The Island of Doctor Moreau (7 page)

"It's nothing so very dreadful," said he. "But I think you
have had about enough for one day." The puma suddenly gave
a sharp yell of pain. At that he swore under his breath.
"I'm damned," said he, "if this place is not as bad as Gower Street,
with its cats."

"Montgomery," said I, "what was that thing that came after me?
Was it a beast or was it a man?"

"If you don't sleep to-night," he said, "you'll be off your
head to-morrow."

I stood up in front of him. "What was that thing that came after me?"
I asked.

He looked me squarely in the eyes, and twisted his mouth askew.
His eyes, which had seemed animated a minute before, went dull.
"From your account," said he, "I'm thinking it was a bogle."

I felt a gust of intense irritation, which passed as quickly as it came.
I flung myself into the chair again, and pressed my hands on my forehead.
The puma began once more.

Montgomery came round behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Look here, Prendick," he said, "I had no business to let
you drift out into this silly island of ours. But it's not
so bad as you feel, man. Your nerves are worked to rags.
Let me give you something that will make you sleep.
That
—will keep
on for hours yet. You must simply get to sleep, or I won't answer
for it."

I did not reply. I bowed forward, and covered my face with my hands.
Presently he returned with a small measure containing a dark liquid.
This he gave me. I took it unresistingly, and he helped me into
the hammock.

When I awoke, it was broad day. For a little while I lay flat,
staring at the roof above me. The rafters, I observed, were made
out of the timbers of a ship. Then I turned my head, and saw a meal
prepared for me on the table. I perceived that I was hungry,
and prepared to clamber out of the hammock, which, very politely
anticipating my intention, twisted round and deposited me upon
all-fours on the floor.

I got up and sat down before the food. I had a heavy feeling
in my head, and only the vaguest memory at first of the things
that had happened over night. The morning breeze blew very
pleasantly through the unglazed window, and that and the food
contributed to the sense of animal comfort which I experienced.
Presently the door behind me—the door inward towards the yard
of the enclosure—opened. I turned and saw Montgomery's face.

"All right," said he. "I'm frightfully busy." And he shut the door.

Afterwards I discovered that he forgot to re-lock it.
Then I recalled the expression of his face the previous night,
and with that the memory of all I had experienced reconstructed
itself before me. Even as that fear came back to me came a cry
from within; but this time it was not the cry of a puma.
I put down the mouthful that hesitated upon my lips, and listened.
Silence, save for the whisper of the morning breeze. I began to think my
ears had deceived me.

After a long pause I resumed my meal, but with my ears still vigilant.
Presently I heard something else, very faint and low.
I sat as if frozen in my attitude. Though it was faint and low,
it moved me more profoundly than all that I had hitherto heard of
the abominations behind the wall. There was no mistake this time in
the quality of the dim, broken sounds; no doubt at all of their source.
For it was groaning, broken by sobs and gasps of anguish.
It was no brute this time; it was a human being in torment!

As I realised this I rose, and in three steps had crossed the room,
seized the handle of the door into the yard, and flung it open
before me.

"Prendick, man! Stop!" cried Montgomery, intervening.

A startled deerhound yelped and snarled. There was blood, I saw,
in the sink,—brown, and some scarlet—and I smelt the peculiar
smell of carbolic acid. Then through an open doorway beyond,
in the dim light of the shadow, I saw something bound painfully
upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged; and then blotting
this out appeared the face of old Moreau, white and terrible.
In a moment he had gripped me by the shoulder with a hand that was
smeared red, had twisted me off my feet, and flung me headlong back
into my own room. He lifted me as though I was a little child.
I fell at full length upon the floor, and the door slammed
and shut out the passionate intensity of his face.
Then I heard the key turn in the lock, and Montgomery's voice
in expostulation.

"Ruin the work of a lifetime," I heard Moreau say.

"He does not understand," said Montgomery. and other things
that were inaudible.

"I can't spare the time yet," said Moreau.

The rest I did not hear. I picked myself up and stood trembling,
my mind a chaos of the most horrible misgivings. Could it be possible,
I thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried
on here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky;
and suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid
realisation of my own danger.

IT came before my mind with an unreasonable hope of escape that
the outer door of my room was still open to me. I was convinced now,
absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being.
All the time since I had heard his name, I had been trying to link
in my mind in some way the grotesque animalism of the islanders
with his abominations; and now I thought I saw it all.
The memory of his work on the transfusion of blood recurred to me.
These creatures I had seen were the victims of some hideous experiment.
These sickening scoundrels had merely intended to keep me back,
to fool me with their display of confidence, and presently to fall
upon me with a fate more horrible than death,—with torture;
and after torture the most hideous degradation it is possible
to conceive,—to send me off a lost soul, a beast, to the rest of their
Comus rout.

I looked round for some weapon. Nothing. Then with an inspiration I
turned over the deck chair, put my foot on the side of it, and tore
away the side rail. It happened that a nail came away with the wood,
and projecting, gave a touch of danger to an otherwise petty weapon.
I heard a step outside, and incontinently flung open the door and found
Montgomery within a yard of it. He meant to lock the outer door!
I raised this nailed stick of mine and cut at his face;
but he sprang back. I hesitated a moment, then turned and fled,
round the corner of the house. "Prendick, man!" I heard his
astonished cry, "don't be a silly ass, man!"

