Island of Dr. Moreau Page 10

  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.
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  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.

  But 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 in 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 art
istic 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—’

  I gave an impatient shrug at such sophistry.

  ‘Oh! but it is such a little thing. A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing. It may be that, save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained – it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way towards… Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is there?’

  He drew a little penknife, as he spoke, from his pocket, opened the smaller blade and moved his chair so that I could see his thigh. Then, choosing the place deliberately, he drove the blade into his leg and withdrew it.

  ‘No doubt you have seen that before. It does not hurt a pin-prick. But what does it show? The capacity for pain is not needed in the muscle, and it is not placed there; it is but little needed in the skin, and only here and there over the thigh is a spot capable of feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. All living flesh is not painful, nor is all nerve, nor even all sensory nerve. There’s no taint of pain, real pain, in the sensations of the optic nerve. If you wound the optic nerve you merely see flashes of light, just as disease of the auditory nerve merely means a humming in our ears. Plants do not feel pain; the lower animals – it’s possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish do not feel pain. Then with men, the more intelligent they become the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare, and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger. I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.