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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 159 ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The Island of Doctor Moreau
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+Contents
+
+ INTRODUCTION
+ I. IN THE DINGEY OF THE “LADY VAIN”
+ II. THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE
+ III. THE STRANGE FACE
+ IV. AT THE SCHOONER’S RAIL
+ V. THE MAN WHO HAD NOWHERE TO GO
+ VI. THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN
+ VII. THE LOCKED DOOR
+ VIII. THE CRYING OF THE PUMA
+ IX. THE THING IN THE FOREST
+ X. THE CRYING OF THE MAN
+ XI. THE HUNTING OF THE MAN
+ XII. THE SAYERS OF THE LAW
+ XIII. A PARLEY
+ XIV. DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS
+ XV. CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK
+ XVI. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD
+ XVII. A CATASTROPHE
+ XVIII. THE FINDING OF MOREAU
+ XIX. MONTGOMERY’S “BANK HOLIDAY”
+ XX. ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK
+ XXI. THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK
+ XXII. THE MAN ALONE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+On February the First 1887, the _Lady Vain_ was lost by collision with
+a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W.
+
+On January the Fifth, 1888—that is eleven months and four days after—my
+uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard
+the _Lady Vain_ at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was
+picked up in latitude 5° 3′ S. and longitude 101° W. in a small open
+boat of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have
+belonged to the missing schooner _Ipecacuanha_. He gave such a strange
+account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently he
+alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from
+the _Lady Vain_. His case was discussed among psychologists at the time
+as a curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical
+and mental stress. The following narrative was found among his papers
+by the undersigned, his nephew and heir, but unaccompanied by any
+definite request for publication.
+
+The only island known to exist in the region in which my uncle was
+picked up is Noble’s Isle, a small volcanic islet and uninhabited. It
+was visited in 1891 by _H. M. S. Scorpion_. A party of sailors then
+landed, but found nothing living thereon except certain curious white
+moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats. So that
+this narrative is without confirmation in its most essential
+particular. With that understood, there seems no harm in putting this
+strange story before the public in accordance, as I believe, with my
+uncle’s intentions. There is at least this much in its behalf: my uncle
+passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5° S. and longitude 105°
+E., and reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of
+eleven months. In some way he must have lived during the interval. And
+it seems that a schooner called the _Ipecacuanha_ with a drunken
+captain, John Davies, did start from Africa with a puma and certain
+other animals aboard in January, 1887, that the vessel was well known
+at several ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally disappeared
+from those seas (with a considerable amount of copra aboard), sailing
+to its unknown fate from Bayna in December, 1887, a date that tallies
+entirely with my uncle’s story.
+
+CHARLES EDWARD PRENDICK.
+
+
+
+
+The Island of Doctor Moreau
+
+(The Story written by Edward Prendick.)
+
+
+
+
+I.
+IN THE DINGEY OF THE “LADY VAIN.”
+
+
+I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written
+concerning the loss of the _Lady Vain_. As everyone knows, she collided
+with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The longboat, with seven
+of the crew, was picked up eighteen days after by H. M. gunboat
+_Myrtle_, and the story of their terrible privations has become quite
+as well known as the far more horrible _Medusa_ case. But I have to add
+to the published story of the _Lady Vain_ another, possibly as horrible
+and far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who
+were in the dingey perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best of
+evidence for this assertion: I was one of the four men.
+
+But in the first place I must state that there never were _four_ men in
+the dingey,—the number was three. Constans, who was “seen by the
+captain to jump into the gig,”[1] luckily for us and unluckily for
+himself did not reach us. He came down out of the tangle of ropes under
+the stays of the smashed bowsprit, some small rope caught his heel as
+he let go, and he hung for a moment head downward, and then fell and
+struck a block or spar floating in the water. We pulled towards him,
+but he never came up.
+
+ [1] _Daily News_, March 17, 1887.
+
+
+I say luckily for us he did not reach us, and I might almost say
+luckily for himself; for we had only a small beaker of water and some
+soddened ship’s biscuits with us, so sudden had been the alarm, so
+unprepared the ship for any disaster. We thought the people on the
+launch would be better provisioned (though it seems they were not), and
+we tried to hail them. They could not have heard us, and the next
+morning when the drizzle cleared,—which was not until past midday,—we
+could see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us,
+because of the pitching of the boat. The two other men who had escaped
+so far with me were a man named Helmar, a passenger like myself, and a
+seaman whose name I don’t know,—a short sturdy man, with a stammer.
+
+We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end,
+tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After
+the second day the sea subsided slowly to a glassy calm. It is quite
+impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has
+not, luckily for himself, anything in his memory to imagine with. After
+the first day we said little to one another, and lay in our places in
+the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes that grew
+larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining upon
+our companions. The sun became pitiless. The water ended on the fourth
+day, and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with
+our eyes; but it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to
+the thing we had all been thinking. I remember our voices were dry and
+thin, so that we bent towards one another and spared our words. I stood
+out against it with all my might, was rather for scuttling the boat and
+perishing together among the sharks that followed us; but when Helmar
+said that if his proposal was accepted we should have drink, the sailor
+came round to him.
+
+I would not draw lots however, and in the night the sailor whispered to
+Helmar again and again, and I sat in the bows with my clasp-knife in my
+hand, though I doubt if I had the stuff in me to fight; and in the
+morning I agreed to Helmar’s proposal, and we handed halfpence to find
+the odd man. The lot fell upon the sailor; but he was the strongest of
+us and would not abide by it, and attacked Helmar with his hands. They
+grappled together and almost stood up. I crawled along the boat to
+them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor’s leg; but the
+sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the
+gunwale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones. I
+remember laughing at that, and wondering why I laughed. The laugh
+caught me suddenly like a thing from without.
+
+I lay across one of the thwarts for I know not how long, thinking that
+if I had the strength I would drink sea-water and madden myself to die
+quickly. And even as I lay there I saw, with no more interest than if
+it had been a picture, a sail come up towards me over the sky-line. My
+mind must have been wandering, and yet I remember all that happened,
+quite distinctly. I remember how my head swayed with the seas, and the
+horizon with the sail above it danced up and down; but I also remember
+as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and that I
+thought what a jest it was that they should come too late by such a
+little to catch me in my body.
+
+For an endless period, as it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the
+thwart watching the schooner (she was a little ship, schooner-rigged
+fore and aft) come up out of the sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a
+widening compass, for she was sailing dead into the wind. It never
+entered my head to attempt to attract attention, and I do not remember
+anything distinctly after the sight of her side until I found myself in
+a little cabin aft. There’s a dim half-memory of being lifted up to the
+gangway, and of a big round countenance covered with freckles and
+surrounded with red hair staring at me over the bulwarks. I also had a
+disconnected impression of a dark face, with extraordinary eyes, close
+to mine; but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again. I
+fancy I recollect some stuff being poured in between my teeth; and that
+is all.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE.
+
+
+The cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. A
+youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and
+a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute
+we stared at each other without speaking. He had watery grey eyes,
+oddly void of expression. Then just overhead came a sound like an iron
+bedstead being knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large
+animal. At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his question,—“How
+do you feel now?”
+
+I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had got
+there. He must have seen the question in my face, for my voice was
+inaccessible to me.
+
+“You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat was the
+_Lady Vain_, and there were spots of blood on the gunwale.”
+
+At the same time my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked like a
+dirty skin-purse full of loose bones, and all the business of the boat
+came back to me.
+
+“Have some of this,” said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff,
+iced.
+
+It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.
+
+“You were in luck,” said he, “to get picked up by a ship with a medical
+man aboard.” He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost of
+a lisp.
+
+“What ship is this?” I said slowly, hoarse from my long silence.
+
+“It’s a little trader from Arica and Callao. I never asked where she
+came from in the beginning,—out of the land of born fools, I guess. I’m
+a passenger myself, from Arica. The silly ass who owns her,—he’s
+captain too, named Davies,—he’s lost his certificate, or something. You
+know the kind of man,—calls the thing the _Ipecacuanha_, of all silly,
+infernal names; though when there’s much of a sea without any wind, she
+certainly acts according.”
+
+(Then the noise overhead began again, a snarling growl and the voice of
+a human being together. Then another voice, telling some
+“Heaven-forsaken idiot” to desist.)
+
+“You were nearly dead,” said my interlocutor. “It was a very near
+thing, indeed. But I’ve put some stuff into you now. Notice your arm’s
+sore? Injections. You’ve been insensible for nearly thirty hours.”
+
+I thought slowly. (I was distracted now by the yelping of a number of
+dogs.) “Am I eligible for solid food?” I asked.
+
+“Thanks to me,” he said. “Even now the mutton is boiling.”
+
+“Yes,” I said with assurance; “I could eat some mutton.”
+
+“But,” said he with a momentary hesitation, “you know I’m dying to hear
+of how you came to be alone in that boat. _Damn that howling_!” I
+thought I detected a certain suspicion in his eyes.
+
+He suddenly left the cabin, and I heard him in violent controversy with
+some one, who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him. The
+matter sounded as though it ended in blows, but in that I thought my
+ears were mistaken. Then he shouted at the dogs, and returned to the
+cabin.
+
+“Well?” said he in the doorway. “You were just beginning to tell me.”
+
+I told him my name, Edward Prendick, and how I had taken to Natural
+History as a relief from the dulness of my comfortable independence.
+
+He seemed interested in this. “I’ve done some science myself. I did my
+Biology at University College,—getting out the ovary of the earthworm
+and the radula of the snail, and all that. Lord! It’s ten years ago.
+But go on! go on! tell me about the boat.”
+
+He was evidently satisfied with the frankness of my story, which I told
+in concise sentences enough, for I felt horribly weak; and when it was
+finished he reverted at once to the topic of Natural History and his
+own biological studies. He began to question me closely about Tottenham
+Court Road and Gower Street. “Is Caplatzi still flourishing? What a
+shop that was!” He had evidently been a very ordinary medical student,
+and drifted incontinently to the topic of the music halls. He told me
+some anecdotes.
+
+“Left it all,” he said, “ten years ago. How jolly it all used to be!
+But I made a young ass of myself,—played myself out before I was
+twenty-one. I daresay it’s all different now. But I must look up that
+ass of a cook, and see what he’s done to your mutton.”
+
+The growling overhead was renewed, so suddenly and with so much savage
+anger that it startled me. “What’s that?” I called after him, but the
+door had closed. He came back again with the boiled mutton, and I was
+so excited by the appetising smell of it that I forgot the noise of the
+beast that had troubled me.
+
+After a day of alternate sleep and feeding I was so far recovered as to
+be able to get from my bunk to the scuttle, and see the green seas
+trying to keep pace with us. I judged the schooner was running before
+the wind. Montgomery—that was the name of the flaxen-haired man—came in
+again as I stood there, and I asked him for some clothes. He lent me
+some duck things of his own, for those I had worn in the boat had been
+thrown overboard. They were rather loose for me, for he was large and
+long in his limbs. He told me casually that the captain was three-parts
+drunk in his own cabin. As I assumed the clothes, I began asking him
+some questions about the destination of the ship. He said the ship was
+bound to Hawaii, but that it had to land him first.
+
+“Where?” said I.
+
+“It’s an island, where I live. So far as I know, it hasn’t got a name.”
