when the woman began to declare it was impossible, "I had better
131 | tell you who this person is," he added. "This is Inspector Newcomen
132 | of Scotland Yard."
133 |
134 | A flash of odious joy appeared upon the woman's face. "Ah!" said
135 | she, "he is in trouble! What has he done?"
136 |
137 | Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances. "He don't seem a
138 | very popular character," observed the latter. "And now, my good
139 | woman, just let me and this gentleman have a look about us."
140 |
141 | In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old woman
142 | remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms;
143 | but these were furnished with luxury and good taste. A closet was
144 | filled with wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a
145 | good picture hung upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from
146 | Henry Jekyll, who was much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of
147 | many plies and agreeable in colour. At this moment, however, the
148 | rooms bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly
149 | ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside
150 | out;
151 | lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of
152 | grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From these
153 | embers the inspector disinterred the butt-end of a green
154 | cheque-book, which had resisted the action of the fire; the other
155 | half of the stick was found behind the door; and as this clinched
156 | his suspicions, the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to
157 | the bank, where several thousand pounds were found to be lying to
158 | the murderer's credit, completed his gratification.
159 |
160 | "You may depend upon it, sir," he told Mr. Utterson: "I have him in
161 | my hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left the
162 | stick or, above all, burned the cheque-book. Why, money's life to
163 | the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get
164 | out the handbills."
165 |
166 | This last, however, was not so easy of accomplishment; for Mr. Hyde
167 | had numbered few familiars--even the master of the servant-maid
168 | had only seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had
169 | never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed
170 | widely, as common observers will. Only on one point, were they
171 | agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity
172 | with which the fugitive impressed his beholders.
173 |
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/_chapters/01.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | title: Story of the Door
3 | ---
4 |
5 | Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was
6 | never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in
7 | discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and
8 | yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to
9 | his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye;
10 | something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which
11 | spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but
12 | more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with
13 | himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for
14 | vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the
15 | doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for
16 | others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure
17 | of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined
18 | to help rather than to reprove.
19 | "I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my
20 | brother go to the devil in his own way." In this character, it was
21 | frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the
22 | last good influence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as
23 | these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a
24 | shade of change in his demeanour.
25 |
26 | No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was
27 | undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be
28 | founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a
29 | modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands
30 | of opportunity; and that was the lawyer's way. His friends were
31 | those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his
32 | affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no
33 | aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt, the bond that united him to
34 | Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well-known man about
35 | town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in
36 | each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was
37 | reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks, that
38 | they said nothing, looked singularly dull, and would hail with
39 | obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men
40 | put the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief
41 | jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure,
42 | but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy
43 | them uninterrupted.
44 |
45 | It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a
46 | by-street in a busy quarter of London. The street was small and
47 | what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the
48 | week-days. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all
49 | emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of
50 | their gains in coquetry; so that the shop fronts stood along that
51 | thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling
52 | saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms
53 | and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in
54 | contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and
55 | with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses, and
56 | general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased
57 | the eye of the passenger.
58 |
59 | Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line
60 | was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a
61 | certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the
62 | street. It was two stories high; showed no window, nothing but a
63 | door on the lower story and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on
64 | the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and
65 | sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell
66 | nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the
67 | recess and struck matches on
68 | the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had
69 | tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no
70 | one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair
71 | their ravages.
72 |
73 | Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the by-street;
74 | but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his
75 | cane and pointed.
76 |
77 | "Did you ever remark that door?" he asked; and when his companion
78 | had replied in the affirmative, "It is connected in my mind," added
79 | he, "with a very odd story."
80 |
81 | "Indeed?" said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of voice, "and
82 | what was that?"
83 |
84 | "Well, it was this way," returned Mr. Enfield: "I was coming home
85 | from some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a
86 | black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where
87 | there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after
88 | street, and all the folks asleep--street after street, all lighted
89 | up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church--till at
90 | last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens
91 | and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw
92 | two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a
93 | good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was
94 | running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the
95 | two ran into one another naturally enough at the
96 | corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man
97 | trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on
98 | the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see.
99 | It wasn't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a
100 | view-halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought
101 | him back to where there was already quite a group about the
102 | screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but
103 | gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like
104 | running. The people who had turned out were the girl's own family;
105 | and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his
106 | appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened,
107 | according to the Sawbones; and there you might have supposed would
108 | be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken
109 | a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child's
110 | family, which was only natural. But the doctor's case was what
111 | struck me. He was the usual cut-and-dry apothecary, of no particular
112 | age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent, and about as
113 | emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every
114 | time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and
115 | white with the desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just
116 | as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question,
117 | we did the next best. We told the man we could
118 | and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name
119 | stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or
120 | any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time,
121 | as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him
122 | as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a
123 | circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle,
124 | with a kind of black, sneering coolness--frightened too, I could
125 | see that--but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. 'If you
126 | choose to make capital out of this accident,' said he, 'I am
127 | naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,' says
128 | he. 'Name your figure.' Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds
129 | for the child's family; he would have clearly liked to stick out;
130 | but there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and
131 | at last he struck. The next thing was to get the money; and where
132 | do you think he carried us but to that place with the door?--
133 | whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back with the matter
134 | of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts's,
135 | drawn payable to bearer and signed with a name that I can't mention,
136 | though it's one of the points of my story, but it was a name at
137 | least very well known and often printed. The figure was stiff; but
138 | the signature was good for more than that, if it was only genuine. I
139 | took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the whole
140 | business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not, in real life,
141 | walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and come out of it
142 | with another man's cheque for close upon a hundred pounds. But he
143 | was quite easy and sneering. 'Set your mind at rest,' says he, 'I
144 | will stay with you till the banks open and cash the cheque myself.'
145 | So we all set off, the doctor, and the child's father, and our
146 | friend and myself, and passed the rest of the night in my chambers;
147 | and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I
148 | gave in the check myself, and said I had every reason to believe it
149 | was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine."
150 |
151 | "Tut-tut," said Mr. Utterson.
152 |
153 | "I see you feel as I do," said Mr. Enfield. "Yes, it's a bad story.
154 | For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really
155 | damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink
156 | of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of
157 | your fellows who do what they call good. Black-mail, I suppose; an
158 | honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his
159 | youth. Black-Mail House is what I call that place with the door, in
160 | consequence. Though even that, you know, is far from explaining
161 | all," he added, and with the words fell into a vein of musing.
162 |
163 | From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather suddenly:
164 | "And you don't know if the drawer of the cheque lives there?"
165 |
166 | "A likely place, isn't it?" returned Mr. Enfield. "But I happen to
167 | have noticed his address; he lives in some square or other."
168 |
169 | "And you never asked about the--place with the door?" said Mr.
170 | Utterson.
171 |
172 | "No, sir: I had a delicacy," was the reply. "I feel very strongly
173 | about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the
174 | day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a
175 | stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone
176 | goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last
177 | you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own
178 | back-garden and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I
179 | make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the
180 | less I ask."
181 |
182 | "A very good rule, too," said the lawyer.
183 |
184 | "But I have studied the place for myself," continued Mr. Enfield.
185 | "It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes
186 | in or out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of
187 | my adventure. There are three windows looking on the court on the
188 | first floor; none below; the windows are always shut but they're
189 | clean. And then there is a chimney which is generally smoking; so
190 | somebody must live there. And yet it's not so sure; for the
191 | buildings are so packed together about that court, that it's hard to
192 | say where one ends and another begins."
193 |
194 | The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then,
195 | "Enfield," said Mr. Utterson, "that's a good rule of yours."
196 |
197 | "Yes, I think it is," returned Enfield.
198 |
199 | "But for all that," continued the lawyer, "there's one point I want
200 | to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the
201 | child."
202 |
203 | "Well," said Mr. Enfield, "I can't see what harm it would do. It
204 | was a man of the name of Hyde."
205 |
206 | "H'm," said Mr. Utterson. "What sort of a man is he to see?"
207 |
208 | "He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his
209 | appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I
210 | never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be
211 | deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although
212 | I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary-looking man, and
213 | yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no
214 | hand of it; I can't describe him. And it's not want of memory; for I
215 | declare I can see him this moment."
