The_island_of_Dr._Moreau/chapters/The man who was going nowhere.tex

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
\emph{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 \emph{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.\ \emph{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 Prendick, 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 science myself. I did my
Biology at University College,—getting out the ovary of the earthworm
and the radula of the snail, and all that. Lord! It’s ten years ago.
But go on! go on! tell me about the boat.”

He was evidently satisfied with the frankness of my story, which I 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 and Gower Street. “Is Caplatzi still flourishing? What a
shop that was!” He had evidently been a very ordinary medical student,
and drifted incontinently to the topic of the music halls. He told me
some anecdotes.

“Left it all,” he said, “ten years ago. How jolly it all used to be!
But I made a young ass of myself,—played myself out before I was
twenty-one. I daresay it’s all different now. But I must look up that
ass of a cook, and see what he’s 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 appetising 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 as 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 rather 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 hasn’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.