The Gentleman Doctor

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THE GENTLEMAN DOCTOR
By DragonWolf

Chapter II
Honor and Virtue

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That Henry possessed a singularly great intellect was apparent from a young age. He went away to school at Cambridge when he was not yet seventeen years old. This was young to be accepted by such an establishment, but he so impressed the school authorities that they consented to his early admission.

The Cambridge years were some of the best in all his life. There, he discovered there was great value in his bookishness and scholarly dedication. The course load he shouldered was immense, but he remained undaunted, setting about his studies with an eager fire. He swiftly mastered all forms of mathematics, from algebra to geometry to calculus. Languages, too, absorbed him; he took courses in tongues both modern and ancient, attaining fluency in French, Greek, and Latin, as well as studied the marvelous intricacies of English. The sciences, though, were his true passion. Biology, physics, and chemistry fascinated him, and he took course after course in their fields. That which he did not study formally he read extensively of in books, granting him additional expertise in botany, astronomy, geology, and others. In his every course of study he excelled, and he continued to all the way through medical school.

His training in medicine brought out strengths in him like he’d never had before. He discovered to his joy that he possessed a singular aptitude for surgical operation. Far from being clumsy, there was a strength and surety in his hands when it came to the work of surgery. That, paired with his seemingly limitless capacity to learn, bespoke a great deal of promise in the world of medicine.

He graduated from Cambridge summa cum laude. He was twenty-six years old, with a doctoral degree and a bright future ahead of him. He found the practice of medicine suited him. He enjoyed ministering to the sick and the suffering. With his learned expertise, his steady hand, and his compassionate manner, he gained great renown as a good and trustworthy doctor. How often he was told that he should be very proud.

Upon the death of his mother and father, he became the new head of the household and the master of his ancestral home. Even after he completed his formal education, he remained dedicated to the search for knowledge and truth. He converted an old storeroom into a laboratory in which to conduct his experiments. He could spend hours in his sanctuary of science, engrossed in his research and the study of medicine. He dabbled in sciences of all sorts, of which chemistry was his special interest. He even took up some strenuous physical activities; there was strength now in his slim form, muscle in his chest and abdomen. He was flawlessly well-read, tearing through scientific texts and the works of classical authors with equal relish. He kept a fine large library that was the envy of his circle. He was also a great lover of music, and showed considerable talent at playing the cello. And analytical thinker that he was, no one could ever best him at chess.

People all across London knew the name of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., et cetera, et cetera. All that made his acquaintance came away with a feeling of esteem for the good gentleman doctor.

“Doctor Henry Jekyll,” he would introduce himself. “At your service.”

He rose to prominence in the high society of London, building a reputation on the good name of his family and the image he put forth. Through his inheritance and his thriving medical practice, he was worth over a quarter of a million sterling. He dressed well, kept in strong form, and cultivated a fine taste for wine and art. He became well-known for his philanthropic acts as well, and gave generously to charitable causes. He was respected by all who knew him, and by none more than those to whom he was closest. His butler Poole, who’d served his family as a gentleman’s gentleman for twenty years, spoke nothing but praise for the doctor’s honor and virtue. Doctor Henry Jekyll was a man well-liked, universally well-thought of.

It was all a lie.

They spoke of honor, they spoke of virtue. Jekyll knew in his heart he had none of these. There was no virtue left in him. Virtue was a lie.

A lie it may have been, but one he struggled desperately to maintain in front of his friends. They were good men, the best society had to offer, and their esteem was desperately important to him, especially that of his old friend the lawyer, Gabriel Utterson.

He’d watched Utterson in envy, for his friend’s easy devotion to the right and good. Gabriel was a stern, severe man, perhaps appearing somewhat on the tedious side, but not so to those who knew him well. To Henry he was the very soul of the gentleman. Utterson’s friends, to whom he was unfailingly devoted, took special pleasure in his quiet, intelligent company. Perhaps most admirable of all, the lawyer was a man who passed no judgments; to those in troubled straits he would offer help and loyalty, rather than condemnation and rebuke. If there was any man Henry could take into his confidence, it would be him, but the doctor could not bring himself to speak. He trusted Utterson more than any— more than even he trusted himself —but it was because of the man’s great character that he was too ashamed to tell of the wrongs in his own.

Gabriel once said to him that all men have done deeds of which they are not proud, but there was hardly a sin committed to darken that man’s conscience. Had the lawyer overindulged in drink once, or tossed dice in a tavern, or some other token folly of youth? Such things were venial, pardonable, even insignificant by comparison to the darkness in Jekyll’s soul.

Gabriel thought he knew him. He was aware of Henry’s youthful indiscretions, as his friend called them, insomuch that Henry had done things of which he was ashamed. But being the true gentleman Utterson was, he did not press for any more than that.

What Utterson did not know was that those indiscretions had continued from youth into adulthood. He kept this from all his friends, from all the world.