+
+He stared at me with his nether lip dropping, and looked so wilfully
+stupid of a sudden that it came into my head that he desired to avoid
+my questions. I had the discretion to ask no more.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+THE STRANGE FACE.
+
+
+We left the cabin and found a man at the companion obstructing our way.
+He was standing on the ladder with his back to us, peering over the
+combing of the hatchway. He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short,
+broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk
+between his shoulders. He was dressed in dark-blue serge, and had
+peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair. I heard the unseen dogs growl
+furiously, and forthwith he ducked back,—coming into contact with the
+hand I put out to fend him off from myself. He turned with animal
+swiftness.
+
+In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me
+profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part
+projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge
+half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human
+mouth. His eyes were blood-shot at the edges, with scarcely a rim of
+white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of excitement in
+his face.
+
+“Confound you!” said Montgomery. “Why the devil don’t you get out of
+the way?”
+
+The black-faced man started aside without a word. I went on up the
+companion, staring at him instinctively as I did so. Montgomery stayed
+at the foot for a moment. “You have no business here, you know,” he
+said in a deliberate tone. “Your place is forward.”
+
+The black-faced man cowered. “They—won’t have me forward.” He spoke
+slowly, with a queer, hoarse quality in his voice.
+
+“Won’t have you forward!” said Montgomery, in a menacing voice. “But I
+tell you to go!” He was on the brink of saying something further, then
+looked up at me suddenly and followed me up the ladder.
+
+I had paused half way through the hatchway, looking back, still
+astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced
+creature. I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face
+before, and yet—if the contradiction is credible—I experienced at the
+same time an odd feeling that in some way I _had_ already encountered
+exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me. Afterwards it
+occurred to me that probably I had seen him as I was lifted aboard; and
+yet that scarcely satisfied my suspicion of a previous acquaintance.
+Yet how one could have set eyes on so singular a face and yet have
+forgotten the precise occasion, passed my imagination.
+
+Montgomery’s movement to follow me released my attention, and I turned
+and looked about me at the flush deck of the little schooner. I was
+already half prepared by the sounds I had heard for what I saw.
+Certainly I never beheld a deck so dirty. It was littered with scraps
+of carrot, shreds of green stuff, and indescribable filth. Fastened by
+chains to the mainmast were a number of grisly staghounds, who now
+began leaping and barking at me, and by the mizzen a huge puma was
+cramped in a little iron cage far too small even to give it turning
+room. Farther under the starboard bulwark were some big hutches
+containing a number of rabbits, and a solitary llama was squeezed in a
+mere box of a cage forward. The dogs were muzzled by leather straps.
+The only human being on deck was a gaunt and silent sailor at the
+wheel.
+
+The patched and dirty spankers were tense before the wind, and up aloft
+the little ship seemed carrying every sail she had. The sky was clear,
+the sun midway down the western sky; long waves, capped by the breeze
+with froth, were running with us. We went past the steersman to the
+taffrail, and saw the water come foaming under the stern and the
+bubbles go dancing and vanishing in her wake. I turned and surveyed the
+unsavoury length of the ship.
+
+“Is this an ocean menagerie?” said I.
+
+“Looks like it,” said Montgomery.
+
+“What are these beasts for? Merchandise, curios? Does the captain think
+he is going to sell them somewhere in the South Seas?”
+
+“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Montgomery, and turned towards the
+wake again.
+
+Suddenly we heard a yelp and a volley of furious blasphemy from the
+companion hatchway, and the deformed man with the black face came up
+hurriedly. He was immediately followed by a heavy red-haired man in a
+white cap. At the sight of the former the staghounds, who had all tired
+of barking at me by this time, became furiously excited, howling and
+leaping against their chains. The black hesitated before them, and this
+gave the red-haired man time to come up with him and deliver a
+tremendous blow between the shoulder-blades. The poor devil went down
+like a felled ox, and rolled in the dirt among the furiously excited
+dogs. It was lucky for him that they were muzzled. The red-haired man
+gave a yawp of exultation and stood staggering, and as it seemed to me
+in serious danger of either going backwards down the companion hatchway
+or forwards upon his victim.
+
+So soon as the second man had appeared, Montgomery had started forward.
+“Steady on there!” he cried, in a tone of remonstrance. A couple of
+sailors appeared on the forecastle. The black-faced man, howling in a
+singular voice rolled about under the feet of the dogs. No one
+attempted to help him. The brutes did their best to worry him, butting
+their muzzles at him. There was a quick dance of their lithe
+grey-figured bodies over the clumsy, prostrate figure. The sailors
+forward shouted, as though it was admirable sport. Montgomery gave an
+angry exclamation, and went striding down the deck, and I followed him.
+The black-faced man scrambled up and staggered forward, going and
+leaning over the bulwark by the main shrouds, where he remained,
+panting and glaring over his shoulder at the dogs. The red-haired man
+laughed a satisfied laugh.
+
+“Look here, Captain,” said Montgomery, with his lisp a little
+accentuated, gripping the elbows of the red-haired man, “this won’t
+do!”
+
+I stood behind Montgomery. The captain came half round, and regarded
+him with the dull and solemn eyes of a drunken man. “Wha’ won’t do?” he
+said, and added, after looking sleepily into Montgomery’s face for a
+minute, “Blasted Sawbones!”
+
+With a sudden movement he shook his arms free, and after two
+ineffectual attempts stuck his freckled fists into his side pockets.
+
+“That man’s a passenger,” said Montgomery. “I’d advise you to keep your
+hands off him.”
+
+“Go to hell!” said the captain, loudly. He suddenly turned and
+staggered towards the side. “Do what I like on my own ship,” he said.
+
+I think Montgomery might have left him then, seeing the brute was
+drunk; but he only turned a shade paler, and followed the captain to
+the bulwarks.
+
+“Look you here, Captain,” he said; “that man of mine is not to be
+ill-treated. He has been hazed ever since he came aboard.”
+
+For a minute, alcoholic fumes kept the captain speechless. “Blasted
+Sawbones!” was all he considered necessary.
+
+I could see that Montgomery had one of those slow, pertinacious tempers
+that will warm day after day to a white heat, and never again cool to
+forgiveness; and I saw too that this quarrel had been some time
+growing. “The man’s drunk,” said I, perhaps officiously; “you’ll do no
+good.”
+
+Montgomery gave an ugly twist to his dropping lip. “He’s always drunk.
+Do you think that excuses his assaulting his passengers?”
+
+“My ship,” began the captain, waving his hand unsteadily towards the
+cages, “was a clean ship. Look at it now!” It was certainly anything
+but clean. “Crew,” continued the captain, “clean, respectable crew.”
+
+“You agreed to take the beasts.”
+
+“I wish I’d never set eyes on your infernal island. What the devil—want
+beasts for on an island like that? Then, that man of yours—understood
+he was a man. He’s a lunatic; and he hadn’t no business aft. Do you
+think the whole damned ship belongs to you?”
+
+“Your sailors began to haze the poor devil as soon as he came aboard.”
+
+“That’s just what he is—he’s a devil! an ugly devil! My men can’t stand
+him. _I_ can’t stand him. None of us can’t stand him. Nor _you_
+either!”
+
+Montgomery turned away. “_You_ leave that man alone, anyhow,” he said,
+nodding his head as he spoke.
+
+But the captain meant to quarrel now. He raised his voice. “If he comes
+this end of the ship again I’ll cut his insides out, I tell you. Cut
+out his blasted insides! Who are _you_, to tell _me_ what _I’m_ to do?
+I tell you I’m captain of this ship,—captain and owner. I’m the law
+here, I tell you,—the law and the prophets. I bargained to take a man
+and his attendant to and from Arica, and bring back some animals. I
+never bargained to carry a mad devil and a silly Sawbones, a—”
+
+Well, never mind what he called Montgomery. I saw the latter take a
+step forward, and interposed. “He’s drunk,” said I. The captain began
+some abuse even fouler than the last. “Shut up!” I said, turning on him
+sharply, for I had seen danger in Montgomery’s white face. With that I
+brought the downpour on myself.
+
+However, I was glad to avert what was uncommonly near a scuffle, even
+at the price of the captain’s drunken ill-will. I do not think I have
+ever heard quite so much vile language come in a continuous stream from
+any man’s lips before, though I have frequented eccentric company
+enough. I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered
+man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to “shut up” I had
+forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my
+resources and with my fare unpaid; a mere casual dependant on the
+bounty, or speculative enterprise, of the ship. He reminded me of it
+with considerable vigour; but at any rate I prevented a fight.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+AT THE SCHOONER’S RAIL.
+
+
+That night land was sighted after sundown, and the schooner hove to.
+Montgomery intimated that was his destination. It was too far to see
+any details; it seemed to me then simply a low-lying patch of dim blue
+in the uncertain blue-grey sea. An almost vertical streak of smoke went
+up from it into the sky. The captain was not on deck when it was
+sighted. After he had vented his wrath on me he had staggered below,
+and I understand he went to sleep on the floor of his own cabin. The
+mate practically assumed the command. He was the gaunt, taciturn
+individual we had seen at the wheel. Apparently he was in an evil
+temper with Montgomery. He took not the slightest notice of either of
+us. We dined with him in a sulky silence, after a few ineffectual
+efforts on my part to talk. It struck me too that the men regarded my
+companion and his animals in a singularly unfriendly manner. I found
+Montgomery very reticent about his purpose with these creatures, and
+about his destination; and though I was sensible of a growing curiosity
+as to both, I did not press him.
+
+We remained talking on the quarter deck until the sky was thick with
+stars. Except for an occasional sound in the yellow-lit forecastle and
+a movement of the animals now and then, the night was very still. The
+puma lay crouched together, watching us with shining eyes, a black heap
+in the corner of its cage. Montgomery produced some cigars. He talked
+to me of London in a tone of half-painful reminiscence, asking all
+kinds of questions about changes that had taken place. He spoke like a
+man who had loved his life there, and had been suddenly and irrevocably
+cut off from it. I gossiped as well as I could of this and that. All
+the time the strangeness of him was shaping itself in my mind; and as I
+talked I peered at his odd, pallid face in the dim light of the
+binnacle lantern behind me. Then I looked out at the darkling sea,
+where in the dimness his little island was hidden.
+
+This man, it seemed to me, had come out of Immensity merely to save my
+life. To-morrow he would drop over the side, and vanish again out of my
+existence. Even had it been under commonplace circumstances, it would
+have made me a trifle thoughtful; but in the first place was the
+singularity of an educated man living on this unknown little island,
+and coupled with that the extraordinary nature of his luggage. I found
+myself repeating the captain’s question. What did he want with the
+beasts? Why, too, had he pretended they were not his when I had
+remarked about them at first? Then, again, in his personal attendant
+there was a bizarre quality which had impressed me profoundly. These
+circumstances threw a haze of mystery round the man. They laid hold of
+my imagination, and hampered my tongue.
+
+Towards midnight our talk of London died away, and we stood side by
+side leaning over the bulwarks and staring dreamily over the silent,
+starlit sea, each pursuing his own thoughts. It was the atmosphere for
+sentiment, and I began upon my gratitude.
+
+“If I may say it,” said I, after a time, “you have saved my life.”
+
+“Chance,” he answered. “Just chance.”
+
+“I prefer to make my thanks to the accessible agent.”
