Chapter 10:
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 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 hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I

was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my

breast as sudden and startling as the crash of cymbals; and

bounding from my bed I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that

met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin

and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened

Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself; and

then, with another bound of terror—how was it to be remedied?

It was well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs

were in the cabinet—a long journey down two pairs of stairs,

through the back passage, across the open court and through the

anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horror-struck.

It might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was

that, when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature?

And then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back

upon my mind that the servants were already used to the coming and

going of my second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was

able, in clothes of my own size: had soon passed through the

house, where Bradshaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at

such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes later,

Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was sitting down,

with a darkened brow, to make a feint of breakfasting.

Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident,

this reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the

Babylonian finger on the wall, to be spelling out the letters of

my judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously than ever

before on the issues and possibilities of my double existence.

That part of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately

been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as

though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though

(when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide

of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much

prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently

overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the

character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine. The power of

the drug had not been always equally displayed. Once, very early

in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I had been

obliged on more than one occasion to double, and once, with

infinite risk of death, to treble the amount; and these rare

uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole shadow on my contentment.

Now, however, and in the light of that morning's accident, I was

led to remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had

been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but

decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things

therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold

of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated

with my second and worse.

Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures

had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally

shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most

sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and

shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was

indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain

bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from

pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more

than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to

die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had

of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a

thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and

forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear

unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales;

for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of

abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had

lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate

are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and

alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it

fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my

fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the

strength to keep to it.

Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor,

surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a

resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light

step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in

the disguise of Hyde. I made this choice perhaps with some

unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho,

nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in

my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true to my

determination; for two months, I led a life of such severity as I

had never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an

approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the

freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow

into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and

longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an

hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the

transforming draught.

I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself

upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by

the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical

insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my

position, made enough allowance for the complete moral

insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the

leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was

punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I

was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled,

a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I

suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with

which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I

declare, at least, before God, no man morally sane could have been

guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I

struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick

child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped

myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of

us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among

temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was

to fall.

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a

transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight

from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to

succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium,

struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A mist

dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene

of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of

evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the

topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance

doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the

lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on

my crime, light-headedly devising others in the future, and yet

still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for the steps of

the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the

draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of

transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,

with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon

his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of

self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a

whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had

walked with my father's hand, and through the self-denying toils

of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same

sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I

could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to

smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my

memory swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the

ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the acuteness

of this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of

joy. The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth

impossible; whether I would or not, I was now confined to the

better part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced to think of

it! with what willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions

of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I locked the door

by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under

my heel!

The next day, came the news that the murder had been

overlooked, that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and

that the victim was a man high in public estimation. It was not

only a crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to

know it; I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus

buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was

now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the

hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can

say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You

know yourself how earnestly, in the last months of the last year,

I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for

others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for

myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and

innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more

completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and

as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me,

so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for

licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea

of that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person

that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it

was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the

assaults of temptation.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure

is filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally

destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the

fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had

made my discovery. It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under

foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the

Regent's Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring

odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking

the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed,

promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After

all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled,

comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will

with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment

of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid

nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and

left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began

to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater

boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of

obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my

shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy.

I was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of

all men's respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in

the dining-room at home; and now I was the common quarry of

mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the

gallows.

My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have

more than once observed that in my second character, my faculties

seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic;

thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have

succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs

were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them?

That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set

myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought

to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the

gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon.

How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped

capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his

presence? and how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor,

prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his

colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original

character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and

once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must

follow became lighted up from end to end.

Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and

summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street,

the name of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which

was indeed comical enough, however tragic a fate these garments

covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my

teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile

withered from his face—happily for him—yet more happily for

myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from

his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so

black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did

they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led

me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde

in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with

inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to

inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with

a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters,

one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual

evidence of their being posted, sent them out with directions that

they should be registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the

fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined,

sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before

his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth

in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the

streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of

Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.

And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow

suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in

his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into

the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions

raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his

fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented

thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided him from

midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of

lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.

When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend

perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a

drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon

these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the

fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked

me. I received Lanyon's condemnation partly in a dream; it was

partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into

bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent

and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me

could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened,

but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute

that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the

appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home,

in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape

shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness

of hope.

I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast,

drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized

again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the

change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet,

before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of

Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to

myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the

fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.

In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as

of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the

drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all

hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory

shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my

chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of

this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which

I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought

possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up

and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and

solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But

when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would

leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation

grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming

with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and

a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging

energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with

the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided

them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital

instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature

that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and

was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of

community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his

distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of

something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking

thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices;

that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was

dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And

this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than

a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard

it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of

weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him,

and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of

a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him

continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his

subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed

the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was

now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself

regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me,

scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books,

burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and

indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago

have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his

love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at

the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion

of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut

him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this

description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that

suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not

alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain

acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for

years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which

has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision

of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the

first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply

and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first

change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without

efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London

ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first

supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which

lent efficacy to the draught.

About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement

under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then,

is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think

his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in

the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an

end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has

been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck.

Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde

will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after

I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription

to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of

his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us

both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now,

when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I

know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or

continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of

listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge)

and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the

scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last

moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death,

and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as

I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring

the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.