216 |
217 | Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and obviously under a
218 | weight of consideration.
219 |
220 | "You are sure he used a key?" he inquired at last.
221 |
222 | "My dear sir..." began Enfield, surprised out of himself.
223 |
224 | "Yes, I know," said Utterson; "I know it must seem strange. The
225 | fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is
226 | because I know it already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone
227 | home. If you have been inexact in any point, you had better correct
228 | it."
229 |
230 | "I think you might have warned me," returned the other, with a
231 | touch of sullenness. "But I have been pedantically exact, as you
232 | call it. The fellow had a key; and what's more, he has it still. I
233 | saw him use it, not a week ago."
234 |
235 | Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the young man
236 | presently resumed. "Here is another lesson to say nothing," said he.
237 | "I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to
238 | refer to this again."
239 |
240 | "With all my heart," said the lawyer. "I shake hands on that,
241 | Richard."
242 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/_chapters/09.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | title: Dr. Lanyon's Narrative
3 | ---
4 |
5 | On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the
6 | evening delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of
7 | my colleague and old school-companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good
8 | deal surprised by this; for we were by no means in the habit of
9 | correspondence; I had seen the man, dined with him, indeed, the
10 | night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse that
11 | should justify formality of registration. The contents increased
12 | my wonder; for this is how the letter ran:
13 |
14 | > 10th December, 18---
15 | >
16 | > Dear Lanyon, -- You are one of my oldest friends; and although we
17 | > may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot
18 | > remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There
19 | > was never a day when, if you had said to me, 'Jekyll, my life, my
20 | > honour, my reason, depend upon you,' I would not have sacrificed
21 | > my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour my reason,
22 | > are all at your mercy;
23 | > if you fail me to-night I am lost. You might suppose, after this
24 | > preface, that I am going to ask you for something dishonourable
25 | > to grant. Judge for yourself.
26 | >
27 | > I want you to postpone all other engagements for to-night--ay,
28 | > even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a
29 | > cab, unless your carriage should be actually at the door; and
30 | > with this letter in your hand for consultation, to drive straight
31 | > to my house. Poole, my butler, has his orders; you will find, him
32 | > waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is
33 | > then to be forced: and you are to go in alone; to open the glazed
34 | > press (letter E) on the left hand, breaking the lock if it be
35 | > shut; and to draw out, with all its contents as they stand, the
36 | > fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same thing) the third
37 | > from the bottom. In my extreme distress of wind, I have a morbid
38 | > fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you may know
39 | > the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial and a
40 | > paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to
41 | > Cavendish Square exactly as it stands.
42 | >
43 | > That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You
44 | > should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this,
45 | > long before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin,
46 | > not only in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither
47 | > be prevented nor foreseen,
48 | > but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be
49 | > preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I
50 | > have to ask you to be alone in your consulting-room, to admit
51 | > with your own hand into the house a man who will present himself
52 | > in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer that you will
53 | > have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will have played
54 | > your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes
55 | > afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have
56 | > understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; and
57 | > that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must
58 | > appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or
59 | > the shipwreck of my reason.
60 | >
61 | > Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my
62 | > heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a
63 | > possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place,
64 | > labouring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can
65 | > exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually
66 | > serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told.
67 | > Serve me, my dear Lanyon, and save
68 | >
69 | > Your friend,
70 | > H. J.
71 | >
72 | > P. S. I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck
73 | > upon my soul. It is possible that the postoffice may fail me, and
74 | > this letter
75 | > not come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case,
76 | > dear Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be most convenient for
77 | > you in the course of the day; and once more expect my messenger
78 | > at midnight. It may then already be too late; and if that night
79 | > passes without event, you will know that you have seen the last
80 | > of Henry Jekyll.
81 |
82 |
83 | Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was
84 | insane; but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt,
85 | I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I understood of this
86 | farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance;
87 | and an appeal so worded could not be set aside without a grave
88 | responsibility. I rose accordingly from table, got into a hansom,
89 | and drove straight to Jekyll's house. The butler was awaiting my
90 | arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a registered
91 | letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a
92 | carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we
93 | moved in a body to old Dr. Denman's surgical theatre, from which
94 | (as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll's private cabinet is most
95 | conveniently entered. The door was very strong, the lock
96 | excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble and
97 | have to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the
98 | locksmith was near despair. But this last was a handy fellow,
99 | and after two hours' work, the door stood open. The press marked
100 | E was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with
101 | straw and tied in a sheet, and returned with it to Cavendish
102 | Square.
103 |
104 | Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly
105 | enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing
106 | chemist; so that it was plain they were of Jekyll's private
107 | manufacture; and when I opened one of the wrappers I found what
108 | seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white colour. The
109 | phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have been about
110 | half-full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the
111 | sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some
112 | volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess.
113 | The book was an ordinary version-book and contained little but a
114 | series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I
115 | observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite
116 | abruptly. Here and there a brief remark was appended to a date,
117 | usually no more than a single word: "double" occurring perhaps
118 | six times in a total of several hundred entries; and once very
119 | early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation,
120 | "total failure!!!" All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told
121 | me little that was definite. Here were a phial of some tincture,
122 | a paper of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments
123 | that had led (like too many of Jekyll's investigations) to
124 | no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence of these
125 | articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the
126 | life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one
127 | place, why could he not go to another? And even granting some
128 | impediment, why was this gentleman to be received by me in
129 | secret? The more I reflected the more convinced I grew that I was
130 | dealing with a case of cerebral disease: and though I dismissed
131 | my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might be
132 | found in some posture of self-defence.
133 |
134 | Twelve o'clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker
135 | sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons,
136 | and found a small man crouching against the pillars of the
137 | portico.
138 |
139 | "Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?" I asked.
140 |
141 | He told me "yes" by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden
142 | him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance
143 | into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far
144 | off, advancing with his bull's eye open; and at the sight, I
145 | thought my visitor started and made greater haste.
146 |
147 | These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I
148 | followed him into the bright light of the consulting-room, I kept
149 | my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a
150 | chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before,
151 | so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck
152 | besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his
153 | remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great
154 | apparent debility of constitution, and--last but not least--
155 | with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood.
156 | This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was
157 | accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set
158 | it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely
159 | wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had
160 | reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of
161 | man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of
162 | hatred.
163 |
164 | This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance,
165 | struck in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity)
166 | was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person
167 | laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although they were of
168 | rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every
169 | measurement--the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to
170 | keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his
171 | haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders.
172 | Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from
173 | moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal
174 | and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that
175 | now faced me -- something seizing, surprising, and revolting -- this fresh
176 | disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that
177 | to my interest in the man's nature and character, there was added
178 | a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in
179 | the world.
180 |
181 | These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be
182 | set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was,
183 | indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.
184 |
185 | "Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so lively was
186 | his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought
187 | to shake me.
188 |
189 | I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang
190 | along my blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not
191 | yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please."
192 | And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary
193 | seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a
194 | patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my
195 | pre-occupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer
196 | me to muster.
197 |
198 | "I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon," he replied civilly enough. "What
199 | you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its
200 | heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your
201 | colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some
202 | moment; and I understood..." He paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could
203 | see, in spite of his collected manner, that he was wrestling
204 | against the approaches of the hysteria--"I understood, a
205 | drawer..."
206 |
207 | But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some perhaps
208 | on my own growing curiosity.
209 |
210 | "There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay
211 | on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.
212 |
213 | He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his
214 | heart: I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of
215 | his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed
216 | both for his life and reason.
217 |
218 | "Compose yourself," said I.
219 |
220 | He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of
221 | despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he
222 | uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified.
223 | And the next moment, in a voice that was already fairly well
224 | under control, "Have you a graduated glass?" he asked.
225 |
226 | I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him
227 | what he asked.
228 |
229 | He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of
230 | the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which
231 | was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the
232 | crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly,
233 | and to throw off small
234 | fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition
235 | ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded
236 | again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched
237 | these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass
238 | upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of
239 | scrutiny.
