The Island of Doctor Moreau quotes

We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After the second day the sea subsided slowly to a glassy calm.

It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has not, luckily for himself, anything in his memory to imagine with.

After the first day we said little to one another, and lay in our places in the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes that grew larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining upon our companions.

I crawled along the boat to them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor’s leg; but the sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the gunwale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones.

I remember laughing at that, and wondering why I laughed. The laugh caught me suddenly like a thing from without.

I lay across one of the thwarts for I know not how long, thinking that if I had the strength I would drink seawater and madden myself to die quickly.

“

Thank no one. You had the need, and I had the knowledge; and I injected and fed you much as I might have collected a specimen.

I was bored and wanted something to do. If I’d been jaded that day, or hadn’t liked your face, well—it’s a curious question where you would have been now!”

I did not know then that a reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes.

The thing came to me as stark inhumanity.

That black figure with its eyes of fire struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind. Then the effect passed as it had come.

I was alternately despairful and desperate. Once or twice as I stood waiting there for things to accomplish themselves, I could not resist an impulse to laugh at my miserable quandary. I felt all the wretcheder for the lack of a breakfast.

Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.

I perceived pretty clearly that I had not the stamina either to resist what the captain chose to do to expel me, or to force myself upon Montgomery and his companion. So I waited passively upon fate;

They fell in a struggling heap one on the top of the other. He clapped his hands, and forthwith they went off with that hopping run of theirs, fifteen or twenty of them I should think, up the beach.

“Increase and multiply, my friends,” said Montgomery. “Replenish the island. Hitherto we’ve had a certain lack of meat here.”

As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a brandy-flask and some biscuits. “Something to go on with, Prendick,” said he, in a far more familiar tone than before.

On the day of its publication a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, escaped from Moreau’s house. It was in the silly season, and a prominent editor, a cousin of the temporary laboratory assistant, appealed to the conscience of the nation.

It was not the first time that conscience has turned against the methods of research.

The doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be that he deserved to be; but I still think that the tepid support of his fellow investigators and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers was a shameful thing.

It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough.

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the chequered wall.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors.

It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice.

Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

I gave a wild cry, and redoubled my pace. Some dim, black things about three or four times the size of rabbits went running or hopping up from the beach towards the bushes as I passed.

So long as I live, I shall remember the terror of that chase.

I ran near the water’s edge, and heard every now and then the splash of the feet that gained upon me. Far away, hopelessly far, was the yellow light. All the night about us was black and still.

And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible gibberish to me about him, whoever he might be. I could have fancied it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream.

“His is the lightning flash,” we sang. “His is the deep, salt sea.”

A horrible fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalising these men, had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of himself.

It was the size of a man, but it seemed covered with a dull grey hair almost like a Skye terrier. What was it? What were they all?

Imagine yourself surrounded by all the most horrible cripples and maniacs it is possible to conceive, and you may understand a little of my feelings with these grotesque caricatures of humanity about me.

“He is a five-man, a five-man, a five-man—like me,” said the ape-man.

I held out my hands. The grey creature in the corner leant forward.

“Not to run on all fours; that is the law. Are we not men?” he said.

He put out a strangely distorted talon and gripped my fingers. The thing was almost like the hoof of a deer produced into claws. I could have yelled with surprise and pain.

The knot of beast men, still wondering, stood back among the trees. I passed them as serenely as possible. One started to follow me, but retreated again when Montgomery cracked his whip. The rest stood silent—watching.

They may once have been animals; but I never before saw an animal trying to think.

Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!

The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem!

Sympathetic pain—all I know of it I remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted—it was the one thing I wanted—to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.”

“To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter,” he continued. “

The study of nature makes a man at last as remorseless as nature.

I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing; and the material has—dripped into the huts yonder. It is nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery and six Kanakas.

But I will conquer yet! Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’

After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.

” He thought darkly. “But I am drawing near the fastness. This puma of mine—” After a silence, “And they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again.” Another long silence.

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.

They were all still intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing.

A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.

The leopard-man had happened to go under: that was all the difference. Poor brute!

In those days my fear of the beast people went the way of my personal fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island.

A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the beast people with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, …

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?

”

I know now the folly of my cowardice.

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.

As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a mere leader among my fellows.

They were staggered at my assurance.

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

“The man with the bandaged arm speaks a strange thing,” said one of the beast folk.

One thing about him entertained me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an idea, I believe, that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the proper use of speech.

He called it “big thinks” to distinguish it from “little thinks,” the sane everyday interests of life.

If ever I made a remark he did not understand, he would praise it very much, ask me to say it again, learn it by heart, and go off repeating it, with a word wrong here or there, to all the milder of the beast …

My monkey-man’s jabber multiplied in volume but grew less and less comprehensible, more and more simian. Some of the others seemed altogether slipping their hold upon speech, though they still understood what I said to them at that time.

(Can you imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering, losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again?)

And they walked erect with an increasing difficulty. Though they evidently felt ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or another running on toes and fingertips, and quite unable to recover the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily;

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.

As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau’s enclosure.

As I approached, the monster lifted its glaring eyes to mine, its lips went trembling back from its red-stained teeth, and it growled menacingly.

It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint had vanished.

I advanced a step farther, stopped, and pulled out my revolver. At last I had him face to face.