"Герберт Уэллс. Dr. Moreau" - читать интересную книгу автора

him distractedly.

Presently our meal came to an end; the misshapen monster with
the pointed ears cleared the remains away, and Montgomery left
me alone in the room again. All the time he had been in a state
of ill-concealed irritation at the noise of the vivisected puma.
He had spoken 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 to 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 entrance-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 chequered wall.




IX. 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 slope before me. I hesitated, and sat down in the edge
of the shade.