『ジキル博士とハイド氏の奇妙な事件』

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.