+
+“Thank no one. You had the need, and I had the knowledge; and I
+injected and fed you much as I might have collected a specimen. I was
+bored and wanted something to do. If I’d been jaded that day, or hadn’t
+liked your face, well—it’s a curious question where you would have been
+now!”
+
+This damped my mood a little. “At any rate,” I began.
+
+“It’s a chance, I tell you,” he interrupted, “as everything is in a
+man’s life. Only the asses won’t see it! Why am I here now, an outcast
+from civilisation, instead of being a happy man enjoying all the
+pleasures of London? Simply because eleven years ago—I lost my head for
+ten minutes on a foggy night.”
+
+He stopped. “Yes?” said I.
+
+“That’s all.”
+
+We relapsed into silence. Presently he laughed. “There’s something in
+this starlight that loosens one’s tongue. I’m an ass, and yet somehow I
+would like to tell you.”
+
+“Whatever you tell me, you may rely upon my keeping to myself—if that’s
+it.”
+
+He was on the point of beginning, and then shook his head, doubtfully.
+
+“Don’t,” said I. “It is all the same to me. After all, it is better to
+keep your secret. There’s nothing gained but a little relief if I
+respect your confidence. If I don’t—well?”
+
+He grunted undecidedly. I felt I had him at a disadvantage, had caught
+him in the mood of indiscretion; and to tell the truth I was not
+curious to learn what might have driven a young medical student out of
+London. I have an imagination. I shrugged my shoulders and turned away.
+Over the taffrail leant a silent black figure, watching the stars. It
+was Montgomery’s strange attendant. It looked over its shoulder quickly
+with my movement, then looked away again.
+
+It may seem a little thing to you, perhaps, but it came like a sudden
+blow to me. The only light near us was a lantern at the wheel. The
+creature’s face was turned for one brief instant out of the dimness of
+the stern towards this illumination, and I saw that the eyes that
+glanced at me shone with a pale-green light. I did not know then that a
+reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes. The thing
+came to me as stark inhumanity. That black figure with its eyes of fire
+struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a
+moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind. Then
+the effect passed as it had come. An uncouth black figure of a man, a
+figure of no particular import, hung over the taffrail against the
+starlight, and I found Montgomery was speaking to me.
+
+“I’m thinking of turning in, then,” said he, “if you’ve had enough of
+this.”
+
+I answered him incongruously. We went below, and he wished me
+good-night at the door of my cabin.
+
+That night I had some very unpleasant dreams. The waning moon rose
+late. Its light struck a ghostly white beam across my cabin, and made
+an ominous shape on the planking by my bunk. Then the staghounds woke,
+and began howling and baying; so that I dreamt fitfully, and scarcely
+slept until the approach of dawn.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+THE MAN WHO HAD NOWHERE TO GO.
+
+
+In the early morning (it was the second morning after my recovery, and
+I believe the fourth after I was picked up), I awoke through an avenue
+of tumultuous dreams,—dreams of guns and howling mobs,—and became
+sensible of a hoarse shouting above me. I rubbed my eyes and lay
+listening to the noise, doubtful for a little while of my whereabouts.
+Then came a sudden pattering of bare feet, the sound of heavy objects
+being thrown about, a violent creaking and the rattling of chains. I
+heard the swish of the water as the ship was suddenly brought round,
+and a foamy yellow-green wave flew across the little round window and
+left it streaming. I jumped into my clothes and went on deck.
+
+As I came up the ladder I saw against the flushed sky—for the sun was
+just rising—the broad back and red hair of the captain, and over his
+shoulder the puma spinning from a tackle rigged on to the mizzen
+spanker-boom.
+
+The poor brute seemed horribly scared, and crouched in the bottom of
+its little cage.
+
+“Overboard with ’em!” bawled the captain. “Overboard with ’em! We’ll
+have a clean ship soon of the whole bilin’ of ’em.”
+
+He stood in my way, so that I had perforce to tap his shoulder to come
+on deck. He came round with a start, and staggered back a few paces to
+stare at me. It needed no expert eye to tell that the man was still
+drunk.
+
+“Hullo!” said he, stupidly; and then with a light coming into his eyes,
+“Why, it’s Mister—Mister?”
+
+“Prendick,” said I.
+
+“Prendick be damned!” said he. “Shut-up,—that’s your name. Mister
+Shut-up.”
+
+It was no good answering the brute; but I certainly did not expect his
+next move. He held out his hand to the gangway by which Montgomery
+stood talking to a massive grey-haired man in dirty-blue flannels, who
+had apparently just come aboard.
+
+“That way, Mister Blasted Shut-up! that way!” roared the captain.
+
+Montgomery and his companion turned as he spoke.
+
+“What do you mean?” I said.
+
+“That way, Mister Blasted Shut-up,—that’s what I mean! Overboard,
+Mister Shut-up,—and sharp! We’re cleaning the ship out,—cleaning the
+whole blessed ship out; and overboard you go!”
+
+I stared at him dumfounded. Then it occurred to me that it was exactly
+the thing I wanted. The lost prospect of a journey as sole passenger
+with this quarrelsome sot was not one to mourn over. I turned towards
+Montgomery.
+
+“Can’t have you,” said Montgomery’s companion, concisely.
+
+“You can’t have me!” said I, aghast. He had the squarest and most
+resolute face I ever set eyes upon.
+
+“Look here,” I began, turning to the captain.
+
+“Overboard!” said the captain. “This ship aint for beasts and cannibals
+and worse than beasts, any more. Overboard you go, Mister Shut-up. If
+they can’t have you, you goes overboard. But, anyhow, you go—with your
+friends. I’ve done with this blessed island for evermore, amen! I’ve
+had enough of it.”
+
+“But, Montgomery,” I appealed.
+
+He distorted his lower lip, and nodded his head hopelessly at the
+grey-haired man beside him, to indicate his powerlessness to help me.
+
+“I’ll see to _you_, presently,” said the captain.
+
+Then began a curious three-cornered altercation. Alternately I appealed
+to one and another of the three men,—first to the grey-haired man to
+let me land, and then to the drunken captain to keep me aboard. I even
+bawled entreaties to the sailors. Montgomery said never a word, only
+shook his head. “You’re going overboard, I tell you,” was the captain’s
+refrain. “Law be damned! I’m king here.” At last I must confess my
+voice suddenly broke in the middle of a vigorous threat. I felt a gust
+of hysterical petulance, and went aft and stared dismally at nothing.
+
+Meanwhile the sailors progressed rapidly with the task of unshipping
+the packages and caged animals. A large launch, with two standing lugs,
+lay under the lee of the schooner; and into this the strange assortment
+of goods were swung. I did not then see the hands from the island that
+were receiving the packages, for the hull of the launch was hidden from
+me by the side of the schooner. Neither Montgomery nor his companion
+took the slightest notice of me, but busied themselves in assisting and
+directing the four or five sailors who were unloading the goods. The
+captain went forward interfering rather than assisting. I was
+alternately despairful and desperate. Once or twice as I stood waiting
+there for things to accomplish themselves, I could not resist an
+impulse to laugh at my miserable quandary. I felt all the wretcheder
+for the lack of a breakfast. Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take
+all the manhood from a man. I perceived pretty clearly that I had not
+the stamina either to resist what the captain chose to do to expel me,
+or to force myself upon Montgomery and his companion. So I waited
+passively upon fate; and the work of transferring Montgomery’s
+possessions to the launch went on as if I did not exist.
+
+Presently that work was finished, and then came a struggle. I was
+hauled, resisting weakly enough, to the gangway. Even then I noticed
+the oddness of the brown faces of the men who were with Montgomery in
+the launch; but the launch was now fully laden, and was shoved off
+hastily. A broadening gap of green water appeared under me, and I
+pushed back with all my strength to avoid falling headlong. The hands
+in the launch shouted derisively, and I heard Montgomery curse at them;
+and then the captain, the mate, and one of the seamen helping him, ran
+me aft towards the stern.
+
+The dingey of the _Lady Vain_ had been towing behind; it was half full
+of water, had no oars, and was quite unvictualled. I refused to go
+aboard her, and flung myself full length on the deck. In the end, they
+swung me into her by a rope (for they had no stern ladder), and then
+they cut me adrift. I drifted slowly from the schooner. In a kind of
+stupor I watched all hands take to the rigging, and slowly but surely
+she came round to the wind; the sails fluttered, and then bellied out
+as the wind came into them. I stared at her weather-beaten side heeling
+steeply towards me; and then she passed out of my range of view.
+
+I did not turn my head to follow her. At first I could scarcely believe
+what had happened. I crouched in the bottom of the dingey, stunned, and
+staring blankly at the vacant, oily sea. Then I realised that I was in
+that little hell of mine again, now half swamped; and looking back over
+the gunwale, I saw the schooner standing away from me, with the
+red-haired captain mocking at me over the taffrail, and turning towards
+the island saw the launch growing smaller as she approached the beach.
+
+Abruptly the cruelty of this desertion became clear to me. I had no
+means of reaching the land unless I should chance to drift there. I was
+still weak, you must remember, from my exposure in the boat; I was
+empty and very faint, or I should have had more heart. But as it was I
+suddenly began to sob and weep, as I had never done since I was a
+little child. The tears ran down my face. In a passion of despair I
+struck with my fists at the water in the bottom of the boat, and kicked
+savagely at the gunwale. I prayed aloud for God to let me die.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN.
+
+
+But the islanders, seeing that I was really adrift, took pity on me. I
+drifted very slowly to the eastward, approaching the island slantingly;
+and presently I saw, with hysterical relief, the launch come round and
+return towards me. She was heavily laden, and I could make out as she
+drew nearer Montgomery’s white-haired, broad-shouldered companion
+sitting cramped up with the dogs and several packing-cases in the stern
+sheets. This individual stared fixedly at me without moving or
+speaking. The black-faced cripple was glaring at me as fixedly in the
+bows near the puma. There were three other men besides,—three strange
+brutish-looking fellows, at whom the staghounds were snarling savagely.
+Montgomery, who was steering, brought the boat by me, and rising,
+caught and fastened my painter to the tiller to tow me, for there was
+no room aboard.
+
+I had recovered from my hysterical phase by this time and answered his
+hail, as he approached, bravely enough. I told him the dingey was
+nearly swamped, and he reached me a piggin. I was jerked back as the
+rope tightened between the boats. For some time I was busy baling.
+
+It was not until I had got the water under (for the water in the dingey
+had been shipped; the boat was perfectly sound) that I had leisure to
+look at the people in the launch again.
+
+The white-haired man I found was still regarding me steadfastly, but
+with an expression, as I now fancied, of some perplexity. When my eyes
+met his, he looked down at the staghound that sat between his knees. He
+was a powerfully-built man, as I have said, with a fine forehead and
+rather heavy features; but his eyes had that odd drooping of the skin
+above the lids which often comes with advancing years, and the fall of
+his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious
+resolution. He talked to Montgomery in a tone too low for me to hear.
+
+From him my eyes travelled to his three men; and a strange crew they
+were. I saw only their faces, yet there was something in their faces—I
+knew not what—that gave me a queer spasm of disgust. I looked steadily
+at them, and the impression did not pass, though I failed to see what
+had occasioned it. They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their
+limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to
+the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and
+women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered
+out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and
+bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and
+seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.