Another minute, thought I, and he would have had me locked in,
and as ready as a hospital rabbit for my fate. He emerged behind
the corner, for I heard him shout, "Prendick!" Then he began to run
after me, shouting things as he ran. This time running blindly,
I went northeastward in a direction at right angles to my
previous expedition. Once, as I went running headlong up the beach,
I glanced over my shoulder and saw his attendant with him.
I ran furiously up the slope, over it, then turning eastward along
a rocky valley fringed on either side with jungle I ran for perhaps
a mile altogether, my chest straining, my heart beating in my ears;
and then hearing nothing of Montgomery or his man, and feeling
upon the verge of exhaustion, I doubled sharply back towards
the beach as I judged, and lay down in the shelter of a canebrake.
There I remained for a long time, too fearful to move, and indeed
too fearful even to plan a course of action. The wild scene about me
lay sleeping silently under the sun, and the only sound near me was
the thin hum of some small gnats that had discovered me. Presently I
became aware of a drowsy breathing sound, the soughing of the sea upon
the beach.

After about an hour I heard Montgomery shouting my name,
far away to the north. That set me thinking of my plan of action.
As I interpreted it then, this island was inhabited only by these two
vivisectors and their animalised victims. Some of these no doubt
they could press into their service against me if need arose.
I knew both Moreau and Montgomery carried revolvers; and, save for a feeble
bar of deal spiked with a small nail, the merest mockery of a mace,
I was unarmed.

So I lay still there, until I began to think of food and drink;
and at that thought the real hopelessness of my position came home to me.
I knew no way of getting anything to eat. I was too ignorant of botany
to discover any resort of root or fruit that might lie about me;
I had no means of trapping the few rabbits upon the island.
It grew blanker the more I turned the prospect over. At last in
the desperation of my position, my mind turned to the animal men I
had encountered. I tried to find some hope in what I remembered of them.
In turn I recalled each one I had seen, and tried to draw some augury
of assistance from my memory.

Then suddenly I heard a staghound bay, and at that realised a new danger.
I took little time to think, or they would have caught me then,
but snatching up my nailed stick, rushed headlong from my hiding-place
towards the sound of the sea. I remember a growth of thorny plants,
with spines that stabbed like pen-knives. I emerged bleeding and
with torn clothes upon the lip of a long creek opening northward.
I went straight into the water without a minute's hesitation, wading up
the creek, and presently finding myself kneedeep in a little stream.
I scrambled out at last on the westward bank, and with my heart beating
loudly in my ears, crept into a tangle of ferns to await the issue.
I heard the dog (there was only one) draw nearer, and yelp when it came
to the thorns. Then I heard no more, and presently began to think I
had escaped.

The minutes passed; the silence lengthened out, and at last
after an hour of security my courage began to return to me.
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable.
I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair.
I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion
made me capable of daring anything. I had even a certain wish
to encounter Moreau face to face; and as I had waded into the water,
I remembered that if I were too hard pressed at least one path
of escape from torment still lay open to me,—they could not
very well prevent my drowning myself. I had half a mind to drown
myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out,
a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained me.
I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny plants,
and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed
to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black
face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had
met the launch upon the beach. He was clinging to the oblique
stem of a palm-tree. I gripped my stick, and stood up facing him.
He began chattering. "You, you, you," was all I could distinguish
at first. Suddenly he dropped from the tree, and in another
moment was holding the fronds apart and staring curiously
at me.

I did not feel the same repugnance towards this creature which I
had experienced in my encounters with the other Beast Men.
"You," he said, "in the boat." He was a man, then,—at least as much
of a man as Montgomery's attendant,—for he could talk.

"Yes," I said, "I came in the boat. From the ship."

"Oh!" he said, and his bright, restless eyes travelled over me,
to my hands, to the stick I carried, to my feet, to the tattered places
in my coat, and the cuts and scratches I had received from the thorns.
He seemed puzzled at something. His eyes came back to my hands.
He held his own hand out and counted his digits slowly, "One, two,
three, four, five—eigh?"

I did not grasp his meaning then; afterwards I was to find that
a great proportion of these Beast People had malformed hands,
lacking sometimes even three digits. But guessing this was
in some way a greeting, I did the same thing by way of reply.
He grinned with immense satisfaction. Then his swift roving
glance went round again; he made a swift movement—and vanished.
The fern fronds he had stood between came swishing together,

I pushed out of the brake after him, and was astonished to find
him swinging cheerfully by one lank arm from a rope of creepers
that looped down from the foliage overhead. His back was to me.

"Hullo!" said I.

He came down with a twisting jump, and stood facing me.

"I say," said I, "where can I get something to eat?"

"Eat!" he said. "Eat Man's food, now." And his eye went back
to the swing of ropes. "At the huts."

"But where are the huts?"

"Oh!"

"I'm new, you know."

At that he swung round, and set off at a quick walk.
All his motions were curiously rapid. "Come along," said he.

I went with him to see the adventure out. I guessed the huts were some
rough shelter where he and some more of these Beast People lived.
I might perhaps find them friendly, find some handle in their minds
to take hold of. I did not know how far they had forgotten their
human heritage.

My ape-like companion trotted along by my side, with his hands
hanging down and his jaw thrust forward. I wondered what memory
he might have in him. "How long have you been on this island?"
said I.

"How long?" he asked; and after having the question repeated,
he held up three fingers.

The creature was little better than an idiot. I tried
to make out what he meant by that, and it seems I bored him.
After another question or two he suddenly left my side and went
leaping at some fruit that hung from a tree. He pulled down
a handful of prickly husks and went on eating the contents.
I noted this with satisfaction, for here at least was a hint for feeding.
I tried him with some other questions, but his chattering, prompt responses
were as often as not quite at cross purposes with my question.
Some few were appropriate, others quite parrot-like.