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Adicionado mais alguns capitulos de forma separada.

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I turned again and went on down towards the sea. I found the hot stream
broadened out to a shallow, weedy sand, in which an abundance of crabs
and long-bodied, many-legged creatures started from my footfall. I
walked to the very edge of the salt water, and then I felt I was safe.
I turned and stared, arms akimbo, at the thick green behind me, into
which the steamy ravine cut like a smoking gash. But, as I say, I was
too full of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have never
known danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.
Then it came into my head that there was one chance before me yet.
While Moreau and Montgomery and their bestial rabble chased me through
the island, might I not go round the beach until I came to their
enclosure,—make a flank march upon them, in fact, and then with a rock
lugged out of their loosely-built wall, perhaps, smash in the lock of
the smaller door and see what I could find (knife, pistol, or what not)
to fight them with when they returned? It was at any rate something to
try.
So I turned to the westward and walked along by the water’s edge. The
setting sun flashed his blinding heat into my eyes. The slight Pacific
tide was running in with a gentle ripple. Presently the shore fell away
southward, and the sun came round upon my right hand. Then suddenly,
far in front of me, I saw first one and then several figures emerging
from the bushes,—Moreau, with his grey staghound, then Montgomery, and
two others. At that I stopped.
They saw me, and began gesticulating and advancing. I stood watching
them approach. The two Beast Men came running forward to cut me off
from the undergrowth, inland. Montgomery came, running also, but
straight towards me. Moreau followed slower with the dog.
At last I roused myself from my inaction, and turning seaward walked
straight into the water. The water was very shallow at first. I was
thirty yards out before the waves reached to my waist. Dimly I could
see the intertidal creatures darting away from my feet.
“What are you doing, man?” cried Montgomery.
I turned, standing waist deep, and stared at them. Montgomery stood
panting at the margin of the water. His face was bright-red with
exertion, his long flaxen hair blown about his head, and his dropping
nether lip showed his irregular teeth. Moreau was just coming up, his
face pale and firm, and the dog at his hand barked at me. Both men had
heavy whips. Farther up the beach stared the Beast Men.
“What am I doing? I am going to drown myself,” said I.
Montgomery and Moreau looked at each other. “Why?” asked Moreau.
“Because that is better than being tortured by you.”
“I told you so,” said Montgomery, and Moreau said something in a low
tone.
“What makes you think I shall torture you?” asked Moreau.
“What I saw,” I said. “And those—yonder.”
“Hush!” said Moreau, and held up his hand.
“I will not,” said I. “They were men: what are they now? I at least
will not be like them.”
I looked past my interlocutors. Up the beach were M’ling, Montgomery’s
attendant, and one of the white-swathed brutes from the boat. Farther
up, in the shadow of the trees, I saw my little Ape-man, and behind him
some other dim figures.
“Who are these creatures?” said I, pointing to them and raising my
voice more and more that it might reach them. “They were men, men like
yourselves, whom you have infected with some bestial taint,—men whom
you have enslaved, and whom you still fear.
“You who listen,” I cried, pointing now to Moreau and shouting past him
to the Beast Men,—“You who listen! Do you not see these men still fear
you, go in dread of you? Why, then, do you fear them? You are many—”
“For God’s sake,” cried Montgomery, “stop that, Prendick!”
“Prendick!” cried Moreau.
They both shouted together, as if to drown my voice; and behind them
lowered the staring faces of the Beast Men, wondering, their deformed
hands hanging down, their shoulders hunched up. They seemed, as I
fancied, to be trying to understand me, to remember, I thought,
something of their human past.
I went on shouting, I scarcely remember what,—that Moreau and
Montgomery could be killed, that they were not to be feared: that was
the burden of what I put into the heads of the Beast People. I saw the
green-eyed man in the dark rags, who had met me on the evening of my
arrival, come out from among the trees, and others followed him, to
hear me better. At last for want of breath I paused.
“Listen to me for a moment,” said the steady voice of Moreau; “and then
say what you will.”
“Well?” said I.
He coughed, thought, then shouted: “Latin, Prendick! bad Latin,
schoolboy Latin; but try and understand. \emph{Hi non sunt homines; sunt
animalia qui nos habemus}—vivisected. A humanising process. I will
explain. Come ashore.”
I laughed. “A pretty story,” said I. “They talk, build houses. They
were men. It’s likely I’ll come ashore.”
“The water just beyond where you stand is deep—and full of sharks.”
“That’s my way,” said I. “Short and sharp. Presently.”
“Wait a minute.” He took something out of his pocket that flashed back
the sun, and dropped the object at his feet. “That’s a loaded
revolver,” said he. “Montgomery here will do the same. Now we are going
up the beach until you are satisfied the distance is safe. Then come
and take the revolvers.”
“Not I! You have a third between you.”
“I want you to think over things, Prendick. In the first place, I never
asked you to come upon this island. If we vivisected men, we should
import men, not beasts. In the next, we had you drugged last night, had
we wanted to work you any mischief; and in the next, now your first
panic is over and you can think a little, is Montgomery here quite up
to the character you give him? We have chased you for your good.
Because this island is full of inimical phenomena. Besides, why should
we want to shoot you when you have just offered to drown yourself?”
