[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 Arica 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.