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

as follows:

 

“My dear Utterson,—When this shall fall into your hands, I

shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the

penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances

of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be

early. Go then, and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned

me he was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more,

turn to the confession of

 

“Your unworthy and unhappy friend,

 

“HENRY JEKYLL.”

 

“There was a third enclosure?” asked Utterson.

 

“Here, sir,” said Poole, and gave into his hands a

considerable packet sealed in several places.

 

The lawyer put it in his pocket. “I would say nothing of this

paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save

his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these

documents in quiet; but I shall be back before midnight, when we

shall send for the police.”

 

They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them;

and Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the

fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two

narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained.

 

Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative

 

On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the

evening delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of

my colleague and old school companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good

deal surprised by this; for we were by no means in the habit of

correspondence; I had seen the man, dined with him, indeed, the

night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse

that should justify formality of registration. The contents

increased my wonder; for this is how the letter ran:

 

“10th December, 18—.

 

“Dear Lanyon,—You are one of my oldest friends; and

although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I

cannot remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection.

There was never a day when, if you had said to me, `Jekyll, my

life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,’ I would not have

sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon my life, my honour,

my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me tonight, I am

lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I am going to

ask you for something dishonourable to grant. Judge for yourself.

 

“I want you to postpone all other engagements for tonight—

ay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to

take a cab, unless your carriage should be actually at the door;

and with this letter in your hand for consultation, to drive

straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has his orders; you will

find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my

cabinet is then to be forced: and you are to go in alone; to open

the glazed press (letter E) on the left hand, breaking the lock if

it be shut; and to draw out, with all its contents as they stand,

the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same thing) the

third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of mind, I have a

morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you

may know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial

and a paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you

to Cavendish Square exactly as it stands.

 

“That is the first part of the service: now for the second.

You should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this,

long before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin,

not only in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be

prevented nor foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are

in bed is to be preferred for what will then remain to do. At

midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting

room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man who will

present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer

that you will have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you

will have played your part and earned my gratitude completely.

Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you

will have understood that these arrangements are of capital

importance; and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as

they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my

death or the shipwreck of my reason.

 

“Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal,

my heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a

possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place,

labouring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can

exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually

serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told.

Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save

 

“Your friend,

“H.J.

 

“P.S.—I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror

struck upon my soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail

me, and this letter not come into your hands until to-morrow

morning. In that case, dear Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be

most convenient for you in the course of the day; and once more

expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be too late;

and if that night passes without event, you will know that you

have seen the last of Henry Jekyll.”

 

Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was

insane; but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt,

I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I understood of this

farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance;

and an appeal so worded could not be set aside without a grave

responsibility. I rose accordingly from table, got into a hansom,

and drove straight to Jekyll’s house. The butler was awaiting my

arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a registered

letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a

carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we

moved in a body to old Dr. Denman’s surgical theatre, from which

(as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll’s private cabinet is most

conveniently entered. The door was very strong, the lock

excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble and

have to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the

locksmith was near despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and

after two hour’s work, the door stood open. The press marked E

was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with

straw and tied in a sheet, and returned with it to Cavendish

Square.

 

Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were

neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing

chemist; so that it was plain they were of Jekyll’s private

manufacture: and when I opened one of the wrappers I found what

seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white colour. The

phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have been about

half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the

sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some

volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess.

The book was an ordinary version book and contained little but a

series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I

observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite

abruptly. Here and there a brief remark was appended to a date,

usually no more than a single word: “double” occurring perhaps six

times in a total of several hundred entries; and once very early

in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation, “total

failure!!!” All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me

little that was definite. Here were a phial of some salt, and the

record of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of

Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How

could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the

honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his

messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another?

And even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be

received by me in secret? The more I reflected the more convinced

I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and

though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver,

that I might be found in some posture of self-defence.

 

Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the

knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the

summons, and found a small man crouching against the pillars of

the portico.

 

“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.

 

He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had

bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward

glance into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not

far off, advancing with his bull’s eye open; and at the sight, I

thought my visitor started and made greater haste.

 

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I

followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept

my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of

clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before, so much

was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides

with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable

combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility

of constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd,

subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore

some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a

marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some

idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the

acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe

the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on

some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.

 

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his

entrance, struck in me what I can only, describe as a disgustful

curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an

ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although

they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for

him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and

rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat

below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his

shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far

from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something

abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that

now faced me—something seizing, surprising and revolting—

this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce

it; so that to my interest in the man’s nature and character,

there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his

fortune and status in the world.

 

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to

be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor

was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.

 

“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you