บทที่ บทที่ 22 · THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK.

. THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK.

In this way I became one among the Beast People in the Island of Doctor

Moreau. When I awoke, it was dark about me. My arm ached in its

bandages. I sat up, wondering at first where I might be. I heard coarse

voices talking outside. Then I saw that my barricade had gone, and that

the opening of the hut stood clear. My revolver was still in my hand.

I heard something breathing, saw something crouched together close

beside me. I held my breath, trying to see what it was. It began to

move slowly, interminably. Then something soft and warm and moist

passed across my hand. All my muscles contracted. I snatched my hand

away. A cry of alarm began and was stifled in my throat. Then I just

realised what had happened sufficiently to stay my fingers on the

revolver.

“Who is that?” I said in a hoarse whisper, the revolver still pointed.

“_I_—Master.”

“Who are _you?_”

“They say there is no Master now. But I know, I know. I carried the

bodies into the sea, O Walker in the Sea! the bodies of those you slew.

I am your slave, Master.”

“Are you the one I met on the beach?” I asked.

“The same, Master.”

The Thing was evidently faithful enough, for it might have fallen upon

me as I slept. “It is well,” I said, extending my hand for another

licking kiss. I began to realise what its presence meant, and the tide

of my courage flowed. “Where are the others?” I asked.

“They are mad; they are fools,” said the Dog-man. “Even now they talk

together beyond there. They say, ‘The Master is dead. The Other with

the Whip is dead. That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are. We

have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end.

We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no

Whips for ever again.’ So they say. But I know, Master, I know.”

I felt in the darkness, and patted the Dog-man’s head. “It is well,” I

said again.

“Presently you will slay them all,” said the Dog-man.

“Presently,” I answered, “I will slay them all,—after certain days and

certain things have come to pass. Every one of them save those you

spare, every one of them shall be slain.”

“What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills,” said the Dog-man

with a certain satisfaction in his voice.

“And that their sins may grow,” I said, “let them live in their folly

until their time is ripe. Let them not know that I am the Master.”

“The Master’s will is sweet,” said the Dog-man, with the ready tact of

his canine blood.

“But one has sinned,” said I. “Him I will kill, whenever I may meet

him. When I say to you, ‘_That is he_,’ see that you fall upon him. And

now I will go to the men and women who are assembled together.”

For a moment the opening of the hut was blackened by the exit of the

Dog-man. Then I followed and stood up, almost in the exact spot where I

had been when I had heard Moreau and his staghound pursuing me. But now

it was night, and all the miasmatic ravine about me was black; and

beyond, instead of a green, sunlit slope, I saw a red fire, before

which hunched, grotesque figures moved to and fro. Farther were the

thick trees, a bank of darkness, fringed above with the black lace of

the upper branches. The moon was just riding up on the edge of the

ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that

was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island.

“Walk by me,” said I, nerving myself; and side by side we walked down

the narrow way, taking little heed of the dim Things that peered at us

out of the huts.

None about the fire attempted to salute me. Most of them disregarded

me, ostentatiously. I looked round for the Hyena-swine, but he was not

there. Altogether, perhaps twenty of the Beast Folk squatted, staring

into the fire or talking to one another.

“He is dead, he is dead! the Master is dead!” said the voice of the

Ape-man to the right of me. “The House of Pain—there is no House of

Pain!”

“He is not dead,” said I, in a loud voice. “Even now he watches us!”

This startled them. Twenty pairs of eyes regarded me.

“The House of Pain is gone,” said I. “It will come again. The Master

you cannot see; yet even now he listens among you.”

“True, true!” said the Dog-man.

They were staggered at my assurance. An animal may be ferocious and

cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

“The Man with the Bandaged Arm speaks a strange thing,” said one of the

Beast Folk.

“I tell you it is so,” I said. “The Master and the House of Pain will

come again. Woe be to him who breaks the Law!”

They looked curiously at one another. With an affectation of

indifference I began to chop idly at the ground in front of me with my

hatchet. They looked, I noticed, at the deep cuts I made in the turf.

Then the Satyr raised a doubt. I answered him. Then one of the dappled

things objected, and an animated discussion sprang up round the fire.

