Adrian Voss's Statement of the Case

I was born to a large fortune, endowed with excellent parts, and fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow creatures. The worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, which I found hard to reconcile with my desire to wear a grave countenance before the public. Hence I concealed my pleasures, and stood by the age of reflection already committed to a profound duplicity of life. It was the exacting nature of my aspirations that severed in me, deeper than in most men, the provinces of good and ill which divide and compound every human soul. And my scientific studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the transcendental, shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. From both sides of my intelligence I drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I saw that, of the two natures contending in my consciousness, I could be said to be either only because I was radically both. How, then, were they to be dissociated?

I hesitated long before I put the theory to the test of practice, for I knew I risked death. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame my alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture. I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew to be the last ingredient required. And late one accursed night I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded. My teeth were driven together and I bit through my tongue and tasted blood. I went down on my knees beside the bench because the floor would not keep still under me, and was sick into the sink, and afterward I could not get my breath except in short pulls, as though the ribs had been laced tight. I tried to count my pulse at the wrist and lost the count twice. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something indescribably new in my sensations and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body, conscious of a heady recklessness and an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil. And the thought braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting, and in the act I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.

I must here speak by theory alone. The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good I had just deposed. Hence Marsh was smaller, slighter, and younger than Adrian Voss. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. And yet I went to the glass over the washstand and stood a long while at it. I found the brows first, heavier than mine and set lower, and then the mouth, which was wider and wet; I put up my hand and the hand in the glass went up too, and nothing in that face started at the touch of it. I leaned in until my breath clouded the surface and wiped it clear with my sleeve rather than step back and lose a moment of the sight, and I have not forgotten the hunger of that gesture. This, too, was myself. None could come near that semblance without a visible misgiving of the flesh. All human beings are commingled out of good and evil. In that glass the evil had been drawn off by itself and left whole.

I lingered but a moment. It remained to be seen whether I had lost my identity beyond redemption. Hurrying back to my cabinet, I prepared and drank the cup again, suffered again the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the face of Adrian Voss. That night I had come to the fatal crossroads. The drug had no discriminating action; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition, and that which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered, my evil was alert and swift to seize the occasion, and the thing that was projected was Marsh.

Even at that time I had not conquered my aversion to the dryness of a life of study, and as my pleasures were undignified and I was growing toward the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily more unwelcome. I had but to drink the cup to doff at once the body of the noted founder and assume, like a thick cloak, that of Marsh. I made my preparations with studious care. I took and furnished the lodging in the lower ward, and engaged as its keeper a creature I knew to be silent and unscrupulous. I announced to my staff that a Mr. Marsh was to have full liberty about the house on Aldercote Square, and drew up the will to which Kessler so much objected. And when, by opening an account in his own name and sloping my hand backward, I had supplied my double with money and a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate. Think of it: I did not even exist. But in the hands of Marsh my pleasures soon began to turn toward the monstrous, for this familiar that I called out of my own soul was a being inherently malign and villainous. It was Marsh, after all, and Marsh alone, that was guilty.

Into the details of those months I will not follow him far. There was a supper room above a billiard hall in the lower ward, where the company drank from the bottle and I, in the body of Marsh, was the loudest among them; I came to myself next morning on the floor of the lodging with a cut across my knuckles and no memory of how it came there. There was a night in an alley when I held a woman by the arm while she counted out what she had, and let her go when she had finished, and laughed all the way back to the square. There was a brindled dog he took on a length of rope to a pawnbroker on Baxter Court and left at a hook beside the door; the man cut it down after and buried it behind the shop. I met with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against me the anger of a passerby whom I recognized the other day in the person of your kinsman. The doctor and the child's family joined him, and at last, to pacify their too just resentment, Marsh had to bring them to the door and pay them with a check drawn in the name of Adrian Voss.

Some two months before the murder of Congressman Whitfield I woke the next day in bed with odd sensations. Something kept insisting that I had not wakened where I seemed to be but in the lodging in the lower ward where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Marsh. And then my eyes fell upon my hand. The hand of Adrian Voss was large, firm, white, and comely. But the hand I now saw was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor, and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Marsh.

