The Island of Doctor Moreau (14 page)

"Has he come?" said Montgomery.

"Moreau?" said I. "No."

"My God!" The man was panting, almost sobbing. "Go back in," he said,
taking my arm. "They're mad. They're all rushing about mad. What can
have happened? I don't know. I'll tell you, when my breath comes.
Where's some brandy?"

Montgomery limped before me into the room and sat down in the deck chair.
M'ling flung himself down just outside the doorway and began
panting like a dog. I got Montgomery some brandy-and-water. He
sat staring in front of him at nothing, recovering his breath.
After some minutes he began to tell me what had happened.

He had followed their track for some way. It was plain enough at
first on account of the crushed and broken bushes, white rags torn
from the puma's bandages, and occasional smears of blood on the leaves
of the shrubs and undergrowth. He lost the track, however, on the stony
ground beyond the stream where I had seen the Beast Man drinking,
and went wandering aimlessly westward shouting Moreau's name.
Then M'ling had come to him carrying a light hatchet. M'ling had seen
nothing of the puma affair; had been felling wood, and heard him calling.
They went on shouting together. Two Beast Men came crouching
and peering at them through the undergrowth, with gestures and a
furtive carriage that alarmed Montgomery by their strangeness.
He hailed them, and they fled guiltily. He stopped shouting
after that, and after wandering some time farther in an undecided way,
determined to visit the huts.

He found the ravine deserted.

Growing more alarmed every minute, he began to retrace his steps.
Then it was he encountered the two Swine-men I had seen dancing
on the night of my arrival; blood-stained they were about the mouth,
and intensely excited. They came crashing through the ferns,
and stopped with fierce faces when they saw him. He cracked his whip
in some trepidation, and forthwith they rushed at him. Never before
had a Beast Man dared to do that. One he shot through the head;
M'ling flung himself upon the other, and the two rolled grappling.
M'ling got his brute under and with his teeth in its throat,
and Montgomery shot that too as it struggled in M'ling's grip.
He had some difficulty in inducing M'ling to come on with him.
Thence they had hurried back to me. On the way, M'ling had suddenly
rushed into a thicket and driven out an under-sized Ocelot-man,
also blood-stained, and lame through a wound in the foot.
This brute had run a little way and then turned savagely at bay,
and Montgomery—with a certain wantonness, I thought—had shot
him.

"What does it all mean?" said I.

He shook his head, and turned once more to the brandy.

WHEN I saw Montgomery swallow a third dose of brandy, I took it
upon myself to interfere. He was already more than half fuddled.
I told him that some serious thing must have happened to
Moreau by this time, or he would have returned before this,
and that it behoved us to ascertain what that catastrophe was.
Montgomery raised some feeble objections, and at last agreed.
We had some food, and then all three of us started.

It is possibly due to the tension of my mind, at the time,
but even now that start into the hot stillness of the tropical
afternoon is a singularly vivid impression. M'ling went first,
his shoulder hunched, his strange black head moving with quick
starts as he peered first on this side of the way and then on that.
He was unarmed; his axe he had dropped when he encountered
the Swine-man. Teeth were
his
weapons, when it came to fighting.
Montgomery followed with stumbling footsteps, his hands in his pockets,
his face downcast; he was in a state of muddled sullenness
with me on account of the brandy. My left arm was in a sling
(it was lucky it was my left), and I carried my revolver in my right.
Soon we traced a narrow path through the wild luxuriance of
the island, going northwestward; and presently M'ling stopped,
and became rigid with watchfulness. Montgomery almost staggered
into him, and then stopped too. Then, listening intently,
we heard coming through the trees the sound of voices and footsteps
approaching us.

"He is dead," said a deep, vibrating voice.

"He is not dead; he is not dead," jabbered another.

"We saw, we saw," said several voices.

"Hullo!" suddenly shouted Montgomery, "Hullo, there!"

"Confound you!" said I, and gripped my pistol.

