Chapter 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 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.
End of chapter 9