CHAPTER NINE
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 fore-seen, 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 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."
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.
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.
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 pre-occupations, 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 arm 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; 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.
Chapter Ten |
