Adicionado Mais Capitulos em arquivos tex individuais.
This commit is contained in:
Gustavo Henrique Santos Souza de Miranda
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chapters/*.aux
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chapters/*.fls
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chapters/*.toc
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Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike
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and abhorrence for this infamous experiment of Moreau’s. My one idea
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was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image,
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back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men. My
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fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume
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idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory. My first friendship with
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Montgomery did not increase. His long separation from humanity, his
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secret vice of drunkenness, his evident sympathy with the Beast People,
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tainted him to me. Several times I let him go alone among them. I
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avoided intercourse with them in every possible way. I spent an
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increasing proportion of my time upon the beach, looking for some
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liberating sail that never appeared,—until one day there fell upon us
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an appalling disaster, which put an altogether different aspect upon my
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strange surroundings.
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It was about seven or eight weeks after my landing,—rather more, I
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think, though I had not troubled to keep account of the time,—when this
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catastrophe occurred. It happened in the early morning—I should think
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about six. I had risen and breakfasted early, having been aroused by
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the noise of three Beast Men carrying wood into the enclosure.
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After breakfast I went to the open gateway of the enclosure, and stood
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there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the freshness of the early
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morning. Moreau presently came round the corner of the enclosure and
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greeted me. He passed by me, and I heard him behind me unlock and enter
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his laboratory. So indurated was I at that time to the abomination of
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the place, that I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim
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begin another day of torture. It met its persecutor with a shriek,
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almost exactly like that of an angry virago.
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Then suddenly something happened,—I do not know what, to this day. I
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heard a short, sharp cry behind me, a fall, and turning saw an awful
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face rushing upon me,—not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed
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with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, and the
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lidless eyes ablaze. I threw up my arm to defend myself from the blow
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that flung me headlong with a broken forearm; and the great monster,
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swathed in lint and with red-stained bandages fluttering about it,
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leapt over me and passed. I rolled over and over down the beach, tried
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to sit up, and collapsed upon my broken arm. Then Moreau appeared, his
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massive white face all the more terrible for the blood that trickled
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from his forehead. He carried a revolver in one hand. He scarcely
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glanced at me, but rushed off at once in pursuit of the puma.
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I tried the other arm and sat up. The muffled figure in front ran in
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great striding leaps along the beach, and Moreau followed her. She
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turned her head and saw him, then doubling abruptly made for the
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bushes. She gained upon him at every stride. I saw her plunge into
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them, and Moreau, running slantingly to intercept her, fired and missed
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as she disappeared. Then he too vanished in the green confusion. I
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stared after them, and then the pain in my arm flamed up, and with a
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groan I staggered to my feet. Montgomery appeared in the doorway,
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dressed, and with his revolver in his hand.
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“Great God, Prendick!” he said, not noticing that I was hurt, “that
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brute’s loose! Tore the fetter out of the wall! Have you seen them?”
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Then sharply, seeing I gripped my arm, “What’s the matter?”
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“I was standing in the doorway,” said I.
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He came forward and took my arm. “Blood on the sleeve,” said he, and
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rolled back the flannel. He pocketed his weapon, felt my arm about
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painfully, and led me inside. “Your arm is broken,” he said, and then,
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“Tell me exactly how it happened—what happened?”
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I told him what I had seen; told him in broken sentences, with gasps of
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pain between them, and very dexterously and swiftly he bound my arm
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meanwhile. He slung it from my shoulder, stood back and looked at me.
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“You’ll do,” he said. “And now?”
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He thought. Then he went out and locked the gates of the enclosure. He
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was absent some time.
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I was chiefly concerned about my arm. The incident seemed merely one
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more of many horrible things. I sat down in the deck chair, and I must
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admit swore heartily at the island. The first dull feeling of injury in
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my arm had already given way to a burning pain when Montgomery
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reappeared. His face was rather pale, and he showed more of his lower
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gums than ever.
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“I can neither see nor hear anything of him,” he said. “I’ve been
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thinking he may want my help.” He stared at me with his expressionless
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eyes. “That was a strong brute,” he said. “It simply wrenched its
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fetter out of the wall.” He went to the window, then to the door, and
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there turned to me. “I shall go after him,” he said. “There’s another
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revolver I can leave with you. To tell you the truth, I feel anxious
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somehow.”
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He obtained the weapon, and put it ready to my hand on the table; then
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went out, leaving a restless contagion in the air. I did not sit long
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after he left, but took the revolver in hand and went to the doorway.
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The morning was as still as death. Not a whisper of wind was stirring;
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the sea was like polished glass, the sky empty, the beach desolate. In
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my half-excited, half-feverish state, this stillness of things
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oppressed me. I tried to whistle, and the tune died away. I swore
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again,—the second time that morning. Then I went to the corner of the
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enclosure and stared inland at the green bush that had swallowed up
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Moreau and Montgomery. When would they return, and how? Then far away
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up the beach a little grey Beast Man appeared, ran down to the water’s
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edge and began splashing about. I strolled back to the doorway, then to
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the corner again, and so began pacing to and fro like a sentinel upon
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duty. Once I was arrested by the distant voice of Montgomery bawling,
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“Coo-ee—Moreau!” My arm became less painful, but very hot. I got
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feverish and thirsty. My shadow grew shorter. I watched the distant
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figure until it went away again. Would Moreau and Montgomery never
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return? Three sea-birds began fighting for some stranded treasure.
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Then from far away behind the enclosure I heard a pistol-shot. A long
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silence, and then came another. Then a yelling cry nearer, and another
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dismal gap of silence. My unfortunate imagination set to work to
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torment me. Then suddenly a shot close by. I went to the corner,
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startled, and saw Montgomery,—his face scarlet, his hair disordered,
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and the knee of his trousers torn. His face expressed profound
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consternation. Behind him slouched the Beast Man, M’ling, and round
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M’ling’s jaws were some queer dark stains.
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“Has he come?” said Montgomery.
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“Moreau?” said I. “No.”
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“My God!” The man was panting, almost sobbing. “Go back in,” he said,
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taking my arm. “They’re mad. They’re all rushing about mad. What can
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have happened? I don’t know. I’ll tell you, when my breath comes.
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Where’s some brandy?”
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Montgomery limped before me into the room and sat down in the deck
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chair. M’ling flung himself down just outside the doorway and began
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panting like a dog. I got Montgomery some brandy-and-water. He sat
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staring in front of him at nothing, recovering his breath. After some
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minutes he began to tell me what had happened.
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He had followed their track for some way. It was plain enough at first
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on account of the crushed and broken bushes, white rags torn from the
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puma’s bandages, and occasional smears of blood on the leaves of the
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shrubs and undergrowth. He lost the track, however, on the stony ground
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beyond the stream where I had seen the Beast Man drinking, and went
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wandering aimlessly westward shouting Moreau’s name. Then M’ling had
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come to him carrying a light hatchet. M’ling had seen nothing of the
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puma affair; had been felling wood, and heard him calling. They went on
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shouting together. Two Beast Men came crouching and peering at them
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through the undergrowth, with gestures and a furtive carriage that
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alarmed Montgomery by their strangeness. He hailed them, and they fled
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guiltily. He stopped shouting after that, and after wandering some time
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farther in an undecided way, determined to visit the huts.
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He found the ravine deserted.
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Growing more alarmed every minute, he began to retrace his steps. Then
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it was he encountered the two Swine-men I had seen dancing on the night
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of my arrival; blood-stained they were about the mouth, and intensely
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excited. They came crashing through the ferns, and stopped with fierce
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faces when they saw him. He cracked his whip in some trepidation, and
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forthwith they rushed at him. Never before had a Beast Man dared to do
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that. One he shot through the head; M’ling flung himself upon the
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other, and the two rolled grappling. M’ling got his brute under and
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with his teeth in its throat, and Montgomery shot that too as it
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struggled in M’ling’s grip. He had some difficulty in inducing M’ling
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to come on with him. Thence they had hurried back to me. On the way,
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M’ling had suddenly rushed into a thicket and driven out an under-sized
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Ocelot-man, also blood-stained, and lame through a wound in the foot.
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This brute had run a little way and then turned savagely at bay, and
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Montgomery—with a certain wantonness, I thought—had shot him.
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“What does it all mean?” said I.
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He shook his head, and turned once more to the brandy.
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I faced these people, facing my fate in them, single-handed
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now,—literally single-handed, for I had a broken arm. In my pocket was
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a revolver with two empty chambers. Among the chips scattered about the
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beach lay the two axes that had been used to chop up the boats. The
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tide was creeping in behind me. There was nothing for it but courage. I
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looked squarely into the faces of the advancing monsters. They avoided
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my eyes, and their quivering nostrils investigated the bodies that lay
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beyond me on the beach. I took half-a-dozen steps, picked up the
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blood-stained whip that lay beneath the body of the Wolf-man, and
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cracked it. They stopped and stared at me.
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“Salute!” said I. “Bow down!”
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They hesitated. One bent his knees. I repeated my command, with my
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heart in my mouth, and advanced upon them. One knelt, then the other
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two.
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I turned and walked towards the dead bodies, keeping my face towards
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the three kneeling Beast Men, very much as an actor passing up the
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stage faces the audience.
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“They broke the Law,” said I, putting my foot on the Sayer of the Law.
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“They have been slain,—even the Sayer of the Law; even the Other with
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the Whip. Great is the Law! Come and see.”
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“None escape,” said one of them, advancing and peering.
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“None escape,” said I. “Therefore hear and do as I command.” They stood
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up, looking questioningly at one another.
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“Stand there,” said I.
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I picked up the hatchets and swung them by their heads from the sling
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of my arm; turned Montgomery over; picked up his revolver still loaded
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in two chambers, and bending down to rummage, found half-a-dozen
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cartridges in his pocket.
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“Take him,” said I, standing up again and pointing with the whip; “take
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him, and carry him out and cast him into the sea.”
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They came forward, evidently still afraid of Montgomery, but still more
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afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and
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hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly,
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carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling
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welter of the sea.
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“On!” said I, “on! Carry him far.”
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They went in up to their armpits and stood regarding me.
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“Let go,” said I; and the body of Montgomery vanished with a splash.
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Something seemed to tighten across my chest.
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“Good!” said I, with a break in my voice; and they came back, hurrying
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and fearful, to the margin of the water, leaving long wakes of black in
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the silver. At the water’s edge they stopped, turning and glaring into
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the sea as though they presently expected Montgomery to arise therefrom
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and exact vengeance.
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“Now these,” said I, pointing to the other bodies.
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They took care not to approach the place where they had thrown
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Montgomery into the water, but instead, carried the four dead Beast
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People slantingly along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards before
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they waded out and cast them away.
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As I watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M’ling, I heard a
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light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine
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perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes
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were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his
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side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes a
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little averted.
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For a moment we stood eye to eye. I dropped the whip and snatched at
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the pistol in my pocket; for I meant to kill this brute, the most
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formidable of any left now upon the island, at the first excuse. It may
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seem treacherous, but so I was resolved. I was far more afraid of him
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than of any other two of the Beast Folk. His continued life was I knew
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a threat against mine.
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I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself. Then cried I, “Salute!
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Bow down!”
