The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells
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Title: The Invisible Man
Author: H. G. Wells
Release Date: June 9, 2002 [eBook #5230]
[Most recently updated: October 16, 2021]
Language: English
Produced by: Andrew Sly
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE MAN ***
[Illustration]
The Invisible Man
A Grotesque Romance
by H. G. Wells
Contents
I. The strange Man’s Arrival
II. Mr. Teddy Henfrey’s first Impressions
III. The thousand and one Bottles
IV. Mr. Cuss interviews the Stranger
V. The Burglary at the Vicarage
VI. The Furniture that went mad
VII. The Unveiling of the Stranger
VIII. In Transit
IX. Mr. Thomas Marvel
X. Mr. Marvel’s Visit to Iping
XI. In the “Coach and Horses”
XII. The invisible Man loses his Temper
XIII. Mr. Marvel discusses his Resignation
XIV. At Port Stowe
XV. The Man who was running
XVI. In the “Jolly Cricketers”
XVII. Dr. Kemp’s Visitor
XVIII. The invisible Man sleeps
XIX. Certain first Principles
XX. At the House in Great Portland Street
XXI. In Oxford Street
XXII. In the Emporium
XXIII. In Drury Lane
XXIV. The Plan that failed
XXV. The Hunting of the invisible Man
XXVI. The Wicksteed Murder
XXVII. The Siege of Kemp’s House
XXVIII. The Hunter hunted
The Epilogue
CHAPTER I.
THE STRANGE MAN’S ARRIVAL
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting
wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down,
walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black
portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to
foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but
the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his
shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried.
He staggered into the “Coach and Horses” more dead than alive, and
flung his portmanteau down. “A fire,” he cried, “in the name of human
charity! A room and a fire!” He stamped and shook the snow from off
himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to
strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a couple
of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.
Mrs. Hall lit the fire and left him there while she went to prepare him
a meal with her own hands. A guest to stop at Iping in the wintertime
was an unheard-of piece of luck, let alone a guest who was no
“haggler,” and she was resolved to show herself worthy of her good
fortune. As soon as the bacon was well under way, and Millie, her
lymphatic maid, had been brisked up a bit by a few deftly chosen
expressions of contempt, she carried the cloth, plates, and glasses
into the parlour and began to lay them with the utmost _éclat_.
Although the fire was burning up briskly, she was surprised to see that
her visitor still wore his hat and coat, standing with his back to her
and staring out of the window at the falling snow in the yard. His
gloved hands were clasped behind him, and he seemed to be lost in
thought. She noticed that the melting snow that still sprinkled his
shoulders dripped upon her carpet. “Can I take your hat and coat, sir?”
she said, “and give them a good dry in the kitchen?”
“No,” he said without turning.
She was not sure she had heard him, and was about to repeat her
question.
He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. “I prefer to
keep them on,” he said with emphasis, and she noticed that he wore big
blue spectacles with sidelights, and had a bush side-whisker over his
coat-collar that completely hid his cheeks and face.
“Very well, sir,” she said. “_As_ you like. In a bit the room will be
warmer.”
He made no answer, and had turned his face away from her again, and
Mrs. Hall, feeling that her conversational advances were ill-timed,
laid the rest of the table things in a quick staccato and whisked out
of the room. When she returned he was still standing there, like a man
of stone, his back hunched, his collar turned up, his dripping hat-brim
turned down, hiding his face and ears completely. She put down the eggs
and bacon with considerable emphasis, and called rather than said to
him, “Your lunch is served, sir.”
“Thank you,” he said at the same time, and did not stir until she was
closing the door. Then he swung round and approached the table with a
certain eager quickness.
As she went behind the bar to the kitchen she heard a sound repeated at
regular intervals. Chirk, chirk, chirk, it went, the sound of a spoon
being rapidly whisked round a basin. “That girl!” she said. “There! I
clean forgot it. It’s her being so long!” And while she herself
finished mixing the mustard, she gave Millie a few verbal stabs for her
excessive slowness. She had cooked the ham and eggs, laid the table,
and done everything, while Millie (help indeed!) had only succeeded in
delaying the mustard. And him a new guest and wanting to stay! Then she
filled the mustard pot, and, putting it with a certain stateliness upon
a gold and black tea-tray, carried it into the parlour.
She rapped and entered promptly. As she did so her visitor moved
quickly, so that she got but a glimpse of a white object disappearing
behind the table. It would seem he was picking something from the
floor. She rapped down the mustard pot on the table, and then she
noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off and put over a chair in
front of the fire, and a pair of wet boots threatened rust to her steel
fender. She went to these things resolutely. “I suppose I may have them
to dry now,” she said in a voice that brooked no denial.
“Leave the hat,” said her visitor, in a muffled voice, and turning she
saw he had raised his head and was sitting and looking at her.
For a moment she stood gaping at him, too surprised to speak.
He held a white cloth—it was a serviette he had brought with him—over
the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely
hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled voice. But it was not
that which startled Mrs. Hall. It was the fact that all his forehead
above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another
covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting
only his pink, peaked nose. It was bright, pink, and shiny just as it
had been at first. He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high,
black, linen-lined collar turned up about his neck. The thick black
hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages,
projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest
appearance conceivable. This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike
what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.
He did not remove the serviette, but remained holding it, as she saw
now, with a brown gloved hand, and regarding her with his inscrutable
blue glasses. “Leave the hat,” he said, speaking very distinctly
through the white cloth.
Her nerves began to recover from the shock they had received. She
placed the hat on the chair again by the fire. “I didn’t know, sir,”
she began, “that—” and she stopped embarrassed.
“Thank you,” he said drily, glancing from her to the door and then at
her again.
“I’ll have them nicely dried, sir, at once,” she said, and carried his
clothes out of the room. She glanced at his white-swathed head and blue
goggles again as she was going out of the door; but his napkin was
still in front of his face. She shivered a little as she closed the
door behind her, and her face was eloquent of her surprise and
perplexity. “I _never_,” she whispered. “There!” She went quite softly
to the kitchen, and was too preoccupied to ask Millie what she was
messing about with _now_, when she got there.
The visitor sat and listened to her retreating feet. He glanced
inquiringly at the window before he removed his serviette, and resumed
his meal. He took a mouthful, glanced suspiciously at the window, took
another mouthful, then rose and, taking the serviette in his hand,
walked across the room and pulled the blind down to the top of the
white muslin that obscured the lower panes. This left the room in a
twilight. This done, he returned with an easier air to the table and
his meal.
“The poor soul’s had an accident or an op’ration or somethin’,” said
Mrs. Hall. “What a turn them bandages did give me, to be sure!”
She put on some more coal, unfolded the clothes-horse, and extended the
traveller’s coat upon this. “And they goggles! Why, he looked more like
a divin’ helmet than a human man!” She hung his muffler on a corner of
the horse. “And holding that handkerchief over his mouth all the time.
Talkin’ through it! ... Perhaps his mouth was hurt too—maybe.”
She turned round, as one who suddenly remembers. “Bless my soul alive!”
she said, going off at a tangent; “ain’t you done them taters _yet_,
Millie?”
When Mrs. Hall went to clear away the stranger’s lunch, her idea that
his mouth must also have been cut or disfigured in the accident she
supposed him to have suffered, was confirmed, for he was smoking a
pipe, and all the time that she was in the room he never loosened the
silk muffler he had wrapped round the lower part of his face to put the
mouthpiece to his lips. Yet it was not forgetfulness, for she saw he
glanced at it as it smouldered out. He sat in the corner with his back
to the window-blind and spoke now, having eaten and drunk and being
comfortably warmed through, with less aggressive brevity than before.
The reflection of the fire lent a kind of red animation to his big
spectacles they had lacked hitherto.
“I have some luggage,” he said, “at Bramblehurst station,” and he asked
her how he could have it sent. He bowed his bandaged head quite
politely in acknowledgment of her explanation. “To-morrow?” he said.
“There is no speedier delivery?” and seemed quite disappointed when she
answered, “No.” Was she quite sure? No man with a trap who would go
over?
Mrs. Hall, nothing loath, answered his questions and developed a
conversation. “It’s a steep road by the down, sir,” she said in answer
to the question about a trap; and then, snatching at an opening, said,
“It was there a carriage was upsettled, a year ago and more. A
gentleman killed, besides his coachman. Accidents, sir, happen in a
moment, don’t they?”
But the visitor was not to be drawn so easily. “They do,” he said
through his muffler, eyeing her quietly through his impenetrable
glasses.
“But they take long enough to get well, don’t they? ... There was my
sister’s son, Tom, jest cut his arm with a scythe, tumbled on it in the
’ayfield, and, bless me! he was three months tied up sir. You’d hardly
believe it. It’s regular given me a dread of a scythe, sir.”
“I can quite understand that,” said the visitor.
“He was afraid, one time, that he’d have to have an op’ration—he was
that bad, sir.”
The visitor laughed abruptly, a bark of a laugh that he seemed to bite
and kill in his mouth. “_Was_ he?” he said.
“He was, sir. And no laughing matter to them as had the doing for him,
as I had—my sister being took up with her little ones so much. There
was bandages to do, sir, and bandages to undo. So that if I may make so
bold as to say it, sir—”
“Will you get me some matches?” said the visitor, quite abruptly. “My
pipe is out.”
Mrs. Hall was pulled up suddenly. It was certainly rude of him, after
telling him all she had done. She gasped at him for a moment, and
remembered the two sovereigns. She went for the matches.
“Thanks,” he said concisely, as she put them down, and turned his
shoulder upon her and stared out of the window again. It was altogether
too discouraging. Evidently he was sensitive on the topic of operations
and bandages. She did not “make so bold as to say,” however, after all.
But his snubbing way had irritated her, and Millie had a hot time of it
that afternoon.
The visitor remained in the parlour until four o’clock, without giving
the ghost of an excuse for an intrusion. For the most part he was quite
still during that time; it would seem he sat in the growing darkness
smoking in the firelight—perhaps dozing.
Once or twice a curious listener might have heard him at the coals, and
for the space of five minutes he was audible pacing the room. He seemed
to be talking to himself. Then the armchair creaked as he sat down
again.
CHAPTER II.
MR. TEDDY HENFREY’S FIRST IMPRESSIONS
At four o’clock, when it was fairly dark and Mrs. Hall was screwing up
her courage to go in and ask her visitor if he would take some tea,
Teddy Henfrey, the clock-jobber, came into the bar. “My sakes! Mrs.
Hall,” said he, “but this is terrible weather for thin boots!” The snow
outside was falling faster.
Mrs. Hall agreed, and then noticed he had his bag with him. “Now you’re
here, Mr. Teddy,” said she, “I’d be glad if you’d give th’ old clock in
the parlour a bit of a look. ’Tis going, and it strikes well and
hearty; but the hour-hand won’t do nuthin’ but point at six.”
And leading the way, she went across to the parlour door and rapped and
entered.
Her visitor, she saw as she opened the door, was seated in the armchair
before the fire, dozing it would seem, with his bandaged head drooping
on one side. The only light in the room was the red glow from the
fire—which lit his eyes like adverse railway signals, but left his
downcast face in darkness—and the scanty vestiges of the day that came
in through the open door. Everything was ruddy, shadowy, and indistinct
to her, the more so since she had just been lighting the bar lamp, and
her eyes were dazzled. But for a second it seemed to her that the man
she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open—a vast and incredible
mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face. It was
the sensation of a moment: the white-bound head, the monstrous goggle
eyes, and this huge yawn below it. Then he stirred, started up in his
chair, put up his hand. She opened the door wide, so that the room was
lighter, and she saw him more clearly, with the muffler held up to his
face just as she had seen him hold the serviette before. The shadows,
she fancied, had tricked her.
“Would you mind, sir, this man a-coming to look at the clock, sir?” she
said, recovering from the momentary shock.
“Look at the clock?” he said, staring round in a drowsy manner, and
speaking over his hand, and then, getting more fully awake,
“certainly.”
Mrs. Hall went away to get a lamp, and he rose and stretched himself.
Then came the light, and Mr. Teddy Henfrey, entering, was confronted by
this bandaged person. He was, he says, “taken aback.”
“Good afternoon,” said the stranger, regarding him—as Mr. Henfrey says,
with a vivid sense of the dark spectacles—“like a lobster.”
“I hope,” said Mr. Henfrey, “that it’s no intrusion.”
“None whatever,” said the stranger. “Though, I understand,” he said
turning to Mrs. Hall, “that this room is really to be mine for my own
private use.”
“I thought, sir,” said Mrs. Hall, “you’d prefer the clock—”
“Certainly,” said the stranger, “certainly—but, as a rule, I like to be
alone and undisturbed.
“But I’m really glad to have the clock seen to,” he said, seeing a
certain hesitation in Mr. Henfrey’s manner. “Very glad.” Mr. Henfrey
had intended to apologise and withdraw, but this anticipation reassured
him. The stranger turned round with his back to the fireplace and put
his hands behind his back. “And presently,” he said, “when the
clock-mending is over, I think I should like to have some tea. But not
till the clock-mending is over.”
Mrs. Hall was about to leave the room—she made no conversational
advances this time, because she did not want to be snubbed in front of
Mr. Henfrey—when her visitor asked her if she had made any arrangements
about his boxes at Bramblehurst. She told him she had mentioned the
matter to the postman, and that the carrier could bring them over on
the morrow. “You are certain that is the earliest?” he said.
She was certain, with a marked coldness.
“I should explain,” he added, “what I was really too cold and fatigued
to do before, that I am an experimental investigator.”
“Indeed, sir,” said Mrs. Hall, much impressed.
“And my baggage contains apparatus and appliances.”
“Very useful things indeed they are, sir,” said Mrs. Hall.
“And I’m very naturally anxious to get on with my inquiries.”
“Of course, sir.”
“My reason for coming to Iping,” he proceeded, with a certain
deliberation of manner, “was ... a desire for solitude. I do not wish
to be disturbed in my work. In addition to my work, an accident—”
“I thought as much,” said Mrs. Hall to herself.
“—necessitates a certain retirement. My eyes—are sometimes so weak and
painful that I have to shut myself up in the dark for hours together.
Lock myself up. Sometimes—now and then. Not at present, certainly. At
such times the slightest disturbance, the entry of a stranger into the
room, is a source of excruciating annoyance to me—it is well these
things should be understood.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Mrs. Hall. “And if I might make so bold as to
ask—”
“That I think, is all,” said the stranger, with that quietly
irresistible air of finality he could assume at will. Mrs. Hall
reserved her question and sympathy for a better occasion.
After Mrs. Hall had left the room, he remained standing in front of the
fire, glaring, so Mr. Henfrey puts it, at the clock-mending. Mr.
Henfrey not only took off the hands of the clock, and the face, but
extracted the works; and he tried to work in as slow and quiet and
unassuming a manner as possible. He worked with the lamp close to him,
and the green shade threw a brilliant light upon his hands, and upon
the frame and wheels, and left the rest of the room shadowy. When he
looked up, coloured patches swam in his eyes. Being constitutionally of
a curious nature, he had removed the works—a quite unnecessary
proceeding—with the idea of delaying his departure and perhaps falling
into conversation with the stranger. But the stranger stood there,
perfectly silent and still. So still, it got on Henfrey’s nerves. He
felt alone in the room and looked up, and there, grey and dim, was the
bandaged head and huge blue lenses staring fixedly, with a mist of
green spots drifting in front of them. It was so uncanny to Henfrey
that for a minute they remained staring blankly at one another. Then
Henfrey looked down again. Very uncomfortable position! One would like
to say something. Should he remark that the weather was very cold for
the time of year?
He looked up as if to take aim with that introductory shot. “The
weather—” he began.
“Why don’t you finish and go?” said the rigid figure, evidently in a
state of painfully suppressed rage. “All you’ve got to do is to fix the
hour-hand on its axle. You’re simply humbugging—”
“Certainly, sir—one minute more. I overlooked—” and Mr. Henfrey
finished and went.
But he went feeling excessively annoyed. “Damn it!” said Mr. Henfrey to
himself, trudging down the village through the thawing snow; “a man
must do a clock at times, surely.”
And again, “Can’t a man look at you?—Ugly!”
And yet again, “Seemingly not. If the police was wanting you you
couldn’t be more wropped and bandaged.”
At Gleeson’s corner he saw Hall, who had recently married the
stranger’s hostess at the “Coach and Horses,” and who now drove the
Iping conveyance, when occasional people required it, to Sidderbridge
Junction, coming towards him on his return from that place. Hall had
evidently been “stopping a bit” at Sidderbridge, to judge by his
driving. “’Ow do, Teddy?” he said, passing.
“You got a rum un up home!” said Teddy.
Hall very sociably pulled up. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Rum-looking customer stopping at the ‘Coach and Horses,’” said Teddy.
“My sakes!”
And he proceeded to give Hall a vivid description of his grotesque
guest. “Looks a bit like a disguise, don’t it? I’d like to see a man’s
face if I had him stopping in _my_ place,” said Henfrey. “But women are
that trustful—where strangers are concerned. He’s took your rooms and
he ain’t even given a name, Hall.”
“You don’t say so!” said Hall, who was a man of sluggish apprehension.
“Yes,” said Teddy. “By the week. Whatever he is, you can’t get rid of
him under the week. And he’s got a lot of luggage coming to-morrow, so
he says. Let’s hope it won’t be stones in boxes, Hall.”
He told Hall how his aunt at Hastings had been swindled by a stranger
with empty portmanteaux. Altogether he left Hall vaguely suspicious.
“Get up, old girl,” said Hall. “I s’pose I must see ’bout this.”
Teddy trudged on his way with his mind considerably relieved.
Instead of “seeing ’bout it,” however, Hall on his return was severely
rated by his wife on the length of time he had spent in Sidderbridge,
and his mild inquiries were answered snappishly and in a manner not to
the point. But the seed of suspicion Teddy had sown germinated in the
mind of Mr. Hall in spite of these discouragements. “You wim’ don’t
know everything,” said Mr. Hall, resolved to ascertain more about the
personality of his guest at the earliest possible opportunity. And
after the stranger had gone to bed, which he did about half-past nine,
Mr. Hall went very aggressively into the parlour and looked very hard
at his wife’s furniture, just to show that the stranger wasn’t master
there, and scrutinised closely and a little contemptuously a sheet of
mathematical computations the stranger had left. When retiring for the
night he instructed Mrs. Hall to look very closely at the stranger’s
luggage when it came next day.
“You mind your own business, Hall,” said Mrs. Hall, “and I’ll mind
mine.”
She was all the more inclined to snap at Hall because the stranger was
undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger, and she was by no
means assured about him in her own mind. In the middle of the night she
woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing
after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes.
But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and
went to sleep again.
CHAPTER III.
THE THOUSAND AND ONE BOTTLES
So it was that on the twenty-ninth day of February, at the beginning of
the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping village.
Next day his luggage arrived through the slush—and very remarkable
luggage it was. There were a couple of trunks indeed, such as a
rational man might need, but in addition there were a box of books—big,
fat books, of which some were just in an incomprehensible
handwriting—and a dozen or more crates, boxes, and cases, containing
objects packed in straw, as it seemed to Hall, tugging with a casual
curiosity at the straw—glass bottles. The stranger, muffled in hat,
coat, gloves, and wrapper, came out impatiently to meet Fearenside’s
cart, while Hall was having a word or so of gossip preparatory to
helping bring them in. Out he came, not noticing Fearenside’s dog, who
was sniffing in a _dilettante_ spirit at Hall’s legs. “Come along with
those boxes,” he said. “I’ve been waiting long enough.”
And he came down the steps towards the tail of the cart as if to lay
hands on the smaller crate.
No sooner had Fearenside’s dog caught sight of him, however, than it
began to bristle and growl savagely, and when he rushed down the steps
it gave an undecided hop, and then sprang straight at his hand. “Whup!”
cried Hall, jumping back, for he was no hero with dogs, and Fearenside
howled, “Lie down!” and snatched his whip.
They saw the dog’s teeth had slipped the hand, heard a kick, saw the
dog execute a flanking jump and get home on the stranger’s leg, and
heard the rip of his trousering. Then the finer end of Fearenside’s
whip reached his property, and the dog, yelping with dismay, retreated
under the wheels of the waggon. It was all the business of a swift
half-minute. No one spoke, everyone shouted. The stranger glanced
swiftly at his torn glove and at his leg, made as if he would stoop to
the latter, then turned and rushed swiftly up the steps into the inn.
They heard him go headlong across the passage and up the uncarpeted
stairs to his bedroom.
“You brute, you!” said Fearenside, climbing off the waggon with his
whip in his hand, while the dog watched him through the wheel. “Come
here,” said Fearenside—“You’d better.”
Hall had stood gaping. “He wuz bit,” said Hall. “I’d better go and see
to en,” and he trotted after the stranger. He met Mrs. Hall in the
passage. “Carrier’s darg,” he said “bit en.”
He went straight upstairs, and the stranger’s door being ajar, he
pushed it open and was entering without any ceremony, being of a
naturally sympathetic turn of mind.
The blind was down and the room dim. He caught a glimpse of a most
singular thing, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a
face of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the face of
a pale pansy. Then he was struck violently in the chest, hurled back,
and the door slammed in his face and locked. It was so rapid that it
gave him no time to observe. A waving of indecipherable shapes, a blow,
and a concussion. There he stood on the dark little landing, wondering
what it might be that he had seen.
A couple of minutes after, he rejoined the little group that had formed
outside the “Coach and Horses.” There was Fearenside telling about it
all over again for the second time; there was Mrs. Hall saying his dog
didn’t have no business to bite her guests; there was Huxter, the
general dealer from over the road, interrogative; and Sandy Wadgers
from the forge, judicial; besides women and children, all of them
saying fatuities: “Wouldn’t let en bite _me_, I knows”; “’Tasn’t right
_have_ such dargs”; “Whad ’_e_ bite ’n for, then?” and so forth.
