Classic Adventure Books - Daily

15 - The Island of Dr Moreau - H G Wells

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Duration:: 15m
Broadcast on:: 01 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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Murrow's explanation stood before my mind, clear and definite, from the moment of my awakening. Not 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 manlike 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. The tapping came at the door, and I heard the gluttonous accents of Imling speaking. I pocketed one of the revolvers, keeping one hand upon it, and opened to him. "Good morning, sir," 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 Murrow, 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 beastfolk lived. In particular, I was urgent to know how these inhuman monsters were kept from falling upon Murrow and Montgomery, and from rending one another. He explained to me that the comparative safety of Murrow 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 Murrow into their minds, which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotized, had been told that certain things were possible, 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 all instinct was at war with Murrow's convenience, were in a less stable condition. A series of propositions called "The Law," I had 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 Murrow displayed particular solicitude to keep them ignorant of the taste of blood. They feared the inevitable suggestions of that flavor. 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 were 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 multiferous 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. 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 an 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 the strange creations of Morozart, not counting the smaller monstrosities which lived in the undergrowth and were without human form. All together 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. An answer to my question Montgomery said that they actually bore offspring, but that these generally died. When they lived, Moroz 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. 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 inwards 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 prognethous, malformed about the ears, with large protobearant 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. Their 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 digits, clumsy about the fingernails 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 seer of the law, emling, and a seighter-like creature of ape and goat. There were the three swine men, and a swine woman, a mere rhinoceros creature, and several other females whose sources I did not ascertain. There were several wolf-creatures, a bear bull, and a saint-banard 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. The law-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 dukingly 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 pass to him. Only once in a year or so did he go to Attica to deal with Monroe's agents, a traitor 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. Imling, the black-faced man, Montgomery's attendant, the thirst 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 while 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 morose-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 capour with extraordinary delight. Sometimes he would ill treat it, especially after he had been at the whisky, kicking it, beating it, pelting it with stones or lighted fuses. And 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 impression 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 from his mechanical labours. Before I would meet the fox-bear woman's vault-pene, 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 any doubt or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunched-back human savage, to all appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dins, what stretches arms in yawn, showing with startling suddenness scissor-edged incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant as knives; or in some narrow pathway, glancing with the transitory daring into the eyes of some live, white-swathed female figure, I would suddenly see, with a spasmodic revulsion, that she had slit-like pupils. Before glancing down note the curving nail with which she held her shapeless wrap about her. It is a curious thing, by the by, 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 a quorum of extensive costume. 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