THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU

by

H. G. WELLS


First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1896.

This edition scanned and proofread from Book Club Associates collection
of Wells' stories, published 1980.

Digitizer's note: The degree symbol has been transcribed here as "deg.".



INTRODUCTION


On 1 February 1887 the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict
when about the latitude 1 deg. S. and longitude 107 deg. W.

On 5 January 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 deg. 3' S. and longitude 101 deg. 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 Va in . 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. No specimen was
secured of these. 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 deg. S. and longitude 105 deg. W., 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 Davis, 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 Banya in December 1887,
a date that tallies entirely with my uncle's story.

                                                  Charles Edward Prendick



CHAPTER 1

IN THE DINGHY 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 long-boat with seven
of the crew was picked up eighteen days after by H.M. gun-boat Myrtle,
and the story of their privations has become almost as well known as
the far more terrible Medusa case. I have now, however, to add to the
published story of the Lady Vain another as horrible, and certainly
far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were
in the dinghy perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best evidence
for this assertion -- I am one of the four men.

But, in the first place, I must state that there never were four men in
the dinghy; the number was three. Constans, who was `seen by the captain
to jump into the gig' (Daily News, March 17, 1887), 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.

I say luckily for us he did not reach us, and I might also add luckily for
himself, for there were 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 mid-day -- we could
see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us because of
the pitching of the boat. The sea ran in great rollers, and we had much
ado to keep the boat's head to them. 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 all had
in mind. I remember our voices 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 gunwhale 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 skyline.
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 they should come too late by such a little to catch
me in my body.

For an endless period it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart
watching the dancing 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 is 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.



CHAPTER 2

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
one another without speaking. He had watery grey expressionless eyes.

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 again.

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 queer marks on the gunwhale.' 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 Davis -- 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 arms 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.
`May I have 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
how you came to be alone in the boat.' I thought I detected a certain
suspicion in his eyes.

`Damn that howling!'

He suddenly left the cabin, and I heard him in violent controversy
with someone 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 dullness 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 presently to the topic of natural history and his
own biological studies. He began to question me closely about Tottenhan
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 doing 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 forthwith.

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, he said,
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 for 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'm ready,' I said. He lead the way out of the cabin.



CHAPTER 3

THE STRANGE FACE


At the companion was a man 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.

The black face thus flashed upon me startled 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 bloodshot
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, still staring at him almost against my will
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 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 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. Further 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 stared side by side for a space at the water foaming under
the stern and the bubbles 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 coming from the
companion hatchway, and the deformed man with the black face clambered
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 with his fist.
The poor devil went down like a felled ox, and rolled in the dirt among
the furiously excited dogs. It was lucky for him 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 violently.
`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 bodies over the clumsy prostrate figure.
The sailors forward shouted to them as though it was admirable sport.
Montgomery gave an angry exclamation, and went striding down the deck.
I followed him.

In another second the black-faced man had scrambled up and was staggering
forward. He stumbled up against 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 sidepockets.

`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 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 an ugly temper, 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 the 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 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.



CHAPTER 4

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 too 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 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 fore-castle,
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. The dogs seemed to be asleep.
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 that
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 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 to 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 a 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 faint 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.



CHAPTER 5

THE LANDING ON THE ISLAND


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 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 white-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?' said I.

`That way, Mister Blasted Shut Up -- that's what I mean. Overboard,
Mister Shut Up -- and sharp. We're clearing the ship out, cleaning the
whole blessed ship out. And overboard you go.

I stared at him dumbfounded. Then it occurred to me 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 ain't for beasts and cannibals,
and worse than beasts, any more. Overboard you go... Mister Shut Up.
If they can't have you, you goes adrift. 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 assortment of
goods was 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 transfering 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 seaman
helping him, ran me aft towards the stern. The dinghy 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 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 dinghy, stunned,
and staring blankly at the vacant oily sea. Then I realised I was in
that little hell of mine again, now half-swamped. Looking back over the
gunwhale 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 gunwhale. I prayed aloud to God that he would let me die.



CHAPTER 6

THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN


But the islanders, seeing 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 as she drew near I could
make out 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, 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 dinghy was
near 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 dinghy
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 staghounds 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 that 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 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 horse-hair, 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
the other 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 of the inevitable
palm-trees. 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 a 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 stone
enclosure that 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 with singular awkward
gestures and 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 long-boat.