+The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height, sat a
+head below any one of the three. I found afterwards that really none
+were taller than myself; but their bodies were abnormally long, and the
+thigh-part of the leg short and curiously twisted. At any rate, they
+were an amazingly ugly gang, and over the heads of them under the
+forward lug peered the black face of the man whose eyes were luminous
+in the dark. As I stared at them, they met my gaze; and then first one
+and then another turned away from my direct stare, and looked at me in
+an odd, furtive manner. It occurred to me that I was perhaps annoying
+them, and I turned my attention to the island we were approaching.
+
+It was low, and covered with thick vegetation,—chiefly a kind of palm,
+that was new to me. From one point a thin white thread of vapour rose
+slantingly to an immense height, and then frayed out like a down
+feather. We were now within the embrace of a broad bay flanked on
+either hand by a low promontory. The beach was of dull-grey sand, and
+sloped steeply up to a ridge, perhaps sixty or seventy feet above the
+sea-level, and irregularly set with trees and undergrowth. Half way up
+was a square enclosure of some greyish stone, which I found
+subsequently was built partly of coral and partly of pumiceous lava.
+Two thatched roofs peeped from within this enclosure. A man stood
+awaiting us at the water’s edge. I fancied while we were still far off
+that I saw some other and very grotesque-looking creatures scuttle into
+the bushes upon the slope; but I saw nothing of these as we drew
+nearer. This man was of a moderate size, and with a black negroid face.
+He had a large, almost lipless, mouth, extraordinary lank arms, long
+thin feet, and bow-legs, and stood with his heavy face thrust forward
+staring at us. He was dressed like Montgomery and his white-haired
+companion, in jacket and trousers of blue serge. As we came still
+nearer, this individual began to run to and fro on the beach, making
+the most grotesque movements.
+
+At a word of command from Montgomery, the four men in the launch sprang
+up, and with singularly awkward gestures struck the lugs. Montgomery
+steered us round and into a narrow little dock excavated in the beach.
+Then the man on the beach hastened towards us. This dock, as I call it,
+was really a mere ditch just long enough at this phase of the tide to
+take the longboat. I heard the bows ground in the sand, staved the
+dingey off the rudder of the big boat with my piggin, and freeing the
+painter, landed. The three muffled men, with the clumsiest movements,
+scrambled out upon the sand, and forthwith set to landing the cargo,
+assisted by the man on the beach. I was struck especially by the
+curious movements of the legs of the three swathed and bandaged
+boatmen,—not stiff they were, but distorted in some odd way, almost as
+if they were jointed in the wrong place. The dogs were still snarling,
+and strained at their chains after these men, as the white-haired man
+landed with them. The three big fellows spoke to one another in odd
+guttural tones, and the man who had waited for us on the beach began
+chattering to them excitedly—a foreign language, as I fancied—as they
+laid hands on some bales piled near the stern. Somewhere I had heard
+such a voice before, and I could not think where. The white-haired man
+stood, holding in a tumult of six dogs, and bawling orders over their
+din. Montgomery, having unshipped the rudder, landed likewise, and all
+set to work at unloading. I was too faint, what with my long fast and
+the sun beating down on my bare head, to offer any assistance.
+
+Presently the white-haired man seemed to recollect my presence, and
+came up to me.
+
+“You look,” said he, “as though you had scarcely breakfasted.” His
+little eyes were a brilliant black under his heavy brows. “I must
+apologise for that. Now you are our guest, we must make you
+comfortable,—though you are uninvited, you know.” He looked keenly into
+my face. “Montgomery says you are an educated man, Mr. Prendick; says
+you know something of science. May I ask what that signifies?”
+
+I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and
+had done some researches in biology under Huxley. He raised his
+eyebrows slightly at that.
+
+“That alters the case a little, Mr. Prendick,” he said, with a trifle
+more respect in his manner. “As it happens, we are biologists here.
+This is a biological station—of a sort.” His eye rested on the men in
+white who were busily hauling the puma, on rollers, towards the walled
+yard. “I and Montgomery, at least,” he added. Then, “When you will be
+able to get away, I can’t say. We’re off the track to anywhere. We see
+a ship once in a twelve-month or so.”
+
+He left me abruptly, and went up the beach past this group, and I think
+entered the enclosure. The other two men were with Montgomery, erecting
+a pile of smaller packages on a low-wheeled truck. The llama was still
+on the launch with the rabbit hutches; the staghounds were still lashed
+to the thwarts. The pile of things completed, all three men laid hold
+of the truck and began shoving the ton-weight or so upon it after the
+puma. Presently Montgomery left them, and coming back to me held out
+his hand.
+
+“I’m glad,” said he, “for my own part. That captain was a silly ass.
+He’d have made things lively for you.”
+
+“It was you,” said I, “that saved me again.”
+
+“That depends. You’ll find this island an infernally rum place, I
+promise you. I’d watch my goings carefully, if I were you. _He_—” He
+hesitated, and seemed to alter his mind about what was on his lips. “I
+wish you’d help me with these rabbits,” he said.
+
+His procedure with the rabbits was singular. I waded in with him, and
+helped him lug one of the hutches ashore. No sooner was that done than
+he opened the door of it, and tilting the thing on one end turned its
+living contents out on the ground. They fell in a struggling heap one
+on the top of the other. He clapped his hands, and forthwith they went
+off with that hopping run of theirs, fifteen or twenty of them I should
+think, up the beach.
+
+“Increase and multiply, my friends,” said Montgomery. “Replenish the
+island. Hitherto we’ve had a certain lack of meat here.”
+
+As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a
+brandy-flask and some biscuits. “Something to go on with, Prendick,”
+said he, in a far more familiar tone than before. I made no ado, but
+set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man helped
+Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits. Three big
+hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma. The brandy I did
+not touch, for I have been an abstainer from my birth.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+THE LOCKED DOOR.
+
+
+The reader will perhaps understand that at first everything was so
+strange about me, and my position was the outcome of such unexpected
+adventures, that I had no discernment of the relative strangeness of
+this or that thing. I followed the llama up the beach, and was
+overtaken by Montgomery, who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure.
+I noticed then that the puma in its cage and the pile of packages had
+been placed outside the entrance to this quadrangle.
+
+I turned and saw that the launch had now been unloaded, run out again,
+and was being beached, and the white-haired man was walking towards us.
+He addressed Montgomery.
+
+“And now comes the problem of this uninvited guest. What are we to do
+with him?”
+
+“He knows something of science,” said Montgomery.
+
+“I’m itching to get to work again—with this new stuff,” said the
+white-haired man, nodding towards the enclosure. His eyes grew
+brighter.
+
+“I daresay you are,” said Montgomery, in anything but a cordial tone.
+
+“We can’t send him over there, and we can’t spare the time to build him
+a new shanty; and we certainly can’t take him into our confidence just
+yet.”
+
+“I’m in your hands,” said I. I had no idea of what he meant by “over
+there.”
+
+“I’ve been thinking of the same things,” Montgomery answered. “There’s
+my room with the outer door—”
+
+“That’s it,” said the elder man, promptly, looking at Montgomery; and
+all three of us went towards the enclosure. “I’m sorry to make a
+mystery, Mr. Prendick; but you’ll remember you’re uninvited. Our little
+establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Blue-Beard’s
+chamber, in fact. Nothing very dreadful, really, to a sane man; but
+just now, as we don’t know you—”
+
+“Decidedly,” said I, “I should be a fool to take offence at any want of
+confidence.”
+
+He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile—he was one of those
+saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down,—and
+bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance. The main entrance to the
+enclosure was passed; it was a heavy wooden gate, framed in iron and
+locked, with the cargo of the launch piled outside it, and at the
+corner we came to a small doorway I had not previously observed. The
+white-haired man produced a bundle of keys from the pocket of his
+greasy blue jacket, opened this door, and entered. His keys, and the
+elaborate locking-up of the place even while it was still under his
+eye, struck me as peculiar. I followed him, and found myself in a small
+apartment, plainly but not uncomfortably furnished and with its inner
+door, which was slightly ajar, opening into a paved courtyard. This
+inner door Montgomery at once closed. A hammock was slung across the
+darker corner of the room, and a small unglazed window defended by an
+iron bar looked out towards the sea.
+
+This the white-haired man told me was to be my apartment; and the inner
+door, which “for fear of accidents,” he said, he would lock on the
+other side, was my limit inward. He called my attention to a convenient
+deck-chair before the window, and to an array of old books, chiefly, I
+found, surgical works and editions of the Latin and Greek classics
+(languages I cannot read with any comfort), on a shelf near the
+hammock. He left the room by the outer door, as if to avoid opening the
+inner one again.
+
+“We usually have our meals in here,” said Montgomery, and then, as if
+in doubt, went out after the other. “Moreau!” I heard him call, and for
+the moment I do not think I noticed. Then as I handled the books on the
+shelf it came up in consciousness: Where had I heard the name of Moreau
+before? I sat down before the window, took out the biscuits that still
+remained to me, and ate them with an excellent appetite. Moreau!
+
+Through the window I saw one of those unaccountable men in white,
+lugging a packing-case along the beach. Presently the window-frame hid
+him. Then I heard a key inserted and turned in the lock behind me.
+After a little while I heard through the locked door the noise of the
+staghounds, that had now been brought up from the beach. They were not
+barking, but sniffing and growling in a curious fashion. I could hear
+the rapid patter of their feet, and Montgomery’s voice soothing them.
+
+I was very much impressed by the elaborate secrecy of these two men
+regarding the contents of the place, and for some time I was thinking
+of that and of the unaccountable familiarity of the name of Moreau; but
+so odd is the human memory that I could not then recall that well-known
+name in its proper connection. From that my thoughts went to the
+indefinable queerness of the deformed man on the beach. I never saw
+such a gait, such odd motions as he pulled at the box. I recalled that
+none of these men had spoken to me, though most of them I had found
+looking at me at one time or another in a peculiarly furtive manner,
+quite unlike the frank stare of your unsophisticated savage. Indeed,
+they had all seemed remarkably taciturn, and when they did speak,
+endowed with very uncanny voices. What was wrong with them? Then I
+recalled the eyes of Montgomery’s ungainly attendant.
+
+Just as I was thinking of him he came in. He was now dressed in white,
+and carried a little tray with some coffee and boiled vegetables
+thereon. I could hardly repress a shuddering recoil as he came, bending
+amiably, and placed the tray before me on the table. Then astonishment
+paralysed me. Under his stringy black locks I saw his ear; it jumped
+upon me suddenly close to my face. The man had pointed ears, covered
+with a fine brown fur!
+
+“Your breakfast, sair,” he said.
+
+I stared at his face without attempting to answer him. He turned and
+went towards the door, regarding me oddly over his shoulder. I followed
+him out with my eyes; and as I did so, by some odd trick of unconscious
+cerebration, there came surging into my head the phrase, “The Moreau
+Hollows”—was it? “The Moreau—” Ah! It sent my memory back ten years.
+“The Moreau Horrors!” The phrase drifted loose in my mind for a moment,
+and then I saw it in red lettering on a little buff-coloured pamphlet,
+to read which made one shiver and creep. Then I remembered distinctly
+all about it. That long-forgotten pamphlet came back with startling
+vividness to my mind. I had been a mere lad then, and Moreau was, I
+suppose, about fifty,—a prominent and masterful physiologist,
+well-known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination and
+his brutal directness in discussion.