Often he would listen to the way men of his circle would speak of the city. They thought the society of London to be the premier and best of all the civilizations of the world. Theirs was the highest standard of behavior and propriety, theirs were the greatest of art and learning, theirs was the triumph of virtue over vice. Theirs was all that was purely admirable.

Henry knew better. Oh, how he knew.

He had been twenty-four when the dam of his reserve broke, and the flood unleashed had first swept him to the darkness.

Those respectable gentlemen who spoke so highly of their city had not seen so much of it as Henry had. They knew only the centers of class and taste. But there were other places in London, places where God’s light never seemed to touch. Unclean places, destitute and disease-ridden. Hideous deeds were committed there every day, crimes that no one would ever hear of, that no one even knew occurred. There was where society’s damned suffered in their living Hell.

There, he would cast off the name and the respectable image of Doctor Henry Jekyll. He planned his excursions with as painstaking care as he took in the performing of surgery. Henry kept to himself a great deal, often in his laboratory where no one would see him for hours on end. The servants would pay it little mind when the master of the house wasn’t right around. They would think he was simply shut up working in his laboratory and did not wish to be disturbed. It would go unnoticed if he disappeared for a few hours, leaving through the door that lead out into a darker side of the street.

He usually devised some errand that needed to be run, some reason for his going out. Perhaps it would be a visit to a museum or to the symphony, or to attend on a patient that lived some distance away. Sometimes it was nothing more elaborate than a simple evening stroll. Whatever his invented purpose, he made meticulously sure that no one would miss that he never actually arrived.

The next step was to disguise any aspects that might identify him as Henry Jekyll. He was known to be very well-dressed, so it would not do to be seen in those dark places attired like a gentleman. Casting off the costume of the wealthy, respectable doctor, Henry dressed carefully down to disguise himself, and hid it all beneath a greatcoat until he reached his destination.

Even his method of departure was cautiously circumspect. Sometimes he would disappear in the dead of night, leaving always through the back door of the laboratory where no one would see him go. Many a time he did not dare to hire a cab, for fear that the driver might remember him later. In those cases, he kept to the shadows and walked.
And so the doctor plunged into London’s own working miniature of Sodom and Gomorrah. And there, he shed the image of the Henry Jekyll the world knew.

In his circle of friends, Jekyll was known to be a connoisseur of fine wines and a moderate, sensible drinker. Here, haunting dark, seamy taverns in the company of society’s dregs, he drowned his sorrows in strong, ghastly liquor until he no longer knew what he was drinking. With enough of it, it hardly mattered anyway. Its numbing strength kept from him all feeling— his pain, his fears, his pervasive self-loathing mercifully abandoned him. And in such a state, all thought for principle was entirely stripped away.

Henry Jekyll was known as a peaceful man, who righteously abhorred the crudity of violence, and valued his reason and dignity too highly to ever engage in it. The doctor was also thought of as a careful man, even to the point of nervous over-caution. Privately many people thought him a touch fainthearted. But when he was good and drunk, robbed of these sensibilities, he was ready to take on anyone. And so in those darkened, disreputable public houses, Henry would throw himself into fights that, if he were sober, would have sent him cowering.

In times of clear thought later, he could not for the life of him recall what would instigate them. All he knew was that something inside him was bent on violence. He would strike out like one possessed, driven by a nameless, directionless, half-realized anger. Of course he did not emerge from these brawls completely unscathed, but the injuries he sustained did not trouble him; truly, they were part of the reason he fought at all. He was a doctor; he understood physical pain, knew how to contend with it. Pain of body blocked out that of the heart. Alcohol and violence overbore the suffering he did not know how to deal with, and on the isolated occasion when they were not enough, he turned to opium.

To society’s view, Jekyll’s sensibilities as a physician kept him away from unhealthful things. Indeed, at first the smoky dens with their chemical-ravaged denizens would horrify him, so much he dared not enter. His every instinct as a doctor cried out against such an unwholesome practice, nor was sure he could handle it if he dared. While in general good health, his constitution was not strong, and faced assaults from his other excesses. But when it all became too much for him to bear, he cast these worries to the winds and accepted this only other deliverance.

Opium brought oblivion more absolute than any alcohol could. In the dreamy, all-encompassing dullness of the drug, there was room for neither honor nor shame, neither guilt nor exultation. Not for him were other deadly chemicals, such as cocaine and the like, for they brought on mad, sick energy while he wanted only the deadened emptiness of feeling. Opium granted him reprieve from even his sense of self. Never mind that it made him wrenchingly ill for days afterward, conjuring up formless chemical horrors from within his own mind, until the wicked substance worked out of his system. It pushed him beyond all thought into near-insensibility. And for him, insensibility was escape.

These were the things Jekyll did to escape, to handle his sadness and self-loathing. They brought the mercy of forgetfulness, of blessed dullness to pain. These, though, were not the doctor’s chief vice, the vice he despised himself for above all others.

That, of course, was women.

~~~

To be continued...