Love Among the Particles Read online

  During the first years of imprisonment, Hyde raved—raved and rioted in his basement cell, making the hearts of his jailers quake. He was the very coin of evil, with the face and bearing of a beast—malignancy made flesh, affecting them like a cold hand upon the heart. To hear him execrate God turned their bowels to ice. To see him was to look on leprosy. And so Hyde lived, unregenerate, cursing God and Henry Jekyll—God for having given Jekyll life, Jekyll for giving life to Hyde.

  Early in his second decade of confinement, Hyde changed. He grew quiet, calm, composed, mild. He became pleasing in his demeanor, so that his outward form seemed, almost, to copy an altered nature. Almost, for the deformity—the most notable aspect of his appearance (a misshapenness that had been thought the visible evidence of an inward corruption)—persisted. It could not be otherwise, for Jekyll’s chemistry had produced the outlines of Hyde’s very form. The skull was too large, as if the fontanelles, which had closed in infancy, had been reopened by a gigantic subterranean strain. The hands, too, were overlarge, pelted and sinewed like an animal’s. The backbone had been violently recast into the likeness of a heavy swag of iron chain, such as decorates a courthouse entrance. And yet, it was possible now for his jailers to look at Hyde without shuddering, because his soul no longer seemed to them repugnant. Even the asylum’s fastidious chaplain, who had fled from Hyde’s insistent blasphemies, would stop to give him the comforts of his Savior, for which Hyde would bless him. Hyde’s reclamation soon came to the attention of the superintendent and then to that of the Home Office, which recommended clemency toward the prisoner. No longer considered dangerous or insane, Hyde was given a larger, more pleasant cell on one of the asylum’s upper floors, with a view of sky and English countryside. He was allowed to take daily exercise on the asylum grounds and given other privileges reserved for the reformed. He would die at Broadmoor: No provision existed for his release. But he might live out his life there in relative ease. The public had forgotten him entirely, in favor of the hated Boer, whose iniquities belittled Hyde’s in the popular press and imagination.

  This was the Hyde to whom Frederick Drayton was introduced in the winter of 1900, in Hyde’s bright, if spare, cell, with an aspidistra struggling on the brick sill and a curtain at the window to keep out the morning light. He was not “the child of Hell” Stevenson had promised and that he, Drayton, had been expecting. The man who rose politely to acknowledge his visitor was reserved, remarkably kempt, and almost gentle in his manner. Hyde might have been a caretaker or a gardener attached to some estate.

  He looked his age—seventy-five—but no more than that, or less. Drayton had read, in Stevenson’s account, that Hyde’s appearance and vigorousness had belonged to a man much younger than Jekyll, who also would have been seventy-five, had he survived. Apparently, Hyde had caught up with his age during a quarter century of enforced retreat from the world, whose stimulations had earlier excited in him youth and an unnatural robustness. During Drayton’s visit, he kept his hands hidden.

  Hyde must have guessed that curiosity (and fear perhaps) had brought the American to visit him. His instincts remained quick. He might have seen in Drayton’s face disappointment, which the young man made an effort to dissemble—not in sympathy for the old man, but because of the duplicity with which he habitually engaged the world. He did not want to put Hyde off! In his mind, Drayton saw the placard he had daydreamed in a San Francisco barroom that announced, in handsome Baskerville: THE ATONEMENT OF EDWARD HYDE. He was versatile and quick-witted and knew that although what was handed him—by fate or accident—might be likely to surprise him, it would not—he swore—defeat him.

  “Mr. Drayton, you expected something else?”

  “Not at all!”

  “The world remembers Hyde the monster, if it remembers him at all.”

  “I am glad to see you’re looking—”

  “So unlike an animal?”

  “Well, Mr. Hyde. Looking so well after your years of hardship here.”

  “Please call me Edward.”

  “And you, sir, may call me Frederick.”

  (Hyde snuffled.)

  “I smell winter on you, Frederick.”

  “It is cold.”

  (A silence ensued, during which Hyde sat down at the oak table.)