I must have stared for near half a minute before terror woke in my breast like the crash of cymbals. Yes, I had gone to bed Adrian Voss; I had awakened Marsh, without the drug. How was this to be remedied? My drugs were in the cabinet, a long journey across the court from where I stood. Then it came back to me that the staff were already used to the coming and going of my second self by the stair of the old annex. I put on the clothes of Marsh, which I had not destroyed, and they hung on me as they always hung. The court was the whole of the danger, and I crossed it with my collar up and my chin down, and I did not look at the cook, who stood with her back to me at the range. A van was turning in the yard and I waited with its step between me and the house until it had gone on. The stair took me thirty seconds. In the cabinet I locked the door behind me before I went to the drawer, and I weighed the powder with my hands shaking so that some of it went down on the table, and drank it off, and the pangs took me with my arms on the bench and my teeth on my own wrist. When they let go I was Adrian Voss, and I went down and sat ten minutes at the table with a cup in front of me and made a feint of breakfasting.

This reversal seemed to be spelling out the letters of my judgment. I began to spy a danger that the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown and the character of Marsh become irrevocably mine. The power of the drug had not always been equally displayed; since the first experiment I had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount. I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self.

Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. To cast in my lot with Voss was to die to the appetites I had long indulged. To cast it in with Marsh was to die to a thousand interests and become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it, for I neither gave up the lodging nor destroyed his clothes. For two months I was true to my determination. But time began to obliterate the freshness of my alarm. Then, on a night of rain in the third month, I woke at one with the taste of the stuff in my mouth, lay an hour without moving, and then rose and went down in my dressing gown to the cabinet. The key of the locked drawer was where I had left it, and I stood with it in my hand so long that the candle burned down an inch before I turned it. I weighed the powder twice, and the second time my hand shook so that the pan rang against the bench, and I set it down and poured the tincture with the other hand. I drank it standing, the way a man takes a medicine he does not mean to finish.

My devil had been long caged. He came out roaring. I declare, at least, before God, that no man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation. The packet was mine. Whitfield had called at the institute that afternoon about the federal grant; he was to see you the next morning, and before he left I sealed the papers myself and wrote your name across the front in my own hand, so that whatever he carried into your office would have gone through me first. He asked me whether the grant could be accounted for, and he asked it civilly, in my own hall, with the envelope under his arm. That was the provocation, and that was all of it. The envelope was still on him when the police came, and it was carried to your office the next morning; that was no part of anything I had arranged. I swung the stick at the side of his head and he went down on one knee with a sound I took at first for courtesy. I hit him again across the shoulder, and the wood shuddered in my hand. He put up an arm and the arm gave, and I heard it give. Then I was on him on the cobbles, driving the stick down with both hands as though I were driving a post, and every time it landed the shock came up through my palms into my arms and I did not want it to stop. It was the wood that stopped me: a crack ran up my wrists and half the stick went spinning off the stones into the gutter. I stood over him with the splintered end in my fist and my breath going like a bellows, and only then, with the lane quiet again, was I struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. I saw my life to be forfeit, and fled, at once glorying and trembling. Marsh had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draught. The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him before Adrian Voss, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. As the remorse died away it was succeeded by a sense of joy. Marsh was thenceforth impossible. With what sincere renunciation I locked the door by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under my heel!

The next day came the news that the victim was a man high in public estimation. Voss was now my city of refuge. I resolved to redeem the past, and my resolve was fruitful of some good: in the last months of the last year I labored to relieve suffering, and the days passed quietly, almost happily. But as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me began to growl for license. It was in my own person that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience, and The fall, when it came, was a small thing: a woman left standing in a hall. The widow of one of my patients came twice to the house about a bequest; she was a slight woman in a good coat gone shiny at the cuffs, and I left her in the hall while I turned over papers I had no need of, and watched her look up the staircase. That night I wrote to her at her lodgings. I wrote that a codicil had come to light, that the bequest would go hard with her if the papers were read in the wrong order, and that she was to bring them to the house in the evening, alone, after the staff had gone. I signed it in my own hand and sent it by a messenger paid to say nothing. She did not come, and I never knew whether she had read it.

