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 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 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.
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.
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.