The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Chapter 10

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde by
Robert Louis Stephenson, Chapter ten. Henry Jekyll's full statement of
the case. I was born in the year eighteen something
to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined

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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 honorable
and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults
was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has

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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 grow
countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I
concealed my pleasures, and that when I reached years of

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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

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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,

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severed in me those provinces of good and evil which
divide and compact 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

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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

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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.

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With everyday, 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

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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,

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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 recognize the thorough and primitive duality
of man. I saw that of the two natures that

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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,

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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 might go his way, delivered from the aspirations

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and remorse of his more upright twin, and the just
could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward pasth, doing
the good things in which he found pleasure, and no
longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of
his extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that

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these incongruous fagots were thus bound together, that in the
agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.
How then were they disconnected? I was so far in
my reflections, when, as I have said, a side light

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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 mist like transience
of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk.
Attired agents I have found to have the power to

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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 burden of our

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life is bound forever 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. Secondly, because,
as my narrative will make alas too evident, my discoveries

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were incomplete enough then that I not only recognized 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

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substituted nonetheless 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

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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 in opportunity in the
moment of exhibition utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which
I looked to it to change. But the temptation of

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a discovery so singular and profound, at last overcame the
suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture.
I purchased, at oncets 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

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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

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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,

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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,

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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 sin, And the thought in that
moment braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out

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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 that date in
my room. That which stands beside me as I write,
was brought there later on, and for the very purpose

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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,

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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 on sleeping vigilance
had yet disclosed to them. I stole through the corridors

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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 supposed to be
most probable. The evil side of my nature to which

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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.

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And hence I think it came about that Edward Hyde
was so much smaller, slighter, and younger than Henry Jekyl.
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

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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

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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,

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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 Hide, alone
in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. I lingered,

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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

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once more prepared and drank the coup, once more suffered
the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more
with the character, the stature, and the face of Henry Jekyl.
That night I had come to the fatal cross roads.

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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

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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,

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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

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old Henry Jekyl, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and
improved 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

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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

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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 Hide.
I smiled at the notion. It seemed to me at
the time to be humorous, and I made my prep

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operations with the most studious care. I took and furnished
that house in Soho to which Hide 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 mister Hyde, whom

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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

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in the person of doctor 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

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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

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school by 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

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swallow the draft that I had always standing ready. And
whatever he had done, Edward Hide 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 Jekyl. The pleasures which I made

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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 towards
the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions,
I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at

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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

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bestial avidity, from any degree of taughture to another, relentless
like a man of stone. Henry Jekyl stood at times
aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde. But the situation
was apart from ordinary laws and insidiously relaxed the grasp

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of conscience. It was hide, after all, and hide alone
that was guilty. Jekyl 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 Hide, and thus his conscience slumbered into the details

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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

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an act of cruelty to a child aroused against me
the anger of a passer by whom I recognized 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 Hide had to

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bring them to the door and pay them in a
check drawn in the name of Henry Jekyl. But this
danger was easily eliminated from the future by opening an
account at another bank in the name of Edward Hide himself.
And when by sloping my own hand backward I had
supplied my double with a signature, I thought I sat

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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,

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I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my
room in the square in Vain, that I recognized 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 awakened where I
seemed to be, but in the little room in Soho,

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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 in a comfortable
morning doze, I was still so engaged when, in one

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of my more wakeful moments, my eye fell upon my hand. Now,
the hand of Henry Jekyl, 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.

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Lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, cordid, mockly
of a dusky pallor, and thickly shaded with a smart
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,

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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 changing into something exquisitely thin
and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyl.

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I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained?
I asked myself, And then, with another bound of horror,
how was it to be remedied? It was well on
in the morning, the servants were up, all my drugs
were in the cabinet. A long journey down two pairs

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of stairs, through the back passage, across the open court,
and through the anatomical theater, 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 of my stature. And then,

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with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon
my mind that the servants were 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 mister Hyde

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at such an hour and in such a strange array,
And ten minutes later Doctor Jekyll had returned to his
old shape, and was sitting down with a darkened brow
to make a feint of breakfasting. Small indeed was my appetite.

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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

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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,

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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 always equally displayed. Once, very early in my
career it had totally failed me. Since then I had

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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 his to the sole
shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light
of that morning's accident, I was led to remark that

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whereas in the beginning the difficulty had been to throw
off the body of Jekyl, 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

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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. Jekyl, who was composite, now with

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the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusts, though
projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hide.
But Hyde was indifferent to Jekyl, or but remembered him
as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he
conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyl had more than a father's interest.