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His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl. “Who are \emph{you} that I should—”
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Perhaps a little too spasmodically I drew my revolver, aimed quickly
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and fired. I heard him yelp, saw him run sideways and turn, knew I had
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missed, and clicked back the cock with my thumb for the next shot. But
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he was already running headlong, jumping from side to side, and I dared
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not risk another miss. Every now and then he looked back at me over his
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shoulder. He went slanting along the beach, and vanished beneath the
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driving masses of dense smoke that were still pouring out from the
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burning enclosure. For some time I stood staring after him. I turned to
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my three obedient Beast Folk again and signalled them to drop the body
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they still carried. Then I went back to the place by the fire where the
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bodies had fallen and kicked the sand until all the brown blood-stains
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were absorbed and hidden.
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I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the
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beach into the thickets. I carried my pistol in my hand, my whip thrust
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with the hatchets in the sling of my arm. I was anxious to be alone, to
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think out the position in which I was now placed. A dreadful thing that
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I was only beginning to realise was, that over all this island there
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was now no safe place where I could be alone and secure to rest or
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sleep. I had recovered strength amazingly since my landing, but I was
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still inclined to be nervous and to break down under any great stress.
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I felt that I ought to cross the island and establish myself with the
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Beast People, and make myself secure in their confidence. But my heart
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failed me. I went back to the beach, and turning eastward past the
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burning enclosure, made for a point where a shallow spit of coral sand
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ran out towards the reef. Here I could sit down and think, my back to
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the sea and my face against any surprise. And there I sat, chin on
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knees, the sun beating down upon my head and unspeakable dread in my
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mind, plotting how I could live on against the hour of my rescue (if
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ever rescue came). I tried to review the whole situation as calmly as I
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could, but it was difficult to clear the thing of emotion.
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I began turning over in my mind the reason of Montgomery’s despair.
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“They will change,” he said; “they are sure to change.” And Moreau,
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what was it that Moreau had said? “The stubborn beast-flesh grows day
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by day back again.” Then I came round to the Hyena-swine. I felt sure
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that if I did not kill that brute, he would kill me. The Sayer of the
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Law was dead: worse luck. They knew now that we of the Whips could be
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killed even as they themselves were killed. Were they peering at me
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already out of the green masses of ferns and palms over yonder,
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watching until I came within their spring? Were they plotting against
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me? What was the Hyena-swine telling them? My imagination was running
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away with me into a morass of unsubstantial fears.
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My thoughts were disturbed by a crying of sea-birds hurrying towards
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some black object that had been stranded by the waves on the beach near
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the enclosure. I knew what that object was, but I had not the heart to
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go back and drive them off. I began walking along the beach in the
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opposite direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the
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island and so approach the ravine of the huts, without traversing the
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possible ambuscades of the thickets.
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Perhaps half a mile along the beach I became aware of one of my three
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Beast Folk advancing out of the landward bushes towards me. I was now
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so nervous with my own imaginings that I immediately drew my revolver.
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Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me. He
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hesitated as he approached.
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“Go away!” cried I.
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There was something very suggestive of a dog in the cringing attitude
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of the creature. It retreated a little way, very like a dog being sent
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home, and stopped, looking at me imploringly with canine brown eyes.
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“Go away,” said I. “Do not come near me.”
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“May I not come near you?” it said.
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“No; go away,” I insisted, and snapped my whip. Then putting my whip in
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my teeth, I stooped for a stone, and with that threat drove the
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creature away.
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So in solitude I came round by the ravine of the Beast People, and
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hiding among the weeds and reeds that separated this crevice from the
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sea I watched such of them as appeared, trying to judge from their
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gestures and appearance how the death of Moreau and Montgomery and the
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destruction of the House of Pain had affected them. I know now the
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folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the
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dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might
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have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast
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People. As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a
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mere leader among my fellows.
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Towards noon certain of them came and squatted basking in the hot sand.
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The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread. I
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came out of the bushes, and, revolver in hand, walked down towards
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these seated figures. One, a Wolf-woman, turned her head and stared at
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me, and then the others. None attempted to rise or salute me. I felt
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too faint and weary to insist, and I let the moment pass.
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“I want food,” said I, almost apologetically, and drawing near.
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“There is food in the huts,” said an Ox-boar-man, drowsily, and looking
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away from me.
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I passed them, and went down into the shadow and odours of the almost
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deserted ravine. In an empty hut I feasted on some specked and
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half-decayed fruit; and then after I had propped some branches and
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sticks about the opening, and placed myself with my face towards it and
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my hand upon my revolver, the exhaustion of the last thirty hours
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claimed its own, and I fell into a light slumber, hoping that the
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flimsy barricade I had erected would cause sufficient noise in its
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removal to save me from surprise.
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I woke early. Moreau’s explanation stood before my mind, clear and
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definite, from the moment of my awakening. I got out of the hammock and
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went to the door to assure myself that the key was turned. Then I tried
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the window-bar, and found it firmly fixed. That these man-like
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creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque
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travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their
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possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.
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A tapping came at the door, and I heard the glutinous accents of M’ling
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speaking. I pocketed one of the revolvers (keeping one hand upon it),
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and opened to him.
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“Good-morning, sair,” he said, bringing in, in addition to the
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customary herb-breakfast, an ill-cooked rabbit. Montgomery followed
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him. His roving eye caught the position of my arm and he smiled askew.
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The puma was resting to heal that day; but Moreau, who was singularly
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solitary in his habits, did not join us. I talked with Montgomery to
|
||||
clear my ideas of the way in which the Beast Folk lived. In particular,
|
||||
I was urgent to know how these inhuman monsters were kept from falling
|
||||
upon Moreau and Montgomery and from rending one another. He explained
|
||||
to me that the comparative safety of Moreau and himself was due to the
|
||||
limited mental scope of these monsters. In spite of their increased
|
||||
intelligence and the tendency of their animal instincts to reawaken,
|
||||
they had certain fixed ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which
|
||||
absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised; had
|
||||
been told that certain things were impossible, and that certain things
|
||||
were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture
|
||||
of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute.
|
||||
|
||||
Certain matters, however, in which old instinct was at war with
|
||||
Moreau’s convenience, were in a less stable condition. A series of
|
||||
propositions called the Law (I had already heard them recited) battled
|
||||
in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their
|
||||
animal natures. This Law they were ever repeating, I found, and ever
|
||||
breaking. Both Montgomery and Moreau displayed particular solicitude to
|
||||
keep them ignorant of the taste of blood; they feared the inevitable
|
||||
suggestions of that flavour. Montgomery told me that the Law,
|
||||
especially among the feline Beast People, became oddly weakened about
|
||||
nightfall; that then the animal was at its strongest; that a spirit of
|
||||
adventure sprang up in them at the dusk, when they would dare things
|
||||
they never seemed to dream about by day. To that I owed my stalking by
|
||||
the Leopard-man, on the night of my arrival. But during these earlier
|
||||
days of my stay they broke the Law only furtively and after dark; in
|
||||
the daylight there was a general atmosphere of respect for its
|
||||
multifarious prohibitions.
|
||||
|
||||
And here perhaps I may give a few general facts about the island and
|
||||
the Beast People. The island, which was of irregular outline and lay
|
||||
low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose, of seven or eight
|
||||
square miles.\footnote{This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle.—C.
|
||||
E. P.} It was volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on
|
||||
three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles to the northward, and a hot
|
||||
spring, were the only vestiges of the forces that had long since
|
||||
originated it. Now and then a faint quiver of earthquake would be
|
||||
sensible, and sometimes the ascent of the spire of smoke would be
|
||||
rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam; but that was all. The population
|
||||
of the island, Montgomery informed me, now numbered rather more than
|
||||
sixty of these strange creations of Moreau’s art, not counting the
|
||||
smaller monstrosities which lived in the undergrowth and were without
|
||||
human form. Altogether he had made nearly a hundred and twenty; but
|
||||
many had died, and others—like the writhing Footless Thing of which he
|
||||
had told me—had come by violent ends. In answer to my question,
|
||||
Montgomery said that they actually bore offspring, but that these
|
||||
generally died. When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human
|
||||
form upon them. There was no evidence of the inheritance of their
|
||||
acquired human characteristics. The females were less numerous than the
|
||||
males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy
|
||||
the Law enjoined.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail;
|
||||
my eye has had no training in details, and unhappily I cannot sketch.
|
||||
Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the
|
||||
disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of
|
||||
their bodies; and yet—so relative is our idea of grace—my eye became
|
||||
habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their
|
||||
persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly. Another point was the
|
||||
forward carriage of the head and the clumsy and inhuman curvature of
|
||||
the spine. Even the Ape-man lacked that inward sinuous curve of the
|
||||
back which makes the human figure so graceful. Most had their shoulders
|
||||
hunched clumsily, and their short forearms hung weakly at their sides.
|
||||
Few of them were conspicuously hairy, at least until the end of my time
|
||||
upon the island.
|
||||
|
||||
The next most obvious deformity was in their faces, almost all of which
|
||||
were prognathous, malformed about the ears, with large and protuberant
|
||||
noses, very furry or very bristly hair, and often strangely-coloured or
|
||||
strangely-placed eyes. None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a
|
||||
chattering titter. Beyond these general characters their heads had
|
||||
little in common; each preserved the quality of its particular species:
|
||||
the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, the ox, or the
|
||||
sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature had been
|
||||
moulded. The voices, too, varied exceedingly. The hands were always
|
||||
malformed; and though some surprised me by their unexpected human
|
||||
appearance, almost all were deficient in the number of the digits,
|
||||
clumsy about the finger-nails, and lacking any tactile sensibility.
|
||||
|
||||
The two most formidable Animal Men were my Leopard-man and a creature
|
||||
made of hyena and swine. Larger than these were the three
|
||||
bull-creatures who pulled in the boat. Then came the silvery-hairy-man,
|
||||
who was also the Sayer of the Law, M’ling, and a satyr-like creature of
|
||||
ape and goat. There were three Swine-men and a Swine-woman, a
|
||||
mare-rhinoceros-creature, and several other females whose sources I did
|
||||
not ascertain. There were several wolf-creatures, a bear-bull, and a
|
||||
Saint-Bernard-man. I have already described the Ape-man, and there was
|
||||
a particularly hateful (and evil-smelling) old woman made of vixen and
|
||||
bear, whom I hated from the beginning. She was said to be a passionate
|
||||
votary of the Law. Smaller creatures were certain dappled youths and my
|
||||
little sloth-creature. But enough of this catalogue.
|
||||
|
||||
At first I had a shivering horror of the brutes, felt all too keenly
|
||||
that they were still brutes; but insensibly I became a little
|
||||
habituated to the idea of them, and moreover I was affected by
|
||||
Montgomery’s attitude towards them. He had been with them so long that
|
||||
he had come to regard them as almost normal human beings. His London
|
||||
days seemed a glorious, impossible past to him. Only once in a year or
|
||||
so did he go to Africa to deal with Moreau’s agent, a trader in animals
|
||||
there. He hardly met the finest type of mankind in that seafaring
|
||||
village of Spanish mongrels. The men aboard-ship, he told me, seemed at
|
||||
first just as strange to him as the Beast Men seemed to me,—unnaturally
|
||||
long in the leg, flat in the face, prominent in the forehead,
|
||||
suspicious, dangerous, and cold-hearted. In fact, he did not like men:
|
||||
his heart had warmed to me, he thought, because he had saved my life. I
|
||||
fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these
|
||||
metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways, but
|
||||
that he attempted to veil it from me at first.