Mr. Hall, staring at them from the steps and listening, found it
incredible that he had seen anything so very remarkable happen
upstairs. Besides, his vocabulary was altogether too limited to express
his impressions.
“He don’t want no help, he says,” he said in answer to his wife’s
inquiry. “We’d better be a-takin’ of his luggage in.”
“He ought to have it cauterised at once,” said Mr. Huxter; “especially
if it’s at all inflamed.”
“I’d shoot en, that’s what I’d do,” said a lady in the group.
Suddenly the dog began growling again.
“Come along,” cried an angry voice in the doorway, and there stood the
muffled stranger with his collar turned up, and his hat-brim bent down.
“The sooner you get those things in the better I’ll be pleased.” It is
stated by an anonymous bystander that his trousers and gloves had been
changed.
“Was you hurt, sir?” said Fearenside. “I’m rare sorry the darg—”
“Not a bit,” said the stranger. “Never broke the skin. Hurry up with
those things.”
He then swore to himself, so Mr. Hall asserts.
Directly the first crate was, in accordance with his directions,
carried into the parlour, the stranger flung himself upon it with
extraordinary eagerness, and began to unpack it, scattering the straw
with an utter disregard of Mrs. Hall’s carpet. And from it he began to
produce bottles—little fat bottles containing powders, small and
slender bottles containing coloured and white fluids, fluted blue
bottles labeled Poison, bottles with round bodies and slender necks,
large green-glass bottles, large white-glass bottles, bottles with
glass stoppers and frosted labels, bottles with fine corks, bottles
with bungs, bottles with wooden caps, wine bottles, salad-oil
bottles—putting them in rows on the chiffonnier, on the mantel, on the
table under the window, round the floor, on the bookshelf—everywhere.
The chemist’s shop in Bramblehurst could not boast half so many. Quite
a sight it was. Crate after crate yielded bottles, until all six were
empty and the table high with straw; the only things that came out of
these crates besides the bottles were a number of test-tubes and a
carefully packed balance.
And directly the crates were unpacked, the stranger went to the window
and set to work, not troubling in the least about the litter of straw,
the fire which had gone out, the box of books outside, nor for the
trunks and other luggage that had gone upstairs.
When Mrs. Hall took his dinner in to him, he was already so absorbed in
his work, pouring little drops out of the bottles into test-tubes, that
he did not hear her until she had swept away the bulk of the straw and
put the tray on the table, with some little emphasis perhaps, seeing
the state that the floor was in. Then he half turned his head and
immediately turned it away again. But she saw he had removed his
glasses; they were beside him on the table, and it seemed to her that
his eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow. He put on his spectacles
again, and then turned and faced her. She was about to complain of the
straw on the floor when he anticipated her.
“I wish you wouldn’t come in without knocking,” he said in the tone of
abnormal exasperation that seemed so characteristic of him.
“I knocked, but seemingly—”
“Perhaps you did. But in my investigations—my really very urgent and
necessary investigations—the slightest disturbance, the jar of a door—I
must ask you—”
“Certainly, sir. You can turn the lock if you’re like that, you know.
Any time.”
“A very good idea,” said the stranger.
“This stror, sir, if I might make so bold as to remark—”
“Don’t. If the straw makes trouble put it down in the bill.” And he
mumbled at her—words suspiciously like curses.
He was so odd, standing there, so aggressive and explosive, bottle in
one hand and test-tube in the other, that Mrs. Hall was quite alarmed.
But she was a resolute woman. “In which case, I should like to know,
sir, what you consider—”
“A shilling—put down a shilling. Surely a shilling’s enough?”
“So be it,” said Mrs. Hall, taking up the table-cloth and beginning to
spread it over the table. “If you’re satisfied, of course—”
He turned and sat down, with his coat-collar toward her.
All the afternoon he worked with the door locked and, as Mrs. Hall
testifies, for the most part in silence. But once there was a
concussion and a sound of bottles ringing together as though the table
had been hit, and the smash of a bottle flung violently down, and then
a rapid pacing athwart the room. Fearing “something was the matter,”
she went to the door and listened, not caring to knock.
“I can’t go on,” he was raving. “I _can’t_ go on. Three hundred
thousand, four hundred thousand! The huge multitude! Cheated! All my
life it may take me! ... Patience! Patience indeed! ... Fool! fool!”
There was a noise of hobnails on the bricks in the bar, and Mrs. Hall
had very reluctantly to leave the rest of his soliloquy. When she
returned the room was silent again, save for the faint crepitation of
his chair and the occasional clink of a bottle. It was all over; the
stranger had resumed work.
When she took in his tea she saw broken glass in the corner of the room
under the concave mirror, and a golden stain that had been carelessly
wiped. She called attention to it.
“Put it down in the bill,” snapped her visitor. “For God’s sake don’t
worry me. If there’s damage done, put it down in the bill,” and he went
on ticking a list in the exercise book before him.
“I’ll tell you something,” said Fearenside, mysteriously. It was late
in the afternoon, and they were in the little beer-shop of Iping
Hanger.
“Well?” said Teddy Henfrey.
“This chap you’re speaking of, what my dog bit. Well—he’s black.
Leastways, his legs are. I seed through the tear of his trousers and
the tear of his glove. You’d have expected a sort of pinky to show,
wouldn’t you? Well—there wasn’t none. Just blackness. I tell you, he’s
as black as my hat.”
“My sakes!” said Henfrey. “It’s a rummy case altogether. Why, his nose
is as pink as paint!”
“That’s true,” said Fearenside. “I knows that. And I tell ’ee what I’m
thinking. That marn’s a piebald, Teddy. Black here and white there—in
patches. And he’s ashamed of it. He’s a kind of half-breed, and the
colour’s come off patchy instead of mixing. I’ve heard of such things
before. And it’s the common way with horses, as any one can see.”
CHAPTER IV.
MR. CUSS INTERVIEWS THE STRANGER
I have told the circumstances of the stranger’s arrival in Iping with a
certain fulness of detail, in order that the curious impression he
created may be understood by the reader. But excepting two odd
incidents, the circumstances of his stay until the extraordinary day of
the club festival may be passed over very cursorily. There were a
number of skirmishes with Mrs. Hall on matters of domestic discipline,
but in every case until late April, when the first signs of penury
began, he over-rode her by the easy expedient of an extra payment. Hall
did not like him, and whenever he dared he talked of the advisability
of getting rid of him; but he showed his dislike chiefly by concealing
it ostentatiously, and avoiding his visitor as much as possible. “Wait
till the summer,” said Mrs. Hall sagely, “when the artisks are
beginning to come. Then we’ll see. He may be a bit overbearing, but
bills settled punctual is bills settled punctual, whatever you’d like
to say.”
The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference
between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as
Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early
and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room,
fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by
the fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none.
His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was
that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once
or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic
gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest
intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily
upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make
neither head nor tail of what she heard.
He rarely went abroad by daylight, but at twilight he would go out
muffled up invisibly, whether the weather were cold or not, and he
chose the loneliest paths and those most overshadowed by trees and
banks. His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the
penthouse of his hat, came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the
darkness upon one or two home-going labourers, and Teddy Henfrey,
tumbling out of the “Scarlet Coat” one night, at half-past nine, was
scared shamefully by the stranger’s skull-like head (he was walking hat
in hand) lit by the sudden light of the opened inn door. Such children
as saw him at nightfall dreamt of bogies, and it seemed doubtful
whether he disliked boys more than they disliked him, or the reverse;
but there was certainly a vivid enough dislike on either side.
It was inevitable that a person of so remarkable an appearance and
bearing should form a frequent topic in such a village as Iping.
Opinion was greatly divided about his occupation. Mrs. Hall was
sensitive on the point. When questioned, she explained very carefully
that he was an “experimental investigator,” going gingerly over the
syllables as one who dreads pitfalls. When asked what an experimental
investigator was, she would say with a touch of superiority that most
educated people knew such things as that, and would thus explain that
he “discovered things.” Her visitor had had an accident, she said,
which temporarily discoloured his face and hands, and being of a
sensitive disposition, he was averse to any public notice of the fact.
Out of her hearing there was a view largely entertained that he was a
criminal trying to escape from justice by wrapping himself up so as to
conceal himself altogether from the eye of the police. This idea sprang
from the brain of Mr. Teddy Henfrey. No crime of any magnitude dating
from the middle or end of February was known to have occurred.
Elaborated in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant
in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was
an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives, and he resolved to
undertake such detective operations as his time permitted. These
consisted for the most part in looking very hard at the stranger
whenever they met, or in asking people who had never seen the stranger,
leading questions about him. But he detected nothing.
Another school of opinion followed Mr. Fearenside, and either accepted
the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for instance, Silas
Durgan, who was heard to assert that “if he chooses to show enself at
fairs he’d make his fortune in no time,” and being a bit of a
theologian, compared the stranger to the man with the one talent. Yet
another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a
harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything
straight away.
Between these main groups there were waverers and compromisers. Sussex
folk have few superstitions, and it was only after the events of early
April that the thought of the supernatural was first whispered in the
village. Even then it was only credited among the women folk.
But whatever they thought of him, people in Iping, on the whole, agreed
in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have been
comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these
quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they surprised now
and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that swept him upon them
round quiet corners, the inhuman bludgeoning of all tentative advances
of curiosity, the taste for twilight that led to the closing of doors,
the pulling down of blinds, the extinction of candles and lamps—who
could agree with such goings on? They drew aside as he passed down the
village, and when he had gone by, young humourists would up with
coat-collars and down with hat-brims, and go pacing nervously after him
in imitation of his occult bearing. There was a song popular at that
time called “The Bogey Man”. Miss Statchell sang it at the schoolroom
concert (in aid of the church lamps), and thereafter whenever one or
two of the villagers were gathered together and the stranger appeared,
a bar or so of this tune, more or less sharp or flat, was whistled in
the midst of them. Also belated little children would call “Bogey Man!”
after him, and make off tremulously elated.
Cuss, the general practitioner, was devoured by curiosity. The bandages
excited his professional interest, the report of the thousand and one
bottles aroused his jealous regard. All through April and May he
coveted an opportunity of talking to the stranger, and at last, towards
Whitsuntide, he could stand it no longer, but hit upon the
subscription-list for a village nurse as an excuse. He was surprised to
find that Mr. Hall did not know his guest’s name. “He give a name,”
said Mrs. Hall—an assertion which was quite unfounded—“but I didn’t
rightly hear it.” She thought it seemed so silly not to know the man’s
name.
Cuss rapped at the parlour door and entered. There was a fairly audible
imprecation from within. “Pardon my intrusion,” said Cuss, and then the
door closed and cut Mrs. Hall off from the rest of the conversation.
She could hear the murmur of voices for the next ten minutes, then a
cry of surprise, a stirring of feet, a chair flung aside, a bark of
laughter, quick steps to the door, and Cuss appeared, his face white,
his eyes staring over his shoulder. He left the door open behind him,
and without looking at her strode across the hall and went down the
steps, and she heard his feet hurrying along the road. He carried his
hat in his hand. She stood behind the door, looking at the open door of
the parlour. Then she heard the stranger laughing quietly, and then his
footsteps came across the room. She could not see his face where she
stood. The parlour door slammed, and the place was silent again.
Cuss went straight up the village to Bunting the vicar. “Am I mad?”
Cuss began abruptly, as he entered the shabby little study. “Do I look
like an insane person?”
“What’s happened?” said the vicar, putting the ammonite on the loose
sheets of his forth-coming sermon.
“That chap at the inn—”
“Well?”
“Give me something to drink,” said Cuss, and he sat down.
When his nerves had been steadied by a glass of cheap sherry—the only
drink the good vicar had available—he told him of the interview he had
just had. “Went in,” he gasped, “and began to demand a subscription for
that Nurse Fund. He’d stuck his hands in his pockets as I came in, and
he sat down lumpily in his chair. Sniffed. I told him I’d heard he took
an interest in scientific things. He said yes. Sniffed again. Kept on
sniffing all the time; evidently recently caught an infernal cold. No
wonder, wrapped up like that! I developed the nurse idea, and all the
while kept my eyes open. Bottles—chemicals—everywhere. Balance,
test-tubes in stands, and a smell of—evening primrose. Would he
subscribe? Said he’d consider it. Asked him, point-blank, was he
researching. Said he was. A long research? Got quite cross. ‘A damnable
long research,’ said he, blowing the cork out, so to speak. ‘Oh,’ said
I. And out came the grievance. The man was just on the boil, and my
question boiled him over. He had been given a prescription, most
valuable prescription—what for he wouldn’t say. Was it medical? ‘Damn
you! What are you fishing after?’ I apologised. Dignified sniff and
cough. He resumed. He’d read it. Five ingredients. Put it down; turned
his head. Draught of air from window lifted the paper. Swish, rustle.
He was working in a room with an open fireplace, he said. Saw a
flicker, and there was the prescription burning and lifting
chimneyward. Rushed towards it just as it whisked up the chimney. So!
Just at that point, to illustrate his story, out came his arm.”
“Well?”
“No hand—just an empty sleeve. Lord! I thought, _that’s_ a deformity!
Got a cork arm, I suppose, and has taken it off. Then, I thought,
there’s something odd in that. What the devil keeps that sleeve up and
open, if there’s nothing in it? There was nothing in it, I tell you.
Nothing down it, right down to the joint. I could see right down it to
the elbow, and there was a glimmer of light shining through a tear of
the cloth. ‘Good God!’ I said. Then he stopped. Stared at me with those
black goggles of his, and then at his sleeve.”
“Well?”
“That’s all. He never said a word; just glared, and put his sleeve back
in his pocket quickly. ‘I was saying,’ said he, ‘that there was the
prescription burning, wasn’t I?’ Interrogative cough. ‘How the devil,’
said I, ‘can you move an empty sleeve like that?’ ‘Empty sleeve?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘an empty sleeve.’
“‘It’s an empty sleeve, is it? You saw it was an empty sleeve?’ He
stood up right away. I stood up too. He came towards me in three very
slow steps, and stood quite close. Sniffed venomously. I didn’t flinch,
though I’m hanged if that bandaged knob of his, and those blinkers,
aren’t enough to unnerve any one, coming quietly up to you.
“‘You said it was an empty sleeve?’ he said. ‘Certainly,’ I said. At
staring and saying nothing a barefaced man, unspectacled, starts
scratch. Then very quietly he pulled his sleeve out of his pocket
again, and raised his arm towards me as though he would show it to me
again. He did it very, very slowly. I looked at it. Seemed an age.
‘Well?’ said I, clearing my throat, ‘there’s nothing in it.’
“Had to say something. I was beginning to feel frightened. I could see
right down it. He extended it straight towards me, slowly, slowly—just
like that—until the cuff was six inches from my face. Queer thing to
see an empty sleeve come at you like that! And then—”
“Well?”
“Something—exactly like a finger and thumb it felt—nipped my nose.”
Bunting began to laugh.
“There wasn’t anything there!” said Cuss, his voice running up into a
shriek at the “there.” “It’s all very well for you to laugh, but I tell
you I was so startled, I hit his cuff hard, and turned around, and cut
out of the room—I left him—”
Cuss stopped. There was no mistaking the sincerity of his panic. He
turned round in a helpless way and took a second glass of the excellent
vicar’s very inferior sherry. “When I hit his cuff,” said Cuss, “I tell
you, it felt exactly like hitting an arm. And there wasn’t an arm!
There wasn’t the ghost of an arm!”
Mr. Bunting thought it over. He looked suspiciously at Cuss. “It’s a
most remarkable story,” he said. He looked very wise and grave indeed.
“It’s really,” said Mr. Bunting with judicial emphasis, “a most
remarkable story.”
CHAPTER V.
THE BURGLARY AT THE VICARAGE
The facts of the burglary at the vicarage came to us chiefly through
the medium of the vicar and his wife. It occurred in the small hours of
Whit Monday, the day devoted in Iping to the Club festivities. Mrs.
Bunting, it seems, woke up suddenly in the stillness that comes before
the dawn, with the strong impression that the door of their bedroom had
opened and closed. She did not arouse her husband at first, but sat up
in bed listening. She then distinctly heard the pad, pad, pad of bare
feet coming out of the adjoining dressing-room and walking along the
passage towards the staircase. As soon as she felt assured of this, she
aroused the Rev. Mr. Bunting as quietly as possible. He did not strike
a light, but putting on his spectacles, her dressing-gown and his bath
slippers, he went out on the landing to listen. He heard quite
distinctly a fumbling going on at his study desk down-stairs, and then
a violent sneeze.
At that he returned to his bedroom, armed himself with the most obvious
weapon, the poker, and descended the staircase as noiselessly as
possible. Mrs. Bunting came out on the landing.
The hour was about four, and the ultimate darkness of the night was
past. There was a faint shimmer of light in the hall, but the study
doorway yawned impenetrably black. Everything was still except the
faint creaking of the stairs under Mr. Bunting’s tread, and the slight
movements in the study. Then something snapped, the drawer was opened,
and there was a rustle of papers. Then came an imprecation, and a match
was struck and the study was flooded with yellow light. Mr. Bunting was
now in the hall, and through the crack of the door he could see the
desk and the open drawer and a candle burning on the desk. But the
robber he could not see. He stood there in the hall undecided what to
do, and Mrs. Bunting, her face white and intent, crept slowly
downstairs after him. One thing kept Mr. Bunting’s courage; the
persuasion that this burglar was a resident in the village.
They heard the chink of money, and realised that the robber had found
the housekeeping reserve of gold—two pounds ten in half sovereigns
altogether. At that sound Mr. Bunting was nerved to abrupt action.
Gripping the poker firmly, he rushed into the room, closely followed by
Mrs. Bunting. “Surrender!” cried Mr. Bunting, fiercely, and then
stooped amazed. Apparently the room was perfectly empty.
Yet their conviction that they had, that very moment, heard somebody
moving in the room had amounted to a certainty. For half a minute,
perhaps, they stood gaping, then Mrs. Bunting went across the room and
looked behind the screen, while Mr. Bunting, by a kindred impulse,
peered under the desk. Then Mrs. Bunting turned back the
window-curtains, and Mr. Bunting looked up the chimney and probed it
with the poker. Then Mrs. Bunting scrutinised the waste-paper basket
and Mr. Bunting opened the lid of the coal-scuttle. Then they came to a
stop and stood with eyes interrogating each other.
“I could have sworn—” said Mr. Bunting.
“The candle!” said Mr. Bunting. “Who lit the candle?”
“The drawer!” said Mrs. Bunting. “And the money’s gone!”
She went hastily to the doorway.
“Of all the strange occurrences—”
There was a violent sneeze in the passage. They rushed out, and as they
did so the kitchen door slammed. “Bring the candle,” said Mr. Bunting,
and led the way. They both heard a sound of bolts being hastily shot
back.
As he opened the kitchen door he saw through the scullery that the back
door was just opening, and the faint light of early dawn displayed the
dark masses of the garden beyond. He is certain that nothing went out
of the door. It opened, stood open for a moment, and then closed with a
slam. As it did so, the candle Mrs. Bunting was carrying from the study
flickered and flared. It was a minute or more before they entered the
kitchen.
The place was empty. They refastened the back door, examined the
kitchen, pantry, and scullery thoroughly, and at last went down into
the cellar. There was not a soul to be found in the house, search as
they would.
Daylight found the vicar and his wife, a quaintly-costumed little
couple, still marvelling about on their own ground floor by the
unnecessary light of a guttering candle.
CHAPTER VI.
THE FURNITURE THAT WENT MAD
Now it happened that in the early hours of Whit Monday, before Millie
was hunted out for the day, Mr. Hall and Mrs. Hall both rose and went
noiselessly down into the cellar. Their business there was of a private
nature, and had something to do with the specific gravity of their
beer. They had hardly entered the cellar when Mrs. Hall found she had
forgotten to bring down a bottle of sarsaparilla from their joint-room.
As she was the expert and principal operator in this affair, Hall very
properly went upstairs for it.
On the landing he was surprised to see that the stranger’s door was
ajar. He went on into his own room and found the bottle as he had been
directed.
But returning with the bottle, he noticed that the bolts of the front
door had been shot back, that the door was in fact simply on the latch.
And with a flash of inspiration he connected this with the stranger’s
room upstairs and the suggestions of Mr. Teddy Henfrey. He distinctly
remembered holding the candle while Mrs. Hall shot these bolts
overnight. At the sight he stopped, gaping, then with the bottle still
in his hand went upstairs again. He rapped at the stranger’s door.
There was no answer. He rapped again; then pushed the door wide open
and entered.
It was as he expected. The bed, the room also, was empty. And what was
stranger, even to his heavy intelligence, on the bedroom chair and
along the rail of the bed were scattered the garments, the only
garments so far as he knew, and the bandages of their guest. His big
slouch hat even was cocked jauntily over the bed-post.
As Hall stood there he heard his wife’s voice coming out of the depth
of the cellar, with that rapid telescoping of the syllables and
interrogative cocking up of the final words to a high note, by which
the West Sussex villager is wont to indicate a brisk impatience.
“George! You gart whad a wand?”
At that he turned and hurried down to her. “Janny,” he said, over the
rail of the cellar steps, “’tas the truth what Henfrey sez. ’E’s not in
uz room, ’e en’t. And the front door’s onbolted.”
At first Mrs. Hall did not understand, and as soon as she did she
resolved to see the empty room for herself. Hall, still holding the
bottle, went first. “If ’e en’t there,” he said, “’is close are. And
what’s ’e doin’ ’ithout ’is close, then? ’Tas a most curious business.”
