wn the beach.
I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against
the evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea;
and like a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable
aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among
the rocks beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several
other of the Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau.
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!

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau's cruelty.
I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came
to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau's hands.
I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure.
But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had
been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings,
and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles
of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they
could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony,
was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau--and for what?
It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at
least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that.
I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate.
But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity,
his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were
thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer,
and at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves;
the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held
them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their
natural animosities.

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 fea