[adapted]

by
Robert Louis Stevenson

Story of the Door

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man with a rough face that was never brightened by a smile; cold, quiet and shy in conversation; slow to show his feelings; thin, tall, dusty, dull and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was the kind he liked, something very human shone from his eye; something indeed which never came into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent signs of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the actions of his life.

He was strict with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to stop his liking for fine wines; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not gone into one for twenty years. But he had a kind patience for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the great energy in their bad actions; and in any hard time he was ready to help rather than to scold. “I tend to Cain’s belief,” he used to say in an old-fashioned way: “I let my brother go his own way, even if it is bad.”

In this role, he often was the last respectable friend and the last good influence in the lives of men who were getting worse. And to people like these, as long as they came to his rooms, he never showed any change in his behavior.

No doubt the task was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was not very open even at his best, and even his friendship seemed to be based on a similar wide good nature. It is the sign of a modest man to accept his circle of friends already made from chance; and that was the lawyer’s way. His friends were those of his own family or those whom he had known the longest; his feelings, like ivy, were the growth of time, they did not mean any special quality in the person.

So, no doubt the tie that joined him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant relative, the well-known man around town. It was a puzzle for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who met them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked very dull and would greet, with clear relief, the appearance of a friend. Even so, the two men valued these walks most, called them the best part of each week, and not only put aside times of pleasure, but even resisted the demands of work, so that they might enjoy them without a break.

It happened on one of these walks that they went down a side street in a busy part of London. The street was small and what people call quiet, but it did good business on weekdays. The people living there were all doing well, it seemed, and all trying to do even better, and spending the extra of their money on decoration; so that the shop fronts stood along that street with a welcoming look, like rows of smiling saleswomen.

Even on Sunday, when it hid its brighter charms and was quite empty of people passing, the street stood out against its dirty neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, shiny brass, and general cleanliness and cheerfulness that you could notice, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger.

Two doors from one corner, on the left side when going east the line was broken by the entrance of a courtyard; and just at that point a certain dark block of building stuck out its front on the street. It was two storeys high; had no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blank face of dirty wall on the upper; and showed in every feature, the signs of long and dirty neglect.

The door, which had no bell or knocker, was blistered and stained. Homeless people walked slowly into the doorway and lit matches on the panels; children played shop on the steps; the schoolboy had used his knife on the moldings; and for nearly a generation, no one had come to drive away these random visitors or to fix their damage.

Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the side street; but when they came next to the doorway, Mr. Enfield lifted up his cane and pointed.

“Did you ever notice that door?” he asked; and when his friend had said yes, “It is connected in my mind,” he added, “with a very strange story.”

“Really?” said Mr. Utterson, with a small change in his voice, “and what was that?”

“Well, it was this way,” replied Mr. Enfield: “I was coming home from some place very far away, about three o’clock on a dark winter morning, and my way went through a part of town where there was nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street and all the folks asleep — street after street, all lighted up as if for a parade and all as empty as a church — till at last I felt that way when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two people: one a little man who was walking along to the east at a good pace, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as fast as she could down a cross street.

Well, sir, the two bumped into each other naturally enough at the corner; and then came the terrible part of the thing; for the man stepped calmly on the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds like nothing to hear, but it was awful to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some terrible big thing. I gave a few shouts, ran after him, caught the man, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group around the screaming child. He was perfectly calm and did not fight, but gave me one look, so ugly that it made me sweat as if I had been running. The people who had come out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, who had been sent for, came.

Well, the child was not much hurt, more frightened, according to the doctor; and you might think that would be the end of it. But there was one strange thing. I had taken a strong dislike to the man at first sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s reaction was what surprised me. He was the usual plain doctor, of no clear age or looks, with a strong Edinburgh accent and with almost no emotion. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that doctor turn sick and white with the wish to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and since killing was impossible, we did the next best thing. We told the man we could and would make such a big fuss out of this that his name would stink from one end of London to the other.

If he had any friends or any good name, we made sure that he would lose them. And all the time, as we were speaking very angrily, we were keeping the women off him as best we could for they were as wild as wild beasts. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of dark, nasty calm — frightened too, I could see that — but handling it, sir, really like Satan. ‘If you choose to make money out of this accident,’ said he, ‘I can do nothing. Every gentleman wants to avoid a scene,’ says he. ‘Name your price.’ Well, we made him agree to pay a hundred pounds for the child’s family; he clearly wanted to refuse; but there was something about all of us that meant trouble, and at last he agreed. The next thing was to get the money; and where do you think he took us but to that place with the door? — quickly took out a key, went in, and soon came back with about ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the rest on Coutts’s, made payable to anyone who carried it and signed with a name that I can’t mention, though it is one of the points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed.

The figure was stiff; but the signature was worth more than that if it was real. I told the gentleman that the whole business looked fake, and that a man does not, in real life, go in a cellar door at four in the morning and come out with another man’s cheque for almost a hundred pounds. But he was quite calm and mocking. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I will stay with you until the banks open and cash the cheque myself.’ So we all went, the doctor, and the child’s father, and our friend and myself, and spent the rest of the night in my rooms; and next day, after we had breakfast, went all together to the bank. I handed in the cheque myself, and said I had every reason to think it was a fake. Not at all. The cheque was real.”

“Oh dear!” said Mr. Utterson.

