Chapter 10
Since the day I was born, I had been enjoying wealth and getting respect from everyone around me. I had always been this hard-working, which made me set for a very satisfactory future ahead. The worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me. People seldom took me seriously accounting to my happy nature. So I restricted myself from sharing anything with others prefererred concealing my pleasures; and it was not late before my success made me realize I had been living a dual life. Most of the people would have bragged about such a life in public but I reckoned my deeds with a certain shame. Soon, my nature led the feelings of good and evil in me which define a dual personality of a person. 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. But, I was in no sense a hypocrite; I did my job with complete earnesty. I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. My scientific theories had a keen pursuance which often led to conflicts among my members. I came closer and closer every day to the truth that doomed me completely later on; that man is not one but two! I analysed the moral aspect of this theory. I realized from no one else but myself about the duality in the personality of a person. Even before I saw the scientific aspect of this duality, I had given a thought to the separation of the elements of our nature. I always thought that a man having both good and evil inside him is a curse to mankind. A world could be a better place if every man could get over the evil inside him.
I was so consumed with my theories when 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. After months of research and study, I patented a new form of drug which could bring inside me just the negative aspects of my personality.
I was hesitant to give this theory a practical chance. I was aware that taking such a drug was putting my life at stake; it might destroy my identity or even my existence. But my risks and fears seemed shorter infront of my ambitions to make such a profound and huge discovery. One night, I developed the salt, the tincture and other elements, boiled them together and finally drank the contents of the glass upto the brink.
It gave me a nauseatic startle, searing pain in the grinding bones and evil spirits started to haunt me. Gradually, the pain reduced and it felt as if I was waking up from a sleep, fresh and sweet, as if being born from dead again. I felt shorter from height as I tried to stretch my arms. Wicked thoughts had occupied my mind and it was fascinating me. I was feeling younger and a sense of freedom rested in my soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be 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.
I wanted to witness these transformations but there was no mirror in that room at that time. 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 ran through the corridor to reach for my room where I witnessed the newly born Edward Hyde for the first time.
I would discuss the most certain aspects of the situation rather than apllying my intellect. The evil in me was less exposed and I had incinerated the good left in me. Maybe, that was the reason for short height, young age and the evil ugly face of the Mr. Hyde born from me. But instead of feeling any remorse I felt proud for it was me only. I was livelier and more independent I had ever been. I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was I. It seemed natural and human. 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 made my way back to the cabinet to ensure the success of the experiment and out of a sense of fear if I had lost my identity. I made another cup of that drink and emptied it in a single gulp. After the suffering amidst the changes, there I stood myself as Jekyll again.
That was the most memorable and restless night of my life. I had come to believe about the two appearances, two sides of my personality; the evil Mr. Hyde, and the old and good-hearted Dr. 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.
My temptations had taken a new face, where I could be free from the aversions of my increasing age. My pleasures were 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 could drink the cup and become the new powerful and lively Mr. Hyde. It seemed a cheerful thought at that time, often brought smile on my face. I had the house in Soho renovated. It was the same house police had traced Hyde in. I recruited a housekeeper who was silent and careful. I told my servants that Mr. Hyde had complete authority in my house. I made the will that startled you; that everything I owned, belongs to Hyde if something ever happened to Dr. Jekyll.
I admit I did all this for my pleasure and satisfaction. I could be the well-respected Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde in a single life; But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safely was complete. Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll. But, my pleasures were momentary as things started to get ugly with Mr. Hyde. The violent acts of E. Hyde left the Jekyll in me remorseful and shocked often; 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 didn’t bother anymore.
Mr. Hyde went cruel with the child which attracted the attention of all the passers by. He had to pay them a cheque drawn in Henry Jekyll’s name to pacify them. Incidents such as this often made me fearful with my life. I opened another account for E. Hyde and gave him a fake signature too.
Two months prior to Danver’s death, I returned to my place with another set of mischeifs. I woke up feeling quite strange and weird. 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. It was not my house I had spent the night in, it was the room in house I had taken for Mr. Hyde. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand, I saw the lean, corder, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair hand, of Edward Hyde.
I was terror-stricken, when I looked at it. I ran in front of the mirror to look at myself. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy; but I was shocked to see I had woken up as Hyde and slept the previous night as Henry Jekyll! I could not figure out how it happened. It was morning and it was difficult to reach for my drugs in the cabinet without getting caught or detected. 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 for breakfast.
I wondered if Edward Hyde in me had started to overpower the personality of Henry Jekyll. He was getting persistent over me and my nature. 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. I had wrongly estimated the affects of the drug. A couple of times I had taken three times the normal dosage. I knew then I was losing myself and becoming the evil side of me.