240 |
241 | "And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise?
242 | will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my
243 | hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or
244 | has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before
245 | you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide,
246 | you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor
247 | wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal
248 | distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if
249 | you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and
250 | new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in
251 | this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a
252 | prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan."
253 |
254 | "Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
255 | possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder
256 | that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I
257 | have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause
258 | before I see the end."
259 |
260 | "It is well," replied my visitor. "Lanyon,
261 | you remember your vows: what follows is under the seal of our
262 | profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the most
263 | narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of
264 | transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors--
265 | behold!"
266 |
267 | He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry
268 | followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held
269 | on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I
270 | looked there came, I thought, a change--he seemed to swell--
271 | his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt
272 | and alter--and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and
273 | leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from
274 | that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
275 |
276 | "O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there
277 | before my eyes--pale and shaken, and half-fainting, and groping
278 | before him with his hands, like a man restored from death--
279 | there stood Henry Jekyll!
280 |
281 | What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set
282 | on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul
283 | sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my
284 | eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life
285 | is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror
286 | sits by me at all hours of the day and night; I feel that my days
287 | are numbered, and that I
288 | must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral
289 | turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence,
290 | I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror.
291 | I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring
292 | your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The creature
293 | who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll's own
294 | confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every
295 | corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.
296 |
297 | _Hastie Lanyon_
298 |
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/_chapters/02.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | title: Search for Mr. Hyde
3 | ---
4 |
5 | That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre
6 | spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of
7 | a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a
8 | volume of some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of
9 | the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would
10 | go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, as soon as
11 | the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his
12 | business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private
13 | part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll's Will,
14 | and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was
15 | holograph, for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that it
16 | was made, had refused to lend the least assistance in the making of
17 | it; it provided not only that, in case of the decease of Henry
18 | Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., all his possessions were
19 | to pass into the hands of his "friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,"
20 | but that in case of
21 | Dr. Jekyll's "disappearance or unexplained absence for any period
22 | exceeding three calendar months," the said Edward Hyde should step
23 | into the said Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free
24 | from any burthen or obligation, beyond the payment of a few small
25 | sums to the members of the doctor's household. This document had
26 | long been the lawyer's eyesore. It offended him both as a lawyer and
27 | as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the
28 | fanciful was the immodest. And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr.
29 | Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was
30 | his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name was but a
31 | name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when it began to
32 | be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting,
33 | insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped
34 | up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.
35 |
36 | "I thought it was madness," he said, as he replaced the obnoxious
37 | paper in the safe, "and now I begin to fear it is disgrace."
38 |
39 | With that he blew out his candle, put on a great-coat, and set
40 | forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of
41 | medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and
42 | received his crowding patients. "If any one knows, it will be
43 | Lanyon," he had thought.
44 |
45 | The solemn butler knew and welcomed him;
46 | he was subjected to no stage of delay, but ushered direct from the
47 | door to the dining-room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone over his wine.
48 | This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a
49 | shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided
50 | manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and
51 | welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the
52 | man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine
53 | feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at school
54 | and college, both thorough respecters of themselves and of each
55 | other, and, what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed
56 | each other's company.
57 |
58 | After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject
59 | which so disagreeably pre-occupied his mind.
60 |
61 | "I suppose, Lanyon," said he "you and I must be the two oldest
62 | friends that Henry Jekyll has?"
63 |
64 | "I wish the friends were younger," chuckled Dr. Lanyon. "But I
65 | suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now."
66 |
67 |
68 | "Indeed?" said Utterson. "I thought you had a bond of common
69 | interest."
70 |
71 | "We had," was the reply. "But it is more than ten years since Henry
72 | Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in
73 | mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for
74 | old sake's sake, as they say,
75 | I see and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific
76 | balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have
77 | estranged Damon and Pythias."
78 |
79 | This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to Mr.
80 | Utterson. "They have only differed on some point of science," he
81 | thought; and being a man of no scientific passions (except in the
82 | matter of conveyancing), he even added: "It is nothing worse than
83 | that!" He gave his friend a few seconds to recover his composure,
84 | and then approached the question he had come to put. "Did you ever
85 | come across a protege of his--one Hyde?" he asked.
86 |
87 | "Hyde?" repeated Lanyon. "No. Never heard of him. Since my time."
88 |
89 | That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried back
90 | with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro,
91 | until the small hours of the morning began to grow large. It was a
92 | night of little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness
93 | and besieged by questions.
94 |
95 | Six o'clock struck on the bells of the church that was so
96 | conveniently near to Mr. Utterson's dwelling, and still he was
97 | digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the
98 | intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged,
99 | or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness
100 | of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield's tale went by
101 | before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware
102 | of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure
103 | of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor's;
104 | and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down
105 | and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room
106 | in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling
107 | at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the
108 | curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo!
109 | there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and
110 | even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The figure
111 | in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time
112 | he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through
113 | sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more
114 | swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted
115 | city, and at every street-corner crush a child and leave her
116 | screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know
117 | it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and
118 | melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and
119 | grew apace in the lawyer's mind a singularly strong, almost an
120 | inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde.
121 | If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would
122 | lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of
123 | mysterious
124 | things when well examined. He might see a reason for his friend's
125 | strange preference or bondage (call it which you please) and even
126 | for the startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face
127 | worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy: a
128 | face which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of the
129 | unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.
130 |
131 | From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the
132 | by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon when
133 | business was plenty, and time scarce, at night under the face of the
134 | fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or
135 | concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post.
136 |
137 | "If he be Mr. Hyde," he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek."
138 |
139 | And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry night;
140 | frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor; the
141 | lamps, unshaken, by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light
142 | and shadow. By ten o'clock, when the shops were closed, the
143 | by-street was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of
144 | London from all round, very silent. Small sounds carried far;
145 | domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either
146 | side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of any
147 | passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some
148 | minutes at his post, when he was
149 | aware of an odd, light footstep drawing near. In the course of his
150 | nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the quaint effect
151 | with which the footfalls of a single person, while he is still a
152 | great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and
153 | clatter of the city. Yet his attention had never before been so
154 | sharply and decisively arrested; and it was with a strong,
155 | superstitious prevision of success that he withdrew into the entry
156 | of the court.
157 |
158 | The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as
159 | they turned the end of the street. The lawyer, looking forth from
160 | the entry, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with.
161 | He was small and very plainly dressed, and the look of him, even at
162 | that distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher's
163 | inclination. But he made straight for the door, crossing the
164 | roadway to save time; and as he came, he drew a key from his pocket
165 | like one approaching home.
166 |
167 | Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the shoulder as he
168 | passed. "Mr. Hyde, I think?"
169 |
170 | Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But his
171 | fear was only momentary; and though he did not look the lawyer in
172 | the face, he answered coolly enough: "That is my name. What do you
173 | want?"
174 |
175 | "I see you are going in," returned the lawyer. "I am an old friend
176 | of Dr. Jekyll's -- Mr. Utterson of Gaunt Street -- you must have
177 | heard my name; and meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might
178 | admit me."
179 |
180 | "You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home," replied Mr. Hyde,
181 | blowing in the key. And then suddenly, but still without looking up,
182 | "How did you know me?" he asked.
183 |
184 | "On your side," said Mr. Utterson, "will you do me a favour?"
185 |
186 | "With pleasure," replied the other. "What shall it be?"
187 |
188 | "Will you let me see your face?" asked the lawyer.
189 |
190 | Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some sudden
191 | reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair
192 | stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. "Now I shall
193 | know you again," said Mr. Utterson. "It may be useful."
194 |
195 | "Yes," returned Mr. Hyde, "it is as well we have, met; and a
196 | propos, you should have my address." And he gave a number of a
197 | street in Soho.
198 |
199 | "Good God!" thought Mr. Utterson, "can he, too, have been thinking
200 | of the will?" But he kept his feelings to himself and only grunted
201 | in acknowledgment of the address.
202 |
203 | "And now," said the other, "how did you know me?"
204 |
205 | "By description," was the reply.