|
||||
|
||||
M’ling, the black-faced man, Montgomery’s attendant, the first of the
|
||||
Beast Folk I had encountered, did not live with the others across the
|
||||
island, but in a small kennel at the back of the enclosure. The
|
||||
creature was scarcely so intelligent as the Ape-man, but far more
|
||||
docile, and the most human-looking of all the Beast Folk; and
|
||||
Montgomery had trained it to prepare food, and indeed to discharge all
|
||||
the trivial domestic offices that were required. It was a complex
|
||||
trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill,—a bear, tainted with dog and ox, and
|
||||
one of the most elaborately made of all his creatures. It treated
|
||||
Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion. Sometimes he would
|
||||
notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular names, and so
|
||||
make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he would ill-treat
|
||||
it, especially after he had been at the whiskey, kicking it, beating
|
||||
it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees. But whether he treated it
|
||||
well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be near him.
|
||||
|
||||
I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things
|
||||
which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and
|
||||
ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from
|
||||
the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too
|
||||
peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well
|
||||
defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the
|
||||
launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself
|
||||
asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human
|
||||
yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the
|
||||
Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its
|
||||
speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city
|
||||
byway.
|
||||
|
||||
Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond doubt
|
||||
or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunch-backed human savage to all
|
||||
appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens, would stretch
|
||||
his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness scissor-edged
|
||||
incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant as knives. Or in
|
||||
some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory daring into the eyes of
|
||||
some lithe, white-swathed female figure, I would suddenly see (with a
|
||||
spasmodic revulsion) that she had slit-like pupils, or glancing down
|
||||
note the curving nail with which she held her shapeless wrap about her.
|
||||
It is a curious thing, by the bye, for which I am quite unable to
|
||||
account, that these weird creatures—the females, I mean—had in the
|
||||
earlier days of my stay an instinctive sense of their own repulsive
|
||||
clumsiness, and displayed in consequence a more than human regard for
|
||||
the decency and decorum of extensive costume.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,465 @@
|
|||
My inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread of
|
||||
my story.
|
||||
|
||||
After I had breakfasted with Montgomery, he took me across the island
|
||||
to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring into whose
|
||||
scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day. Both of us carried
|
||||
whips and loaded revolvers. While going through a leafy jungle on our
|
||||
road thither, we heard a rabbit squealing. We stopped and listened, but
|
||||
we heard no more; and presently we went on our way, and the incident
|
||||
dropped out of our minds. Montgomery called my attention to certain
|
||||
little pink animals with long hind-legs, that went leaping through the
|
||||
undergrowth. He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of
|
||||
the Beast People, that Moreau had invented. He had fancied they might
|
||||
serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had
|
||||
defeated this intention. I had already encountered some of these
|
||||
creatures,—once during my moonlight flight from the Leopard-man, and
|
||||
once during my pursuit by Moreau on the previous day. By chance, one
|
||||
hopping to avoid us leapt into the hole caused by the uprooting of a
|
||||
wind-blown tree; before it could extricate itself we managed to catch
|
||||
it. It spat like a cat, scratched and kicked vigorously with its
|
||||
hind-legs, and made an attempt to bite; but its teeth were too feeble
|
||||
to inflict more than a painless pinch. It seemed to me rather a pretty
|
||||
little creature; and as Montgomery stated that it never destroyed the
|
||||
turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits, I should imagine
|
||||
it might prove a convenient substitute for the common rabbit in
|
||||
gentlemen’s parks.
|
||||
|
||||
We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips and
|
||||
splintered deeply. Montgomery called my attention to this. “Not to claw
|
||||
bark of trees,\emph{that} is the Law,” he said. “Much some of them care for
|
||||
it!” It was after this, I think, that we met the Satyr and the Ape-man.
|
||||
The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau,—his
|
||||
face ovine in expression, like the coarser Hebrew type; his voice a
|
||||
harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic. He was gnawing the husk of
|
||||
a pod-like fruit as he passed us. Both of them saluted Montgomery.
|
||||
|
||||
“Hail,” said they, “to the Other with the Whip!”
|
||||
|
||||
“There’s a Third with a Whip now,” said Montgomery. “So you’d better
|
||||
mind!”
|
||||
|
||||
“Was he not made?” said the Ape-man. “He said—he said he was made.”
|
||||
|
||||
The Satyr-man looked curiously at me. “The Third with the Whip, he that
|
||||
walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.”
|
||||
|
||||
“He has a thin long whip,” said Montgomery.
|
||||
|
||||
“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr. “You never bleed nor
|
||||
weep. The Master does not bleed or weep.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you
|
||||
don’t look out!”
|
||||
|
||||
“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.
|
||||
|
||||
“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went on
|
||||
with him.
|
||||
|
||||
The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching us and making other remarks to
|
||||
each other.
|
||||
|
||||
“He says nothing,” said the Satyr. “Men have voices.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Yesterday he asked me of things to eat,” said the Ape-man. “He did not
|
||||
know.”
|
||||
|
||||
Then they spoke inaudible things, and I heard the Satyr laughing.
|
||||
|
||||
It was on our way back that we came upon the dead rabbit. The red body
|
||||
of the wretched little beast was rent to pieces, many of the ribs
|
||||
stripped white, and the backbone indisputably gnawed.
|
||||
|
||||
At that Montgomery stopped. “Good God!” said he, stooping down, and
|
||||
picking up some of the crushed vertebrae to examine them more closely.
|
||||
“Good God!” he repeated, “what can this mean?”
|
||||
|
||||
“Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” I said after a
|
||||
pause. “This backbone has been bitten through.”
|
||||
|
||||
He stood staring, with his face white and his lip pulled askew. “I
|
||||
don’t like this,” he said slowly.
|
||||
|
||||
“I saw something of the same kind,” said I, “the first day I came
|
||||
here.”
|
||||
|
||||
“The devil you did! What was it?”
|
||||
|
||||
“A rabbit with its head twisted off.”
|
||||
|
||||
“The day you came here?”
|
||||
|
||||
“The day I came here. In the undergrowth at the back of the enclosure,
|
||||
when I went out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.”
|
||||
|
||||
He gave a long, low whistle.
|
||||
|
||||
“And what is more, I have an idea which of your brutes did the thing.
|
||||
It’s only a suspicion, you know. Before I came on the rabbit I saw one
|
||||
of your monsters drinking in the stream.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Sucking his drink?”
|
||||
|
||||
“Yes.”
|
||||
|
||||
“‘Not to suck your drink; that is the Law.’ Much the brutes care for
|
||||
the Law, eh? when Moreau’s not about!”
|
||||
|
||||
“It was the brute who chased me.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Of course,” said Montgomery; “it’s just the way with carnivores. After
|
||||
a kill, they drink. It’s the taste of blood, you know.—What was the
|
||||
brute like?” he continued. “Would you know him again?” He glanced about
|
||||
us, standing astride over the mess of dead rabbit, his eyes roving
|
||||
among the shadows and screens of greenery, the lurking-places and
|
||||
ambuscades of the forest that bounded us in. “The taste of blood,” he
|
||||
said again.
|
||||
|
||||
He took out his revolver, examined the cartridges in it and replaced
|
||||
it. Then he began to pull at his dropping lip.
|
||||
|
||||
“I think I should know the brute again,” I said. “I stunned him. He
|
||||
ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.”
|
||||
|
||||
“But then we have to \emph{prove} that he killed the rabbit,” said
|
||||
Montgomery. “I wish I’d never brought the things here.”
|
||||
|
||||
I should have gone on, but he stayed there thinking over the mangled
|
||||
rabbit in a puzzle-headed way. As it was, I went to such a distance
|
||||
that the rabbit’s remains were hidden.
|
||||
|
||||
“Come on!” I said.
|
||||
|
||||
Presently he woke up and came towards me. “You see,” he said, almost in
|
||||
a whisper, “they are all supposed to have a fixed idea against eating
|
||||
anything that runs on land. If some brute has by any accident tasted
|
||||
blood—”
|
||||
|
||||
We went on some way in silence. “I wonder what can have happened,” he
|
||||
said to himself. Then, after a pause again: “I did a foolish thing the
|
||||
other day. That servant of mine—I showed him how to skin and cook a
|
||||
rabbit. It’s odd—I saw him licking his hands—It never occurred to me.”
|
||||
|
||||
Then: “We must put a stop to this. I must tell Moreau.”
|
||||
|
||||
He could think of nothing else on our homeward journey.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreau took the matter even more seriously than Montgomery, and I need
|
||||
scarcely say that I was affected by their evident consternation.
|
||||
|
||||
“We must make an example,” said Moreau. “I’ve no doubt in my own mind
|
||||
that the Leopard-man was the sinner. But how can we prove it? I wish,
|
||||
Montgomery, you had kept your taste for meat in hand, and gone without
|
||||
these exciting novelties. We may find ourselves in a mess yet, through
|
||||
it.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I was a silly ass,” said Montgomery. “But the thing’s done now; and
|
||||
you said I might have them, you know.”
|
||||
|
||||
“We must see to the thing at once,” said Moreau. “I suppose if anything
|
||||
should turn up, M’ling can take care of himself?”
|
||||
|
||||
“I’m not so sure of M’ling,” said Montgomery. “I think I ought to know
|
||||
him.”
|
||||
|
||||
In the afternoon, Moreau, Montgomery, myself, and M’ling went across
|
||||
the island to the huts in the ravine. We three were armed; M’ling
|
||||
carried the little hatchet he used in chopping firewood, and some coils
|
||||
of wire. Moreau had a huge cowherd’s horn slung over his shoulder.
|
||||
|
||||
“You will see a gathering of the Beast People,” said Montgomery. “It is
|
||||
a pretty sight!”
|
||||
|
||||
Moreau said not a word on the way, but the expression of his heavy,
|
||||
white-fringed face was grimly set.
|
||||
|
||||
We crossed the ravine down which smoked the stream of hot water, and
|
||||
followed the winding pathway through the canebrakes until we reached a
|
||||
wide area covered over with a thick, powdery yellow substance which I
|
||||
believe was sulphur. Above the shoulder of a weedy bank the sea
|
||||
glittered. We came to a kind of shallow natural amphitheatre, and here
|
||||
the four of us halted. Then Moreau sounded the horn, and broke the
|
||||
sleeping stillness of the tropical afternoon. He must have had strong
|
||||
lungs. The hooting note rose and rose amidst its echoes, to at last an
|
||||
ear-penetrating intensity.
|
||||
|
||||
“Ah!” said Moreau, letting the curved instrument fall to his side
|
||||
again.
|
||||
|
||||
Immediately there was a crashing through the yellow canes, and a sound
|
||||
of voices from the dense green jungle that marked the morass through
|
||||
which I had run on the previous day. Then at three or four points on
|
||||
the edge of the sulphurous area appeared the grotesque forms of the
|
||||
Beast People hurrying towards us. I could not help a creeping horror,
|
||||
as I perceived first one and then another trot out from the trees or
|
||||
reeds and come shambling along over the hot dust. But Moreau and
|
||||
Montgomery stood calmly enough; and, perforce, I stuck beside them.
|
||||
|
||||
First to arrive was the Satyr, strangely unreal for all that he cast a
|
||||
shadow and tossed the dust with his hoofs. After him from the brake
|
||||
came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros, chewing a straw
|
||||
as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the
|
||||
Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then
|
||||
others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward they began to cringe
|
||||
towards Moreau and chant, quite regardless of one another, fragments of
|
||||
the latter half of the litany of the Law,—“His is the Hand that wounds;
|
||||
His is the Hand that heals,” and so forth. As soon as they had
|
||||
approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and
|
||||
bowing on knees and elbows began flinging the white dust upon their
|
||||
heads.