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Hide had more than a son's indifference. To cast in
my lot with Jekyl was to die to those appetites
which I had long secretly indulged, and had of late
begune to pamper. To cast it in with Hide was
to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to

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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 Jekyl would suffer smartingly in
the fires of abstinence, Hide would be not even conscious

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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 inducement and alarms cast the
die for any tempted and trembling sinner, And it fell

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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

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the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping pulses,
and secret pleasures that I had enjoyed in the disguise
of Hide. I made this choice, perhaps with some unconscious reservation,
for I neither gave up the house in soho, nor
destroyed the clothes of Edward Hide, which still lay ready

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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.

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The praises of conscience began to grow into a thing
of course, I began to be tortured with throes and
longings as of hide, struggling after freedom, and at last,
in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded
and swallowed the transforming draft. I do not suppose that

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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

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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 draft of a
more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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 lamp lit streets in the same divided ecstasy of mind,
gloating on my crime lightheadedly devising others in the future,

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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 draft, and as
he drank it pledged the dead man. The pangs of
transformation had not done tearing him before Henry Jekyl, with

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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 hand to foot. I saw
my life as a whole. I followed it up from
the days of childhood, when I had walked with my

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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

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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.

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The problem of my conduct was solved. Hide 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.

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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 Hide was patent to the world,
and that the victim was a man high in public estimation.

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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,
Jekyl was now my city of refuge. Let but Hide

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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

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months of last year I labored 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.

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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 license. Not that I
dreamed of resuscitating hide, the bare idea of that would

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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

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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

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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

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not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I
was like my neighbors. 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 vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea,

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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,

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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 cordid and hairy, I
was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had
been safe of all men's respect, wealthy, beloved the cloth

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laying for me on 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

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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 Jekyl perhaps might have succumbed,
hide rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs
were in one of the presses of my cabinet. How

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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,

(39:52):
and thought of Lanyon. How was he to be reached,
how persuaded? Supposing that I escape 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

(40:14):
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.

(40:36):
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

(41:00):
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

(41:21):
a countenance as to make 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 hide in danger of his life
was a creature new to me, shaken with inordinate anger,

(41:45):
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 Lanyon and one to Paul, and that he might
receive actual evidence of their being posted, sent them out

(42:07):
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

(42:27):
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

(42:49):
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

(43:13):
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 Lanion's, the

(43:38):
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 hide that racked me. I

(44:00):
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 wrong me could avail to break.

(44:23):
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

(44:43):
to my drugs, and gratitude for my escape shone so
strong in my soul that it almost rivaled 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,

(45:09):
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 hide. 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

(45:33):
be readministered 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 Jekyl. At all hours
of the day and night. I would be taken with

(45:54):
the premonitory shudder. Above all, if I slept, or even
dozed for a while in my chair, it was always
as Hide that I awakened under the strain of this
continually impending doom, and by the sleeplessness to which I
now condemned myself, I even beyond what I had thought

(46:16):
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,

(46:37):
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

(46:59):
the rage energies of life. The powers of Hide seemed
to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyl, and certainly
the hate that now divided them was equal on each side.
With Jekyl. It was a thing of vital instinct. He
had now seen the full deformity of that creature that

(47:22):
shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and
was co er with him to death and beyond these
links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant
part of his distress. He thought of hide for all
his energies of life, as of something not only hellish

(47:44):
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 would usurp the offices of life.

(48:06):
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
its struggle to be borne, and at every hour of
weakness and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him

(48:27):
and deposed him out of life. The hatred of hide,
for Jekyl 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

(48:48):
a person. But he loathed the necessity. He loathed the
despondency into which Jekyl was now fallen, and he resented
the dislike with which he was himself regarded, hence the
apelike tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my
own hand, blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning

(49:13):
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

(49:33):
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.

(49:58):
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

(50:19):
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 draft.

(50:41):
The ebullition followed, and the first change of color, not
the second. I drank it, and it was without efficacy.
You will learn from Paul 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

(51:04):
unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draft. 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,

(51:24):
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

(51:47):
great good luck. Should the throes of change take me
in the act of writing it, hide will tear it
in pieces. But if some time shall have elapsed, after
I have life laid it by his wonderful selfishness and
circumscription to the moment, will probably save it once again

(52:08):
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,

(52:32):
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 hide die upon the scaffold, or will he find
the courage to release himself at the last moment? God

(52:57):
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

(53:19):
Henry Jekyl to an end. End of the strange case
of Doctor Jekyl and mister Hyde