There was a silence, then a crashing among the interlacing vegetation,
first here, then there, and then half-a-dozen faces appeared,—strange
faces, lit by a strange light. M'ling made a growling
noise in his throat. I recognised the Ape-man: I had indeed
already identified his voice, and two of the white-swathed
brown-featured creatures I had seen in Montgomery's boat.
With these were the two dappled brutes and that grey, horribly crooked
creature who said the Law, with grey hair streaming down its cheeks,
heavy grey eyebrows, and grey locks pouring off from a central
parting upon its sloping forehead,—a heavy, faceless thing,
with strange red eyes, looking at us curiously from amidst
the green.

For a space no one spoke. Then Montgomery hiccoughed, "Who—said
he was dead?"

The Monkey-man looked guiltily at the hairy-grey Thing. "He is dead,"
said this monster. "They saw."

There was nothing threatening about this detachment, at any rate.
They seemed awestricken and puzzled.

"Where is he?" said Montgomery.

"Beyond," and the grey creature pointed.

"Is there a Law now?" asked the Monkey-man. "Is it still to be this
and that? Is he dead indeed?"

"Is there a Law?" repeated the man in white. "Is there a Law,
thou Other with the Whip?"

"He is dead," said the hairy-grey Thing. And they all stood
watching us.

"Prendick," said Montgomery, turning his dull eyes to me.
"He's dead, evidently."

I had been standing behind him during this colloquy.
I began to see how things lay with them. I suddenly stepped in front
of Montgomery and lifted up my voice:—"Children of the Law,"
I said, "he is
not
dead!" M'ling turned his sharp eyes on me.
"He has changed his shape; he has changed his body," I went on.
"For a time you will not see him. He is—there," I pointed upward,
"where he can watch you. You cannot see him, but he can see you.
Fear the Law!"

I looked at them squarely. They flinched.

"He is great, he is good," said the Ape-man, peering fearfully
upward among the dense trees.

"And the other Thing?" I demanded.

"The Thing that bled, and ran screaming and sobbing,—that is dead too,"
said the grey Thing, still regarding me.

"That's well," grunted Montgomery.

"The Other with the Whip—" began the grey Thing.

"Well?" said I.

"Said he was dead."

But Montgomery was still sober enough to understand my motive in denying
Moreau's death. "He is not dead," he said slowly, "not dead at all.
No more dead than I am."

"Some," said I, "have broken the Law: they will die. Some have died.
Show us now where his old body lies,—the body he cast away because
he had no more need of it."

"It is this way, Man who walked in the Sea," said the grey Thing.

And with these six creatures guiding us, we went through the tumult
of ferns and creepers and tree-stems towards the northwest.
Then came a yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little
pink homunculus rushed by us shrieking. Immediately after appeared
a monster in headlong pursuit, blood-bedabbled, who was amongst us
almost before he could stop his career. The grey Thing leapt aside.
M'ling, with a snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside. Montgomery fired
and missed, bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run.
I fired, and the Thing still came on; fired again, point-blank, into
its ugly face. I saw its features vanish in a flash: its face was
driven in. Yet it passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him,
fell headlong beside him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its
death-agony.

I found myself alone with M'ling, the dead brute, and the prostrate man.
Montgomery raised himself slowly and stared in a muddled way at
the shattered Beast Man beside him. It more than half sobered him.
He scrambled to his feet. Then I saw the grey Thing returning cautiously
through the trees.

"See," said I, pointing to the dead brute, "is the Law not alive?
This came of breaking the Law."

He peered at the body. "He sends the Fire that kills,"
said he, in his deep voice, repeating part of the Ritual.
The others gathered round and stared for a space.