|
||||
|
||||
Imagine the scene if you can! We three blue-clad men, with our
|
||||
misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of sunlit
|
||||
yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle
|
||||
of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,—some almost human save in
|
||||
their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so
|
||||
strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our
|
||||
wildest dreams; and, beyond, the reedy lines of a canebrake in one
|
||||
direction, a dense tangle of palm-trees on the other, separating us
|
||||
from the ravine with the huts, and to the north the hazy horizon of the
|
||||
Pacific Ocean.
|
||||
|
||||
“Sixty-two, sixty-three,” counted Moreau. “There are four more.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I do not see the Leopard-man,” said I.
|
||||
|
||||
Presently Moreau sounded the great horn again, and at the sound of it
|
||||
all the Beast People writhed and grovelled in the dust. Then, slinking
|
||||
out of the canebrake, stooping near the ground and trying to join the
|
||||
dust-throwing circle behind Moreau’s back, came the Leopard-man. The
|
||||
last of the Beast People to arrive was the little Ape-man. The earlier
|
||||
animals, hot and weary with their grovelling, shot vicious glances at
|
||||
him.
|
||||
|
||||
“Cease!” said Moreau, in his firm, loud voice; and the Beast People sat
|
||||
back upon their hams and rested from their worshipping.
|
||||
|
||||
“Where is the Sayer of the Law?” said Moreau, and the hairy-grey
|
||||
monster bowed his face in the dust.
|
||||
|
||||
“Say the words!” said Moreau.
|
||||
|
||||
Forthwith all in the kneeling assembly, swaying from side to side and
|
||||
dashing up the sulphur with their hands,—first the right hand and a
|
||||
puff of dust, and then the left,—began once more to chant their strange
|
||||
litany. When they reached, “Not to eat Flesh or Fish, that is the Law,”
|
||||
Moreau held up his lank white hand.
|
||||
|
||||
“Stop!” he cried, and there fell absolute silence upon them all.
|
||||
|
||||
I think they all knew and dreaded what was coming. I looked round at
|
||||
their strange faces. When I saw their wincing attitudes and the furtive
|
||||
dread in their bright eyes, I wondered that I had ever believed them to
|
||||
be men.
|
||||
|
||||
“That Law has been broken!” said Moreau.
|
||||
|
||||
“None escape,” from the faceless creature with the silvery hair. “None
|
||||
escape,” repeated the kneeling circle of Beast People.
|
||||
|
||||
“Who is he?” cried Moreau, and looked round at their faces, cracking
|
||||
his whip. I fancied the Hyena-swine looked dejected, so too did the
|
||||
Leopard-man. Moreau stopped, facing this creature, who cringed towards
|
||||
him with the memory and dread of infinite torment.
|
||||
|
||||
“Who is he?” repeated Moreau, in a voice of thunder.
|
||||
|
||||
“Evil is he who breaks the Law,” chanted the Sayer of the Law.
|
||||
|
||||
Moreau looked into the eyes of the Leopard-man, and seemed to be
|
||||
dragging the very soul out of the creature.
|
||||
|
||||
“Who breaks the Law—” said Moreau, taking his eyes off his victim, and
|
||||
turning towards us (it seemed to me there was a touch of exultation in
|
||||
his voice).
|
||||
|
||||
“Goes back to the House of Pain,” they all clamoured,—“goes back to the
|
||||
House of Pain, O Master!”
|
||||
|
||||
“Back to the House of Pain,—back to the House of Pain,” gabbled the
|
||||
Ape-man, as though the idea was sweet to him.
|
||||
|
||||
“Do you hear?” said Moreau, turning back to the criminal, “my
|
||||
friend—Hullo!”
|
||||
|
||||
For the Leopard-man, released from Moreau’s eye, had risen straight
|
||||
from his knees, and now, with eyes aflame and his huge feline tusks
|
||||
flashing out from under his curling lips, leapt towards his tormentor.
|
||||
I am convinced that only the madness of unendurable fear could have
|
||||
prompted this attack. The whole circle of threescore monsters seemed to
|
||||
rise about us. I drew my revolver. The two figures collided. I saw
|
||||
Moreau reeling back from the Leopard-man’s blow. There was a furious
|
||||
yelling and howling all about us. Every one was moving rapidly. For a
|
||||
moment I thought it was a general revolt. The furious face of the
|
||||
Leopard-man flashed by mine, with M’ling close in pursuit. I saw the
|
||||
yellow eyes of the Hyena-swine blazing with excitement, his attitude as
|
||||
if he were half resolved to attack me. The Satyr, too, glared at me
|
||||
over the Hyena-swine’s hunched shoulders. I heard the crack of Moreau’s
|
||||
pistol, and saw the pink flash dart across the tumult. The whole crowd
|
||||
seemed to swing round in the direction of the glint of fire, and I too
|
||||
was swung round by the magnetism of the movement. In another second I
|
||||
was running, one of a tumultuous shouting crowd, in pursuit of the
|
||||
escaping Leopard-man.
|
||||
|
||||
That is all I can tell definitely. I saw the Leopard-man strike Moreau,
|
||||
and then everything spun about me until I was running headlong. M’ling
|
||||
was ahead, close in pursuit of the fugitive. Behind, their tongues
|
||||
already lolling out, ran the Wolf-women in great leaping strides. The
|
||||
Swine folk followed, squealing with excitement, and the two Bull-men in
|
||||
their swathings of white. Then came Moreau in a cluster of the Beast
|
||||
People, his wide-brimmed straw hat blown off, his revolver in hand, and
|
||||
his lank white hair streaming out. The Hyena-swine ran beside me,
|
||||
keeping pace with me and glancing furtively at me out of his feline
|
||||
eyes, and the others came pattering and shouting behind us.
|
||||
|
||||
The Leopard-man went bursting his way through the long canes, which
|
||||
sprang back as he passed, and rattled in M’ling’s face. We others in
|
||||
the rear found a trampled path for us when we reached the brake. The
|
||||
chase lay through the brake for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then
|
||||
plunged into a dense thicket, which retarded our movements exceedingly,
|
||||
though we went through it in a crowd together,—fronds flicking into our
|
||||
faces, ropy creepers catching us under the chin or gripping our ankles,
|
||||
thorny plants hooking into and tearing cloth and flesh together.
|
||||
|
||||
“He has gone on all-fours through this,” panted Moreau, now just ahead
|
||||
of me.
|
||||
|
||||
“None escape,” said the Wolf-bear, laughing into my face with the
|
||||
exultation of hunting. We burst out again among rocks, and saw the
|
||||
quarry ahead running lightly on all-fours and snarling at us over his
|
||||
shoulder. At that the Wolf Folk howled with delight. The Thing was
|
||||
still clothed, and at a distance its face still seemed human; but the
|
||||
carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive droop of its
|
||||
shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal. It leapt over some
|
||||
thorny yellow-flowering bushes, and was hidden. M’ling was halfway
|
||||
across the space.
|
||||
|
||||
Most of us now had lost the first speed of the chase, and had fallen
|
||||
into a longer and steadier stride. I saw as we traversed the open that
|
||||
the pursuit was now spreading from a column into a line. The
|
||||
Hyena-swine still ran close to me, watching me as it ran, every now and
|
||||
then puckering its muzzle with a snarling laugh. At the edge of the
|
||||
rocks the Leopard-man, realising that he was making for the projecting
|
||||
cape upon which he had stalked me on the night of my arrival, had
|
||||
doubled in the undergrowth; but Montgomery had seen the manoeuvre, and
|
||||
turned him again. So, panting, tumbling against rocks, torn by
|
||||
brambles, impeded by ferns and reeds, I helped to pursue the
|
||||
Leopard-man who had broken the Law, and the Hyena-swine ran, laughing
|
||||
savagely, by my side. I staggered on, my head reeling and my heart
|
||||
beating against my ribs, tired almost to death, and yet not daring to
|
||||
lose sight of the chase lest I should be left alone with this horrible
|
||||
companion. I staggered on in spite of infinite fatigue and the dense
|
||||
heat of the tropical afternoon.
|
||||
|
||||
At last the fury of the hunt slackened. We had pinned the wretched
|
||||
brute into a corner of the island. Moreau, whip in hand, marshalled us
|
||||
all into an irregular line, and we advanced now slowly, shouting to one
|
||||
another as we advanced and tightening the cordon about our victim. He
|
||||
lurked noiseless and invisible in the bushes through which I had run
|
||||
from him during that midnight pursuit.
|
||||
|
||||
“Steady!” cried Moreau, “steady!” as the ends of the line crept round
|
||||
the tangle of undergrowth and hemmed the brute in.
|
||||
|
||||
“Ware a rush!” came the voice of Montgomery from beyond the thicket.
|
||||
|
||||
I was on the slope above the bushes; Montgomery and Moreau beat along
|
||||
the beach beneath. Slowly we pushed in among the fretted network of
|
||||
branches and leaves. The quarry was silent.
|
||||
|
||||
“Back to the House of Pain, the House of Pain, the House of Pain!”
|
||||
yelped the voice of the Ape-man, some twenty yards to the right.
|
||||
|
||||
When I heard that, I forgave the poor wretch all the fear he had
|
||||
inspired in me. I heard the twigs snap and the boughs swish aside
|
||||
before the heavy tread of the Horse-rhinoceros upon my right. Then
|
||||
suddenly through a polygon of green, in the half darkness under the
|
||||
luxuriant growth, I saw the creature we were hunting. I halted. He was
|
||||
crouched together into the smallest possible compass, his luminous
|
||||
green eyes turned over his shoulder regarding me.
|
||||
|
||||
It may seem a strange contradiction in me,—I cannot explain the
|
||||
fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal
|
||||
attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human
|
||||
face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity.
|
||||
In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be
|
||||
overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures
|
||||
of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between its
|
||||
terror-struck eyes, and fired. As I did so, the Hyena-swine saw the
|
||||
Thing, and flung itself upon it with an eager cry, thrusting thirsty
|
||||
teeth into its neck. All about me the green masses of the thicket were
|
||||
swaying and cracking as the Beast People came rushing together. One
|
||||
face and then another appeared.
|
||||
|
||||
“Don’t kill it, Prendick!” cried Moreau. “Don’t kill it!” and I saw him
|
||||
stooping as he pushed through under the fronds of the big ferns.
|
||||
|
||||
In another moment he had beaten off the Hyena-swine with the handle of
|
||||
his whip, and he and Montgomery were keeping away the excited
|
||||
carnivorous Beast People, and particularly M’ling, from the still
|
||||
quivering body. The hairy-grey Thing came sniffing at the corpse under
|
||||
my arm. The other animals, in their animal ardour, jostled me to get a
|
||||
nearer view.
|
||||
|
||||
“Confound you, Prendick!” said Moreau. “I wanted him.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I’m sorry,” said I, though I was not. “It was the impulse of the
|
||||
moment.” I felt sick with exertion and excitement. Turning, I pushed my
|
||||
way out of the crowding Beast People and went on alone up the slope
|
||||
towards the higher part of the headland. Under the shouted directions
|
||||
of Moreau I heard the three white-swathed Bull-men begin dragging the
|
||||
victim down towards the water.
