felt convinced that this must be the same man. Everything pointed to it. It dawned upon me to what end the puma and the other animals, which had now been brought with other luggage into the enclosure behind the house, were destined; and a curious faint odour, the halitus of something familiar, an odour that had been in the background of my consciousness hitherto, suddenly came forward into the forefront of my thoughts. It was the antiseptic odour of the operating-room. I heard the puma growling through the wall, and one of the dogs yelped as though it had been struck.
Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy. And by some odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery’s attendant came back again before me with the sharpest definition. I stared before me out at the green sea, frothing under a freshening breeze, and let these and other strange memories of the last few days chase each other through my mind.
What could it mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?…
CHAPTER 8
THE CRYING OF THE PUMA
Montgomery interrupted my tangle of mystification and suspicion about one, and his grotesque attendant followed him with a tray bearing bread, some herbs, and other eatables, a flask of whisky, a jug of water, and three glasses and knives. I glanced askance at this strange creature, and found him watching me with his queer restless eyes. Montgomery said he would lunch with me, but that Moreau was too preoccupied with some work to come.
`Moreau!’ said I; `I know that name.’
`The devil you do!’ said he. `What an ass I was to mention it to you. I might have thought. Anyhow, it will give you an inkling of our — mysteries. Whisky?’
`No thanks — I’m an abstainer.
`I wish I’d been. But it’s no use locking the door after the steed is stolen. It was that infernal stuff led to my coming here. That and a foggy night. I thought myself in luck at the time when Moreau offered to get me off. It’s queer.
`Montgomery,’ said I suddenly, as the outer door closed; `why has your man pointed ears?’
`Damn!’ he said, over his first mouthful of food. He stared at me for a moment, and then repeated: `Pointed ears?’
`Little points to them,’ said I, as calmly as possible, with a catch in my breath; `and a fine brown fur at the edges.’
He helped himself to whisky and water with great deliberation. `I was under the impression … that his hair covered his ears.’
`I saw them as he stooped by me to put that coffee you sent to me on the table. And his eyes shine in the dark.’
By this time Montgomery had recovered from the surprise of my question. `I always thought,’ he said deliberately, with a certain accentuation of his flavouring of lisp; `that there was something the matter with his ears. From the way he covered them…. What were they like?’
I was persuaded from his manner that this ignorance was a pretence. Still I could hardly tell the man I thought him a liar. `Pointed,’ I said; `rather small and furry — distinctly furry. But the whole man is one of the strangest beings I ever set eyes on.’
A sharp, hoarse cry of animal pain came from the enclosure behind us. Its depth and volume testified to the puma. I saw Montgomery wince.
`Yes!’ he said.
`Where did you pick the creature up?’
`Er — San Francisco…. He’s an ugly brute, I admit. Halfwitted, you know. Can’t remember where he came from. But I’m used to him, you know. We both are. How does he strike you?’
`He’s unnatural,’ I said. `There’s something about him…. Don’t think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation, a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It’s a touch… of the diabolical, in fact.’
Montgomery had stopped eating while I told him this. `Rum,’ he said. `I can’t see it.’
He resumed his meal. `I had no idea of it,’ he said, and masticated. `The crew of the schooner… must have felt it the same…. Made a dead set at the poor devil…. You saw the captain?’
Suddenly the puma howled again, this time more painfully. Montgomery swore under his breath. I had half a mind to attack him about the men on the beach. Then the poor brute within gave vent to a series of short, sharp screams.
`Your men on the beach,’ said I; `what race are they?’
`Excellent fellows, aren’t they?’ said he absentmindedly, knitting his brows as the animal yelled. I said no more. There was another outcry worse than the former. He looked at me with his dull grey eyes, and then took some more whisky. He tried to draw me into a discussion about alcohol, professing to have saved my life with it. He seemed anxious to lay stress on the fact that I owed my life to him. I answered him distractedly. Presently our meal came to an end, the misshapen monster with the pointed ears cleared away, and Montgomery left me alone in the room again. All the time he was in a state of ill-concealed irritation at the noise of the vivisected puma. He spoke of his odd want of nerve, and left me to the obvious application.
I found myself that the cries were singularly irritating, and they grew in depth and intensity as the afternoon wore on. They were painful at first, but their constant resurgence at last altogether upset my balance. I flung aside a crib of Horace I had been reading, and began to clench my fists, to bite my lips, and pace the room.
Presently I got to stopping my ears with my fingers.
The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon me steadily, grew at last to such an exquisite expression of suffering that I could stand it in that confined room no longer. I stepped out of the door into the slumberous heat of the late afternoon, and walking past the main enclosure — locked again I noticed — turned the corner of the 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. 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 stone wall.
CHAPTER 9
THE THING IN THE FOREST
I strode through the undergrowth that clothed the ridge behind the house, scarcely heeding whither I went, passed on through the shadow of a thick cluster of straight-stemmed trees beyond it, and so presently found myself some way on the other side of the ridge, and descending towards a streamlet that ran through a narrow valley. I paused and listened. The distance I had come, or the intervening masses of thicket, deadened any sound that might be coming from the enclosure. The air was still. Then with a rustle a rabbit emerged, and went scampering up the sllope before me. I hesitated, and sat down in the edge of the shade.
The place was a pleasant one. The rivulet was hidden by the luxuriant vegetation of the banks, save at one point, where I caught a triangular patch of its glittering water. On the further side I saw through a bluish haze a tangle of trees and creepers, and above these again the luminous blue of the sky. Here and there a splash of white or crimson marked the blooming of some trailing epiphyte. I let my eyes wander over this scene for a while, and then began to turn over in my mind again the strange peculiarities of Montgomery’s man. But it was too hot to think elaborately,