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

had escaped.

The minutes passed; 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, passed 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 pricks 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 ship."

"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 swishing 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 creeper
that looped down from the foliage overhead. His back was to me.