As they came up the cellar steps they both, it was afterwards
ascertained, fancied they heard the front door open and shut, but
seeing it closed and nothing there, neither said a word to the other
about it at the time. Mrs. Hall passed her husband in the passage and
ran on first upstairs. Someone sneezed on the staircase. Hall,
following six steps behind, thought that he heard her sneeze. She,
going on first, was under the impression that Hall was sneezing. She
flung open the door and stood regarding the room. “Of all the curious!”
she said.
She heard a sniff close behind her head as it seemed, and turning, was
surprised to see Hall a dozen feet off on the topmost stair. But in
another moment he was beside her. She bent forward and put her hand on
the pillow and then under the clothes.
“Cold,” she said. “He’s been up this hour or more.”
As she did so, a most extraordinary thing happened. The bed-clothes
gathered themselves together, leapt up suddenly into a sort of peak,
and then jumped headlong over the bottom rail. It was exactly as if a
hand had clutched them in the centre and flung them aside. Immediately
after, the stranger’s hat hopped off the bed-post, described a whirling
flight in the air through the better part of a circle, and then dashed
straight at Mrs. Hall’s face. Then as swiftly came the sponge from the
washstand; and then the chair, flinging the stranger’s coat and
trousers carelessly aside, and laughing drily in a voice singularly
like the stranger’s, turned itself up with its four legs at Mrs. Hall,
seemed to take aim at her for a moment, and charged at her. She
screamed and turned, and then the chair legs came gently but firmly
against her back and impelled her and Hall out of the room. The door
slammed violently and was locked. The chair and bed seemed to be
executing a dance of triumph for a moment, and then abruptly everything
was still.
Mrs. Hall was left almost in a fainting condition in Mr. Hall’s arms on
the landing. It was with the greatest difficulty that Mr. Hall and
Millie, who had been roused by her scream of alarm, succeeded in
getting her downstairs, and applying the restoratives customary in such
cases.
“’Tas sperits,” said Mrs. Hall. “I know ’tas sperits. I’ve read in
papers of en. Tables and chairs leaping and dancing...”
“Take a drop more, Janny,” said Hall. “’Twill steady ye.”
“Lock him out,” said Mrs. Hall. “Don’t let him come in again. I half
guessed—I might ha’ known. With them goggling eyes and bandaged head,
and never going to church of a Sunday. And all they bottles—more’n it’s
right for any one to have. He’s put the sperits into the furniture....
My good old furniture! ’Twas in that very chair my poor dear mother
used to sit when I was a little girl. To think it should rise up
against me now!”
“Just a drop more, Janny,” said Hall. “Your nerves is all upset.”
They sent Millie across the street through the golden five o’clock
sunshine to rouse up Mr. Sandy Wadgers, the blacksmith. Mr. Hall’s
compliments and the furniture upstairs was behaving most extraordinary.
Would Mr. Wadgers come round? He was a knowing man, was Mr. Wadgers,
and very resourceful. He took quite a grave view of the case. “Arm
darmed if thet ent witchcraft,” was the view of Mr. Sandy Wadgers. “You
warnt horseshoes for such gentry as he.”
He came round greatly concerned. They wanted him to lead the way
upstairs to the room, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He
preferred to talk in the passage. Over the way Huxter’s apprentice came
out and began taking down the shutters of the tobacco window. He was
called over to join the discussion. Mr. Huxter naturally followed over
in the course of a few minutes. The Anglo-Saxon genius for
parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of
talk and no decisive action. “Let’s have the facts first,” insisted Mr.
Sandy Wadgers. “Let’s be sure we’d be acting perfectly right in bustin’
that there door open. A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye
can’t onbust a door once you’ve busted en.”
And suddenly and most wonderfully the door of the room upstairs opened
of its own accord, and as they looked up in amazement, they saw
descending the stairs the muffled figure of the stranger staring more
blackly and blankly than ever with those unreasonably large blue glass
eyes of his. He came down stiffly and slowly, staring all the time; he
walked across the passage staring, then stopped.
“Look there!” he said, and their eyes followed the direction of his
gloved finger and saw a bottle of sarsaparilla hard by the cellar door.
Then he entered the parlour, and suddenly, swiftly, viciously, slammed
the door in their faces.
Not a word was spoken until the last echoes of the slam had died away.
They stared at one another. “Well, if that don’t lick everything!” said
Mr. Wadgers, and left the alternative unsaid.
“I’d go in and ask’n ’bout it,” said Wadgers, to Mr. Hall. “I’d d’mand
an explanation.”
It took some time to bring the landlady’s husband up to that pitch. At
last he rapped, opened the door, and got as far as, “Excuse me—”
“Go to the devil!” said the stranger in a tremendous voice, and “Shut
that door after you.” So that brief interview terminated.
CHAPTER VII.
THE UNVEILING OF THE STRANGER
The stranger went into the little parlour of the “Coach and Horses”
about half-past five in the morning, and there he remained until near
midday, the blinds down, the door shut, and none, after Hall’s repulse,
venturing near him.
All that time he must have fasted. Thrice he rang his bell, the third
time furiously and continuously, but no one answered him. “Him and his
‘go to the devil’ indeed!” said Mrs. Hall. Presently came an imperfect
rumour of the burglary at the vicarage, and two and two were put
together. Hall, assisted by Wadgers, went off to find Mr. Shuckleforth,
the magistrate, and take his advice. No one ventured upstairs. How the
stranger occupied himself is unknown. Now and then he would stride
violently up and down, and twice came an outburst of curses, a tearing
of paper, and a violent smashing of bottles.
The little group of scared but curious people increased. Mrs. Huxter
came over; some gay young fellows resplendent in black ready-made
jackets and _piqué_ paper ties—for it was Whit Monday—joined the group
with confused interrogations. Young Archie Harker distinguished himself
by going up the yard and trying to peep under the window-blinds. He
could see nothing, but gave reason for supposing that he did, and
others of the Iping youth presently joined him.
It was the finest of all possible Whit Mondays, and down the village
street stood a row of nearly a dozen booths, a shooting gallery, and on
the grass by the forge were three yellow and chocolate waggons and some
picturesque strangers of both sexes putting up a cocoanut shy. The
gentlemen wore blue jerseys, the ladies white aprons and quite
fashionable hats with heavy plumes. Wodger, of the “Purple Fawn,” and
Mr. Jaggers, the cobbler, who also sold old second-hand ordinary
bicycles, were stretching a string of union-jacks and royal ensigns
(which had originally celebrated the first Victorian Jubilee) across
the road.
And inside, in the artificial darkness of the parlour, into which only
one thin jet of sunlight penetrated, the stranger, hungry we must
suppose, and fearful, hidden in his uncomfortable hot wrappings, pored
through his dark glasses upon his paper or chinked his dirty little
bottles, and occasionally swore savagely at the boys, audible if
invisible, outside the windows. In the corner by the fireplace lay the
fragments of half a dozen smashed bottles, and a pungent twang of
chlorine tainted the air. So much we know from what was heard at the
time and from what was subsequently seen in the room.
About noon he suddenly opened his parlour door and stood glaring
fixedly at the three or four people in the bar. “Mrs. Hall,” he said.
Somebody went sheepishly and called for Mrs. Hall.
Mrs. Hall appeared after an interval, a little short of breath, but all
the fiercer for that. Hall was still out. She had deliberated over this
scene, and she came holding a little tray with an unsettled bill upon
it. “Is it your bill you’re wanting, sir?” she said.
“Why wasn’t my breakfast laid? Why haven’t you prepared my meals and
answered my bell? Do you think I live without eating?”
“Why isn’t my bill paid?” said Mrs. Hall. “That’s what I want to know.”
“I told you three days ago I was awaiting a remittance—”
“I told you two days ago I wasn’t going to await no remittances. You
can’t grumble if your breakfast waits a bit, if my bill’s been waiting
these five days, can you?”
The stranger swore briefly but vividly.
“Nar, nar!” from the bar.
“And I’d thank you kindly, sir, if you’d keep your swearing to
yourself, sir,” said Mrs. Hall.
The stranger stood looking more like an angry diving-helmet than ever.
It was universally felt in the bar that Mrs. Hall had the better of
him. His next words showed as much.
“Look here, my good woman—” he began.
“Don’t ‘good woman’ _me_,” said Mrs. Hall.
“I’ve told you my remittance hasn’t come.”
“Remittance indeed!” said Mrs. Hall.
“Still, I daresay in my pocket—”
“You told me three days ago that you hadn’t anything but a sovereign’s
worth of silver upon you.”
“Well, I’ve found some more—”
“’Ul-lo!” from the bar.
“I wonder where you found it,” said Mrs. Hall.
That seemed to annoy the stranger very much. He stamped his foot. “What
do you mean?” he said.
“That I wonder where you found it,” said Mrs. Hall. “And before I take
any bills or get any breakfasts, or do any such things whatsoever, you
got to tell me one or two things I don’t understand, and what nobody
don’t understand, and what everybody is very anxious to understand. I
want to know what you been doing t’my chair upstairs, and I want to
know how ’tis your room was empty, and how you got in again. Them as
stops in this house comes in by the doors—that’s the rule of the house,
and that you _didn’t_ do, and what I want to know is how you _did_ come
in. And I want to know—”
Suddenly the stranger raised his gloved hands clenched, stamped his
foot, and said, “Stop!” with such extraordinary violence that he
silenced her instantly.
“You don’t understand,” he said, “who I am or what I am. I’ll show you.
By Heaven! I’ll show you.” Then he put his open palm over his face and
withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. “Here,” he
said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she,
staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when
she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered
back. The nose—it was the stranger’s nose! pink and shining—rolled on
the floor.
Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took
off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and
bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible
anticipation passed through the bar. “Oh, my Gard!” said some one. Then
off they came.
It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and
horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the
house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars,
disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false
hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to
avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the
man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid
gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and
then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!
People down the village heard shouts and shrieks, and looking up the
street saw the “Coach and Horses” violently firing out its humanity.
They saw Mrs. Hall fall down and Mr. Teddy Henfrey jump to avoid
tumbling over her, and then they heard the frightful screams of Millie,
who, emerging suddenly from the kitchen at the noise of the tumult, had
come upon the headless stranger from behind. These increased suddenly.
Forthwith everyone all down the street, the sweetstuff seller, cocoanut
shy proprietor and his assistant, the swing man, little boys and girls,
rustic dandies, smart wenches, smocked elders and aproned gipsies—began
running towards the inn, and in a miraculously short space of time a
crowd of perhaps forty people, and rapidly increasing, swayed and
hooted and inquired and exclaimed and suggested, in front of Mrs.
Hall’s establishment. Everyone seemed eager to talk at once, and the
result was Babel. A small group supported Mrs. Hall, who was picked up
in a state of collapse. There was a conference, and the incredible
evidence of a vociferous eye-witness. “O Bogey!” “What’s he been doin’,
then?” “Ain’t hurt the girl, ’as ’e?” “Run at en with a knife, I
believe.” “No ’ed, I tell ye. I don’t mean no manner of speaking. I
mean _marn ’ithout a ’ed_!” “Narnsense! ’tis some conjuring trick.”
“Fetched off ’is wrapping, ’e did—”
In its struggles to see in through the open door, the crowd formed
itself into a straggling wedge, with the more adventurous apex nearest
the inn. “He stood for a moment, I heerd the gal scream, and he turned.
I saw her skirts whisk, and he went after her. Didn’t take ten seconds.
Back he comes with a knife in uz hand and a loaf; stood just as if he
was staring. Not a moment ago. Went in that there door. I tell ’e, ’e
ain’t gart no ’ed at all. You just missed en—”
There was a disturbance behind, and the speaker stopped to step aside
for a little procession that was marching very resolutely towards the
house; first Mr. Hall, very red and determined, then Mr. Bobby Jaffers,
the village constable, and then the wary Mr. Wadgers. They had come now
armed with a warrant.
People shouted conflicting information of the recent circumstances.
“’Ed or no ’ed,” said Jaffers, “I got to ’rest en, and ’rest en I
_will_.”
Mr. Hall marched up the steps, marched straight to the door of the
parlour and flung it open. “Constable,” he said, “do your duty.”
Jaffers marched in. Hall next, Wadgers last. They saw in the dim light
the headless figure facing them, with a gnawed crust of bread in one
gloved hand and a chunk of cheese in the other.
“That’s him!” said Hall.
“What the devil’s this?” came in a tone of angry expostulation from
above the collar of the figure.
“You’re a damned rum customer, mister,” said Mr. Jaffers. “But ’ed or
no ’ed, the warrant says ‘body,’ and duty’s duty—”
“Keep off!” said the figure, starting back.
Abruptly he whipped down the bread and cheese, and Mr. Hall just
grasped the knife on the table in time to save it. Off came the
stranger’s left glove and was slapped in Jaffers’ face. In another
moment Jaffers, cutting short some statement concerning a warrant, had
gripped him by the handless wrist and caught his invisible throat. He
got a sounding kick on the shin that made him shout, but he kept his
grip. Hall sent the knife sliding along the table to Wadgers, who acted
as goal-keeper for the offensive, so to speak, and then stepped forward
as Jaffers and the stranger swayed and staggered towards him, clutching
and hitting in. A chair stood in the way, and went aside with a crash
as they came down together.
“Get the feet,” said Jaffers between his teeth.
Mr. Hall, endeavouring to act on instructions, received a sounding kick
in the ribs that disposed of him for a moment, and Mr. Wadgers, seeing
the decapitated stranger had rolled over and got the upper side of
Jaffers, retreated towards the door, knife in hand, and so collided
with Mr. Huxter and the Sidderbridge carter coming to the rescue of law
and order. At the same moment down came three or four bottles from the
chiffonnier and shot a web of pungency into the air of the room.
“I’ll surrender,” cried the stranger, though he had Jaffers down, and
in another moment he stood up panting, a strange figure, headless and
handless—for he had pulled off his right glove now as well as his left.
“It’s no good,” he said, as if sobbing for breath.
It was the strangest thing in the world to hear that voice coming as if
out of empty space, but the Sussex peasants are perhaps the most
matter-of-fact people under the sun. Jaffers got up also and produced a
pair of handcuffs. Then he stared.
“I say!” said Jaffers, brought up short by a dim realization of the
incongruity of the whole business, “Darn it! Can’t use ’em as I can
see.”
The stranger ran his arm down his waistcoat, and as if by a miracle the
buttons to which his empty sleeve pointed became undone. Then he said
something about his shin, and stooped down. He seemed to be fumbling
with his shoes and socks.
“Why!” said Huxter, suddenly, “that’s not a man at all. It’s just empty
clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his
clothes. I could put my arm—”
He extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he
drew it back with a sharp exclamation. “I wish you’d keep your fingers
out of my eye,” said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage
expostulation. “The fact is, I’m all here—head, hands, legs, and all
the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded
nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by
every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?”
The suit of clothes, now all unbuttoned and hanging loosely upon its
unseen supports, stood up, arms akimbo.
Several other of the men folks had now entered the room, so that it was
closely crowded. “Invisible, eh?” said Huxter, ignoring the stranger’s
abuse. “Who ever heard the likes of that?”
“It’s strange, perhaps, but it’s not a crime. Why am I assaulted by a
policeman in this fashion?”
“Ah! that’s a different matter,” said Jaffers. “No doubt you are a bit
difficult to see in this light, but I got a warrant and it’s all
correct. What I’m after ain’t no invisibility,—it’s burglary. There’s a
house been broke into and money took.”
“Well?”
“And circumstances certainly point—”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said the Invisible Man.
“I hope so, sir; but I’ve got my instructions.”
“Well,” said the stranger, “I’ll come. I’ll _come_. But no handcuffs.”
“It’s the regular thing,” said Jaffers.
“No handcuffs,” stipulated the stranger.
“Pardon me,” said Jaffers.
Abruptly the figure sat down, and before any one could realise was was
being done, the slippers, socks, and trousers had been kicked off under
the table. Then he sprang up again and flung off his coat.
“Here, stop that,” said Jaffers, suddenly realising what was happening.
He gripped at the waistcoat; it struggled, and the shirt slipped out of
it and left it limp and empty in his hand. “Hold him!” said Jaffers,
loudly. “Once he gets the things off—”
“Hold him!” cried everyone, and there was a rush at the fluttering
white shirt which was now all that was visible of the stranger.
The shirt-sleeve planted a shrewd blow in Hall’s face that stopped his
open-armed advance, and sent him backward into old Toothsome the
sexton, and in another moment the garment was lifted up and became
convulsed and vacantly flapping about the arms, even as a shirt that is
being thrust over a man’s head. Jaffers clutched at it, and only helped
to pull it off; he was struck in the mouth out of the air, and
incontinently threw his truncheon and smote Teddy Henfrey savagely upon
the crown of his head.
“Look out!” said everybody, fencing at random and hitting at nothing.
“Hold him! Shut the door! Don’t let him loose! I got something! Here he
is!” A perfect Babel of noises they made. Everybody, it seemed, was
being hit all at once, and Sandy Wadgers, knowing as ever and his wits
sharpened by a frightful blow in the nose, reopened the door and led
the rout. The others, following incontinently, were jammed for a moment
in the corner by the doorway. The hitting continued. Phipps, the
Unitarian, had a front tooth broken, and Henfrey was injured in the
cartilage of his ear. Jaffers was struck under the jaw, and, turning,
caught at something that intervened between him and Huxter in the
mêlée, and prevented their coming together. He felt a muscular chest,
and in another moment the whole mass of struggling, excited men shot
out into the crowded hall.
“I got him!” shouted Jaffers, choking and reeling through them all, and
wrestling with purple face and swelling veins against his unseen enemy.
Men staggered right and left as the extraordinary conflict swayed
swiftly towards the house door, and went spinning down the half-dozen
steps of the inn. Jaffers cried in a strangled voice—holding tight,
nevertheless, and making play with his knee—spun around, and fell
heavily undermost with his head on the gravel. Only then did his
fingers relax.
There were excited cries of “Hold him!” “Invisible!” and so forth, and
a young fellow, a stranger in the place whose name did not come to
light, rushed in at once, caught something, missed his hold, and fell
over the constable’s prostrate body. Half-way across the road a woman
screamed as something pushed by her; a dog, kicked apparently, yelped
and ran howling into Huxter’s yard, and with that the transit of the
Invisible Man was accomplished. For a space people stood amazed and
gesticulating, and then came panic, and scattered them abroad through
the village as a gust scatters dead leaves.
But Jaffers lay quite still, face upward and knees bent, at the foot of
the steps of the inn.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN TRANSIT
The eighth chapter is exceedingly brief, and relates that Gibbons, the
amateur naturalist of the district, while lying out on the spacious
open downs without a soul within a couple of miles of him, as he
thought, and almost dozing, heard close to him the sound as of a man
coughing, sneezing, and then swearing savagely to himself; and looking,
beheld nothing. Yet the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear
with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a
cultivated man. It grew to a climax, diminished again, and died away in
the distance, going as it seemed to him in the direction of Adderdean.
It lifted to a spasmodic sneeze and ended. Gibbons had heard nothing of
the morning’s occurrences, but the phenomenon was so striking and
disturbing that his philosophical tranquillity vanished; he got up
hastily, and hurried down the steepness of the hill towards the
village, as fast as he could go.
CHAPTER IX.
MR. THOMAS MARVEL
You must picture Mr. Thomas Marvel as a person of copious, flexible
visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample,
fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure
inclined to embonpoint; his short limbs accentuated this inclination.
He wore a furry silk hat, and the frequent substitution of twine and
shoe-laces for buttons, apparent at critical points of his costume,
marked a man essentially bachelor.
Mr. Thomas Marvel was sitting with his feet in a ditch by the roadside
over the down towards Adderdean, about a mile and a half out of Iping.
His feet, save for socks of irregular open-work, were bare, his big
toes were broad, and pricked like the ears of a watchful dog. In a
leisurely manner—he did everything in a leisurely manner—he was
contemplating trying on a pair of boots. They were the soundest boots
he had come across for a long time, but too large for him; whereas the
ones he had were, in dry weather, a very comfortable fit, but too
thin-soled for damp. Mr. Thomas Marvel hated roomy shoes, but then he
hated damp. He had never properly thought out which he hated most, and
it was a pleasant day, and there was nothing better to do. So he put
the four shoes in a graceful group on the turf and looked at them. And
seeing them there among the grass and springing agrimony, it suddenly
occurred to him that both pairs were exceedingly ugly to see. He was
not at all startled by a voice behind him.
“They’re boots, anyhow,” said the Voice.
“They are—charity boots,” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, with his head on one
side regarding them distastefully; “and which is the ugliest pair in
the whole blessed universe, I’m darned if I know!”
“H’m,” said the Voice.
“I’ve worn worse—in fact, I’ve worn none. But none so owdacious ugly—if
you’ll allow the expression. I’ve been cadging boots—in particular—for
days. Because I was sick of _them_. They’re sound enough, of course.
But a gentleman on tramp sees such a thundering lot of his boots. And
if you’ll believe me, I’ve raised nothing in the whole blessed country,
try as I would, but _them_. Look at ’em! And a good country for boots,
too, in a general way. But it’s just my promiscuous luck. I’ve got my
boots in this country ten years or more. And then they treat you like
this.”
“It’s a beast of a country,” said the Voice. “And pigs for people.”
“Ain’t it?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel. “Lord! But them boots! It beats
it.”
He turned his head over his shoulder to the right, to look at the boots
of his interlocutor with a view to comparisons, and lo! where the boots
of his interlocutor should have been were neither legs nor boots. He
was irradiated by the dawn of a great amazement. “Where _are_ yer?”
said Mr. Thomas Marvel over his shoulder and coming on all fours. He
saw a stretch of empty downs with the wind swaying the remote
green-pointed furze bushes.
