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21 - The Island of Dr Moreau - H G Wells · Adventure Books Collection

• Twenty one, 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 crouch 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 realized what had happened sufficiently disday my fingers on the revolver. Who is that? I said, in a hoarse whisper. The revolver still pointed, A 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 realize 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. The 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 dark 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 stag hound pursuing me. But now it was night, and all the meres Mattic 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 vapor that was forever streaming from the fumeroles of the island. Walk by me, said I, nerving myself in. 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 folks 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 arms 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 back 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 satier raised a doubt, I answered him. Then one of the dapple things objected in 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 dins in the ravine, and I, dreading the silence and darkness, went with them, knowing it was safer with several of them than with one alone. In this manner began the longer part of my sojourn upon the 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 humanized 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 honor 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 invented 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 believed 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 it, 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 ambuscards. 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 in 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 forever jabbering at me, jabbering the most errant 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 he was the silliest creature I had 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 fingertips, and quite unable to recover the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily, Drinking by suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner. Every day. I realized, 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 disorganization 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 morose 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. 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 forever. Of course, these 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 ersine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly, But each was tainted with other creatures, a kind of generalized 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 forefoot, 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 Ipaquana 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 into 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 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 at to 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 warn 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 an 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 ghostly 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 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 nine pin. 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 layers 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 newcomer. 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 can 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 creature 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 Sliord. But most of the requirements of a raft I met at last in some clumsy, circuitous way or another, 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 untraveled seas. I would have even tried pottery, but the eye and 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 wander 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, marveling 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 boughs, the other at the rudder. The head was not kept in the wind. It yarred 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 or 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 ipa Quana, 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 again, 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 in word to an inward projection of the wreath, for fear of the beast people,