Latest / Daily Classic Sci Fi Books / 02 - The Island of Dr Moreau - H G Wells
Transcript
- Two, the man who was going nowhere. The cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. The youngish man, with flaxen hair, a bristly straw colored mustache, and dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute, we stared at each other without speaking. He had waterly gray eyes, oddly void of expression. Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about in the low, angry growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke up. He repeated his question, how do you feel now? I think, I said, I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had got there. He must have seen the question in my face, for my voice was inaccessible to me. Here picked up in a boat starving. The name on the boat was the Lady Vain, and that a thpots of blood on the gun wale. At the same time, my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked like a dirty skin purse full of loose bones. And all the business of the boat came back to me. Have thumb of this, said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff iced. It tasted like blood and made me feel stronger. You are in luck, said he to get picked up by a ship with a medical man aboard. He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost of a lisp. What ship is this, I said, slowly, hoarse from my long silence. It's a little trader from Arica and Callao. I never asked where she came from in the beginning, out of the land of born fools, I gas, I'm a pasenger myself from Adka. The thiliad who owned her heath captain too named Davies heath Lot, his certificate or something. You know. The kind of man calls the thing the apecacuana of all thilly infernal names. Though when there's much of a thief without any wind, she certainly acts according Then the noise of a head began again, a snarling growl in the voice of a human being, together, then another voice telling some heaven forsake an idiot to desist. You were nearly dead, said my interlocutor. Twas the very near thing, indeed, But they've put some stuff into you now, noteth your arm's sore injections. You've been insensible for nearly thirty hours, I thought, slowly. I was distracted now by the helping of a number of dogs. Am I eligible for solid food? I asked, think to me, he said, even now the mutton is boiling. Yes, I said, with assurance, I could eat some mutton. But said he with a momentary hesitation. You know, I'm dying to hear how you came to be alone in that boat. Damn that howling, I thought. I detected a certain suspicion in his eyes. He suddenly left the cabin, and I heard him in violent controversy with some one who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him. The matter sounded as though it ended in blows. But in that I thought my ears were mistaken. Then he shouted at the dogs and returned to the cabin. Well, said he in the doorway. You were just beginning to tell me. I told him my name, Edward Prindick, and how I had taken to natural history as a relief from the dulness of my comfortable independence. He seemed interested in this. I've done some thianth myself. I did my biology at University College, getting out the ovary of the earthworm and the radu lo of theth nail and all that. Lord, it's ten years ago. Go on, go on, tell me about the boat. He is evidently satisfied with the frankness of my story, which it told in concise sentences, enough for I felt horribly weak, And when it was finished, he reverted at once to the topic of natural history and his own biological studies. He began to question me closely about Tottenham Court Road in Gower Street, with Kaplatti still flourishing. What a shot that was. He had evidently been a very ordinary medical student, and drifted incontinently to the topic of the music. Hause he told me some anecdotes left it all. He said, ten years ago, how jolly it all youth to be. But I made a young ath of myself, plained myself out before I was twenty one. A dare say it's all different now. But I must look up that ath of a cook and thie what he done to your mutton? The growling overhead was renewed so suddenly and with so much savage anger, that it startled me. What's that? I called after him, but the door had closed. He came back again with the boiled mutton, and I was so excited by the appetizing smell of it, that I forgot the noise of the beast that had troubled me. After a day of alternate sleep and feeding, I was so far recovered to be able to get from my bunk to the scuttle and see the green seas trying to keep pace with us. I judged the schooner was running before the wind. Montgomery, that was the name of the flaxen haired man, came in again as I stood there, and I asked him for some clothes. He lent me some duck things of his own, for those I had worn in the boat had been thrown overboard. They were other loose for me, for he was large and long in his limbs. He told me casually that the captain was three parts drunk in his own cabin. As I assumed the clothes, I began asking him some questions about the destination of the ship. He said the ship was bound to Hawaii, but that it had to land him first. Where, said I. It's an island where I live. So far as I know it hathn't got a name. He stared at me with his nether lip dropping, and looked so wilfully stupid of a sudden that it came into my head that he desired to avoid my questions. I had the discretion to ask no more