PARTISAN REVIEW
547
and the final denouement of Utterson's digestive dramas. All that
Poole could truthfully testify to-from the evidence of each morning's
disorder, its variety, its thickness-is that almost any human activity
could have taken place there the night before.
Utterson is being served eggs, steak, and coffee on a tray. Some–
one is lying next to Utterson, buried under the mountain of blankets
and befouled sheets, but Poole can't make out who it is. Well-trained,
he is not guessing. The boy goes into the dressing-room and surveys
the walls to see if he'll need a step-ladder this morning to clean them
off. Meanwhile, Jekyll gets out of bed delicately so as not to wake his
wife, tiptoes across their bedroom, and goes through the apartment to
the kitchen to start making breakfast. He is not walking barefoot for
fear of disturbing Utterson in Oyster Bay, who's already awake any–
way, gulping his coffee directly from the battered old thermos bottle,
but because he, Jekyll, revels in the feel of the deep pile carpet under
his feet.
Sweating, white-lipped, Jekyll is jogging in Central Park. It's just
twilight. As in some city in a nightmare, a thin clay-colored pall lowers
over the trees, but the wind is continually slicing into and redistribut–
ing the smog, so that Jekyll runs metronomically through many de–
grees and hues of twilight, some black, some dark green, some
reddish-brown, all back lit by the cubes of electric brightness multiply–
ing minute by minute in the stolid ramparts along Fifth Avenue.
Jekyll continues, parallelling the Reservoir. The gravel sounds under
his sneakers, and it would be foolish to think that someone is follow–
ing him; other people jog in the park, too. Jekyll has never succumbed
to
the paranoia epidemic in New York for decades. It's in the park
that Hyde used to lurk, preying on strollers, crazies, baby nurses, and
joggers. ButJekyll will stroll or jog here at any hour. He is not afraid.
Ultimately, Jekyll has learned, one is only afraid of oneself. He has
mastered the terror of Hyde, he has mastered himself. In Jekyll's
schedule, as in the normal schedule of any alert city dwellers, there
are always slots for danger. Jekyll keeps jogging. Then the Voice
speaks to him.
Is this a voice in my mind, Jekyll asks himself.
Once there were other voices which came and accused him, but
Jekyll had decided-after a complex procedure in which he de–
manded that each voice accredit itself-that all these voices were in-
