It will be recalled that I placed a piece of glass in my mouth before the strait-jacket was adjusted.  At midnight the glass was still there.  After the refusal of the night watch, I said to him:  “Then I want you to go to Doctor Jekyll” (I, of course, called him by his right name; but to do so now would be to prove myself as brutal as Mr. Hyde himself).  “Tell him to come here at once and loosen this jacket.  I can’t endure the torture much longer.  After fighting two years to regain my reason, I believe I’ll lose it again.  You have always treated me kindly.  For God’s sake, get the doctor!”

“I can’t leave the main building at this time,” the night watch said.  (Jekyll-Hyde lived in a house about one-eighth of a mile distant, but within the hospital grounds.)

“Then will you take a message to the assistant physician who stays here?” (A colleague of Jekyll-Hyde had apartments in the main building.)

“I’ll do that,” he replied.

“Tell him how I’m suffering.  Ask him to please come here at once and ease this strait-jacket.  If he doesn’t, I’ll be as crazy by morning as I ever was.  Also tell him I’ll kill myself unless he comes, and I can do it, too.  I have a piece of glass in this room and I know just what I’ll do with it.”

The night watch was as good as his word.  He afterwards told me that he had delivered my message.  The doctor ignored it.  He did not come near me that night, nor the next day, nor did Jekyll-Hyde appear until his usual round of inspection about eleven o’clock the next morning.

“I understand that you have a piece of glass which you threatened to use for a suicidal purpose last night,” he said, when he appeared.

“Yes, I have, and it’s not your fault or the other doctor’s that I am not dead.  Had I gone mad, in my frenzy I might have swallowed that glass.”

“Where is it?” asked the doctor, incredulously.

As my strait-jacket rendered me armless, I presented the glass to Jekyll-Hyde on the tip of a tongue he had often heard, but never before seen.

XVII

After fifteen interminable hours the strait-jacket was removed.  Whereas just prior to its putting on I had been in a vigorous enough condition to offer stout resistance when wantonly assaulted, now, on coming out of it, I was helpless.  When my arms were released from their constricted position, the pain was intense.  Every joint had been racked.  I had no control over the fingers of either hand, and could not have dressed myself had I been promised my freedom for doing so.

For more than the following week I suffered as already described, though of course with gradually decreasing intensity as my racked body became accustomed to the unnatural positions it was forced to take.  This first experience occurred on the night of October 18th, 1902.  I was subjected to the same unfair, unnecessary, and unscientific ordeal for twenty-one consecutive nights and parts of each of the corresponding twenty-one days.  On more than one occasion, indeed, the attendant placed me in the strait-jacket during the day for refusing to obey some trivial command.  This, too, without an explicit order from the doctor in charge, though perhaps he acted under a general order.