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14 - The Island of Dr Moreau - H G Wells · Science Fiction Books - Daily

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Fourteen, doctor Moreau explains, And now prendick, I will explain, said
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doctor Moreau. As soon as we had eaten and drunk, I must confess
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that you are the most dictatorial guest I ever entertained. I warn you that
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this is the last I shall do to oblige you. The next thing you
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threatened to commit suicide about I shan't do, even at some personal inconvenience.
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He sat in my deck chair, a cigar, half consumed in his white,
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dexterous looking fingers. The light of the swinging lamp fell on his white
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hair. He stared through the little window out at the starlight. I sat
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as far away from him as possible. The table between us and the revolvers
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to hand. Montgomery was not present. I did not care to be with
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the two of them in such a little room. You admit that the vivisected
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human being, as you called it is, after all, only the puma,
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said Moreau. He made me visit that horror in the inner room to
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assure myself of its inhumanity. It is the puma, I said, still
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alive, but so cut and mutilated, as I pray I may never see
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living flesh again. Of all vile. Never mind that, said Moreau.
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At least spare me your youthful horrors. Montgomery used to be just the same.
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You admit that it is the puma. Now be quiet while I reel
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off my physiological lecture to you, and forthwith, beginning in the tone of
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a man supremely bored, but presently warming a little, he explained his work
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to me. He was very simple and convincing. Now and then there was
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a touch of sarcasm in his voice. Presently I found myself hot with shame
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at our mutual positions. The creatures I had seen were not men, had
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never been men. They were animals, humanized animals, triumphs of vivisection.
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You forget all that a skilled vivisector can do with living things, said Moreau.
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For my own part, I am puzzled why the things I have done
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here have not been done before. Small efforts, of course, have been
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made. Amputation, tongue cutting, excisions. Of course, you know a
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squint may be induced or cured by surgery. Then in the case of excisions,
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you of all kinds of secondary changes, pigmentary disturbances, modifications of the
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passions, alterations in the secretion of fatty tissue. I have no doubt you
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have heard of these things, of course, said I. But these foul
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creatures of yours, all in good time, said he, waving his hand
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at me. I am only the beginning. Those are trivial cases of alteration.
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Surgery can do better things than that. There is building up as well
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as breaking down and changing. You have heard, perhaps of a common surgical
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operation resorted to in cases where the nose has been destroyed. A flap of
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skin is cut from the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heels
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in the new position. This is a kind of grafting, and a new
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position of part of an animal upon itself. Grafting of freshly obtained material from
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another animal is also possible. The case of teeth, for example, the
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grafting of skin and bone is done to facilitate healing. The surgeon places in
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the middle of the wound pieces of skin snipped from another animal, or fragments
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of bone from a victim. Freshly killed hunter's cock spur, possibly you have
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heard of that flourished on the bull's neck. And the rhinoceros rats of the
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Algerian zouaves are also to be theoret of monsters manufactured by transferring a slip from
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the tail of an ordinary rat to its snout and allowing it to heal in
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that position. Monsters manufactured, said I, then you mean to tell me,
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yes, these creatures you have seen are animals carving and rot into new
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shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms,
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my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining a knowledge
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as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling
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you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago,
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but no one had the temerity to touch it. It is not simply
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the outward form of an animal which I can change. The physiology, the
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chemical rhythm of the creature may also be made to undergo an enduring modification,
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of which vaccination and other methods of inoculation with living or dead matter are exempt.
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That will no doubt be familiar to you. A similar operation is the
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transfusion of blood, with which subject, indeed, I began. These are
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all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more extensive, were the
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operations of those medieval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar cripples. Show monsters,
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some vestiges of whose art still remains in the preliminary manipulation of the young montebank
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or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them in lum Quirie. But
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perhaps my meaning grows plain now you begin to see that it is a possible
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thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another, or from
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one animal to another, to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth,
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to modify the articulations of its limbs, and indeed to change it in its
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most intimately structure. And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought
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as an end and systematically my modern investigators, until I took it up.