|
||||
|
||||
It was easy now for me to be alone. The Beast People manifested a quite
|
||||
human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot,
|
||||
sniffing and growling at it as the Bull-men dragged it down the beach.
|
||||
I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against the
|
||||
evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea; and like
|
||||
a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable
|
||||
aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among the rocks
|
||||
beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several other of the
|
||||
Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all still
|
||||
intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their
|
||||
loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind
|
||||
that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange
|
||||
persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the
|
||||
grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of
|
||||
human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and
|
||||
fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under:
|
||||
that was all the difference. Poor brute!
|
||||
|
||||
Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had
|
||||
not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor
|
||||
victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only
|
||||
at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to
|
||||
me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly
|
||||
adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now
|
||||
they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never
|
||||
died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human
|
||||
existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long
|
||||
dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred
|
||||
me.
|
||||
|
||||
Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at
|
||||
least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I
|
||||
could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate.
|
||||
But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his
|
||||
mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown
|
||||
out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at
|
||||
last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal
|
||||
hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held them back from a
|
||||
brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.
|
||||
|
||||
In those days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal
|
||||
fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring,
|
||||
and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must
|
||||
confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it
|
||||
suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast
|
||||
pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and
|
||||
I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for
|
||||
drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions,
|
||||
were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite
|
||||
complexity of its incessant wheels. But this condition did not come all
|
||||
at once: I think indeed that I anticipate a little in speaking of it
|
||||
now.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,258 @@
|
|||
When this was accomplished, and we had washed and eaten, Montgomery and
|
||||
I went into my little room and seriously discussed our position for the
|
||||
first time. It was then near midnight. He was almost sober, but greatly
|
||||
disturbed in his mind. He had been strangely under the influence of
|
||||
Moreau’s personality: I do not think it had ever occurred to him that
|
||||
Moreau could die. This disaster was the sudden collapse of the habits
|
||||
that had become part of his nature in the ten or more monotonous years
|
||||
he had spent on the island. He talked vaguely, answered my questions
|
||||
crookedly, wandered into general questions.
|
||||
|
||||
“This silly ass of a world,” he said; “what a muddle it all is! I
|
||||
haven’t had any life. I wonder when it’s going to begin. Sixteen years
|
||||
being bullied by nurses and schoolmasters at their own sweet will; five
|
||||
in London grinding hard at medicine, bad food, shabby lodgings, shabby
|
||||
clothes, shabby vice, a blunder,—\emph{I} didn’t know any better,—and
|
||||
hustled off to this beastly island. Ten years here! What’s it all for,
|
||||
Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?”
|
||||
|
||||
It was hard to deal with such ravings. “The thing we have to think of
|
||||
now,” said I, “is how to get away from this island.”
|
||||
|
||||
“What’s the good of getting away? I’m an outcast. Where am \emph{I} to join
|
||||
on? It’s all very well for \emph{you}, Prendick. Poor old Moreau! We can’t
|
||||
leave him here to have his bones picked. As it is—And besides, what
|
||||
will become of the decent part of the Beast Folk?”
|
||||
|
||||
“Well,” said I, “that will do to-morrow. I’ve been thinking we might
|
||||
make the brushwood into a pyre and burn his body—and those other
|
||||
things. Then what will happen with the Beast Folk?”
|
||||
|
||||
“\emph{I} don’t know. I suppose those that were made of beasts of prey will
|
||||
make silly asses of themselves sooner or later. We can’t massacre the
|
||||
lot—can we? I suppose that’s what \emph{your} humanity would suggest? But
|
||||
they’ll change. They are sure to change.”
|
||||
|
||||
He talked thus inconclusively until at last I felt my temper going.
|
||||
|
||||
“Damnation!” he exclaimed at some petulance of mine; “can’t you see I’m
|
||||
in a worse hole than you are?” And he got up, and went for the brandy.
|
||||
“Drink!” he said returning, “you logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of
|
||||
an atheist, drink!”
|
||||
|
||||
“Not I,” said I, and sat grimly watching his face under the yellow
|
||||
paraffine flare, as he drank himself into a garrulous misery.
|
||||
|
||||
I have a memory of infinite tedium. He wandered into a maudlin defence
|
||||
of the Beast People and of M’ling. M’ling, he said, was the only thing
|
||||
that had ever really cared for him. And suddenly an idea came to him.
|
||||
|
||||
“I’m damned!” said he, staggering to his feet and clutching the brandy
|
||||
bottle.
|
||||
|
||||
By some flash of intuition I knew what it was he intended. “You don’t
|
||||
give drink to that beast!” I said, rising and facing him.
|
||||
|
||||
“Beast!” said he. “You’re the beast. He takes his liquor like a
|
||||
Christian. Come out of the way, Prendick!”
|
||||
|
||||
“For God’s sake,” said I.
|
||||
|
||||
“Get—out of the way!” he roared, and suddenly whipped out his revolver.
|
||||
|
||||
“Very well,” said I, and stood aside, half-minded to fall upon him as
|
||||
he put his hand upon the latch, but deterred by the thought of my
|
||||
useless arm. “You’ve made a beast of yourself,—to the beasts you may
|
||||
go.”
|
||||
|
||||
He flung the doorway open, and stood half facing me between the yellow
|
||||
lamp-light and the pallid glare of the moon; his eye-sockets were
|
||||
blotches of black under his stubbly eyebrows.
|
||||
|
||||
“You’re a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You’re always fearing and
|
||||
fancying. We’re on the edge of things. I’m bound to cut my throat
|
||||
to-morrow. I’m going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night.” He turned
|
||||
and went out into the moonlight. “M’ling!” he cried; “M’ling, old
|
||||
friend!”
|
||||
|
||||
Three dim creatures in the silvery light came along the edge of the wan
|
||||
beach,—one a white-wrapped creature, the other two blotches of
|
||||
blackness following it. They halted, staring. Then I saw M’ling’s
|
||||
hunched shoulders as he came round the corner of the house.
|
||||
|
||||
“Drink!” cried Montgomery, “drink, you brutes! Drink and be men! Damme,
|
||||
I’m the cleverest. Moreau forgot this; this is the last touch. Drink, I
|
||||
tell you!” And waving the bottle in his hand he started off at a kind
|
||||
of quick trot to the westward, M’ling ranging himself between him and
|
||||
the three dim creatures who followed.
|
||||
|
||||
I went to the doorway. They were already indistinct in the mist of the
|
||||
moonlight before Montgomery halted. I saw him administer a dose of the
|
||||
raw brandy to M’ling, and saw the five figures melt into one vague
|
||||
patch.
|
||||
|
||||
“Sing!” I heard Montgomery shout,—“sing all together, ‘Confound old
|
||||
Prendick!’ That’s right; now again, ‘Confound old Prendick!’”
|
||||
|
||||
The black group broke up into five separate figures, and wound slowly
|
||||
away from me along the band of shining beach. Each went howling at his
|
||||
own sweet will, yelping insults at me, or giving whatever other vent
|
||||
this new inspiration of brandy demanded. Presently I heard Montgomery’s
|
||||
voice shouting, “Right turn!” and they passed with their shouts and
|
||||
howls into the blackness of the landward trees. Slowly, very slowly,
|
||||
they receded into silence.
|
||||
|
||||
The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past
|
||||
the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very
|
||||
bright riding through the empty blue sky. The shadow of the wall lay, a
|
||||
yard wide and of inky blackness, at my feet. The eastward sea was a
|
||||
featureless grey, dark and mysterious; and between the sea and the
|
||||
shadow the grey sands (of volcanic glass and crystals) flashed and
|
||||
shone like a beach of diamonds. Behind me the paraffine lamp flared hot
|
||||
and ruddy.
|
||||
|
||||
Then I shut the door, locked it, and went into the enclosure where
|
||||
Moreau lay beside his latest victims,—the staghounds and the llama and
|
||||
some other wretched brutes,—with his massive face calm even after his
|
||||
terrible death, and with the hard eyes open, staring at the dead white
|
||||
moon above. I sat down upon the edge of the sink, and with my eyes upon
|
||||
that ghastly pile of silvery light and ominous shadows began to turn
|
||||
over my plans. In the morning I would gather some provisions in the
|
||||
dingey, and after setting fire to the pyre before me, push out into the
|
||||
desolation of the high sea once more. I felt that for Montgomery there
|
||||
was no help; that he was, in truth, half akin to these Beast Folk,
|
||||
unfitted for human kindred.
|
||||
|
||||
I do not know how long I sat there scheming. It must have been an hour
|
||||
or so. Then my planning was interrupted by the return of Montgomery to
|
||||
my neighbourhood. I heard a yelling from many throats, a tumult of
|
||||
exultant cries passing down towards the beach, whooping and howling,
|
||||
and excited shrieks that seemed to come to a stop near the water’s
|
||||
edge. The riot rose and fell; I heard heavy blows and the splintering
|
||||
smash of wood, but it did not trouble me then. A discordant chanting
|
||||
began.
|
||||
|
||||
My thoughts went back to my means of escape. I got up, brought the
|
||||
lamp, and went into a shed to look at some kegs I had seen there. Then
|
||||
I became interested in the contents of some biscuit-tins, and opened
|
||||
one. I saw something out of the tail of my eye,—a red figure,—and
|
||||
turned sharply.
|
||||
|
||||
Behind me lay the yard, vividly black-and-white in the moonlight, and
|
||||
the pile of wood and faggots on which Moreau and his mutilated victims
|
||||
lay, one over another. They seemed to be gripping one another in one
|
||||
last revengeful grapple. His wounds gaped, black as night, and the
|
||||
blood that had dripped lay in black patches upon the sand. Then I saw,
|
||||
without understanding, the cause of my phantom,—a ruddy glow that came
|
||||
and danced and went upon the wall opposite. I misinterpreted this,
|
||||
fancied it was a reflection of my flickering lamp, and turned again to
|
||||
the stores in the shed. I went on rummaging among them, as well as a
|
||||
one-armed man could, finding this convenient thing and that, and
|
||||
putting them aside for to-morrow’s launch. My movements were slow, and
|
||||
the time passed quickly. Insensibly the daylight crept upon me.
|
||||
|
||||
The chanting died down, giving place to a clamour; then it began again,
|
||||
and suddenly broke into a tumult. I heard cries of, “More! more!” a
|
||||
sound like quarrelling, and a sudden wild shriek. The quality of the
|
||||
sounds changed so greatly that it arrested my attention. I went out
|
||||
into the yard and listened. Then cutting like a knife across the
|
||||
confusion came the crack of a revolver.
|
||||
|
||||
I rushed at once through my room to the little doorway. As I did so I
|
||||
heard some of the packing-cases behind me go sliding down and smash
|
||||
together with a clatter of glass on the floor of the shed. But I did
|
||||
not heed these. I flung the door open and looked out.
|
||||
|
||||
Up the beach by the boathouse a bonfire was burning, raining up sparks
|
||||
into the indistinctness of the dawn. Around this struggled a mass of
|
||||
black figures. I heard Montgomery call my name. I began to run at once
|
||||
towards this fire, revolver in hand. I saw the pink tongue of
|
||||
Montgomery’s pistol lick out once, close to the ground. He was down. I
|
||||
shouted with all my strength and fired into the air. I heard some one
|
||||
cry, “The Master!” The knotted black struggle broke into scattering
|
||||
units, the fire leapt and sank down. The crowd of Beast People fled in
|
||||
sudden panic before me, up the beach. In my excitement I fired at their
|
||||
retreating backs as they disappeared among the bushes. Then I turned to
|
||||
the black heaps upon the ground.
