The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

diaphanous

“Now, sir,” said he, “you come as gently as you can. I want you to hear, and I don’t want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if by any chance he was to ask you in, don’t go.”

A voice answered from within: “Tell him I cannot see anyone,” it said complainingly.

“This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale my man,”

“Suppose it were as you suppose, supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been—well, murdered, what could induce the murderer to stay? That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend itself to reason.”

whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind.

Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face? If it was my master, why did he cry out like a rat, and run from me? I have served him long enough. And then. . .”

Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer;

“Ay, ay,” said the lawyer. “My fears incline to the same point. Evil, I fear, founded—evil was sure to come—of that connection.

“Jekyll,” cried Utterson, with a loud voice, “I demand to see you.” He paused a moment, but there came no reply. “I give you fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see you,” he resumed; “if not by fair means, then by foul—if not of your consent, then by brute force!”

besiegers,

They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde.

phial

Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.

No where was there any trace of Henry Jekyll dead or alive.

“That is the same drug that I was always bringing him,” said Poole;

“My dear Utterson,—When this shall fall into your hands, I shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early. Go then,

and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned me he was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more, turn to the confession of “Your unworthy and unhappy friend, “HENRY JEKYLL.”

trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which

this mystery was now to be explained.

Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save “Your friend, “H.J.

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.”

farrago,

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.

effervesce

ebullition

“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!

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

inveterately

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

multifarious,

incongruous

deni...

I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both;

It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.

How, then were they dissociated?

effulgence

a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.

I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed.

Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay.

This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

I once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.

The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition;

Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll,

Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.

All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

Between these two, I now felt I had to choose.

I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.