“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
over-archings to mark the eyes and mouth.
“He has little nails,” said this grisly creature in his hairy beard.
“It is well.”
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 one another.
“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 grey 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 or Fish;
that is the Law. Are we not Men?’”
“None escape,” said a dappled brute standing in the doorway.
“For every one the want 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 some one, 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 that 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 passage 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 a half-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 towards 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 forward
into another. I felt his hands fly round, clutching at me and missing
me. The little pink sloth-creature dashed at me, and I gashed down its
ugly face with the nail in my stick and in another minute 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.
That gap was altogether fortunate for me, for the narrow chimney,
slanting obliquely upward, must have impeded the nearer pursuers. 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 which
I pushed into a dark, thick undergrowth that was black and succulent
under foot. As I plunged into the reeds, my foremost pursuers emerged
from the gap. I broke my way through this undergrowth for some minutes.
The air behind me and about 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 crash 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 kneedeep, 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 canebrake again. Then suddenly it
turned parallel with the edge of a steep-walled gap, which came without
warning, like the ha-ha of an English park,—turned with an 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 which 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 drifting 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 facets. I saw my death before me; but I
was hot and panting, with the warm blood oozing out on my face and
running pleasantly through my veins. 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 yet. 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 of help for me
lay in the Beast People.
XIII.
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 steamy 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 a 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 something to
try.
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 my 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 intertidal 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. Farther up the beach stared the Beast Men.
“What am I doing? I am going to drown myself,” said I.
Montgomery and Moreau looked at each other. “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. Farther
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 Men,—“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, to be trying to understand me, to remember, I thought,
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 burden of what I put into the heads of the Beast People. 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. 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. If we vivisected men, we should
import men, not beasts. 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. Besides, why should
we want to shoot you when you have just offered to drown yourself?”
“Why did you set—your people onto 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 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 round 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 imagination.” And
with a touch of contempt which 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 never before
saw an animal trying to think.
XIV.
DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS.
“And now, Prendick, I will explain,” said Doctor Moreau, so soon as we
had eaten and drunk. “I must confess that you are the most dictatorial
guest I ever entertained. I warn you that this is the last I shall 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 the vivisected human being, as you called it, is, after
all, only the puma?” said Moreau. He had made me visit that 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 that 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 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
cock-spur—possibly you have heard of that—flourished on the bull’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, and 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 is not simply the outward form of
an animal which 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 beggar-cripples, 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 begin 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 possibility of
vivisection does 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 superseding old inherent instincts by new suggestions,
grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed
of what we call moral education, he said, 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 continued,—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.
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 for 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—”