10 Further Cont. Jekyll And Hyde Read By Stephanie Poppins

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson writes about the duality of human nature – the idea that every single human being has good and evil within them. Stevenson describes how there is a good and an evil side to everyone's personality, but what is important is how you behave and the decisions you make.

In this episode, we hear about the transition from Good to Evil.

Transcript

Welcome to Sleep Stories with Steph,

Your go-to podcast that guarantees you a calm and relaxing transition into a great night's sleep.

Today's story is called Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

First published in 1886,

This story explores the duality of human nature and suggests that within each and every one of us lies both good and evil.

But before we begin,

Let's take a moment to focus on where we are now.

It is time to relax and fully let go.

There is nothing you need to be doing now and nowhere you need to go.

Take a deep breath in through your nose.

Then let it out on a long sigh.

Chapter 10 further continued.

Between the two characters,

I now felt I had to choose.

My two natures had memory in common,

But all other faculties were almost unequally shared.

Jekyll,

Now with the most sensitive apprehensions,

A greedy gusto projected and shared in the pleasures and life of Hyde.

But Hyde was indifferent.

He may remember him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit.

That was all.

Jekyll had more than a father's interest.

Hyde had no more than a son's indifference.

To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations and to become at a blow and forever despised and friendless.

The bargain might appear unequal,

But there was another consideration.

While Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence,

Hyde would be not even conscious of all he had lost.

Strange as my circumstances were,

The terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as any man's.

Much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner,

And it fell out with me as it falls out with so vast a majority of my fellows that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep it.

I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor,

Surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes.

I bade a resolute farewell to the liberty,

Youth,

Light step,

Leaping pulses and secret pleasures that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde.

I made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation,

For I neither gave up the house in Soho nor destroyed the clothes of Hyde.

They still lay ready in my cabinet.

But for two months I was true to my determination.

For two months I led a life of such severity as I had never before attained to,

And I enjoyed the compensations of an approving conscience.

But at last time began to obliterate the freshness of my alarm.

The praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course.

I began to be tortured with throes and longings as of Hyde struggling after freedom,

And at last,

In an hour of moral weakness,

I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.

I do not suppose when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice,

He is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers he runs through his brutish physical insensibility.

Neither had I,

Long as I had,

Considered my position,

Made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil,

Which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde.

Yet it was by these I was punished.

My devil had been long caged,

And he came out roaring.

I was conscious,

Even when I took the draught,

Of a more unbridled,

Furious propensity to ill.

It must have been this,

I suppose,

That stirred in my soul the tempest of impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim.

I declare,

At least before God,

No man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation.

I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything.

But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness amongst temptation,

And in my case to be tempted,

However slightly,

Was to fall.

Instantly,

The spirit of hell awoke in me and raged.

With a transport of glee,

I mauled the unresisting body,

Tasting delight from every blow.

And it was not till weariness had begun to succeed that I was suddenly in the top fit of my delirium,

Struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror.

Amidst dispersed,

I saw my life to be forfeit,

And I fled from the scene of these excesses at once glorifying and trembling,

My lust of evil gratified and stimulated,

My love of life screwed to the topmost peg.

I ran to the house in Soho and destroyed my papers.

Thence I set out through the lamplit streets in the same divided ecstasy of mind,

Gloating on my crime,

Lightheartedly dividing others in the future,

And yet still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for these steps of the adventure.

I had had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draught,

And as he drank it pledged the dead man.

The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him before Henry Jekyll,

With streaming tears of gratitude and remorse,

Had fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God.

The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot.

Now I saw my life as a whole.

I followed it up from the days of childhood,

When I had walked with my father's hand,

And through the self-denying toils of my professional life,

To arrive again and again with the same sense of unreality,

And the damned horrors of the evening.

I could have screamed out loud.

I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me.

And still between the petitions,

The ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul.

As the acuteness of this remorse began to die away,

It was succeeded by a sense of joy.

The problem of my conduct was solved.

Hide was thenceforth impossible.

Whether I would or not,

I was now confined to the better part of my existence.

And oh,

How I rejoiced to think it!

With what willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions of natural life.

With what sincere enunciation I locked the door by which I had so often gone and come,

And ground the key under my heel.

The next day came the news the murder had been overlooked.

That the guilt of hide was patent to the world.

That the victim was a man high in public estimation.

It was not only a crime,

It had been a tragic folly.

I think I was glad to know it.

I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold.

Jekyll was now my city of refuge.

Let but hide peep out at an instant and the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past,

And I can say with honesty my resolve was fruitful of some good.

You know yourself how earnestly in the last months of last year I laboured to relieve suffering.

You know that much was done for others and that the days passed quietly,

Almost happily for myself.

Nor can I truly say I was wearied of this beneficent and innocent life.

I think instead I daily enjoyed it more completely,

But I was still cursed with my duality of purpose.

And as the first edge of my penitence wore off,

The lower side of me,

So long indulged,

So recently chained down,

Began to growl for licence.

Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde,

The bare idea of that would startle me to frenzy.

No,

It was my own person I was once more tempted to trifle with,

My conscience.

And it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.

There comes to an end all things.

The most capacious measure is filled at last.

And this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

And yet I was not alarmed.

The fall seemed natural,

Like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery.

It was a fine,

Clear January day,

Wet underfoot,

When the frost had melted,

But cloudless overhead.

The Regent's Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours.

I sat in the sun on a bench,

The animal within me licking the chops of memory.

The spiritual side a little drowsed,

Promising subsequent penitence,

But not yet moved to begin.

After all,

I reflected,

I was like my neighbours.

And then I smiled,

Comparing myself with other men,

Comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect.

And at the very moment of that thought,

A qualm came over me.

A horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering.

These passed away and left me faint.

And then,

As in its turn the faintness subsided,

I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts.

A greater boldness,

Contempt of danger,

A solution of the bonds of obligation.

My clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs,

The hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy.

Once more I was Edward Hyde.

A moment before,

I'd been safe of all men's respect,

Wealthy,

Loved,

The cloth laying for me in the dining room at home.

And now I was the common quarry of mankind,

Hunted,

Houseless,

A known murderer,

Thrall to the gallows.

My reason wavered,

But it did not fail me utterly.

I had more than once observed that in my second character,

My faculty seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic.

Thus it came about that,

Where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed,

Hyde rose to the important of the moment.

My drugs were in one of the presses in my cabinet,

But how was I to reach them?

The laboratory drawer I had closed.

If I sought to enter by the house,

My own servants would consign me to the gallows.

I saw I must employ another hand,

So I thought of Lanyon.

But how was he to be reached?

How persuaded?

Supposing I escaped capture in the streets,

How was I to make my way into his presence?

And how should I,

An unknown and displeasing visitor,

Prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his colleague,

Dr.

Jekyll?

Then I remembered that of my original character.

One part remained to me,

I could write my own hand.

And once I'd conceived that kindling spark,

The way that I must follow became lighted up from end to end.

Thereupon,

I arranged my clothes as best I could,

And summoning a passing handsome cab,

I drove to a hotel in Portland Street.

Reviews

I had to listen several times to take it all in. Night time listening proved soporific! 😘
A stealthy chapter.