I was in a dilemma where I had to chose between the two. As much as Jekyll was attached to Hyde, Hyde felt indifferent to the good-hearted Dr. Jekyll, he remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. They both shared memories but everything else was different between them. There was boredom in Jekyll’s life, but isolation and loneliness in Hyde’s life. 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. I finally thought to end the evil in me, and choose the better part; but I lacked the will to be determined over my decision.
I knew I had to be the same unsatisfied and aged doctor I used to be, having friends who cared about me. I reluctanctly made the decision; but I chose to keep the house and all the other belongings of Hyde as well. I was very sensitive to let him go.
For several weeks I stuck to my choice and lived the life of Henry Jekyll honestly, with a clean conscience. Then, the temptations returned to haunt me with all the desires of Mr. Hyde. I struggled with the urge; but I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness but it won over me at last. I drank the potion again and out of moral weakness gave rise to the evil Mr. Hyde once again.
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.
I had now unleashed the evil in me which had been in the entrapment for a long time. He came out with a yell and a roar. Not a single person could have spared from the remorse for a sucha cruel act that I did with the child in the street. But, as Mr. Hyde I took pleasure every time I hit that poor child. I returned to the house meant for Hyde in Soho and transformed myself again back to Dr. Jekyll. I broke down in tears of despair, and begged on my knees to god for mercy and forgiveness for my sins. Soon the shame in me was overpowered by a certain sense of delight. It was finally the end of Mr. Hyde for me. I could not live with his evil anymore.
When the news came out that the murder had been stepped upon and not investigated further. I knew that if ever Hyde came out again. He would be killed by everyone around. I had to take refuge with Dr. Jekyll.
I decided to compensate for the evil deeds of Hyde by doing as many good deeds as possible. I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past. I can say I gradually started to get relief from the sufferings of guilt and day passed by happily for some time ; 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. I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience
One fine day in the month of January I was strolling in the park. The frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I was content and happy with my goodwill as compared to others around me. Suddenly, I had a strange nauseatic sensation over me, and I almost fainted. I felt I was free from every obligation; a sense of liveliness had overpowered me. I observed soon enough that my body had shrunk to half its size and my clothes were hanging on this shrunken body, my hand had become lean and knotty, it was not anymore big as it had been for past several days. I knew what this meant. I had transformed into Hyde once again, the evil murderer 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.
I tried to figure out not what I knew, but what had been probable to account for this change. I had locked away all the drugs in the cabinet and got rid of the key. Also, my servants were instructed not to let me in the house. Then the name of my friend, Lanyon, came to my mind. How to contact him? Even if I managed to slip away from every eye on the street, I was unaware of how I would appear before that man. I thought of one thing that didn’t transform of Dr. Jekyll’ was his handwriting. I instructed the carriage driver to drive me to a hotel in Portland Street. 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. Those who attended me, fearful of my appearance, obeyed every word I said. They lead to the private room I had asked for. 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. I found a paper there to write on. Being E. Hyde, was filled with fury, aggravated at the thought of his life being endangered. He wrote two set of instructions, one was for Lanyon and other for his loyal butler, Poole.
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. As sun set in evening, he took a cab and drove to Lanyon’s place in the dark. 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 taking a walk near the court, taking the pleasure of the freshness in the air all around, before I felt the shuddering again which accompanied the change. I was too late before I could reach for my drugs; and I was once again the devil. Since then, I gave myselg regular dosages of the drug to keep Hyde from appearing again. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
I was running out of the salt I used for the experiment. I set out a servant to get me a renewal. I used the fresh salt in the portion but the transformation wasn’t there this time. 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 this was the last calamity which had now fallen, and which had finally severed me from my own face and nature.
I had almost whole country looked out for my powder, I was disappointed every time. I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to this draught. It has been two weeks now and I write this letter as Henry Jekyll under the influence of the old powder. This is the last time that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face in the glass. I will not take long before I end this narrative for if the influence of the old powder sheds off, Mr. Hyde will appear and the he will tear this letter into 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 his actions.
I know the damage and the ruin that awaits for both of us. I wait until a few minutes later, I might change into that miserable devil again, I can foresee myself going back and forth in this room with all kinds of fears inside me. I don’t know if Hyde will die here in Gallows. I have made my share of sins. My end is near and all the penance after death is for someone other than me. I pray for forgiveness and mercy. I am Henry Jerkyll ending this narrative, bringing an end to my unhappy and miserable life.
