Part 9 (1/2)

I knew both Moreau and Montgomery carried revolvers; and, save for a feeble bar of deal spiked with a small nail, the merest mockery of a mace, I was unarmed.

So I lay still there, until I began to think of food and drink; and at that thought the real hopelessness of my position came home to me.

I knew no way of getting anything to eat. I was too ignorant of botany to discover any resort of root or fruit that might lie about me; I had no means of trapping the few rabbits upon the island.

It grew blanker the more I turned the prospect over. At last in the desperation of my position, my mind turned to the animal men I had encountered. I tried to find some hope in what I remembered of them.

In turn I recalled each one I had seen, and tried to draw some augury of a.s.sistance from my memory.

Then suddenly I heard a staghound bay, and at that realised a new danger.

I took little time to think, or they would have caught me then, but s.n.a.t.c.hing up my nailed stick, rushed headlong from my hiding-place towards the sound of the sea. I remember a growth of th.o.r.n.y plants, with spines that stabbed like pen-knives. I emerged bleeding and with torn clothes upon the lip of a long creek opening northward.

I went straight into the water without a minute's hesitation, wading up the creek, and presently finding myself kneedeep in a little stream.

I scrambled out at last on the westward bank, and with my heart beating loudly in my ears, crept into a tangle of ferns to await the issue.

I heard the dog (there was only one) draw nearer, and yelp when it came to the thorns. Then I heard no more, and presently began to think I had escaped.

The minutes pa.s.sed; the silence lengthened out, and at last after an hour of security my courage began to return to me.

By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable.

I had, as it were, pa.s.sed the limit of terror and despair.

I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything. I had even a certain wish to encounter Moreau face to face; and as I had waded into the water, I remembered that if I were too hard pressed at least one path of escape from torment still lay open to me,--they could not very well prevent my drowning myself. I had half a mind to drown myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out, a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained me.

I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the p.r.i.c.ks of the spiny plants, and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had met the launch upon the beach. He was clinging to the oblique stem of a palm-tree. I gripped my stick, and stood up facing him.

He began chattering. ”You, you, you,” was all I could distinguish at first. Suddenly he dropped from the tree, and in another moment was holding the fronds apart and staring curiously at me.

I did not feel the same repugnance towards this creature which I had experienced in my encounters with the other Beast Men.

”You,” he said, ”in the boat.” He was a man, then,--at least as much of a man as Montgomery's attendant,--for he could talk.

”Yes,” I said, ”I came in the boat. From the s.h.i.+p.”

”Oh!” he said, and his bright, restless eyes travelled over me, to my hands, to the stick I carried, to my feet, to the tattered places in my coat, and the cuts and scratches I had received from the thorns.

He seemed puzzled at something. His eyes came back to my hands.

He held his own hand out and counted his digits slowly, ”One, two, three, four, five--eigh?”

I did not grasp his meaning then; afterwards I was to find that a great proportion of these Beast People had malformed hands, lacking sometimes even three digits. But guessing this was in some way a greeting, I did the same thing by way of reply.

He grinned with immense satisfaction. Then his swift roving glance went round again; he made a swift movement--and vanished.

The fern fronds he had stood between came swis.h.i.+ng together.

I pushed out of the brake after him, and was astonished to find him swinging cheerfully by one lank arm from a rope of creepers that looped down from the foliage overhead. His back was to me.

”Hullo!” said I.

He came down with a twisting jump, and stood facing me.

”I say,” said I, ”where can I get something to eat?”

”Eat!” he said. ”Eat Man's food, now.” And his eye went back to the swing of ropes. ”At the huts.”

”But where are the huts?”

”Oh!”

”I'm new, you know.”