I heard the bows ground in the sand, staved the dinghy 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 with 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 gutteral 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 handss 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 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 not 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 research in biology under Huxley. He raised his eye-brows
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 twelvemonth 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 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.



CHAPTER 7

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 about me. 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 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
grey-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 Bluebeard'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 acknowledgement 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 grey-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 grey-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,
which 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 and white-swathed 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 peculiar furtive manner,
quite unlike the frank stare of your unsophisticated savage. I wondered
what language they spoke. 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 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 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, that to read 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 he deserved to be, but I still think 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 have once fallen
under the overmastering spell of research. He was unmarried, and had
indeed nothing but his own interests 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 operating-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 each other through my mind.

What could it mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious
vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?...



CHAPTER 8

THE CRYING OF THE PUMA


Montgomery interrupted my tangle of mystification and suspicion about
one, and his grotesque attendant followed him with a tray bearing bread,
some herbs, and other eatables, a flask of whisky, 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 pre-occupied 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. Whisky?'

`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 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 brown fur at the edges.'

He helped himself to whisky 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 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 the creature up?'

`Er -- 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 screams.

`Your men on the beach,' said I; `what race are they?'

`Excellent fellows, aren't they?' said he absent-mindedly, knitting his
brows as the animal yelled. 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 whisky. 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 away, and Montgomery left me alone in the
room again. All the time he was in a state of ill-concealed irritation
at the noise of the vivisected puma. He spoke 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 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 enclosure --
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 stone wall.



CHAPTER 9

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 sllope
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 further 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 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.
Every now and then he regarded me with a steadfast stare. 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
the 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 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
its 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 middles, 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. Never before had I seen 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 time 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, rising
and stamping their feet and waving their arms; a kind of tune crept
into their rhythmic recitation, and a refrain -- `Allola' or `Baloola'
it sounded like. Their eyes began to sparkle and their ugly faces to
brighten with an expression of strange pleasure. Saliva dropped from
their lipless mouths.

Suddenly, as I watched their grotesque and unaccountable gesture,
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 realisation, and then the most horrible
questionings came rushing into my mind. They began leaping into 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 leaf rustled,
I pushed back into the bushes. It was long before I grew bolder and
dared to move freely.

My one 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 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 animal? 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 yards 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 to face the
danger, 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, perplexed by all these things, and presently found
myself in a level 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 formless blackness. Presently the trees grew thinner,
and the shrubby undergrowth more abundant. Then there was a desolate
space covered with white sand, and then another expanse of tangled bushes.

I was 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 went on again there
was an echo to my footsteps.

I moved away from the thickets, keeping to the more open ground, and
endeavouring by sudden turns now and then to surprise this thing, if it
existed, 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 skyline
and vanished again. I felt assured now that my tawny-faced antagonist
was stalking me again. And coupled with that was another unpleasant
realisation, that I had lost my way.

For a time I hurried on hopelessly perplexed, 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 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 to a run, and immediately
there was a stumble in my rear.

I turned suddenly and started at the uncertain trees behind me. One black
shadow seemed to leap into another. I listened rigid, and heard nothing
but the whisper 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 any 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, 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 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 his 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 ripping 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.
It seemed to me a voice was calling me.



CHAPTER 10

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 the darkness at the side
of that orange oblong, the voice of Montgomery shouting `Prendick.'

I continued running. Presently I heard him again. I replied by a feeble
`Hello!' 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 about you until about half an hour ago.

He led me into the room and sat me down in the deck chair. For a while
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!'

For 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 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 been
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 tonight,' he said, `you'll be off your head tomorrow.

I stood up in front of him. `What was that thing that came after me?'
I asked.

He looked at 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 that passed as quickly as it came.
I flung myself into the chair and pressed my hands on my forehead.
The puma began again.

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 turned 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
overnight. The morning breeze blew very pleasantly through the unglazed
window, and that and the food contributed to the sense of animal comfort
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 returned to me came a cry from within. But this time
it was not the cry of the 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 ear 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!

And as I realised this I rose, and in three steps had cross 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 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 the vivisection of men
be possible? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky.
And suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid
realisation of my danger.



CHAPTER 11

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 works
in 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 was 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,
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 north-eastward, 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 turned eastward along a
rocky valley, fringed on either side with jungle. I ran 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 cane brake.

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 where I was until I began to think of food and drink.
And at that moment 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 penknives. I emerged, bleeding and with torn clothes,
upon the lip of a long creek opening northward. I went straight into
the waves without a minute's hesitation, wading up to the creek, and
presently finding myself knee-deep 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
-- it 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 terrified or very miserable. For 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 that 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 -- eh!'