  “What is it, Frederick, that you want of me?”

  “To give you your say.”

  (Hyde, perplexed.)

  “Your side of it. I hope—with your permission and assistance—to present your point of view upon the stage.”

  (Hyde nodded—might even have smiled momentarily.)

  “But the stage—I’m afraid—is unavailable to me.”

  “I will record you, Edward—your voice. It will be just as if you were there in front of them. The audience. It will be a sen—a most moving testimony to—it will be extraordinary, Edward!”

  (Hyde did smile then; but pleased by his own cleverness in so quickly having gained his object’s confidence, Drayton did not see him smile.)

  “You intend to take down what I say, then have it read out by an actor?”

  “I will record it with an apparatus. It will capture your voice as a photograph does a face.”

  (Hyde turned his face and looked outside—at a vast shadow that a sudden wind had caused to slip over the snow beyond the outer walls, blackening it.)

  “Science! Of what is it not capable?”

  “I have brought it with me—it is in the anteroom! Shall I go and get it?”

  “It will be my pleasure.”

  (Hyde turned his head toward the window.)

  “What’s that you are humming, Edward?”

  “A favorite air from Alexander’s Feast. Do you know it? It’s by Handel.”

  “No. I’ll get the machine. The spectacle of the Elephant Man will be nothing next to this!”

  4.

  Frederick Drayton was lucky. Within the very month that he had conceived his plan for Hyde and then realized its impracticability, he had attended a public demonstration of Edison’s newest recording device. The lecturer produced waxed cylinders on which sounds had been previously captured. Drayton listened to a cornet solo by Sergeant Smith of the Coldstream Guards, a bassoon solo entitled “Lucy Long,” and a solo by the English whistler Charles Capper.

  Had the Raising of Lazarus been presented upon that little stage with its sad proscenium and tatty drapes, it would not have created a sensation to equal this. Each who bore witness to the miraculous occasion was amazed.

  The lecturer predicted that, in a very little while, people would be relieved of the drudgery of writing letters. Instead, he asserted, they would sit before the phonograph and speak their letters into the machine, which would capture not only their words but also subtleties of tone and emphasis. If the subject were droll, one might laugh; and the laugh would go down on wax. And should a sigh or kiss escape while one spoke tenderly of love—these, too, would be inscribed onto the cylinder.

  “Thus will you be able to send a laugh or a sigh or a kiss by post!” the lecturer exclaimed, so great was his enthusiasm for Mr. Edison’s device.

  The demonstration ended with a recording made three months earlier of “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Rule, Britannia.” It was this last song that brought to Drayton’s mind Hyde and how he might be presented on the stage. Not Hyde himself, to be sure—but his recorded voice amplified by a tundish, just as the music and songs were heard in the crowded hall of the San Francisco Philosophical Society.

  If so many thronged to listen spellbound to Charles Capper whistle, what would the voice of Hyde evoke in them? What would they not pay to hear him speak or rage or weep?

  Drayton approached the lecturer immediately after the demonstration to discover how he might order a machine of his own. The cost was high, but he soon found a man willing to invest in the enterprise. Two months later, Drayton was in New York City, where, in an afternoon, he learned to operate the phonograph and, with the machine and a supp
ly of waxed cylinders bedded in excelsior, he embarked the following day for England.

  5.

  Cylinder No. 1: 10 December 1900—3 o’clock in the Afternoon

  HYDE: … was for me at the start of it.

  DRAYTON: You must not turn your head away from the machine when you speak. Aim your voice there, at the tube.

  HYDE: I don’t recall much of how it was for me in the beginning.

  DRAYTON: Good.

