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.
XVI. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.
MY inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread of my story.
After I had breakfasted with Montgomery, he took me across the island to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring into whose scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day.
Both of us carried whips and loaded revolvers.
While going through a leafy jungle on our road thither, we heard a rabbit squealing.
We stopped and listened, but we heard no more; and presently we went on our way, and the incident dropped out of our minds.
Montgomery called my attention to certain little pink animals with long hind-legs, that went leaping through the undergrowth.
He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had invented.
He had fancied they might serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had defeated this intention.
I had already encountered some of these creatures,—once during my moonlight flight from the Leopard-man, and once during my pursuit by Moreau on the previous day.
By chance, one hopping to avoid us leapt into the hole caused by the uprooting of a wind-blown tree; before it could extricate itself we managed to catch it.
It spat like a cat, scratched and kicked vigorously with its hind-legs, and made an attempt to bite; but its teeth were too feeble to inflict more than a painless pinch.
It seemed to me rather a pretty little creature; and as Montgomery stated that it never destroyed the turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits, I should imagine it might prove a convenient substitute for the common rabbit in gentlemen's parks.
We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips and splintered deeply.
Montgomery called my attention to this.
“Not to claw bark of trees, that is the Law,” he said. “Much some of them care for it!”
It was after this, I think, that we met the Satyr and the Ape-man.
The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau,—his face ovine in expression, like the coarser Hebrew type; his voice a harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic.
He was gnawing the husk of a pod-like fruit as he passed us.
Both of them saluted Montgomery.
“Hail,” said they, “to the Other with the Whip!”
“There's a Third with a Whip now,” said Montgomery. “So you'd better mind!”
“Was he not made?” said the Ape-man. “He said—he said he was made.”
The Satyr-man looked curiously at me.
“The Third with the Whip, he that walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.”
“He has a thin long whip,” said Montgomery.
“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr. “You never bleed nor weep.
The Master does not bleed or weep.”
“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you'll bleed and weep if you don't look out!”
“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.
“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went on with him.
The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching us and making other remarks to each other.
“He says nothing,” said the Satyr. “Men have voices.”
“Yesterday he asked me of things to eat,” said the Ape-man. “He did not know.”
Then they spoke inaudible things, and I heard the Satyr laughing.
It was on our way back that we came upon the dead rabbit.
The red body of the wretched little beast was rent to pieces, many of the ribs stripped white, and the backbone indisputably gnawed.
At that Montgomery stopped.
“Good God!” said he, stooping down, and picking up some of the crushed vertebrae to examine them more closely. “Good God!” he repeated, “what can this mean?”