The Island of Doctor Moreau - H. G. Wells (little readers txt) 📗

found, and ever breaking. Both Montgomery and Moreau displayed

particular solicitude to keep them ignorant of the taste of blood;

they feared the inevitable suggestions of that flavour.

Montgomery told me that the Law, especially among the feline Beast People,

became oddly weakened about nightfall; that then the animal was at

its strongest; that a spirit of adventure sprang up in them at the dusk,

when they would dare things they never seemed to dream about by day.

To that I owed my stalking by the Leopard-man, on the night of my arrival.

But during these earlier days of my stay they broke the Law only

furtively and after dark; in the daylight there was a general

atmosphere of respect for its multifarious prohibitions.

 

And here perhaps I may give a few general facts about the island

and the Beast People. The island, which was of irregular outline

and lay low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose,

of seven or eight square miles.<2> It was volcanic in origin,

and was now fringed on three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles

to the northward, and a hot spring, were the only vestiges of

the forces that had long since originated it. Now and then a faint

quiver of earthquake would be sensible, and sometimes the ascent

of the spire of smoke would be rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam;

but that was all. The population of the island, Montgomery informed me,

now numbered rather more than sixty of these strange creations

of Moreau’s art, not counting the smaller monstrosities

which lived in the undergrowth and were without human form.

Altogether he had made nearly a hundred and twenty; but many had died,

and others—like the writhing Footless Thing of which he had told me—

had come by violent ends. In answer to my question, Montgomery said

that they actually bore offspring, but that these generally died.

When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human form upon them.

There was no evidence of the inheritance of their acquired

human characteristics. The females were less numerous than the males,

and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy the

Law enjoined.

 

<2> This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle.

— C. E. P.

 

It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail;

my eye has had no training in details, and unhappily I cannot sketch.

Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the

disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length

of their bodies; and yet—so relative is our idea of grace—

my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell

in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.

Another point was the forward carriage of the head and the clumsy

and inhuman curvature of the spine. Even the Ape-man lacked

that inward sinuous curve of the back which makes the human

figure so graceful. Most had their shoulders hunched clumsily,

and their short forearms hung weakly at their sides. Few of them

were conspicuously hairy, at least until the end of my time upon

the island.

 

The next most obvious deformity was in their faces,

almost all of which were prognathous, malformed about the ears,

with large and protuberant noses, very furry or very bristly hair,

and often strangely-coloured or strangely-placed eyes.

None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a chattering titter.

Beyond these general characters their heads had little in common;

each preserved the quality of its particular species:

the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, the ox,

or the sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature

had been moulded. The voices, too, varied exceedingly.

The hands were always malformed; and though some surprised me by their

unexpected human appearance, almost all were deficient in the number

of the digits, clumsy about the finger-nails, and lacking any

tactile sensibility.

 

The two most formidable Animal Men were my Leopard-man and a creature

made of hyena and swine. Larger than these were the three bull-creatures

who pulled in the boat. Then came the silvery-hairy-man, who was also

the Sayer of the Law, M’ling, and a satyr-like creature of ape and goat.

There were three Swine-men and a Swine-woman, a mare-rhinoceros-creature,

and several other females whose sources I did not ascertain.

There were several wolf-creatures, a bear-bull, and a Saint-Bernard-man. I

have already described the Ape-man, and there was a particularly hateful

(and evil-smelling) old woman made of vixen and bear, whom I hated

from the beginning. She was said to be a passionate votary of the Law.

Smaller creatures were certain dappled youths and my little

sloth-creature. But enough of this catalogue.

 

At first I had a shivering horror of the brutes, felt all too keenly

that they were still brutes; but insensibly I became a little

habituated to the idea of them, and moreover I was affected by

Montgomery’s attitude towards them. He had been with them so long

that he had come to regard them as almost normal human beings.

His London days seemed a glorious, impossible past to him.

Only once in a year or so did he go to Arica to deal with

Moreau’s agent, a trader in animals there. He hardly met the finest

type of mankind in that seafaring village of Spanish mongrels.

