Free The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Page B

was
nearly ripe for the conception of the day—the inmates of my
house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I
determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in
my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein
the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with
wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping
vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the
corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I
saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
    I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I
know, but that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side
of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping
efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I
had just deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had
been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control,
it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And
hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much
smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good
shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly
and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must
still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body
an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon
that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance,
rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed
natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the
spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and
divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine.
And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I
wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at
first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take
it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled
out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of
mankind, was pure evil.
    I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and
conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to
be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee
before daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying
back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once
more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once
more with the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.
    That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I
approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the
experiment while under the empire of generous or pious
aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies
of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend.
The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical
nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my
disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood
within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept
awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and
the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I
had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly
evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that
incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had
already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward
the worse.
    Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the
dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at
times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified,
and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing
towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily
growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power
tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup,
to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume,
like a thick cloak, that of Edward