“Why did you set—your people onto me when I was in the hut?”
“We felt sure of catching you, and bringing you out of danger.
Afterwards we drew away from the scent, for your good.”
I mused. It seemed just possible. Then I remembered something again.
“But I saw,” said I, “in the enclosure—”
“That was the puma.”
“Look here, Prendick,” said Montgomery, “you’re a silly ass! Come out
of the water and take these revolvers, and talk. We can’t do anything
more than we could do now.”
I will confess that then, and indeed always, I distrusted and dreaded
Moreau; but Montgomery was a man I felt I understood.
“Go up the beach,” said I, after thinking, and added, “holding your
hands up.”
“Can’t do that,” said Montgomery, with an explanatory nod over his
shoulder. “Undignified.”
“Go up to the trees, then,” said I, “as you please.”
“It’s a damned silly ceremony,” said Montgomery.
Both turned and faced the six or seven grotesque creatures, who stood
there in the sunlight, solid, casting shadows, moving, and yet so
incredibly unreal. Montgomery cracked his whip at them, and forthwith
they all turned and fled helter-skelter into the trees; and when
Montgomery and Moreau were at a distance I judged sufficient, I waded
ashore, and picked up and examined the revolvers. To satisfy myself
against the subtlest trickery, I discharged one at a round lump of
lava, and had the satisfaction of seeing the stone pulverised and the
beach splashed with lead. Still I hesitated for a moment.
“I’ll take the risk,” said I, at last; and with a revolver in each hand
I walked up the beach towards them.
“That’s better,” said Moreau, without affectation. “As it is, you have
wasted the best part of my day with your confounded imagination.” And
with a touch of contempt which humiliated me, he and Montgomery turned
and went on in silence before me.
The knot of Beast Men, still wondering, stood back among the trees. I
passed them as serenely as possible. One started to follow me, but
retreated again when Montgomery cracked his whip. The rest stood
silent—watching. They may once have been animals; but I never before
saw an animal trying to think.

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“And now, Prendick, I will explain,” said Doctor Moreau, so soon as we
had eaten and drunk. “I must confess that you are the most dictatorial
guest I ever entertained. I warn you that this is the last I shall do
to oblige you. The next thing you threaten to commit suicide about, I
shan’t do,—even at some personal inconvenience.”
He sat in my deck chair, a cigar half consumed in his white,
dexterous-looking fingers. The light of the swinging lamp fell on his
white hair; he stared through the little window out at the starlight. I
sat as far away from him as possible, the table between us and the
revolvers to hand. Montgomery was not present. I did not care to be
with the two of them in such a little room.
“You admit that the vivisected human being, as you called it, is, after
all, only the puma?” said Moreau. He had made me visit that horror in
the inner room, to assure myself of its inhumanity.
“It is the puma,” I said, “still alive, but so cut and mutilated as I
pray I may never see living flesh again. Of all vile—”
“Never mind that,” said Moreau; “at least, spare me those youthful
horrors. Montgomery used to be just the same. You admit that it is the
puma. Now be quiet, while I reel off my physiological lecture to you.”
And forthwith, beginning in the tone of a man supremely bored, but
presently warming a little, he explained his work to me. He was very
simple and convincing. Now and then there was a touch of sarcasm in his
voice. Presently I found myself hot with shame at our mutual positions.
The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were
animals, humanised animals,—triumphs of vivisection.
“You forget all that a skilled vivisector can do with living things,”
said Moreau. “For my own part, I’m puzzled why the things I have done
here have not been done before. Small efforts, of course, have been
made,—amputation, tongue-cutting, excisions. Of course you know a
squint may be induced or cured by surgery? Then in the case of
excisions you have all kinds of secondary changes, pigmentary
disturbances, modifications of the passions, alterations in the
secretion of fatty tissue. I have no doubt you have heard of these
things?”
“Of course,” said I. “But these foul creatures of yours—”
“All in good time,” said he, waving his hand at me; “I am only
beginning. Those are trivial cases of alteration. Surgery can do better
things than that. There is building up as well as breaking down and
changing. You have heard, perhaps, of a common surgical operation
resorted to in cases where the nose has been destroyed: a flap of skin
is cut from the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heals in the new
position. This is a kind of grafting in a new position of part of an
animal upon itself. Grafting of freshly obtained material from another
animal is also possible,—the case of teeth, for example. The grafting
of skin and bone is done to facilitate healing: the surgeon places in
the middle of the wound pieces of skin snipped from another animal, or
fragments of bone from a victim freshly killed. Hunter’s
cock-spur—possibly you have heard of that—flourished on the bull’s
neck; and the rhinoceros rats of the Algerian zouaves are also to be
thought of,—monsters manufactured by transferring a slip from the tail
of an ordinary rat to its snout, and allowing it to heal in that
position.”