“Am I drunk?” said Mr. Marvel. “Have I had visions? Was I talking to
myself? What the—”
“Don’t be alarmed,” said a Voice.
“None of your ventriloquising _me_,” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, rising
sharply to his feet. “Where _are_ yer? Alarmed, indeed!”
“Don’t be alarmed,” repeated the Voice.
“_You’ll_ be alarmed in a minute, you silly fool,” said Mr. Thomas
Marvel. “Where _are_ yer? Lemme get my mark on yer...
“Are yer _buried_?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, after an interval.
There was no answer. Mr. Thomas Marvel stood bootless and amazed, his
jacket nearly thrown off.
“Peewit,” said a peewit, very remote.
“Peewit, indeed!” said Mr. Thomas Marvel. “This ain’t no time for
foolery.” The down was desolate, east and west, north and south; the
road with its shallow ditches and white bordering stakes, ran smooth
and empty north and south, and, save for that peewit, the blue sky was
empty too. “So help me,” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, shuffling his coat on
to his shoulders again. “It’s the drink! I might ha’ known.”
“It’s not the drink,” said the Voice. “You keep your nerves steady.”
“Ow!” said Mr. Marvel, and his face grew white amidst its patches.
“It’s the drink!” his lips repeated noiselessly. He remained staring
about him, rotating slowly backwards. “I could have _swore_ I heard a
voice,” he whispered.
“Of course you did.”
“It’s there again,” said Mr. Marvel, closing his eyes and clasping his
hand on his brow with a tragic gesture. He was suddenly taken by the
collar and shaken violently, and left more dazed than ever. “Don’t be a
fool,” said the Voice.
“I’m—off—my—blooming—chump,” said Mr. Marvel. “It’s no good. It’s
fretting about them blarsted boots. I’m off my blessed blooming chump.
Or it’s spirits.”
“Neither one thing nor the other,” said the Voice. “Listen!”
“Chump,” said Mr. Marvel.
“One minute,” said the Voice, penetratingly, tremulous with
self-control.
“Well?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, with a strange feeling of having been
dug in the chest by a finger.
“You think I’m just imagination? Just imagination?”
“What else _can_ you be?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, rubbing the back of
his neck.
“Very well,” said the Voice, in a tone of relief. “Then I’m going to
throw flints at you till you think differently.”
“But where _are_ yer?”
The Voice made no answer. Whizz came a flint, apparently out of the
air, and missed Mr. Marvel’s shoulder by a hair’s-breadth. Mr. Marvel,
turning, saw a flint jerk up into the air, trace a complicated path,
hang for a moment, and then fling at his feet with almost invisible
rapidity. He was too amazed to dodge. Whizz it came, and ricochetted
from a bare toe into the ditch. Mr. Thomas Marvel jumped a foot and
howled aloud. Then he started to run, tripped over an unseen obstacle,
and came head over heels into a sitting position.
“_Now_,” said the Voice, as a third stone curved upward and hung in the
air above the tramp. “Am I imagination?”
Mr. Marvel by way of reply struggled to his feet, and was immediately
rolled over again. He lay quiet for a moment. “If you struggle any
more,” said the Voice, “I shall throw the flint at your head.”
“It’s a fair do,” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, sitting up, taking his
wounded toe in hand and fixing his eye on the third missile. “I don’t
understand it. Stones flinging themselves. Stones talking. Put yourself
down. Rot away. I’m done.”
The third flint fell.
“It’s very simple,” said the Voice. “I’m an invisible man.”
“Tell us something I don’t know,” said Mr. Marvel, gasping with pain.
“Where you’ve hid—how you do it—I _don’t_ know. I’m beat.”
“That’s all,” said the Voice. “I’m invisible. That’s what I want you to
understand.”
“Anyone could see that. There is no need for you to be so confounded
impatient, mister. _Now_ then. Give us a notion. How are you hid?”
“I’m invisible. That’s the great point. And what I want you to
understand is this—”
“But whereabouts?” interrupted Mr. Marvel.
“Here! Six yards in front of you.”
“Oh, _come_! I ain’t blind. You’ll be telling me next you’re just thin
air. I’m not one of your ignorant tramps—”
“Yes, I am—thin air. You’re looking through me.”
“What! Ain’t there any stuff to you. _Vox et_—what is it?—jabber. Is it
that?”
“I am just a human being—solid, needing food and drink, needing
covering too—But I’m invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea.
Invisible.”
“What, real like?”
“Yes, real.”
“Let’s have a hand of you,” said Marvel, “if you _are_ real. It won’t
be so darn out-of-the-way like, then—_Lord_!” he said, “how you made me
jump!—gripping me like that!”
He felt the hand that had closed round his wrist with his disengaged
fingers, and his fingers went timorously up the arm, patted a muscular
chest, and explored a bearded face. Marvel’s face was astonishment.
“I’m dashed!” he said. “If this don’t beat cock-fighting! Most
remarkable!—And there I can see a rabbit clean through you, ’arf a mile
away! Not a bit of you visible—except—”
He scrutinised the apparently empty space keenly. “You ’aven’t been
eatin’ bread and cheese?” he asked, holding the invisible arm.
“You’re quite right, and it’s not quite assimilated into the system.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Marvel. “Sort of ghostly, though.”
“Of course, all this isn’t half so wonderful as you think.”
“It’s quite wonderful enough for _my_ modest wants,” said Mr. Thomas
Marvel. “Howjer manage it! How the dooce is it done?”
“It’s too long a story. And besides—”
“I tell you, the whole business fairly beats me,” said Mr. Marvel.
“What I want to say at present is this: I need help. I have come to
that—I came upon you suddenly. I was wandering, mad with rage, naked,
impotent. I could have murdered. And I saw you—”
“_Lord_!” said Mr. Marvel.
“I came up behind you—hesitated—went on—”
Mr. Marvel’s expression was eloquent.
“—then stopped. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘is an outcast like myself. This is the
man for me.’ So I turned back and came to you—you. And—”
“_Lord_!” said Mr. Marvel. “But I’m all in a tizzy. May I ask—How is
it? And what you may be requiring in the way of help?—Invisible!”
“I want you to help me get clothes—and shelter—and then, with other
things. I’ve left them long enough. If you won’t—well! But you
_will—must_.”
“Look here,” said Mr. Marvel. “I’m too flabbergasted. Don’t knock me
about any more. And leave me go. I must get steady a bit. And you’ve
pretty near broken my toe. It’s all so unreasonable. Empty downs, empty
sky. Nothing visible for miles except the bosom of Nature. And then
comes a voice. A voice out of heaven! And stones! And a fist—Lord!”
“Pull yourself together,” said the Voice, “for you have to do the job
I’ve chosen for you.”
Mr. Marvel blew out his cheeks, and his eyes were round.
“I’ve chosen you,” said the Voice. “You are the only man except some of
those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible
man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for
you. An invisible man is a man of power.” He stopped for a moment to
sneeze violently.
“But if you betray me,” he said, “if you fail to do as I direct you—”
He paused and tapped Mr. Marvel’s shoulder smartly. Mr. Marvel gave a
yelp of terror at the touch. “I don’t want to betray you,” said Mr.
Marvel, edging away from the direction of the fingers. “Don’t you go
a-thinking that, whatever you do. All I want to do is to help you—just
tell me what I got to do. (Lord!) Whatever you want done, that I’m most
willing to do.”
CHAPTER X.
MR. MARVEL’S VISIT TO IPING
After the first gusty panic had spent itself Iping became
argumentative. Scepticism suddenly reared its head—rather nervous
scepticism, not at all assured of its back, but scepticism
nevertheless. It is so much easier not to believe in an invisible man;
and those who had actually seen him dissolve into air, or felt the
strength of his arm, could be counted on the fingers of two hands. And
of these witnesses Mr. Wadgers was presently missing, having retired
impregnably behind the bolts and bars of his own house, and Jaffers was
lying stunned in the parlour of the “Coach and Horses.” Great and
strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men
and women than smaller, more tangible considerations. Iping was gay
with bunting, and everybody was in gala dress. Whit Monday had been
looked forward to for a month or more. By the afternoon even those who
believed in the Unseen were beginning to resume their little amusements
in a tentative fashion, on the supposition that he had quite gone away,
and with the sceptics he was already a jest. But people, sceptics and
believers alike, were remarkably sociable all that day.
Haysman’s meadow was gay with a tent, in which Mrs. Bunting and other
ladies were preparing tea, while, without, the Sunday-school children
ran races and played games under the noisy guidance of the curate and
the Misses Cuss and Sackbut. No doubt there was a slight uneasiness in
the air, but people for the most part had the sense to conceal whatever
imaginative qualms they experienced. On the village green an inclined
strong [rope?], down which, clinging the while to a pulley-swung
handle, one could be hurled violently against a sack at the other end,
came in for considerable favour among the adolescents, as also did the
swings and the cocoanut shies. There was also promenading, and the
steam organ attached to a small roundabout filled the air with a
pungent flavour of oil and with equally pungent music. Members of the
club, who had attended church in the morning, were splendid in badges
of pink and green, and some of the gayer-minded had also adorned their
bowler hats with brilliant-coloured favours of ribbon. Old Fletcher,
whose conceptions of holiday-making were severe, was visible through
the jasmine about his window or through the open door (whichever way
you chose to look), poised delicately on a plank supported on two
chairs, and whitewashing the ceiling of his front room.
About four o’clock a stranger entered the village from the direction of
the downs. He was a short, stout person in an extraordinarily shabby
top hat, and he appeared to be very much out of breath. His cheeks were
alternately limp and tightly puffed. His mottled face was apprehensive,
and he moved with a sort of reluctant alacrity. He turned the corner of
the church, and directed his way to the “Coach and Horses.” Among
others old Fletcher remembers seeing him, and indeed the old gentleman
was so struck by his peculiar agitation that he inadvertently allowed a
quantity of whitewash to run down the brush into the sleeve of his coat
while regarding him.
This stranger, to the perceptions of the proprietor of the cocoanut
shy, appeared to be talking to himself, and Mr. Huxter remarked the
same thing. He stopped at the foot of the “Coach and Horses” steps,
and, according to Mr. Huxter, appeared to undergo a severe internal
struggle before he could induce himself to enter the house. Finally he
marched up the steps, and was seen by Mr. Huxter to turn to the left
and open the door of the parlour. Mr. Huxter heard voices from within
the room and from the bar apprising the man of his error. “That room’s
private!” said Hall, and the stranger shut the door clumsily and went
into the bar.
In the course of a few minutes he reappeared, wiping his lips with the
back of his hand with an air of quiet satisfaction that somehow
impressed Mr. Huxter as assumed. He stood looking about him for some
moments, and then Mr. Huxter saw him walk in an oddly furtive manner
towards the gates of the yard, upon which the parlour window opened.
The stranger, after some hesitation, leant against one of the
gate-posts, produced a short clay pipe, and prepared to fill it. His
fingers trembled while doing so. He lit it clumsily, and folding his
arms began to smoke in a languid attitude, an attitude which his
occasional glances up the yard altogether belied.
All this Mr. Huxter saw over the canisters of the tobacco window, and
the singularity of the man’s behaviour prompted him to maintain his
observation.
Presently the stranger stood up abruptly and put his pipe in his
pocket. Then he vanished into the yard. Forthwith Mr. Huxter,
conceiving he was witness of some petty larceny, leapt round his
counter and ran out into the road to intercept the thief. As he did so,
Mr. Marvel reappeared, his hat askew, a big bundle in a blue
table-cloth in one hand, and three books tied together—as it proved
afterwards with the Vicar’s braces—in the other. Directly he saw Huxter
he gave a sort of gasp, and turning sharply to the left, began to run.
“Stop, thief!” cried Huxter, and set off after him. Mr. Huxter’s
sensations were vivid but brief. He saw the man just before him and
spurting briskly for the church corner and the hill road. He saw the
village flags and festivities beyond, and a face or so turned towards
him. He bawled, “Stop!” again. He had hardly gone ten strides before
his shin was caught in some mysterious fashion, and he was no longer
running, but flying with inconceivable rapidity through the air. He saw
the ground suddenly close to his face. The world seemed to splash into
a million whirling specks of light, and subsequent proceedings
interested him no more.
CHAPTER XI.
IN THE “COACH AND HORSES”
Now in order clearly to understand what had happened in the inn, it is
necessary to go back to the moment when Mr. Marvel first came into view
of Mr. Huxter’s window.
At that precise moment Mr. Cuss and Mr. Bunting were in the parlour.
They were seriously investigating the strange occurrences of the
morning, and were, with Mr. Hall’s permission, making a thorough
examination of the Invisible Man’s belongings. Jaffers had partially
recovered from his fall and had gone home in the charge of his
sympathetic friends. The stranger’s scattered garments had been removed
by Mrs. Hall and the room tidied up. And on the table under the window
where the stranger had been wont to work, Cuss had hit almost at once
on three big books in manuscript labelled “Diary.”
“Diary!” said Cuss, putting the three books on the table. “Now, at any
rate, we shall learn something.” The Vicar stood with his hands on the
table.
“Diary,” repeated Cuss, sitting down, putting two volumes to support
the third, and opening it. “H’m—no name on the fly-leaf.
Bother!—cypher. And figures.”
The vicar came round to look over his shoulder.
Cuss turned the pages over with a face suddenly disappointed. “I’m—dear
me! It’s all cypher, Bunting.”
“There are no diagrams?” asked Mr. Bunting. “No illustrations throwing
light—”
“See for yourself,” said Mr. Cuss. “Some of it’s mathematical and some
of it’s Russian or some such language (to judge by the letters), and
some of it’s Greek. Now the Greek I thought _you_—”
“Of course,” said Mr. Bunting, taking out and wiping his spectacles and
feeling suddenly very uncomfortable—for he had no Greek left in his
mind worth talking about; “yes—the Greek, of course, may furnish a
clue.”
“I’ll find you a place.”
“I’d rather glance through the volumes first,” said Mr. Bunting, still
wiping. “A general impression first, Cuss, and _then_, you know, we can
go looking for clues.”
He coughed, put on his glasses, arranged them fastidiously, coughed
again, and wished something would happen to avert the seemingly
inevitable exposure. Then he took the volume Cuss handed him in a
leisurely manner. And then something did happen.
The door opened suddenly.
Both gentlemen started violently, looked round, and were relieved to
see a sporadically rosy face beneath a furry silk hat. “Tap?” asked the
face, and stood staring.
“No,” said both gentlemen at once.
“Over the other side, my man,” said Mr. Bunting. And “Please shut that
door,” said Mr. Cuss, irritably.
“All right,” said the intruder, as it seemed in a low voice curiously
different from the huskiness of its first inquiry. “Right you are,”
said the intruder in the former voice. “Stand clear!” and he vanished
and closed the door.
“A sailor, I should judge,” said Mr. Bunting. “Amusing fellows, they
are. Stand clear! indeed. A nautical term, referring to his getting
back out of the room, I suppose.”
“I daresay so,” said Cuss. “My nerves are all loose to-day. It quite
made me jump—the door opening like that.”
Mr. Bunting smiled as if he had not jumped. “And now,” he said with a
sigh, “these books.”
Someone sniffed as he did so.
“One thing is indisputable,” said Bunting, drawing up a chair next to
that of Cuss. “There certainly have been very strange things happen in
Iping during the last few days—very strange. I cannot of course believe
in this absurd invisibility story—”
“It’s incredible,” said Cuss—“incredible. But the fact remains that I
saw—I certainly saw right down his sleeve—”
“But did you—are you sure? Suppose a mirror, for instance—
hallucinations are so easily produced. I don’t know if you have ever
seen a really good conjuror—”
“I won’t argue again,” said Cuss. “We’ve thrashed that out, Bunting.
And just now there’s these books—Ah! here’s some of what I take to be
Greek! Greek letters certainly.”
He pointed to the middle of the page. Mr. Bunting flushed slightly and
brought his face nearer, apparently finding some difficulty with his
glasses. Suddenly he became aware of a strange feeling at the nape of
his neck. He tried to raise his head, and encountered an immovable
resistance. The feeling was a curious pressure, the grip of a heavy,
firm hand, and it bore his chin irresistibly to the table. “Don’t move,
little men,” whispered a voice, “or I’ll brain you both!” He looked
into the face of Cuss, close to his own, and each saw a horrified
reflection of his own sickly astonishment.
“I’m sorry to handle you so roughly,” said the Voice, “but it’s
unavoidable.”
“Since when did you learn to pry into an investigator’s private
memoranda,” said the Voice; and two chins struck the table
simultaneously, and two sets of teeth rattled.
“Since when did you learn to invade the private rooms of a man in
misfortune?” and the concussion was repeated.
“Where have they put my clothes?”
“Listen,” said the Voice. “The windows are fastened and I’ve taken the
key out of the door. I am a fairly strong man, and I have the poker
handy—besides being invisible. There’s not the slightest doubt that I
could kill you both and get away quite easily if I wanted to—do you
understand? Very well. If I let you go will you promise not to try any
nonsense and do what I tell you?”
The vicar and the doctor looked at one another, and the doctor pulled a
face. “Yes,” said Mr. Bunting, and the doctor repeated it. Then the
pressure on the necks relaxed, and the doctor and the vicar sat up,
both very red in the face and wriggling their heads.
“Please keep sitting where you are,” said the Invisible Man. “Here’s
the poker, you see.”
“When I came into this room,” continued the Invisible Man, after
presenting the poker to the tip of the nose of each of his visitors, “I
did not expect to find it occupied, and I expected to find, in addition
to my books of memoranda, an outfit of clothing. Where is it? No—don’t
rise. I can see it’s gone. Now, just at present, though the days are
quite warm enough for an invisible man to run about stark, the evenings
are quite chilly. I want clothing—and other accommodation; and I must
also have those three books.”
CHAPTER XII.
THE INVISIBLE MAN LOSES HIS TEMPER
It is unavoidable that at this point the narrative should break off
again, for a certain very painful reason that will presently be
apparent. While these things were going on in the parlour, and while
Mr. Huxter was watching Mr. Marvel smoking his pipe against the gate,
not a dozen yards away were Mr. Hall and Teddy Henfrey discussing in a
state of cloudy puzzlement the one Iping topic.
Suddenly there came a violent thud against the door of the parlour, a
sharp cry, and then—silence.
“Hul-lo!” said Teddy Henfrey.
“Hul-lo!” from the Tap.
Mr. Hall took things in slowly but surely. “That ain’t right,” he said,
and came round from behind the bar towards the parlour door.
He and Teddy approached the door together, with intent faces. Their
eyes considered. “Summat wrong,” said Hall, and Henfrey nodded
agreement. Whiffs of an unpleasant chemical odour met them, and there
was a muffled sound of conversation, very rapid and subdued.
“You all right thur?” asked Hall, rapping.
The muttered conversation ceased abruptly, for a moment silence, then
the conversation was resumed, in hissing whispers, then a sharp cry of
“No! no, you don’t!” There came a sudden motion and the oversetting of
a chair, a brief struggle. Silence again.
“What the dooce?” exclaimed Henfrey, _sotto voce_.
“You—all—right thur?” asked Mr. Hall, sharply, again.
The Vicar’s voice answered with a curious jerking intonation: “Quite
ri-right. Please don’t—interrupt.”
“Odd!” said Mr. Henfrey.
“Odd!” said Mr. Hall.
“Says, ‘Don’t interrupt,’” said Henfrey.
“I heerd’n,” said Hall.
“And a sniff,” said Henfrey.
They remained listening. The conversation was rapid and subdued. “I
_can’t_,” said Mr. Bunting, his voice rising; “I tell you, sir, I
_will_ not.”
“What was that?” asked Henfrey.
“Says he wi’ nart,” said Hall. “Warn’t speaking to us, wuz he?”
“Disgraceful!” said Mr. Bunting, within.
“‘Disgraceful,’” said Mr. Henfrey. “I heard it—distinct.”
“Who’s that speaking now?” asked Henfrey.
“Mr. Cuss, I s’pose,” said Hall. “Can you hear—anything?”
Silence. The sounds within indistinct and perplexing.
“Sounds like throwing the table-cloth about,” said Hall.
Mrs. Hall appeared behind the bar. Hall made gestures of silence and
invitation. This aroused Mrs. Hall’s wifely opposition. “What yer
listenin’ there for, Hall?” she asked. “Ain’t you nothin’ better to
do—busy day like this?”
Hall tried to convey everything by grimaces and dumb show, but Mrs.
Hall was obdurate. She raised her voice. So Hall and Henfrey, rather
crestfallen, tiptoed back to the bar, gesticulating to explain to her.
At first she refused to see anything in what they had heard at all.
Then she insisted on Hall keeping silence, while Henfrey told her his
story. She was inclined to think the whole business nonsense—perhaps
they were just moving the furniture about. “I heerd’n say
‘disgraceful’; _that_ I did,” said Hall.
“_I_ heerd that, Mrs. Hall,” said Henfrey.
“Like as not—” began Mrs. Hall.
“Hsh!” said Mr. Teddy Henfrey. “Didn’t I hear the window?”
“What window?” asked Mrs. Hall.
“Parlour window,” said Henfrey.
Everyone stood listening intently. Mrs. Hall’s eyes, directed straight
before her, saw without seeing the brilliant oblong of the inn door,
the road white and vivid, and Huxter’s shop-front blistering in the
June sun. Abruptly Huxter’s door opened and Huxter appeared, eyes
staring with excitement, arms gesticulating. “Yap!” cried Huxter. “Stop
thief!” and he ran obliquely across the oblong towards the yard gates,
and vanished.