+
+Was this the same Moreau? He had published some very astonishing facts
+in connection with the transfusion of blood, and in addition was known
+to be doing valuable work on morbid growths. Then suddenly his career
+was closed. He had to leave England. A journalist obtained access to
+his laboratory in the capacity of laboratory-assistant, with the
+deliberate intention of making sensational exposures; and by the help
+of a shocking accident (if it was an accident), his gruesome pamphlet
+became notorious. On the day of its publication a wretched dog, flayed
+and otherwise mutilated, escaped from Moreau’s house. It was in the
+silly season, and a prominent editor, a cousin of the temporary
+laboratory-assistant, appealed to the conscience of the nation. It was
+not the first time that conscience has turned against the methods of
+research. The doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be
+that he deserved to be; but I still think that the tepid support of his
+fellow-investigators and his desertion by the great body of scientific
+workers was a shameful thing. Yet some of his experiments, by the
+journalist’s account, were wantonly cruel. He might perhaps have
+purchased his social peace by abandoning his investigations; but he
+apparently preferred the latter, as most men would who have once fallen
+under the overmastering spell of research. He was unmarried, and had
+indeed nothing but his own interest to consider.
+
+I felt convinced that this must be the same man. Everything pointed to
+it. It dawned upon me to what end the puma and the other animals—which
+had now been brought with other luggage into the enclosure behind the
+house—were destined; and a curious faint odour, the halitus of
+something familiar, an odour that had been in the background of my
+consciousness hitherto, suddenly came forward into the forefront of my
+thoughts. It was the antiseptic odour of the dissecting-room. I heard
+the puma growling through the wall, and one of the dogs yelped as
+though it had been struck.
+
+Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing
+so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some
+odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of
+Montgomery’s attendant came back again before me with the sharpest
+definition. I stared before me out at the green sea, frothing under a
+freshening breeze, and let these and other strange memories of the last
+few days chase one another through my mind.
+
+What could it all mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a
+notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+THE CRYING OF THE PUMA.
+
+
+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 _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.
+“_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.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+THE THING IN THE FOREST.
+
+
+I strode through the undergrowth that clothed the ridge behind the
+house, scarcely heeding whither I went; passed on through the shadow of
+a thick cluster of straight-stemmed trees beyond it, and so presently
+found myself some way on the other side of the ridge, and descending
+towards a streamlet that ran through a narrow valley. I paused and
+listened. The distance I had come, or the intervening masses of
+thicket, deadened any sound that might be coming from the enclosure.
+The air was still. Then with a rustle a rabbit emerged, and went
+scampering up the slope before me. I hesitated, and sat down in the
+edge of the shade.
+
+The place was a pleasant one. The rivulet was hidden by the luxuriant
+vegetation of the banks save at one point, where I caught a triangular
+patch of its glittering water. On the farther side I saw through a
+bluish haze a tangle of trees and creepers, and above these again the
+luminous blue of the sky. Here and there a splash of white or crimson
+marked the blooming of some trailing epiphyte. I let my eyes wander
+over this scene for a while, and then began to turn over in my mind
+again the strange peculiarities of Montgomery’s man. But it was too hot
+to think elaborately, and presently I fell into a tranquil state midway
+between dozing and waking.
+
+From this I was aroused, after I know not how long, by a rustling
+amidst the greenery on the other side of the stream. For a moment I
+could see nothing but the waving summits of the ferns and reeds. Then
+suddenly upon the bank of the stream appeared something—at first I
+could not distinguish what it was. It bowed its round head to the
+water, and began to drink. Then I saw it was a man, going on all-fours
+like a beast. He was clothed in bluish cloth, and was of a
+copper-coloured hue, with black hair. It seemed that grotesque ugliness
+was an invariable character of these islanders. I could hear the suck
+of the water at his lips as he drank.
+
+I leant forward to see him better, and a piece of lava, detached by my
+hand, went pattering down the slope. He looked up guiltily, and his
+eyes met mine. Forthwith he scrambled to his feet, and stood wiping his
+clumsy hand across his mouth and regarding me. His legs were scarcely
+half the length of his body. So, staring one another out of
+countenance, we remained for perhaps the space of a minute. Then,
+stopping to look back once or twice, he slunk off among the bushes to
+the right of me, and I heard the swish of the fronds grow faint in the
+distance and die away. Long after he had disappeared, I remained
+sitting up staring in the direction of his retreat. My drowsy
+tranquillity had gone.
+
+I was startled by a noise behind me, and turning suddenly saw the
+flapping white tail of a rabbit vanishing up the slope. I jumped to my
+feet. The apparition of this grotesque, half-bestial creature had
+suddenly populated the stillness of the afternoon for me. I looked
+around me rather nervously, and regretted that I was unarmed. Then I
+thought that the man I had just seen had been clothed in bluish cloth,
+had not been naked as a savage would have been; and I tried to persuade
+myself from that fact that he was after all probably a peaceful
+character, that the dull ferocity of his countenance belied him.
+
+Yet I was greatly disturbed at the apparition. I walked to the left
+along the slope, turning my head about and peering this way and that
+among the straight stems of the trees. Why should a man go on all-fours
+and drink with his lips? Presently I heard an animal wailing again, and
+taking it to be the puma, I turned about and walked in a direction
+diametrically opposite to the sound. This led me down to the stream,
+across which I stepped and pushed my way up through the undergrowth
+beyond.
+
+I was startled by a great patch of vivid scarlet on the ground, and
+going up to it found it to be a peculiar fungus, branched and
+corrugated like a foliaceous lichen, but deliquescing into slime at the
+touch; and then in the shadow of some luxuriant ferns I came upon an
+unpleasant thing,—the dead body of a rabbit covered with shining flies,
+but still warm and with the head torn off. I stopped aghast at the
+sight of the scattered blood. Here at least was one visitor to the
+island disposed of! There were no traces of other violence about it. It
+looked as though it had been suddenly snatched up and killed; and as I
+stared at the little furry body came the difficulty of how the thing
+had been done. The vague dread that had been in my mind since I had
+seen the inhuman face of the man at the stream grew distincter as I
+stood there. I began to realise the hardihood of my expedition among
+these unknown people. The thicket about me became altered to my
+imagination. Every shadow became something more than a shadow,—became
+an ambush; every rustle became a threat. Invisible things seemed
+watching me. I resolved to go back to the enclosure on the beach. I
+suddenly turned away and thrust myself violently, possibly even
+frantically, through the bushes, anxious to get a clear space about me
+again.
+
+I stopped just in time to prevent myself emerging upon an open space.
+It was a kind of glade in the forest, made by a fall; seedlings were
+already starting up to struggle for the vacant space; and beyond, the
+dense growth of stems and twining vines and splashes of fungus and
+flowers closed in again. Before me, squatting together upon the fungoid
+ruins of a huge fallen tree and still unaware of my approach, were
+three grotesque human figures. One was evidently a female; the other
+two were men. They were naked, save for swathings of scarlet cloth
+about the middle; and their skins were of a dull pinkish-drab colour,
+such as I had seen in no savages before. They had fat, heavy, chinless
+faces, retreating foreheads, and a scant bristly hair upon their heads.
+I never saw such bestial-looking creatures.
+
+They were talking, or at least one of the men was talking to the other
+two, and all three had been too closely interested to heed the rustling
+of my approach. They swayed their heads and shoulders from side to
+side. The speaker’s words came thick and sloppy, and though I could
+hear them distinctly I could not distinguish what he said. He seemed to
+me to be reciting some complicated gibberish. Presently his
+articulation became shriller, and spreading his hands he rose to his
+feet. At that the others began to gibber in unison, also rising to
+their feet, spreading their hands and swaying their bodies in rhythm
+with their chant. I noticed then the abnormal shortness of their legs,
+and their lank, clumsy feet. All three began slowly to circle round,
+raising and stamping their feet and waving their arms; a kind of tune
+crept into their rhythmic recitation, and a refrain,—“Aloola,” or
+“Balloola,” it sounded like. Their eyes began to sparkle, and their
+ugly faces to brighten, with an expression of strange pleasure. Saliva
+dripped from their lipless mouths.
+
+Suddenly, as I watched their grotesque and unaccountable gestures, I
+perceived clearly for the first time what it was that had offended me,
+what had given me the two inconsistent and conflicting impressions of
+utter strangeness and yet of the strangest familiarity. The three
+creatures engaged in this mysterious rite were human in shape, and yet
+human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal.
+Each of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing,
+and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into it—into its
+movements, into the expression of its countenance, into its whole
+presence—some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint,
+the unmistakable mark of the beast.
+
+I stood overcome by this amazing realisation and then the most horrible
+questionings came rushing into my mind. They began leaping in the air,
+first one and then the other, whooping and grunting. Then one slipped,
+and for a moment was on all-fours,—to recover, indeed, forthwith. But
+that transitory gleam of the true animalism of these monsters was
+enough.
+
+I turned as noiselessly as possible, and becoming every now and then
+rigid with the fear of being discovered, as a branch cracked or a leaf
+rustled, I pushed back into the bushes. It was long before I grew
+bolder, and dared to move freely. My only idea for the moment was to
+get away from these foul beings, and I scarcely noticed that I had
+emerged upon a faint pathway amidst the trees. Then suddenly traversing
+a little glade, I saw with an unpleasant start two clumsy legs among
+the trees, walking with noiseless footsteps parallel with my course,
+and perhaps thirty yards away from me. The head and upper part of the
+body were hidden by a tangle of creeper. I stopped abruptly, hoping the
+creature did not see me. The feet stopped as I did. So nervous was I
+that I controlled an impulse to headlong flight with the utmost
+difficulty. Then looking hard, I distinguished through the interlacing
+network the head and body of the brute I had seen drinking. He moved
+his head. There was an emerald flash in his eyes as he glanced at me
+from the shadow of the trees, a half-luminous colour that vanished as
+he turned his head again. He was motionless for a moment, and then with
+a noiseless tread began running through the green confusion. In another
+moment he had vanished behind some bushes. I could not see him, but I
+felt that he had stopped and was watching me again.
+
+What on earth was he,—man or beast? What did he want with me? I had no
+weapon, not even a stick. Flight would be madness. At any rate the
+Thing, whatever it was, lacked the courage to attack me. Setting my
+teeth hard, I walked straight towards him. I was anxious not to show
+the fear that seemed chilling my backbone. I pushed through a tangle of
+tall white-flowered bushes, and saw him twenty paces beyond, looking
+over his shoulder at me and hesitating. I advanced a step or two,
+looking steadfastly into his eyes.
+
+“Who are you?” said I.
+
+He tried to meet my gaze. “No!” he said suddenly, and turning went
+bounding away from me through the undergrowth. Then he turned and
+stared at me again. His eyes shone brightly out of the dusk under the
+trees.
+
+My heart was in my mouth; but I felt my only chance was bluff, and
+walked steadily towards him. He turned again, and vanished into the
+dusk. Once more I thought I caught the glint of his eyes, and that was
+all.
+
+For the first time I realised how the lateness of the hour might affect
+me. The sun had set some minutes since, the swift dusk of the tropics
+was already fading out of the eastern sky, and a pioneer moth fluttered
+silently by my head. Unless I would spend the night among the unknown
+dangers of the mysterious forest, I must hasten back to the enclosure.