“Monsters manufactured!” said I. “Then you mean to tell me—”
“Yes. These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into
new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my
life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge
as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing
new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no
one had the temerity to touch it. It is not simply the outward form of
an animal which I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of
the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification,—of
which vaccination and other methods of inoculation with living or dead
matter are examples that will, no doubt, be familiar to you. A similar
operation is the transfusion of blood,—with which subject, indeed, I
began. These are all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more
extensive, were the operations of those mediaeval practitioners who
made dwarfs and beggar-cripples, show-monsters,—some vestiges of whose
art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young
mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them in
‘L’Homme qui Rit.’—But perhaps my meaning grows plain now. You begin to
see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of
an animal to another, or from one animal to another; to alter its
chemical reactions and methods of growth; to modify the articulations
of its limbs; and, indeed, to change it in its most intimate structure.
“And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought
as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators until I took it
up! Some such things have been hit upon in the last resort of surgery;
most of the kindred evidence that will recur to your mind has been
demonstrated as it were by accident,—by tyrants, by criminals, by the
breeders of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained clumsy-handed
men working for their own immediate ends. I was the first man to take
up this question armed with antiseptic surgery, and with a really
scientific knowledge of the laws of growth. Yet one would imagine it
must have been practised in secret before. Such creatures as the
Siamese Twins—And in the vaults of the Inquisition. No doubt their
chief aim was artistic torture, but some at least of the inquisitors
must have had a touch of scientific curiosity.”
“But,” said I, “these things—these animals talk!”
He said that was so, and proceeded to point out that the possibility of
vivisection does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may
be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the
bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a
possibility of superseding old inherent instincts by new suggestions,
grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed
of what we call moral education, he said, is such an artificial
modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into
courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious
emotion. And the great difference between man and monkey is in the
larynx, he continued,—in the incapacity to frame delicately different
sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained. In this I failed to
agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my
objection. He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account
of his work.
I asked him why he had taken the human form as a model. There seemed to
me then, and there still seems to me now, a strange wickedness for that
choice.
He confessed that he had chosen that form by chance. “I might just as
well have worked to form sheep into llamas and llamas into sheep. I
suppose there is something in the human form that appeals to the
artistic turn of mind more powerfully than any animal shape can. But
I’ve not confined myself to man-making. Once or twice—” He was silent,
for a minute perhaps. “These years! How they have slipped by! And here
I have wasted a day saving your life, and am now wasting an hour
explaining myself!”
“But,” said I, “I still do not understand. Where is your justification
for inflicting all this pain? The only thing that could excuse
vivisection to me would be some application—”
“Precisely,” said he. “But, you see, I am differently constituted. We
are on different platforms. You are a materialist.”
“I am \emph{not} a materialist,” I began hotly.
“In my view—in my view. For it is just this question of pain that parts
us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your
own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about
sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less
obscurely what an animal feels. This pain—”
I gave an impatient shrug at such sophistry.
“Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to what science
has to teach must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in
this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before
the nearest star could be attained—it may be, I say, that nowhere else
does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way
towards—Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is
there?”
As he spoke he drew a little penknife from his pocket, opened the
smaller blade, and moved his chair so that I could see his thigh. Then,
choosing the place deliberately, he drove the blade into his leg and
withdrew it.
“No doubt,” he said, “you have seen that before. It does not hurt a
pin-prick. But what does it show? The capacity for pain is not needed
in the muscle, and it is not placed there,—is but little needed in the
skin, and only here and there over the thigh is a spot capable of
feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us
and stimulate us. Not all living flesh is painful; nor is all nerve,
not even all sensory nerve. There’s no taint of pain, real pain, in the
sensations of the optic nerve. If you wound the optic nerve, you merely
see flashes of light,—just as disease of the auditory nerve merely
means a humming in our ears. Plants do not feel pain, nor the lower
animals; it’s possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish
do not feel pain at all. Then with men, the more intelligent they
become, the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare,
and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger. I
never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence
by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.
“Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may
be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker
than you,—for I have sought his laws, in \emph{my} way, all my life, while
you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you,
pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell. Pleasure and
pain—bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the
dark? This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain,
Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them,—the mark of the beast
from which they came! Pain, pain and pleasure, they are for us only so
long as we wriggle in the dust.
“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is
the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question,
devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got a fresh question.
Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means
to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You
cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual
desires! The thing before you is no longer an animal, a
fellow-creature, but a problem! Sympathetic pain,—all I know of it I
remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted—it was
the one thing I wanted—to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a
living shape.”
“But,” said I, “the thing is an abomination—”
“To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter,” he
continued. “The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as
Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was
pursuing; and the material has—dripped into the huts yonder. It is
nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery and six
Kanakas. I remember the green stillness of the island and the empty
ocean about us, as though it was yesterday. The place seemed waiting
for me.
“The stores were landed and the house was built. The Kanakas founded
some huts near the ravine. I went to work here upon what I had brought
with me. There were some disagreeable things happened at first. I began
with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip of the
scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear and
left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had
finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it. It
remembered me, and was terrified beyond imagination; and it had no more
than the wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it the clumsier it
seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery. These
animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things,
without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,—they are no good
for man-making.
