The Island of Doctor Moreau: Chapters 17–22

Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike and abhorrence for this infamous experiment of Moreau's.

My fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory.

It met its persecutor with a shriek, almost exactly like that of an angry virago.

“Great God, Prendick!” he said, not noticing that I was hurt, “that brute's loose! Tore the fetter out of the wall! Have you seen them?”

I strolled back to the doorway, then to the corner again, and so began pacing to and fro like a sentinel upon duty.

I had been standing behind him during this colloquy.

Then came a yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus rushed by us shrieking.

“Not I,” said I, and sat grimly watching his face under the yellow paraffine flare, as he drank himself into a garrulous misery.

I have a memory of infinite tedium.

He wandered into a maudlin defence of the Beast People and of M'ling.

Behind me the paraffine lamp flared hot and ruddy.

The sky had grown brighter, the setting moon was becoming pale and opaque in the luminous blue of the day.

A sudden convulsion of rage shook me.

I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the beach into the thickets.

Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me.

It retreated a little way, very like a dog being sent home, and stopped, looking at me imploringly with canine brown eyes.

Had I kept my courage up to the level of the dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast People.

Had I kept my courage up to the level of the dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast People.

The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread.

It began to move slowly, interminably.

But now it was night, and all the miasmatic 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.

Most of them disregarded me, ostentatiously.

In this manner began the longer part of my sojourn upon this Island of Doctor Moreau.

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-humanised brutes.

Indeed, I may say—without vanity, I hope—that I held something like pre-eminence among them.

The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense.

The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense.

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.

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.

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.

Of course these creatures 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 ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions.

I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned 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 am an extremely unhandy man (my schooling was over before the days of Slöjd); but most of the requirements of a raft I met at last in some clumsy, circuitous way or other, 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 untravelled seas.

Two men were in the boat, sitting low down,—one by the bows, the other at the rudder. The head was not kept to the wind; it yawed and fell away.

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 moored to an inward projection of the reef, for fear of the Beast People.

And on the third day I was picked up by a brig from Apia to San Francisco. Neither the captain nor the mate would believe my story...

I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children.

There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.