Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had
memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared
between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive
apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the
pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to
Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the
cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more
than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.
To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I
had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast
it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations,
and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The
bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another
consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer
smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even
conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were,
the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the
same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and
trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast
a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found
wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by
friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to
the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses
and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I
made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I
neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of
Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two months,
however, I was true to my determination; for two months, I led a
life of such severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed
the compensations of an approving conscience. But time began at last
to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience
began to grow into a thing of course; 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.
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers
that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither
had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance
for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to
evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was
by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came
out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a
more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been
this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience
with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I
declare, at least, before God, no man morally sane could have been
guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I
struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child
may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all
those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to
walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and in my
case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport
of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every
blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was
suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by
a cold thrill of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be
forfeit; and fled from the scene of these excesses, at once glorying
and trembling, my lust of evil gratified and stimulated, my love of
life screwed to the topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to
make assurance doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out
through the lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind,
gloating on my crime, light-headedly devising others in the future,
and yet still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for the
steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded
the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of
transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll, with
streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees
and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was
rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up
from the days of childhood, when I had walked with my father’s hand,
and through the self-denying toils of my professional life, to
arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at the
damned horrors of the evening. I could have screamed aloud; I sought
with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images
and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me; and still,
between the petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my
soul. As the acuteness of this remorse began to die away, it was
succeeded by a sense of joy. The problem of my conduct was solved.
Hyde was thenceforth impossible; whether I would or not, I was now
confined to the better part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced
to think of it! with what willing humility I embraced anew the
restrictions of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I
locked the door by which I had so often gone and come, and ground
the key under my heel!
The next day, came the news that the murder had not been overlooked,
that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim
was a man high in public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had
been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was
glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the
terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but
Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all men would be raised
to take and slay him.