“Then I took a gorilla I had; and upon that, working with infinite care
and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. All the
week, night and day, I moulded him. With him it was chiefly the brain
that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed. I thought him
a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had finished him, and he lay
bandaged, bound, and motionless before me. It was only when his life
was assured that I left him and came into this room again, and found
Montgomery much as you are. He had heard some of the cries as the thing
grew human,—cries like those that disturbed \emph{you} so. I didn’t take him
completely into my confidence at first. And the Kanakas too, had
realised something of it. They were scared out of their wits by the
sight of me. I got Montgomery over to me—in a way; but I and he had the
hardest job to prevent the Kanakas deserting. Finally they did; and so
we lost the yacht. I spent many days educating the brute,—altogether I
had him for three or four months. I taught him the rudiments of
English; gave him ideas of counting; even made the thing read the
alphabet. But at that he was slow, though I’ve met with idiots slower.
He began with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories left in his mind
of what he had been. When his scars were quite healed, and he was no
longer anything but painful and stiff, and able to converse a little, I
took him yonder and introduced him to the Kanakas as an interesting
stowaway.
“They were horribly afraid of him at first, somehow,—which offended me
rather, for I was conceited about him; but his ways seemed so mild, and
he was so abject, that after a time they received him and took his
education in hand. He was quick to learn, very imitative and adaptive,
and built himself a hovel rather better, it seemed to me, than their
own shanties. There was one among the boys a bit of a missionary, and
he taught the thing to read, or at least to pick out letters, and gave
him some rudimentary ideas of morality; but it seems the beast’s habits
were not all that is desirable.
“I rested from work for some days after this, and was in a mind to
write an account of the whole affair to wake up English physiology.
Then I came upon the creature squatting up in a tree and gibbering at
two of the Kanakas who had been teasing him. I threatened him, told him
the inhumanity of such a proceeding, aroused his sense of shame, and
came home resolved to do better before I took my work back to England.
I have been doing better. But somehow the things drift back again: the
stubborn beast-flesh grows day by day back again. But I mean to do
better things still. I mean to conquer that. This puma—
“But that’s the story. All the Kanaka boys are dead now; one fell
overboard of the launch, and one died of a wounded heel that he
poisoned in some way with plant-juice. Three went away in the yacht,
and I suppose and hope were drowned. The other one—was killed. Well, I
have replaced them. Montgomery went on much as you are disposed to do
at first, and then—
“What became of the other one?” said I, sharply,—“the other Kanaka who
was killed?”
“The fact is, after I had made a number of human creatures I made a
Thing—” He hesitated.
“Yes?” said I.
“It was killed.”
“I don’t understand,” said I; “do you mean to say—”
“It killed the Kanaka—yes. It killed several other things that it
caught. We chased it for a couple of days. It only got loose by
accident—I never meant it to get away. It wasn’t finished. It was
purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing, with a horrible face,
that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It was immensely
strong, and in infuriating pain. It lurked in the woods for some days,
until we hunted it; and then it wriggled into the northern part of the
island, and we divided the party to close in upon it. Montgomery
insisted upon coming with me. The man had a rifle; and when his body
was found, one of the barrels was curved into the shape of an S and
very nearly bitten through. Montgomery shot the thing. After that I
stuck to the ideal of humanity—except for little things.”
He became silent. I sat in silence watching his face.
“So for twenty years altogether—counting nine years in England—I have
been going on; and there is still something in everything I do that
defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort.
Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it; but always
I fall short of the things I dream. The human shape I can get now,
almost with ease, so that it is lithe and graceful, or thick and
strong; but often there is trouble with the hands and the
claws,—painful things, that I dare not shape too freely. But it is in
the subtle grafting and reshaping one must needs do to the brain that
my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with
unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps. And least satisfactory of
all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere—I cannot determine
where—in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that
harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst forth suddenly and
inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear.
These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you so soon as
you began to observe them; but to me, just after I make them, they seem
to be indisputably human beings. It’s afterwards, as I observe them,
that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another, creeps
to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer yet! Each time
I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This
time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational
creature of my own!’ After all, what is ten years? Men have been a
hundred thousand in the making.” He thought darkly. “But I am drawing
near the fastness. This puma of mine—” After a silence, “And they
revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep
back, begins to assert itself again.” Another long silence.
“Then you take the things you make into those dens?” said I.
“They go. I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and
presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is
a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it,
for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them
to our service. He’s ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of
those beasts. It’s his business, not mine. They only sicken me with a
sense of failure. I take no interest in them. I fancy they follow in
the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery
of a rational life, poor beasts! There’s something they call the Law.
Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’ They build themselves their dens, gather
fruit, and pull herbs—marry even. But I can see through it all, see
into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts,
beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify
themselves.—Yet they’re odd; complex, like everything else alive. There
is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual
emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me. I have some hope of
this puma. I have worked hard at her head and brain—
“And now,” said he, standing up after a long gap of silence, during
which we had each pursued our own thoughts, “what do you think? Are you
in fear of me still?”
I looked at him, and saw but a white-faced, white-haired man, with calm
eyes. Save for his serenity, the touch almost of beauty that resulted
from his set tranquillity and his magnificent build, he might have
passed muster among a hundred other comfortable old gentlemen. Then I
shivered. By way of answer to his second question, I handed him a
revolver with either hand.
“Keep them,” he said, and snatched at a yawn. He stood up, stared at me
for a moment, and smiled. “You have had two eventful days,” said he. “I
should advise some sleep. I’m glad it’s all clear. Good-night.” He
thought me over for a moment, then went out by the inner door.
I immediately turned the key in the outer one. I sat down again; sat
for a time in a kind of stagnant mood, so weary, emotionally, mentally,
and physically, that I could not think beyond the point at which he had
left me. The black window stared at me like an eye. At last with an
effort I put out the light and got into the hammock. Very soon I was
asleep.

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It came before my mind with an unreasonable hope of escape that the
outer door of my room was still open to me. I was convinced now,
absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being. All
the time since I had heard his name, I had been trying to link in my
mind in some way the grotesque animalism of the islanders with his
abominations; and now I thought I saw it all. The memory of his work on
the transfusion of blood recurred to me. These creatures I had seen
were the victims of some hideous experiment. These sickening scoundrels
had merely intended to keep me back, to fool me with their display of
confidence, and presently to fall upon me with a fate more horrible
than death,—with torture; and after torture the most hideous
degradation it is possible to conceive,—to send me off a lost soul, a
beast, to the rest of their Comus rout.
I looked round for some weapon. Nothing. Then with an inspiration I
turned over the deck chair, put my foot on the side of it, and tore
away the side rail. It happened that a nail came away with the wood,
and projecting, gave a touch of danger to an otherwise petty weapon. I
heard a step outside, and incontinently flung open the door and found
Montgomery within a yard of it. He meant to lock the outer door! I
raised this nailed stick of mine and cut at his face; but he sprang
back. I hesitated a moment, then turned and fled, round the corner of
the house. “Prendick, man!” I heard his astonished cry, “don’t be a
silly ass, man!”
Another minute, thought I, and he would have had me locked in, and as
ready as a hospital rabbit for my fate. He emerged behind the corner,
for I heard him shout, “Prendick!” Then he began to run after me,
shouting things as he ran. This time running blindly, I went
northeastward in a direction at right angles to my previous expedition.
Once, as I went running headlong up the beach, I glanced over my
shoulder and saw his attendant with him. I ran furiously up the slope,
over it, then turning eastward along a rocky valley fringed on either
side with jungle I ran for perhaps a mile altogether, my chest
straining, my heart beating in my ears; and then hearing nothing of
Montgomery or his man, and feeling upon the verge of exhaustion, I
doubled sharply back towards the beach as I judged, and lay down in the
shelter of a canebrake. There I remained for a long time, too fearful
to move, and indeed too fearful even to plan a course of action. The
wild scene about me lay sleeping silently under the sun, and the only
sound near me was the thin hum of some small gnats that had discovered
me. Presently I became aware of a drowsy breathing sound, the soughing
of the sea upon the beach.
After about an hour I heard Montgomery shouting my name, far away to
the north. That set me thinking of my plan of action. As I interpreted
it then, this island was inhabited only by these two vivisectors and
their animalised victims. Some of these no doubt they could press into
their service against me if need arose. I knew both Moreau and
Montgomery carried revolvers; and, save for a feeble bar of deal spiked
with a small nail, the merest mockery of a mace, I was unarmed.
So I lay still there, until I began to think of food and drink; and at
that thought the real hopelessness of my position came home to me. I
knew no way of getting anything to eat. I was too ignorant of botany to
discover any resort of root or fruit that might lie about me; I had no
means of trapping the few rabbits upon the island. It grew blanker the
more I turned the prospect over. At last in the desperation of my
position, my mind turned to the animal men I had encountered. I tried
to find some hope in what I remembered of them. In turn I recalled each
one I had seen, and tried to draw some augury of assistance from my
memory.
Then suddenly I heard a staghound bay, and at that realised a new
danger. I took little time to think, or they would have caught me then,
but snatching up my nailed stick, rushed headlong from my hiding-place
towards the sound of the sea. I remember a growth of thorny plants,
with spines that stabbed like pen-knives. I emerged bleeding and with
torn clothes upon the lip of a long creek opening northward. I went
straight into the water without a minute’s hesitation, wading up the
creek, and presently finding myself kneedeep in a little stream. I
scrambled out at last on the westward bank, and with my heart beating
loudly in my ears, crept into a tangle of ferns to await the issue. I
heard the dog (there was only one) draw nearer, and yelp when it came
to the thorns. Then I heard no more, and presently began to think I had
escaped.
The minutes passed; the silence lengthened out, and at last after an
hour of security my courage began to return to me. By this time I was
no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were,
passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was
practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring
anything. I had even a certain wish to encounter Moreau face to face;
and as I had waded into the water, I remembered that if I were too hard
pressed at least one path of escape from torment still lay open to
me,—they could not very well prevent my drowning myself. I had half a
mind to drown myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure
out, a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained
me. I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny
plants, and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it
seemed to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a
black face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had
met the launch upon the beach. He was clinging to the oblique stem of a
palm-tree. I gripped my stick, and stood up facing him. He began
chattering. “You, you, you,” was all I could distinguish at first.
Suddenly he dropped from the tree, and in another moment was holding
the fronds apart and staring curiously at me.
I did not feel the same repugnance towards this creature which I had
experienced in my encounters with the other Beast Men. “You,” he said,
“in the boat.” He was a man, then,—at least as much of a man as
Montgomery’s attendant,—for he could talk.
“Yes,” I said, “I came in the boat. From the ship.”
“Oh!” he said, and his bright, restless eyes travelled over me, to my
hands, to the stick I carried, to my feet, to the tattered places in my
coat, and the cuts and scratches I had received from the thorns. He
seemed puzzled at something. His eyes came back to my hands. He held
his own hand out and counted his digits slowly, “One, two, three, four,
five—eigh?”
I did not grasp his meaning then; afterwards I was to find that a great
proportion of these Beast People had malformed hands, lacking sometimes
even three digits. But guessing this was in some way a greeting, I did
the same thing by way of reply. He grinned with immense satisfaction.
Then his swift roving glance went round again; he made a swift
movement—and vanished. The fern fronds he had stood between came
swishing together.
I pushed out of the brake after him, and was astonished to find him
swinging cheerfully by one lank arm from a rope of creepers that looped
down from the foliage overhead. His back was to me.
“Hullo!” said I.
He came down with a twisting jump, and stood facing me.
“I say,” said I, “where can I get something to eat?”
“Eat!” he said. “Eat Man’s food, now.” And his eye went back to the
swing of ropes. “At the huts.”
“But where are the huts?”
“Oh!”
“I’m new, you know.”
At that he swung round, and set off at a quick walk. All his motions
were curiously rapid. “Come along,” said he.
I went with him to see the adventure out. I guessed the huts were some
rough shelter where he and some more of these Beast People lived. I
might perhaps find them friendly, find some handle in their minds to
take hold of. I did not know how far they had forgotten their human
heritage.
My ape-like companion trotted along by my side, with his hands hanging
down and his jaw thrust forward. I wondered what memory he might have
in him. “How long have you been on this island?” said I.
“How long?” he asked; and after having the question repeated, he held
up three fingers.
The creature was little better than an idiot. I tried to make out what
he meant by that, and it seems I bored him. After another question or
two he suddenly left my side and went leaping at some fruit that hung
from a tree. He pulled down a handful of prickly husks and went on
eating the contents. I noted this with satisfaction, for here at least
was a hint for feeding. I tried him with some other questions, but his
chattering, prompt responses were as often as not quite at cross
purposes with my question. Some few were appropriate, others quite
parrot-like.
I was so intent upon these peculiarities that I scarcely noticed the
path we followed. Presently we came to trees, all charred and brown,
and so to a bare place covered with a yellow-white incrustation, across
which a drifting smoke, pungent in whiffs to nose and eyes, went
drifting. On our right, over a shoulder of bare rock, I saw the level
blue of the sea. The path coiled down abruptly into a narrow ravine
between two tumbled and knotty masses of blackish scoriae. Into this we
plunged.
It was extremely dark, this passage, after the blinding sunlight
reflected from the sulphurous ground. Its walls grew steep, and
approached each other. Blotches of green and crimson drifted across my
eyes. My conductor stopped suddenly. “Home!” said he, and I stood in a
floor of a chasm that was at first absolutely dark to me. I heard some
strange noises, and thrust the knuckles of my left hand into my eyes. I
became aware of a disagreeable odor, like that of a monkey’s cage
ill-cleaned. Beyond, the rock opened again upon a gradual slope of
sunlit greenery, and on either hand the light smote down through narrow
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Then something cold touched my hand. I started violently, and saw close
to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than
anything else in the world. The creature had exactly the mild but
repulsive features of a sloth, the same low forehead and slow gestures.
As the first shock of the change of light passed, I saw about me more
distinctly. The little sloth-like creature was standing and staring at
me. My conductor had vanished. The place was a narrow passage between
high walls of lava, a crack in the knotted rock, and on either side
interwoven heaps of sea-mat, palm-fans, and reeds leaning against the
rock formed rough and impenetrably dark dens. The winding way up the
ravine between these was scarcely three yards wide, and was disfigured
by lumps of decaying fruit-pulp and other refuse, which accounted for
the disagreeable stench of the place.
The little pink sloth-creature was still blinking at me when my Ape-man
reappeared at the aperture of the nearest of these dens, and beckoned
me in. As he did so a slouching monster wriggled out of one of the
places, further up this strange street, and stood up in featureless
silhouette against the bright green beyond, staring at me. I hesitated,
having half a mind to bolt the way I had come; and then, determined to
go through with the adventure, I gripped my nailed stick about the
middle and crawled into the little evil-smelling lean-to after my
conductor.
It was a semi-circular space, shaped like the half of a bee-hive; and
against the rocky wall that formed the inner side of it was a pile of
variegated fruits, cocoa-nuts among others. Some rough vessels of lava
and wood stood about the floor, and one on a rough stool. There was no
fire. In the darkest corner of the hut sat a shapeless mass of darkness
that grunted “Hey!” as I came in, and my Ape-man stood in the dim light
of the doorway and held out a split cocoa-nut to me as I crawled into
the other corner and squatted down. I took it, and began gnawing it, as
serenely as possible, in spite of a certain trepidation and the nearly
intolerable closeness of the den. The little pink sloth-creature stood
in the aperture of the hut, and something else with a drab face and
bright eyes came staring over its shoulder.
“Hey!” came out of the lump of mystery opposite. “It is a man.”
“It is a man,” gabbled my conductor, “a man, a man, a five-man, like
me.”
“Shut up!” said the voice from the dark, and grunted. I gnawed my
cocoa-nut amid an impressive stillness.
I peered hard into the blackness, but could distinguish nothing.
“It is a man,” the voice repeated. “He comes to live with us?”
It was a thick voice, with something in it—a kind of whistling
overtone—that struck me as peculiar; but the English accent was
strangely good.
The Ape-man looked at me as though he expected something. I perceived
the pause was interrogative. “He comes to live with you,” I said.
“It is a man. He must learn the Law.”
I began to distinguish now a deeper blackness in the black, a vague
outline of a hunched-up figure. Then I noticed the opening of the place
was darkened by two more black heads. My hand tightened on my stick.
The thing in the dark repeated in a louder tone, “Say the words.” I had
missed its last remark. “Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law,” it
repeated in a kind of sing-song.
I was puzzled.
“Say the words,” said the Ape-man, repeating, and the figures in the
doorway echoed this, with a threat in the tone of their voices.
I realised that I had to repeat this idiotic formula; and then began
the insanest ceremony. The voice in the dark began intoning a mad
litany, line by line, and I and the rest to repeat it. As they did so,
they swayed from side to side in the oddest way, and beat their hands
upon their knees; and I followed their example. I could have imagined I
was already dead and in another world. That dark hut, these grotesque
dim figures, just flecked here and there by a glimmer of light, and all
of them swaying in unison and chanting,
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to claw the Bark of Trees; \emph{that} is the Law. Are we not Men?
“Not to chase other Men; \emph{that} is the Law. Are we not Men?”
And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the
prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible,
and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic
fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster,
repeating this amazing Law. Superficially the contagion of these brutes
was upon me, but deep down within me the laughter and disgust struggled
together. We ran through a long list of prohibitions, and then the
chant swung round to a new formula.
“\emph{His} is the House of Pain.
“\emph{His} is the Hand that makes.
“\emph{His} is the Hand that wounds.
“\emph{His} is the Hand that heals.”
And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible
gibberish to me about \emph{Him}, whoever he might be. I could have fancied
it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream.
“\emph{His} is the lightning flash,” we sang. “\emph{His} is the deep, salt sea.”
A horrible fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalising these
men, had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of
himself. However, I was too keenly aware of white teeth and strong
claws about me to stop my chanting on that account.
“\emph{His} are the stars in the sky.”
At last that song ended. I saw the Ape-man’s face shining with
perspiration; and my eyes being now accustomed to the darkness, I saw
more distinctly the figure in the corner from which the voice came. It
was the size of a man, but it seemed covered with a dull grey hair
almost like a Skye-terrier. What was it? What were they all? Imagine
yourself surrounded by all the most horrible cripples and maniacs it is
possible to conceive, and you may understand a little of my feelings
with these grotesque caricatures of humanity about me.
“He is a five-man, a five-man, a five-man—like me,” said the Ape-man.
I held out my hands. The grey creature in the corner leant forward.
“Not to run on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” he said.
He put out a strangely distorted talon and gripped my fingers. The
thing was almost like the hoof of a deer produced into claws. I could
have yelled with surprise and pain. His face came forward and peered at
my nails, came forward into the light of the opening of the hut and I
saw with a quivering disgust that it was like the face of neither man
nor beast, but a mere shock of grey hair, with three shadowy
over-archings to mark the eyes and mouth.
“He has little nails,” said this grisly creature in his hairy beard.
“It is well.”
He threw my hand down, and instinctively I gripped my stick.
“Eat roots and herbs; it is His will,” said the Ape-man.
“I am the Sayer of the Law,” said the grey figure. “Here come all that
be new to learn the Law. I sit in the darkness and say the Law.”
“It is even so,” said one of the beasts in the doorway.
“Evil are the punishments of those who break the Law. None escape.”
“None escape,” said the Beast Folk, glancing furtively at one another.
“None, none,” said the Ape-man,—“none escape. See! I did a little
thing, a wrong thing, once. I jabbered, jabbered, stopped talking. None
could understand. I am burnt, branded in the hand. He is great. He is
good!”
“None escape,” said the grey creature in the corner.
“None escape,” said the Beast People, looking askance at one another.
“For every one the want that is bad,” said the grey Sayer of the Law.
“What you will want we do not know; we shall know. Some want to follow
things that move, to watch and slink and wait and spring; to kill and
bite, bite deep and rich, sucking the blood. It is bad. ‘Not to chase
other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Flesh or Fish;
that is the Law. Are we not Men?’”
“None escape,” said a dappled brute standing in the doorway.
“For every one the want is bad,” said the grey Sayer of the Law. “Some
want to go tearing with teeth and hands into the roots of things,
snuffing into the earth. It is bad.”
“None escape,” said the men in the door.
“Some go clawing trees; some go scratching at the graves of the dead;
some go fighting with foreheads or feet or claws; some bite suddenly,
none giving occasion; some love uncleanness.”
“None escape,” said the Ape-man, scratching his calf.
“None escape,” said the little pink sloth-creature.
“Punishment is sharp and sure. Therefore learn the Law. Say the words.”