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Some such things have been hit upon in the last resort of surgery. Most
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of the kindred evidence that will recur to your mind has been demonstrated, as
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it were, by accident, by tyrants, by criminals, by the breeders
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of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained, clumsy handed men working
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for their own immediate ends. I was the first man to take up this
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question, armed with antiseptic surgery and with a really scientific knowledge of the laws
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of growth. Yet one would imagine it must have been practiced in secret before
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such creatures as the Siamese twins, and in the vaults of the Inquisition.
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No doubt their chief aim was artistic torture. But some at least of the
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inquisitors must have had a touch of scienceific curiosity. But said I these things
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these animals talk. He said, that was so, and proceeded to point
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out that the possibility of vivisection does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis.
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A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the
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bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism, we find the promise of a
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possibility of superseding old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the
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inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he
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said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct. Pugnacity is trained
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into courageous self sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. And the great
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difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued, in the
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capacity to frame delicately different sound symbols by which thought could be sustained in this
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I failed to agree with him, but with a certain incivility, he declined
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to notice my objection. He repeated that the thing was so, and continued
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his account of his work. I asked him why he had taken the human
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form as a model. There seemed to me then, and there still seems
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to me now, a strange wickedness for that choice. He confessed that he
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had chosen that form by chance. I might as well have worked to form
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sheep into lamas and llamas into sheep. I suppose there is something in the
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human form that appeals to the artistic turn of mind more powerfully than any animal
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shape can. But have not confined myself to man making once or twice?
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He was silent for a minute. Perhaps these years, how they have slipped
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by, And here I have wasted a day saving your life, and am
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now wasting an hour explaining myself. But said I, I still do not
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understand. Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain. The only thing
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that could excuse vivisection to me would be some application, precisely, said he.
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But you see I am differently constituted. We are on different platforms.
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You are a materialist. I am not a materialist. I began hotly in
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my view. In my view, for it is just this question of pain
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that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick,
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so long as your own pain drives you, so long as pain underlies your
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propositions about sin, So long I tell you you are an animal, thinking
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a little obscurely what an animal feels this pain? I gave an impatient shrug
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at such sophistry. Oh but it is such a little thing. A mind
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truly open to what science has to teach must see that it is a little
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thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of
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cosmic dust, invisible, long before the nearest star could be attained. It
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may be I say that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But
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the laws we feel our way towards. Why, even on this earth,
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even among living things, what pain is there? As he spoke, he
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drew a little pinknife from his pocket, opened the smaller blade, and moved
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his chair so that I could see his thigh. Then, choosing the place
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deliberately, he drove the blade into his leg and withdrew it. No doubt,
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he said, you have seen that before. It does not hurt a
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pinprick, But what does it show. The capacity for pain is not kneaded
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in the muscle and is not placed. There is but little kneeded in the
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skin, and only here and there over the thigh is a spot capable of
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feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate
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us. Not all living flesh is painful, nor is all nerve, not
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even all sensory nerve. There's no taint of pain, real pain in the
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sensations of the optic nerve. If you wound the optic nerve, you merely
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see flashes of light, just as disease of the auditory nerve merely means a
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humming in our ears. Plants do not feel pain, nor the lower animals.
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It's possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish do not feel pain
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at all. Then with men, the more in intelligent they become, the
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more intelligently they will see after their own welfare, and the less they will
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need to go to keep them out of danger. I never heard of a
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useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution. Sooner or later,
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did you and pain gets needless. Then I am a religious man,
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predict, as every sane man must be. It may be I fancy that
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I have seen more of the ways of this world's maker than you, For
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I have sought his laws in my way all my life, while you,
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I understand, have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you, pleasure and
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pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell. Pleasure and pain, Bah,
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what is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's owery in the dark, This store
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which men and women set on pleasure and pain, predict, is the mark
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of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came.