Simultaneously came a tumult from the parlour, and a sound of windows
being closed.
Hall, Henfrey, and the human contents of the tap rushed out at once
pell-mell into the street. They saw someone whisk round the corner
towards the road, and Mr. Huxter executing a complicated leap in the
air that ended on his face and shoulder. Down the street people were
standing astonished or running towards them.
Mr. Huxter was stunned. Henfrey stopped to discover this, but Hall and
the two labourers from the Tap rushed at once to the corner, shouting
incoherent things, and saw Mr. Marvel vanishing by the corner of the
church wall. They appear to have jumped to the impossible conclusion
that this was the Invisible Man suddenly become visible, and set off at
once along the lane in pursuit. But Hall had hardly run a dozen yards
before he gave a loud shout of astonishment and went flying headlong
sideways, clutching one of the labourers and bringing him to the
ground. He had been charged just as one charges a man at football. The
second labourer came round in a circle, stared, and conceiving that
Hall had tumbled over of his own accord, turned to resume the pursuit,
only to be tripped by the ankle just as Huxter had been. Then, as the
first labourer struggled to his feet, he was kicked sideways by a blow
that might have felled an ox.
As he went down, the rush from the direction of the village green came
round the corner. The first to appear was the proprietor of the
cocoanut shy, a burly man in a blue jersey. He was astonished to see
the lane empty save for three men sprawling absurdly on the ground. And
then something happened to his rear-most foot, and he went headlong and
rolled sideways just in time to graze the feet of his brother and
partner, following headlong. The two were then kicked, knelt on, fallen
over, and cursed by quite a number of over-hasty people.
Now when Hall and Henfrey and the labourers ran out of the house, Mrs.
Hall, who had been disciplined by years of experience, remained in the
bar next the till. And suddenly the parlour door was opened, and Mr.
Cuss appeared, and without glancing at her rushed at once down the
steps toward the corner. “Hold him!” he cried. “Don’t let him drop that
parcel.”
He knew nothing of the existence of Marvel. For the Invisible Man had
handed over the books and bundle in the yard. The face of Mr. Cuss was
angry and resolute, but his costume was defective, a sort of limp white
kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece. “Hold him!” he
bawled. “He’s got my trousers! And every stitch of the Vicar’s
clothes!”
“’Tend to him in a minute!” he cried to Henfrey as he passed the
prostrate Huxter, and, coming round the corner to join the tumult, was
promptly knocked off his feet into an indecorous sprawl. Somebody in
full flight trod heavily on his finger. He yelled, struggled to regain
his feet, was knocked against and thrown on all fours again, and became
aware that he was involved not in a capture, but a rout. Everyone was
running back to the village. He rose again and was hit severely behind
the ear. He staggered and set off back to the “Coach and Horses”
forthwith, leaping over the deserted Huxter, who was now sitting up, on
his way.
Behind him as he was halfway up the inn steps he heard a sudden yell of
rage, rising sharply out of the confusion of cries, and a sounding
smack in someone’s face. He recognised the voice as that of the
Invisible Man, and the note was that of a man suddenly infuriated by a
painful blow.
In another moment Mr. Cuss was back in the parlour. “He’s coming back,
Bunting!” he said, rushing in. “Save yourself!”
Mr. Bunting was standing in the window engaged in an attempt to clothe
himself in the hearth-rug and a _West Surrey Gazette_. “Who’s coming?”
he said, so startled that his costume narrowly escaped disintegration.
“Invisible Man,” said Cuss, and rushed on to the window. “We’d better
clear out from here! He’s fighting mad! Mad!”
In another moment he was out in the yard.
“Good heavens!” said Mr. Bunting, hesitating between two horrible
alternatives. He heard a frightful struggle in the passage of the inn,
and his decision was made. He clambered out of the window, adjusted his
costume hastily, and fled up the village as fast as his fat little legs
would carry him.
From the moment when the Invisible Man screamed with rage and Mr.
Bunting made his memorable flight up the village, it became impossible
to give a consecutive account of affairs in Iping. Possibly the
Invisible Man’s original intention was simply to cover Marvel’s retreat
with the clothes and books. But his temper, at no time very good, seems
to have gone completely at some chance blow, and forthwith he set to
smiting and overthrowing, for the mere satisfaction of hurting.
You must figure the street full of running figures, of doors slamming
and fights for hiding-places. You must figure the tumult suddenly
striking on the unstable equilibrium of old Fletcher’s planks and two
chairs—with cataclysmic results. You must figure an appalled couple
caught dismally in a swing. And then the whole tumultuous rush has
passed and the Iping street with its gauds and flags is deserted save
for the still raging unseen, and littered with cocoanuts, overthrown
canvas screens, and the scattered stock in trade of a sweetstuff stall.
Everywhere there is a sound of closing shutters and shoving bolts, and
the only visible humanity is an occasional flitting eye under a raised
eyebrow in the corner of a window pane.
The Invisible Man amused himself for a little while by breaking all the
windows in the “Coach and Horses,” and then he thrust a street lamp
through the parlour window of Mrs. Gribble. He it must have been who
cut the telegraph wire to Adderdean just beyond Higgins’ cottage on the
Adderdean road. And after that, as his peculiar qualities allowed, he
passed out of human perceptions altogether, and he was neither heard,
seen, nor felt in Iping any more. He vanished absolutely.
But it was the best part of two hours before any human being ventured
out again into the desolation of Iping street.
CHAPTER XIII.
MR. MARVEL DISCUSSES HIS RESIGNATION
When the dusk was gathering and Iping was just beginning to peep
timorously forth again upon the shattered wreckage of its Bank Holiday,
a short, thick-set man in a shabby silk hat was marching painfully
through the twilight behind the beechwoods on the road to Bramblehurst.
He carried three books bound together by some sort of ornamental
elastic ligature, and a bundle wrapped in a blue table-cloth. His
rubicund face expressed consternation and fatigue; he appeared to be in
a spasmodic sort of hurry. He was accompanied by a voice other than his
own, and ever and again he winced under the touch of unseen hands.
“If you give me the slip again,” said the Voice, “if you attempt to
give me the slip again—”
“Lord!” said Mr. Marvel. “That shoulder’s a mass of bruises as it is.”
“On my honour,” said the Voice, “I will kill you.”
“I didn’t try to give you the slip,” said Marvel, in a voice that was
not far remote from tears. “I swear I didn’t. I didn’t know the blessed
turning, that was all! How the devil was I to know the blessed turning?
As it is, I’ve been knocked about—”
“You’ll get knocked about a great deal more if you don’t mind,” said
the Voice, and Mr. Marvel abruptly became silent. He blew out his
cheeks, and his eyes were eloquent of despair.
“It’s bad enough to let these floundering yokels explode my little
secret, without _your_ cutting off with my books. It’s lucky for some
of them they cut and ran when they did! Here am I ... No one knew I was
invisible! And now what am I to do?”
“What am _I_ to do?” asked Marvel, _sotto voce_.
“It’s all about. It will be in the papers! Everybody will be looking
for me; everyone on their guard—” The Voice broke off into vivid curses
and ceased.
The despair of Mr. Marvel’s face deepened, and his pace slackened.
“Go on!” said the Voice.
Mr. Marvel’s face assumed a greyish tint between the ruddier patches.
“Don’t drop those books, stupid,” said the Voice, sharply—overtaking
him.
“The fact is,” said the Voice, “I shall have to make use of you....
You’re a poor tool, but I must.”
“I’m a _miserable_ tool,” said Marvel.
“You are,” said the Voice.
“I’m the worst possible tool you could have,” said Marvel.
“I’m not strong,” he said after a discouraging silence.
“I’m not over strong,” he repeated.
“No?”
“And my heart’s weak. That little business—I pulled it through, of
course—but bless you! I could have dropped.”
“Well?”
“I haven’t the nerve and strength for the sort of thing you want.”
“_I’ll_ stimulate you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t like to mess up your plans, you know.
But I might—out of sheer funk and misery.”
“You’d better not,” said the Voice, with quiet emphasis.
“I wish I was dead,” said Marvel.
“It ain’t justice,” he said; “you must admit.... It seems to me I’ve a
perfect right—”
“_Get_ on!” said the Voice.
Mr. Marvel mended his pace, and for a time they went in silence again.
“It’s devilish hard,” said Mr. Marvel.
This was quite ineffectual. He tried another tack.
“What do I make by it?” he began again in a tone of unendurable wrong.
“Oh! _shut up_!” said the Voice, with sudden amazing vigour. “I’ll see
to you all right. You do what you’re told. You’ll do it all right.
You’re a fool and all that, but you’ll do—”
“I tell you, sir, I’m not the man for it. Respectfully—but it _is_ so—”
“If you don’t shut up I shall twist your wrist again,” said the
Invisible Man. “I want to think.”
Presently two oblongs of yellow light appeared through the trees, and
the square tower of a church loomed through the gloaming. “I shall keep
my hand on your shoulder,” said the Voice, “all through the village. Go
straight through and try no foolery. It will be the worse for you if
you do.”
“I know that,” sighed Mr. Marvel, “I know all that.”
The unhappy-looking figure in the obsolete silk hat passed up the
street of the little village with his burdens, and vanished into the
gathering darkness beyond the lights of the windows.
CHAPTER XIV.
AT PORT STOWE
Ten o’clock the next morning found Mr. Marvel, unshaven, dirty, and
travel-stained, sitting with the books beside him and his hands deep in
his pockets, looking very weary, nervous, and uncomfortable, and
inflating his cheeks at infrequent intervals, on the bench outside a
little inn on the outskirts of Port Stowe. Beside him were the books,
but now they were tied with string. The bundle had been abandoned in
the pine-woods beyond Bramblehurst, in accordance with a change in the
plans of the Invisible Man. Mr. Marvel sat on the bench, and although
no one took the slightest notice of him, his agitation remained at
fever heat. His hands would go ever and again to his various pockets
with a curious nervous fumbling.
When he had been sitting for the best part of an hour, however, an
elderly mariner, carrying a newspaper, came out of the inn and sat down
beside him. “Pleasant day,” said the mariner.
Mr. Marvel glanced about him with something very like terror. “Very,”
he said.
“Just seasonable weather for the time of year,” said the mariner,
taking no denial.
“Quite,” said Mr. Marvel.
The mariner produced a toothpick, and (saving his regard) was engrossed
thereby for some minutes. His eyes meanwhile were at liberty to examine
Mr. Marvel’s dusty figure, and the books beside him. As he had
approached Mr. Marvel he had heard a sound like the dropping of coins
into a pocket. He was struck by the contrast of Mr. Marvel’s appearance
with this suggestion of opulence. Thence his mind wandered back again
to a topic that had taken a curiously firm hold of his imagination.
“Books?” he said suddenly, noisily finishing with the toothpick.
Mr. Marvel started and looked at them. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes,
they’re books.”
“There’s some extra-ordinary things in books,” said the mariner.
“I believe you,” said Mr. Marvel.
“And some extra-ordinary things out of ’em,” said the mariner.
“True likewise,” said Mr. Marvel. He eyed his interlocutor, and then
glanced about him.
“There’s some extra-ordinary things in newspapers, for example,” said
the mariner.
“There are.”
“In _this_ newspaper,” said the mariner.
“Ah!” said Mr. Marvel.
“There’s a story,” said the mariner, fixing Mr. Marvel with an eye that
was firm and deliberate; “there’s a story about an Invisible Man, for
instance.”
Mr. Marvel pulled his mouth askew and scratched his cheek and felt his
ears glowing. “What will they be writing next?” he asked faintly.
“Ostria, or America?”
“Neither,” said the mariner. “_Here_.”
“Lord!” said Mr. Marvel, starting.
“When I say _here_,” said the mariner, to Mr. Marvel’s intense relief,
“I don’t of course mean here in this place, I mean hereabouts.”
“An Invisible Man!” said Mr. Marvel. “And what’s _he_ been up to?”
“Everything,” said the mariner, controlling Marvel with his eye, and
then amplifying, “every—blessed—thing.”
“I ain’t seen a paper these four days,” said Marvel.
“Iping’s the place he started at,” said the mariner.
“In-_deed_!” said Mr. Marvel.
“He started there. And where he came from, nobody don’t seem to know.
Here it is: ‘Pe-culiar Story from Iping.’ And it says in this paper
that the evidence is extra-ordinary strong—extra-ordinary.”
“Lord!” said Mr. Marvel.
“But then, it’s an extra-ordinary story. There is a clergyman and a
medical gent witnesses—saw ’im all right and proper—or leastways didn’t
see ’im. He was staying, it says, at the ‘Coach an’ Horses,’ and no one
don’t seem to have been aware of his misfortune, it says, aware of his
misfortune, until in an Altercation in the inn, it says, his bandages
on his head was torn off. It was then ob-served that his head was
invisible. Attempts were At Once made to secure him, but casting off
his garments, it says, he succeeded in escaping, but not until after a
desperate struggle, in which he had inflicted serious injuries, it
says, on our worthy and able constable, Mr. J. A. Jaffers. Pretty
straight story, eh? Names and everything.”
“Lord!” said Mr. Marvel, looking nervously about him, trying to count
the money in his pockets by his unaided sense of touch, and full of a
strange and novel idea. “It sounds most astonishing.”
“Don’t it? Extra-ordinary, _I_ call it. Never heard tell of Invisible
Men before, I haven’t, but nowadays one hears such a lot of
extra-ordinary things—that—”
“That all he did?” asked Marvel, trying to seem at his ease.
“It’s enough, ain’t it?” said the mariner.
“Didn’t go Back by any chance?” asked Marvel. “Just escaped and that’s
all, eh?”
“All!” said the mariner. “Why!—ain’t it enough?”
“Quite enough,” said Marvel.
“I should think it was enough,” said the mariner. “I should think it
was enough.”
“He didn’t have any pals—it don’t say he had any pals, does it?” asked
Mr. Marvel, anxious.
“Ain’t one of a sort enough for you?” asked the mariner. “No, thank
Heaven, as one might say, he didn’t.”
He nodded his head slowly. “It makes me regular uncomfortable, the bare
thought of that chap running about the country! He is at present At
Large, and from certain evidence it is supposed that he
has—taken—_took_, I suppose they mean—the road to Port Stowe. You see
we’re right _in_ it! None of your American wonders, this time. And just
think of the things he might do! Where’d you be, if he took a drop over
and above, and had a fancy to go for you? Suppose he wants to rob—who
can prevent him? He can trespass, he can burgle, he could walk through
a cordon of policemen as easy as me or you could give the slip to a
blind man! Easier! For these here blind chaps hear uncommon sharp, I’m
told. And wherever there was liquor he fancied—”
“He’s got a tremenjous advantage, certainly,” said Mr. Marvel.
“And—well...”
“You’re right,” said the mariner. “He _has_.”
All this time Mr. Marvel had been glancing about him intently,
listening for faint footfalls, trying to detect imperceptible
movements. He seemed on the point of some great resolution. He coughed
behind his hand.
He looked about him again, listened, bent towards the mariner, and
lowered his voice: “The fact of it is—I happen—to know just a thing or
two about this Invisible Man. From private sources.”
“Oh!” said the mariner, interested. “_You_?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Marvel. “Me.”
“Indeed!” said the mariner. “And may I ask—”
“You’ll be astonished,” said Mr. Marvel behind his hand. “It’s
tremenjous.”
“Indeed!” said the mariner.
“The fact is,” began Mr. Marvel eagerly in a confidential undertone.
Suddenly his expression changed marvellously. “Ow!” he said. He rose
stiffly in his seat. His face was eloquent of physical suffering.
“Wow!” he said.
“What’s up?” said the mariner, concerned.
“Toothache,” said Mr. Marvel, and put his hand to his ear. He caught
hold of his books. “I must be getting on, I think,” he said. He edged
in a curious way along the seat away from his interlocutor. “But you
was just a-going to tell me about this here Invisible Man!” protested
the mariner. Mr. Marvel seemed to consult with himself. “Hoax,” said a
Voice. “It’s a hoax,” said Mr. Marvel.
“But it’s in the paper,” said the mariner.
“Hoax all the same,” said Marvel. “I know the chap that started the
lie. There ain’t no Invisible Man whatsoever—Blimey.”
“But how ’bout this paper? D’you mean to say—?”
“Not a word of it,” said Marvel, stoutly.
The mariner stared, paper in hand. Mr. Marvel jerkily faced about.
“Wait a bit,” said the mariner, rising and speaking slowly, “D’you mean
to say—?”
“I do,” said Mr. Marvel.
“Then why did you let me go on and tell you all this blarsted stuff,
then? What d’yer mean by letting a man make a fool of himself like that
for? Eh?”
Mr. Marvel blew out his cheeks. The mariner was suddenly very red
indeed; he clenched his hands. “I been talking here this ten minutes,”
he said; “and you, you little pot-bellied, leathery-faced son of an old
boot, couldn’t have the elementary manners—”
“Don’t you come bandying words with _me_,” said Mr. Marvel.
“Bandying words! I’m a jolly good mind—”
“Come up,” said a Voice, and Mr. Marvel was suddenly whirled about and
started marching off in a curious spasmodic manner. “You’d better move
on,” said the mariner. “Who’s moving on?” said Mr. Marvel. He was
receding obliquely with a curious hurrying gait, with occasional
violent jerks forward. Some way along the road he began a muttered
monologue, protests and recriminations.
“Silly devil!” said the mariner, legs wide apart, elbows akimbo,
watching the receding figure. “I’ll show you, you silly ass—hoaxing
_me_! It’s here—on the paper!”
Mr. Marvel retorted incoherently and, receding, was hidden by a bend in
the road, but the mariner still stood magnificent in the midst of the
way, until the approach of a butcher’s cart dislodged him. Then he
turned himself towards Port Stowe. “Full of extra-ordinary asses,” he
said softly to himself. “Just to take me down a bit—that was his silly
game—It’s on the paper!”
And there was another extraordinary thing he was presently to hear,
that had happened quite close to him. And that was a vision of a “fist
full of money” (no less) travelling without visible agency, along by
the wall at the corner of St. Michael’s Lane. A brother mariner had
seen this wonderful sight that very morning. He had snatched at the
money forthwith and had been knocked headlong, and when he had got to
his feet the butterfly money had vanished. Our mariner was in the mood
to believe anything, he declared, but that was a bit _too_ stiff.
Afterwards, however, he began to think things over.
The story of the flying money was true. And all about that
neighbourhood, even from the august London and Country Banking Company,
from the tills of shops and inns—doors standing that sunny weather
entirely open—money had been quietly and dexterously making off that
day in handfuls and rouleaux, floating quietly along by walls and shady
places, dodging quickly from the approaching eyes of men. And it had,
though no man had traced it, invariably ended its mysterious flight in
the pocket of that agitated gentleman in the obsolete silk hat, sitting
outside the little inn on the outskirts of Port Stowe.
It was ten days after—and indeed only when the Burdock story was
already old—that the mariner collated these facts and began to
understand how near he had been to the wonderful Invisible Man.
CHAPTER XV.
THE MAN WHO WAS RUNNING
In the early evening time Dr. Kemp was sitting in his study in the
belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. It was a pleasant little
room, with three windows—north, west, and south—and bookshelves covered
with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and,
under the north window, a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments,
some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents. Dr. Kemp’s solar lamp
was lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his
blinds were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders to
require them pulled down. Dr. Kemp was a tall and slender young man,
with flaxen hair and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon
would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society, so
highly did he think of it.
And his eye, presently wandering from his work, caught the sunset
blazing at the back of the hill that is over against his own. For a
minute perhaps he sat, pen in mouth, admiring the rich golden colour
above the crest, and then his attention was attracted by the little
figure of a man, inky black, running over the hill-brow towards him. He
was a shortish little man, and he wore a high hat, and he was running
so fast that his legs verily twinkled.
“Another of those fools,” said Dr. Kemp. “Like that ass who ran into me
this morning round a corner, with the ‘’Visible Man a-coming, sir!’ I
can’t imagine what possesses people. One might think we were in the
thirteenth century.”
He got up, went to the window, and stared at the dusky hillside, and
the dark little figure tearing down it. “He seems in a confounded
hurry,” said Dr. Kemp, “but he doesn’t seem to be getting on. If his
pockets were full of lead, he couldn’t run heavier.”
“Spurted, sir,” said Dr. Kemp.
In another moment the higher of the villas that had clambered up the
hill from Burdock had occulted the running figure. He was visible again
for a moment, and again, and then again, three times between the three
detached houses that came next, and then the terrace hid him.
“Asses!” said Dr. Kemp, swinging round on his heel and walking back to
his writing-table.
But those who saw the fugitive nearer, and perceived the abject terror
on his perspiring face, being themselves in the open roadway, did not
share in the doctor’s contempt. By the man pounded, and as he ran he
chinked like a well-filled purse that is tossed to and fro. He looked
neither to the right nor the left, but his dilated eyes stared straight
downhill to where the lamps were being lit, and the people were crowded
in the street. And his ill-shaped mouth fell apart, and a glairy foam
lay on his lips, and his breath came hoarse and noisy. All he passed
stopped and began staring up the road and down, and interrogating one
another with an inkling of discomfort for the reason of his haste.
And then presently, far up the hill, a dog playing in the road yelped
and ran under a gate, and as they still wondered something—a wind—a
pad, pad, pad,—a sound like a panting breathing, rushed by.
People screamed. People sprang off the pavement: It passed in shouts,
it passed by instinct down the hill. They were shouting in the street
before Marvel was halfway there. They were bolting into houses and
slamming the doors behind them, with the news. He heard it and made one
last desperate spurt. Fear came striding by, rushed ahead of him, and
in a moment had seized the town.
