9

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 mind, 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.

"P.S.--I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror
struck upon my soul. It is possible that the post-office 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."

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 hour's 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.

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 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.

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.

"Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?" I asked.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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
preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer
me to muster.

"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 ..."

But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some
perhaps on my own growing curiosity.

"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.

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.

"Compose yourself," said I.

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.

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him
what he asked.

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.

"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."

"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."

"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!"

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 arms raised to shield me from that
prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

"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!

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; and 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 can not, 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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