|
||||
|
||||
Montgomery lay on his back, with the hairy-grey Beast-man sprawling
|
||||
across his body. The brute was dead, but still gripping Montgomery’s
|
||||
throat with its curving claws. Near by lay M’ling on his face and quite
|
||||
still, his neck bitten open and the upper part of the smashed
|
||||
brandy-bottle in his hand. Two other figures lay near the fire,—the one
|
||||
motionless, the other groaning fitfully, every now and then raising its
|
||||
head slowly, then dropping it again.
|
||||
|
||||
I caught hold of the grey man and pulled him off Montgomery’s body; his
|
||||
claws drew down the torn coat reluctantly as I dragged him away.
|
||||
Montgomery was dark in the face and scarcely breathing. I splashed
|
||||
sea-water on his face and pillowed his head on my rolled-up coat.
|
||||
M’ling was dead. The wounded creature by the fire—it was a Wolf-brute
|
||||
with a bearded grey face—lay, I found, with the fore part of its body
|
||||
upon the still glowing timber. The wretched thing was injured so
|
||||
dreadfully that in mercy I blew its brains out at once. The other brute
|
||||
was one of the Bull-men swathed in white. He too was dead. The rest of
|
||||
the Beast People had vanished from the beach.
|
||||
|
||||
I went to Montgomery again and knelt beside him, cursing my ignorance
|
||||
of medicine. The fire beside me had sunk down, and only charred beams
|
||||
of timber glowing at the central ends and mixed with a grey ash of
|
||||
brushwood remained. I wondered casually where Montgomery had got his
|
||||
wood. Then I saw that the dawn was upon us. The sky had grown brighter,
|
||||
the setting moon was becoming pale and opaque in the luminous blue of
|
||||
the day. The sky to the eastward was rimmed with red.
|
||||
|
||||
Suddenly I heard a thud and a hissing behind me, and, looking round,
|
||||
sprang to my feet with a cry of horror. Against the warm dawn great
|
||||
tumultuous masses of black smoke were boiling up out of the enclosure,
|
||||
and through their stormy darkness shot flickering threads of blood-red
|
||||
flame. Then the thatched roof caught. I saw the curving charge of the
|
||||
flames across the sloping straw. A spurt of fire jetted from the window
|
||||
of my room.
|
||||
|
||||
I knew at once what had happened. I remembered the crash I had heard.
|
||||
When I had rushed out to Montgomery’s assistance, I had overturned the
|
||||
lamp.
|
||||
|
||||
The hopelessness of saving any of the contents of the enclosure stared
|
||||
me in the face. My mind came back to my plan of flight, and turning
|
||||
swiftly I looked to see where the two boats lay upon the beach. They
|
||||
were gone! Two axes lay upon the sands beside me; chips and splinters
|
||||
were scattered broadcast, and the ashes of the bonfire were blackening
|
||||
and smoking under the dawn. Montgomery had burnt the boats to revenge
|
||||
himself upon me and prevent our return to mankind!
|
||||
|
||||
A sudden convulsion of rage shook me. I was almost moved to batter his
|
||||
foolish head in, as he lay there helpless at my feet. Then suddenly his
|
||||
hand moved, so feebly, so pitifully, that my wrath vanished. He
|
||||
groaned, and opened his eyes for a minute. I knelt down beside him and
|
||||
raised his head. He opened his eyes again, staring silently at the
|
||||
dawn, and then they met mine. The lids fell.
|
||||
|
||||
“Sorry,” he said presently, with an effort. He seemed trying to think.
|
||||
“The last,” he murmured, “the last of this silly universe. What a
|
||||
mess—”
|
||||
|
||||
I listened. His head fell helplessly to one side. I thought some drink
|
||||
might revive him; but there was neither drink nor vessel in which to
|
||||
bring drink at hand. He seemed suddenly heavier. My heart went cold. I
|
||||
bent down to his face, put my hand through the rent in his blouse. He
|
||||
was dead; and even as he died a line of white heat, the limb of the
|
||||
sun, rose eastward beyond the projection of the bay, splashing its
|
||||
radiance across the sky and turning the dark sea into a weltering
|
||||
tumult of dazzling light. It fell like a glory upon his death-shrunken
|
||||
face.
|
||||
|
||||
I let his head fall gently upon the rough pillow I had made for him,
|
||||
and stood up. Before me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the
|
||||
awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the
|
||||
island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The
|
||||
enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with
|
||||
sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash.
|
||||
The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the
|
||||
distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the
|
||||
charred vestiges of the boats and these five dead bodies.
|
||||
|
||||
Then out of the bushes came three Beast People, with hunched shoulders,
|
||||
protruding heads, misshapen hands awkwardly held, and inquisitive,
|
||||
unfriendly eyes and advanced towards me with hesitating gestures.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,150 @@
|
|||
When I saw Montgomery swallow a third dose of brandy, I took it upon
|
||||
myself to interfere. He was already more than half fuddled. I told him
|
||||
that some serious thing must have happened to Moreau by this time, or
|
||||
he would have returned before this, and that it behoved us to ascertain
|
||||
what that catastrophe was. Montgomery raised some feeble objections,
|
||||
and at last agreed. We had some food, and then all three of us started.
|
||||
|
||||
It is possibly due to the tension of my mind, at the time, but even now
|
||||
that start into the hot stillness of the tropical afternoon is a
|
||||
singularly vivid impression. M’ling went first, his shoulder hunched,
|
||||
his strange black head moving with quick starts as he peered first on
|
||||
this side of the way and then on that. He was unarmed; his axe he had
|
||||
dropped when he encountered the Swine-man. Teeth were \emph{his} weapons,
|
||||
when it came to fighting. Montgomery followed with stumbling footsteps,
|
||||
his hands in his pockets, his face downcast; he was in a state of
|
||||
muddled sullenness with me on account of the brandy. My left arm was in
|
||||
a sling (it was lucky it was my left), and I carried my revolver in my
|
||||
right. Soon we traced a narrow path through the wild luxuriance of the
|
||||
island, going northwestward; and presently M’ling stopped, and became
|
||||
rigid with watchfulness. Montgomery almost staggered into him, and then
|
||||
stopped too. Then, listening intently, we heard coming through the
|
||||
trees the sound of voices and footsteps approaching us.
|
||||
|
||||
“He is dead,” said a deep, vibrating voice.
|
||||
|
||||
“He is not dead; he is not dead,” jabbered another.
|
||||
|
||||
“We saw, we saw,” said several voices.
|
||||
|
||||
“\emph{Hul}-lo!” suddenly shouted Montgomery, “Hullo, there!”
|
||||
|
||||
“Confound you!” said I, and gripped my pistol.
|
||||
|
||||
There was a silence, then a crashing among the interlacing vegetation,
|
||||
first here, then there, and then half-a-dozen faces appeared,—strange
|
||||
faces, lit by a strange light. M’ling made a growling noise in his
|
||||
throat. I recognised the Ape-man: I had indeed already identified his
|
||||
voice, and two of the white-swathed brown-featured creatures I had seen
|
||||
in Montgomery’s boat. With these were the two dappled brutes and that
|
||||
grey, horribly crooked creature who said the Law, with grey hair
|
||||
streaming down its cheeks, heavy grey eyebrows, and grey locks pouring
|
||||
off from a central parting upon its sloping forehead,—a heavy, faceless
|
||||
thing, with strange red eyes, looking at us curiously from amidst the
|
||||
green.
|
||||
|
||||
For a space no one spoke. Then Montgomery hiccoughed, “Who—said he was
|
||||
dead?”
|
||||
|
||||
The Monkey-man looked guiltily at the hairy-grey Thing. “He is dead,”
|
||||
said this monster. “They saw.”
|
||||
|
||||
There was nothing threatening about this detachment, at any rate. They
|
||||
seemed awestricken and puzzled.
|
||||
|
||||
“Where is he?” said Montgomery.
|
||||
|
||||
“Beyond,” and the grey creature pointed.
|
||||
|
||||
“Is there a Law now?” asked the Monkey-man. “Is it still to be this and
|
||||
that? Is he dead indeed?”
|
||||
|
||||
“Is there a Law?” repeated the man in white. “Is there a Law, thou
|
||||
Other with the Whip?”
|
||||
|
||||
“He is dead,” said the hairy-grey Thing. And they all stood watching
|
||||
us.
|
||||
|
||||
“Prendick,” said Montgomery, turning his dull eyes to me. “He’s dead,
|
||||
evidently.”
|
||||
|
||||
I had been standing behind him during this colloquy. I began to see how
|
||||
things lay with them. I suddenly stepped in front of Montgomery and
|
||||
lifted up my voice:—“Children of the Law,” I said, “he is \emph{not} dead!”
|
||||
M’ling turned his sharp eyes on me. “He has changed his shape; he has
|
||||
changed his body,” I went on. “For a time you will not see him. He
|
||||
is—there,” I pointed upward, “where he can watch you. You cannot see
|
||||
him, but he can see you. Fear the Law!”
|
||||
|
||||
I looked at them squarely. They flinched.
|
||||
|
||||
“He is great, he is good,” said the Ape-man, peering fearfully upward
|
||||
among the dense trees.
|
||||
|
||||
“And the other Thing?” I demanded.
|
||||
|
||||
“The Thing that bled, and ran screaming and sobbing,—that is dead too,”
|
||||
said the grey Thing, still regarding me.
|
||||
|
||||
“That’s well,” grunted Montgomery.
|
||||
|
||||
“The Other with the Whip—” began the grey Thing.
|
||||
|
||||
“Well?” said I.
|
||||
|
||||
“Said he was dead.”
|
||||
|
||||
But Montgomery was still sober enough to understand my motive in
|
||||
denying Moreau’s death. “He is not dead,” he said slowly, “not dead at
|
||||
all. No more dead than I am.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Some,” said I, “have broken the Law: they will die. Some have died.
|
||||
Show us now where his old body lies,—the body he cast away because he
|
||||
had no more need of it.”
|
||||
|
||||
“It is this way, Man who walked in the Sea,” said the grey Thing.
|
||||
|
||||
And with these six creatures guiding us, we went through the tumult of
|
||||
ferns and creepers and tree-stems towards the northwest. Then came a
|
||||
yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus
|
||||
rushed by us shrieking. Immediately after appeared a monster in
|
||||
headlong pursuit, blood-bedabbled, who was amongst us almost before he
|
||||
could stop his career. The grey Thing leapt aside. M’ling, with a
|
||||
snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside. Montgomery fired and missed,
|
||||
bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run. I fired, and the
|
||||
Thing still came on; fired again, point-blank, into its ugly face. I
|
||||
saw its features vanish in a flash: its face was driven in. Yet it
|
||||
passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him, fell headlong beside
|
||||
him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its death-agony.
|
||||
|
||||
I found myself alone with M’ling, the dead brute, and the prostrate
|
||||
man. Montgomery raised himself slowly and stared in a muddled way at
|
||||
the shattered Beast Man beside him. It more than half sobered him. He
|
||||
scrambled to his feet. Then I saw the grey Thing returning cautiously
|
||||
through the trees.