  HYDE: I seem to have been asleep far more than awake. Although it was not sleep. There was no refreshment—no waking afterward to a renewal of my relationship to the things of the world, which had been broken, temporarily, by fatigue. There was no sense of waking up from a dream, no feeling of relationship to anything or anyone. It was—it is difficult to say what it was—as if I were suddenly born. Each time. Born anew, without connection or associations. I had little sense of connection even with my former self—for that is what I felt myself to be: something that had been. Something previous. The merest sketch. Opening my eyes, I was left with the sensation of having been, but without memory of what I was. I did not know that I was bad, for the knowledge of my crimes died with me each time I fell asleep. But I tell you it was not sleep! It was a blackness that overtook me, engulfing and profound. It was death—yes, that is what it was like for me at the start! As if I’d died with all my sins upon me and was born again spotless. I did not know that I was bad! If I had known, I might have chosen otherwise. I mean I might have ended it. But the thing was beyond me—beyond my power to change. I was not myself: I belonged to someone else. To Jekyll! Though I did not know him then. My eyes would open on a shuttered-up room with the stink of chemicals in the close air. Later, I understood the room belonged to Dr. Jekyll—was his laboratory. But it was only a name to me then! The man whose space this was, was never there—never at home, always elsewhere, on his rounds or at his club or at the houses of his friends. I’d wait for him in that stuffy, pent-up, dismal place, growing sick and tired and angry. You cannot imagine what quality and depth of anger. Anger is far too weak a word. Rage—I was always in a rage. And he did not come! I would fall asleep—let’s call it sleep, for convenience—and Hyde would disappear—who knows where—until he woke again in the empty laboratory. Later still, my eyes would open elsewhere—in a woman’s room or an alley—and soon there would be blood upon the coverlet or bricks. I was helpless against the raging, helpless to understand it even, and baffled by the absence of the elusive Dr. Jekyll! May I have a glass of water?

  DRAYTON: I will call for one. I must change the cylinder, too.

  Cylinder No. 2: 10 December 1900—3:30 in the Afternoon

  HYDE: I went in search of Jekyll. I hunted him. But in every place he might have been, should have been—he wasn’t. Never was he where they said he was. His man, Poole. His friends Lanyon and Utterson. I broke my stick on the head of Sir Danvers because he knew and would not say! If you are looking for a monster—look at him! At Jekyll! He tormented me so! He hid from Hyde, and Hyde—poor Edward—could not understand who or what he was and why he should wake in that laboratory! There was some vital connection between us, which I could not fathom! He drove me to fury and to madness. To murder—murders that I committed and forgot. Except for the blood on my hands and clothes, my broken stick, I would not have known that I had … that I had been where blood’d spilled. Later, I did know. Later, I remembered a little of before—I mean before I woke. I did not dream. Poor Edward has never dreamed—not even here. But I seemed to see on the other side of that engulfing darkness a distant coastline, fogged in at first. Little by little, the fog dispelled. And I saw. But that was long after the beginning. The end—it was—when I seemed not to sleep at all but to be Hyde Hyde Hyde for days on end and never sleep at all. Then I knew the meaning of my bloodstained clothes, the ripped collar, and fingernails which looked like claws that had been trying to tear up the alleyway bricks. Christ, what had I done! And why? I knew it was not Christ who knew, but Jekyll, whom I could not find and hunted days and nights in every street and brothel, museum and music hall. I almost caught up with him one afternoon in Kew Gardens. I rushed at him with my sword-stick, ready to run him through, but he turned—the man turned at the noise of my bearing down on him over the dead leaves—and I saw that he was not the man I wished dead. Surely, you can see why!

  DRAYTON (irresistibly): Yes!

  HYDE: It was Jekyll who drove me!

  DRAYTON: They shall find it out! Edward, you will be vindicated!

  HYDE: I wish now that he were alive to see it and be hounded and brought down and called a monster and made to endure a quarter century shut up here!

  DRAYTON: They will set you free, Edward! When they hear you speak, they will insist you be released. They will demand it. They will storm the walls and break down the door if you are not! They will love you, Edward, for—

  Drayton turned off the phonograph and placed the two waxed cylinders carefully into the rosewood case.

  “—your martyrdom. We will make them pay. You will be a free man, and rich!”

