Chapter Nine

Doctor 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 honor, my reason, depend upon you,’ I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honor, 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 dishonorable 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 vial, 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, laboring 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 theater (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 color. The vial, 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 vial 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 honor, 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-defense.

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 neighborhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigor, 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 accouterment 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 re-inforce 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 somber 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 sprung 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 color, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapor. 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.

Footnotes

  1. Mr. Hyde offers Dr. Lanyon the choice to witness the drinking of the mixture or not. He gives the spectacle a sense of enormous scale, promising “new avenues to fame and power.” He goes on to cast it in religious language, referring to it as a “prodigy”—an extraordinary, inexplicable occurrence—that would shake even the most skeptical. Hyde’s heightened tone underscores the climactic nature of the moment.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  2. “Moral turpitude” refers to wickedness and vile behaviour. Lanyon does not elucidate precisely why he considers Jekyll’s actions turpid. It seems to be the case, rather, that Lanyon’s judgment arises from his emotional reaction, his “horror” when reflecting on all that has happened.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  3. Whether or not Dr. Lanyon regrets having chosen to witness Jekyll’s transformation, he senses that the event has defeated him, leading him to “feel that my days are numbered.” The whole affair with Jekyll has also defeated his reasoning faculties: as Lanyon says, “I shall die incredulous.” Stevenson uses Lanyon as a representative for a skeptical, rational point of view. Thus Lanyon’s defeat before Jekyll’s great secret strengthens the story’s supernaturalism.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  4. Mr. Hyde accuses Dr. Lanyon of being a materialist in his scientific pursuits. “Material views” include all philosophies which reduce reality down to physical existence. Mr. Hyde offers, in contrast, “the virtue of transcendental medicine,” which is not an actual field per se. Hyde, however, seems to be espousing a science that incorporates a spiritual or divine dimension.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  5. “Tincture” refers to a pigment or dye, and comes from the Latin tingere, meaning “to dye.”

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  6. “Minim” refers to the smallest possible portion of a substance, a tiny drop.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  7. In this clever metaphor, Mr. Hyde describes his poor manners and restless demeanor. The metaphor casts Hyde’s “impatience” and “politeness” as characters, the former of whom turns, “show[s] its heels,” and walks away from the latter. The physicality of the metaphor serves to reinforce Mr. Hyde’s frenetic presence.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  8. To be “misbegotten” is to be born out of wedlock, a bastard. Dr. Lanyon is correct in his assumption that Mr. Hyde is misbegotten, though he does not yet understand how it is that he is misbegotten.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  9. A “portico” is a covered walkway held up by columns.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  10. The word “farrago” refers to a hodgepodge, a jumbled mixture. Dr. Lanyon uses the word to describe the letter Dr. Jekyll has written to him which, in its desperation and lack of detail, strike the doctor as grounds for insanity.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  11. In his letter-within-a-letter, Dr. Jekyll uses a rich metaphor. He expresses the hope that if Dr. Lanyon follows his instructions “my troubles will roll away like a story that is told.” The comparison does not make sense in the way most similes do. The verb “roll away” invites a simile to some object which literally rolls—a stone comes to mind. Instead, we have “a story that is told,” a phrase which suggests the process of lightening and unburdening that follows the telling of a story. What makes this metaphor so fascinating is that the story is not merely an abstract vehicle for the simile. As he writes, Jekyll is in the direct process of telling his story.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  12. The story takes a distinct turn in its telling. With Dr. Lanyon and Mr. Hyde dead, and Dr. Jekyll gone, the events of the plot have run their course. Yet there are a number of loose ends. Stevenson structures the end of the story with two chapters of illuminating exposition: the first written by Dr. Lanyon, the second by Dr. Jekyll. Both chapters represent examples of a story-within-a-story structure, in which multiple layers of narrative are nested.

    — Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor
  13. At this moment, the duality of Jekyll and Hyde is revealed: Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, two halves of the same whole who are constantly warring with one another. Though readers may have suspected the relationship before, only here—in a violent, grotesque litany of imagery—is their true connection confirmed. The implication of this revelation speaks to the good and evil present in every person: though people are capable of great cruelty, they are also capable of morality and respectability.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  14. The noun “accouterment” refers to additional equipment or items of clothing needed to complete a particular activity. Though Lanyon doesn’t know why the stranger is dressed so oddly, he suspects it must be for some reason.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  15. The phrase “to turn on a hinge” suggests that the cause of Lanyon’s unease in Hyde’s presence is centered around something—though he initially believes it to simply be unfounded dislike, he later thinks his unease comes from a more profound source, perhaps from what Hyde represents.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  16. The noun “neighborhood” in this context refers to the area immediately surrounding a person. By virtue of his mere presence, Hyde inspires negative reactions in the environment around him.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  17. The noun “debility” is another word for weakness, and “constitution” refers to a person’s physical health or appearance. Lanyon notes the discrepancy between the man’s constantly shifting facial expressions and how ill he appears—a comments on the man’s dual, and apparently contradictory, nature.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  18. Though its other definition is more well-known, the policeman’s bull’s eye referenced here is in fact a lantern. Invented in the 13th century, its popularity persisted into the 18th century as a precursor to the modern flashlight. The lantern’s user would switch open the device’s door, which would allow the light to focus on a specific direction.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  19. The adjective “flighty” means impulsive and irresponsible. With the mundane discovery of Jekyll’s various experimental ingredients—none of which seem out of the ordinary— Lanyon is becoming increasingly convinced that Jekyll is insane and unable to think rationally.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff
  20. The noun “press” in this context refers to a dresser or set of drawers where clothes are kept, whereas the adjective “glazed” refers to the dresser’s glass doors.

    — Kim, Owl Eyes Staff