The island of Doctor Moreau
“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you
don’t look out!”
“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.
“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went on
with him.
The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching us and making other remarks to
each other.
“He says nothing,” said the Satyr. “Men have voices.”
“Yesterday he asked me of things to eat,” said the Ape-man. “He did not
know.”
Then they spoke inaudible things, and I heard the Satyr laughing.
It was on our way back that we came upon the dead rabbit. The red body
of the wretched little beast was rent to pieces, many of the ribs
stripped white, and the backbone indisputably gnawed.
At that Montgomery stopped. “Good God!” said he, stooping down, and
picking up some of the crushed vertebrae to examine them more closely.
“Good God!” he repeated, “what can this mean?”
“Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” I said after a
pause. “This backbone has been bitten through.”
He stood staring, with his face white and his lip pulled askew. “I
don’t like this,” he said slowly.
“I saw something of the same kind,” said I, “the first day I came
here.”
“The devil you did! What was it?”
“A rabbit with its head twisted off.”
“The day you came here?”
“The day I came here. In the undergrowth at the back of the enclosure,
when I went out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.”
He gave a long, low whistle.
“And what is more, I have an idea which of your brutes did the thing.
It’s only a suspicion, you know. Before I came on the rabbit I saw one
of your monsters drinking in the stream.”
“Sucking his drink?”
“Yes.”
“‘Not to suck your drink; that is the Law.’ Much the brutes care for
the Law, eh? when Moreau’s not about!”
“It was the brute who chased me.”
“Of course,” said Montgomery; “it’s just the way with carnivores. After
a kill, they drink. It’s the taste of blood, you know.—What was the
brute like?” he continued. “Would you know him again?” He glanced about
us, standing astride over the mess of dead rabbit, his eyes roving
among the shadows and screens of greenery, the lurking-places and
ambuscades of the forest that bounded us in. “The taste of blood,” he
said again.
He took out his revolver, examined the cartridges in it and replaced
it. Then he began to pull at his dropping lip.
“I think I should know the brute again,” I said. “I stunned him. He
ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.”
“But then we have to _prove_ that he killed the rabbit,” said
Montgomery. “I wish I’d never brought the things here.”
I should have gone on, but he stayed there thinking over the mangled
rabbit in a puzzle-headed way. As it was, I went to such a distance
that the rabbit’s remains were hidden.
“Come on!” I said.
Presently he woke up and came towards me. “You see,” he said, almost in
a whisper, “they are all supposed to have a fixed idea against eating
anything that runs on land. If some brute has by any accident tasted
blood—”
We went on some way in silence. “I wonder what can have happened,” he
said to himself. Then, after a pause again: “I did a foolish thing the
other day. That servant of mine—I showed him how to skin and cook a
rabbit. It’s odd—I saw him licking his hands—It never occurred to me.”
Then: “We must put a stop to this. I must tell Moreau.”
He could think of nothing else on our homeward journey.
Moreau took the matter even more seriously than Montgomery, and I need
scarcely say that I was affected by their evident consternation.
“We must make an example,” said Moreau. “I’ve no doubt in my own mind
that the Leopard-man was the sinner. But how can we prove it? I wish,
Montgomery, you had kept your taste for meat in hand, and gone without
these exciting novelties. We may find ourselves in a mess yet, through
it.”
“I was a silly ass,” said Montgomery. “But the thing’s done now; and
you said I might have them, you know.”
“We must see to the thing at once,” said Moreau. “I suppose if anything
should turn up, M’ling can take care of himself?”
“I’m not so sure of M’ling,” said Montgomery. “I think I ought to know
him.”
In the afternoon, Moreau, Montgomery, myself, and M’ling went across
the island to the huts in the ravine. We three were armed; M’ling
carried the little hatchet he used in chopping firewood, and some coils
of wire. Moreau had a huge cowherd’s horn slung over his shoulder.
“You will see a gathering of the Beast People,” said Montgomery. “It is
a pretty sight!”
Moreau said not a word on the way, but the expression of his heavy,
white-fringed face was grimly set.
We crossed the ravine down which smoked the stream of hot water, and
followed the winding pathway through the canebrakes until we reached a
wide area covered over with a thick, powdery yellow substance which I
believe was sulphur. Above the shoulder of a weedy bank the sea
glittered. We came to a kind of shallow natural amphitheatre, and here
the four of us halted. Then Moreau sounded the horn, and broke the
sleeping stillness of the tropical afternoon. He must have had strong
lungs. The hooting note rose and rose amidst its echoes, to at last an
ear-penetrating intensity.
“Ah!” said Moreau, letting the curved instrument fall to his side
again.
Immediately there was a crashing through the yellow canes, and a sound
of voices from the dense green jungle that marked the morass through
which I had run on the previous day. Then at three or four points on
the edge of the sulphurous area appeared the grotesque forms of the
Beast People hurrying towards us. I could not help a creeping horror,
as I perceived first one and then another trot out from the trees or
reeds and come shambling along over the hot dust. But Moreau and
Montgomery stood calmly enough; and, perforce, I stuck beside them.
