H G Wells Omnibus, page 143
He stood in my way, so that I had perforce to tap his shoulder to come on deck. He came round with a start, and staggered back a few paces to stare at me. It needed no expert eye to tell that the man was still drunk. ‘Hullo!’ said he stupidly, and then with a light coming into his eyes, ‘Why, it’s Mister – Mister—?’
‘Prendick,’ said I.
‘Prendick be damned!’ said he. ‘Shut Up – that’s your name. Mister Shut Up.’
It was no good answering the brute. But I certainly did not expect his next move. He held out his hand to the gangway by which Montgomery stood talking to a massive white-haired man in dirty blue flannels, who had apparently just come aboard. ‘That way, Mister Blasted Shut Up. That way,’ roared the captain.
Montgomery and his companion turned as he spoke.
‘What do you mean?’ said I.
‘That way, Mister Blasted Shut Up – that’s what I mean. Overboard, Mister Shut Up – and sharp. We’re clearing the ship out, cleaning the whole blessed ship out. And overboard you go.’
I stared at him dumbfounded. Then it occurred to me it was exactly the thing I wanted. The lost prospect of a journey as sole passenger with this quarrelsome sot was not one to mourn over. I turned towards Montgomery.
‘Can’t have you,’ said Montgomery’s companion concisely.
‘You can’t have me!’ said I, aghast. He had the squarest and most resolute face I ever set eyes upon.
‘Look here,’ I began, turning to the captain.
‘Overboard,’ said the captain. ‘This ship ain’t for beasts and worse than beasts, any more. Overboard you go… Mister Shut Up. If they can’t have you, you goes adrift. But anyhow you go! With your Friends. I’ve done with this blessed island for evermore amen! I’ve had enough of it.’
‘But, Montgomery,’ I appealed.
He distorted his lower lip, and nodded his head hopelessly at the grey-haired man beside him, to indicate his powerlessness to help me.
‘I’ll see to you presently,’ said the captain.
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. Montgomery said never a word; only shook his head. ‘You’re going overboard, I tell you,’ was the captain’s refrain…. ‘Law be damned! I’m king here.’
At last, I must confess, my voice suddenly broke in the middle of a vigorous threat. I felt a gust of hysterical petulance, and went aft, and stared dismally at nothing.
Meanwhile the sailors progressed rapidly with the task of unshipping the packages and caged animals. A large launch with two standing lugs2 lay under the lee of the schooner, and into this the assortment of goods was swung. I did not then see the hands from the island that were receiving the packages, for the hull of the launch was hidden from me by the side of the schooner.
Neither Montgomery nor his companion took the slightest notice of me, but busied themselves in assisting and directing the four or five sailors who were unloading the goods. The captain went forward, interfering rather than assisting. I was alternately despairful and desperate. 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. I felt all the wretcheder for the lack of a breakfast. Hunger and a shortage of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man. I perceived pretty clearly that I had not the stamina either to resist what the captain chose to do to expel me, or to force myself upon Montgomery and his companion. So I waited passively upon fate, and the work of transferring Montgomery’s possessions to the launch went on as if I did not exist.
Presently that work was finished, and then came a struggle; I was hauled, resisting weakly enough, to the gangway. 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. A broadening gap of green water appeared under me, and I pushed back with all my strength to avoid falling headlong.
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. The dinghy of the Lady Vain had been towing behind; it was half full of water, had no oars, and was quite unvictualled. I refused to go aboard her, and flung myself full-length on the deck. In the end they swung me into her by a rope – for they had no stern ladder – and cut me adrift.
I drifted slowly from the schooner. 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. I stared at her weather-beaten side heeling steeply towards me. And then she passed out of my range of view.
I did not turn my head to follow her. At first I could scarcely believe what had happened. I crouched in the bottom of the dinghy, stunned, and staring blankly at the vacant oily sea. Then I realized I was in that little hell of mine again, now half-swamped. Looking back over the gunwale I saw the schooner standing away from me, with the red-haired captain mocking at me over the taffrail; and, turning towards the island, saw the launch growing smaller as she approached the beach.
Abruptly the cruelty of this desertion became clear to me. I had no means of reaching the land unless I should chance to drift there. I was still weak, you must remember, from my exposure in the boat; I was empty and very faint, or I should have had more heart. But as it was I suddenly began to sob and weep as I had never done since I was a little child. The tears ran down my face. In a passion of despair I struck with my fists at the water in the bottom of the boat, and kicked savagely at the gunwale. I prayed aloud to God that he would let me die.
