THE MAN IN THE CAB
Dr. Hastie Lanyon lived in a fine old house at the corner of Wigmore and Harley Streets in the very heart of the doctors’ quarter, a four-storeyed brick edifice which dwarfed most of the other buildings in the neighborhood and looked as if it had been erected during the reign of James I. The stone steps leading up to the front door had been worn hollow by the countless pairs of feet which had trod them over the years. Scarcely had I made use of the brass bell-pull when the iron-clamped oaken door swung inwards as on a pivot and I found myself face to face with an expressionless manservant whose thick features overlain with scar-tissue made me suspect that he performed double-duty as a bodyguard. I catalogued this information in my memory for future reference.
‘Yes?’ His voice put me in mind of sandpaper being dragged listlessly across a stubborn piece of wood.
‘My name is Dr. Watson,’ said I, presenting my card. ‘I would like to speak with Dr. Lanyon.’
He made no motion to accept the card. ‘Dr. Lanyon is very ill. He can see no-one.’ The door began to close. I borrowed a leaf from Holmes’s book and inserted my foot behind the threshold. The heavy door nearly crushed it. I bit my lip to keep from crying out.
‘I think that he will see me.’ Somehow I managed to keep the strain from my voice. ‘It is about Dr. Jekyll. More specifically, it is about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’
It was a moment before the butler responded. ‘Wait here, please.’ He began again to close the door, paused and glanced meaningfully downwards. I withdrew my foot. The door slid into its casing with a reverberating boom.
I took advantage of the time left me to sit upon the top step and massage my injured appendage, and was thus engaged when the door opened again. I scrambled to my feet.
The manservant’s features were as blank as before. ‘Dr. Lanyon will see you now.’ He stepped aside.
I was led down a shallow corridor lined somewhat incongruously with handsome modern water-colours — hung there, no doubt, to remove patients’ fears that the physician’s methods of healing were anything but up to the moment — and ushered into a comfortable consulting-room in which efficient medicine was much in evidence: leather-bound medical journals jammed the bookshelves and a new-looking microscope reposed unobtrusively surrounded by glass slides upon a deal table near the door, whilst an oaken filing-cabinet with drawers labelled alphabetically stood at the rear of the room. The top drawer was open, and what looked to have been its contents — a dozen or so manila folders crammed with papers — were heaped high atop a modest desk before the cabinet. These were the only details which I was able to make out, however, for no lamp was burning and the only illumination in the room, aside from that provided by the flames in a huge old fireplace at the other end, was that sunlight which filtered through the heavily-curtained window, leaving the corners in shadow.
A man who had been seated in a stuffy leather armchair in one of these corners rose unsteadily at my entrance and stood there swaying. He made no attempt to shake hands and so I did not offer mine. His features were indiscernible in the gloom.
‘Is there any reason why I should know you, Dr. Watson?’ he asked in a dissipated voice. There was in his speech a minute quaver, as one sometimes detects in that of an old man for whom death is approaching.
‘None whatsoever,’ I responded. ‘We do not travel in the same circles.’
‘And yet it would seem that we have a mutual acquaintance in Henry Jekyll.’
He nearly spat the last two words. Now I became aware of an undercurrent of bitterness which seemed to be the only strength he had left. He shambled towards the centre of the room, and as he did so a bar of pale light from the window fell across his features.
Death is hardly novel to one of my experience, and yet I think that I have never been in the presence of a man upon whom it was more clearly written than it was on Hastie Lanyon. He was balding, but in a manner which suggested some sudden malady rather than the systematic ravages of age, large patches of pink scalp showing here and there amidst the white. His hazel eyes were clouded and sunken, his complexion pasty-white, his full jowls, which may once have been cherubic but of recent years had taken on a bulldog tenacity indicative of a cantankerous old age, now slack and glistening with a most unhealthy sheen. Purple circles beneath his eyes told of too many nights spent without sleep, hollow cheeks of too many days without sufficient food. Utterson had been no less than correct when he predicted that his old friend would not survive the winter, but my trained eye foretold that he would be fortunate even to see March.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ said he, watching me from the canyonesque recesses of his sockets. ‘I have no illusions about it; the rest of my life is waiting for me within the next fortnight. I am even now in the midst of updating my patients’ records for the physician whom I have chosen to inherit my practice.’ He nodded towards the pile of folders upon his desk. ‘Which is why I scarcely have time to wait for you to state your business in anything but a direct manner.’
‘May we sit down?’
Standing for him was too painful to allow argument. With a quaking hand he waved me into a curved armchair near his leather one and resumed his own seat, collapsing into it as if the very effort of retracing those few steps had been too much for him.
‘I represent Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective,’ I began. ‘He has been engaged by the authorities to investigate the murder three months ago of Sir Danvers Carew. It hardly matters in what fashion the trail has led us to Dr. Jekyll; suffice it to say that it has. I understand that you and Jekyll are old friends.’
Something akin to normal colouring may have stained his pale cheeks just then, but I could not be sure, so dark was the corner in which we sat. My host had made no effort to light a lamp. ‘Anything Henry Jekyll and I shared which might have been called friendship exists no longer. I consider him as dead.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘You may ask, but you will receive no answer.’
I approached it from a different angle. ‘What of your friendship? When did you first meet?’