“The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!”
CHAPTER XVI.
IN THE “JOLLY CRICKETERS”
The “Jolly Cricketers” is just at the bottom of the hill, where the
tram-lines begin. The barman leant his fat red arms on the counter and
talked of horses with an anaemic cabman, while a black-bearded man in
grey snapped up biscuit and cheese, drank Burton, and conversed in
American with a policeman off duty.
“What’s the shouting about!” said the anaemic cabman, going off at a
tangent, trying to see up the hill over the dirty yellow blind in the
low window of the inn. Somebody ran by outside. “Fire, perhaps,” said
the barman.
Footsteps approached, running heavily, the door was pushed open
violently, and Marvel, weeping and dishevelled, his hat gone, the neck
of his coat torn open, rushed in, made a convulsive turn, and attempted
to shut the door. It was held half open by a strap.
“Coming!” he bawled, his voice shrieking with terror. “He’s coming. The
’Visible Man! After me! For Gawd’s sake! ’Elp! ’Elp! ’Elp!”
“Shut the doors,” said the policeman. “Who’s coming? What’s the row?”
He went to the door, released the strap, and it slammed. The American
closed the other door.
“Lemme go inside,” said Marvel, staggering and weeping, but still
clutching the books. “Lemme go inside. Lock me in—somewhere. I tell you
he’s after me. I give him the slip. He said he’d kill me and he will.”
“_You’re_ safe,” said the man with the black beard. “The door’s shut.
What’s it all about?”
“Lemme go inside,” said Marvel, and shrieked aloud as a blow suddenly
made the fastened door shiver and was followed by a hurried rapping and
a shouting outside. “Hullo,” cried the policeman, “who’s there?” Mr.
Marvel began to make frantic dives at panels that looked like doors.
“He’ll kill me—he’s got a knife or something. For Gawd’s sake—!”
“Here you are,” said the barman. “Come in here.” And he held up the
flap of the bar.
Mr. Marvel rushed behind the bar as the summons outside was repeated.
“Don’t open the door,” he screamed. “_Please_ don’t open the door.
_Where_ shall I hide?”
“This, this Invisible Man, then?” asked the man with the black beard,
with one hand behind him. “I guess it’s about time we saw him.”
The window of the inn was suddenly smashed in, and there was a
screaming and running to and fro in the street. The policeman had been
standing on the settee staring out, craning to see who was at the door.
He got down with raised eyebrows. “It’s that,” he said. The barman
stood in front of the bar-parlour door which was now locked on Mr.
Marvel, stared at the smashed window, and came round to the two other
men.
Everything was suddenly quiet. “I wish I had my truncheon,” said the
policeman, going irresolutely to the door. “Once we open, in he comes.
There’s no stopping him.”
“Don’t you be in too much hurry about that door,” said the anaemic
cabman, anxiously.
“Draw the bolts,” said the man with the black beard, “and if he comes—”
He showed a revolver in his hand.
“That won’t do,” said the policeman; “that’s murder.”
“I know what country I’m in,” said the man with the beard. “I’m going
to let off at his legs. Draw the bolts.”
“Not with that blinking thing going off behind me,” said the barman,
craning over the blind.
“Very well,” said the man with the black beard, and stooping down,
revolver ready, drew them himself. Barman, cabman, and policeman faced
about.
“Come in,” said the bearded man in an undertone, standing back and
facing the unbolted doors with his pistol behind him. No one came in,
the door remained closed. Five minutes afterwards when a second cabman
pushed his head in cautiously, they were still waiting, and an anxious
face peered out of the bar-parlour and supplied information. “Are all
the doors of the house shut?” asked Marvel. “He’s going round—prowling
round. He’s as artful as the devil.”
“Good Lord!” said the burly barman. “There’s the back! Just watch them
doors! I say—!” He looked about him helplessly. The bar-parlour door
slammed and they heard the key turn. “There’s the yard door and the
private door. The yard door—”
He rushed out of the bar.
In a minute he reappeared with a carving-knife in his hand. “The yard
door was open!” he said, and his fat underlip dropped. “He may be in
the house now!” said the first cabman.
“He’s not in the kitchen,” said the barman. “There’s two women there,
and I’ve stabbed every inch of it with this little beef slicer. And
they don’t think he’s come in. They haven’t noticed—”
“Have you fastened it?” asked the first cabman.
“I’m out of frocks,” said the barman.
The man with the beard replaced his revolver. And even as he did so the
flap of the bar was shut down and the bolt clicked, and then with a
tremendous thud the catch of the door snapped and the bar-parlour door
burst open. They heard Marvel squeal like a caught leveret, and
forthwith they were clambering over the bar to his rescue. The bearded
man’s revolver cracked and the looking-glass at the back of the parlour
starred and came smashing and tinkling down.
As the barman entered the room he saw Marvel, curiously crumpled up and
struggling against the door that led to the yard and kitchen. The door
flew open while the barman hesitated, and Marvel was dragged into the
kitchen. There was a scream and a clatter of pans. Marvel, head down,
and lugging back obstinately, was forced to the kitchen door, and the
bolts were drawn.
Then the policeman, who had been trying to pass the barman, rushed in,
followed by one of the cabmen, gripped the wrist of the invisible hand
that collared Marvel, was hit in the face and went reeling back. The
door opened, and Marvel made a frantic effort to obtain a lodgment
behind it. Then the cabman collared something. “I got him,” said the
cabman. The barman’s red hands came clawing at the unseen. “Here he
is!” said the barman.
Mr. Marvel, released, suddenly dropped to the ground and made an
attempt to crawl behind the legs of the fighting men. The struggle
blundered round the edge of the door. The voice of the Invisible Man
was heard for the first time, yelling out sharply, as the policeman
trod on his foot. Then he cried out passionately and his fists flew
round like flails. The cabman suddenly whooped and doubled up, kicked
under the diaphragm. The door into the bar-parlour from the kitchen
slammed and covered Mr. Marvel’s retreat. The men in the kitchen found
themselves clutching at and struggling with empty air.
“Where’s he gone?” cried the man with the beard. “Out?”
“This way,” said the policeman, stepping into the yard and stopping.
A piece of tile whizzed by his head and smashed among the crockery on
the kitchen table.
“I’ll show him,” shouted the man with the black beard, and suddenly a
steel barrel shone over the policeman’s shoulder, and five bullets had
followed one another into the twilight whence the missile had come. As
he fired, the man with the beard moved his hand in a horizontal curve,
so that his shots radiated out into the narrow yard like spokes from a
wheel.
A silence followed. “Five cartridges,” said the man with the black
beard. “That’s the best of all. Four aces and a joker. Get a lantern,
someone, and come and feel about for his body.”
CHAPTER XVII.
DR. KEMP’S VISITOR
Dr. Kemp had continued writing in his study until the shots aroused
him. Crack, crack, crack, they came one after the other.
“Hullo!” said Dr. Kemp, putting his pen into his mouth again and
listening. “Who’s letting off revolvers in Burdock? What are the asses
at now?”
He went to the south window, threw it up, and leaning out stared down
on the network of windows, beaded gas-lamps and shops, with its black
interstices of roof and yard that made up the town at night. “Looks
like a crowd down the hill,” he said, “by ‘The Cricketers,’” and
remained watching. Thence his eyes wandered over the town to far away
where the ships’ lights shone, and the pier glowed—a little
illuminated, facetted pavilion like a gem of yellow light. The moon in
its first quarter hung over the westward hill, and the stars were clear
and almost tropically bright.
After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote
speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last
over the time dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled
down the window again, and returned to his writing desk.
It must have been about an hour after this that the front-door bell
rang. He had been writing slackly, and with intervals of abstraction,
since the shots. He sat listening. He heard the servant answer the
door, and waited for her feet on the staircase, but she did not come.
“Wonder what that was,” said Dr. Kemp.
He tried to resume his work, failed, got up, went downstairs from his
study to the landing, rang, and called over the balustrade to the
housemaid as she appeared in the hall below. “Was that a letter?” he
asked.
“Only a runaway ring, sir,” she answered.
“I’m restless to-night,” he said to himself. He went back to his study,
and this time attacked his work resolutely. In a little while he was
hard at work again, and the only sounds in the room were the ticking of
the clock and the subdued shrillness of his quill, hurrying in the very
centre of the circle of light his lampshade threw on his table.
It was two o’clock before Dr. Kemp had finished his work for the night.
He rose, yawned, and went downstairs to bed. He had already removed his
coat and vest, when he noticed that he was thirsty. He took a candle
and went down to the dining-room in search of a syphon and whiskey.
Dr. Kemp’s scientific pursuits have made him a very observant man, and
as he recrossed the hall, he noticed a dark spot on the linoleum near
the mat at the foot of the stairs. He went on upstairs, and then it
suddenly occurred to him to ask himself what the spot on the linoleum
might be. Apparently some subconscious element was at work. At any
rate, he turned with his burden, went back to the hall, put down the
syphon and whiskey, and bending down, touched the spot. Without any
great surprise he found it had the stickiness and colour of drying
blood.
He took up his burden again, and returned upstairs, looking about him
and trying to account for the blood-spot. On the landing he saw
something and stopped astonished. The door-handle of his own room was
blood-stained.
He looked at his own hand. It was quite clean, and then he remembered
that the door of his room had been open when he came down from his
study, and that consequently he had not touched the handle at all. He
went straight into his room, his face quite calm—perhaps a trifle more
resolute than usual. His glance, wandering inquisitively, fell on the
bed. On the counterpane was a mess of blood, and the sheet had been
torn. He had not noticed this before because he had walked straight to
the dressing-table. On the further side the bedclothes were depressed
as if someone had been recently sitting there.
Then he had an odd impression that he had heard a low voice say, “Good
Heavens!—Kemp!” But Dr. Kemp was no believer in voices.
He stood staring at the tumbled sheets. Was that really a voice? He
looked about again, but noticed nothing further than the disordered and
blood-stained bed. Then he distinctly heard a movement across the room,
near the wash-hand stand. All men, however highly educated, retain some
superstitious inklings. The feeling that is called “eerie” came upon
him. He closed the door of the room, came forward to the
dressing-table, and put down his burdens. Suddenly, with a start, he
perceived a coiled and blood-stained bandage of linen rag hanging in
mid-air, between him and the wash-hand stand.
He stared at this in amazement. It was an empty bandage, a bandage
properly tied but quite empty. He would have advanced to grasp it, but
a touch arrested him, and a voice speaking quite close to him.
“Kemp!” said the Voice.
“Eh?” said Kemp, with his mouth open.
“Keep your nerve,” said the Voice. “I’m an Invisible Man.”
Kemp made no answer for a space, simply stared at the bandage.
“Invisible Man,” he said.
“I am an Invisible Man,” repeated the Voice.
The story he had been active to ridicule only that morning rushed
through Kemp’s brain. He does not appear to have been either very much
frightened or very greatly surprised at the moment. Realisation came
later.
“I thought it was all a lie,” he said. The thought uppermost in his
mind was the reiterated arguments of the morning. “Have you a bandage
on?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the Invisible Man.
“Oh!” said Kemp, and then roused himself. “I say!” he said. “But this
is nonsense. It’s some trick.” He stepped forward suddenly, and his
hand, extended towards the bandage, met invisible fingers.
He recoiled at the touch and his colour changed.
“Keep steady, Kemp, for God’s sake! I want help badly. Stop!”
The hand gripped his arm. He struck at it.
“Kemp!” cried the Voice. “Kemp! Keep steady!” and the grip tightened.
A frantic desire to free himself took possession of Kemp. The hand of
the bandaged arm gripped his shoulder, and he was suddenly tripped and
flung backwards upon the bed. He opened his mouth to shout, and the
corner of the sheet was thrust between his teeth. The Invisible Man had
him down grimly, but his arms were free and he struck and tried to kick
savagely.
“Listen to reason, will you?” said the Invisible Man, sticking to him
in spite of a pounding in the ribs. “By Heaven! you’ll madden me in a
minute!
“Lie still, you fool!” bawled the Invisible Man in Kemp’s ear.
Kemp struggled for another moment and then lay still.
“If you shout, I’ll smash your face,” said the Invisible Man, relieving
his mouth.
“I’m an Invisible Man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am
an Invisible Man. And I want your help. I don’t want to hurt you, but
if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don’t you remember me,
Kemp? Griffin, of University College?”
“Let me get up,” said Kemp. “I’ll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet
for a minute.”
He sat up and felt his neck.
“I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible.
I am just an ordinary man—a man you have known—made invisible.”
“Griffin?” said Kemp.
“Griffin,” answered the Voice. A younger student than you were, almost
an albino, six feet high, and broad, with a pink and white face and red
eyes, who won the medal for chemistry.”
“I am confused,” said Kemp. “My brain is rioting. What has this to do
with Griffin?”
“I _am_ Griffin.”
Kemp thought. “It’s horrible,” he said. “But what devilry must happen
to make a man invisible?”
“It’s no devilry. It’s a process, sane and intelligible enough—”
“It’s horrible!” said Kemp. “How on earth—?”
“It’s horrible enough. But I’m wounded and in pain, and tired ... Great
God! Kemp, you are a man. Take it steady. Give me some food and drink,
and let me sit down here.”
Kemp stared at the bandage as it moved across the room, then saw a
basket chair dragged across the floor and come to rest near the bed. It
creaked, and the seat was depressed the quarter of an inch or so. He
rubbed his eyes and felt his neck again. “This beats ghosts,” he said,
and laughed stupidly.
“That’s better. Thank Heaven, you’re getting sensible!”
“Or silly,” said Kemp, and knuckled his eyes.
“Give me some whiskey. I’m near dead.”
“It didn’t feel so. Where are you? If I get up shall I run into you?
_There_! all right. Whiskey? Here. Where shall I give it to you?”
The chair creaked and Kemp felt the glass drawn away from him. He let
go by an effort; his instinct was all against it. It came to rest
poised twenty inches above the front edge of the seat of the chair. He
stared at it in infinite perplexity. “This is—this must be—hypnotism.
You have suggested you are invisible.”
“Nonsense,” said the Voice.
“It’s frantic.”
“Listen to me.”
“I demonstrated conclusively this morning,” began Kemp, “that
invisibility—”
“Never mind what you’ve demonstrated!—I’m starving,” said the Voice,
“and the night is chilly to a man without clothes.”
“Food?” said Kemp.
The tumbler of whiskey tilted itself. “Yes,” said the Invisible Man
rapping it down. “Have you a dressing-gown?”
Kemp made some exclamation in an undertone. He walked to a wardrobe and
produced a robe of dingy scarlet. “This do?” he asked. It was taken
from him. It hung limp for a moment in mid-air, fluttered weirdly,
stood full and decorous buttoning itself, and sat down in his chair.
“Drawers, socks, slippers would be a comfort,” said the Unseen, curtly.
“And food.”
“Anything. But this is the insanest thing I ever was in, in my life!”
He turned out his drawers for the articles, and then went downstairs to
ransack his larder. He came back with some cold cutlets and bread,
pulled up a light table, and placed them before his guest. “Never mind
knives,” said his visitor, and a cutlet hung in mid-air, with a sound
of gnawing.
“Invisible!” said Kemp, and sat down on a bedroom chair.
“I always like to get something about me before I eat,” said the
Invisible Man, with a full mouth, eating greedily. “Queer fancy!”
“I suppose that wrist is all right,” said Kemp.
“Trust me,” said the Invisible Man.
“Of all the strange and wonderful—”
“Exactly. But it’s odd I should blunder into _your_ house to get my
bandaging. My first stroke of luck! Anyhow I meant to sleep in this
house to-night. You must stand that! It’s a filthy nuisance, my blood
showing, isn’t it? Quite a clot over there. Gets visible as it
coagulates, I see. It’s only the living tissue I’ve changed, and only
for as long as I’m alive.... I’ve been in the house three hours.”
“But how’s it done?” began Kemp, in a tone of exasperation. “Confound
it! The whole business—it’s unreasonable from beginning to end.”
“Quite reasonable,” said the Invisible Man. “Perfectly reasonable.”
He reached over and secured the whiskey bottle. Kemp stared at the
devouring dressing gown. A ray of candle-light penetrating a torn patch
in the right shoulder, made a triangle of light under the left ribs.
“What were the shots?” he asked. “How did the shooting begin?”
“There was a real fool of a man—a sort of confederate of mine—curse
him!—who tried to steal my money. _Has_ done so.”
“Is _he_ invisible too?”
“No.”
“Well?”
“Can’t I have some more to eat before I tell you all that? I’m
hungry—in pain. And you want me to tell stories!”
Kemp got up. “_You_ didn’t do any shooting?” he asked.
“Not me,” said his visitor. “Some fool I’d never seen fired at random.
A lot of them got scared. They all got scared at me. Curse them!—I
say—I want more to eat than this, Kemp.”
“I’ll see what there is to eat downstairs,” said Kemp. “Not much, I’m
afraid.”
After he had done eating, and he made a heavy meal, the Invisible Man
demanded a cigar. He bit the end savagely before Kemp could find a
knife, and cursed when the outer leaf loosened. It was strange to see
him smoking; his mouth, and throat, pharynx and nares, became visible
as a sort of whirling smoke cast.
“This blessed gift of smoking!” he said, and puffed vigorously. “I’m
lucky to have fallen upon you, Kemp. You must help me. Fancy tumbling
on you just now! I’m in a devilish scrape—I’ve been mad, I think. The
things I have been through! But we will do things yet. Let me tell
you—”
He helped himself to more whiskey and soda. Kemp got up, looked about
him, and fetched a glass from his spare room. “It’s wild—but I suppose
I may drink.”
“You haven’t changed much, Kemp, these dozen years. You fair men don’t.
Cool and methodical—after the first collapse. I must tell you. We will
work together!”
“But how was it all done?” said Kemp, “and how did you get like this?”
“For God’s sake, let me smoke in peace for a little while! And then I
will begin to tell you.”
But the story was not told that night. The Invisible Man’s wrist was
growing painful; he was feverish, exhausted, and his mind came round to
brood upon his chase down the hill and the struggle about the inn. He
spoke in fragments of Marvel, he smoked faster, his voice grew angry.
Kemp tried to gather what he could.
“He was afraid of me, I could see that he was afraid of me,” said the
Invisible Man many times over. “He meant to give me the slip—he was
always casting about! What a fool I was!
“The cur!
“I should have killed him!”
“Where did you get the money?” asked Kemp, abruptly.
The Invisible Man was silent for a space. “I can’t tell you to-night,”
he said.
He groaned suddenly and leant forward, supporting his invisible head on
invisible hands. “Kemp,” he said, “I’ve had no sleep for near three
days, except a couple of dozes of an hour or so. I must sleep soon.”
“Well, have my room—have this room.”
“But how can I sleep? If I sleep—he will get away. Ugh! What does it
matter?”
“What’s the shot wound?” asked Kemp, abruptly.
“Nothing—scratch and blood. Oh, God! How I want sleep!”
“Why not?”
The Invisible Man appeared to be regarding Kemp. “Because I’ve a
particular objection to being caught by my fellow-men,” he said slowly.
Kemp started.
“Fool that I am!” said the Invisible Man, striking the table smartly.
“I’ve put the idea into your head.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE INVISIBLE MAN SLEEPS
Exhausted and wounded as the Invisible Man was, he refused to accept
Kemp’s word that his freedom should be respected. He examined the two
windows of the bedroom, drew up the blinds and opened the sashes, to
confirm Kemp’s statement that a retreat by them would be possible.
Outside the night was very quiet and still, and the new moon was
setting over the down. Then he examined the keys of the bedroom and the
two dressing-room doors, to satisfy himself that these also could be
made an assurance of freedom. Finally he expressed himself satisfied.
He stood on the hearth rug and Kemp heard the sound of a yawn.
“I’m sorry,” said the Invisible Man, “if I cannot tell you all that I
have done to-night. But I am worn out. It’s grotesque, no doubt. It’s
horrible! But believe me, Kemp, in spite of your arguments of this
morning, it is quite a possible thing. I have made a discovery. I meant
to keep it to myself. I can’t. I must have a partner. And you.... We
can do such things ... But to-morrow. Now, Kemp, I feel as though I
must sleep or perish.”
Kemp stood in the middle of the room staring at the headless garment.
“I suppose I must leave you,” he said. “It’s—incredible. Three things
happening like this, overturning all my preconceptions—would make me
insane. But it’s real! Is there anything more that I can get you?”
“Only bid me good-night,” said Griffin.
“Good-night,” said Kemp, and shook an invisible hand. He walked
sideways to the door. Suddenly the dressing-gown walked quickly towards
him. “Understand me!” said the dressing-gown. “No attempts to hamper
me, or capture me! Or—”
Kemp’s face changed a little. “I thought I gave you my word,” he said.
Kemp closed the door softly behind him, and the key was turned upon him
forthwith. Then, as he stood with an expression of passive amazement on
his face, the rapid feet came to the door of the dressing-room and that
too was locked. Kemp slapped his brow with his hand. “Am I dreaming?
Has the world gone mad—or have I?”
He laughed, and put his hand to the locked door. “Barred out of my own
bedroom, by a flagrant absurdity!” he said.
He walked to the head of the staircase, turned, and stared at the
locked doors. “It’s fact,” he said. He put his fingers to his slightly
bruised neck. “Undeniable fact!
“But—”
He shook his head hopelessly, turned, and went downstairs.
He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the
room, ejaculating. Now and then he would argue with himself.
“Invisible!” he said.
“Is there such a thing as an invisible animal? ... In the sea, yes.
Thousands—millions. All the larvae, all the little nauplii and
tornarias, all the microscopic things, the jelly-fish. In the sea there
are more things invisible than visible! I never thought of that before.
