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:

“10_th 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 to-night, 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 to-night—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 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 cannot, 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.