206 |
207 | "Whose description?"
208 |
209 | "We have common friends," said Mr. Utterson.
210 |
211 | "Common friends?" echoed Mr. Hyde, a little hoarsely. "Who are
212 | they?"
213 |
214 | "Jekyll, for instance," said the lawyer.
215 |
216 | "He never told you," cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of anger. "I did
217 | not think you would have lied."
218 |
219 | "Come," said Mr. Utterson, "that is not fitting language."
220 |
221 |
222 | The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment,
223 | with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and
224 | disappeared into the house.
225 |
226 | The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of
227 | disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing
228 | every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in
229 | mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked,
230 | was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and
231 | dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable
232 | malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to
233 | the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and
234 | boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken
235 | voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these
236 | together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and
237 | fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. "There must be something
238 | else," said the perplexed gentleman. "There is something
239 | more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems
240 | hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the
241 | old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul
242 | that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?
243 | The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read
244 | Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
245 |
246 | Round the corner from the by-street, there was a square of ancient,
247 | handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high
248 | estate and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of
249 | men: map-engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of
250 | obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was
251 | still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great
252 | air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness
253 | except for the fan-light, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A
254 | well-dressed, elderly servant opened the door.
255 |
256 | "Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?" asked the lawyer.
257 |
258 | "I will see, Mr. Utterson," said Poole, admitting the visitor, as
259 | he spoke, into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall, paved with
260 | flags, warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by a bright,
261 | open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak. "Will you
262 | wait here by the
263 | fire, sir? or shall I give you a light in the dining room?"
264 |
265 | "Here, thank you," said the lawyer, and he drew near and leaned on
266 | the tall fender. This hall, in which he was now left alone, was a
267 | pet fancy of his friend the doctor's; and Utterson himself was wont
268 | to speak of it as the pleasantest room in London. But to-night there
269 | was a shudder in his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his
270 | memory; he felt (what was rare with him) a nausea and distaste of
271 | life; and in the gloom of his spirits, he seemed to read a menace in
272 | the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the
273 | uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed of his
274 | relief, when Poole presently returned to announce that Dr. Jekyll
275 | was gone out.
276 |
277 | "I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting-room door, Poole," he
278 | said. "Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home?"
279 |
280 | "Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir," replied the servant. "Mr. Hyde
281 | has a key."
282 |
283 | "Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young
284 | man, Poole," resumed the other musingly.
285 |
286 | "Yes, sir, he do indeed," said Poole. "We have all orders to obey
287 | him."
288 |
289 | "I do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde?" asked Utterson.
290 |
291 |
292 | "O, dear no, sir. He never dines here," replied the butler. "Indeed
293 | we see very little of
294 | him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and goes by the
295 | laboratory."
296 |
297 | "Well, good-night, Poole."
298 |
299 | "Good-night, Mr. Utterson." And the lawyer set out homeward with a
300 | very heavy heart. "Poor Harry Jekyll," he thought, "my mind
301 | misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a
302 | long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no
303 | statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old
304 | sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming,
305 | _pede claudo_, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the
306 | fault." And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded a while on
307 | his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance
308 | some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there.
309 | His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their
310 | life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the
311 | many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and
312 | fearful gratitude by the many that he had come so near to doing, yet
313 | avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a
314 | spark of hope. "This Master Hyde, if he were studied," thought he,
315 | "must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him;
316 | secrets compared to which poor Jekyll's worst would be like
317 | sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to
318 | think of this creature stealing like a
319 | thief to Harry's bedside; poor Harry, what a wakening! And the
320 | danger of it; for if this Hyde suspects the existence of the will,
321 | he may grow impatient to inherit. Ay, I must put my shoulder to the
322 | wheel if Jekyll will but let me," he added, "if Jekyll will only let
323 | me." For once more he saw before his mind's eye, as clear as a
324 | transparency, the strange clauses of the will.
325 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/_chapters/08.md:
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1 | ---
2 | title: The Last Night
3 | ---
4 |
5 | Mr. Utterson was sitting by his fireside one evening after
6 | dinner, when he was surprised to receive a visit from Poole.
7 |
8 | "Bless me, Poole, what brings you here?" he cried; and then
9 | taking a second look at him, "What ails you?" he added; "is the
10 | doctor ill?"
11 |
12 | "Mr. Utterson," said the man, "there is something wrong."
13 |
14 |
15 | "Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine for you," said the
16 | lawyer. "Now, take your time, and tell me plainly what you want."
17 |
18 | "You know the doctor's ways, sir," replied Poole, "and how he
19 | shuts himself up. Well, he's shut up again in the cabinet; and I
20 | don't like it, sir--I wish I may die if I like it. Mr. Utterson,
21 | sir, I'm afraid."
22 |
23 | "Now, my good man," said the lawyer, "be explicit. What are you
24 | afraid of?"
25 |
26 | "I've been afraid for about a week," returned Poole, doggedly
27 | disregarding the question, "and I can bear it no more."
28 |
29 | The man's appearance amply bore out his
30 | words; his manner was altered for the worse; and except for the
31 | moment when he had first announced his terror, he had not once
32 | looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he sat with the glass of
33 | wine untasted on his knee, and his eyes directed to a corner of
34 | the floor. "I can bear it no more," he repeated.
35 |
36 | "Come," said the lawyer, "I see you have some good reason, Poole;
37 | I see there is something seriously amiss. Try to tell me what it
38 | is."
39 |
40 | "I think there's been foul play," said Poole, hoarsely.
41 |
42 |
43 | "Foul play!" cried the lawyer, a good deal frightened and rather
44 | inclined to be irritated in consequence. "What foul play? What
45 | does the man mean?"
46 |
47 | "I daren't say, sir," was the answer; "but will you come along
48 | with me and see for yourself?"
49 |
50 | Mr. Utterson's only answer was to rise and get his hat and
51 | great-coat; but he observed with wonder the greatness of the
52 | relief that appeared upon the butler's face, and perhaps with no
53 | less, that the wine was still untasted when he set it down to
54 | follow.
55 |
56 | It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon,
57 | lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying
58 | wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made
59 | talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed
60 | to have swept the
61 | streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson
62 | thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He
63 | could have wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been
64 | conscious of so sharp a wish to see and touch his
65 | fellow-creatures; for struggle as he might, there was borne in
66 | upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The square,
67 | when they got there, was all full of wind and dust, and the thin
68 | trees in the garden were lashing themselves along the railing.
69 | Poole, who had kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now pulled
70 | up in the middle of the pavement, and in spite of the biting
71 | weather, took off his hat and mopped his brow with a red
72 | pocket-handkerchief. But for all the hurry of his coming, these
73 | were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but the
74 | moisture of some strangling anguish; for his face was white and
75 | his voice, when he spoke, harsh and broken.
76 |
77 | "Well, sir," he said, "here we are, and God grant there be
78 | nothing wrong."
79 |
80 | "Amen, Poole," said the lawyer.
81 |
82 | Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded manner; the door
83 | was opened on the chain; and a voice asked from within, "Is that
84 | you, Poole?"
85 |
86 | "It's all right," said Poole. "Open the door." The hall, when
87 | they entered it, was brightly lighted up; the fire was built
88 | high; and about the hearth the whole of the servants, men and
89 | women, stood huddled together like a flock of sheep. At the sight
90 | of Mr. Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysterical whimpering;
91 | and the cook, crying out, "Bless God! it's Mr. Utterson," ran
92 | forward as if to take him in her arms.
93 |
94 | "What, what? Are you all here?" said the lawyer peevishly. "Very
95 | irregular, very unseemly; your master would be far from pleased."
96 |
97 | "They're all afraid," said Poole.
98 |
99 | Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the maid lifted
100 | up her voice and now wept loudly.
101 |
102 | "Hold your tongue!" Poole said to her, with a ferocity of accent
103 | that testified to his own jangled nerves; and indeed, when the
104 | girl had so suddenly raised the note of her lamentation, they had
105 | all started and turned toward the inner door with faces of
106 | dreadful expectation. "And now," continued the butler, addressing
107 | the knife-boy, "reach me a candle, and we'll get this through
108 | hands at once." And then he begged Mr. Utterson to follow him,
109 | and led the way to the back-garden.
