บทที่ บทที่ 17 · HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.

. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.

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 or weep.”

“Ollendorffian beggar!” 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 went out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.”

He gave a long, 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 continued. “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 said. “I stunned him. He

ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.”

“But then we have to _prove_ that 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 any 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 that I was affected 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 is

a pretty sight!”

Moreau said not a word on the way, but the expression of his heavy,

white-fringed face was grimly set.

We crossed the ravine down which smoked the stream of hot water, and

followed the winding pathway through the canebrakes 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; 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, the reedy lines of a canebrake in one

direction, 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 canebrake, stooping near the ground and trying to join the

dust-throwing circle behind Moreau’s back, came the Leopard-man. 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.

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 a furious

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 pink 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, which 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. We burst out again among rocks, and saw the

quarry ahead running lightly on all-fours and snarling at us over his

shoulder. At that the Wolf Folk howled with delight. The Thing was

still clothed, and at a distance its face still seemed human; but the

carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive droop of its

shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal. It leapt over some

thorny yellow-flowering bushes, and was hidden. M’ling was halfway

across the space.

Most of us now had lost the first speed of the chase, and had fallen

into a longer and steadier stride. I saw as we traversed the open that

the pursuit was now spreading from a column into a line. The

Hyena-swine still ran close to me, watching me as it ran, every now and

then puckering its muzzle with a snarling laugh. At the edge of the

rocks the Leopard-man, realising that he was making for the projecting

cape upon which he had stalked me on the night of my arrival, had

doubled in the undergrowth; but Montgomery had seen the manoeuvre, and

turned him again. So, panting, tumbling against rocks, torn by

brambles, impeded by ferns and reeds, I helped to pursue the

Leopard-man who had broken the Law, and the Hyena-swine ran, laughing

savagely, by my side. I staggered on, my head reeling and my heart

beating against my ribs, tired almost to death, and yet not daring to

lose sight of the chase lest I should be left alone with this horrible

companion. I staggered on in spite of infinite fatigue and the dense

heat of the tropical afternoon.

At last the fury of the hunt slackened. We had pinned the wretched

brute into a corner of the island. Moreau, whip in hand, marshalled us

all into an irregular line, and we advanced now slowly, shouting to one

another as we advanced and tightening the cordon about our victim. He

lurked noiseless and invisible in the bushes through which I had run

from him during that midnight pursuit.

“Steady!” cried Moreau, “steady!” as the ends of the line crept round

the tangle of undergrowth and hemmed the brute in.

“Ware a rush!” came the voice of Montgomery from beyond the thicket.

I was on the slope above the bushes; Montgomery and Moreau beat along

the beach beneath. Slowly we pushed in among the fretted network of

branches and leaves. The quarry was silent.

“Back to the House of Pain, the House of Pain, the House of Pain!”

yelped the voice of the Ape-man, some twenty yards to the right.

When I heard that, I forgave the poor wretch all the fear he had

inspired in me. I heard the twigs snap and the boughs swish aside

before the heavy tread of the Horse-rhinoceros upon my right. Then

suddenly through a polygon of green, in the half darkness under the

luxuriant growth, I saw the creature we were hunting. I halted. He was

crouched together into the smallest possible compass, his luminous

green eyes turned over his shoulder regarding me.

It may seem a strange contradiction in me,—I cannot explain the

fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal

attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human

face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity.

In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be

overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures

of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between its

terror-struck eyes, and fired. As I did so, the Hyena-swine saw the

Thing, and flung itself upon it with an eager cry, thrusting thirsty

teeth into its neck. All about me the green masses of the thicket were

swaying and cracking as the Beast People came rushing together. One

face and then another appeared.

“Don’t kill it, Prendick!” cried Moreau. “Don’t kill it!” and I saw him

stooping as he pushed through under the fronds of the big ferns.

In another moment he had beaten off the Hyena-swine with the handle of

his whip, and he and Montgomery were keeping away the excited

carnivorous Beast People, and particularly M’ling, from the still

quivering body. The hairy-grey Thing came sniffing at the corpse under

my arm. The other animals, in their animal ardour, jostled me to get a

nearer view.

“Confound you, Prendick!” said Moreau. “I wanted him.”

“I’m sorry,” said I, though I was not. “It was the impulse of the

moment.” I felt sick with exertion and excitement. Turning, I pushed my

way out of the crowding Beast People and went on alone up the slope

towards the higher part of the headland. Under the shouted directions

of Moreau I heard the three white-swathed Bull-men begin dragging the

victim down towards the water.

It was easy now for me to be alone. The Beast People manifested a quite

human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot,

sniffing and growling at it as the Bull-men dragged it down the beach.

I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against the

evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea; and like

a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable

aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among the rocks

beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several other of the

Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all still

intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their

loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind

that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange

persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the

grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of

human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and

fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under:

that was all the difference. Poor brute!

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had

not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor

victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only

at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to

me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly

adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now

they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never

died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human

existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long

dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred

me.

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at

least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I

could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate.

But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his

mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown

out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at

last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal

hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held them back from a

brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.

In those days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal

fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring,

and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must

confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it

suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast

pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and

I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for

drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions,

were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite

complexity of its incessant wheels. But this condition did not come all

at once: I think indeed that I anticipate a little in speaking of it

now.