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

the Wolf-women in great leaping strides.

The Swine folk followed, squealing with excitement, and the two

Bull-men in their swathings of white. Then came Moreau in a

cluster of the Beast People, his wide-brimmed straw hat blown off,

his revolver in hand, and his lank white hair streaming out.

The Hyena-swine ran beside me, keeping pace with me and glancing furtively

at me out of his feline eyes, and the others came pattering and shouting

behind us.

 

The Leopard-man went bursting his way through the long canes,

which sprang back as he passed, and rattled in M’ling’s face.

We others in the rear found a trampled path for us when we reached

the brake. The chase lay through the brake for perhaps a quarter

of a mile, and then plunged into a dense thicket, which retarded our

movements exceedingly, though we went through it in a crowd together,—

fronds flicking into our faces, ropy creepers catching us under the chin

or gripping our ankles, thorny plants hooking into and tearing cloth

and flesh together.

 

“He has gone on all-fours through this,” panted Moreau, now just

ahead of me.

 

“None escape,” said the Wolf-bear, laughing into my face with

the exultation of hunting. We burst out again among rocks,

and saw the quarry ahead running lightly on all-fours and snarling

at us over his shoulder. At that the Wolf Folk howled with delight.

The Thing was still clothed, and at a distance its face still seemed human;

but the carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive

droop of its shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal.

It leapt over some thorny yellow-flowering bushes, and was hidden.

M’ling was halfway across the space.

 

Most of us now had lost the first speed of the chase, and had fallen

into a longer and steadier stride. I saw as we traversed the open

that the pursuit was now spreading from a column into a line.

The Hyena-swine still ran close to me, watching me as it ran,

every now and then puckering its muzzle with a snarling laugh.

At the edge of the rocks the Leopard-man, realising that he was

making for the projecting cape upon which he had stalked me

on the night of my arrival, had doubled in the undergrowth;

but Montgomery had seen the manoeuvre, and turned him again.

So, panting, tumbling against rocks, torn by brambles, impeded by

ferns and reeds, I helped to pursue the Leopard-man who had broken

the Law, and the Hyena-swine ran, laughing savagely, by my side.

I staggered on, my head reeling and my heart beating against my ribs,

tired almost to death, and yet not daring to lose sight of the chase

lest I should be left alone with this horrible companion.

I staggered on in spite of infinite fatigue and the dense heat of the

tropical afternoon.

 

At last the fury of the hunt slackened. We had pinned the wretched

brute into a corner of the island. Moreau, whip in hand, marshalled us

all into an irregular line, and we advanced now slowly, shouting to one

another as we advanced and tightening the cordon about our victim.

He lurked noiseless and invisible in the bushes through which I

had run from him during that midnight pursuit.

 

“Steady!” cried Moreau, “steady!” as the ends of the line crept

round the tangle of undergrowth and hemmed the brute in.

 

“Ware a rush!” came the voice of Montgomery from beyond the thicket.

 

I was on the slope above the bushes; Montgomery and Moreau beat

along the beach beneath. Slowly we pushed in among the fretted

network of branches and leaves. The quarry was silent.

 

“Back to the House of Pain, the House of Pain, the House of Pain!”

yelped the voice of the Ape-man, some twenty yards to the right.

 

When I heard that, I forgave the poor wretch all the fear he had

inspired in me. I heard the twigs snap and the boughs swish aside

before the heavy tread of the Horse-rhinoceros upon my right.

Then suddenly through a polygon of green, in the half darkness

under the luxuriant growth, I saw the creature we were hunting.

I halted. He was crouched together into the smallest possible compass,

his luminous green eyes turned over his shoulder regarding me.

 

It may seem a strange contradiction in me,—I cannot explain the fact,—

but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude,

with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human face

distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity.

In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it

would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more

the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out

my revolver, aimed between its terror-struck eyes, and fired.

As I did so, the Hyena-swine saw the Thing, and flung itself upon

it with an eager cry, thrusting thirsty teeth into its neck.

All about me the green masses of the thicket were swaying and cracking

as the Beast People came rushing together. One face and then

another appeared.

 

“Don’t kill it, Prendick!” cried Moreau. “Don’t kill it!”

and I saw him stooping as he pushed through under the fronds

of the big ferns.

 

In another moment he had beaten off the Hyena-swine with the handle of

his whip, and he and Montgomery were keeping away the excited carnivorous

Beast People, and particularly M’ling, from the still quivering body.

The hairy-grey Thing came sniffing at the corpse under my arm.

The other animals, in their animal ardour, jostled me to get a

nearer view.

 

“Confound you, Prendick!” said Moreau. “I wanted him.”

 

“I’m sorry,” said I, though I was not. “It was the impulse

of the moment.” I felt sick with exertion and excitement.

Turning, I pushed my way out of the crowding Beast People and went

on alone up the slope towards the higher part of the headland.

Under the shouted directions of Moreau I heard the three white-swathed

Bull-men begin dragging the victim down towards the water.

 

It was easy now for me to be alone. The Beast People manifested a quite

human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot,

sniffing and growling at it as the Bull-men dragged it down the beach.

I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against

the evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea;

and like a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable

aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among

the rocks beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several

other of the Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau.

They were all still intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy

expressions of their loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute

assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-swine was implicated

in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me, that,

save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms,

I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature,

the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.

The Leopard-man had happened to go under: that was all the difference.

Poor brute!

 

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty.

I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came

to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands.

I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure.

But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had

been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings,

and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles

of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they

could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony,

was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau—and for what?

It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.

 

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at

least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that.

I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate.

But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity,

his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were

thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer,

and at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves;

the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held

them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their

natural animosities.

 

In those days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal

fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring,

and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island.

A blind Fate, a vast pitiless Mechanism, seemed to cut and

shape the fabric of existence and I, Moreau (by his passion

for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast

People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn

and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity

of its incessant wheels. But this condition did not come all at once:

I think indeed that I anticipate a little in speaking of

it now.

 

XVII. A CATASTROPHE.

 

SCARCELY six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but

dislike and abhorrence for this infamous experiment of Moreau’s.

My one idea was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my

Maker’s image, back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men.

My fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume

idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory. My first friendship with

Montgomery did not increase. His long separation from humanity,

his secret vice of drunkenness, his evident sympathy with the Beast People,

tainted him to me. Several times I let him go alone among them.

I avoided intercourse with them in every possible way.

I spent an increasing proportion of my time upon the beach,

looking for some liberating sail that never appeared,—until one day

there fell upon us an appalling disaster, which put an altogether

different aspect upon my strange surroundings.

 

It was about seven or eight weeks after my landing,—rather more,

I think, though I had not troubled to keep account of the time,—

when this catastrophe occurred. It happened in the early morning—

I should think about six. I had risen and breakfasted early,

having been aroused by the noise of three Beast Men carrying wood into

the enclosure.

 

After breakfast I went to the open gateway of the enclosure,

and stood there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the freshness

of the early morning. Moreau presently came round the corner

of the enclosure and greeted me. He passed by me, and I heard him

behind me unlock and enter his laboratory. So indurated was I

at that time to the abomination of the place, that I heard without

a touch of emotion the puma victim begin another day of torture.

It met its persecutor with a shriek, almost exactly like that of an

angry virago.

 

Then suddenly something happened,—I do not know what,

to this day. I heard a short, sharp cry behind me, a fall,

and turning saw an awful face rushing upon me,—not human,

not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed with red branching scars,

red drops starting out upon it, and the lidless eyes ablaze.

I threw up my arm to defend myself from the blow that flung

me headlong with a broken forearm; and the great