110 |
111 | "Now, sir," said he, "you come as gently as you can. I want you
112 | to hear, and I don't want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if
113 | by any chance he was to ask you in, don't go."
114 |
115 | Mr. Utterson's nerves, at this unlooked-for termination, gave a
116 | jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he re-collected
117 | his courage
118 | and followed the butler into the laboratory building and through
119 | the surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to
120 | the foot of the stair. Here Poole motioned him to stand on one
121 | side and listen; while he himself, setting down the candle and
122 | making a great and obvious call on his resolution, mounted the
123 | steps and knocked with a somewhat uncertain hand on the red baize
124 | of the cabinet door.
125 |
126 | "Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you," he called; and even as he
127 | did so, once more violently signed to the lawyer to give ear.
128 |
129 | A voice answered from within: "Tell him I cannot see any one," it
130 | said complainingly.
131 |
132 | "Thank you, sir," said Poole, with a note of something like
133 | triumph in his voice; and taking up his candle, he led Mr.
134 | Utterson back across the yard and into the great kitchen, where
135 | the fire was out and the beetles were leaping on the floor.
136 |
137 | "Sir," he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was that my
138 | master's voice?"
139 |
140 | "It seems much changed," replied the lawyer, very pale, but
141 | giving look for look.
142 |
143 | "Changed? Well, yes, I think so," said the butler. "Have I been
144 | twenty years in this man's house, to be deceived about his voice?
145 | No, sir; master's made away with; he was made, away with eight
146 | days ago, when we heard him cry out upon the name of God; and
147 | who's in there instead of him, and why it stays there, is a thing
148 | that cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson!"
149 |
150 | "This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale,
151 | my man," said Mr. Utterson, biting his finger. "Suppose it were
152 | as you suppose, supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been--well,
153 | murdered, what could induce the murderer to stay? That won't hold
154 | water; it doesn't commend itself to reason."
155 |
156 | "Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, but I'll do
157 | it yet," said Poole. "All this last week (you must know) him, or
158 | it, or whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying
159 | night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his
160 | mind. It was sometimes his way--the master's, that is--to
161 | write his orders on a sheet of paper and throw it on the stair.
162 | We've had nothing else this week back; nothing but papers, and a
163 | closed door, and the very meals left there to be smuggled in when
164 | nobody was looking. Well, sir, every day, ay, and twice and
165 | thrice in the same day, there have been orders and complaints,
166 | and I have been sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in
167 | town. Every time I brought the stuff back, there would be another
168 | paper telling me to return it, because it was not pure, and
169 | another order to a different firm. This drug is wanted bitter
170 | bad, sir, whatever for."
171 |
172 | "Have you any of these papers?" asked Mr. Utterson.
173 |
174 | Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note, which
175 | the lawyer, bending nearer
176 | to the candle, carefully examined. Its contents ran thus: "Dr.
177 | Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw. He assures them
178 | that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his
179 | present purpose. In the year 18---, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat
180 | large quantity from Messrs. M. He now begs them to search with
181 | the most sedulous care, and should any of the same quality be
182 | left, to forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration.
183 | The importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated." So
184 | far the letter had run composedly enough, but here with a sudden
185 | splutter of the pen, the writer's emotion had broken loose. "For
186 | God's sake," he had added, "find me some of the old."
187 |
188 | "This is a strange note," said Mr. Utterson; and then sharply,
189 | "How do you come to have it open?"
190 |
191 | "The man at Maw's was main angry, sir, and he threw it back to me
192 | like so much dirt," returned Poole.
193 |
194 | "This is unquestionably the doctor's hand, do you know?" resumed
195 | the lawyer.
196 |
197 | "I thought it looked like it," said the servant rather sulkily;
198 | and then, with another voice, "But what matters hand-of-write?"
199 | he said. "I've seen him!"
200 |
201 | "Seen him?" repeated Mr. Utterson. "Well?"
202 |
203 | "That's it!" said Poole. "It was this way. I came suddenly into
204 | the theatre from the
205 | garden. It seems he had slipped out to look for this drug or
206 | whatever it is; for the cabinet door was open, and there he was
207 | at the far end of the room digging among the crates. He looked up
208 | when I came in, gave a kind of cry, and whipped up-stairs into
209 | the cabinet. It was but for one minute that I saw him, but the
210 | hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master,
211 | why had he a mask upon his face? If it was my master, why did he
212 | cry out like a rat, and run from me? I have served him long
213 | enough. And then..." The man paused and passed his hand over his
214 | face.
215 |
216 | "These are all very strange circumstances," said Mr. Utterson,
217 | "but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master, Poole, is
218 | plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and
219 | deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of
220 | his voice; hence the mask and the avoidance of his friends; hence
221 | his eagerness to find this drug, by means of which the poor soul
222 | retains some hope of ultimate recovery--God grant that he be
223 | not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole,
224 | ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs
225 | well together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms."
226 |
227 | "Sir," said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled pallor,
228 | "that thing was not my master, and there's the truth. My master"
229 | here he looked round him and began to whisper -- "is
230 | a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of a dwarf."
231 | Utterson attempted to protest. "O, sir," cried Poole, "do you
232 | think I do not know my master after twenty years? Do you think I
233 | do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door, where I
234 | saw him every morning of my life? No, Sir, that thing in the mask
235 | was never Dr. Jekyll--God knows what it was, but it was never
236 | Dr. Jekyll; and it is the belief of my heart that there was
237 | murder done."
238 |
239 | "Poole," replied the lawyer, "if you say that, it will become my
240 | duty to make certain. Much as I desire to spare your master's
241 | feelings, much as I am puzzled by this note which seems to prove
242 | him to be still alive, I shall consider it my duty to break in
243 | that door."
244 |
245 | "Ah Mr. Utterson, that's talking!" cried the butler.
246 |
247 | "And now comes the second question," resumed Utterson: "Who is
248 | going to do it?"
249 |
250 | "Why, you and me," was the undaunted reply.
251 |
252 | "That's very well said," returned the lawyer; "and whatever comes
253 | of it, I shall make it my business to see you are no loser."
254 |
255 | "There is an axe in the theatre," continued Poole; "and you might
256 | take the kitchen poker for yourself."
257 |
258 | The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrument into his hand,
259 | and balanced it. "Do you know, Poole," he said, looking up, "that
260 | you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some
261 | peril?"
262 |
263 | "You may say so, sir, indeed," returned the butler.
264 |
265 | "It is well, then, that we should be frank," said the other. "We
266 | both think more than we have said; let us make a clean breast.
267 | This masked figure that you saw, did you recognise it?"
268 |
269 | "Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so doubled up,
270 | that I could hardly swear to that," was the answer. "But if you
271 | mean, was it Mr. Hyde?--why, yes, I think it was! You see, it
272 | was much of the same bigness; and it had the same quick, light
273 | way with it; and then who else could have got in by the
274 | laboratory door? You have not forgot, sir that at the time of the
275 | murder he had still the key with him? But that's not all. I don't
276 | know, Mr. Utterson, if ever you met this Mr. Hyde?"
277 |
278 | "Yes," said the lawyer, "I once spoke with him."
279 |
280 | "Then you must know as well as the rest of us that there was
281 | something queer about that gentleman--something that gave a man
282 | a turn--I don't know rightly how to say it, sir, beyond this:
283 | that you felt it in your marrow kind of cold and thin."
284 |
285 | "I own I felt something of what you describe," said Mr. Utterson.
286 |
287 | "Quite so, sir," returned Poole. "Well, when
288 | that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals
289 | and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. Oh,
290 | I know it's not evidence, Mr. Utterson. I'm book-learned enough
291 | for that; but a man has his feelings, and I give you my
292 | Bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!"
293 |
294 | "Ay, ay," said the lawyer. "My fears incline to the same point.
295 | Evil, I fear, founded--evil was sure to come--of that
296 | connection. Ay, truly, I believe you; I believe poor Harry is
297 | killed; and I believe his murderer (for what purpose, God alone
298 | can tell) is still lurking in his victim's room. Well, let our
299 | name be vengeance. Call Bradshaw."
