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02 - The Island of Dr Moreau - H G Wells · Adventure Books Library

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