The men aboard-ship, he told me, seemed at first just as strange

to him as the Beast Men seemed to me,—unnaturally long in the leg,

flat in the face, prominent in the forehead, suspicious, dangerous,

and cold-hearted. In fact, he did not like men: his heart

had warmed to me, he thought, because he had saved my life.

I fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these

metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways,

but that he attempted to veil it from me at first.

 

M’ling, the black-faced man, Montgomery’s attendant, the first of

the Beast Folk I had encountered, did not live with the others across

the island, but in a small kennel at the back of the enclosure.

The creature was scarcely so intelligent as the Ape-man, but far

more docile, and the most human-looking of all the Beast Folk;

and Montgomery had trained it to prepare food, and indeed to

discharge all the trivial domestic offices that were required.

It was a complex trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill,—a bear, tainted with

dog and ox, and one of the most elaborately made of all his creatures.

It treated Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion.

Sometimes he would notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular

names, and so make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he

would ill-treat it, especially after he had been at the whiskey,

kicking it, beating it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees.

But whether he treated it well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be

near him.

 

I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand

things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became

natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence

takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.

Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual

to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined.

I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch

treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking,

trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human

yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet

the Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its

speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some

city byway.

 

Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond

doubt or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunch-backed human savage

to all appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens,

would stretch his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness

scissor-edged incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant

as knives. Or in some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory

daring into the eyes of some lithe, white-swathed female figure,

I would suddenly see (with a spasmodic revulsion) that she had

slit-like pupils, or glancing down note the curving nail with which she

held her shapeless wrap about her. It is a curious thing, by the bye,

for which I am quite unable to account, that these weird creatures—

the females, I mean—had in the earlier days of my stay an

instinctive sense of their own repulsive clumsiness, and displayed

in consequence a more than human regard for the decency and decorum

of extensive costume.

 

XVI. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.

 

MY inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread

of my story.

 

After I had breakfasted with Montgomery, he took me across

the island to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring

into whose scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day.

Both of us carried whips and loaded revolvers. While going through

a leafy jungle on our road thither, we heard a rabbit squealing.

We stopped and listened, but we heard no more; and presently we

went on our way, and the incident dropped out of our minds.

Montgomery called my attention to certain little pink animals

with long hind-legs, that went leaping through the undergrowth.

He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of the Beast People,

that Moreau had invented. He had fancied they might serve for meat,

but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had defeated

this intention. I had already encountered some of these creatures,—

once during my moonlight flight from the Leopard-man,

and once during my pursuit by Moreau on the previous day.

By chance, one hopping to avoid us leapt into the hole caused

by the uprooting of a wind-blown tree; before it could extricate

itself we managed to catch it. It spat like a cat, scratched and

kicked vigorously with its hind-legs, and made an attempt to bite;

but its teeth were too feeble to inflict more than a painless pinch.

It seemed to me rather a pretty little creature; and as Montgomery stated

that it never destroyed the turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly

in its habits, I should imagine it might prove a convenient substitute

for the common rabbit in gentlemen’s parks.

 

We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips

and splintered deeply. Montgomery called my attention to this.

“Not to claw bark of trees, that is the Law,” he said.

“Much some of them care for it!” It was after this, I think, that we

met the Satyr and the Ape-man. The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory

on the part of Moreau,—his face ovine in expression, like the coarser

Hebrew type; his voice a harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic.

He was gnawing the husk of a pod-like fruit as he passed us.

Both of them saluted Montgomery.

 

“Hail,” said they, “to the Other with the Whip!”

 

“There’s a Third with a Whip now,” said Montgomery. “So you’d

better mind!”

 

“Was he not made?” said the Ape-man. “He said—he said he was made.”

 

The Satyr-man looked curiously at me. “The Third with the Whip,

he that walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.”

 

“He has a thin long whip,” said Montgomery.

 

“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr. “You never bleed nor weep.

The Master does not bleed or weep.”

 

“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep

if you don’t look out!”

 

“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.

 

“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went

on with him.

 

The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching