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

locked enclosure on a lonely island,

a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?

 

VIII. THE CRYING OF THE PUMA.

 

MONTGOMERY interrupted my tangle of mystification and suspicion

about one o’clock, and his grotesque attendant followed him

with a tray bearing bread, some herbs and other eatables,

a flask of whiskey, a jug of water, and three glasses and knives.

I glanced askance at this strange creature, and found him watching

me with his queer, restless eyes. Montgomery said he would lunch

with me, but that Moreau was too preoccupied with some work

to come.

 

“Moreau!” said I. “I know that name.”

 

“The devil you do!” said he. “What an ass I was to mention it to you!

I might have thought. Anyhow, it will give you an inkling

of our—mysteries. Whiskey?”

 

“No, thanks; I’m an abstainer.”

 

“I wish I’d been. But it’s no use locking the door

after the steed is stolen. It was that infernal

stuff which led to my coming here,—that, and a foggy night.

I thought myself in luck at the time, when Moreau offered to get me off.

It’s queer—”

 

“Montgomery,” said I, suddenly, as the outer door closed, “why has

your man pointed ears?”

 

“Damn!” he said, over his first mouthful of food. He stared at me

for a moment, and then repeated, “Pointed ears?”

 

“Little points to them,” said I, as calmly as possible, with a catch

in my breath; “and a fine black fur at the edges?”

 

He helped himself to whiskey and water with great deliberation.

“I was under the impression—that his hair covered his ears.”

 

“I saw them as he stooped by me to put that coffee you sent to me

on the table. And his eyes shine in the dark.”

 

By this time Montgomery had recovered from the surprise of my question.

“I always thought,” he said deliberately, with a certain

accentuation of his flavouring of lisp, “that there was something

the matter with his ears, from the way he covered them.

What were they like?”

 

I was persuaded from his manner that this ignorance was a pretence.

Still, I could hardly tell the man that I thought him a liar.

“Pointed,” I said; “rather small and furry,—distinctly furry.

But the whole man is one of the strangest beings I ever set

eyes on.”

 

A sharp, hoarse cry of animal pain came from the enclosure behind us.

Its depth and volume testified to the puma. I saw Montgomery wince.

 

“Yes?” he said.

 

“Where did you pick up the creature?”

 

“San Francisco. He’s an ugly brute, I admit. Half-witted, you know.

Can’t remember where he came from. But I’m used to him, you know.

We both are. How does he strike you?”

 

“He’s unnatural,” I said. “There’s something about him—

don’t think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation,

a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It’s a touch—

of the diabolical, in fact.”

 

Montgomery had stopped eating while I told him this. “Rum!” he said.

“I can’t see it.” He resumed his meal. “I had no idea of it,”

he said, and masticated. “The crew of the schooner must have

felt it the same. Made a dead set at the poor devil. You saw

the captain?”

 

Suddenly the puma howled again, this time more painfully.

Montgomery swore under his breath. I had half a mind to attack him

about the men on the beach. Then the poor brute within gave vent

to a series of short, sharp cries.

 

“Your men on the beach,” said I; “what race are they?”

 

“Excellent fellows, aren’t they?” said he, absentmindedly,

knitting his brows as the animal yelled out sharply.

 

I said no more. There was another outcry worse than the former.

He looked at me with his dull grey eyes, and then took some

more whiskey. He tried to draw me into a discussion about alcohol,

professing to have saved my life with it. He seemed anxious

to lay stress on the fact that I owed my life to him. I answered

him distractedly.

 

Presently our meal came to an end; the misshapen monster with

the pointed ears cleared the remains away, and Montgomery left

me alone in the room again. All the time he had been in a state

of ill-concealed irritation at the noise of the vivisected puma.

He had spoken of his odd want of nerve, and left me to the

obvious application.

 

I found myself that the cries were singularly irritating,

and they grew in depth and intensity as the afternoon wore on.

They were painful at first, but their constant resurgence at last

altogether upset my balance. I flung aside a crib of Horace I

had been reading, and began to clench my fists, to bite my lips,

and to pace the room. Presently I got to stopping my ears with

my fingers.

 

The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon me steadily,

grew at last to such an exquisite expression of suffering that I

could stand it in that confined room no longer. I stepped

out of the door into the slumberous heat of the late afternoon,

and walking past the main entrance—locked again, I noticed—

turned the corner of the wall

 

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain

in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in

the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—

I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice

and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees

waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion,

blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot

of the house in the chequered wall.

