And when at last,
thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab
and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object
marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers,
these two base passions raged within him like a tempest. He walked
fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the
less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided
him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box
of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled. 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 life 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. About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under
the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last
time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts
or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I
delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has
hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great
prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in
the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time
shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness
and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from
the action of his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing
on us both has already changed and crushed him.