Chương Chương 16 · CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK.

. CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK.

I woke early. Moreau’s explanation stood before my mind, clear and

definite, from the moment of my awakening. I got out of the hammock and

went to the door to assure myself that the key was turned. Then I tried

the window-bar, and found it firmly fixed. That these man-like

creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque

travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their

possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.

A tapping came at the door, and I heard the glutinous accents of M’ling

speaking. I pocketed one of the revolvers (keeping one hand upon it),

and opened to him.

“Good-morning, sair,” he said, bringing in, in addition to the

customary herb-breakfast, an ill-cooked rabbit. Montgomery followed

him. His roving eye caught the position of my arm and he smiled askew.

The puma was resting to heal that day; but Moreau, who was singularly

solitary in his habits, did not join us. I talked with Montgomery to

clear my ideas of the way in which the Beast Folk lived. In particular,

I was urgent to know how these inhuman monsters were kept from falling

upon Moreau and Montgomery and from rending one another. He explained

to me that the comparative safety of Moreau and himself was due to the

limited mental scope of these monsters. In spite of their increased

intelligence and the tendency of their animal instincts to reawaken,

they had certain fixed ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which

absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised; had

been told that certain things were impossible, and that certain things

were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture

of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute.

Certain matters, however, in which old instinct was at war with

Moreau’s convenience, were in a less stable condition. A series of

propositions called the Law (I had already heard them recited) battled

in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their

animal natures. This Law they were ever repeating, I found, and ever

breaking. Both Montgomery and Moreau displayed particular solicitude to

keep them ignorant of the taste of blood; they feared the inevitable

suggestions of that flavour. Montgomery told me that the Law,

especially among the feline Beast People, became oddly weakened about

nightfall; that then the animal was at its strongest; that a spirit of

adventure sprang up in them at the dusk, when they would dare things

they never seemed to dream about by day. To that I owed my stalking by

the Leopard-man, on the night of my arrival. But during these earlier

days of my stay they broke the Law only furtively and after dark; in

the daylight there was a general atmosphere of respect for its

multifarious prohibitions.

And here perhaps I may give a few general facts about the island and

the Beast People. The island, which was of irregular outline and lay

low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose, of seven or eight

square miles.[2] It was volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on

three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles to the northward, and a hot

spring, were the only vestiges of the forces that had long since

originated it. Now and then a faint quiver of earthquake would be

sensible, and sometimes the ascent of the spire of smoke would be

rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam; but that was all. The population

of the island, Montgomery informed me, now numbered rather more than

sixty of these strange creations of Moreau’s art, not counting the

smaller monstrosities which lived in the undergrowth and were without

human form. Altogether he had made nearly a hundred and twenty; but

many had died, and others—like the writhing Footless Thing of which he

had told me—had come by violent ends. In answer to my question,

Montgomery said that they actually bore offspring, but that these

generally died. When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human

form upon them. There was no evidence of the inheritance of their

acquired human characteristics. The females were less numerous than the

males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy

the Law enjoined.

[2]This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle.—C.

E. P.

It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail;

my eye has had no training in details, and unhappily I cannot sketch.

Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the

disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of

their bodies; and yet—so relative is our idea of grace—my eye became

habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their

persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly. Another point was the

forward carriage of the head and the clumsy and inhuman curvature of

the spine. Even the Ape-man lacked that inward sinuous curve of the

back which makes the human figure so graceful. Most had their shoulders

hunched clumsily, and their short forearms hung weakly at their sides.

Few of them were conspicuously hairy, at least until the end of my time

upon the island.

The next most obvious deformity was in their faces, almost all of which

were prognathous, malformed about the ears, with large and protuberant

noses, very furry or very bristly hair, and often strangely-coloured or

strangely-placed eyes. None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a

chattering titter. Beyond these general characters their heads had

little in common; each preserved the quality of its particular species:

the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, the ox, or the

sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature had been

moulded. The voices, too, varied exceedingly. The hands were always

malformed; and though some surprised me by their unexpected human

appearance, almost all were deficient in the number of the digits,

clumsy about the finger-nails, and lacking any tactile sensibility.

The two most formidable Animal Men were my Leopard-man and a creature

made of hyena and swine. Larger than these were the three

bull-creatures who pulled in the boat. Then came the silvery-hairy-man,

who was also the Sayer of the Law, M’ling, and a satyr-like creature of

ape and goat. There were three Swine-men and a Swine-woman, a

mare-rhinoceros-creature, and several other females whose sources I did

not ascertain. There were several wolf-creatures, a bear-bull, and a

Saint-Bernard-man. I have already described the Ape-man, and there was

a particularly hateful (and evil-smelling) old woman made of vixen and

bear, whom I hated from the beginning. She was said to be a passionate

votary of the Law. Smaller creatures were certain dappled youths and my

little sloth-creature. But enough of this catalogue.

At first I had a shivering horror of the brutes, felt all too keenly

that they were still brutes; but insensibly I became a little

habituated to the idea of them, and moreover I was affected by

Montgomery’s attitude towards them. He had been with them so long that

he had come to regard them as almost normal human beings. His London

days seemed a glorious, impossible past to him. Only once in a year or

so did he go to Africa to deal with Moreau’s agent, a trader in animals

there. He hardly met the finest type of mankind in that seafaring

village of Spanish mongrels. The men aboard-ship, he told me, seemed at

first just as strange to him as the Beast Men seemed to me,—unnaturally

long in the leg, flat in the face, prominent in the forehead,

suspicious, dangerous, and cold-hearted. In fact, he did not like men:

his heart had warmed to me, he thought, because he had saved my life. 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 it from me at first.

M’ling, the black-faced man, Montgomery’s 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 his 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 whiskey, kicking it, beating

it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees. 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, that a thousand things

which 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 clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the

launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself

asking, 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 hunch-backed 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 she 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 bye, 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 decency and decorum of extensive costume.