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

He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression.
Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being
knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large animal.
At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his question,-"How do you
feel now?"

I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I
had got there. He must have seen the question in my face,
for my voice was inaccessible to me.

"You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat
was the `Lady Vain,' and there were spots of blood on the gunwale."

At the same time my eye caught my hand, thin so that it looked
like a dirty skin-purse full of loose bones, and all the business
of the boat came back to me.

"Have some of this," said he, and gave me a dose of some
scarlet stuff, iced.

It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.

"You were in luck," said he, "to get picked up by a ship with a
medical man aboard." He spoke with a slobbering articulation,
with the ghost of a lisp.

"What ship is this?" I said slowly, hoarse from my long silence.

"It's a little trader from Arica and Callao. I never asked
where she came from in the beginning,-out of the land
of born fools, I guess. I'm a passenger myself, from Arica.
The silly ass who owns her,-he's captain too, named Davies,-
he's lost his certificate, or something. You know the kind of man,-
calls the thing the `Ipecacuanha,' of all silly, infernal names;
though when there's much of a sea without any wind, she certainly
acts according."

(Then the noise overhead began again, a snarling growl
and the voice of a human being together. Then another voice,
telling some "Heaven-forsaken idiot" to desist.)

"You were nearly dead," said my interlocutor. "It was a very
near thing, indeed. But I've put some stuff into you now.
Notice your arm's sore? Injections. You've been insensible for nearly
thirty hours."

I thought slowly. (I was distracted now by the yelping of a number
of dogs.) "Am I eligible for solid food?" I asked.

"Thanks to me," he said. "Even now the mutton is boiling."