H G Wells Omnibus, page 147
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 cut it over, gashed down its ugly face with the nail in my stick, and in another minute I 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.
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 this I pushed into a dark thick undergrowth that was black and succulent under foot. That gap was altogether fortunate for me, for the narrow way slanting obliquely upward must have impeded the nearer pursuers. As I plunged into the reeds the foremost had only just 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 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 knee-deep, 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 uphill, across another open space covered with white incrustation, and plunged into a cane-brake again.
Then suddenly it turned parallel with the edge of a steep walled gap which came without warning like the haha of an English park2 – turned with 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 that 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 downstream, 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. 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. My blood was too warm.
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 a chance of getting a price for my life.
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 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. Further up the beach stared the Beast Men.
‘What am I doing? – I am going to drown myself,’ said I.
Montgomery and Moreau looked at one another. ‘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. Further 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 then, to be trying to understand me, to remember 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 burthen of what I put into the heads of the Beast People to my own ultimate undoing. 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.1 A humanizing process. I will explain. Come ashore.’
I laughed. ‘A pretty story,’ said I. ‘They talk, build houses, cook. 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. 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. Why should we want to shoot you when you have just offered to drown yourself?’
‘Why did you set… your people on to 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 then 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 rounded lump of lava, and had the satisfaction of seeing the stone pulverized 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 panic.’
And with a touch of contempt that 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 never before did I see 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 you are the most dictatorial guest I ever entertained. I warn you that this is the last I 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 yet care to be with the two of them in such a little room.
‘You admit that 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 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 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 – humanized 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 cockspur – possibly you have heard of that – flourished on the bull’s neck.1 And the rhinoceros rats of the Algerian Zouaves2 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, yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay on the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it. It’s not simply the outward form of an animal 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 and 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’….3 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 articulation 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 possibilities of vivisection do 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 replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafted upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education 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 said, 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.