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 quick 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 eyes 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 yet how
far they were from the human heritage I ascribed to them.

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. After another
question or two, he suddenly left my side and sprang 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, as cross-purposes
with my question. Some few were appropriate, others quite parrot-like.

I was so intent upon these peculiarities that I scarcely noted 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 went a drifting smoke, pungent in whiffs to nose and eyes. 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
one another. 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 odour 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 a narrow channel into
the central gloom.



CHAPTER 12

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
its knotted flow 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 -- had
half a mind to bolt the way I had come -- and then, determined to go
through with the adventure, gripped my nailed stick about the middle,
and crawled into the little evil-smelling lean-to after my conductor.

It was a semicircular 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 and 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 my tense 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 live man, like me.'

`Shut up,' said the voice from the dark, and grunted. I gnawed my
cocoa-nut amid an impressive silence. 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 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 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, and beat their hands upon their knees,
and I followed their example. I could have imagined I was already dead
and in another world. The dark hut, these grotesque dim figures, just
flicked 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 Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?'

`Not to claw 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 brute men was upon me, but deep down
within me 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 overarchings
to mark the eyes and mouth.

`He has little nails,' said this grisly creature in his hairy beard.
`It is well. Many are troubled with big nails.'

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 each other.

`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 great 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 nor Fish;
that is the Law. Are we not Men?"'

`None escape, said a dappled brute standing in the doorway.

`For every one the want that 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 someone, 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 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 passages 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 half a 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 toward
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 foward into another. I felt his hands fly
round, clutching at me and missing me. The little pink sloth creature
dashed at me and I cut it over, gashed down its ugly face with the nail in
my stick, and in another minute I 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.

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
this I pushed into a dark thick undergrowth that was black and succulent
under foot. That gap was altogether fortunate for me, for the narrow way
slanting obliquely upward must have impeded the nearer pursuers. As I
plunged into the reeds the foremost had only just emerged from the gap.
I broke my way through the undergrowth for some minutes. The air behind
me and above 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 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 knee-deep, 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 cane-brake again.

Then suddenly it turned parallel with the edge of a steep walled gap
which came without warning like the haha of an English park -- turned
with 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 that 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 driving
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 facts. I saw my death before me.

But I was hot and panting. 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. My blood was too warm.

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 for me lay in the Beast People.



CHAPTER 13

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 streamy 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 aa 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 a chance of getting a
price for my life.

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 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 inter-tidal 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. Further up the beach stared the Beast Men.

`What am I doing? -- I am going to drown myself,' said I.

Montgomery and Moreau looked at one another. `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. Further 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 Man, `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 then, to be trying to understand me, to remember 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 burthen of
what I put into the heads of the Beast People to my own ultimate undoing.
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, cook.
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. 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. Why should we want
to shoot you when you have just offered to drown yourself?'

`Why did you set... your people on to 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 then 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 rounded 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 panic.'

And with a touch of contempt that 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 neverr before saw an
animal trying to think.



CHAPTER 14

DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS


`And now, Prendick, I will explain,' said Doctor Moreau, so soon as we
had eaten and drunk. `I must confess you are the most dictatorial guest I
ever entertained. I warn you that this is the last I 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 vivisected human being, as you called it, is after all
only the puma?' said Moreau. He had made me visit the 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 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 a 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 cockspur
-- possibly you have heard of that -- flourished on the bbull'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, 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's not simply the outward form of an animal
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 beggars
cripples and 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 began 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 possibilities
of vivisection do 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 replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon
or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we
call moral education 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 said, 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.

But 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 in
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?'

He drew a little penknife, as he spoke, 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 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; it 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.
All living flesh is not painful, nor is all nerve, nor 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; the lower animals -- it's possible that such
animals as the starfish and crayfish do not feel pain. 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 a I fancy 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 and hell. Pleasure and
pain -- Bah! What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in
the dark? This store 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, 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 research going. I asked a question, devised
some method of getting 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 only 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.
The study of Nature makes a man at least 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. Some disagreeable things happened 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 done 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 the room 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 seemed the beast's
habits were not all that is desirable.

