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
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the
chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those
indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the
time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging
and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a
double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat
looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be
re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great
effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of
the day and night I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above
all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always
as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending
doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even
beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a
creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and
mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.
But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would
leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew
daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images
of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed
not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of
Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly
the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it
was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of
that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links
of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his
distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing;
that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the
amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no
shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that
insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye;
lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to
be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of
slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred
of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows
drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the
necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen,
and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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