The Island of Doctor Moreau
Copyright© 2016 by H. G. Wells
Chapter 2: The Man Who Was Going Nowhere
THE cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. A youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute we stared at each other without speaking. He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression. Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke. 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.
“You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat was the ‘Lady Vain, ‘ and there were spots of blood on the gunwale.”
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 some of this,” said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced.
It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.
“You were 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 guess. I’m a passenger myself, from Arica. The silly ass who owns her, --he’s captain too, named Davies, --he’s lost his certificate, or something. You know the kind of man, --calls the thing the ‘Ipecacuanha, ‘ of all silly, infernal names; though when there’s much of a sea without any wind, she certainly acts according.”
(Then the noise overhead began again, a snarling growl and the voice of a human being together. Then another voice, telling some “Heaven-forsaken idiot” to desist.)
“You were nearly dead,” said my interlocutor. “It was a very near thing, indeed. But I’ve put some stuff into you now. Notice your arm’s sore? Injections. You’ve been insensible for nearly thirty hours.”
I thought slowly. (I was distracted now by the yelping of a number of dogs.) “Am I eligible for solid food?” I asked.
“Thanks 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 of how you came to be alone in that boat. Damn that howling!” I thought I detected a certain suspicion in his eyes.
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