Every moment I began to feel more convinced of my present security. I

talked now without the catching in my breath, due to the intensity of

my excitement, that had troubled me at first. In the course of about an

hour I had really convinced several of the Beast Folk of the truth of

my assertions, and talked most of the others into a dubious state. I

kept a sharp eye for my enemy the Hyena-swine, but he never appeared.

Every now and then a suspicious movement would startle me, but my

confidence grew rapidly. Then as the moon crept down from the zenith,

one by one the listeners began to yawn (showing the oddest teeth in the

light of the sinking fire), and first one and then another retired

towards the dens in the ravine; and I, dreading the silence and

darkness, went with them, knowing I was safer with several of them than

with one alone.

In this manner began the longer part of my sojourn upon this Island of

Doctor Moreau. But from that night until the end came, there was but

one thing happened to tell save a series of innumerable small

unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that

I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one

cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these

half-humanised brutes. There is much that sticks in my memory that I

could write,—things that I would cheerfully give my right hand to

forget; but they do not help the telling of the story.

In the retrospect it is strange to remember how soon I fell in with

these monsters’ ways, and gained my confidence again. I had my quarrels

with them of course, and could show some of their teeth-marks still;

but they soon gained a wholesome respect for my trick of throwing

stones and for the bite of my hatchet. And my Saint-Bernard-man’s

loyalty was of infinite service to me. I found their simple scale of

honour was based mainly on the capacity for inflicting trenchant

wounds. Indeed, I may say—without vanity, I hope—that I held something

like pre-eminence among them. One or two, whom in a rare access of high

spirits I had scarred rather badly, bore me a grudge; but it vented

itself chiefly behind my back, and at a safe distance from my missiles,

in grimaces.

The Hyena-swine avoided me, and I was always on the alert for him. My

inseparable Dog-man hated and dreaded him intensely. I really believe

that was at the root of the brute’s attachment to me. It was soon

evident to me that the former monster had tasted blood, and gone the

way of the Leopard-man. He formed a lair somewhere in the forest, and

became solitary. Once I tried to induce the Beast Folk to hunt him, but

I lacked the authority to make them co-operate for one end. Again and

again I tried to approach his den and come upon him unaware; but always

he was too acute for me, and saw or winded me and got away. He too made

every forest pathway dangerous to me and my ally with his lurking

ambuscades. The Dog-man scarcely dared to leave my side.

In the first month or so the Beast Folk, compared with their latter

condition, were human enough, and for one or two besides my canine

friend I even conceived a friendly tolerance. The little pink

sloth-creature displayed an odd affection for me, and took to following

me about. The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength

of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at

me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained

me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an

idea, I believe, that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the

proper use of speech. He called it “Big Thinks” to distinguish it from

“Little Thinks,” the sane every-day interests of life. If ever I made a

remark he did not understand, he would praise it very much, ask me to

say it again, learn it by heart, and go off repeating it, with a word

wrong here or there, to all the milder of the Beast People. He thought

nothing of what was plain and comprehensible. I invented some very

curious “Big Thinks” for his especial use. I think now that he was the

silliest creature I ever met; he had developed in the most wonderful

way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the

natural folly of a monkey.

This, I say, was in the earlier weeks of my solitude among these

brutes. During that time they respected the usage established by the

Law, and behaved with general decorum. Once I found another rabbit torn

to pieces,—by the Hyena-swine, I am assured,—but that was all. It was

about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in

their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a

growing disinclination to talk. My Monkey-man’s jabber multiplied in

volume but grew less and less comprehensible, more and more simian.

Some of the others seemed altogether slipping their hold upon speech,

though they still understood what I said to them at that time. (Can you

imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering,

losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again?) And they

walked erect with an increasing difficulty. Though they evidently felt

ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or

another running on toes and finger-tips, and quite unable to recover

the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily; drinking by

suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more

keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the “stubborn

beast-flesh.” They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.

Some of them—the pioneers in this, I noticed with some surprise, were

all females—began to disregard the injunction of decency, deliberately

for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon the

institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly losing

its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.

My Dog-man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he

became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy. I scarcely noticed the transition from

the companion on my right hand to the lurching dog at my side.

