The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 05Stevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 05
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century; Fiction
Six o'clock struck on the bells of the church that was so conveniently
near to Mr. Utterson's dwelling, and still he was digging at the
problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but
now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay
and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room,
Mr. Enfield's tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted
pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal
city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child
running from the doctor's; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut
trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he
would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming
and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be
opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and
lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and
even at that dead hour he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in
these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he
dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping
houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to
dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every
street-corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the
figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had
no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it
was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer's mind a
singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the
features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once set eyes on him, he
thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as
was the habit of mysterious things when well examined. He might see a
reason for his friend's strange preference or bondage (call it which you
please) and even for the startling clauses of the will. And at least it
would be a face worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels
of mercy: a face which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind
of the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.
From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the
by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon when
business was plenty and time scarce, at night under the face of the
fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or
concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post.
"If he be Mr. Hyde," he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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