300 |
301 | The footman came at the summons, very white and nervous.
302 |
303 |
304 | "Pull yourself together, Bradshaw," said the lawyer. "This
305 | suspense, I know, is telling upon all of you; but it is now our
306 | intention to make an end of it. Poole, here, and I are going to
307 | force our way into the cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are
308 | broad enough to bear the blame. Meanwhile, lest anything should
309 | really be amiss, or any malefactor seek to escape by the back,
310 | you and the boy must go round the corner with a pair of good
311 | sticks and take your post at the laboratory door. We give you ten
312 | minutes to get to your stations."
313 |
314 | As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch. "And now,
315 | Poole, let us get to ours,"
316 | he said; and taking the poker under his arm, led the way into the
317 | yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite
318 | dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that
319 | deep well of building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro
320 | about their steps, until they came into the shelter of the
321 | theatre, where they sat down silently to wait. London hummed
322 | solemnly all around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only
323 | broken by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the
324 | cabinet floor.
325 |
326 | "So it will walk all day, sir," whispered Poole; "ay, and the
327 | better part of the night. Only when a new sample comes from the
328 | chemist, there's a bit of a break. Ah, it's an ill conscience
329 | that's such an enemy to rest! Ah, sir, there's blood foully shed
330 | in every step of it! But hark again, a little closer--put your
331 | heart in your ears, Mr. Utterson, and tell me, is that the
332 | doctor's foot?"
333 |
334 | The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for all
335 | they went so slowly; it was different indeed from the heavy
336 | creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. "Is there never
337 | anything else?" he asked.
338 |
339 | Poole nodded. "Once," he said. "Once I heard it weeping!"
340 |
341 | "Weeping? how that?" said the lawyer, conscious of a sudden chill
342 | of horror.
343 |
344 | "Weeping like a woman or a lost soul," said
345 | the butler. "I came away with that upon my heart, that I could
346 | have wept too."
347 |
348 | But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole disinterred the axe
349 | from under a stack of packing straw; the candle was set upon the
350 | nearest table to light them to the attack; and they drew near
351 | with bated breath to where that patient foot was still going up
352 | and down, up and down, in the quiet of the night.
353 |
354 | "Jekyll," cried Utterson, with a loud voice, "I demand to see
355 | you." He paused a moment, but there came no reply. "I give you
356 | fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall
357 | see you," he resumed; "if not by fair means, then by foul! if not
358 | of your consent, then by brute force!"
359 |
360 | "Utterson," said the voice, "for God's sake, have mercy!"
361 |
362 |
363 | "Ah, that's not Jekyll's voice--it's Hyde's!" cried Utterson.
364 | "Down with the door, Poole!"
365 |
366 | Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow shook the
367 | building, and the red baize door leaped against the lock and
368 | hinges. A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from the
369 | cabinet. Up went the axe again, and again the panels crashed and
370 | the frame bounded; four times the blow fell; but the wood was
371 | tough and the fittings were of excellent workmanship; and it was
372 | not until the fifth, that the lock burst in sunder and the wreck
373 | of the door fell inwards on the carpet.
374 |
375 | The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness that
376 | had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the
377 | cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire
378 | glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin
379 | strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the
380 | business-table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea:
381 | the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for the glazed
382 | presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in
383 | London.
384 |
385 | Right in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted
386 | and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its
387 | back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in
388 | clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness;
389 | the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but
390 | life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the
391 | strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew
392 | that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.
393 |
394 | "We have come too late," he said sternly, "whether to save or
395 | punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains for us
396 | to find the body of your master."
397 |
398 | The far greater proportion of the building was occupied by the
399 | theatre, which filled almost the whole ground story and was
400 | lighted from above, and by the cabinet, which formed an upper
401 | story at one end and looked upon the
402 | court. A corridor joined the theatre to the door on the
403 | by-street; and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a
404 | second flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets
405 | and a spacious cellar. All these they now thoroughly examined.
406 | Each closet needed but a glance, for all were empty, and all, by
407 | the dust that fell from their doors, had stood long unopened. The
408 | cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from
409 | the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll's predecessor; but even
410 | as they opened the door they were advertised of the uselessness
411 | of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which
412 | had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace
413 | of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive.
414 |
415 | Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. "He must be buried
416 | here," he said, hearkening to the sound.
417 |
418 | "Or he may have fled," said Utterson, and he turned to examine
419 | the door in the by-street. It was locked; and lying near by on
420 | the flags, they found the key, already stained with rust.
421 |
422 | "This does not look like use," observed the lawyer.
423 |
424 | "Use!" echoed Poole. "Do you not see, sir, it is broken? much as
425 | if a man had stamped on it."
426 |
427 | "Ay," continued Utterson, "and the fractures, too, are rusty."
428 | The two men looked at each other with a scare. "This is beyond
429 | me,
430 | Poole," said the lawyer. "Let us go back to the cabinet."
431 |
432 | They mounted the stair in silence, and still with an occasional
433 | awe-struck glance at the dead body, proceeded more thoroughly to
434 | examine the contents of the cabinet. At one table, there were
435 | traces of chemical work, various measured heaps of some white
436 | salt being laid on glass saucers, as though for an experiment in
437 | which the unhappy man had been prevented.
438 |
439 | "That is the same drug that I was always bringing him," said
440 | Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling noise
441 | boiled over.
442 |
443 | This brought them to the fireside, where the easy-chair was drawn
444 | cosily up, and the tea-things stood ready to the sitter's elbow,
445 | the very sugar in the cup. There were several books on a shelf;
446 | one lay beside the tea-things open, and Utterson was amazed to
447 | find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several
448 | times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with
449 | startling blasphemies.
450 |
451 | Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the searchers
452 | came to the cheval glass, into whose depths they looked with an
453 | involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing
454 | but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a
455 | hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and
456 | their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in.
457 |
458 | "This glass have seen some strange things, sir," whispered Poole.
459 |
460 | "And surely none stranger than itself," echoed the lawyer in the
461 | same tones. "For what did Jekyll"--he caught himself up at the
462 | word with a start, and then conquering the weakness--"what
463 | could Jekyll want with it?" he said.
464 |
465 | "You may say that!" said Poole. Next they turned to the
466 | business-table. On the desk among the neat array of papers, a
467 | large envelope was uppermost, and bore, in the doctor's hand, the
468 | name of Mr. Utterson. The lawyer unsealed it, and several
469 | enclosures fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the
470 | same eccentric terms as the one which he had returned six months
471 | before, to serve as a testament in case of death and as a deed of
472 | gift in case of disappearance; but, in place of the name of
473 | Edward Hyde, the lawyer, with indescribable amazement, read the
474 | name of Gabriel John Utterson. He looked at Poole, and then back
475 | at the paper, and last of all at the dead malefactor stretched
476 | upon the carpet.
477 |
478 | "My head goes round," he said. "He has been all these days in
479 | possession; he had no cause to like me; he must have raged to see
480 | himself displaced; and he has not destroyed this document."
481 |
482 | He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in the doctor's
483 | hand and dated at the top.
484 | "O Poole!" the lawyer cried, "he was alive and here this day. He
485 | cannot have been disposed of in so short a space, he must be
486 | still alive, he must have fled! And then, why fled? and how? and
487 | in that case, can we venture to declare this suicide? Oh, we must
488 | be careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in some
489 | dire catastrophe."
490 |
491 | "Why don't you read it, sir?" asked Poole.
492 |
493 | "Because I fear," replied the lawyer solemnly. "God grant I have
494 | no cause for it!" And with that he brought the paper to his eyes
495 | and read as follows:
496 |
497 |
498 | > My dear Utterson, -- When this shall fall into your hands, I
499 | > shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the
500 | > penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances
501 | > of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be
502 | > early. Go then, and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned
503 | > me he was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more,
504 | > turn to the confession of
505 | >
506 | > Your unworthy and unhappy friend,
507 | > Henry Jekyll
508 |
509 |
510 | "There was a third enclosure?" asked Utterson.
