Chapter 15 - 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 bad 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 Arica 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.