The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (best free e book reader txt) 📖

the very moment

of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid

nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and

left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began

to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater

boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of

obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my

shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy.

I was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of

all men’s respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in

the dining-room at home; and now I was the common quarry of

mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the

gallows.

 

My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have

more than once observed that in my second character, my faculties

seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic;

thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have

succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs

were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them?

That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set

myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought

to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the

gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon.

How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped

capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his

presence? and how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor,

prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his

colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original

character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and

once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must

follow became lighted up from end to end.

 

Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and

summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street,

the name of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which

was indeed comical enough, however tragic a fate these garments

covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my

teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile

withered from his face—happily for him—yet more happily for

myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from

his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so

black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did

they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led

me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde

in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with

inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to

inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with

a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters,

one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual

evidence of their being posted, sent them out with directions that

they should be registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the

fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined,

sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before

his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth

in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the

streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of

Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.

And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow

suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in

his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into

the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions

raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his

fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented

thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided him from

midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of

lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.

 

When I came to myself at Lanyon’s, the horror of my old friend

perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a

drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon

these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the

fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked

me. I received Lanyon’s condemnation partly in a dream; it was

partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into

bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent

and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me

could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened,

but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute

that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the

appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home,

in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape

shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness

of hope.

 

I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast,

drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized

again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the

change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet,

before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of

Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to

myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the

fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.

In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as

of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the

drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all

hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory

shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my

chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of

this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which

I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought

possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up

and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and

solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But

when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would

leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation

grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming

with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and

a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging

energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with

the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided

them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital

instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature

that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and

was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of

community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his

distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of

something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking

thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices;

that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was

dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And

this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than

a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard

it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of

weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him,

and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of

a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him

continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his

subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed

the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was

now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself

regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me,

scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books,

burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and

indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago

have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his

love of 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.

 

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this

description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that

suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not

alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain

acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for

years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which

has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision

of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the

first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply

and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first

change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without

efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London

ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first

supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which

lent efficacy to the draught.

 

About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement

under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then,

is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think

his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in

the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an

end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has

been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck.

Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde

will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after

I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription

to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of

his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us

both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now,

when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I

know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or

continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of

listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge)

and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the

scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last

moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death,

and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as

I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up