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"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 remorse-less
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 really eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery
and six Kanakas. I remember the green stillness of the island
and the empty ocean about us, as though it was yesterday.
The place seemed waiting for me.
"The stores were landed and the house was built. The Kanakas founded
some huts near the ravine. I went to work here upon what I had brought
with me. There were some disagreeable things happened at first.
I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip
of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear
and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I
had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it.
It remembered me, and was terrified beyond imagination; and it had no
more than the wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it the clumsier
it seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery.
These animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things,
without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,--they are no good for
man-making.
"Then I took a gorilla I had; and upon that, working with infinite
care and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man.
All the week, night and day, I moulded him. With him it was chiefly
the brain that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed.
I thought him a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had
finished him, and he lay bandaged, bound, and motionless before me.
It was only when his life was assured that I left him and came
into this room again, and found Montgomery much as you are.
He had heard some of the cries as the thing grew human,--
cries like those that disturbed you so. I didn't take him
completely into my confidence at first. And the Kanakas too,
had realised something of it. They were scared out of their wits
by the sight of me. I got Montgomery over to me--in a way;
but I and he had the hardest job to prevent the Kanakas deserting.
Finally they did; and so we lost the yacht. I spent many days
educating the brute,--altogether I had him for three or four months.
I taught him the rudiments of English; gave him ideas of counting;
even made the thing read the alphabet. But at that he was slow,
though I've met with idiots slower. He began with a clean sheet,
mentally; had no memories left in his mind of what he had been.
When his scars were quite healed, and he was no longer anything
but painful and stiff, and able to converse a little, I took
him yonder and introduced him to the Kanakas as an interesting
stowaway.
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