He must have seen the
up and down; but I also remember as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and that I thought what a jest it was that they should come too late by such a little to catch me in my body.
For an endless period, as it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart watching the schooner (she was a lit- tle ship, schooner-rigged fore and aft) come up out of the sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a widening compass, for she was sailing dead into the wind. It never entered my head to attempt to attract attention, and I do not remember anything distinctly after the sight of her side until I found myself in a little cabin aft. There’s a dim half-memory of be- ing lifted up to the gangway, and of a big red countenance covered with freckles and surrounded with red hair staring at me over the bulwarks. I also had a disconnected impres- sion of a dark face, with extraordinary eyes, close to mine; but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again. I fancy I recollect some stuff being poured in between my teeth; and that is all.
The Island of Doctor Moreau�
II. 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, thin so 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
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a medical man aboard.’ He spoke with a slobbering articu- lation, 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, infer- nal 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.)