‘More years ago than I care or have energy to remember. We graduated from the University of Edinburgh in the same year. Black year that, which released Henry Jekyll upon the world!’ His voice shook with rage and weakness. I became alarmed for his life.
‘Calm yourself,’ said I. ‘I understand that differences arose between you and Jekyll something over a decade ago. What caused the breach?’
He hesitated before answering. Then, casually: ‘Oh, you know, a clash of opinions over some scientific subject. I hardly remember what it was all about. I take it that you are a medical man yourself, and understand how jealously each of us clings to his pet theories.’
‘It would appear so, to have caused you to avoid each other’s company for ten years.’
He made no response. I pushed onwards.
‘What is Jekyll’s attitude towards you?’
‘I do not know and hardly care.’
‘I know that you dined at Jekyll’s the evening of the eighth. What has happened since then to cool your feelings towards him?’
For a moment his eyes widened in surprise. Presently, however, he resumed his listless attitude. ‘Utterson, of course. He was there. He told you we dined. At first I thought that you had done something extraordinary.’
‘You have not answered my question.’
‘Can you not see, Doctor, that I do not wish to talk about this dead man?’
‘Then why did you agree to see me?’
‘I thought perhaps that you had settled the question of the relationship of Henry Jekyll to Edward Hyde, in which case I was prepared to help you lay the matter to rest by supplying you with whatever information I could. I see now that you know rather less than I do.’
I leant forward, my heart pounding. ‘Meaning that you know something which we do not?’
His expression told me that he regretted having said as much as he had. His jaw tightened. ‘That was a figure of speech. I know nothing which can help you.’
‘I do not believe you,’ said I. ‘How did you know about Edward Hyde?’
‘You told me, of course.’
‘I told your butler that I had come to see you about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I did not mention his Christian name.’ I stared at him, seeking to duplicate my friend’s piercing glare.
He smiled, weakly and without enthusiasm. ‘You cannot trap an honest man, Doctor. The name of Edward Hyde and the details of the Carew murder have been linked for months in the press. Besides, I seem to recall Utterson having asked me about him something over a year ago.’
‘I congratulate you upon your remarkable memory.’
He made no response.
‘You know far more than you are telling,’ said I. ‘I am bound to say that it will go hard with you if it comes out later that you were involved in this affair and did not come forward.’
‘What care I? By the middle of February I shall be a corpse. What will the law do then, dig me up and place me in the dock?’ He paused. His gaunt face softened. ‘You seek the truth, Doctor; in that I sympathise with you. I can only tell you that there are laws by which a man must live lest he descend into a world where wrong is right and evil is good, a mad world which no man may enter and still call himself a man. Jekyll has broken those laws; he has entered that world. Do not seek to follow him. If you do, it will mean your ruin as well.’
For a period we sat thus, our gazes locked. The crackle of the fire and the staccato ticking of the clock atop the mantelpiece were the only sounds in the room. Finally I placed my hands upon the arms of the chair in which I sat.
‘Those are your last words upon the subject?’
He nodded, a feeble movement barely discernible in the gloom. I rose.
‘Ring for the butler,’ said he, indicating the bell cord which hung about the desk. ‘He will show you out.’
‘That won’t be necessary. Since you have brought him up, however, I must say that he is an odd sort of manservant for a man in your position to have.’
‘He is more than a manservant; he is my bodyguard.’
‘I imagined as much. Do you fear for your life this late in the game?’
‘Hardly. But there is a certain visitor whom I would rather not have beneath this roof. Gregory — that is the butler — sees to that.’
‘Hyde?’
He looked up at me. For a brief moment his eyes cleared, the firelight glinting off the pupils. ‘Good day, Dr. Watson,’ said he.
I bowed stiffly and left him alone to die.
Walking along Harley Street afterwards, I took little notice of the fact that it had begun again to snow, or that the wind had increased and was blowing the razor-sharp flakes into my face, brooding as I was over the conversation in which I had just taken part. What scanty information Lanyon had supplied was enigmatic and beyond my power to attach either rhyme or reason to it. What had he meant when he said that Jekyll had entered ‘a mad world which no man may enter and still call himself a man’? Was he saying that Jekyll had gone mad? If so, why had he not told me that in as many words? And why had he turned his back upon his old friend at the very time when it seemed Jekyll needed him most? Finally, what was the shock which he’d told Utterson was the reason for his rapid decline? My thoughts made little headway, as if the bitter cold had numbed my brain as well as my hands and face. So caught up was I in this reverie that I was nearly run down when I wandered off the kerb and a hansom swept past within a few inches of my left shoulder, plucking off my hat in the wind of its passage.
I glanced up in alarm and found myself staring into the face of the vehicle’s single occupant, who had thrust his head out to see what fool had come so close to losing his life through his own clumsiness. A thrill went up my spine at the sight of the narrow, wolfish features crowded into the center of the huge head beneath the brim of the passenger’s top hat. An instant later it was gone, pulled back into the hansom as abruptly as a tortoise withdrawing into its protective shell. Immediately the horse stepped up its pace and the cab receded into the swirling veil of snow. But it had not been swift enough to prevent the sudden rush of loathing which overcame me the instant our eyes met. There was but one man in all of England who could spark that strange reaction, and he had not been heard from since the night he brutally murdered Sir Danvers Carew.