"Герберт Уэллс. Dr. Moreau" - читать интересную книгу автора

"lt 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. 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 was being 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?"