First to arrive was the Satyr, strangely unreal for all that he cast a
shadow and tossed the dust with his hoofs. After him from the brake
came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros, chewing a straw
as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the
Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then
others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward they began to cringe
towards Moreau and chant, quite regardless of one another, fragments of
the latter half of the litany of the Law,—“His is the Hand that wounds;
His is the Hand that heals,” and so forth. As soon as they had
approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and
bowing on knees and elbows began flinging the white dust upon their
heads.
Imagine the scene if you can! We three blue-clad men, with our
misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of sunlit
yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle
of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,—some almost human save in
their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so
strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our
wildest dreams; and, beyond, the reedy lines of a canebrake in one
direction, a dense tangle of palm-trees on the other, separating us
from the ravine with the huts, and to the north the hazy horizon of the
Pacific Ocean.
“Sixty-two, sixty-three,” counted Moreau. “There are four more.”
“I do not see the Leopard-man,” said I.
Presently Moreau sounded the great horn again, and at the sound of it
all the Beast People writhed and grovelled in the dust. Then, slinking
out of the canebrake, stooping near the ground and trying to join the
dust-throwing circle behind Moreau’s back, came the Leopard-man. The
last of the Beast People to arrive was the little Ape-man. The earlier
animals, hot and weary with their grovelling, shot vicious glances at
him.
“Cease!” said Moreau, in his firm, loud voice; and the Beast People sat
back upon their hams and rested from their worshipping.
“Where is the Sayer of the Law?” said Moreau, and the hairy-grey
monster bowed his face in the dust.
“Say the words!” said Moreau.
Forthwith all in the kneeling assembly, swaying from side to side and
dashing up the sulphur with their hands,—first the right hand and a
puff of dust, and then the left,—began once more to chant their strange
litany. When they reached, “Not to eat Flesh or Fish, that is the Law,”
Moreau held up his lank white hand.
“Stop!” he cried, and there fell absolute silence upon them all.
I think they all knew and dreaded what was coming. I looked round at
their strange faces. When I saw their wincing attitudes and the furtive
dread in their bright eyes, I wondered that I had ever believed them to
be men.
“That Law has been broken!” said Moreau.
“None escape,” from the faceless creature with the silvery hair. “None
escape,” repeated the kneeling circle of Beast People.
“Who is he?” cried Moreau, and looked round at their faces, cracking
his whip. I fancied the Hyena-swine looked dejected, so too did the
Leopard-man. Moreau stopped, facing this creature, who cringed towards
him with the memory and dread of infinite torment.
“Who is he?” repeated Moreau, in a voice of thunder.
“Evil is he who breaks the Law,” chanted the Sayer of the Law.
Moreau looked into the eyes of the Leopard-man, and seemed to be
dragging the very soul out of the creature.
“Who breaks the Law—” said Moreau, taking his eyes off his victim, and
turning towards us (it seemed to me there was a touch of exultation in
his voice).
“Goes back to the House of Pain,” they all clamoured,—“goes back to the
House of Pain, O Master!”
“Back to the House of Pain,—back to the House of Pain,” gabbled the
Ape-man, as though the idea was sweet to him.
“Do you hear?” said Moreau, turning back to the criminal, “my
friend—Hullo!”
For the Leopard-man, released from Moreau’s eye, had risen straight
from his knees, and now, with eyes aflame and his huge feline tusks
flashing out from under his curling lips, leapt towards his tormentor.
I am convinced that only the madness of unendurable fear could have
prompted this attack. The whole circle of threescore monsters seemed to
rise about us. I drew my revolver. The two figures collided. I saw
Moreau reeling back from the Leopard-man’s blow. There was a furious
yelling and howling all about us. Every one was moving rapidly. For a
moment I thought it was a general revolt. The furious face of the
Leopard-man flashed by mine, with M’ling close in pursuit. I saw the
yellow eyes of the Hyena-swine blazing with excitement, his attitude as
if he were half resolved to attack me. The Satyr, too, glared at me
over the Hyena-swine’s hunched shoulders. I heard the crack of Moreau’s
pistol, and saw the pink flash dart across the tumult. The whole crowd
seemed to swing round in the direction of the glint of fire, and I too
was swung round by the magnetism of the movement. In another second I
was running, one of a tumultuous shouting crowd, in pursuit of the
escaping Leopard-man.
That is all I can tell definitely. I saw the Leopard-man strike Moreau,
and then everything spun about me until I was running headlong. M’ling
was ahead, close in pursuit of the fugitive. Behind, their tongues
already lolling out, ran the Wolf-women in great leaping strides. The
Swine folk followed, squealing with excitement, and the two Bull-men in
their swathings of white. Then came Moreau in a cluster of the Beast
People, his wide-brimmed straw hat blown off, his revolver in hand, and
his lank white hair streaming out. The Hyena-swine ran beside me,
keeping pace with me and glancing furtively at me out of his feline
eyes, and the others came pattering and shouting behind us.
The Leopard-man went bursting his way through the long canes, which