|
||||
|
||||
“See,” said I, pointing to the dead brute, “is the Law not alive? This
|
||||
came of breaking the Law.”
|
||||
|
||||
He peered at the body. “He sends the Fire that kills,” said he, in his
|
||||
deep voice, repeating part of the Ritual. The others gathered round and
|
||||
stared for a space.
|
||||
|
||||
At last we drew near the westward extremity of the island. We came upon
|
||||
the gnawed and mutilated body of the puma, its shoulder-bone smashed by
|
||||
a bullet, and perhaps twenty yards farther found at last what we
|
||||
sought. Moreau lay face downward in a trampled space in a canebrake.
|
||||
One hand was almost severed at the wrist and his silvery hair was
|
||||
dabbled in blood. His head had been battered in by the fetters of the
|
||||
puma. The broken canes beneath him were smeared with blood. His
|
||||
revolver we could not find. Montgomery turned him over. Resting at
|
||||
intervals, and with the help of the seven Beast People (for he was a
|
||||
heavy man), we carried Moreau back to the enclosure. The night was
|
||||
darkling. Twice we heard unseen creatures howling and shrieking past
|
||||
our little band, and once the little pink sloth-creature appeared and
|
||||
stared at us, and vanished again. But we were not attacked again. At
|
||||
the gates of the enclosure our company of Beast People left us, M’ling
|
||||
going with the rest. We locked ourselves in, and then took Moreau’s
|
||||
mangled body into the yard and laid it upon a pile of brushwood. Then
|
||||
we went into the laboratory and put an end to all we found living
|
||||
there.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,402 @@
|
|||
In this way I became one among the Beast People in the Island of Doctor
|
||||
Moreau. When I awoke, it was dark about me. My arm ached in its
|
||||
bandages. I sat up, wondering at first where I might be. I heard coarse
|
||||
voices talking outside. Then I saw that my barricade had gone, and that
|
||||
the opening of the hut stood clear. My revolver was still in my hand.
|
||||
|
||||
I heard something breathing, saw something crouched together close
|
||||
beside me. I held my breath, trying to see what it was. It began to
|
||||
move slowly, interminably. Then something soft and warm and moist
|
||||
passed across my hand. All my muscles contracted. I snatched my hand
|
||||
away. A cry of alarm began and was stifled in my throat. Then I just
|
||||
realised what had happened sufficiently to stay my fingers on the
|
||||
revolver.
|
||||
|
||||
“Who is that?” I said in a hoarse whisper, the revolver still pointed.
|
||||
|
||||
“\emph{I}—Master.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Who are \emph{you?}”
|
||||
|
||||
“They say there is no Master now. But I know, I know. I carried the
|
||||
bodies into the sea, O Walker in the Sea! the bodies of those you slew.
|
||||
I am your slave, Master.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Are you the one I met on the beach?” I asked.
|
||||
|
||||
“The same, Master.”
|
||||
|
||||
The Thing was evidently faithful enough, for it might have fallen upon
|
||||
me as I slept. “It is well,” I said, extending my hand for another
|
||||
licking kiss. I began to realise what its presence meant, and the tide
|
||||
of my courage flowed. “Where are the others?” I asked.
|
||||
|
||||
“They are mad; they are fools,” said the Dog-man. “Even now they talk
|
||||
together beyond there. They say, ‘The Master is dead. The Other with
|
||||
the Whip is dead. That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are. We
|
||||
have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end.
|
||||
We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no
|
||||
Whips for ever again.’ So they say. But I know, Master, I know.”
|
||||
|
||||
I felt in the darkness, and patted the Dog-man’s head. “It is well,” I
|
||||
said again.
|
||||
|
||||
“Presently you will slay them all,” said the Dog-man.
|
||||
|
||||
“Presently,” I answered, “I will slay them all,—after certain days and
|
||||
certain things have come to pass. Every one of them save those you
|
||||
spare, every one of them shall be slain.”
|
||||
|
||||
“What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills,” said the Dog-man
|
||||
with a certain satisfaction in his voice.
|
||||
|
||||
“And that their sins may grow,” I said, “let them live in their folly
|
||||
until their time is ripe. Let them not know that I am the Master.”
|
||||
|
||||
“The Master’s will is sweet,” said the Dog-man, with the ready tact of
|
||||
his canine blood.
|
||||
|
||||
“But one has sinned,” said I. “Him I will kill, whenever I may meet
|
||||
him. When I say to you, ‘\emph{That is he},’ see that you fall upon him. And
|
||||
now I will go to the men and women who are assembled together.”
|
||||
|
||||
For a moment the opening of the hut was blackened by the exit of the
|
||||
Dog-man. Then I followed and stood up, almost in the exact spot where I
|
||||
had been when I had heard Moreau and his staghound pursuing me. But now
|
||||
it was night, and all the miasmatic ravine about me was black; and
|
||||
beyond, instead of a green, sunlit slope, I saw a red fire, before
|
||||
which hunched, grotesque figures moved to and fro. Farther were the
|
||||
thick trees, a bank of darkness, fringed above with the black lace of
|
||||
the upper branches. The moon was just riding up on the edge of the
|
||||
ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that
|
||||
was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island.
|
||||
|
||||
“Walk by me,” said I, nerving myself; and side by side we walked down
|
||||
the narrow way, taking little heed of the dim Things that peered at us
|
||||
out of the huts.
|
||||
|
||||
None about the fire attempted to salute me. Most of them disregarded
|
||||
me, ostentatiously. I looked round for the Hyena-swine, but he was not
|
||||
there. Altogether, perhaps twenty of the Beast Folk squatted, staring
|
||||
into the fire or talking to one another.
|
||||
|
||||
“He is dead, he is dead! the Master is dead!” said the voice of the
|
||||
Ape-man to the right of me. “The House of Pain—there is no House of
|
||||
Pain!”
|
||||
|
||||
“He is not dead,” said I, in a loud voice. “Even now he watches us!”
|
||||
|
||||
This startled them. Twenty pairs of eyes regarded me.
|
||||
|
||||
“The House of Pain is gone,” said I. “It will come again. The Master
|
||||
you cannot see; yet even now he listens among you.”
|
||||
|
||||
“True, true!” said the Dog-man.
|
||||
|
||||
They were staggered at my assurance. An animal may be ferocious and
|
||||
cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
|
||||
|
||||
“The Man with the Bandaged Arm speaks a strange thing,” said one of the
|
||||
Beast Folk.
|
||||
|
||||
“I tell you it is so,” I said. “The Master and the House of Pain will
|
||||
come again. Woe be to him who breaks the Law!”
|
||||
|
||||
They looked curiously at one another. With an affectation of
|
||||
indifference I began to chop idly at the ground in front of me with my
|
||||
hatchet. They looked, I noticed, at the deep cuts I made in the turf.
|
||||
|
||||
Then the Satyr raised a doubt. I answered him. Then one of the dappled
|
||||
things objected, and an animated discussion sprang up round the fire.
|
||||
Every moment I began to feel more convinced of my present security. I
|
||||
talked now without the catching in my breath, due to the intensity of
|
||||
my excitement, that had troubled me at first. In the course of about an
|
||||
hour I had really convinced several of the Beast Folk of the truth of
|
||||
my assertions, and talked most of the others into a dubious state. I
|
||||
kept a sharp eye for my enemy the Hyena-swine, but he never appeared.
|
||||
Every now and then a suspicious movement would startle me, but my
|
||||
confidence grew rapidly. Then as the moon crept down from the zenith,
|
||||
one by one the listeners began to yawn (showing the oddest teeth in the
|
||||
light of the sinking fire), and first one and then another retired
|
||||
towards the dens in the ravine; and I, dreading the silence and
|
||||
darkness, went with them, knowing I was safer with several of them than
|
||||
with one alone.
|
||||
|
||||
In this manner began the longer part of my sojourn upon this Island of
|
||||
Doctor Moreau. But from that night until the end came, there was but
|
||||
one thing happened to tell save a series of innumerable small
|
||||
unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that
|
||||
I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one
|
||||
cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these
|
||||
half-humanised brutes. There is much that sticks in my memory that I
|
||||
could write,—things that I would cheerfully give my right hand to
|
||||
forget; but they do not help the telling of the story.
|
||||
|
||||
In the retrospect it is strange to remember how soon I fell in with
|
||||
these monsters’ ways, and gained my confidence again. I had my quarrels
|
||||
with them of course, and could show some of their teeth-marks still;
|
||||
but they soon gained a wholesome respect for my trick of throwing
|
||||
stones and for the bite of my hatchet. And my Saint-Bernard-man’s
|
||||
loyalty was of infinite service to me. I found their simple scale of
|
||||
honour was based mainly on the capacity for inflicting trenchant
|
||||
wounds. Indeed, I may say—without vanity, I hope—that I held something
|
||||
like pre-eminence among them. One or two, whom in a rare access of high
|
||||
spirits I had scarred rather badly, bore me a grudge; but it vented
|
||||
itself chiefly behind my back, and at a safe distance from my missiles,
|
||||
in grimaces.
|
||||
|
||||
The Hyena-swine avoided me, and I was always on the alert for him. My
|
||||
inseparable Dog-man hated and dreaded him intensely. I really believe
|
||||
that was at the root of the brute’s attachment to me. It was soon
|
||||
evident to me that the former monster had tasted blood, and gone the
|
||||
way of the Leopard-man. He formed a lair somewhere in the forest, and
|
||||
became solitary. Once I tried to induce the Beast Folk to hunt him, but
|
||||
I lacked the authority to make them co-operate for one end. Again and
|
||||
again I tried to approach his den and come upon him unaware; but always
|
||||
he was too acute for me, and saw or winded me and got away. He too made
|
||||
every forest pathway dangerous to me and my ally with his lurking
|
||||
ambuscades. The Dog-man scarcely dared to leave my side.
|
||||
|
||||
In the first month or so the Beast Folk, compared with their latter
|
||||
condition, were human enough, and for one or two besides my canine
|
||||
friend I even conceived a friendly tolerance. The little pink
|
||||
sloth-creature displayed an odd affection for me, and took to following
|
||||
me about. The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength
|
||||
of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at
|
||||
me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained
|
||||
me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an
|
||||
idea, I believe, that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the
|
||||
proper use of speech. He called it “Big Thinks” to distinguish it from
|
||||
“Little Thinks,” the sane every-day interests of life. If ever I made a
|
||||
remark he did not understand, he would praise it very much, ask me to
|
||||
say it again, learn it by heart, and go off repeating it, with a word
|
||||
wrong here or there, to all the milder of the Beast People. He thought
|
||||
nothing of what was plain and comprehensible. I invented some very
|
||||
curious “Big Thinks” for his especial use. I think now that he was the
|
||||
silliest creature I ever met; he had developed in the most wonderful
|
||||
way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the
|
||||
natural folly of a monkey.
|
||||
|
||||
This, I say, was in the earlier weeks of my solitude among these
|
||||
brutes. During that time they respected the usage established by the
|
||||
Law, and behaved with general decorum. Once I found another rabbit torn
|
||||
to pieces,—by the Hyena-swine, I am assured,—but that was all. It was
|
||||
about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in
|
||||
their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a
|
||||
growing disinclination to talk. My Monkey-man’s jabber multiplied in
|
||||
volume but grew less and less comprehensible, more and more simian.