VI
THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN
But the islanders, seeing I was really adrift, took pity on me. I drifted very slowly to the eastward, approaching the island slantingly, and presently I saw with hysterical relief the launch come round and return towards me. She was heavily laden, and as she drew near I could make out Montgomery’s white-haired broad-shouldered companion sitting cramped up with the dogs and several packing-cases in the stern-sheets. This individual stared fixedly at me without moving or speaking. The black-faced cripple was glaring at me as fixedly in the bows near the puma. There were three other men besides, strange brutish-looking fellows, at whom the staghounds were snarling savagely. Montgomery, who was steering, brought the boat by me and, rising, caught and fastened my painter to the tiller1 to tow me – for there was no room aboard.
I had recovered from my hysterical phase by this time, and answered his hail as he approached bravely enough. I told him the dinghy was nearly swamped, and he reached me a piggin.2 I was jerked back as the rope tightened between the boats. For some time I was busy baling.
It was not until I had got the water under – for the water in the dinghy had been shipped, the boat was perfectly sound – that I had leisure to look at the people in the launch again.
The white-haired man, I found, was still regarding me steadfastly, but with an expression, as I now fancied, of some perplexity. When my eyes met his he looked down at the stag-hounds that sat between his knees. 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 that often comes with advancing years, and the fall of his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious resolution. He talked to Montgomery in a tone too low for me to hear. From him my eyes travelled to his three men, and a strange crew they were. I saw only their faces, yet there was something in their faces – I knew not what – that gave me a spasm of disgust. I looked steadily at them, and the impression did not pass though I failed to see what had occasioned it.
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 wore turbans, too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me, faces with protruding lower jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair almost like horse-hair, 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. I found afterwards that really none were taller than myself, but their bodies were abnormally long and the thigh part of the leg short and curiously twisted. At any rate they were an amazingly ugly gang, and over the heads of them, under the forward lug, peered the black face of the man whose eyes were luminous in the dark.
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. It occurred to me that I was perhaps annoying them, and I turned my attention to the island we were approaching.
It was low, and covered with thick vegetation, chiefly of the inevitable palm-trees. From one point a thin white thread of vapour rose slantingly to an immense height, and then frayed out like a down feather. We were now within the embrace of a broad bay flanked on either hand by a low promontory. The beach was of a dull grey sand, and sloped steeply up to a ridge, perhaps sixty or seventy feet above the sea-level, and irregularly set with trees and undergrowth. Halfway up was a square stone enclosure that I found subsequently was built partly of coral and partly of pumiceous lava. Two thatched roofs peeped from within this enclosure.
A man stood awaiting us at the water’s edge. I fancied, while we were still far off, that I saw some other and very grotesque-looking creatures scuttle into the bushes upon the slope, but I saw nothing of these as we drew nearer. This man was of a moderate size, and with a black negroid face. He had a large, almost lipless mouth, extraordinary, lank arms, long thin feet and bow legs, and stood with his heavy face thrust forward staring at us. He was dressed like Montgomery and his white-haired companion, in jacket and trousers of blue serge.
As we came still nearer, this individual began to run to and fro on the beach, making the most grotesque movements. At a word of command from Montgomery the four men in the launch sprang up with singular awkward gestures and struck the lugs. Montgomery steered us round and into a narrow little dock excavated in the beach. Then the man on the beach hastened towards us. This dock, as I call it, was really a mere ditch just long enough at this phase of the tide to take the long-boat.
I heard the bows ground in the sand, staved the dinghy off the rudder of the big boat with my piggin, and, freeing the painter, landed. The three muffled men, with the clumsiest movements, scrambled out upon the sand, and forthwith set to landing the cargo, assisted by the man on the beach. I was struck especially with the curious movements of the legs of the three swathed and bandaged boatmen – not stiff they were, but distorted in some odd way, almost as if they were jointed in the wrong place. The dogs were still snarling, and strained at their chains after these men, as the white-haired man landed with them.
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. Somewhere I had heard such a voice before, and I could not think where. The white-haired man stood holding in a tumult of six dogs, and bawling orders over their din. Montgomery, having unshipped the rudder, landed likewise, and all set to work at unloading. I was too faint, what with my long fast and the sun beating down on my bare head, to offer any assistance.
Presently the white-haired man seemed to recollect my presence, and came up to me. ‘You look,’ said he, ‘as though you had not breakfasted.’
His little eyes were a brilliant black under his heavy brows. ‘I must apologize for that. Now you are our guest, we must make you comfortable – though you are uninvited, you know.’
