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

rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the

less I ask.”

 

“A very good rule, too,” said the lawyer.

 

“But I have studied the place for myself,” continued Mr.

Enfield. “It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and

nobody goes in or out of that one but, once in a great while, the

gentleman of my adventure. There are three windows looking on the

court on the first floor; none below; the windows are always shut

but they’re clean. And then there is a chimney which is generally

smoking; so somebody must live there. And yet it’s not so sure;

for the buildings are so packed together about the court, that

it’s hard to say where one ends and another begins.”

 

The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then

“Enfield,” said Mr. Utterson, “that’s a good rule of yours.”

 

“Yes, I think it is,” returned Enfield.

 

“But for all that,” continued the lawyer, “there’s one point I

want to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over

the child.”

 

“Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do.

It was a man of the name of Hyde.”

 

“Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What sort of a man is he to see?”

 

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his

appearance; something displeasing, something downright

detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce

know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong

feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s

an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing

out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t

describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can

see him this moment.”

 

Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and obviously

under a weight of consideration. “You are sure he used a key?” he

inquired at last.

 

“My dear sir …” began Enfield, surprised out of himself.

 

“Yes, I know,” said Utterson; “I know it must seem strange.

The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it

is because I know it already. You see, Richard, your tale has

gone home. If you have been inexact in any point you had better

correct it.”

 

“I think you might have warned me,” returned the other with a

touch of sullenness. “But I have been pedantically exact, as you

call it. The fellow had a key; and what’s more, he has it still.

I saw him use it not a week ago.”

 

Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the

young man presently resumed. “Here is another lesson to say

nothing,” said he. “I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make

a bargain never to refer to this again.”

 

“With all my heart,” said the lawyer. I shake hands on that,

Richard.”

 

Search for Mr. Hyde

 

That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in

sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his

custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the

fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading desk, until the

clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when

he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night however,

as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went

into his business room. There he opened his safe, took from the

most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr.

Jekyll’s Will and sat down with a clouded brow to study its

contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson though he took

charge of it now that it was made, had refused to lend the least

assistance in the making of it; it provided not only that, in case

of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S.,

etc., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his

“friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,” but that in case of Dr.

Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period

exceeding three calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde should step

into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free

from any burthen or obligation beyond the payment of a few small

sums to the members of the doctor’s household. This document had

long been the lawyer’s eyesore. It offended him both as a lawyer

and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom

the fanciful was the immodest. And hitherto it was his ignorance

of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden

turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the

name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse

when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and

out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled

his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a

fiend.

 

“I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the

obnoxious paper in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is

disgrace.”

 

With that he blew out his candle, put on a greatcoat, and set

forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of

medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house

and received his crowding patients. “If anyone knows, it will be

Lanyon,” he had thought.

 

The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was subjected to

no stage of delay, but ushered direct from the door to the

dining-room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone over his wine. This was a

hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair

prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight

of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and welcomed him with

both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was

somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine feeling.

For these two were old friends, old mates both at school and

college, both thorough respectors of themselves and of each other,

and what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each

other’s company.

 

After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject

which so disagreeably preoccupied his mind.

 

“I suppose, Lanyon,” said he, “you and I must be the two

oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has?”

 

“I wish the friends were younger,” chuckled Dr. Lanyon. “But

I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now.”

 

“Indeed?” said Utterson. “I thought you had a bond of common

interest.”

 

“We had,” was the reply. “But it is more than ten years since

Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong,

wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest

in him for old sake’s sake, as they say, I see and I have seen

devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash,” added

the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, “would have estranged Damon

and Pythias.”

 

This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to

Mr. Utterson. “They have only differed on some point of science,”

he thought; and being a man of no scientific passions (except in

the matter of conveyancing), he even added: “It is nothing worse

than that!” He gave his friend a few seconds to recover his

composure, and then approached the question he had come to put.

“Did you ever come across a protege of his—one Hyde?” he asked.

 

“Hyde?” repeated Lanyon. “No. Never heard of him. Since my

time.”

 

That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried

back with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and

fro, until the small hours of the morning began to grow large. It

was a night of little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere

darkness and beseiged by questions.

 

Six o’clock struck on the bells of the church that was so

conveniently near to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was

digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the

intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged,

or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness

of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s tale went by

before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be

aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the

figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the

doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the

child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he

would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep,

dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room

would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the

sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure

to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise

and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the

lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to

see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the

more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness,

through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street

corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the

figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams,

it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his

eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the

lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity

to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once

set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps

roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when

well examined. He might see a reason for his friend’s strange

preference or bondage (call it which you please) and even for the

startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth

seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy: a face

which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of the

unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.

 

From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door

in the by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at

noon when business was plenty, and time scarce, at night under the

face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of

solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen

post.

 

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

 

And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry

night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor;

the lamps, unshaken by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of

light and shadow. By ten o’clock, when the shops were closed the

by-street was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of

London from all round, very silent. Small sounds carried far;

domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either

side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of any

passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some

minutes at his post, when he was aware of an odd light