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

of an overdose or at the least

inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that

immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the

temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last

overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my

tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists,

a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my

experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one

accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and

smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided,

with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

 

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones,

deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded

at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly

to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness.

There was something strange in my sensations, something

indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I

felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of

a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images

running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of

obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I

knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more

wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and

the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I

stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these

sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost

in stature.

 

There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which

stands beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for

the very purpose of these transformations. The night however, was

far gone into the morning—the morning, black as it was, was

nearly ripe for the conception of the day—the inmates of my

house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I

determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in

my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein

the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with

wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping

vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the

corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I

saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

 

I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I

know, but that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side

of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping

efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I

had just deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had

been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control,

it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And

hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much

smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good

shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly

and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must

still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body

an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon

that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance,

rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed

natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the

spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and

divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine.

And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I

wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at

first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take

it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled

out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of

mankind, was pure evil.

 

I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and

conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to

be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee

before daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying

back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once

more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once

more with the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.

 

That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I

approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the

experiment while under the empire of generous or pious

aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies

of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend.

The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical

nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my

disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood

within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept

awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and

the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I

had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly

evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that

incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had

already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward

the worse.

 

Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the

dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at

times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified,

and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing

towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily

growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power

tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup,

to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume,

like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion;

it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my

preparations with the most studious care. I took and furnished

that house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and

engaged as a housekeeper a creature whom I knew well to be silent

and unscrupulous. On the other side, I announced to my servants

that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described) was to have full liberty and

power about my house in the square; and to parry mishaps, I even

called and made myself a familiar object, in my second character.

I next drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that if

anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on

that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified,

as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by the strange

immunities of my position.

 

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while

their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the

first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that

could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability,

and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and

spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my

impenetrable mantle, the safely was complete. Think of it—I

did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door,

give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I

had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde

would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there

in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his

study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be

Henry Jekyll.

 

The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were,

as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term.

But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward

the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I

was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.

This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth

alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and

villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking

pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to

another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at

times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was

apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of

conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was

guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities

seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was

possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience

slumbered.

 

Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for

even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design

of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and the

successive steps with which my chastisement approached. I met

with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I shall

no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused

against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other

day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child’s

family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life;

and at last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward

Hyde had to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn

in the name of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily

eliminated from the future, by opening an account at another bank

in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by sloping my own

hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I

thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.

 

Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been

out for one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and

woke the next day in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in

vain I looked about me; in vain I saw the decent furniture and

tall proportions of my room in the square; in vain that I

recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and the design of the

mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I was not

where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in

the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the

body of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological

way, began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion,

occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable

morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more

wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry

Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and

size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I

now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London

morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder,

knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth

of