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 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 demand sending letters. The contents increased my wonder; for this is how the letter ran:

“10th December, 18—

“Dear Lanyon, You are one of my oldest friends; although we may have differed at times on scientific questions. If you had said to me, ‘Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,’ I would have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour my reason, are all at your mercy. 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 tonight—ay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a cab 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. 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.

That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You should be back long before midnight. 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.

If you 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 tomorrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon, do my errand when it is most convenient for you in the course of the day; and 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 I decided to do as he requested. I rose 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 to old Dr. Denman’s surgical theatre, from which Jekyll’s private cabinet is most conveniently entered. The locksmith 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, and returned with it to Cavendish Square.

Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough made up; 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 liquid, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether.

The copy-book contained 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!!!” Here were a phial of some tincture, a paper of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments. How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of my colleague? And why was the messenger 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.

Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, when the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I found a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

“Are you from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.

He told me “yes”; and I had bidden him enter. There was a policeman not far off; and, I thought my visitor started and made great haste.

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. 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 with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. At the time, I set it down to some personal distaste.

This person 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. There was something abnormal in the very essence of the creature that now faced me—something seizing, surprising, and revolting.

These observations were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was on fire.

“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.

“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.

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough. “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 that he was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria— “I understood, a drawer…”

“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 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 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.

“And now,” said he, “will you be wise? will you let me take this glass in my hand and go forth from your house? or you are curious? 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. Or, if you 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.”

“Sir,” said I, “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 who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, behold!”

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table, 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 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 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. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that if you can bring 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