IX. 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; 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 foreseen, but because an hour when
your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what
will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to
ask you to be alone in your consulting-room, to
admit with your own hand into the house a man who
will present himself in my name, and to place in his
hands the drawer that you will have brought with you
from my cabinet. Then you will have played your part
and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes
afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you
will have understood that these arrangements are of
capital importance; and that by the neglect of one
of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might
have charged your conscience with my death or the
shipwreck of my reason.
“Confident as I am that you will not trifle with
this appeal, my heart sinks and my hand trembles at
the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of me
at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a
blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate,
and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually
serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story
that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon, and save
Your friend,
H. J.”
1
“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 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.” 2
Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my
colleague was insane; but till that was proved
beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do
as he requested. The less I understood of this
farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of
its importance; and an appeal so worded could not be
set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose
accordingly from table, got into a hansom, and drove
straight to Jekyll’s house. The butler was awaiting
my arrival; he had received by the same post as mine
a registered letter of instruction, and had sent at
once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The tradesmen
came while we were yet speaking; and we moved in a
body to old Dr. Denman’s surgical theatre, from
which (as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll’s private
cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was
very strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter
avowed he would have great trouble and have to do
much damage, if force were to be used; and the
locksmith was near despair. But this last was a
handy fellow, and after two 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. 3
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
experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll’s
investigations) to no end of practical usefulness.
How could the presence of these articles in my house
affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of
my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to
one place, why could he not go to another? And even
granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to
be received by me in secret? The more I reflected
the more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a
case of cerebral disease: and though I dismissed my
servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I
might be found in some posture of self-defence. 4
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. 5
“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked. 6
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. 7
These particulars struck me, I confess,
disagreeably; and as I followed him into the bright
light of the consulting-room, I kept my hand ready
on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of
clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him
before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have
said; I was struck besides with the shocking
expression of his face, with his remarkable
combination of great muscular activity and great
apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not
least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by
his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to
incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked
sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to
some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely
wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I
have since had reason to believe the cause to lie
much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on
some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred. 8
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of
his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe
as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion
that would have made an ordinary person laughable;
his clothes, that is to say, although they were of
rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for
him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his
legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the
waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar
sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to
relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from
moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was
something abnormal and misbegotten in the very
essence of the creature that now faced me—something
seizing, surprising, and revolting—this fresh
disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce
it; so that to my interest in the man’s nature and
character, there was added a curiosity as to his
origin, his life, his fortune and status in the
world. 9
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. 10
“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. 11
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. 12
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly
enough. “What you say is very well founded; and my
impatience has shown its heels to my politeness. I
come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr.
Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment;
and I understood…” He paused and put his hand to his
throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected
manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches
of the hysteria—“I understood, a drawer…” 13
But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and
some perhaps on my own growing curiosity. 14
“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. 15
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. 16
“Compose yourself,” said I. 17
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. 18
I rose from my place with something of an effort and
gave him what he asked. 19
He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few
minims of the red tincture and added one of the
powders. The mixture, which was at first of a
reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals
melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce
audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour.
Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition
ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple,
which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My
visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a
keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table,
and then turned and looked upon me with an air of
scrutiny. 20
“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.” 21
“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.” 22
“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you
remember your vows: what follows is under the seal
of our profession. And now, you who have so long
been bound to the most narrow and material views,
you who have denied the virtue of transcendental
medicine, you who have derided your
superiors—behold!” 23
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. 24
“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! 25
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 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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