There comes an end to all things, and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. It was a fine, clear, January day, and the Public Garden was full of winter chirpings. I sat in the sun on a bench, the animal within me licking the chops of memory, the spiritual side a little drowsed. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. I looked down. My clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs. The hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Marsh, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows.

Thereupon I arranged my clothes as best I could, remembering that of my original character one part remained to me: I could write my own hand. I drove to a hotel on Portland Street, where the attendants led me to a private room and brought me wherewithal to write. Marsh in danger of his life was a creature new to me, shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder. Yet the creature was astute. He composed his two important letters, one to Reyes and one to Doyle, and dispatched them with directions that they should be registered. And thence, when the night was fully come, he took a closed cab at the rank by the hotel and gave the driver a street, and then, a block short of it, another. He rode with his knees drawn up and his hat low, and when the lamps came along he turned his face to the far window. Twice he knocked on the glass and had the man pull up at a corner where there was nothing to stop for, and twice he sat on with the door shut and told him to go on. At the bridge he made them turn back. At the Public Garden he put his hand to the door and did not open it. He paid at last out of money I had counted that morning, and was set down where he had started, and stood on the pavement watching the tail light go away from him. He, I say. I cannot say, I. That child of hell had nothing human.

I was stepping across the court after breakfast when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change, and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet before I was once more raging and freezing with the passions of Marsh. It took a double dose to recall me to myself, and alas, six hours after, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be administered again. In short, from that day forth it seemed only under the immediate stimulation of the drug that I was able to wear the countenance of Voss. Above all, if I slept, it was always as Marsh that I awakened. But when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition, for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked, into a soul boiling with causeless hatreds and a body not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Marsh seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Voss, and the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. Voss thought of Marsh as of something not only hellish but inorganic: what was dead and had no shape should usurp the offices of life. The insurgent horror lay caged in his flesh, and at every hour of weakness it prevailed against him and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Marsh for Voss was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling blasphemies in my own hand on the pages of my books, burning my letters, destroying the portrait of my father.

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description. My punishment might have gone on for years but for the last calamity which has now fallen and has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught. The ebullition followed, and the first change of color, not the second. I set the glass down on the bench and counted a hundred, listening for the ache to begin. The room stayed the room: the ring the beaker had left on the bench, the empty scale pan, the winter light off the wall of the Public Garden. I drank the rest where it stood, gone cold, and waited again with my hand flat on the bench, and nothing came. There was no heat in the belly, and the ache that had always begun in the long bones did not begin. My hands lay on the bench in front of me and stayed my own. And I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.

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 Adrian Voss can think his own thoughts or see his own face in the glass. Nor must I delay too long, for should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Marsh will tear it in pieces. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed and crushed him. He came out of his shell for the last time at four in the afternoon and took the stair down to the street. Of that hour I will give you what he did with it and no more. There was a child in a red coat at the crossing by the school, holding its mother's hand and then not holding it. He went across and took it by the arm. The mother had the child back and was down on the white paint with it, screaming, and he was already twenty paces on at his ordinary walk. A shoe lay on the crossing where the child had been standing. He did not look behind him. Half an hour later he put up his hand for a cab and gave an address he had no intention of reaching, and when it stopped at the corner he named he was out of the door and gone before the driver could get the flag down. The driver left his seat and followed on foot as far as the next street, and came back to the cab standing open in the roadway with the meter turning. No child was reported missing that night. I have read every paper since for one. Then the terror of the hunt drove him back here to die. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or pace up and down this room, my last earthly refuge, giving ear to every sound of menace. Will Marsh 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 have considered long whether the man who stood trial could be called me, and I have concluded he could not, for the one who would sit in the dock would be Marsh, and Marsh has no answers that any court would credit and no face that any witness would forgive. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of Adrian Voss to an end.