511 |
512 | "Here, sir," said Poole, and gave into his hands a considerable
513 | packet sealed in several places.
514 |
515 | The lawyer put it in his pocket. "I would say nothing of this
516 | paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save
517 | his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these
518 | documents in quiet; but I shall be back before midnight, when we
519 | shall send for the police."
520 |
521 | They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them; and
522 | Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the fire
523 | in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two
524 | narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained.
525 |
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/_chapters/10.md:
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1 | ---
2 | title: Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
3 | ---
4 |
5 | I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune, endowed besides
6 | with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the
7 | respect of the wise and good among my fellow-men, and thus, as
8 | might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable
9 | and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a
10 | certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the
11 | happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with
12 | my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than
13 | commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about
14 | that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of
15 | reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my
16 | progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to
17 | a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned
18 | such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views
19 | that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost
20 | morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting
21 | nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my
22 | faults, that made me what I was and, with even a deeper trench
23 | than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of
24 | good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this
25 | case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that
26 | hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one
27 | of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a
28 | double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me
29 | were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside
30 | restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye
31 | of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow
32 | and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific
33 | studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the
34 | transcendental, re-acted and shed a strong light on this
35 | consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every
36 | day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
37 | intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose
38 | partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful
39 | shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two,
40 | because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that
41 | point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same
42 | lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known
43 | for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent
44 | denizens. I, for my
45 | part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one
46 | direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side,
47 | and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough
48 | and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that
49 | contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could
50 | rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically
51 | both; and from an early date, even before the course of my
52 | scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
53 | possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with
54 | pleasure, as a beloved day-dream, on the thought of the
55 | separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could but
56 | be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all
57 | that was unbearable; the unjust delivered from the aspirations
58 | might go his way, and remorse of his more upright twin; and the
59 | just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path,
60 | doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no
61 | longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this
62 | extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these
63 | incongruous fagots were thus bound together that in the agonised
64 | womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously
65 | struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?
66 |
67 | I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side-light
68 | began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I
69 | began to perceive
70 | more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling
71 | immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so
72 | solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to
73 | have the power to shake and to pluck back that fleshly vestment,
74 | even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two
75 | good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch
76 | of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn that
77 | the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man's
78 | shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but
79 | returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
80 | Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my
81 | discoveries were incomplete. Enough, then, that I not only
82 | recognised my natural body for the mere aura and effulgence of
83 | certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to
84 | compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from
85 | their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted,
86 | none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and
87 | bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul.
88 |
89 | I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of
90 | practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so
91 | potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity,
92 | might by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least
93 | inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that
94 | immaterial tabernacle which I
95 | looked to it to change. But the temptation of a discovery so
96 | singular and profound, at last overcame the suggestions of alarm.
97 | I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from
98 | a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular
99 | salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient
100 | required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the elements,
101 | watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the
102 | ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off
103 | the potion.
104 |
105 | The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly
106 | nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the
107 | hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to
108 | subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness.
109 | There was something strange in my sensations, something
110 | indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I
111 | felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of
112 | a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images
113 | running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of
114 | obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I
115 | knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more
116 | wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil;
117 | and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like
118 | wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of
119 | these
120 | sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost
121 | in stature.
122 |
123 | There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands
124 | beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very
125 | purpose of these transformations. The night, however, was far
126 | gone into the morning--the morning, black as it was, was nearly
127 | ripe for the conception of the day--the inmates of my house
128 | were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I
129 | determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in
130 | my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein
131 | the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought,
132 | with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their
133 | unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through
134 | the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room,
135 | I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
136 |
137 | I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know,
138 | but that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my
139 | nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was
140 | less robust and less developed than the good which I had just
141 | deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had been, after
142 | all, nine-tenths a life of effort, virtue, and control, it had
143 | been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I
144 | think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller,
145 | slighter, and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon
146 | the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly
147 | on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still
148 | believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an
149 | imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that
150 | ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather
151 | of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural
152 | and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it
153 | seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided
154 | countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in
155 | so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore
156 | the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first
157 | without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was
158 | because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of
159 | good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind,
160 | was pure evil.
161 |
162 | I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive
163 | experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if
164 | I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before
165 | daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back
166 | to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once more
167 | suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more
168 | with the character, the stature, and the face of Henry Jekyll.
169 |
170 | That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached
171 | my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment
172 | while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must
173 | have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I
174 | had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no
175 | discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it
176 | but shook the doors of the prison-house of my disposition; and
177 | like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.
178 | At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by
179 | ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the
180 | thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had
181 | now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly
182 | evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that
183 | incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had
184 | already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward
185 | the worse.
186 |
187 | Even at that time, I had not yet conquered my aversion to the
188 | dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at
189 | times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified,
190 | and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing
191 | toward the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily
192 | growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power
193 | tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup,
194 | to doff at once the body
195 | of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that
196 | of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed to me at the
197 | time to be humorous; and I made my preparations with the most
198 | studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho, to which
199 | Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as housekeeper a
200 | creature whom I well knew to be silent and unscrupulous. On the
201 | other side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I
202 | described) was to have full liberty and power about my house in
203 | the square; and to parry mishaps, I even called and made myself a
204 | familiar object, in my second character. I next drew up that will
205 | to which you so much objected; so that if anything befell me in
206 | the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that of Edward Hyde
207 | without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed, on
208 | every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my
209 | position.
210 |
211 | Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while
212 | their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the
213 | first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that
214 | could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial
215 | respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off
216 | these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But
217 | for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think
218 | of it--I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my
219 | laboratory door, give me but a second or
220 | two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing
221 | ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like
222 | the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead,
223 | quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man
224 | who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.
225 |
226 | The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as
227 | I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But
228 | in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the
229 | monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was
230 | often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.
231 | This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth
232 | alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and
233 | villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking
234 | pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to
235 | another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at
236 | times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation
237 | was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp
238 | of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was
239 | guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities
240 | seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was
241 | possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience
242 | slumbered.
243 |
244 | Into the details of the infamy at which I thus
245 | connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I
246 | have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings
247 | and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached. I
248 | met with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I
249 | shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused
250 | against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other
251 | day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child's
252 | family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life;
253 | and at last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward
254 | Hyde had to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque
255 | drawn in the name of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily
256 | eliminated from the future, by opening an account at another bank
257 | in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by sloping my own
258 | hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I
259 | thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.
260 |
261 | Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out
262 | for one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke
263 | the next day in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain
264 | I looked about me; in vain I saw the decent furniture and tall
265 | proportions of my room in the square; in vain that I recognised
266 | the pattern of the bed-curtains and the design of the mahogany
267 | frame; something still kept insisting that I was not where I was,
268 | that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the little
269 | room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of
270 | Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and, in my psychological way
271 | began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion,
272 | occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable
273 | morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more
274 | wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry
275 | Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and
276 | size: it was large, firm, white, and comely. But the hand which I
277 | now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London
278 | morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes, was lean, corded,
279 | knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth
280 | of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.
281 |
282 | I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was
283 | in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my
284 | breast as sudden and startling as the crash of cymbals; and
285 | bounding from my bed, I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that
286 | met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin
287 | and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened
288 | Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself, and
289 | then, with another bound of terror--how was it to be remedied?
290 | It was well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs
291 | were in the
292 | cabinet--a long journey down two pairs of stairs, through the
293 | back passage, across the open court and through the anatomical
294 | theatre, from where I was then standing horror-struck. It might
295 | indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that,
296 | when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? And
297 | then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon
298 | my mind that the servants were already used to the coming and
299 | going of my second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was
300 | able, in clothes of my own size: had soon passed through the
301 | house, where Bradshaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at
302 | such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes later,
303 | Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was sitting down,
304 | with a darkened brow, to make a feint of breakfasting.
