第 十五 章 · DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS.

. DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS.

“And now, Prendick, I will explain,” said Doctor Moreau, so soon as we

had eaten and drunk. “I must confess that you are the most dictatorial

guest I ever entertained. I warn you that this is the last I shall 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 care to be

with the two of them in such a little room.

“You admit that the 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 so 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 that 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, humanised 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

cock-spur—possibly you have heard of that—flourished on the bull’s

neck; and the rhinoceros rats of the Algerian zouaves 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, and yet I am telling you nothing

new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no

one had the temerity to touch it. It is not simply the outward form of

an animal which 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, 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.’—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 articulations

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 possibility of

vivisection does 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 superseding old inherent instincts by new suggestions,

grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed

of what we call moral education, he said, 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 continued,—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.

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 for 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

artistic 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?”

As he spoke he drew a little penknife 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,” he said, “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,—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. Not all living flesh is painful; nor is all nerve,

not 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, nor the lower

animals; it’s possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish

do not feel pain at all. 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.

“Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may

be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker

than you,—for I have sought his laws, in _my_ way, all my life, while

you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you,

pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell. Pleasure and

pain—bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the

dark? This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain,

Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them,—the mark of the beast

from which they came! Pain, pain and pleasure, they are for us only so

long as we wriggle in the dust.

“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is

the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question,

devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got a fresh question.

Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means

to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You

cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual

desires! The thing before you is no longer an animal, a

fellow-creature, but a problem! Sympathetic pain,—all I know of it I

remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted—it was

the one thing I wanted—to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a

living shape.”

“But,” said I, “the thing is an abomination—”

“To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter,” he

continued. “The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as

Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was

pursuing; and the material has—dripped into the huts yonder. It is

nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery and six

Kanakas. I remember the green stillness of the island and the empty

ocean about us, as though it was yesterday. The place seemed waiting

for me.

“The stores were landed and the house was built. The Kanakas founded

some huts near the ravine. I went to work here upon what I had brought

with me. There were some disagreeable things happened at first. I began

with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip of the

scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear and

left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had

finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it. It

remembered me, and was terrified beyond imagination; and it had no more

than the wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it the clumsier it

seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery. These

animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things,

without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,—they are no good

for man-making.

“Then I took a gorilla I had; and upon that, working with infinite care

and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. All the

week, night and day, I moulded him. With him it was chiefly the brain

that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed. I thought him

a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had finished him, and he lay

bandaged, bound, and motionless before me. It was only when his life

was assured that I left him and came into this room again, and found

Montgomery much as you are. He had heard some of the cries as the thing

grew human,—cries like those that disturbed _you_ so. I didn’t take him

completely into my confidence at first. And the Kanakas too, had

realised something of it. They were scared out of their wits by the

sight of me. I got Montgomery over to me—in a way; but I and he had the

hardest job to prevent the Kanakas deserting. Finally they did; and so

we lost the yacht. I spent many days educating the brute,—altogether I

had him for three or four months. I taught him the rudiments of

English; gave him ideas of counting; even made the thing read the

alphabet. But at that he was slow, though I’ve met with idiots slower.

He began with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories left in his mind

of what he had been. When his scars were quite healed, and he was no

longer anything but painful and stiff, and able to converse a little, I

took him yonder and introduced him to the Kanakas as an interesting

stowaway.

“They were horribly afraid of him at first, somehow,—which offended me

rather, for I was conceited about him; but his ways seemed so mild, and

he was so abject, that after a time they received him and took his

education in hand. He was quick to learn, very imitative and adaptive,

and built himself a hovel rather better, it seemed to me, than their

own shanties. There was one among the boys a bit of a missionary, and

he taught the thing to read, or at least to pick out letters, and gave

him some rudimentary ideas of morality; but it seems the beast’s habits

were not all that is desirable.

“I rested from work for some days after this, and was in a mind to

write an account of the whole affair to wake up English physiology.

Then I came upon the creature squatting up in a tree and gibbering at

two of the Kanakas who had been teasing him. I threatened him, told him

the inhumanity of such a proceeding, aroused his sense of shame, and

came home resolved to do better before I took my work back to England.

