The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson (bts book recommendations .txt) 📗

got it?” And so

lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm

and sought to shake me.

 

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang

along my blood. “Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have not

yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please.”

And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary

seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a

patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my

preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer

me to muster.

 

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough.

“What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown

its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your

colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some

moment; and I understood …” He paused and put his hand to his

throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he

was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria—“I

understood, a drawer …”

 

But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and some

perhaps on my own growing curiosity.

 

“There it is, sir,” said I, pointing to the drawer, where it

lay on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.

 

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his

heart: I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of

his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed

both for his life and reason.

 

“Compose yourself,” said I.

 

He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision

of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he

uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified.

And the next moment, in a voice that was already fairly well under

control, “Have you a graduated glass?” he asked.

 

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him

what he asked.

 

He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of

the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which

was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the

crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and

to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same

moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark

purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My

visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye,

smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and

looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.

 

“And now,” said he, “to settle what remains. Will you be

wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in

my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or

has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before

you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide,

you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor

wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal

distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if

you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new

avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this

room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a

prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.”

 

“Sir,” said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly

possessing, “you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder

that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I

have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause

before I see the end.”

 

“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you remember your

vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now,

you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material

views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine,

you who have derided your superiors—behold!”

 

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry

followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on,

staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I

looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—

his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and

alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped

back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that

prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

 

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there

before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping

before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there

stood Henry Jekyll!

 

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to

set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul

sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my

eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life

is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror

sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my

days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die

incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me,

even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in memory, dwell on

it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson,

and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more

than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was,

on Jekyll’s own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted

for in every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.

 

HASTIE LANYON

 

Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case

 

I was born in the year 18— to a large fortune, endowed besides

with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the

respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as

might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable

and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a

certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the

happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with

my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than

commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about

that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of

reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my

progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a

profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned

such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views

that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost

morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of

my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that

made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the

majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill

which divide and compound man’s dual nature. In this case, I was

driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of

life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most

plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a

double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me

were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside

restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye

of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and

suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific

studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the

transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this

consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every

day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the

intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose

partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck:

that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the

state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others

will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I

hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere

polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I,

for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in

one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral

side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the

thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two

natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I

could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was

radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of

my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked

possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with

pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation

of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in

separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was

unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the

aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just

could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the

good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed

to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were

thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness,

these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then

were they dissociated?

 

I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side

light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table.

I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated,

the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this

seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents

I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly

vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion.

For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific

branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn

that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s

shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but

returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my

discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only

recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of

certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to

compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from

their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted,

none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and

bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.

 

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of

practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so

potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity,

might, by the least scruple