`I rested from work for some days, 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 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 here 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.... 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 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, and it travelled in a rolling way like a
porpoise swimming. It lurked in the woods for some days, doing mischief
to all it came across, 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 claws -- painful things
that I dare not shape too freely. But it is in the subtle grafting
and re-shaping one must needs do to the brain that my trouble lies.
The intelligence is often oddly low, with unaccountable black 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 suddenly and inundate the whole being
of the creature with anger, hate, or fear. These creatures of mine seemed
strange and uncanny to you as soon as you began to observe them, but to
me, just after I make them, they seem to be indisputable 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 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?
Man has 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 these 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 that 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 from 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 left me. The black window stared at me like an eye.
At last with an effort I put out the lamp and got into the hammock.
Very soon I was asleep.



CHAPTER 15

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 that 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 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 certain things were impossible, and 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 mminds with the
deep-seated, ever rebellious cravings of their animal natures. This Law
they were perpetually repeating, I found, and -- perpetually 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; a spirit of adventure sprang up in them at the dusk, 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 multi-farious 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.
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. There was no evidence of the inheritance of
the acquired human characteristics. When they lived, Moreau took them
and stamped the human form upon them. The females were less numerous
than the males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the
monogamy the Law enjoined.

It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail --
my eye has had no training in details -- and unhappily I cannot sketch.
Most striking perhaps in their general appearance was the disproportion
between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies;
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 the inward sinuous curve of the back that 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
mirthless grin. 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 humanity, 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 hyaena 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 Horse-Rhinoceros creature,
and several other females whose sources I did not ascertain. There were
several Wolf creatures, a Bear-Bull, and a Saint Bernard Dog 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.

At first I had a shivering horror of the brutes, felt all too keenly that
they were still brutes, but insensibly I became a little habituated to
the idea of them, and, moreover, I was affected by Montgomery's attitude
towards them. He had been with them so long that he had come to regard
them as almost normal human beings -- his London days seemed a glorious
impossible past to him. Only once in a year or so did he go to Africa to
deal with Moreau's agent, a trader in animals there. He hardly met the
finest type of mankind in that seafaring village of Spanish mongrels.
The men aboard ship, he told me, seemed at first just as strange to him
as the Beast Men seemed to me, -- unnaturally long in the leg, flat in the
face, prominent in the forehead, suspicious, dangerous, and cold-hearted.
In fact, he did not like men. His heart had warmed to me, he thought,
because he had saved my life.

I fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these
metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways, but
that he attempted to veil from me at first.

M'ling, the black-faced man, his 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 the 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
whisky, kicking it, beating it, pelting it with stones or lighted fuses.
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
that 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 bovine creatures who worked the
launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself 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 hunchbacked 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 they 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 by, 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 decencies
and decorum of external costume.



CHAPTER 16

HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTED BLOOD


But 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
windblown 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 sweeping 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 nor 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 came out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.'

He gave a 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 asked. `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 stunned him. He ought to have
a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.'

`But then we have to prove 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 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 I was infected 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 of 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's a pretty sight.'
Moreau said not a word on the way, but 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 cane brakes 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; and 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 cane brake in one
direction and 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 cane brake, stooping near the ground, and trying to join
the dust-throwing circle behind Moreau's back, came the Leopard Man.
And I saw that his forehead was bruised. 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, and 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 Hyaena-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 three-score 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. Everyone 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 Hyaena-Swine blazing with
excitement, his attitude as if he were half-resolved to attack me.
The Satyr, too, glared at me over the Hyaena-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 Hyaena-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 dense thicket that 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 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 half-way 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 Hyaena-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 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 Hyaena-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.

And 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 animmal 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 his
terror-struck eyes and fired.

As I did the Hyaena-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 the under fronds of the big ferns.

In another moment he had beaten off the Hyaena-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 sniffling 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 instructions 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,
sniffling 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 Hyaena-Swine, and several other of the Beast People,
standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all 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 Hyaena-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 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
be 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
began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of
Moreau -- and for what? It was the wantonness 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 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; 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 of 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 the morbid state, deep and enduring, alien
to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess 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.



CHAPTER 17

A CATASTROPHE


Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike
and abhorrence for these infamous experiments 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, that 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 something happened. I do not know what it was exactly to this day.
I heard a 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 flung 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, leaped 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 the weapon, felt my arm painfully,
and let 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.
It's just possible you may need it.'

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. I took the revolver in hand and went to the doorway.

The morning was as still as death. Not a whisper of wind stirred,
the sea was like polished glass, the sky empty, the beach desolate.
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 has 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... Mor-eau!' 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 ominous brown stains.

`He has come?' he said.