 

IX. THE THING IN THE FOREST.

 

I STRODE through the undergrowth that clothed the ridge behind the house,

scarcely heeding whither I went; passed on through the shadow of a thick

cluster of straight-stemmed trees beyond it, and so presently found

myself some way on the other side of the ridge, and descending towards

a streamlet that ran through a narrow valley. I paused and listened.

The distance I had come, or the intervening masses of thicket,

deadened any sound that might be coming from the enclosure.

The air was still. Then with a rustle a rabbit emerged, and went

scampering up the slope before me. I hesitated, and sat down in the edge

of the shade.

 

The place was a pleasant one. The rivulet was hidden

by the luxuriant vegetation of the banks save at one point,

where I caught a triangular patch of its glittering water.

On the farther side I saw through a bluish haze a tangle of trees

and creepers, and above these again the luminous blue of the sky.

Here and there a splash of white or crimson marked the blooming of some

trailing epiphyte. I let my eyes wander over this scene for a while,

and then began to turn over in my mind again the strange peculiarities

of Montgomery’s man. But it was too hot to think elaborately,

and presently I fell into a tranquil state midway between dozing

and waking.

 

From this I was aroused, after I know not how long, by a

rustling amidst the greenery on the other side of the stream.

For a moment I could see nothing but the waving summits of

the ferns and reeds. Then suddenly upon the bank of the stream

appeared Something—at first I could not distinguish what it was.

It bowed its round head to the water, and began to drink.

Then I saw it was a man, going on all-fours like a beast. He was clothed

in bluish cloth, and was of a copper-coloured hue, with black hair.

It seemed that grotesque ugliness was an invariable character of

these islanders. I could hear the suck of the water at his lips as

he drank.

 

I leant forward to see him better, and a piece of lava, detached by

my hand, went pattering down the slope. He looked up guiltily,

and his eyes met mine. Forthwith he scrambled to his feet,

and stood wiping his clumsy hand across his mouth and regarding me.

His legs were scarcely half the length of his body.

So, staring one another out of countenance, we remained for perhaps

the space of a minute. Then, stopping to look back once or twice,

he slunk off among the bushes to the right of me, and I heard

the swish of the fronds grow faint in the distance and die away.

Long after he had disappeared, I remained sitting up staring

in the direction of his retreat. My drowsy tranquillity

had gone.

 

I was startled by a noise behind me, and turning suddenly saw

the flapping white tail of a rabbit vanishing up the slope.

I jumped to my feet. The apparition of this grotesque, half-bestial

creature had suddenly populated the stillness of the afternoon for me.

I looked around me rather nervously, and regretted that I was unarmed.

Then I thought that the man I had just seen had been clothed

in bluish cloth, had not been naked as a savage would have been;

and I tried to persuade myself from that fact that he was after all

probably a peaceful character, that the dull ferocity of his countenance

belied him.

 

Yet I was greatly disturbed at the apparition. I walked

to the left along the slope, turning my head about and peering

this way and that among the straight stems of the trees.

Why should a man go on all-fours and drink with his lips? Presently I

heard an animal wailing again, and taking it to be the puma, I turned

about and walked in a direction diametrically opposite to the sound.

This led me down to the stream, across which I stepped and pushed

my way up through the undergrowth beyond.

 

I was startled by a great patch of vivid scarlet on the ground,

and going up to it found it to be a peculiar fungus, branched and

corrugated like a foliaceous lichen, but deliquescing into slime

at the touch; and then in the shadow of some luxuriant ferns I

came upon an unpleasant thing,—the dead body of a rabbit covered

with shining flies, but still warm and with the head torn off.

I stopped aghast at the sight of the scattered blood.

Here at least was one visitor to the island disposed of!

There were no traces of other violence about it. It looked as though it

had been suddenly snatched up and killed; and as I stared at the little

furry body came the difficulty of how the thing had been done.

The vague dread that had been in my mind since I had seen the inhuman

face of the man at the stream grew distincter as I stood there.

I began to realise the hardihood of my expedition among these

unknown people. The thicket about me became altered to my imagination.

Every shadow became something more than a shadow,—became an ambush;

every rustle became a threat. Invisible things seemed watching me.

I resolved to go back to the enclosure on the beach. I suddenly

turned away and thrust myself violently, possibly even frantically,

through the bushes, anxious to get a clear space about me

again.

 

I stopped just in time to prevent myself emerging upon an open space.

It was a kind of glade in the forest, made by a fall; seedlings were

already starting up to struggle for the vacant space; and beyond,

the dense growth of stems and twining vines and splashes