PARTISAN REVIEW
599
Utterson's heavy veined neck.
"You know," Hyde sneers. "Violence. V-I-O-L-"
"I know how it's spelled," groans Jekyll. He feels a painful contraction
around the heart.
"What
violence?"
"Well.. . ." Hyde pauses, giving a theatrical (or a gorilla's) imitation of
someone thinking. "You're not up to offing Utterson, we got that. Right? So . ..
so, how about something easy for a start? Like burning down the Institute. You
could always hope that nobody'll get killed."
"You think I'm capable of that?"
"You could try." Hyde has stopped moving, and
IS
picking his nose.
"Maybe you could get someone to help you."
"I don't need any help."
"You don't, huh? That's not how you were coming on last night."
Jekyll, who wants to leave, is standing near the hook where his co<l:t is
hanging.
"Suppose," Hyde mutters, borne up by a new current of energy, "suppose
I tell you someone's already planning to trash the Institute."
"Are you telling me?"
"You don't believe me." Hyde's face flushes .
"I might, if you explain how you know about it."
"I can't reveal my sources." Hyde clears his throat and spits on the floor.
"But I'll tell you when. This month, the night of October 16th."
Is it envy or terror that Jekyll is feeling? "Are you ... going to tell
Utterson?"
Hyde doesn't answer. He is prancing aound his bicycle.
"You've got to!"
"Why?" rages Hyde. "He's telepathic and clairvoyant and all that, ain't he?
Let the creep figure it out for himself."
Jekyll doesn't have a reply for this. But who isn't clairvoyant and tele–
pathic? Is seemed like a cheap trick. Don't we all inhabit the same space? Jekyll
is thinking about crime. He is thinking about Utterson.
A quotation from Utterson: "When the devil has been caged too long, he
comes out roaring." Jekyll has the feeling that something is coming to him from
the patches of blue in the cloudy sky he sees through the broken windowpane,
from the sounds, the smells, the temperature outside-something that he is
trying to keep away. Then he abandons himself; a voice whispers over and
over: "Free, free, freel"
There is a scene that Jekyll once witnessed, which goes like this. An aged
man with white hair is walking along Riverside Drive late one summer evening
and another man, young, very small, is coming toward him.When they get near
each other, the old man nods with stately, unfashionable politeness, and stops.