And in the ponds too! All those little pond-life things—specks of
colourless translucent jelly! But in air? No!
“It can’t be.
“But after all—why not?
“If a man was made of glass he would still be visible.”
His meditation became profound. The bulk of three cigars had passed
into the invisible or diffused as a white ash over the carpet before he
spoke again. Then it was merely an exclamation. He turned aside, walked
out of the room, and went into his little consulting-room and lit the
gas there. It was a little room, because Dr. Kemp did not live by
practice, and in it were the day’s newspapers. The morning’s paper lay
carelessly opened and thrown aside. He caught it up, turned it over,
and read the account of a “Strange Story from Iping” that the mariner
at Port Stowe had spelt over so painfully to Mr. Marvel. Kemp read it
swiftly.
“Wrapped up!” said Kemp. “Disguised! Hiding it! ‘No one seems to have
been aware of his misfortune.’ What the devil _is_ his game?”
He dropped the paper, and his eye went seeking. “Ah!” he said, and
caught up the _St. James’ Gazette_, lying folded up as it arrived. “Now
we shall get at the truth,” said Dr. Kemp. He rent the paper open; a
couple of columns confronted him. “An Entire Village in Sussex goes
Mad” was the heading.
“Good Heavens!” said Kemp, reading eagerly an incredulous account of
the events in Iping, of the previous afternoon, that have already been
described. Over the leaf the report in the morning paper had been
reprinted.
He re-read it. “Ran through the streets striking right and left.
Jaffers insensible. Mr. Huxter in great pain—still unable to describe
what he saw. Painful humiliation—vicar. Woman ill with terror! Windows
smashed. This extraordinary story probably a fabrication. Too good not
to print—_cum grano_!”
He dropped the paper and stared blankly in front of him. “Probably a
fabrication!”
He caught up the paper again, and re-read the whole business. “But when
does the Tramp come in? Why the deuce was he chasing a tramp?”
He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench. “He’s not only invisible,”
he said, “but he’s mad! Homicidal!”
When dawn came to mingle its pallor with the lamp-light and cigar smoke
of the dining-room, Kemp was still pacing up and down, trying to grasp
the incredible.
He was altogether too excited to sleep. His servants, descending
sleepily, discovered him, and were inclined to think that over-study
had worked this ill on him. He gave them extraordinary but quite
explicit instructions to lay breakfast for two in the belvedere
study—and then to confine themselves to the basement and ground-floor.
Then he continued to pace the dining-room until the morning’s paper
came. That had much to say and little to tell, beyond the confirmation
of the evening before, and a very badly written account of another
remarkable tale from Port Burdock. This gave Kemp the essence of the
happenings at the “Jolly Cricketers,” and the name of Marvel. “He has
made me keep with him twenty-four hours,” Marvel testified. Certain
minor facts were added to the Iping story, notably the cutting of the
village telegraph-wire. But there was nothing to throw light on the
connexion between the Invisible Man and the Tramp; for Mr. Marvel had
supplied no information about the three books, or the money with which
he was lined. The incredulous tone had vanished and a shoal of
reporters and inquirers were already at work elaborating the matter.
Kemp read every scrap of the report and sent his housemaid out to get
every one of the morning papers she could. These also he devoured.
“He is invisible!” he said. “And it reads like rage growing to mania!
The things he may do! The things he may do! And he’s upstairs free as
the air. What on earth ought I to do?”
“For instance, would it be a breach of faith if—? No.”
He went to a little untidy desk in the corner, and began a note. He
tore this up half written, and wrote another. He read it over and
considered it. Then he took an envelope and addressed it to “Colonel
Adye, Port Burdock.”
The Invisible Man awoke even as Kemp was doing this. He awoke in an
evil temper, and Kemp, alert for every sound, heard his pattering feet
rush suddenly across the bedroom overhead. Then a chair was flung over
and the wash-hand stand tumbler smashed. Kemp hurried upstairs and
rapped eagerly.
CHAPTER XIX.
CERTAIN FIRST PRINCIPLES
“What’s the matter?” asked Kemp, when the Invisible Man admitted him.
“Nothing,” was the answer.
“But, confound it! The smash?”
“Fit of temper,” said the Invisible Man. “Forgot this arm; and it’s
sore.”
“You’re rather liable to that sort of thing.”
“I am.”
Kemp walked across the room and picked up the fragments of broken
glass. “All the facts are out about you,” said Kemp, standing up with
the glass in his hand; “all that happened in Iping, and down the hill.
The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows
you are here.”
The Invisible Man swore.
“The secret’s out. I gather it was a secret. I don’t know what your
plans are, but of course I’m anxious to help you.”
The Invisible Man sat down on the bed.
“There’s breakfast upstairs,” said Kemp, speaking as easily as
possible, and he was delighted to find his strange guest rose
willingly. Kemp led the way up the narrow staircase to the belvedere.
“Before we can do anything else,” said Kemp, “I must understand a
little more about this invisibility of yours.” He had sat down, after
one nervous glance out of the window, with the air of a man who has
talking to do. His doubts of the sanity of the entire business flashed
and vanished again as he looked across to where Griffin sat at the
breakfast-table—a headless, handless dressing-gown, wiping unseen lips
on a miraculously held serviette.
“It’s simple enough—and credible enough,” said Griffin, putting the
serviette aside and leaning the invisible head on an invisible hand.
“No doubt, to you, but—” Kemp laughed.
“Well, yes; to me it seemed wonderful at first, no doubt. But now,
great God! ... But we will do great things yet! I came on the stuff
first at Chesilstowe.”
“Chesilstowe?”
“I went there after I left London. You know I dropped medicine and took
up physics? No; well, I did. _Light_ fascinated me.”
“Ah!”
“Optical density! The whole subject is a network of riddles—a network
with solutions glimmering elusively through. And being but
two-and-twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said, ‘I will devote my life
to this. This is worth while.’ You know what fools we are at
two-and-twenty?”
“Fools then or fools now,” said Kemp.
“As though knowing could be any satisfaction to a man!
“But I went to work—like a slave. And I had hardly worked and thought
about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes
suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle of pigments and
refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four
dimensions. Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know
anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of
molecular physics. In the books—the books that tramp has hidden—there
are marvels, miracles! But this was not a method, it was an idea, that
might lead to a method by which it would be possible, without changing
any other property of matter—except, in some instances colours—to lower
the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air—so
far as all practical purposes are concerned.”
“Phew!” said Kemp. “That’s odd! But still I don’t see quite ... I can
understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but personal
invisibility is a far cry.”
“Precisely,” said Griffin. “But consider, visibility depends on the
action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or
it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither
reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be
visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour
absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of
the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the
light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box.
Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor
reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where
the surfaces were favourable the light would be reflected and
refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing
reflections and translucencies—a sort of skeleton of light. A glass box
would not be so brilliant, nor so clearly visible, as a diamond box,
because there would be less refraction and reflection. See that? From
certain points of view you would see quite clearly through it. Some
kinds of glass would be more visible than others, a box of flint glass
would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very
thin common glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would
absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you
put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you put it in
some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether,
because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or
reflected or indeed affected in any way. It is almost as invisible as a
jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in air. And for precisely the same
reason!”
“Yes,” said Kemp, “that is pretty plain sailing.”
“And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a sheet of glass
is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it becomes much more
visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque white
powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces of the
glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In the sheet of glass
there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is reflected or
refracted by each grain it passes through, and very little gets right
through the powder. But if the white powdered glass is put into water,
it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass and water have much the same
refractive index; that is, the light undergoes very little refraction
or reflection in passing from one to the other.
“You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly the
same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if it is
put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if you will
consider only a second, you will see also that the powder of glass
might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index could be made
the same as that of air; for then there would be no refraction or
reflection as the light passed from glass to air.”
“Yes, yes,” said Kemp. “But a man’s not powdered glass!”
“No,” said Griffin. “He’s more transparent!”
“Nonsense!”
“That from a doctor! How one forgets! Have you already forgotten your
physics, in ten years? Just think of all the things that are
transparent and seem not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up of
transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same reason
that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up
the interstices between the particles with oil so that there is no
longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it becomes
as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen
fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and _bone_, Kemp, _flesh_, Kemp,
_hair_, Kemp, _nails_ and _nerves_, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of a
man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are all
made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make
us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living
creature are no more opaque than water.”
“Great Heavens!” cried Kemp. “Of course, of course! I was thinking only
last night of the sea larvae and all jelly-fish!”
“_Now_ you have me! And all that I knew and had in mind a year after I
left London—six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to do my work
under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a scientific
bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas—he was always
prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I
simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on
working; I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment,
a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon
the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up
the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps. And suddenly, not by
design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology.”
“Yes?”
“You know the red colouring matter of blood; it can be made
white—colourless—and remain with all the functions it has now!”
Kemp gave a cry of incredulous amazement.
The Invisible Man rose and began pacing the little study. “You may well
exclaim. I remember that night. It was late at night—in the daytime one
was bothered with the gaping, silly students—and I worked then
sometimes till dawn. It came suddenly, splendid and complete in my
mind. I was alone; the laboratory was still, with the tall lights
burning brightly and silently. In all my great moments I have been
alone. ‘One could make an animal—a tissue—transparent! One could make
it invisible! All except the pigments—I could be invisible!’ I said,
suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge.
It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was doing, and went and
stared out of the great window at the stars. ‘I could be invisible!’ I
repeated.
“To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld,
unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might
mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw
none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck,
hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might
suddenly become—this. I ask you, Kemp if _you_ ... Anyone, I tell you,
would have flung himself upon that research. And I worked three years,
and every mountain of difficulty I toiled over showed another from its
summit. The infinite details! And the exasperation! A professor, a
provincial professor, always prying. ‘When are you going to publish
this work of yours?’ was his everlasting question. And the students,
the cramped means! Three years I had of it—
“And after three years of secrecy and exasperation, I found that to
complete it was impossible—impossible.”
“How?” asked Kemp.
“Money,” said the Invisible Man, and went again to stare out of the
window.
He turned around abruptly. “I robbed the old man—robbed my father.
“The money was not his, and he shot himself.”
CHAPTER XX.
AT THE HOUSE IN GREAT PORTLAND STREET
For a moment Kemp sat in silence, staring at the back of the headless
figure at the window. Then he started, struck by a thought, rose, took
the Invisible Man’s arm, and turned him away from the outlook.
“You are tired,” he said, “and while I sit, you walk about. Have my
chair.”
He placed himself between Griffin and the nearest window.
For a space Griffin sat silent, and then he resumed abruptly:
“I had left the Chesilstowe cottage already,” he said, “when that
happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a large
unfurnished room in a big ill-managed lodging-house in a slum near
Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances I had
bought with his money; the work was going on steadily, successfully,
drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a thicket, and
suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy. I went to bury him. My mind
was still on this research, and I did not lift a finger to save his
character. I remember the funeral, the cheap hearse, the scant
ceremony, the windy frost-bitten hillside, and the old college friend
of his who read the service over him—a shabby, black, bent old man with
a snivelling cold.
“I remember walking back to the empty house, through the place that had
once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry
builders into the ugly likeness of a town. Every way the roads ran out
at last into the desecrated fields and ended in rubble heaps and rank
wet weeds. I remember myself as a gaunt black figure, going along the
slippery, shiny pavement, and the strange sense of detachment I felt
from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of the place.
“I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the
victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant required my
attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my affair.
“But going along the High Street, my old life came back to me for a
space, for I met the girl I had known ten years since. Our eyes met.
“Something moved me to turn back and talk to her. She was a very
ordinary person.
“It was all like a dream, that visit to the old places. I did not feel
then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a
desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to
the general inanity of things. Re-entering my room seemed like the
recovery of reality. There were the things I knew and loved. There
stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and waiting. And now
there was scarcely a difficulty left, beyond the planning of details.
“I will tell you, Kemp, sooner or later, all the complicated processes.
We need not go into that now. For the most part, saving certain gaps I
chose to remember, they are written in cypher in those books that tramp
has hidden. We must hunt him down. We must get those books again. But
the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose
refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centres of a
sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later.
No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don’t know that these others of mine
have been described. Yet they are obvious enough. I needed two little
dynamos, and these I worked with a cheap gas engine. My first
experiment was with a bit of white wool fabric. It was the strangest
thing in the world to see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and
white, and then to watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish.
“I could scarcely believe I had done it. I put my hand into the
emptiness, and there was the thing as solid as ever. I felt it
awkwardly, and threw it on the floor. I had a little trouble finding it
again.
“And then came a curious experience. I heard a miaow behind me, and
turning, saw a lean white cat, very dirty, on the cistern cover outside
the window. A thought came into my head. ‘Everything ready for you,’ I
said, and went to the window, opened it, and called softly. She came
in, purring—the poor beast was starving—and I gave her some milk. All
my food was in a cupboard in the corner of the room. After that she
went smelling round the room, evidently with the idea of making herself
at home. The invisible rag upset her a bit; you should have seen her
spit at it! But I made her comfortable on the pillow of my truckle-bed.
And I gave her butter to get her to wash.”
“And you processed her?”
“I processed her. But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp! And the
process failed.”
“Failed!”
“In two particulars. These were the claws and the pigment stuff, what
is it?—at the back of the eye in a cat. You know?”
“_Tapetum_.”
“Yes, the _tapetum_. It didn’t go. After I’d given the stuff to bleach
the blood and done certain other things to her, I gave the beast opium,
and put her and the pillow she was sleeping on, on the apparatus. And
after all the rest had faded and vanished, there remained two little
ghosts of her eyes.”
“Odd!”
“I can’t explain it. She was bandaged and clamped, of course—so I had
her safe; but she woke while she was still misty, and miaowed dismally,
and someone came knocking. It was an old woman from downstairs, who
suspected me of vivisecting—a drink-sodden old creature, with only a
white cat to care for in all the world. I whipped out some chloroform,
applied it, and answered the door. ‘Did I hear a cat?’ she asked. ‘My
cat?’ ‘Not here,’ said I, very politely. She was a little doubtful and
tried to peer past me into the room; strange enough to her no
doubt—bare walls, uncurtained windows, truckle-bed, with the gas engine
vibrating, and the seethe of the radiant points, and that faint ghastly
stinging of chloroform in the air. She had to be satisfied at last and
went away again.”
“How long did it take?” asked Kemp.
“Three or four hours—the cat. The bones and sinews and the fat were the
last to go, and the tips of the coloured hairs. And, as I say, the back
part of the eye, tough, iridescent stuff it is, wouldn’t go at all.
“It was night outside long before the business was over, and nothing
was to be seen but the dim eyes and the claws. I stopped the gas
engine, felt for and stroked the beast, which was still insensible, and
then, being tired, left it sleeping on the invisible pillow and went to
bed. I found it hard to sleep. I lay awake thinking weak aimless stuff,
going over the experiment over and over again, or dreaming feverishly
of things growing misty and vanishing about me, until everything, the
ground I stood on, vanished, and so I came to that sickly falling
nightmare one gets. About two, the cat began miaowing about the room. I
tried to hush it by talking to it, and then I decided to turn it out. I
remember the shock I had when striking a light—there were just the
round eyes shining green—and nothing round them. I would have given it
milk, but I hadn’t any. It wouldn’t be quiet, it just sat down and
miaowed at the door. I tried to catch it, with an idea of putting it
out of the window, but it wouldn’t be caught, it vanished. Then it
began miaowing in different parts of the room. At last I opened the
window and made a bustle. I suppose it went out at last. I never saw
any more of it.
“Then—Heaven knows why—I fell thinking of my father’s funeral again,
and the dismal windy hillside, until the day had come. I found sleeping
was hopeless, and, locking my door after me, wandered out into the
morning streets.”
“You don’t mean to say there’s an invisible cat at large!” said Kemp.
“If it hasn’t been killed,” said the Invisible Man. “Why not?”
“Why not?” said Kemp. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s very probably been killed,” said the Invisible Man. “It was alive
four days after, I know, and down a grating in Great Titchfield Street;
because I saw a crowd round the place, trying to see whence the
miaowing came.”
He was silent for the best part of a minute. Then he resumed abruptly:
“I remember that morning before the change very vividly. I must have
gone up Great Portland Street. I remember the barracks in Albany
Street, and the horse soldiers coming out, and at last I found the
summit of Primrose Hill. It was a sunny day in January—one of those
sunny, frosty days that came before the snow this year. My weary brain
tried to formulate the position, to plot out a plan of action.
“I was surprised to find, now that my prize was within my grasp, how
inconclusive its attainment seemed. As a matter of fact I was worked
out; the intense stress of nearly four years’ continuous work left me
incapable of any strength of feeling. I was apathetic, and I tried in
vain to recover the enthusiasm of my first inquiries, the passion of
discovery that had enabled me to compass even the downfall of my
father’s grey hairs. Nothing seemed to matter. I saw pretty clearly
this was a transient mood, due to overwork and want of sleep, and that
either by drugs or rest it would be possible to recover my energies.
“All I could think clearly was that the thing had to be carried
through; the fixed idea still ruled me. And soon, for the money I had
was almost exhausted. I looked about me at the hillside, with children
playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all the
fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world. After a
time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine,
and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed. Strychnine is a grand
tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man.”
“It’s the devil,” said Kemp. “It’s the palaeolithic in a bottle.”
“I awoke vastly invigorated and rather irritable. You know?”
“I know the stuff.”
“And there was someone rapping at the door. It was my landlord with
threats and inquiries, an old Polish Jew in a long grey coat and greasy
slippers. I had been tormenting a cat in the night, he was sure—the old
woman’s tongue had been busy. He insisted on knowing all about it. The
laws in this country against vivisection were very severe—he might be
liable. I denied the cat. Then the vibration of the little gas engine
could be felt all over the house, he said. That was true, certainly. He
edged round me into the room, peering about over his German-silver
spectacles, and a sudden dread came into my mind that he might carry
away something of my secret. I tried to keep between him and the
concentrating apparatus I had arranged, and that only made him more
curious. What was I doing? Why was I always alone and secretive? Was it
legal? Was it dangerous? I paid nothing but the usual rent. His had
always been a most respectable house—in a disreputable neighbourhood.
Suddenly my temper gave way. I told him to get out. He began to
protest, to jabber of his right of entry. In a moment I had him by the
collar; something ripped, and he went spinning out into his own
passage. I slammed and locked the door and sat down quivering.
“He made a fuss outside, which I disregarded, and after a time he went
away.
“But this brought matters to a crisis. I did not know what he would do,
nor even what he had the power to do. To move to fresh apartments would
have meant delay; altogether I had barely twenty pounds left in the
world, for the most part in a bank—and I could not afford that. Vanish!
It was irresistible. Then there would be an inquiry, the sacking of my
room.
“At the thought of the possibility of my work being exposed or
interrupted at its very climax, I became very angry and active. I
hurried out with my three books of notes, my cheque-book—the tramp has
them now—and directed them from the nearest Post Office to a house of
call for letters and parcels in Great Portland Street. I tried to go
out noiselessly. Coming in, I found my landlord going quietly upstairs;
he had heard the door close, I suppose. You would have laughed to see
him jump aside on the landing as I came tearing after him. He glared at
me as I went by him, and I made the house quiver with the slamming of
my door. I heard him come shuffling up to my floor, hesitate, and go
down. I set to work upon my preparations forthwith.
“It was all done that evening and night. While I was still sitting
under the sickly, drowsy influence of the drugs that decolourise blood,
there came a repeated knocking at the door. It ceased, footsteps went
away and returned, and the knocking was resumed. There was an attempt
to push something under the door—a blue paper. Then in a fit of
irritation I rose and went and flung the door wide open. ‘Now then?’
said I.
“It was my landlord, with a notice of ejectment or something. He held
it out to me, saw something odd about my hands, I expect, and lifted
his eyes to my face.
“For a moment he gaped. Then he gave a sort of inarticulate cry,
dropped candle and writ together, and went blundering down the dark
passage to the stairs. I shut the door, locked it, and went to the
looking-glass. Then I understood his terror.... My face was white—like
white stone.
“But it was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night of
racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth, though my skin
was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like grim
death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I
chloroformed it. Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room.
There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck to
it.... I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness.
“The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not
care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing
that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow
clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the
sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent
eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded,
vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I gritted my teeth and
stayed there to the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails
remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my
fingers.
“I struggled up. At first I was as incapable as a swathed
infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry.
I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where
an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes,
fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my forehead
against the glass.
“It was only by a frantic effort of will that I dragged myself back to
the apparatus and completed the process.
“I slept during the forenoon, pulling the sheet over my eyes to shut
out the light, and about midday I was awakened again by a knocking. My
strength had returned. I sat up and listened and heard a whispering. I
sprang to my feet and as noiselessly as possible began to detach the
connections of my apparatus, and to distribute it about the room, so as
to destroy the suggestions of its arrangement. Presently the knocking
was renewed and voices called, first my landlord’s, and then two
others. To gain time I answered them. The invisible rag and pillow came
to hand and I opened the window and pitched them out on to the cistern
cover. As the window opened, a heavy crash came at the door. Someone
had charged it with the idea of smashing the lock. But the stout bolts
I had screwed up some days before stopped him. That startled me, made
me angry. I began to tremble and do things hurriedly.
“I tossed together some loose paper, straw, packing paper and so forth,
in the middle of the room, and turned on the gas. Heavy blows began to
rain upon the door. I could not find the matches. I beat my hands on
the wall with rage. I turned down the gas again, stepped out of the
window on the cistern cover, very softly lowered the sash, and sat
down, secure and invisible, but quivering with anger, to watch events.
