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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 lugs, lay under the lea of the schooner;
and into this the strange assortment of goods were 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 lack 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 dingey 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 then they 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 dingey,
stunned, and staring blankly at the vacant, oily sea. Then I realized
that I was in that little hell of mine again, now half swamped;
and 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 for God to let
me die.
VI. THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN.
BUT the islanders, seeing that 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 I could make out as she
drew nearer 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,—three 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 tiller 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 dingey was nearly swamped, and he reached me a piggin.
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 dingey 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 staghound 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 which 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 queer 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 horsehair, 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 a kind of palm,
that was new to me. 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 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.
Half way up was a square enclosure of some greyish stone, which 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, and with singularly awkward gestures 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 longboat.
I heard the bows ground in the sand, staved the dingey 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 by 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 scarcely breakfasted.”
His little eyes were a brilliant black under his heavy brows.
“I must apologise 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 researches in biology under Huxley. 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
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