As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the

lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome

that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of

boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau’s enclosure. Some memory of pain,

I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk.

It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these

monsters,—to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how

they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch

of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs; how

their foreheads fell away and their faces projected; how the

quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the

first month of my loneliness became a shuddering horror to recall.

The change was slow and inevitable. For them and for me it came without

any definite shock. I still went among them in safety, because no jolt

in the downward glide had released the increasing charge of explosive

animalism that ousted the human day by day. But I began to fear that

soon now that shock must come. My Saint-Bernard-brute followed me to

the enclosure every night, and his vigilance enabled me to sleep at

times in something like peace. The little pink sloth-thing became shy

and left me, to crawl back to its natural life once more among the

tree-branches. We were in just the state of equilibrium that would

remain in one of those “Happy Family” cages which animal-tamers

exhibit, if the tamer were to leave it for ever.

Of course these creatures did not decline into such beasts as the

reader has seen in zoological gardens,—into ordinary bears, wolves,

tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something strange about

each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was

ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but

each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism

appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds

of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary

recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the

fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect.

I too must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as

yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew

long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have

a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.

At first I spent the daylight hours on the southward beach watching for

a ship, hoping and praying for a ship. I counted on the _Ipecacuanha_

returning as the year wore on; but she never came. Five times I saw

sails, and thrice smoke; but nothing ever touched the island. I always

had a bonfire ready, but no doubt the volcanic reputation of the island

was taken to account for that.

It was only about September or October that I began to think of making

a raft. By that time my arm had healed, and both my hands were at my

service again. At first, I found my helplessness appalling. I had never

done any carpentry or such-like work in my life, and I spent day after

day in experimental chopping and binding among the trees. I had no

ropes, and could hit on nothing wherewith to make ropes; none of the

abundant creepers seemed limber or strong enough, and with all my

litter of scientific education I could not devise any way of making

them so. I spent more than a fortnight grubbing among the black ruins

of the enclosure and on the beach where the boats had been burnt,

looking for nails and other stray pieces of metal that might prove of

service. Now and then some Beast-creature would watch me, and go

leaping off when I called to it. There came a season of thunder-storms

and heavy rain, which greatly retarded my work; but at last the raft

was completed.

I was delighted with it. But with a certain lack of practical sense

which has always been my bane, I had made it a mile or more from the

sea; and before I had dragged it down to the beach the thing had fallen

to pieces. Perhaps it is as well that I was saved from launching it;

but at the time my misery at my failure was so acute that for some days

I simply moped on the beach, and stared at the water and thought of

death.

I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned

me unmistakably of the folly of letting the days pass so,—for each

fresh day was fraught with increasing danger from the Beast People.

I was lying in the shade of the enclosure wall, staring out to sea,

when I was startled by something cold touching the skin of my heel, and

starting round found the little pink sloth-creature blinking into my

face. He had long since lost speech and active movement, and the lank

hair of the little brute grew thicker every day and his stumpy claws

more askew. He made a moaning noise when he saw he had attracted my

attention, went a little way towards the bushes and looked back at me.

At first I did not understand, but presently it occurred to me that he

wished me to follow him; and this I did at last,—slowly, for the day

was hot. When we reached the trees he clambered into them, for he could

travel better among their swinging creepers than on the ground. And

suddenly in a trampled space I came upon a ghastly group. My

Saint-Bernard-creature lay on the ground, dead; and near his body

crouched the Hyena-swine, gripping the quivering flesh with its

misshapen claws, gnawing at it, and snarling with delight. As I

approached, the monster lifted its glaring eyes to mine, its lips went

trembling back from its red-stained teeth, and it growled menacingly.

It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint

had vanished. I advanced a step farther, stopped, and pulled out my

revolver. At last I had him face to face.

The brute made no sign of retreat; but its ears went back, its hair

bristled, and its body crouched together. I aimed between the eyes and

fired. As I did so, the Thing rose straight at me in a leap, and I was

knocked over like a ninepin. It clutched at me with its crippled hand,

and struck me in the face. Its spring carried it over me. I fell under

the hind part of its body; but luckily I had hit as I meant, and it had

died even as it leapt. I crawled out from under its unclean weight and

stood up trembling, staring at its quivering body. That danger at least

was over; but this, I knew was only the first of the series of relapses

that must come.