I have been doing better. But somehow the things drift back again: the

stubborn beast-flesh grows day by day back again. But I mean to do

better things still. I mean to conquer that. This puma—

“But that’s the story. All the Kanaka boys are dead now; one fell

overboard of the launch, and one died of a wounded heel that he

poisoned in some way with plant-juice. Three went away in the yacht,

and I suppose and hope were drowned. The other one—was killed. Well, I

have replaced them. Montgomery went on much as you are disposed to do

at first, and then—”

“What became of the other one?” said I, sharply,—“the other Kanaka who

was killed?”

“The fact is, after I had made a number of human creatures I made a

Thing—” He hesitated.

“Yes?” said I.

“It was killed.”

“I don’t understand,” said I; “do you mean to say—”

“It killed the Kanaka—yes. It killed several other things that it

caught. We chased it for a couple of days. It only got loose by

accident—I never meant it to get away. It wasn’t finished. It was

purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing, with a horrible face,

that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It was immensely

strong, and in infuriating pain. It lurked in the woods for some days,

until we hunted it; and then it wriggled into the northern part of the

island, and we divided the party to close in upon it. Montgomery

insisted upon coming with me. The man had a rifle; and when his body

was found, one of the barrels was curved into the shape of an S and

very nearly bitten through. Montgomery shot the thing. After that I

stuck to the ideal of humanity—except for little things.”

He became silent. I sat in silence watching his face.

“So for twenty years altogether—counting nine years in England—I have

been going on; and there is still something in everything I do that

defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort.

Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it; but always

I fall short of the things I dream. The human shape I can get now,

almost with ease, so that it is lithe and graceful, or thick and

strong; but often there is trouble with the hands and the

claws,—painful things, that I dare not shape too freely. But it is in

the subtle grafting and reshaping one must needs do to the brain that

my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with

unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps. And least satisfactory of

all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere—I cannot determine

where—in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that

harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst forth suddenly and

inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear.

These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you so soon as

you began to observe them; but to me, just after I make them, they seem

to be indisputably human beings. It’s afterwards, as I observe them,

that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another, creeps

to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer yet! Each time

I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This

time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational

creature of my own!’ After all, what is ten years? Men have been a

hundred thousand in the making.” He thought darkly. “But I am drawing

near the fastness. This puma of mine—” After a silence, “And they

revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep

back, begins to assert itself again.” Another long silence.

“Then you take the things you make into those dens?” said I.

“They go. I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and

presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is

a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it,

for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them

to our service. He’s ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of

those beasts. It’s his business, not mine. They only sicken me with a

sense of failure. I take no interest in them. I fancy they follow in

the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery

of a rational life, poor beasts! There’s something they call the Law.

Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’ They build themselves their dens, gather

fruit, and pull herbs—marry even. But I can see through it all, see

into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts,

beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify

themselves.—Yet they’re odd; complex, like everything else alive. There

is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual

emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me. I have some hope of

this puma. I have worked hard at her head and brain—

“And now,” said he, standing up after a long gap of silence, during

which we had each pursued our own thoughts, “what do you think? Are you

in fear of me still?”

I looked at him, and saw but a white-faced, white-haired man, with calm

eyes. Save for his serenity, the touch almost of beauty that resulted

from his set tranquillity and his magnificent build, he might have

passed muster among a hundred other comfortable old gentlemen. Then I

shivered. By way of answer to his second question, I handed him a

revolver with either hand.

“Keep them,” he said, and snatched at a yawn. He stood up, stared at me

for a moment, and smiled. “You have had two eventful days,” said he. “I

should advise some sleep. I’m glad it’s all clear. Good-night.” He

thought me over for a moment, then went out by the inner door.

I immediately turned the key in the outer one. I sat down again; sat

for a time in a kind of stagnant mood, so weary, emotionally, mentally,

and physically, that I could not think beyond the point at which he had

left me. The black window stared at me like an eye. At last with an

effort I put out the light and got into the hammock. Very soon I was

asleep.