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 life. 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 furtherance 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 aversion 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 safety 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, corded, 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 pair 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 not 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 life 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.