+The thought of a return to that pain-haunted refuge was extremely
+disagreeable, but still more so was the idea of being overtaken in the
+open by darkness and all that darkness might conceal. I gave one more
+look into the blue shadows that had swallowed up this odd creature, and
+then retraced my way down the slope towards the stream, going as I
+judged in the direction from which I had come.
+
+I walked eagerly, my mind confused with many things, and presently
+found myself in a level place among scattered trees. The colourless
+clearness that comes after the sunset flush was darkling; the blue sky
+above grew momentarily deeper, and the little stars one by one pierced
+the attenuated light; the interspaces of the trees, the gaps in the
+further vegetation, that had been hazy blue in the daylight, grew black
+and mysterious. I pushed on. The colour vanished from the world. The
+tree-tops rose against the luminous blue sky in inky silhouette, and
+all below that outline melted into one formless blackness. Presently
+the trees grew thinner, and the shrubby undergrowth more abundant. Then
+there was a desolate space covered with a white sand, and then another
+expanse of tangled bushes. I did not remember crossing the sand-opening
+before. I began to be tormented by a faint rustling upon my right hand.
+I thought at first it was fancy, for whenever I stopped there was
+silence, save for the evening breeze in the tree-tops. Then when I
+turned to hurry on again there was an echo to my footsteps.
+
+I turned away from the thickets, keeping to the more open ground, and
+endeavouring by sudden turns now and then to surprise something in the
+act of creeping upon me. I saw nothing, and nevertheless my sense of
+another presence grew steadily. I increased my pace, and after some
+time came to a slight ridge, crossed it, and turned sharply, regarding
+it steadfastly from the further side. It came out black and clear-cut
+against the darkling sky; and presently a shapeless lump heaved up
+momentarily against the sky-line and vanished again. I felt assured now
+that my tawny-faced antagonist was stalking me once more; and coupled
+with that was another unpleasant realisation, that I had lost my way.
+
+For a time I hurried on hopelessly perplexed, and pursued by that
+stealthy approach. Whatever it was, the Thing either lacked the courage
+to attack me, or it was waiting to take me at some disadvantage. I kept
+studiously to the open. At times I would turn and listen; and presently
+I had half persuaded myself that my pursuer had abandoned the chase, or
+was a mere creation of my disordered imagination. Then I heard the
+sound of the sea. I quickened my footsteps almost into a run, and
+immediately there was a stumble in my rear.
+
+I turned suddenly, and stared at the uncertain trees behind me. One
+black shadow seemed to leap into another. I listened, rigid, and heard
+nothing but the creep of the blood in my ears. I thought that my nerves
+were unstrung, and that my imagination was tricking me, and turned
+resolutely towards the sound of the sea again.
+
+In a minute or so the trees grew thinner, and I emerged upon a bare,
+low headland running out into the sombre water. The night was calm and
+clear, and the reflection of the growing multitude of the stars
+shivered in the tranquil heaving of the sea. Some way out, the wash
+upon an irregular band of reef shone with a pallid light of its own.
+Westward I saw the zodiacal light mingling with the yellow brilliance
+of the evening star. The coast fell away from me to the east, and
+westward it was hidden by the shoulder of the cape. Then I recalled the
+fact that Moreau’s beach lay to the west.
+
+A twig snapped behind me, and there was a rustle. I turned, and stood
+facing the dark trees. I could see nothing—or else I could see too
+much. Every dark form in the dimness had its ominous quality, its
+peculiar suggestion of alert watchfulness. So I stood for perhaps a
+minute, and then, with an eye to the trees still, turned westward to
+cross the headland; and as I moved, one among the lurking shadows moved
+to follow me.
+
+My heart beat quickly. Presently the broad sweep of a bay to the
+westward became visible, and I halted again. The noiseless shadow
+halted a dozen yards from me. A little point of light shone on the
+further bend of the curve, and the grey sweep of the sandy beach lay
+faint under the starlight. Perhaps two miles away was that little point
+of light. To get to the beach I should have to go through the trees
+where the shadows lurked, and down a bushy slope.
+
+I could see the Thing rather more distinctly now. It was no animal, for
+it stood erect. At that I opened my mouth to speak, and found a hoarse
+phlegm choked my voice. I tried again, and shouted, “Who is there?”
+There was no answer. I advanced a step. The Thing did not move, only
+gathered itself together. My foot struck a stone. That gave me an idea.
+Without taking my eyes off the black form before me, I stooped and
+picked up this lump of rock; but at my motion the Thing turned abruptly
+as a dog might have done, and slunk obliquely into the further
+darkness. Then I recalled a schoolboy expedient against big dogs, and
+twisted the rock into my handkerchief, and gave this a turn round my
+wrist. I heard a movement further off among the shadows, as if the
+Thing was in retreat. Then suddenly my tense excitement gave way; I
+broke into a profuse perspiration and fell a-trembling, with my
+adversary routed and this weapon in my hand.
+
+It was some time before I could summon resolution to go down through
+the trees and bushes upon the flank of the headland to the beach. At
+last I did it at a run; and as I emerged from the thicket upon the
+sand, I heard some other body come crashing after me. At that I
+completely lost my head with fear, and began running along the sand.
+Forthwith there came the swift patter of soft feet in pursuit. I gave a
+wild cry, and redoubled my pace. Some dim, black things about three or
+four times the size of rabbits went running or hopping up from the
+beach towards the bushes as I passed.
+
+So long as I live, I shall remember the terror of that chase. I ran
+near the water’s edge, and heard every now and then the splash of the
+feet that gained upon me. Far away, hopelessly far, was the yellow
+light. All the night about us was black and still. Splash, splash, came
+the pursuing feet, nearer and nearer. I felt my breath going, for I was
+quite out of training; it whooped as I drew it, and I felt a pain like
+a knife at my side. I perceived the Thing would come up with me long
+before I reached the enclosure, and, desperate and sobbing for my
+breath, I wheeled round upon it and struck at it as it came up to
+me,—struck with all my strength. The stone came out of the sling of the
+handkerchief as I did so. As I turned, the Thing, which had been
+running on all-fours, rose to its feet, and the missile fell fair on
+its left temple. The skull rang loud, and the animal-man blundered into
+me, thrust me back with its hands, and went staggering past me to fall
+headlong upon the sand with its face in the water; and there it lay
+still.
+
+I could not bring myself to approach that black heap. I left it there,
+with the water rippling round it, under the still stars, and giving it
+a wide berth pursued my way towards the yellow glow of the house; and
+presently, with a positive effect of relief, came the pitiful moaning
+of the puma, the sound that had originally driven me out to explore
+this mysterious island. At that, though I was faint and horribly
+fatigued, I gathered together all my strength, and began running again
+towards the light. I thought I heard a voice calling me.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+THE CRYING OF THE MAN.
+
+
+As I drew near the house I saw that the light shone from the open door
+of my room; and then I heard coming from out of the darkness at the
+side of that orange oblong of light, the voice of Montgomery shouting,
+“Prendick!” I continued running. Presently I heard him again. I replied
+by a feeble “Hullo!” and in another moment had staggered up to him.
+
+“Where have you been?” said he, holding me at arm’s length, so that the
+light from the door fell on my face. “We have both been so busy that we
+forgot you until about half an hour ago.” He led me into the room and
+sat me down in the deck chair. For awhile I was blinded by the light.
+“We did not think you would start to explore this island of ours
+without telling us,” he said; and then, “I was afraid—But—what—Hullo!”
+
+My last remaining strength slipped from me, and my head fell forward on
+my chest. I think he found a certain satisfaction in giving me brandy.
+
+“For God’s sake,” said I, “fasten that door.”
+
+“You’ve been meeting some of our curiosities, eh?” said he.
+
+He locked the door and turned to me again. He asked me no questions,
+but gave me some more brandy and water and pressed me to eat. I was in
+a state of collapse. He said something vague about his forgetting to
+warn me, and asked me briefly when I left the house and what I had
+seen.
+
+I answered him as briefly, in fragmentary sentences. “Tell me what it
+all means,” said I, in a state bordering on hysterics.
+
+“It’s nothing so very dreadful,” said he. “But I think you have had
+about enough for one day.” The puma suddenly gave a sharp yell of pain.
+At that he swore under his breath. “I’m damned,” said he, “if this
+place is not as bad as Gower Street, with its cats.”
+
+“Montgomery,” said I, “what was that thing that came after me? Was it a
+beast or was it a man?”
+
+“If you don’t sleep to-night,” he said, “you’ll be off your head
+to-morrow.”
+
+I stood up in front of him. “What was that thing that came after me?” I
+asked.
+
+He looked me squarely in the eyes, and twisted his mouth askew. His
+eyes, which had seemed animated a minute before, went dull. “From your
+account,” said he, “I’m thinking it was a bogle.”
+
+I felt a gust of intense irritation, which passed as quickly as it
+came. I flung myself into the chair again, and pressed my hands on my
+forehead. The puma began once more.
+
+Montgomery came round behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Look
+here, Prendick,” he said, “I had no business to let you drift out into
+this silly island of ours. But it’s not so bad as you feel, man. Your
+nerves are worked to rags. Let me give you something that will make you
+sleep. _That_—will keep on for hours yet. You must simply get to sleep,
+or I won’t answer for it.”
+
+I did not reply. I bowed forward, and covered my face with my hands.
+Presently he returned with a small measure containing a dark liquid.
+This he gave me. I took it unresistingly, and he helped me into the
+hammock.
+
+When I awoke, it was broad day. For a little while I lay flat, staring
+at the roof above me. The rafters, I observed, were made out of the
+timbers of a ship. Then I turned my head, and saw a meal prepared for
+me on the table. I perceived that I was hungry, and prepared to clamber
+out of the hammock, which, very politely anticipating my intention,
+twisted round and deposited me upon all-fours on the floor.
+
+I got up and sat down before the food. I had a heavy feeling in my
+head, and only the vaguest memory at first of the things that had
+happened over night. The morning breeze blew very pleasantly through
+the unglazed window, and that and the food contributed to the sense of
+animal comfort which I experienced. Presently the door behind me—the
+door inward towards the yard of the enclosure—opened. I turned and saw
+Montgomery’s face.
+
+“All right,” said he. “I’m frightfully busy.” And he shut the door.
+
+Afterwards I discovered that he forgot to re-lock it. Then I recalled
+the expression of his face the previous night, and with that the memory
+of all I had experienced reconstructed itself before me. Even as that
+fear came back to me came a cry from within; but this time it was not
+the cry of a puma. I put down the mouthful that hesitated upon my lips,
+and listened. Silence, save for the whisper of the morning breeze. I
+began to think my ears had deceived me.
+
+After a long pause I resumed my meal, but with my ears still vigilant.
+Presently I heard something else, very faint and low. I sat as if
+frozen in my attitude. Though it was faint and low, it moved me more
+profoundly than all that I had hitherto heard of the abominations
+behind the wall. There was no mistake this time in the quality of the
+dim, broken sounds; no doubt at all of their source. For it was
+groaning, broken by sobs and gasps of anguish. It was no brute this
+time; it was a human being in torment!
+
+As I realised this I rose, and in three steps had crossed the room,
+seized the handle of the door into the yard, and flung it open before
+me.
+
+“Prendick, man! Stop!” cried Montgomery, intervening.
