The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Part 1

Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, was a man of rugged countenance and rare smile, cold in discourse yet possessed of a quiet, stubborn humanity. He practiced an austere self-denial, drinking gin alone to mortify his taste for vintages, and had not set foot in a theatre for twenty years. Yet he tolerated others with the same strange charity, and he was fond of saying, with a quaint air, that he inclined to Cain’s heresy and let his brother go to the devil in his own way. In this fashion he had become, for many a ruined man, the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence left to them.

Among his few intimates was Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman and a well-known man about town. Their Sunday walks were a mystery to those who observed them, for the pair said nothing, looked singularly dull, and hailed with relief the appearance of any third party. Yet they set great store by these excursions, putting off even business to enjoy them.

On one such walk their way led them down a small by-street in a busy quarter of London, a place of well-kept shop fronts that smiled even on a Sunday. But two doors from one corner the pleasant line was broken by a sinister block of building: two storeys high, windowless below the upper storey, with a door that had neither bell nor knocker, blistered and distained, scarred by tramps’ matches and the schoolboy’s knife. The door, in short, was long neglected.

Enfield lifted his cane and pointed. “Did you ever remark that door?” he asked, and when Utterson replied in the affirmative, he added, “It is connected in my mind with a very odd story.”

What followed was a tale told by Enfield as they walked. He had been coming home one black winter morning at three o’clock through a deserted part of town, when he saw a little man stumping along eastward at a good walk, and a girl of eight or ten running hard down a cross street. The two met at the corner, and the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. Enfield collared the fellow, dragged him back to the gathering crowd, and discovered that the man was perfectly cool, making no resistance, though his face was so ugly it brought out the sweat on Enfield’s brow. The doctor arrived, and even the apothecary, dry as a bagpipe, turned sick and white with desire to kill him. They extorted a promise of a hundred pounds for the child’s family, and the man led them to that very door with the key, returning presently with ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance, drawn to bearer upon Coutts’s bank and signed with a name that Enfield could not mention but which was very well known and often printed. The cheque was genuine, as Utterson saw when next morning they went in a body to the bank.

“I see you feel as I do,” said Enfield. “Blackmail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence.”

“And you don’t know if the drawer of the cheque lives there?” Utterson asked.

“A likely place, isn’t it?” returned Enfield. “No, sir, I had a delicacy. I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”

Pressed at last, Enfield said the man’s name was Hyde. He could not describe him well; there was something wrong with his appearance, something displeasing and detestable, a feeling of deformity although he could not specify the point. The fellow had a key and had used it not a week before.

Utterson sighed deeply and said never a word. They shook hands on a bargain never to refer to the matter again.

That evening, however, Utterson sat down to dinner without relish, and when the cloth was taken away, he retired to his business room and opened his safe. From the most private part of it he drew a document endorsed as Dr. Jekyll’s Will. It was holograph, for Utterson though he had taken charge of it had refused to lend the least assistance in the making of it. The will provided that in case of Dr. Henry Jekyll’s decease, all his possessions should pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,” and in case of Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months,” the said Hyde should step into Jekyll’s shoes without further delay. This document had long been the lawyer’s eyesore. Now, with the name of Hyde become suddenly clothed upon with detestable attributes, the vague mists that had baffled his eye resolved at last into the definite presentment of a fiend.

“I thought it was madness,” he said, replacing the paper, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.”

He set out at once through the lamplit city to the house of his friend Dr. Lanyon in Cavendish Square, the citadel of medicine. Lanyon was a hearty, healthy, red-faced gentleman with hair prematurely white. He sprang up to welcome Utterson with both hands, though the geniality was somewhat theatrical; the friendship was genuine, founded on school and college and a thorough enjoyment of each other’s company.

When Utterson led the talk round to Jekyll, Lanyon admitted they had been friends but that more than ten years had passed since Jekyll became too fanciful for him. His unscientific balderdash had estranged them.

“Did you ever come across a protégé of his—one Hyde?” asked Utterson.

“Hyde?” repeated Lanyon. “No. Never heard of him. Since my time.”

Utterson went homeward with a heavy heart and tossed to and fro through the small hours. The figure of Hyde, in two phases, haunted the lawyer all night: a man walking swiftly through lamplighted streets, or gliding into sleeping houses at the dead hour to haunt a friend’s bedside. Always the figure had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes. So there sprang up in the lawyer’s mind an inordinate curiosity to behold the real Mr. Hyde.

From that time forward, Utterson haunted the door in the by-street. By morning, noon, and night, in fog and moonlight, he kept watch. His patience was at last rewarded one fine dry night of frost. He became aware of an odd light footstep drawing near, and as the figure approached he stepped out from the entry of the court.

“Mr. Hyde, I think?”

The man shrank back with a hissing intake of breath, but his fear was only momentary. He was small and plainly dressed, and there was something troglodytic, something deformed without any nameable malformation, about him. He gave a displeasing smile, bore himself with a murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and spoke with a husky, broken voice.

“You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home,” said Hyde, blowing in the key. Then, still without looking up: “How did you know me?”