“I see you feel like I do,” said Mr. Enfield. “Yes, it’s a bad story. Because my man was a man that nobody could deal with, a really terrible man; and the person that wrote the cheque is very proper, famous too, and (which makes it worse) one of your men who do what they call good. Blackmail, I think; an honest man paying a lot of money for some of the pranks of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, because of that. But even that, you know, is far from explaining everything,” he added, and with these words he started thinking.

From this he was brought back by Mr. Utterson asking quite suddenly: “And you don’t know if the person who wrote the cheque lives there?”

“A good place, isn’t it?” said Mr. Enfield. “But I noticed his address; he lives in some square, I don’t know which.”

“And you never asked about the — place with the door?” said Mr. Utterson.

“No, sir; I didn’t want to,” was the reply. “I feel very strongly about asking questions; it is too much like the day of judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and soon some harmless old man (the last you would have thought of) is hit on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like trouble, the less I ask.”

“A very good rule, too,” said the lawyer.

“But I have looked at the place myself,” said Mr. Enfield. “It hardly seems a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one except, once in a long time, the man from my adventure. There are three windows facing the yard on the first floor; none below; the windows are always shut but they’re clean. And then there is a chimney which is usually smoking; so somebody must live there. And yet it’s not certain; because the buildings are so close together around the yard, that it’s hard to say where one ends and another begins.”

The two men kept walking for a while in silence; and then “Enfield,” said Mr. Utterson, “that’s a good rule of yours.”

“Yes, I think it is,” said Enfield.

“But still,” said the lawyer, “there’s one thing I want to ask. I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child.”

“Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do. It was a man named Hyde.”

“Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What does he look like?”

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with how he looks; something unpleasant, something completely awful. I never saw a man I disliked so much, and yet I hardly know why. He must be not normal somewhere; he gives a strong feeling that he is not normal, although I couldn’t say where. He’s a very strange-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing unusual. No, sir; I can’t make sense of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not because of poor memory; for I say I can see him right now.”

Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and clearly thinking hard. “You are sure he used a key?” he asked at last.

“My dear sir…” Enfield began, very surprised.

“Yes, I know,” said Utterson; “I know it must seem strange. The truth is, if I do not ask you the name of the other person, it is because I know it already. You see, Richard, your story has made it clear. If you have been wrong in any part you should correct it.”

“I think you might have warned me,” said the other, a little annoyed. “But I have been very exact, as you call it. The man had a key; and what’s more, he has it still. I saw him use it less than a week ago.”

Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but did not say a word; and the young man soon continued speaking. “Here is another lesson to say nothing,” he said. “I am ashamed of talking too much. Let us make a deal never to talk about this again.”

“With all my heart,” said the lawyer. “Let’s shake hands on that, Richard.”

Search for Mr. Hyde

That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his house, as he lived alone, in a sad mood and sat down to dinner without enjoyment. It was his Sunday habit, when this meal was finished, to sit close by the fire, a book of some dull religion on his reading desk, until the clock of the nearby church rang the hour of twelve, when he would go calmly and thankfully to bed. But on this night, as soon as the tablecloth was taken away, he picked up a candle and went into his office.

There he opened his safe, took from its most private part a paper marked on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll’s Will and sat down with a worried face to read what was inside.

The will was written by hand, because Mr. Utterson, though he took care of it now that it was made, had refused to give the least help in making it; it said not only that, in case of the death of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., all his things were to go to his “friend and helper Edward Hyde,” but that in case of Dr. Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months,” Edward Hyde should take Henry Jekyll’s place without further delay and free from any burden or duty except for the payment of a few small sums of money to the members of the doctor’s household.

This document had long been an ugly sight to the lawyer. It upset him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the normal and usual sides of life, to whom fancy things were not proper. And until now it was his not knowing Mr. Hyde that had increased his anger; now, by a sudden change, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name was only a name of which he could learn no more.

It was worse when it began to be covered with terrible qualities; and out of the changing, thin mists that had so long confused his eye, there leaped up the sudden, clear picture of a devil.

“I thought it was madness,” he said, as he put back the awful paper in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is a shame.”

Then he blew out his candle, put on a big coat, and went toward Cavendish Square, that center of medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his home and saw his many patients. “If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon,” he thought.

The serious butler knew and welcomed him; he had no delay, but was led straight from the door to the dining-room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone with his wine. This was a friendly, healthy, neat, red-faced gentleman, with a thick bunch of hair white too early, and a loud and firm manner. When he saw Mr. Utterson, he jumped up from his chair and welcomed him with both hands.

The friendliness, as was his way, was a bit like acting to the eye; but it came from real feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both had great respect for themselves and for each other, and this does not always happen, men who really enjoyed each other’s company.

After a little chat, the lawyer brought up the subject which had so unpleasantly worried him.

“I think, Lanyon,” he said, “you and I are the two oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has?”

“I wish the friends were younger,” laughed Dr. Lanyon. “But I think we are. And what about that? I do not see much of him now.”

“Really?” said Utterson. “I thought you had a shared interest.”

“We had,” was the answer. “But it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll became too full of strange ideas for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in the mind; and though of course I still care about him for old times’ sake, as they say, I see and I have seen very little of the man. Such unscientific nonsense,” added the doctor, turning suddenly red, “would have separated even Damon and Pythias.”

This little show of anger was a bit of a relief to Mr. Utterson. “They have only disagreed on some point of science,” he thought; and being a man with no strong interest in science (except in the matter of property transfer), he even added: “It is nothing worse than that!” He gave his friend a few seconds to get his calm back, and then came to the question he had come to ask. “Did you ever come across a person he was helping — one Hyde?” he asked.