Chapter: 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;

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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 wind, 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 fore-

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seen, 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 postoffice may fail me, and
this letter

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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,

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and after two hours' 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 tincture,
a paper of some salt, and the record of a series of experi-

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ments 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

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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 misbe-

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gotten 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
pre-occupations, 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 under-

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stood..." 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

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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,

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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 arm 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; I feel that my days
are numbered, and that I

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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

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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 fellow-men, 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

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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 toward the mystic and the
transcendental, re-acted 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

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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 day-dream, on the thought of the
separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could but
be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all
that was unbearable; the unjust delivered from the aspirations
might go his way, 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 fagots 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

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more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling
immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so
solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to
have the power to shake and to 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 for 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

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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 mill-race 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

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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,

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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.

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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 prison-house 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 yet 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
toward 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

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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 humorous; 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 housekeeper a
creature whom I well knew 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 thus 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

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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 centred 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

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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,

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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 bed-clothes, 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

94)

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,

95)

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

96)

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 for ever, 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

97)

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

98)

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

99)

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 oh, how I rejoiced to think 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.

100)

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 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 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 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

101)

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 goodwill with the lazy
cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that
vain-glorious 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 the 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

102)

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

103)

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

104)

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

105)

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

106)

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

107)

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

108)

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 for ever re-indue that hated personality, I know
how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue,
with the most strained and fear-struck 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.

 Chapter nine consists of the text of Lanyon's letter to Utterson, which he was instructed not to open until Lanyon and Jekyll had both died . Lanyon begins at the night after Jekyll's last dinner party. Apparently, he received a very urgent letter from Jekyll that requested Lanyon follow very specific instructions by going to Jekyll's home and retrieving a specific drawer from his cabinet. Poole was to help him get into the upper room. Lanyon was to fetch the drawer and all of its contents and immediately return to his home. A messenger from Jekyll would come to claim the ingredients at midnight. There was no explanation of why Jekyll needed Lanyon to complete these tasks, but there was such a severe sense of urgency that Lanyon felt he should comply. Lanyon followed Jekyll's directions and returned home with the drawer. Inside, he found several vials, one of which appeared to contain a kind of salt, and another that contained a strange red liquid concoction. Lanyon also found a notebook in the drawer that seemed to document years of experiments and notes about their results, but no suggestion as to the nature of the experiments. Lanyon curiously waited for his visitor, and began to conclude that Jekyll must have lost his mind. At midnight, a small dwarfish man appears at Lanyon's home, wearing clothes far too large for him. The reader recognizes this description and knows this messenger is Hyde, but Lanyon had never met Hyde and did not recognize him. Hyde acts strangely, both nervous and excited, and rather than exchange pleasantries with Lanyon, immediately asks where the drawer is. Lanyon points it out and Hyde requests a graduated glass in which he mixes the drawer's ingredients. His mixture first turns purple and then green. At this point, Hyde stops and addresses Lanyon, asking if he would like to see the results of his assistance, which will in his words, "stagger the unbelief of Satan," or if Hyde should leave with the mixture. At this point Lanyon is annoyed by his guest's behavior and is interested in what could warrant such strangeness. He decides that he wants to see this thing to the end. Hyde drinks the glass, and Lanyon watches as his body changes form. Moments later, Hyde is gone and Dr. Jekyll is standing before Lanyon. At this point, Lanyon concludes his letter to Utterson, stating that Jekyll's explanation of the transformation and the nature of his years of experimentation are too disturbing to repeat. Lanyon knows that the shock of this event is so severe that he will surely die.

