Earlier this week I went to a training session on the new Tone of Voice given by our writing consultants called, imaginatively, The Writer. It was an informative and fun session with lots of opportunity to practice what we learnt as we went along.
Our first task was to try and complete Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All nine attempts and the original where then read out and we all had to try and guess which one was the real one. I was very pleased that four people thought that mine was the genuine article! Do you think that you would have been fooled too?
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like spite.
And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever re-indue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself.
I do not know how long it has been since I last wrote in this journal, nor what has happened betwixt times. Hyde came. His passion and violence is all around me in torn clothes suffused with cold dark blood and in the smells and colours of ladies. And now a knock at the door. My next chapter begins.
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