The Island of Doctor Moreau: Chapters 5–8

In the early morning (it was the second morning after my recovery, and I believe the fourth after I was picked up), I awoke through an avenue of tumultuous dreams,—dreams of guns and howling mobs,—and became sensible of a hoarse shouting above me.

He stood in my way, so that I had perforce to tap his shoulder to come on deck.

The lost prospect of a journey as sole passenger with this quarrelsome sot was not one to mourn over.

He had the squarest and most resolute face I ever set eyes upon.

Then began a curious three-cornered altercation. Alternately I appealed to one and another of the three men,—first to the grey-haired man to let me land, and then to the drunken captain to keep me aboard.

I even bawled entreaties to the sailors.

I felt a gust of hysterical petulance, and went aft and stared dismally at nothing.

Once or twice as I stood waiting there for things to accomplish themselves, I could not resist an impulse to laugh at my miserable quandary.

Even then I noticed the oddness of the brown faces of the men who were with Montgomery in the launch; but the launch was now fully laden, and was shoved off hastily.

The hands in the launch shouted derisively, and I heard Montgomery curse at them; and then the captain, the mate, and one of the seamen helping him, ran me aft towards the stern.

In the end, they swung me into her by a rope (for they had no stern ladder), and then they cut me adrift. In a kind of stupor I watched all hands take to the rigging, and slowly but surely she came round to the wind; the sails fluttered, and then bellied out as the wind came into them.

Montgomery, who was steering, brought the boat by me, and rising, caught and fastened my painter to the tiller to tow me, for there was no room aboard.

The white-haired man I found was still regarding me steadfastly, but with an expression, as I now fancied, of some perplexity.

He was a powerfully-built man, as I have said, with a fine forehead and rather heavy features; but his eyes had that odd drooping of the skin above the lids which often comes with advancing years, and the fall of his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious resolution.

They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East.

They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen. The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height, sat a head below any one of the three.

As I stared at them, they met my gaze; and then first one and then another turned away from my direct stare, and looked at me in an odd, furtive manner.

We were now within the embrace of a broad bay flanked on either hand by a low promontory.

Two thatched roofs peeped from within this enclosure.

The three big fellows spoke to one another in odd guttural tones, and the man who had waited for us on the beach began chattering to them excitedly—a foreign language, as I fancied—as they laid hands on some bales piled near the stern.

The white-haired man stood, holding in a tumult of six dogs, and bawling orders over their din.

I made no ado, but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits.

The reader will perhaps understand that at first everything was so strange about me, and my position was the outcome of such unexpected adventures, that I had no discernment of the relative strangeness of this or that thing.

“I daresay you are,” said Montgomery, in anything but a cordial tone.

“We can't send him over there, and we can't spare the time to build him a new shanty; and we certainly can't take him into our confidence just yet.”

He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile—he was one of those saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down,—and bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance.

He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile—he was one of those saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down,—and bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance.

I never saw such a gait, such odd motions as he pulled at the box.

Indeed, they had all seemed remarkably taciturn, and when they did speak, endowed with very uncanny voices.

Indeed, they had all seemed remarkably taciturn, and when they did speak, endowed with very uncanny voices. What was wrong with them?

Then I recalled the eyes of Montgomery's ungainly attendant.

I could hardly repress a shuddering recoil as he came, bending amiably, and placed the tray before me on the table.

I followed him out with my eyes; and as I did so, by some odd trick of unconscious cerebration, there came surging into my head the phrase, “The Moreau Hollows”—was it?

He had published some very astonishing facts in connection with the transfusion of blood, and in addition was known to be doing valuable work on morbid growths.

The doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be that he deserved to be; but I still think that the tepid support of his fellow-investigators and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers was a shameful thing.

Yet some of his experiments, by the journalist's account, were wantonly cruel.

Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery's attendant came back again before me with the sharpest definition.

I glanced askance at this strange creature, and found him watching me with his queer, restless eyes.

Anyhow, it will give you an inkling of our—mysteries.

He resumed his meal. “I had no idea of it,” he said, and masticated.