+
+A startled deerhound yelped and snarled. There was blood, I saw, in the
+sink,—brown, and some scarlet—and I smelt the peculiar smell of
+carbolic acid. Then through an open doorway beyond, in the dim light of
+the shadow, I saw something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred,
+red, and bandaged; and then blotting this out appeared the face of old
+Moreau, white and terrible. In a moment he had gripped me by the
+shoulder with a hand that was smeared red, had twisted me off my feet,
+and flung me headlong back into my own room. He lifted me as though I
+was a little child. I fell at full length upon the floor, and the door
+slammed and shut out the passionate intensity of his face. Then I heard
+the key turn in the lock, and Montgomery’s voice in expostulation.
+
+“Ruin the work of a lifetime,” I heard Moreau say.
+
+“He does not understand,” said Montgomery. and other things that were
+inaudible.
+
+“I can’t spare the time yet,” said Moreau.
+
+The rest I did not hear. I picked myself up and stood trembling, my
+mind a chaos of the most horrible misgivings. Could it be possible, I
+thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried on
+here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky; and
+suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid
+realisation of my own danger.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+THE HUNTING OF THE MAN.
+
+
+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
+ways into the central gloom.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+THE SAYERS OF THE LAW.
+
+
+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; _that_ is the Law. Are we not Men?
+“Not to chase other Men; _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.
+
+“_His_ is the House of Pain.
+“_His_ is the Hand that makes.
+“_His_ is the Hand that wounds.
+“_His_ is the Hand that heals.”
+
+
+And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible
+gibberish to me about _Him_, whoever he might be. I could have fancied
+it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream.
+
+“_His_ is the lightning flash,” we sang. “_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.
+
+“_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.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+A PARLEY.
+
+
+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. _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.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS.
+
+
+“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 _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 _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 _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.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK.
+
+
+I woke early. Moreau’s explanation stood before my mind, clear and
+definite, from the moment of my awakening. I got out of the hammock and
+went to the door to assure myself that the key was turned. Then I tried
+the window-bar, and found it firmly fixed. That these man-like
+creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque
+travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their
+possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.
+
+A tapping came at the door, and I heard the glutinous accents of M’ling
+speaking. I pocketed one of the revolvers (keeping one hand upon it),
+and opened to him.
+
+“Good-morning, sair,” he said, bringing in, in addition to the
+customary herb-breakfast, an ill-cooked rabbit. Montgomery followed
+him. His roving eye caught the position of my arm and he smiled askew.
+
+The puma was resting to heal that day; but Moreau, who was singularly
+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.[2] 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.
+
+ [2]This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle.—C.
+ E. P.
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.
+
+
+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, _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 _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.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+A CATASTROPHE.
+
+
+Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike
+and abhorrence for this infamous experiment of Moreau’s. My one idea
+was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image,
+back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men. My
+fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume
+idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory. My first friendship with
+Montgomery did not increase. His long separation from humanity, his
+secret vice of drunkenness, his evident sympathy with the Beast People,
+tainted him to me. Several times I let him go alone among them. I
+avoided intercourse with them in every possible way. I spent an
+increasing proportion of my time upon the beach, looking for some
+liberating sail that never appeared,—until one day there fell upon us
+an appalling disaster, which put an altogether different aspect upon my
+strange surroundings.
+
+It was about seven or eight weeks after my landing,—rather more, I
+think, though I had not troubled to keep account of the time,—when this
+catastrophe occurred. It happened in the early morning—I should think
+about six. I had risen and breakfasted early, having been aroused by
+the noise of three Beast Men carrying wood into the enclosure.
+
+After breakfast I went to the open gateway of the enclosure, and stood
+there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the freshness of the early
+morning. Moreau presently came round the corner of the enclosure and
+greeted me. He passed by me, and I heard him behind me unlock and enter
+his laboratory. So indurated was I at that time to the abomination of
+the place, that I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim
+begin another day of torture. It met its persecutor with a shriek,
+almost exactly like that of an angry virago.
+
+Then suddenly something happened,—I do not know what, to this day. I
+heard a short, sharp cry behind me, a fall, and turning saw an awful
+face rushing upon me,—not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed
+with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, and the
+lidless eyes ablaze. I threw up my arm to defend myself from the blow
+that flung me headlong with a broken forearm; and the great monster,
+swathed in lint and with red-stained bandages fluttering about it,
+leapt over me and passed. I rolled over and over down the beach, tried
+to sit up, and collapsed upon my broken arm. Then Moreau appeared, his
+massive white face all the more terrible for the blood that trickled
+from his forehead. He carried a revolver in one hand. He scarcely
+glanced at me, but rushed off at once in pursuit of the puma.
+
+I tried the other arm and sat up. The muffled figure in front ran in
+great striding leaps along the beach, and Moreau followed her. She
+turned her head and saw him, then doubling abruptly made for the
+bushes. She gained upon him at every stride. I saw her plunge into
+them, and Moreau, running slantingly to intercept her, fired and missed
+as she disappeared. Then he too vanished in the green confusion. I
+stared after them, and then the pain in my arm flamed up, and with a
+groan I staggered to my feet. Montgomery appeared in the doorway,
+dressed, and with his revolver in his hand.
+
+“Great God, Prendick!” he said, not noticing that I was hurt, “that
+brute’s loose! Tore the fetter out of the wall! Have you seen them?”
+Then sharply, seeing I gripped my arm, “What’s the matter?”
+
+“I was standing in the doorway,” said I.
+
+He came forward and took my arm. “Blood on the sleeve,” said he, and
+rolled back the flannel. He pocketed his weapon, felt my arm about
+painfully, and led me inside. “Your arm is broken,” he said, and then,
+“Tell me exactly how it happened—what happened?”
+
+I told him what I had seen; told him in broken sentences, with gasps of
+pain between them, and very dexterously and swiftly he bound my arm
+meanwhile. He slung it from my shoulder, stood back and looked at me.
+
+“You’ll do,” he said. “And now?”
+
+He thought. Then he went out and locked the gates of the enclosure. He
+was absent some time.
+
+I was chiefly concerned about my arm. The incident seemed merely one
+more of many horrible things. I sat down in the deck chair, and I must
+admit swore heartily at the island. The first dull feeling of injury in
+my arm had already given way to a burning pain when Montgomery
+reappeared. His face was rather pale, and he showed more of his lower
+gums than ever.
+
+“I can neither see nor hear anything of him,” he said. “I’ve been
+thinking he may want my help.” He stared at me with his expressionless
+eyes. “That was a strong brute,” he said. “It simply wrenched its
+fetter out of the wall.” He went to the window, then to the door, and
+there turned to me. “I shall go after him,” he said. “There’s another
+revolver I can leave with you. To tell you the truth, I feel anxious
+somehow.”
+
+He obtained the weapon, and put it ready to my hand on the table; then
+went out, leaving a restless contagion in the air. I did not sit long
+after he left, but took the revolver in hand and went to the doorway.
+
+The morning was as still as death. Not a whisper of wind was stirring;
+the sea was like polished glass, the sky empty, the beach desolate. In
+my half-excited, half-feverish state, this stillness of things
+oppressed me. I tried to whistle, and the tune died away. I swore
+again,—the second time that morning. Then I went to the corner of the
+enclosure and stared inland at the green bush that had swallowed up
+Moreau and Montgomery. When would they return, and how? Then far away
+up the beach a little grey Beast Man appeared, ran down to the water’s
+edge and began splashing about. I strolled back to the doorway, then to
+the corner again, and so began pacing to and fro like a sentinel upon
+duty. Once I was arrested by the distant voice of Montgomery bawling,
+“Coo-ee—Moreau!” My arm became less painful, but very hot. I got
+feverish and thirsty. My shadow grew shorter. I watched the distant
+figure until it went away again. Would Moreau and Montgomery never
+return? Three sea-birds began fighting for some stranded treasure.
+
+Then from far away behind the enclosure I heard a pistol-shot. A long
+silence, and then came another. Then a yelling cry nearer, and another
+dismal gap of silence. My unfortunate imagination set to work to
+torment me. Then suddenly a shot close by. I went to the corner,
+startled, and saw Montgomery,—his face scarlet, his hair disordered,
+and the knee of his trousers torn. His face expressed profound
+consternation. Behind him slouched the Beast Man, M’ling, and round
+M’ling’s jaws were some queer dark stains.
+
+“Has he come?” said Montgomery.
+
+“Moreau?” said I. “No.”
+
+“My God!” The man was panting, almost sobbing. “Go back in,” he said,
+taking my arm. “They’re mad. They’re all rushing about mad. What can
+have happened? I don’t know. I’ll tell you, when my breath comes.
+Where’s some brandy?”
+
+Montgomery limped before me into the room and sat down in the deck
+chair. M’ling flung himself down just outside the doorway and began
+panting like a dog. I got Montgomery some brandy-and-water. He sat
+staring in front of him at nothing, recovering his breath. After some
+minutes he began to tell me what had happened.
+
+He had followed their track for some way. It was plain enough at first
+on account of the crushed and broken bushes, white rags torn from the
+puma’s bandages, and occasional smears of blood on the leaves of the
+shrubs and undergrowth. He lost the track, however, on the stony ground
+beyond the stream where I had seen the Beast Man drinking, and went
+wandering aimlessly westward shouting Moreau’s name. Then M’ling had
+come to him carrying a light hatchet. M’ling had seen nothing of the
+puma affair; had been felling wood, and heard him calling. They went on
+shouting together. Two Beast Men came crouching and peering at them
+through the undergrowth, with gestures and a furtive carriage that
+alarmed Montgomery by their strangeness. He hailed them, and they fled
+guiltily. He stopped shouting after that, and after wandering some time
+farther in an undecided way, determined to visit the huts.
+
+He found the ravine deserted.
+
+Growing more alarmed every minute, he began to retrace his steps. Then
+it was he encountered the two Swine-men I had seen dancing on the night
+of my arrival; blood-stained they were about the mouth, and intensely
+excited. They came crashing through the ferns, and stopped with fierce
+faces when they saw him. He cracked his whip in some trepidation, and
+forthwith they rushed at him. Never before had a Beast Man dared to do
+that. One he shot through the head; M’ling flung himself upon the
+other, and the two rolled grappling. M’ling got his brute under and
+with his teeth in its throat, and Montgomery shot that too as it
+struggled in M’ling’s grip. He had some difficulty in inducing M’ling
+to come on with him. Thence they had hurried back to me. On the way,
+M’ling had suddenly rushed into a thicket and driven out an under-sized
+Ocelot-man, also blood-stained, and lame through a wound in the foot.
+This brute had run a little way and then turned savagely at bay, and
+Montgomery—with a certain wantonness, I thought—had shot him.
+
+“What does it all mean?” said I.
+
+He shook his head, and turned once more to the brandy.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+THE FINDING OF MOREAU.
+
+
+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 _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.
+
+“_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 _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.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+MONTGOMERY’S “BANK HOLIDAY.”
+
+
+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,—_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 _I_ to join
+on? It’s all very well for _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?”
+
+“_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 _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.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK.