I burnt both of the bodies on a pyre of brushwood; but after that I saw

that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time. The

Beast People by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the

ravine and made themselves lairs according to their taste among the

thickets of the island. Few prowled by day, most of them slept, and the

island might have seemed deserted to a new-comer; but at night the air

was hideous with their calls and howling. I had half a mind to make a

massacre of them; to build traps, or fight them with my knife. Had I

possessed sufficient cartridges, I should not have hesitated to begin

the killing. There could now be scarcely a score left of the dangerous

carnivores; the braver of these were already dead. After the death of

this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the

practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at

night. I rebuilt my den in the walls of the enclosure, with such a

narrow opening that anything attempting to enter must necessarily make

a considerable noise. The creatures had lost the art of fire too, and

recovered their fear of it. I turned once more, almost passionately

now, to hammering together stakes and branches to form a raft for my

escape.

I found a thousand difficulties. I am an extremely unhandy man (my

schooling was over before the days of Slöjd); but most of the

requirements of a raft I met at last in some clumsy, circuitous way or

other, and this time I took care of the strength. The only

insurmountable obstacle was that I had no vessel to contain the water I

should need if I floated forth upon these untravelled seas. I would

have even tried pottery, but the island contained no clay. I used to go

moping about the island trying with all my might to solve this one last

difficulty. Sometimes I would give way to wild outbursts of rage, and

hack and splinter some unlucky tree in my intolerable vexation. But I

could think of nothing.

And then came a day, a wonderful day, which I spent in ecstasy. I saw a

sail to the southwest, a small sail like that of a little schooner; and

forthwith I lit a great pile of brushwood, and stood by it in the heat

of it, and the heat of the midday sun, watching. All day I watched that

sail, eating or drinking nothing, so that my head reeled; and the

Beasts came and glared at me, and seemed to wonder, and went away. It

was still distant when night came and swallowed it up; and all night I

toiled to keep my blaze bright and high, and the eyes of the Beasts

shone out of the darkness, marvelling. In the dawn the sail was nearer,

and I saw it was the dirty lug-sail of a small boat. But it sailed

strangely. My eyes were weary with watching, and I peered and could not

believe them. Two men were in the boat, sitting low down,—one by the

bows, the other at the rudder. The head was not kept to the wind; it

yawed and fell away.

As the day grew brighter, I began waving the last rag of my jacket to

them; but they did not notice me, and sat still, facing each other. I

went to the lowest point of the low headland, and gesticulated and

shouted. There was no response, and the boat kept on her aimless

course, making slowly, very slowly, for the bay. Suddenly a great white

bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor

noticed it; it circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its

strong wings outspread.

Then I stopped shouting, and sat down on the headland and rested my

chin on my hands and stared. Slowly, slowly, the boat drove past

towards the west. I would have swum out to it, but something—a cold,

vague fear—kept me back. In the afternoon the tide stranded the boat,

and left it a hundred yards or so to the westward of the ruins of the

enclosure. The men in it were dead, had been dead so long that they

fell to pieces when I tilted the boat on its side and dragged them out.

One had a shock of red hair, like the captain of the _Ipecacuanha_, and

a dirty white cap lay in the bottom of the boat.

As I stood beside the boat, three of the Beasts came slinking out of

the bushes and sniffing towards me. One of my spasms of disgust came

upon me. I thrust the little boat down the beach and clambered on board

her. Two of the brutes were Wolf-beasts, and came forward with

quivering nostrils and glittering eyes; the third was the horrible

nondescript of bear and bull. When I saw them approaching those

wretched remains, heard them snarling at one another and caught the

gleam of their teeth, a frantic horror succeeded my repulsion. I turned

my back upon them, struck the lug and began paddling out to sea. I

could not bring myself to look behind me.

I lay, however, between the reef and the island that night, and the

next morning went round to the stream and filled the empty keg aboard

with water. Then, with such patience as I could command, I collected a

quantity of fruit, and waylaid and killed two rabbits with my last

three cartridges. While I was doing this I left the boat moored to an

inward projection of the reef, for fear of the Beast People.