He looked keenly into my face. ‘Montgomery says you are an educated man, Mr Prendick – says you know something of science. May I ask what that signifies?’
I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some research in biology under Huxley.3 He raised his eyebrows slightly at that.
‘That alters the case a little, Mr Prendick,’ he said with a trifle more respect in his manner. ‘As it happens, we are biologists here. This is a biological station – of a sort.’ His eye rested on the men in white, who were busily hauling the puma, on rollers, towards the walled yard. ‘I and Montgomery, at least,’ he added.
Then, ‘When you will be able to get away, I can’t say. We’re off the track to anywhere. We see a ship once in a twelvemonth or so.’
He left me abruptly and went up the beach past this group, and, I think, entered the enclosure. The other two men were with Montgomery erecting a pile of smaller packages on a low-wheeled truck. The llama was still on the launch with the rabbit-hutches; the staghounds still lashed to the thwarts. The pile of things completed, all three men laid hold of the truck, and began shoving the ton-weight or so upon it after the puma. Presently Montgomery left them, and, coming back to me, held out his hand.
‘I’m glad,’ said he, ‘for my own part. That captain was a silly ass. He’d have made things lively for you.’
‘It was you,’ said I, ‘that saved me again.’
‘That depends. You’ll find this island an infernally rum place, I promise you. I’d watch my goings carefully if I were you. He–’ He hesitated, and seemed to alter his mind about what was on his lips. ‘I wish you’d help me with these rabbits,’ he said.
His procedure with the rabbits was singular. I waded in with him and helped him lug one of the hutches ashore. No sooner was that done than he opened the door of it, and tilting the thing on one end, turned its living contents out on the ground. They fell in a struggling heap one on the top of the other. He clapped his hands, and forthwith they went off with that hopping run of theirs, fifteen or twenty of them, I should think, up the beach. ‘Increase and multiply, my friends,’ said Montgomery. ‘Replenish the island. Hitherto we’ve had a certain lack of meat here.’
As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a brandy flask and some biscuits. ‘Something to go on with, Prendick,’ said he in a far more familiar tone than before.
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. Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma. The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from my birth.
VII
THE LOCKED DOOR
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 about me. I followed the llama up the beach, and was overtaken by Montgomery who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure. I noticed then that the puma in its cage and the pile of packages had been placed outside the entrance to this quadrangle.
I turned and saw that the launch had now been unloaded, run out again, and beached, and the white-haired man was walking towards us. He addressed Montgomery.
‘And now comes the problem of this uninvited guest. What are we to do with him?’
‘He knows something of science,’ said Montgomery.
‘I’m itching to get to work again – with this new stuff,’ said the grey-haired man, nodding towards the enclosure. His eyes grew brighter.
‘I dare say 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.’
‘I’m in your hands,’ said I. I had no idea of what he meant by ‘over there’.
‘I’ve been thinking of the same things,’ Montgomery answered. ‘There’s my room with the outer door—’
‘That’s it,’ said the elder man promptly, looking at Montgomery, and all three of us went towards the enclosure. ‘I’m sorry to make a mystery, Mr Prendick – but you’ll remember you’re uninvited. Our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Bluebeard’s Chamber, in fact. Nothing very dreadful really – to a sane man. But just now – as we don’t know you—’
‘Decidedly,’ said I; ‘I should be a fool to take offence at any want of confidence.’
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. The main entrance to the enclosure we passed; it was a heavy wooden gate, framed in iron and locked, with the cargo of the launch piled outside it; and at the corner we came to a small doorway I had not previously observed. The grey-haired man produced a bundle of keys from the pocket of his greasy blue jacket, opened this door, and entered. His keys and the elaborate locking up of the place, even while it was still under his eye, struck me as peculiar.
I followed him, and found myself in a small apartment, plainly but not uncomfortably furnished, and with its inner door, which was slightly ajar, opening into a paved courtyard. This inner door Montgomery at once closed. A hammock was slung across the darker corner of the room, and a small unglazed window, defended by an iron bar, looked out towards the sea.
This, the grey-haired man told me, was to be my apartment, and the inner door, which, ‘for fear of accidents’, he said, he would lock on the other side, was my limit inward. He called my attention to a convenient deck chair before the window, and to an array of old books, chiefly, I found, surgical works and editions of the Latin and Greek classics – languages I cannot read with any comfort – on a shelf near the hammock. He left the room by the outer door, as if to avoid opening the inner one again.