+
+
+I faced these people, facing my fate in them, single-handed
+now,—literally single-handed, for I had a broken arm. In my pocket was
+a revolver with two empty chambers. Among the chips scattered about the
+beach lay the two axes that had been used to chop up the boats. The
+tide was creeping in behind me. There was nothing for it but courage. I
+looked squarely into the faces of the advancing monsters. They avoided
+my eyes, and their quivering nostrils investigated the bodies that lay
+beyond me on the beach. I took half-a-dozen steps, picked up the
+blood-stained whip that lay beneath the body of the Wolf-man, and
+cracked it. They stopped and stared at me.
+
+“Salute!” said I. “Bow down!”
+
+They hesitated. One bent his knees. I repeated my command, with my
+heart in my mouth, and advanced upon them. One knelt, then the other
+two.
+
+I turned and walked towards the dead bodies, keeping my face towards
+the three kneeling Beast Men, very much as an actor passing up the
+stage faces the audience.
+
+“They broke the Law,” said I, putting my foot on the Sayer of the Law.
+“They have been slain,—even the Sayer of the Law; even the Other with
+the Whip. Great is the Law! Come and see.”
+
+“None escape,” said one of them, advancing and peering.
+
+“None escape,” said I. “Therefore hear and do as I command.” They stood
+up, looking questioningly at one another.
+
+“Stand there,” said I.
+
+I picked up the hatchets and swung them by their heads from the sling
+of my arm; turned Montgomery over; picked up his revolver still loaded
+in two chambers, and bending down to rummage, found half-a-dozen
+cartridges in his pocket.
+
+“Take him,” said I, standing up again and pointing with the whip; “take
+him, and carry him out and cast him into the sea.”
+
+They came forward, evidently still afraid of Montgomery, but still more
+afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and
+hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly,
+carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling
+welter of the sea.
+
+“On!” said I, “on! Carry him far.”
+
+They went in up to their armpits and stood regarding me.
+
+“Let go,” said I; and the body of Montgomery vanished with a splash.
+Something seemed to tighten across my chest.
+
+“Good!” said I, with a break in my voice; and they came back, hurrying
+and fearful, to the margin of the water, leaving long wakes of black in
+the silver. At the water’s edge they stopped, turning and glaring into
+the sea as though they presently expected Montgomery to arise therefrom
+and exact vengeance.
+
+“Now these,” said I, pointing to the other bodies.
+
+They took care not to approach the place where they had thrown
+Montgomery into the water, but instead, carried the four dead Beast
+People slantingly along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards before
+they waded out and cast them away.
+
+As I watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M’ling, I heard a
+light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine
+perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes
+were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his
+side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes a
+little averted.
+
+For a moment we stood eye to eye. I dropped the whip and snatched at
+the pistol in my pocket; for I meant to kill this brute, the most
+formidable of any left now upon the island, at the first excuse. It may
+seem treacherous, but so I was resolved. I was far more afraid of him
+than of any other two of the Beast Folk. His continued life was I knew
+a threat against mine.
+
+I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself. Then cried I, “Salute!
+Bow down!”
+
+His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl. “Who are _you_ that I should—”
+
+Perhaps a little too spasmodically I drew my revolver, aimed quickly
+and fired. I heard him yelp, saw him run sideways and turn, knew I had
+missed, and clicked back the cock with my thumb for the next shot. But
+he was already running headlong, jumping from side to side, and I dared
+not risk another miss. Every now and then he looked back at me over his
+shoulder. He went slanting along the beach, and vanished beneath the
+driving masses of dense smoke that were still pouring out from the
+burning enclosure. For some time I stood staring after him. I turned to
+my three obedient Beast Folk again and signalled them to drop the body
+they still carried. Then I went back to the place by the fire where the
+bodies had fallen and kicked the sand until all the brown blood-stains
+were absorbed and hidden.
+
+I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the
+beach into the thickets. I carried my pistol in my hand, my whip thrust
+with the hatchets in the sling of my arm. I was anxious to be alone, to
+think out the position in which I was now placed. A dreadful thing that
+I was only beginning to realise was, that over all this island there
+was now no safe place where I could be alone and secure to rest or
+sleep. I had recovered strength amazingly since my landing, but I was
+still inclined to be nervous and to break down under any great stress.
+I felt that I ought to cross the island and establish myself with the
+Beast People, and make myself secure in their confidence. But my heart
+failed me. I went back to the beach, and turning eastward past the
+burning enclosure, made for a point where a shallow spit of coral sand
+ran out towards the reef. Here I could sit down and think, my back to
+the sea and my face against any surprise. And there I sat, chin on
+knees, the sun beating down upon my head and unspeakable dread in my
+mind, plotting how I could live on against the hour of my rescue (if
+ever rescue came). I tried to review the whole situation as calmly as I
+could, but it was difficult to clear the thing of emotion.
+
+I began turning over in my mind the reason of Montgomery’s despair.
+“They will change,” he said; “they are sure to change.” And Moreau,
+what was it that Moreau had said? “The stubborn beast-flesh grows day
+by day back again.” Then I came round to the Hyena-swine. I felt sure
+that if I did not kill that brute, he would kill me. The Sayer of the
+Law was dead: worse luck. They knew now that we of the Whips could be
+killed even as they themselves were killed. Were they peering at me
+already out of the green masses of ferns and palms over yonder,
+watching until I came within their spring? Were they plotting against
+me? What was the Hyena-swine telling them? My imagination was running
+away with me into a morass of unsubstantial fears.
+
+My thoughts were disturbed by a crying of sea-birds hurrying towards
+some black object that had been stranded by the waves on the beach near
+the enclosure. I knew what that object was, but I had not the heart to
+go back and drive them off. I began walking along the beach in the
+opposite direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the
+island and so approach the ravine of the huts, without traversing the
+possible ambuscades of the thickets.
+
+Perhaps half a mile along the beach I became aware of one of my three
+Beast Folk advancing out of the landward bushes towards me. I was now
+so nervous with my own imaginings that I immediately drew my revolver.
+Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me. He
+hesitated as he approached.
+
+“Go away!” cried I.
+
+There was something very suggestive of a dog in the cringing attitude
+of the creature. It retreated a little way, very like a dog being sent
+home, and stopped, looking at me imploringly with canine brown eyes.
+
+“Go away,” said I. “Do not come near me.”
+
+“May I not come near you?” it said.
+
+“No; go away,” I insisted, and snapped my whip. Then putting my whip in
+my teeth, I stooped for a stone, and with that threat drove the
+creature away.
+
+So in solitude I came round by the ravine of the Beast People, and
+hiding among the weeds and reeds that separated this crevice from the
+sea I watched such of them as appeared, trying to judge from their
+gestures and appearance how the death of Moreau and Montgomery and the
+destruction of the House of Pain had affected them. I know now the
+folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the
+dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might
+have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast
+People. As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a
+mere leader among my fellows.
+
+Towards noon certain of them came and squatted basking in the hot sand.
+The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread. I
+came out of the bushes, and, revolver in hand, walked down towards
+these seated figures. One, a Wolf-woman, turned her head and stared at
+me, and then the others. None attempted to rise or salute me. I felt
+too faint and weary to insist, and I let the moment pass.
+
+“I want food,” said I, almost apologetically, and drawing near.
+
+“There is food in the huts,” said an Ox-boar-man, drowsily, and looking
+away from me.
+
+I passed them, and went down into the shadow and odours of the almost
+deserted ravine. In an empty hut I feasted on some specked and
+half-decayed fruit; and then after I had propped some branches and
+sticks about the opening, and placed myself with my face towards it and
+my hand upon my revolver, the exhaustion of the last thirty hours
+claimed its own, and I fell into a light slumber, hoping that the
+flimsy barricade I had erected would cause sufficient noise in its
+removal to save me from surprise.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK.
+
+
+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.
+
+“_I_—Master.”
+
+“Who are _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, ‘_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 _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 _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.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+THE MAN ALONE.
+
+
+In the evening I started, and drove out to sea before a gentle wind
+from the southwest, slowly, steadily; and the island grew smaller and
+smaller, and the lank spire of smoke dwindled to a finer and finer line
+against the hot sunset. The ocean rose up around me, hiding that low,
+dark patch from my eyes. The daylight, the trailing glory of the sun,
+went streaming out of the sky, was drawn aside like some luminous
+curtain, and at last I looked into the blue gulf of immensity which the
+sunshine hides, and saw the floating hosts of the stars. The sea was
+silent, the sky was silent. I was alone with the night and silence.
+
+So I drifted for three days, eating and drinking sparingly, and
+meditating upon all that had happened to me,—not desiring very greatly
+then to see men again. One unclean rag was about me, my hair a black
+tangle: no doubt my discoverers thought me a madman.
+
+It is strange, but I felt no desire to return to mankind. I was only
+glad to be quit of the foulness of the Beast People. And on the third
+day I was picked up by a brig from Apia to San Francisco. Neither the
+captain nor the mate would believe my story, judging that solitude and
+danger had made me mad; and fearing their opinion might be that of
+others, I refrained from telling my adventure further, and professed to
+recall nothing that had happened to me between the loss of the _Lady
+Vain_ and the time when I was picked up again,—the space of a year.
+
+I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the
+suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors,
+of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake,
+haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came,
+instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange
+enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my
+stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to
+men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of
+the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a
+disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless
+fear has dwelt in my mind,—such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion
+cub may feel.
+
+My trouble took the strangest form. I could not persuade myself that
+the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals
+half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would
+presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then
+that. But I have confided my case to a strangely able man,—a man who
+had known Moreau, and seemed half to credit my story; a mental
+specialist,—and he has helped me mightily, though I do not expect that
+the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me. At most times
+it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud, a memory, and
+a faint distrust; but there are times when the little cloud spreads
+until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow-men;
+and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or
+dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere,—none that have the calm
+authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging
+up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will
+be played over again on a larger scale. I know this is an illusion;
+that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women,—men
+and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human
+desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves
+of no fantastic Law,—beings altogether different from the Beast Folk.
+Yet I shrink from them, from their curious glances, their inquiries and
+assistance, and long to be away from them and alone. For that reason I
+live near the broad free downland, and can escape thither when this
+shadow is over my soul; and very sweet is the empty downland then,
+under the wind-swept sky.
+
+When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could
+not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors
+were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with
+my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving
+men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with
+tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old
+people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all
+unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children. Then I would turn aside
+into some chapel,—and even there, such was my disturbance, it seemed
+that the preacher gibbered “Big Thinks,” even as the Ape-man had done;
+or into some library, and there the intent faces over the books seemed
+but patient creatures waiting for prey. Particularly nauseous were the
+blank, expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they
+seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I
+did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone. And even it
+seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal
+tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to
+wander alone, like a sheep stricken with gid.
+
+This is a mood, however, that comes to me now, I thank God, more
+rarely. I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and
+multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books,—bright windows
+in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men. I see few
+strangers, and have but a small household. My days I devote to reading
+and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights
+in the study of astronomy. There is—though I do not know how there is
+or why there is—a sense of infinite peace and protection in the
+glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and
+eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and
+troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find
+its solace and its hope. I _hope_, or I could not live.
+
+
+And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.
+
+EDWARD PRENDICK.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+The substance of the chapter entitled “Doctor Moreau explains,” which
+contains the essential idea of the story, appeared as a middle article
+in the _Saturday Review_ in January, 1895. This is the only portion of
+this story that has been previously published, and it has been entirely
+recast to adapt it to the narrative form.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 159 ***