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Pain, pain and pleasure They are for us only so long as we
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wriggle in the dust. You see, I went on with this research just
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the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of
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true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an
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answer, and got a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible?
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You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows
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upon him. You cannot imagine the strange, colorless delight of these intellectual desires.
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The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow creature,
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but a problem sympathetic pain. All I know of it I remember as a
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thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted it was the one
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thing I wanted to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.
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But said I, the thing is in a pomination. To this day,
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I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter, he continued.
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The study of nature makes a man at last as remorseless as nature. I
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have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing, and
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the material has tripped into the huts yonder. It is nearly eleven years since
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we came here. I in Montgomery and six cannakers. I remember the green
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stillness of the island and the empty ocean about us, as though it was
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yesterday. The place seemed waiting for me. The stores were landed in,
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the house was built. The cannarkers found some huts near the ravine. I
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went to work here upon what I had brought with me. There were some
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disagreeable things happened. At first. I began with the sheep and killed it.
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After a day and a half by a slip of the scalpel. I
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took another sheep and made a thing of pain and fear, and left it
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bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had finished
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it, but when I went to it I was discontented with it. It
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remembered me and was terrified beyond imagination, and it had no more than the
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wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it, the clumsier it
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seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery. These
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animals without courage, these fear haunted, pain driven things, without a spark
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of pugnacious energy to face torment, they are no good for man making.
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Then I took a gorilla I had, and upon that, working with infinite
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care and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. All the
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week, night and day I molded him. With him, it was chief
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the brain that needed molting, much had to be added, much changed.
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I thought him a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had finished him,
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and he lay bandaged, bound and motionless before me. It was only
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when his life was assured that I left him and came into his room again,
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and found Montgomery much as you are. He had heard some of the
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cries as the thing grew, human cries like those that disturbed you. So
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I didn't take him completely into my confidence at first, and the Cannachers too
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had realized something of it. They were scared out of the wits by the
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sight of me. I got Montgomery over to me in a way, but
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I and he had the hardest job to prevent the Kannakers deserting. Finally they
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did, and so we lost the yacht. I spent many days educating the
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brute. Altogether, I had him for three or four months. I taught
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him the rudiments of English, gave him ideas of counting, even made the
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thing read the alphabet. But at that he was slow, though I've met
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with idiots slower. He began with a clean sheet mentally, had no memories
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left in his mind of what he had been. When his scars were quite
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healed, and he was no longer anything but painful and stiff, and able
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to converse a little, I took him yonder and introduced him to the Canachers
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as an interesting stowaway. They were horribly afraid of him at first, somehow,
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which offended me rather for I was conceited about him. But his ways
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seemed so mild, and he was so abject, that after a time they
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received him and took his education in hand. He was quick to learn,
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very imitative and adaptive, and built himself a hovel, rather better, it
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seemed to me, than their own shanties. There was one among the boys,
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a bit of a missionary, and he taught the thing to read,
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or at least to pick out letters, and gave him some rudimentary ideas of
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morality. But it seems the beast's habits were not all that is desirable.
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I rested from work for some days after this, and it was in a
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mind to write an account of the whole affair, to wake up English physiology.
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Then I came upon the creature squatting up in a tree and gibbering at
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two of the kanakas who had been teasing him. I threatened him, told
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him the inhumanity of such a proceeding, aroused his sense of shame, and
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came home, resolved to do better. Before I took my work back to
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England. I have been doing better, but somehow the things drift back again.
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The stubborn beast flesh grows day by day back again. But I mean
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to do better things still. I mean to conquer that this puma. But
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that's the story. All the Kannaker boys are dead now. One fell overboard
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of the launch, and one died of a wounded heel that he poisoned in
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some way with plant juice. Three went away in the yacht, and I
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suppose and Hope were drowned. The other one was killed. Well, I
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have replaced them, Montgomery went on, as much as you are disposed to
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do at first. And then what became of the other one, said I
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sharply, the other Kannaker who was killed. The fact is, after I
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had made a number of human creatures, I made a thing. He hesitated,
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Yes, said I it was killed. I don't understand, said I.