|
||||
Some of the others seemed altogether slipping their hold upon speech,
|
||||
though they still understood what I said to them at that time. (Can you
|
||||
imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering,
|
||||
losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again?) And they
|
||||
walked erect with an increasing difficulty. Though they evidently felt
|
||||
ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or
|
||||
another running on toes and finger-tips, and quite unable to recover
|
||||
the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily; drinking by
|
||||
suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more
|
||||
keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the “stubborn
|
||||
beast-flesh.” They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.
|
||||
|
||||
Some of them—the pioneers in this, I noticed with some surprise, were
|
||||
all females—began to disregard the injunction of decency, deliberately
|
||||
for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon the
|
||||
institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly losing
|
||||
its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.
|
||||
|
||||
My Dog-man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he
|
||||
became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy. I scarcely noticed the transition from
|
||||
the companion on my right hand to the lurching dog at my side.
|
||||
|
||||
As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the
|
||||
lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome
|
||||
that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of
|
||||
boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau’s enclosure. Some memory of pain,
|
||||
I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk.
|
||||
|
||||
It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these
|
||||
monsters,—to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how
|
||||
they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch
|
||||
of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs; how
|
||||
their foreheads fell away and their faces projected; how the
|
||||
quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the
|
||||
first month of my loneliness became a shuddering horror to recall.
|
||||
|
||||
The change was slow and inevitable. For them and for me it came without
|
||||
any definite shock. I still went among them in safety, because no jolt
|
||||
in the downward glide had released the increasing charge of explosive
|
||||
animalism that ousted the human day by day. But I began to fear that
|
||||
soon now that shock must come. My Saint-Bernard-brute followed me to
|
||||
the enclosure every night, and his vigilance enabled me to sleep at
|
||||
times in something like peace. The little pink sloth-thing became shy
|
||||
and left me, to crawl back to its natural life once more among the
|
||||
tree-branches. We were in just the state of equilibrium that would
|
||||
remain in one of those “Happy Family” cages which animal-tamers
|
||||
exhibit, if the tamer were to leave it for ever.
|
||||
|
||||
Of course these creatures did not decline into such beasts as the
|
||||
reader has seen in zoological gardens,—into ordinary bears, wolves,
|
||||
tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something strange about
|
||||
each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was
|
||||
ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but
|
||||
each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism
|
||||
appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds
|
||||
of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary
|
||||
recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the
|
||||
fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect.
|
||||
|
||||
I too must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as
|
||||
yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew
|
||||
long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have
|
||||
a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.
|
||||
|
||||
At first I spent the daylight hours on the southward beach watching for
|
||||
a ship, hoping and praying for a ship. I counted on the \emph{Ipecacuanha}
|
||||
returning as the year wore on; but she never came. Five times I saw
|
||||
sails, and thrice smoke; but nothing ever touched the island. I always
|
||||
had a bonfire ready, but no doubt the volcanic reputation of the island
|
||||
was taken to account for that.
|
||||
|
||||
It was only about September or October that I began to think of making
|
||||
a raft. By that time my arm had healed, and both my hands were at my
|
||||
service again. At first, I found my helplessness appalling. I had never
|
||||
done any carpentry or such-like work in my life, and I spent day after
|
||||
day in experimental chopping and binding among the trees. I had no
|
||||
ropes, and could hit on nothing wherewith to make ropes; none of the
|
||||
abundant creepers seemed limber or strong enough, and with all my
|
||||
litter of scientific education I could not devise any way of making
|
||||
them so. I spent more than a fortnight grubbing among the black ruins
|
||||
of the enclosure and on the beach where the boats had been burnt,
|
||||
looking for nails and other stray pieces of metal that might prove of
|
||||
service. Now and then some Beast-creature would watch me, and go
|
||||
leaping off when I called to it. There came a season of thunder-storms
|
||||
and heavy rain, which greatly retarded my work; but at last the raft
|
||||
was completed.
|
||||
|
||||
I was delighted with it. But with a certain lack of practical sense
|
||||
which has always been my bane, I had made it a mile or more from the
|
||||
sea; and before I had dragged it down to the beach the thing had fallen
|
||||
to pieces. Perhaps it is as well that I was saved from launching it;
|
||||
but at the time my misery at my failure was so acute that for some days
|
||||
I simply moped on the beach, and stared at the water and thought of
|
||||
death.
|
||||
|
||||
I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned
|
||||
me unmistakably of the folly of letting the days pass so,—for each
|
||||
fresh day was fraught with increasing danger from the Beast People.
|
||||
|
||||
I was lying in the shade of the enclosure wall, staring out to sea,
|
||||
when I was startled by something cold touching the skin of my heel, and
|
||||
starting round found the little pink sloth-creature blinking into my
|
||||
face. He had long since lost speech and active movement, and the lank
|
||||
hair of the little brute grew thicker every day and his stumpy claws
|
||||
more askew. He made a moaning noise when he saw he had attracted my
|
||||
attention, went a little way towards the bushes and looked back at me.
|
||||
|
||||
At first I did not understand, but presently it occurred to me that he
|
||||
wished me to follow him; and this I did at last,—slowly, for the day
|
||||
was hot. When we reached the trees he clambered into them, for he could
|
||||
travel better among their swinging creepers than on the ground. And
|
||||
suddenly in a trampled space I came upon a ghastly group. My
|
||||
Saint-Bernard-creature lay on the ground, dead; and near his body
|
||||
crouched the Hyena-swine, gripping the quivering flesh with its
|
||||
misshapen claws, gnawing at it, and snarling with delight. As I
|
||||
approached, the monster lifted its glaring eyes to mine, its lips went
|
||||
trembling back from its red-stained teeth, and it growled menacingly.
|
||||
It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint
|
||||
had vanished. I advanced a step farther, stopped, and pulled out my
|
||||
revolver. At last I had him face to face.
|
||||
|
||||
The brute made no sign of retreat; but its ears went back, its hair
|
||||
bristled, and its body crouched together. I aimed between the eyes and
|
||||
fired. As I did so, the Thing rose straight at me in a leap, and I was
|
||||
knocked over like a ninepin. It clutched at me with its crippled hand,
|
||||
and struck me in the face. Its spring carried it over me. I fell under
|
||||
the hind part of its body; but luckily I had hit as I meant, and it had
|
||||
died even as it leapt. I crawled out from under its unclean weight and
|
||||
stood up trembling, staring at its quivering body. That danger at least
|
||||
was over; but this, I knew was only the first of the series of relapses
|
||||
that must come.
|
||||
|
||||
I burnt both of the bodies on a pyre of brushwood; but after that I saw
|
||||
that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time. The
|
||||
Beast People by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the
|
||||
ravine and made themselves lairs according to their taste among the
|
||||
thickets of the island. Few prowled by day, most of them slept, and the
|
||||
island might have seemed deserted to a new-comer; but at night the air
|
||||
was hideous with their calls and howling. I had half a mind to make a
|
||||
massacre of them; to build traps, or fight them with my knife. Had I
|
||||
possessed sufficient cartridges, I should not have hesitated to begin
|
||||
the killing. There could now be scarcely a score left of the dangerous
|
||||
carnivores; the braver of these were already dead. After the death of
|
||||
this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the
|
||||
practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at
|
||||
night. I rebuilt my den in the walls of the enclosure, with such a
|
||||
narrow opening that anything attempting to enter must necessarily make
|
||||
a considerable noise. The creatures had lost the art of fire too, and
|
||||
recovered their fear of it. I turned once more, almost passionately
|
||||
now, to hammering together stakes and branches to form a raft for my
|
||||
escape.
|
||||
|
||||
I found a thousand difficulties. I am an extremely unhandy man (my
|
||||
schooling was over before the days of Slöjd); but most of the
|
||||
requirements of a raft I met at last in some clumsy, circuitous way or
|
||||
other, and this time I took care of the strength. The only
|
||||
insurmountable obstacle was that I had no vessel to contain the water I
|
||||
should need if I floated forth upon these untravelled seas. I would
|
||||
have even tried pottery, but the island contained no clay. I used to go
|
||||
moping about the island trying with all my might to solve this one last
|
||||
difficulty. Sometimes I would give way to wild outbursts of rage, and
|
||||
hack and splinter some unlucky tree in my intolerable vexation. But I
|
||||
could think of nothing.
|
||||
|
||||
And then came a day, a wonderful day, which I spent in ecstasy. I saw a
|
||||
sail to the southwest, a small sail like that of a little schooner; and
|
||||
forthwith I lit a great pile of brushwood, and stood by it in the heat
|
||||
of it, and the heat of the midday sun, watching. All day I watched that
|
||||
sail, eating or drinking nothing, so that my head reeled; and the
|
||||
Beasts came and glared at me, and seemed to wonder, and went away. It
|
||||
was still distant when night came and swallowed it up; and all night I
|
||||
toiled to keep my blaze bright and high, and the eyes of the Beasts
|
||||
shone out of the darkness, marvelling. In the dawn the sail was nearer,
|
||||
and I saw it was the dirty lug-sail of a small boat. But it sailed
|
||||
strangely. My eyes were weary with watching, and I peered and could not
|
||||
believe them. Two men were in the boat, sitting low down,—one by the
|
||||
bows, the other at the rudder. The head was not kept to the wind; it
|
||||
yawed and fell away.
|
||||
|
||||
As the day grew brighter, I began waving the last rag of my jacket to
|
||||
them; but they did not notice me, and sat still, facing each other. I
|
||||
went to the lowest point of the low headland, and gesticulated and
|
||||
shouted. There was no response, and the boat kept on her aimless
|
||||
course, making slowly, very slowly, for the bay. Suddenly a great white
|
||||
bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor
|
||||
noticed it; it circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its
|
||||
strong wings outspread.
|
||||
|
||||
Then I stopped shouting, and sat down on the headland and rested my
|
||||
chin on my hands and stared. Slowly, slowly, the boat drove past
|
||||
towards the west. I would have swum out to it, but something—a cold,
|
||||
vague fear—kept me back. In the afternoon the tide stranded the boat,
|
||||
and left it a hundred yards or so to the westward of the ruins of the
|
||||
enclosure. The men in it were dead, had been dead so long that they
|
||||
fell to pieces when I tilted the boat on its side and dragged them out.
|
||||
One had a shock of red hair, like the captain of the \emph{Ipecacuanha}, and
|
||||
a dirty white cap lay in the bottom of the boat.
|
||||
|
||||
As I stood beside the boat, three of the Beasts came slinking out of
|
||||
the bushes and sniffing towards me. One of my spasms of disgust came
|
||||
upon me. I thrust the little boat down the beach and clambered on board
|
||||
her. Two of the brutes were Wolf-beasts, and came forward with
|
||||
quivering nostrils and glittering eyes; the third was the horrible
|
||||
nondescript of bear and bull. When I saw them approaching those
|
||||
wretched remains, heard them snarling at one another and caught the
|
||||
gleam of their teeth, a frantic horror succeeded my repulsion. I turned
|
||||
my back upon them, struck the lug and began paddling out to sea. I
|
||||
could not bring myself to look behind me.
|
||||
|
||||
I lay, however, between the reef and the island that night, and the
|
||||
next morning went round to the stream and filled the empty keg aboard
|
||||
with water. Then, with such patience as I could command, I collected a
|
||||
quantity of fruit, and waylaid and killed two rabbits with my last
|
||||
three cartridges. While I was doing this I left the boat moored to an
|
||||
inward projection of the reef, for fear of the Beast People.
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue