The_island_of_Dr._Moreau/chapters/The Crying of the puma.tex

Montgomery interrupted my tangle of mystification and suspicion about
one o’clock, and his grotesque attendant followed him with a tray
bearing bread, some herbs and other eatables, a flask of whiskey, a jug
of water, and three glasses and knives. I glanced askance at this
strange creature, and found him watching me with his queer, restless
eyes. Montgomery said he would lunch with me, but that Moreau was too
preoccupied with some work to come.

“Moreau!” said I. “I know that name.”

“The devil you do!” said he. “What an ass I was to mention it to you! I
might have thought. Anyhow, it will give you an inkling of
our—mysteries. Whiskey?”

“No, thanks; I’m an abstainer.”

“I wish I’d been. But it’s no use locking the door after the steed is
stolen. It was that infernal stuff which led to my coming here,—that,
and a foggy night. I thought myself in luck at the time, when Moreau
offered to get me off. It’s queer—”

“Montgomery,” said I, suddenly, as the outer door closed, “why has your
man pointed ears?”

“Damn!” he said, over his first mouthful of food. He stared at me for a
moment, and then repeated, “Pointed ears?”

“Little points to them,” said I, as calmly as possible, with a catch in
my breath; “and a fine black fur at the edges?”

He helped himself to whiskey and water with great deliberation. “I was
under the impression—that his hair covered his ears.”

“I saw them as he stooped by me to put that coffee you sent to me on
the table. And his eyes shine in the dark.”

By this time Montgomery had recovered from the surprise of my question.
“I always thought,” he said deliberately, with a certain accentuation
of his flavouring of lisp, “that there \emph{was} something the matter with
his ears, from the way he covered them. What were they like?”

I was persuaded from his manner that this ignorance was a pretence.
Still, I could hardly tell the man that I thought him a liar.
“Pointed,” I said; “rather small and furry,—distinctly furry. But the
whole man is one of the strangest beings I ever set eyes on.”

A sharp, hoarse cry of animal pain came from the enclosure behind us.
Its depth and volume testified to the puma. I saw Montgomery wince.

“Yes?” he said.

“Where did you pick up the creature?”

“San Francisco. He’s an ugly brute, I admit. Half-witted, you know.
Can’t remember where he came from. But I’m used to him, you know. We
both are. How does he strike you?”

“He’s unnatural,” I said. “There’s something about him—don’t think me
fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation, a tightening of my
muscles, when he comes near me. It’s a touch—of the diabolical, in
fact.”

Montgomery had stopped eating while I told him this. “Rum!” he said.
“\emph{I} can’t see it.” He resumed his meal. “I had no idea of it,” he
said, and masticated. “The crew of the schooner must have felt it the
same. Made a dead set at the poor devil. You saw the captain?”

Suddenly the puma howled again, this time more painfully. Montgomery
swore under his breath. I had half a mind to attack him about the men
on the beach. Then the poor brute within gave vent to a series of
short, sharp cries.

“Your men on the beach,” said I; “what race are they?”

“Excellent fellows, aren’t they?” said he, absentmindedly, knitting his
brows as the animal yelled out sharply.

I said no more. There was another outcry worse than the former. He
looked at me with his dull grey eyes, and then took some more whiskey.
He tried to draw me into a discussion about alcohol, professing to have
saved my life with it. He seemed anxious to lay stress on the fact that
I owed my life to him. I answered him distractedly.

Presently our meal came to an end; the misshapen monster with the
pointed ears cleared the remains away, and Montgomery left me alone in
the room again. All the time he had been in a state of ill-concealed
irritation at the noise of the vivisected puma. He had spoken of his
odd want of nerve, and left me to the obvious application.

I found myself that the cries were singularly irritating, and they grew
in depth and intensity as the afternoon wore on. They were painful at
first, but their constant resurgence at last altogether upset my
balance. I flung aside a crib of Horace I had been reading, and began
to clench my fists, to bite my lips, and to pace the room. Presently I
got to stopping my ears with my fingers.

The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon me steadily, grew at last
to such an exquisite expression of suffering that I could stand it in
that confined room no longer. I stepped out of the door into the
slumberous heat of the late afternoon, and walking past the main
entrance—locked again, I noticed—turned the corner of the wall.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the
next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could
have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets
our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of
the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the
soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting
black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the
chequered wall.