305 |
306 | Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this
307 | reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian
308 | finger on the wall, to be spelling out the letters of my
309 | judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously than ever before
310 | on the issues and possibilities of my double existence. That part
311 | of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much
312 | exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as though
313 | the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I
314 | wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of
315 | blood; and I began to spy a danger that,
316 | if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be
317 | permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be
318 | forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably
319 | mine. The power of the drug had not been always equally
320 | displayed. Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed
321 | me; since then I had been obliged on more than one occasion to
322 | double, and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the
323 | amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole
324 | shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light of that
325 | morning's accident, I was led to remark that whereas, in the
326 | beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of
327 | Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself
328 | to the other side. All things therefore seemed to point to this:
329 | that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and
330 | becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.
331 |
332 | Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had
333 | memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally
334 | shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most
335 | sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and
336 | shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was
337 | indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain
338 | bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from
339 | pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde
340 | had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with
341 | Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly
342 | indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with
343 | Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to
344 | become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless. The
345 | bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another
346 | consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer
347 | smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even
348 | conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances
349 | were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man;
350 | much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted
351 | and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with
352 | so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part
353 | and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
354 |
355 | Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded
356 | by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute
357 | farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step,
358 | leaping impulses and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the
359 | disguise of Hyde. I made this choice perhaps with some
360 | unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho,
361 | nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready
362 | in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true to my
363 | determination; for two months I led a life of such
364 | severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the
365 | compensations of an approving conscience. But time began at last
366 | to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of
367 | conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be
368 | tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after
369 | freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again
370 | compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
371 |
372 | I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon
373 | his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the
374 | dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility;
375 | neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough
376 | allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate
377 | readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward
378 | Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been
379 | long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I
380 | took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity
381 | to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my
382 | soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to the
383 | civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God,
384 | no man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so
385 | pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable
386 | spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything. But
387 | I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing
388 | instincts
389 | by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree
390 | of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted,
391 | however slightly, was to fall.
392 |
393 | Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a
394 | transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight
395 | from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to
396 | succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium,
397 | struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A mist
398 | dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene
399 | of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
400 | evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the
401 | topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance
402 | doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the
403 | lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on
404 | my crime, light-headedly devising others in the future, and yet
405 | still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for the steps of
406 | the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the
407 | draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of
408 | transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
409 | with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon
410 | his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of
411 | self-indulgence was rent from head to foot, I saw my life as a
412 | whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had
413 | walked
414 | with my father's hand, and through the self-denying toils of my
415 | professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense
416 | of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I could have
417 | screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down
418 | the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory
419 | swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly
420 | face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the acuteness of this
421 | remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of joy.
422 | The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth
423 | impossible; whether I would or not, I was now confined to the
424 | better part of my existence; and oh, how I rejoiced to think it!
425 | with what willing humility, I embraced anew the restrictions of
426 | natural life! with what sincere renunciation, I locked the door
427 | by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under
428 | my heel!
429 |
430 | The next day, came the news that the murder had been overlooked,
431 | that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the
432 | victim was a man high in public estimation. It was not only a
433 | crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to know it;
434 | I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and
435 | guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of
436 | refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all
437 | men would be raised to take and slay him.
438 |
439 | I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say
440 | with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know
441 | yourself how earnestly in the last months of last year, I
442 | laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for
443 | others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for
444 | myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and
445 | innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more
446 | completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose;
447 | and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of
448 | me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl
449 | for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare
450 | idea of that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own
451 | person, that I was once more tempted to trifle with my
452 | conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner, that I at
453 | last fell before the assaults of temptation.
454 |
455 | There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is
456 | filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally
457 | destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the
458 | fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had
459 | made discovery. It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot
460 | where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the
461 | Regent's Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with
462 | spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me
463 | licking the
464 | chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising
465 | subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I
466 | reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing
467 | myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy
468 | cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that
469 | vain-glorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and
470 | the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint;
471 | and then as in its turn the faintness subsided, I began to be
472 | aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater
473 | boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of
474 | obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my
475 | shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and
476 | hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been
477 | safe of all men's respect, wealthy, beloved--the cloth laying
478 | for me in the dining-room at home; and now I was the common
479 | quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to
480 | the gallows.
481 |
482 | My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more
483 | than once observed that, in my second character, my faculties
484 | seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic;
485 | thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have
486 | succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs
487 | were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I
488 | to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in
489 | my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had
490 | closed. If I sought to enter by the house, my own servants would
491 | consign me to the gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and
492 | thought of Lanyon. How was he to be reached? how persuaded?
493 | Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets, how was I to
494 | make my way into his presence? and how should I, an unknown and
495 | displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle the
496 | study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my
497 | original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own
498 | hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that
499 | I must follow became lighted up from end to end.
500 |
501 | Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning
502 | a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name
503 | of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was
504 | indeed comical enough, however tragic a fate these garments
505 | covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my
506 | teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile
507 | withered from his face--happily for him--yet more happily for
508 | myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from
509 | his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so
510 | black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look
511 | did they exchange in my
512 | presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led me to a private
513 | room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his
514 | life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger,
515 | strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the
516 | creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the
517 | will; composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and one
518 | to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of their
519 | being posted, sent them out with directions that they should be
520 | registered.
521 |
522 | Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room,
523 | gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears,
524 | the waiter visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the
525 | night was fully come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab,
526 | and was driven to and fro about the streets of the city. He, I
527 | say--I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human;
528 | nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when at last,
529 | thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged
530 | the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes,
531 | an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the
532 | nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him
533 | like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering
534 | to himself, skulking through the less-frequented thoroughfares,
535 | counting the minutes that still divided him from midnight. Once a
536 | woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote
537 | her in the face, and she fled.
538 |
539 | When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend
540 | perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but
541 | a drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon
542 | these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear
543 | of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I
544 | received Lanyon's condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly
545 | in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed. I
546 | slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and
547 | profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me
548 | could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened,
549 | but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute
550 | that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the
551 | appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home,
552 | in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my
553 | escape shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the
554 | brightness of hope.
555 |
556 | I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast,
557 | drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized
558 | again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the
559 | change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet,
560 | before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of
561 | Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to
562 | myself; and alas! Six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the
563 | fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.
564 | In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as
565 | of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
566 | drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all
567 | hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory
568 | shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my
569 | chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of
570 | this continually-impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which
571 | I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought
572 | possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up
573 | and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and
574 | solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But
575 | when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I
576 | would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of
577 | transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a
578 | fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with
579 | causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to
580 | contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to
581 | have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate
582 | that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was
583 | a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of
584 | that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
585 | consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these
586 | links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant
587 | part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of
588 | life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the
589 | shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries
590 | and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that
591 | what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life.
592 | And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer
593 | than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he
594 | heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour
595 | of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against
596 | him and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll,
597 | was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him
598 | continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
599 | subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed
600 | the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was
601 | now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself
602 | regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me,
603 | scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books,
604 | burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and
605 | indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago
606 | have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his
607 | love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken
608 | and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the
609 | abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he
610 | fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart
611 | to pity him.
612 |
613 | It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
614 | description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that
615 | suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought--no, not
616 | alleviation--but a certain callousness of soul, a certain
617 | acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for
618 | years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which
619 | has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision
620 | of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the
621 | first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh
622 | supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the
623 | first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was
624 | without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had
625 | London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my
626 | first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity
627 | which lent efficacy to the draught.
628 |
629 | About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement
630 | under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then,
631 | is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think
632 | his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!)
633 | in the glass. Nor must I delay
634 | too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has
635 | hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of
636 | great prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change
637 | take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces;
638 | but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his
639 | wonderful selfishness and Circumscription to the moment will
640 | probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like
641 | spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both, has
642 | already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I
643 | shall again and for ever re-indue that hated personality, I know
644 | how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue,
645 | with the most strained and fear-struck ecstasy of listening, to
646 | pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear
647 | to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or
648 | will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God
649 | knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is
650 | to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down
651 | the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of
652 | that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
653 |
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