At last we drew near the westward extremity of the island.
We came upon the gnawed and mutilated body of the puma,
its shoulder-bone smashed by a bullet, and perhaps twenty yards
farther found at last what we sought. Moreau lay face downward
in a trampled space in a canebrake. One hand was almost severed
at the wrist and his silvery hair was dabbled in blood.
His head had been battered in by the fetters of the puma.
The broken canes beneath him were smeared with blood.
His revolver we could not find. Montgomery turned him over.
Resting at intervals, and with the help of the seven Beast People
(for he was a heavy man), we carried Moreau back to the enclosure.
The night was darkling. Twice we heard unseen creatures howling
and shrieking past our little band, and once the little pink
sloth-creature appeared and stared at us, and vanished again.
But we were not attacked again. At the gates of the enclosure
our company of Beast People left us, M'ling going with the rest.
We locked ourselves in, and then took Moreau's mangled
body into the yard and laid it upon a pile of brushwood.
Then we went into the laboratory and put an end to all we found living
there.

WHEN this was accomplished, and we had washed and eaten,
Montgomery and I went into my little room and seriously discussed
our position for the first time. It was then near midnight.
He was almost sober, but greatly disturbed in his mind.
He had been strangely under the influence of Moreau's personality:
I do not think it had ever occurred to him that Moreau could die.
This disaster was the sudden collapse of the habits that had become part of
his nature in the ten or more monotonous years he had spent on the island.
He talked vaguely, answered my questions crookedly, wandered into
general questions.

"This silly ass of a world," he said; "what a muddle it all is!
I haven't had any life. I wonder when it's going to begin.
Sixteen years being bullied by nurses and schoolmasters at
their own sweet will; five in London grinding hard at medicine,
bad food, shabby lodgings, shabby clothes, shabby vice, a blunder,—I
didn't know any better,—and hustled off to this beastly island.
Ten years here! What's it all for, Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by
a baby?"

It was hard to deal with such ravings. "The thing we have to think
of now," said I, "is how to get away from this island."

"What's the good of getting away? I'm an outcast.
Where am
I
to join on? It's all very well for
you
, Prendick.
Poor old Moreau! We can't leave him here to have his bones picked.
As it is—And besides, what will become of the decent part of the
Beast Folk?"

"Well," said I, "that will do to-morrow. I've been thinking we might make
the brushwood into a pyre and burn his body—and those other things.
Then what will happen with the Beast Folk?"

"
I
don't know. I suppose those that were made of beasts of prey will
make silly asses of themselves sooner or later. We can't massacre
the lot—can we? I suppose that's what
your
humanity would suggest?
But they'll change. They are sure to change."

He talked thus inconclusively until at last I felt my temper going.

"Damnation!" he exclaimed at some petulance of mine; "can't you see I'm
in a worse hole than you are?" And he got up, and went for the brandy.
"Drink!" he said returning, "you logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint
of an atheist, drink!"

"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. M'ling, he said,
was the only thing that had ever really cared for him.
And suddenly an idea came to him.

"I'm damned!" said he, staggering to his feet and clutching
the brandy bottle.

By some flash of intuition I knew what it was he intended.
"You don't give drink to that beast!" I said, rising and facing him.

"Beast!" said he. "You're the beast. He takes his liquor
like a Christian. Come out of the way, Prendick!"

"For God's sake," said I.

"Get—out of the way!" he roared, and suddenly whipped out his revolver.

"Very well," said I, and stood aside, half-minded to fall upon him
as he put his hand upon the latch, but deterred by the thought
of my useless arm. "You've made a beast of yourself,—to the beasts
you may go."

He flung the doorway open, and stood half facing me between
the yellow lamp-light and the pallid glare of the moon;
his eye-sockets were blotches of black under his stubbly eyebrows.

"You're a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing
and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my
throat to-morrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night."
He turned and went out into the moonlight. "M'ling!" he cried;
"M'ling, old friend!"

Three dim creatures in the silvery light came along the edge
of the wan beach,—one a white-wrapped creature, the other two
blotches of blackness following it. They halted, staring.
Then I saw M'ling's hunched shoulders as he came round the corner
of the house.