`Moreau?' said I. `No.'

`My God!' The man was panting, almost sobbing for breath. `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?'

He 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
blankly in front of him, 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 further in an undecided way,
determined to visits 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 undersized 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 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.



CHAPTER 18

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, 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 hot tropical afternoon is a
singularly vivid impression. M'ling went first, his shoulders 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 Men. 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.

We took 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 them were the two dappled brutes, and that grey,
horrible, 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 awe-stricken and puzzled. `Where is he?' said Montgomery.

`Beyond,' and the grey creature pointed.

`Is there a Law now?' asked the Ape 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 him 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 me.

`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 north-west. Then came a
yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus
rushed by us shrieking. Immediately after appeared a feral 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 further found at last what we sought.
He lay face downwards in a trampled space in a cane brake. 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 him 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.



CHAPTER 19

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
paraffin 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 every 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 pig,
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 good 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, ye brutes! Drink, and be men. Dammy,
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 insult at me, or giving whatever other vent this
new inspiration of brandy demanded.

Presently I heard Montgomery's remote 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 vent. 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 paraffin 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 -- 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 plans in
my mind.

In the morning I would gather some provisions in the dinghy, 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 flicker, 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 on 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 the 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.
Presently the daylight crept upon me.

The chanting died down, gave place to a clamour, then 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 someone 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
growing pale and opaque in the luminous blue of the day. The sky to the
eastward was rimmed with red.

Then 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. He 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.



CHAPTER 20

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 bloodstained 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 his audience.

`They broke the Law,' said I, putting my feet 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, 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 thencefrom 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 Hyaena-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 seen treacherous, but so I was resolved.I was far more afraid
ofhim than any other two ofthe Beast Folk. His continued life was,
I knew, a threat against mine.

I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself. Then I cried, `Salute!
Bow down!'

His teeth flashed me a snarl. `Who are you, that I should....'

Perhaps a little too spasmodically, I drew my revolver, aimed, and quickly
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 bloodstains 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 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 I ought to cross the island and establish
myself with the Beast People, making myself secure in their confidence.
And 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 on the sea and my face against any surprise. And there I sat,
chin on knees, the sun beating down upon my head and a growing 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 impossible 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 Hyaena-Swine.
I felt assured 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 Hyaena-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 an opposite
direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the island,
and so approach the ravine of the hut, 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 against so many, 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 fruit, and then, after
I had propped some specked and half-decayed 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 let myself fall into a light slumber, trusting that the flimsy
barricade I had erected would cause sufficient noise in its removal to
save me from surprise.



CHAPTER 21

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. Further were the thick trees, a
bank of black 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 Hyaena-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 above 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, and 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 Hyaena-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, of course, and could show some teethmarks still,
but they soon gained a wholesome respect for my trick of throwing stones
and the bite of my hatchet. And my St Bernard Dog 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 aa pre-eminence
among them. One or two whom in various disputes 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 Hyaena-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 unawares,
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 allies 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 everyday 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 Hyaena-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 Ape 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
other 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, 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 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 St Bernard Brute followed me to the
enclosure, 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 that 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 appeared 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 forefeet,
a pitiful attempt to walk erect.

I, too, must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as
yellow rags, through whose rents glowed 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 suchlike 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 thunderstorms and heavy
rain that greatly retarded my work, but at last the raft was completed.
I was delighted with it. But with a certain lack of practical sense that
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 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.

But I did not 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 Monsters. 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 he 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 St
Bernard creature lay on the ground dead, and near his body crouched the
Hyaena-Swine, gripping the quivering flesh with 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 further,
stopped, 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 bodies on a pyre of brushwood. Now, indeed, I saw clearly
that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time.
The Beasts by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the
ravine, and made themselves lairs according to their tastes among the
thickets of the island. Few prowled by day; most of them slept, and the
island might have seemed deserted to a newcomer; 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 Sl”jd -- 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, that 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.
The boat 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 it was nearer,
and I saw it was the dirty lug-sail of a small boat. 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 and the other at the rudder.
But the boat sailed strangely. 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 one another. 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 it, 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.

But I lay 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 Monsters.



CHAPTER 22

THE MAN ALONE


In the evening I started and drove out to sea before a gentle wind from
the south-west, slowly and 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 that blue gulf of immensity that 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 happened to me, nor desiring very greatly 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 Monsters. 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 adventures 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 cane brake, 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, still passably human, 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, that sent
it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid.

But this is a mood 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


[End]

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