by H. G. Wells
I fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways, but that he attempted to veil from me at first.
M’ling, the black-faced man, his attendant, the first of the Beast Folk I had encountered, did not live with the others across the island, but in a small kennel at the back of the enclosure. The creature was scarcely so intelligent as the Ape Man, but far more docile, and the most human-looking of all the Beast Folk, and Montgomery had trained it to prepare food and indeed to discharge all the trivial domestic offices that were required. It was a complex trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill, a bear tainted with dog and ox, and one of the most elaborately made of all the creatures. It treated Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion; sometimes he would notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular names, and so make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he would ill-treat it, especially after he had been at the whisky, kicking it, beating it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees.4 But whether he treated it well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be near him.
I say I became habituated to the Beast People, so that a thousand things that had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings: Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the bovine creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself trying hard to recall how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-Bear Woman’s vulpine shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.
Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond doubt or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunchbacked human savage to all appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens, would stretch his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness scissor-edged incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant as knives. Or in some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory daring into the eyes of some lithe white-swathed female figure, I would suddenly see with a spasmodic revulsion that they had slit-like pupils, or, glancing down, note the curving nail with which she held her shapeless wrap about her. It is a curious thing, by the by, for which I am quite unable to account, that these weird creatures – the females I mean – had in the earlier days of my stay an instinctive sense of their own repulsive clumsiness, and displayed in consequence a more than human regard for the decencies and decorum of external costume.
XVI
HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTED BLOOD
But my inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread of my story. After I had breakfasted with Montgomery he took me across the island to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring, into whose scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day. Both of us carried whips and loaded revolvers. While going through a leafy jungle on our road thither we heard a rabbit squealing. We stopped and listened, but we heard no more; and presently we went on our way and the incident dropped out of our minds. Montgomery called my attention to certain little pink animals with long hind legs, that went leaping through the undergrowth. He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had invented. He had fancied they might serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had defeated this intention. I had already encountered some of these creatures, once during my moonlight flight from the Leopard Man, and once during my pursuit by Moreau on the previous day. By chance, one hopping to avoid us leapt into the hole caused by the uprooting of a wind-blown tree. Before it could extricate itself we managed to catch it. It spat like a cat, scratched and kicked vigorously with its hind legs and made an attempt to bite, but its teeth were too feeble to inflict more than a painless pinch. It seemed to me rather a pretty little creature, and as Montgomery stated that it never destroyed the turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits, I should imagine it might prove a convenient substitute for the common rabbit in gentlemen’s parks.
We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips and splintered deeply. Montgomery called my attention to this. ‘Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law,’ he said. ‘Much some of them care for it!’ It was after this, I think, that we met the Satyr and the Ape Man. The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau, his face ovine in expression – like the coarser Hebrew type – his voice a harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic. He was gnawing the husk of a pod-like fruit as he passed us. Both of them saluted Montgomery.
‘Hail,’ said they, ‘to the Other with the whip!’
‘There’s a third with a whip now,’ said Montgomery. ‘So you’d better mind!’
‘Was he not made?’ said the Ape Man. ‘He said – he said he was made.’
The Satyr Man looked curiously at me. ‘The Third with the whip, he that walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.’
‘He has a thin long whip,’ said Montgomery.
‘Yesterday he bled and wept,’ said the Satyr. ‘You never bleed nor weep. The Master does not bleed nor weep.’
‘Ollendorffian beggar!’1 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 came out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.’
He gave a 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 asked. ‘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 stunned him. He ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.’
; ‘But then we have to prove 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 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 I was infected 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’s a pretty sight.’ Moreau said not a word on the way, but his heavy white-fringed face was grim.
We crossed the ravine, down which smoked the stream of hot water, and followed the winding pathway through the cane-brakes 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; and 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 were the reedy lines of a cane-brake in one direction and 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 cane-brake, stooping near the ground, and trying to join the dust-throwing circle behind Moreau’s back, came the Leopard Man. And I saw that his forehead was bruised. 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, and 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 wild 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 p
ink 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 sprang back as he passed and rattled in M’ling’s face. We others in the rear found a trampled path for us when we reached the brake. The chase lay through the brake for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then plunged into a dense thicket that retarded our movements exceedingly, though we went through it in a crowd together – fronds flicking into our faces, ropy creepers catching us under the chin or gripping our ankles, thorny plants hooking into and tearing cloth and flesh together.
‘He has gone on all-fours through this,’ panted Moreau, now just ahead of me.
‘None escape,’ said the Wolf-Bear, laughing into my face with the exultation of hunting.