And incontinently he began again the strange litany of the Law, and
again I and all these creatures began singing and swaying. My head
reeled with this jabbering and the close stench of the place; but I
kept on, trusting to find presently some chance of a new development.
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”
We were making such a noise that I noticed nothing of a tumult outside,
until some one, who I think was one of the two Swine Men I had seen,
thrust his head over the little pink sloth-creature and shouted
something excitedly, something that I did not catch. Incontinently
those at the opening of the hut vanished; my Ape-man rushed out; the
thing that had sat in the dark followed him (I only observed that it
was big and clumsy, and covered with silvery hair), and I was left
alone. Then before I reached the aperture I heard the yelp of a
staghound.
In another moment I was standing outside the hovel, my chair-rail in my
hand, every muscle of me quivering. Before me were the clumsy backs of
perhaps a score of these Beast People, their misshapen heads half
hidden by their shoulder-blades. They were gesticulating excitedly.
Other half-animal faces glared interrogation out of the hovels. Looking
in the direction in which they faced, I saw coming through the haze
under the trees beyond the end of the passage of dens the dark figure
and awful white face of Moreau. He was holding the leaping staghound
back, and close behind him came Montgomery revolver in hand.
For a moment I stood horror-struck. I turned and saw the passage behind
me blocked by another heavy brute, with a huge grey face and twinkling
little eyes, advancing towards me. I looked round and saw to the right
of me and a half-dozen yards in front of me a narrow gap in the wall of
rock through which a ray of light slanted into the shadows.
“Stop!” cried Moreau as I strode towards this, and then, “Hold him!”
At that, first one face turned towards me and then others. Their
bestial minds were happily slow. I dashed my shoulder into a clumsy
monster who was turning to see what Moreau meant, and flung him forward
into another. I felt his hands fly round, clutching at me and missing
me. The little pink sloth-creature dashed at me, and I gashed down its
ugly face with the nail in my stick and in another minute was
scrambling up a steep side pathway, a kind of sloping chimney, out of
the ravine. I heard a howl behind me, and cries of “Catch him!” “Hold
him!” and the grey-faced creature appeared behind me and jammed his
huge bulk into the cleft. “Go on! go on!” they howled. I clambered up
the narrow cleft in the rock and came out upon the sulphur on the
westward side of the village of the Beast Men.
That gap was altogether fortunate for me, for the narrow chimney,
slanting obliquely upward, must have impeded the nearer pursuers. I ran
over the white space and down a steep slope, through a scattered growth
of trees, and came to a low-lying stretch of tall reeds, through which
I pushed into a dark, thick undergrowth that was black and succulent
under foot. As I plunged into the reeds, my foremost pursuers emerged
from the gap. I broke my way through this undergrowth for some minutes.
The air behind me and about me was soon full of threatening cries. I
heard the tumult of my pursuers in the gap up the slope, then the
crashing of the reeds, and every now and then the crackling crash of a
branch. Some of the creatures roared like excited beasts of prey. The
staghound yelped to the left. I heard Moreau and Montgomery shouting in
the same direction. I turned sharply to the right. It seemed to me even
then that I heard Montgomery shouting for me to run for my life.
Presently the ground gave rich and oozy under my feet; but I was
desperate and went headlong into it, struggled through kneedeep, and so
came to a winding path among tall canes. The noise of my pursuers
passed away to my left. In one place three strange, pink, hopping
animals, about the size of cats, bolted before my footsteps. This
pathway ran up hill, across another open space covered with white
incrustation, and plunged into a canebrake again. Then suddenly it
turned parallel with the edge of a steep-walled gap, which came without
warning, like the ha-ha of an English park,—turned with an unexpected
abruptness. I was still running with all my might, and I never saw this
drop until I was flying headlong through the air.
I fell on my forearms and head, among thorns, and rose with a torn ear
and bleeding face. I had fallen into a precipitous ravine, rocky and
thorny, full of a hazy mist which drifted about me in wisps, and with a
narrow streamlet from which this mist came meandering down the centre.
I was astonished at this thin fog in the full blaze of daylight; but I
had no time to stand wondering then. I turned to my right, down-stream,
hoping to come to the sea in that direction, and so have my way open to
drown myself. It was only later I found that I had dropped my nailed
stick in my fall.
Presently the ravine grew narrower for a space, and carelessly I
stepped into the stream. I jumped out again pretty quickly, for the
water was almost boiling. I noticed too there was a thin sulphurous
scum drifting upon its coiling water. Almost immediately came a turn in
the ravine, and the indistinct blue horizon. The nearer sea was
flashing the sun from a myriad facets. I saw my death before me; but I
was hot and panting, with the warm blood oozing out on my face and
running pleasantly through my veins. I felt more than a touch of
exultation too, at having distanced my pursuers. It was not in me then
to go out and drown myself yet. I stared back the way I had come.
I listened. Save for the hum of the gnats and the chirp of some small
insects that hopped among the thorns, the air was absolutely still.
Then came the yelp of a dog, very faint, and a chattering and
gibbering, the snap of a whip, and voices. They grew louder, then
fainter again. The noise receded up the stream and faded away. For a
while the chase was over; but I knew now how much hope of help for me
lay in the Beast People.

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