  He was gripped by an excitement that was part indignation for Hyde and part gratitude for his own good fortune in having found in Hyde so amenable a subject, so very eloquent and moving a victim for him to champion. Drayton sensed a triumph far greater than the one he had first imagined for himself. He saw the headline in his mind that would soon be published through the wide world:FREDERICK DRAYTON EXCULPATES EDWARD HYDE

  INNOCENT VICTIM OF THE INFAMOUS DR. JEKYLL!

  He imagined himself to be not only a celebrated impresario but also an exalted advocate. He would become the most famous man in England and a hero in America to all those of his countrymen who despised the cruelties and exploitation of the aristocracy.

  Already, Hyde sensed the measure of the other man’s ambition.

  “I know of something else the crowd will love.”

  Having begun to disassemble the phonograph, Drayton had the tundish in his hands. “What?”

  “Jekyll’s formula—the one that gave me birth. It will be—what’s that word you Americans use to describe a remarkable disclosure?”

  “Sensation.”

  “Yes. It will be a sensation to put Jekyll’s notebook on display. It will tantalize the mob. It’s yours, if you want it—my gift to you for what you intend to do for me.”

  “You have it here?”

  “Certainly not. It’s hidden in the laboratory. I know where. It must be there still.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s curious, but I know—now—everything that Jekyll knew. I didn’t when I hunted him. But since his death, I have acquired—don’t ask me how—his mind. I know, as well, the impurity that had entered the salt. Because of it, he could not duplicate the original mixture. Because of it, he lacked the strength to keep me out, and so he died.”

  “You and Jekyll are the same.”

  “Everyone knows that!”

  “I had almost forgotten it.”

  “I didn’t understand, at first, that the man I sought to kill was myself. And yet—you know—he was really another man. Whether or not we were locked in the same body, Jekyll was separate from me, and he created me, injured me, and hoped to murder me. We might say—for convenience—that although we were the same, he and I were two different men entirely; and I wish to see him in disgrace.”

  “Edward, you shall! He will be exposed. Together, we’ll restore your good name and blacken his.”

  “The notebook is in the wall behind the laboratory stove. Eight bricks from the floor, seven from the right wall. Poole will let you inside. Lord M—’s introduction will see to that.”

  “And the impurity?”

  “Cigar ash. A length of ordinary cigar ash that, by accident, had fallen into the salt during its manufacture.”

  “I thank you, Edward.”

  (Hyde did not take Drayton’s proffered hand.)

  Drayton picked up the tundish to place it in the box.

/>   “You might leave it here, Frederick, and one of those waxed cylinders, too. In case I think of something else to say.”

  6.

  Lord M—’s secretary now removes the second cylinder from the phonograph and lays it in its bed of crimson plush with a tenderness ordinarily reserved for a relic of a dead religion, or a vanished love. Throat dry after so lengthy a narration, he pours water from an earthenware jug (incongruous in the luxury crowding Lord M—’s study); and as he tilts back his head to drink, it is not the secretary we see, but Edward Hyde—the bony knuckles of his throat working obediently to slake his thirst. We shudder as if it were blood he were drinking—as if Hyde himself were drinking it—until the secretary coughs once and the spell breaks like a thread of saliva.

  “I can’t say I really understand Lord M—’s interest in Frederick Drayton,” says Roebling, taking from a silver case a Dutch cigar; “why he should have lent Drayton his influence and why he should have bothered to acquire this.” He indicates with a hand that holds a flaming match the rosewood box of waxed cylinders and the phonograph.

  “His interest was Hyde,” the secretary says. Roebling is about to ask for an explanation, but a peremptory gesture admonishes him, and indeed all of us. The secretary closes the rosewood box as if to signal his determination to keep the matter dark. “Drayton produced his sensation; the magnitude of its effect exceeded anything he could have foreseen when he conceived of his exploitation of the Monster Hyde. The dimensions of Drayton’s celebrity were enormous. There was not a man or woman in England or America who was not affected by it. I have no doubt they heard the tale in Patagonia, so avid were the journalists to publish details of Drayton’s Grand Guignol.”