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Page 33
When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my old friend
perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a
drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon
these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the
fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked
me. I received Lanyon's condemnation partly in a dream; it was
partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into
bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent
and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me
could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened,
but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute
that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the
appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home,
in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape
shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness
of hope.
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast,
drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized
again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the
change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet,
before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of
Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to
myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the
fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered.
In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as
of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all
hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory
shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my
chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of
this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which
I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought
possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up
and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and
solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But
when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would
leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation
grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming
with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and
a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging
energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with
the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided
them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital
instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature
that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and
was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of
community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his
distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking
thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices;
that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was
dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And
this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than
a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard
it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of
weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him,
and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of
a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him
continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed
the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was
now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself
regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me,
scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books,
burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and
indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago
have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his
love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at
the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion
of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut
him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that
suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought--no, not
alleviation--but a certain callousness of soul, a certain
acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for
years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which
has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision
of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the
first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply
and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first
change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without
efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London
ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first
supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which
lent efficacy to the draught.
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