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Do you mean to say it killed the Kannaker. Yes, it killed
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several other things that it caught. We chased it for a couple of days.
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It got loose by accident. I never meant it to get away.
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It was unfinished. It was purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing
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with a horrible face that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It
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was immensely strong, and in infuriating pain. It lurked in the woods for
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some days until we hunted it, and then it wriggled into the northern part
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of the island, and we divided the party to close in upon it.
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Montgomery insisted upon coming with me. The man had a rifle, and when
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his body was found, one of the beryls was curved into the shape of
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an ass and very nearly bitten through. Montgomery shot the thing. After that
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I stuck to the ideal of humanity, except for little things. He became
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silent. I sat in silence watching his face. So for twenty years altogether,
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counting nine years in England, I have been going on. And there
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is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied,
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challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I
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fall below it, but always I fall short of the things I dream.
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The human shape I can get now almost with ease, so that it is
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lithe and graceful, or thick and strong. But often there is trouble with
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the hands and the claws, painful things that I dare not shape too freely.
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But it is in the subtle grafting and reshaping one must needs do to
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the brain that my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with
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unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps, and least satisfactory of all is something that
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I cannot touch. Somewhere I cannot determine where in the seat of the emotions,
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cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to
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burst forth suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate,
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or fear. These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you so
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soon as you began to observe them. But to me, just after I
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make them, they seemed to be indisputably human beings. It's afterwards, as
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I observed them that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another
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creeps to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer.
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Yet, each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain,
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I say, this time I will burn out all the animal. This
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time I will make a rational creature of my own. After all, what
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is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making, he
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thought darkly. But I am drawing near the fastness this puma of mine.
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After a silence, and they revert. As soon as my hand is taken
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from them. The beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again.
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Another long silence. Then you take the things you make into those dens,
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said I. They go. I turn them out when I begin to
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feel the beast in them, And presently they wander there. They all dread
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this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there.
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Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has
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trained one or two of them to our service. He's ashamed of it,
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but I believe he half likes some of those beasts. It's his business,
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not mine. They only sicken me with a sense of failure. I take
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no interest in them. I fancy they follow in the lines that cannot Commissionary
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marked out, and have a kind of mockery of a rational life. Poor
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beasts. There's something they call the law, seeing hymns about all thine.
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They build themselves their dins, gather fruit and pull herbs, marry even.
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But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and
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see they are nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish, anger,
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and the lusts to live and gratify themselves. Yet there odd complex,
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like everything else alive, there is a kind of upward striving in them,
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part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks
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me. I have some hope of this puma. I have worked hard at
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her head and brain, and now, said he, standing up, after
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a long gap of silence, during which we had each pursued our own thoughts.
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What do you think? Are you in fear of me? Still?
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I looked at him and saw but a white faced, white haired man with
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calm eyes. Save for his serenity, the touch almost of beauty that resulted
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from his set tranquility, and his magnificent build, he might have passed Muster
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among a hundred other comfortable old gentlemen. Then I shivered. By way of
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answer to his second question, jun I handed him a revolver with either hand.
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Keep them, he said, and snatched a yawn. He stood up,
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stared at me for a moment, and smiled. You've had two eventful
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days, said he. I should advise some sleep. I'm glad it's all
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clear. Good night. He thought me over for a moment that went out
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by the inner door. I immediately turned the key in the outer one.
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I sat down again, sat for a time in a kind of stagnant mood,
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so weary emotionally, mentally, and physically that I could not think beyond
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the point at which he had left me. The black window stared at me
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like an eye. At last, with an effort, I put out the
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light and got into the hammock. Very soon I was asleep,