They split a panel, I saw, and in another moment they had broken away
the staples of the bolts and stood in the open doorway. It was the
landlord and his two step-sons, sturdy young men of three or four and
twenty. Behind them fluttered the old hag of a woman from downstairs.
“You may imagine their astonishment to find the room empty. One of the
younger men rushed to the window at once, flung it up and stared out.
His staring eyes and thick-lipped bearded face came a foot from my
face. I was half minded to hit his silly countenance, but I arrested my
doubled fist. He stared right through me. So did the others as they
joined him. The old man went and peered under the bed, and then they
all made a rush for the cupboard. They had to argue about it at length
in Yiddish and Cockney English. They concluded I had not answered them,
that their imagination had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary
elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and
watched these four people—for the old lady came in, glancing
suspiciously about her like a cat, trying to understand the riddle of
my behaviour.
“The old man, so far as I could understand his _patois_, agreed with
the old lady that I was a vivisectionist. The sons protested in garbled
English that I was an electrician, and appealed to the dynamos and
radiators. They were all nervous about my arrival, although I found
subsequently that they had bolted the front door. The old lady peered
into the cupboard and under the bed, and one of the young men pushed up
the register and stared up the chimney. One of my fellow lodgers, a
coster-monger who shared the opposite room with a butcher, appeared on
the landing, and he was called in and told incoherent things.
“It occurred to me that the radiators, if they fell into the hands of
some acute well-educated person, would give me away too much, and
watching my opportunity, I came into the room and tilted one of the
little dynamos off its fellow on which it was standing, and smashed
both apparatus. Then, while they were trying to explain the smash, I
dodged out of the room and went softly downstairs.
“I went into one of the sitting-rooms and waited until they came down,
still speculating and argumentative, all a little disappointed at
finding no ‘horrors,’ and all a little puzzled how they stood legally
towards me. Then I slipped up again with a box of matches, fired my
heap of paper and rubbish, put the chairs and bedding thereby, led the
gas to the affair, by means of an india-rubber tube, and waving a
farewell to the room left it for the last time.”
“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.
“Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail—and no doubt it
was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out
into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to
realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head
was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I
had now impunity to do.”
CHAPTER XXI.
IN OXFORD STREET
“In going downstairs the first time I found an unexpected difficulty
because I could not see my feet; indeed I stumbled twice, and there was
an unaccustomed clumsiness in gripping the bolt. By not looking down,
however, I managed to walk on the level passably well.
“My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might
do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I
experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on
the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my
extraordinary advantage.
“But hardly had I emerged upon Great Portland Street, however (my
lodging was close to the big draper’s shop there), when I heard a
clashing concussion and was hit violently behind, and turning saw a man
carrying a basket of soda-water syphons, and looking in amazement at
his burden. Although the blow had really hurt me, I found something so
irresistible in his astonishment that I laughed aloud. ‘The devil’s in
the basket,’ I said, and suddenly twisted it out of his hand. He let go
incontinently, and I swung the whole weight into the air.
“But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public house, made a sudden
rush for this, and his extending fingers took me with excruciating
violence under the ear. I let the whole down with a smash on the
cabman, and then, with shouts and the clatter of feet about me, people
coming out of shops, vehicles pulling up, I realised what I had done
for myself, and cursing my folly, backed against a shop window and
prepared to dodge out of the confusion. In a moment I should be wedged
into a crowd and inevitably discovered. I pushed by a butcher boy, who
luckily did not turn to see the nothingness that shoved him aside, and
dodged behind the cab-man’s four-wheeler. I do not know how they
settled the business. I hurried straight across the road, which was
happily clear, and hardly heeding which way I went, in the fright of
detection the incident had given me, plunged into the afternoon throng
of Oxford Street.
“I tried to get into the stream of people, but they were too thick for
me, and in a moment my heels were being trodden upon. I took to the
gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and
forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me forcibly under the
shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I
staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a
convulsive movement, and found myself behind the hansom. A happy
thought saved me, and as this drove slowly along I followed in its
immediate wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my adventure.
And not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright day in January
and I was stark naked and the thin slime of mud that covered the road
was freezing. Foolish as it seems to me now, I had not reckoned that,
transparent or not, I was still amenable to the weather and all its
consequences.
“Then suddenly a bright idea came into my head. I ran round and got
into the cab. And so, shivering, scared, and sniffing with the first
intimations of a cold, and with the bruises in the small of my back
growing upon my attention, I drove slowly along Oxford Street and past
Tottenham Court Road. My mood was as different from that in which I had
sallied forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to imagine. This
invisibility indeed! The one thought that possessed me was—how was I to
get out of the scrape I was in.
“We crawled past Mudie’s, and there a tall woman with five or six
yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and I sprang out just in time to
escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight. I made off up
the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, intending to strike north past the
Museum and so get into the quiet district. I was now cruelly chilled,
and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered as
I ran. At the northward corner of the Square a little white dog ran out
of the Pharmaceutical Society’s offices, and incontinently made for me,
nose down.
“I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a dog
what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceive the scent of
a man moving as men perceive his vision. This brute began barking and
leaping, showing, as it seemed to me, only too plainly that he was
aware of me. I crossed Great Russell Street, glancing over my shoulder
as I did so, and went some way along Montague Street before I realised
what I was running towards.
“Then I became aware of a blare of music, and looking along the street
saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square, red shirts, and
the banner of the Salvation Army to the fore. Such a crowd, chanting in
the roadway and scoffing on the pavement, I could not hope to
penetrate, and dreading to go back and farther from home again, and
deciding on the spur of the moment, I ran up the white steps of a house
facing the museum railings, and stood there until the crowd should have
passed. Happily the dog stopped at the noise of the band too,
hesitated, and turned tail, running back to Bloomsbury Square again.
“On came the band, bawling with unconscious irony some hymn about ‘When
shall we see His face?’ and it seemed an interminable time to me before
the tide of the crowd washed along the pavement by me. Thud, thud,
thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for the moment I
did not notice two urchins stopping at the railings by me. ‘See ’em,’
said one. ‘See what?’ said the other. ‘Why—them footmarks—bare. Like
what you makes in mud.’
“I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and were gaping at
the muddy footmarks I had left behind me up the newly whitened steps.
The passing people elbowed and jostled them, but their confounded
intelligence was arrested. ‘Thud, thud, thud, when, thud, shall we see,
thud, his face, thud, thud.’ ‘There’s a barefoot man gone up them
steps, or I don’t know nothing,’ said one. ‘And he ain’t never come
down again. And his foot was a-bleeding.’
“The thick of the crowd had already passed. ‘Looky there, Ted,’ quoth
the younger of the detectives, with the sharpness of surprise in his
voice, and pointed straight to my feet. I looked down and saw at once
the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in splashes of mud. For a
moment I was paralysed.
“‘Why, that’s rum,’ said the elder. ‘Dashed rum! It’s just like the
ghost of a foot, ain’t it?’ He hesitated and advanced with outstretched
hand. A man pulled up short to see what he was catching, and then a
girl. In another moment he would have touched me. Then I saw what to
do. I made a step, the boy started back with an exclamation, and with a
rapid movement I swung myself over into the portico of the next house.
But the smaller boy was sharp-eyed enough to follow the movement, and
before I was well down the steps and upon the pavement, he had
recovered from his momentary astonishment and was shouting out that the
feet had gone over the wall.
“They rushed round and saw my new footmarks flash into being on the
lower step and upon the pavement. ‘What’s up?’ asked someone. ‘Feet!
Look! Feet running!’
“Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was pouring along
after the Salvation Army, and this blow not only impeded me but them.
There was an eddy of surprise and interrogation. At the cost of bowling
over one young fellow I got through, and in another moment I was
rushing headlong round the circuit of Russell Square, with six or seven
astonished people following my footmarks. There was no time for
explanation, or else the whole host would have been after me.
“Twice I doubled round corners, thrice I crossed the road and came back
upon my tracks, and then, as my feet grew hot and dry, the damp
impressions began to fade. At last I had a breathing space and rubbed
my feet clean with my hands, and so got away altogether. The last I saw
of the chase was a little group of a dozen people perhaps, studying
with infinite perplexity a slowly drying footprint that had resulted
from a puddle in Tavistock Square, a footprint as isolated and
incomprehensible to them as Crusoe’s solitary discovery.
“This running warmed me to a certain extent, and I went on with a
better courage through the maze of less frequented roads that runs
hereabouts. My back had now become very stiff and sore, my tonsils were
painful from the cabman’s fingers, and the skin of my neck had been
scratched by his nails; my feet hurt exceedingly and I was lame from a
little cut on one foot. I saw in time a blind man approaching me, and
fled limping, for I feared his subtle intuitions. Once or twice
accidental collisions occurred and I left people amazed, with
unaccountable curses ringing in their ears. Then came something silent
and quiet against my face, and across the Square fell a thin veil of
slowly falling flakes of snow. I had caught a cold, and do as I would I
could not avoid an occasional sneeze. And every dog that came in sight,
with its pointing nose and curious sniffing, was a terror to me.
“Then came men and boys running, first one and then others, and
shouting as they ran. It was a fire. They ran in the direction of my
lodging, and looking back down a street I saw a mass of black smoke
streaming up above the roofs and telephone wires. It was my lodging
burning; my clothes, my apparatus, all my resources indeed, except my
cheque-book and the three volumes of memoranda that awaited me in Great
Portland Street, were there. Burning! I had burnt my boats—if ever a
man did! The place was blazing.”
The Invisible Man paused and thought. Kemp glanced nervously out of the
window. “Yes?” he said. “Go on.”
CHAPTER XXII.
IN THE EMPORIUM
“So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air about
me—and if it settled on me it would betray me!—weary, cold, painful,
inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced of my invisible
quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no
refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could
confide. To have told my secret would have given me away—made a mere
show and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I was half-minded to accost some
passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy. But I knew too clearly the
terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke. I made no plans in
the street. My sole object was to get shelter from the snow, to get
myself covered and warm; then I might hope to plan. But even to me, an
Invisible Man, the rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and
bolted impregnably.
“Only one thing could I see clearly before me—the cold exposure and
misery of the snowstorm and the night.
“And then I had a brilliant idea. I turned down one of the roads
leading from Gower Street to Tottenham Court Road, and found myself
outside Omniums, the big establishment where everything is to be
bought—you know the place: meat, grocery, linen, furniture, clothing,
oil paintings even—a huge meandering collection of shops rather than a
shop. I had thought I should find the doors open, but they were closed,
and as I stood in the wide entrance a carriage stopped outside, and a
man in uniform—you know the kind of personage with ‘Omnium’ on his
cap—flung open the door. I contrived to enter, and walking down the
shop—it was a department where they were selling ribbons and gloves and
stockings and that kind of thing—came to a more spacious region devoted
to picnic baskets and wicker furniture.
“I did not feel safe there, however; people were going to and fro, and
I prowled restlessly about until I came upon a huge section in an upper
floor containing multitudes of bedsteads, and over these I clambered,
and found a resting-place at last among a huge pile of folded flock
mattresses. The place was already lit up and agreeably warm, and I
decided to remain where I was, keeping a cautious eye on the two or
three sets of shopmen and customers who were meandering through the
place, until closing time came. Then I should be able, I thought, to
rob the place for food and clothing, and disguised, prowl through it
and examine its resources, perhaps sleep on some of the bedding. That
seemed an acceptable plan. My idea was to procure clothing to make
myself a muffled but acceptable figure, to get money, and then to
recover my books and parcels where they awaited me, take a lodging
somewhere and elaborate plans for the complete realisation of the
advantages my invisibility gave me (as I still imagined) over my
fellow-men.
“Closing time arrived quickly enough. It could not have been more than
an hour after I took up my position on the mattresses before I noticed
the blinds of the windows being drawn, and customers being marched
doorward. And then a number of brisk young men began with remarkable
alacrity to tidy up the goods that remained disturbed. I left my lair
as the crowds diminished, and prowled cautiously out into the less
desolate parts of the shop. I was really surprised to observe how
rapidly the young men and women whipped away the goods displayed for
sale during the day. All the boxes of goods, the hanging fabrics, the
festoons of lace, the boxes of sweets in the grocery section, the
displays of this and that, were being whipped down, folded up, slapped
into tidy receptacles, and everything that could not be taken down and
put away had sheets of some coarse stuff like sacking flung over them.
Finally all the chairs were turned up on to the counters, leaving the
floor clear. Directly each of these young people had done, he or she
made promptly for the door with such an expression of animation as I
have rarely observed in a shop assistant before. Then came a lot of
youngsters scattering sawdust and carrying pails and brooms. I had to
dodge to get out of the way, and as it was, my ankle got stung with the
sawdust. For some time, wandering through the swathed and darkened
departments, I could hear the brooms at work. And at last a good hour
or more after the shop had been closed, came a noise of locking doors.
Silence came upon the place, and I found myself wandering through the
vast and intricate shops, galleries, show-rooms of the place, alone. It
was very still; in one place I remember passing near one of the
Tottenham Court Road entrances and listening to the tapping of
boot-heels of the passers-by.
“My first visit was to the place where I had seen stockings and gloves
for sale. It was dark, and I had the devil of a hunt after matches,
which I found at last in the drawer of the little cash desk. Then I had
to get a candle. I had to tear down wrappings and ransack a number of
boxes and drawers, but at last I managed to turn out what I sought; the
box label called them lambswool pants, and lambswool vests. Then socks,
a thick comforter, and then I went to the clothing place and got
trousers, a lounge jacket, an overcoat and a slouch hat—a clerical sort
of hat with the brim turned down. I began to feel a human being again,
and my next thought was food.
“Upstairs was a refreshment department, and there I got cold meat.
There was coffee still in the urn, and I lit the gas and warmed it up
again, and altogether I did not do badly. Afterwards, prowling through
the place in search of blankets—I had to put up at last with a heap of
down quilts—I came upon a grocery section with a lot of chocolate and
candied fruits, more than was good for me indeed—and some white
burgundy. And near that was a toy department, and I had a brilliant
idea. I found some artificial noses—dummy noses, you know, and I
thought of dark spectacles. But Omniums had no optical department. My
nose had been a difficulty indeed—I had thought of paint. But the
discovery set my mind running on wigs and masks and the like. Finally I
went to sleep in a heap of down quilts, very warm and comfortable.
“My last thoughts before sleeping were the most agreeable I had had
since the change. I was in a state of physical serenity, and that was
reflected in my mind. I thought that I should be able to slip out
unobserved in the morning with my clothes upon me, muffling my face
with a white wrapper I had taken, purchase, with the money I had taken,
spectacles and so forth, and so complete my disguise. I lapsed into
disorderly dreams of all the fantastic things that had happened during
the last few days. I saw the ugly little Jew of a landlord vociferating
in his rooms; I saw his two sons marvelling, and the wrinkled old
woman’s gnarled face as she asked for her cat. I experienced again the
strange sensation of seeing the cloth disappear, and so I came round to
the windy hillside and the sniffing old clergyman mumbling ‘Earth to
earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ at my father’s open grave.
“‘You also,’ said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards the
grave. I struggled, shouted, appealed to the mourners, but they
continued stonily following the service; the old clergyman, too, never
faltered droning and sniffing through the ritual. I realised I was
invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had their grip on me.
I struggled in vain, I was forced over the brink, the coffin rang
hollow as I fell upon it, and the gravel came flying after me in
spadefuls. Nobody heeded me, nobody was aware of me. I made convulsive
struggles and awoke.
“The pale London dawn had come, the place was full of a chilly grey
light that filtered round the edges of the window blinds. I sat up, and
for a time I could not think where this ample apartment, with its
counters, its piles of rolled stuff, its heap of quilts and cushions,
its iron pillars, might be. Then, as recollection came back to me, I
heard voices in conversation.
“Then far down the place, in the brighter light of some department
which had already raised its blinds, I saw two men approaching. I
scrambled to my feet, looking about me for some way of escape, and even
as I did so the sound of my movement made them aware of me. I suppose
they saw merely a figure moving quietly and quickly away. ‘Who’s that?’
cried one, and ‘Stop there!’ shouted the other. I dashed around a
corner and came full tilt—a faceless figure, mind you!—on a lanky lad
of fifteen. He yelled and I bowled him over, rushed past him, turned
another corner, and by a happy inspiration threw myself behind a
counter. In another moment feet went running past and I heard voices
shouting, ‘All hands to the doors!’ asking what was ‘up,’ and giving
one another advice how to catch me.
“Lying on the ground, I felt scared out of my wits. But—odd as it may
seem—it did not occur to me at the moment to take off my clothes as I
should have done. I had made up my mind, I suppose, to get away in
them, and that ruled me. And then down the vista of the counters came a
bawling of ‘Here he is!’
“I sprang to my feet, whipped a chair off the counter, and sent it
whirling at the fool who had shouted, turned, came into another round a
corner, sent him spinning, and rushed up the stairs. He kept his
footing, gave a view hallo, and came up the staircase hot after me. Up
the staircase were piled a multitude of those bright-coloured pot
things—what are they?”
“Art pots,” suggested Kemp.
“That’s it! Art pots. Well, I turned at the top step and swung round,
plucked one out of a pile and smashed it on his silly head as he came
at me. The whole pile of pots went headlong, and I heard shouting and
footsteps running from all parts. I made a mad rush for the refreshment
place, and there was a man in white like a man cook, who took up the
chase. I made one last desperate turn and found myself among lamps and
ironmongery. I went behind the counter of this, and waited for my cook,
and as he bolted in at the head of the chase, I doubled him up with a
lamp. Down he went, and I crouched down behind the counter and began
whipping off my clothes as fast as I could. Coat, jacket, trousers,
shoes were all right, but a lambswool vest fits a man like a skin. I
heard more men coming, my cook was lying quiet on the other side of the
counter, stunned or scared speechless, and I had to make another dash
for it, like a rabbit hunted out of a wood-pile.
“‘This way, policeman!’ I heard someone shouting. I found myself in my
bedstead storeroom again, and at the end of a wilderness of wardrobes.
I rushed among them, went flat, got rid of my vest after infinite
wriggling, and stood a free man again, panting and scared, as the
policeman and three of the shopmen came round the corner. They made a
rush for the vest and pants, and collared the trousers. ‘He’s dropping
his plunder,’ said one of the young men. ‘He _must_ be somewhere here.’
“But they did not find me all the same.
“I stood watching them hunt for me for a time, and cursing my ill-luck
in losing the clothes. Then I went into the refreshment-room, drank a
little milk I found there, and sat down by the fire to consider my
position.
“In a little while two assistants came in and began to talk over the
business very excitedly and like the fools they were. I heard a
magnified account of my depredations, and other speculations as to my
whereabouts. Then I fell to scheming again. The insurmountable
difficulty of the place, especially now it was alarmed, was to get any
plunder out of it. I went down into the warehouse to see if there was
any chance of packing and addressing a parcel, but I could not
understand the system of checking. About eleven o’clock, the snow
having thawed as it fell, and the day being finer and a little warmer
than the previous one, I decided that the Emporium was hopeless, and
went out again, exasperated at my want of success, with only the
vaguest plans of action in my mind.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
IN DRURY LANE
“But you begin now to realise,” said the Invisible Man, “the full
disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter—no covering—to get
clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and
terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with
unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”
“I never thought of that,” said Kemp.
“Nor had I. And the snow had warned me of other dangers. I could not go
abroad in snow—it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too, would
make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man—a bubble. And
fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy
glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad—in the London air—I
gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I
did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from
that cause also. But I saw clearly it could not be for long.
“Not in London at any rate.
“I went into the slums towards Great Portland Street, and found myself
at the end of the street in which I had lodged. I did not go that way,
because of the crowd halfway down it opposite to the still smoking
ruins of the house I had fired. My most immediate problem was to get
clothing. What to do with my face puzzled me. Then I saw in one of
those little miscellaneous shops—news, sweets, toys, stationery,
belated Christmas tomfoolery, and so forth—an array of masks and noses.
I realised that problem was solved. In a flash I saw my course. I
turned about, no longer aimless, and went—circuitously in order to
avoid the busy ways, towards the back streets north of the Strand; for
I remembered, though not very distinctly where, that some theatrical
costumiers had shops in that district.
“The day was cold, with a nipping wind down the northward running
streets. I walked fast to avoid being overtaken. Every crossing was a
danger, every passenger a thing to watch alertly. One man as I was
about to pass him at the top of Bedford Street, turned upon me abruptly
and came into me, sending me into the road and almost under the wheel
of a passing hansom. The verdict of the cab-rank was that he had had
some sort of stroke. I was so unnerved by this encounter that I went
into Covent Garden Market and sat down for some time in a quiet corner
by a stall of violets, panting and trembling. I found I had caught a
fresh cold, and had to turn out after a time lest my sneezes should
attract attention.
“At last I reached the object of my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little
shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel robes,
sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs. The
shop was old-fashioned and low and dark, and the house rose above it
for four storeys, dark and dismal. I peered through the window and,
seeing no one within, entered. The opening of the door set a clanking
bell ringing. I left it open, and walked round a bare costume stand,
into a corner behind a cheval glass. For a minute or so no one came.
Then I heard heavy feet striding across a room, and a man appeared down
the shop.
“My plans were now perfectly definite. I proposed to make my way into
the house, secrete myself upstairs, watch my opportunity, and when
everything was quiet, rummage out a wig, mask, spectacles, and costume,
and go into the world, perhaps a grotesque but still a credible figure.
And incidentally of course I could rob the house of any available
money.
“The man who had just entered the shop was a short, slight, hunched,
beetle-browed man, with long arms and very short bandy legs. Apparently
I had interrupted a meal. He stared about the shop with an expression
of expectation. This gave way to surprise, and then to anger, as he saw
the shop empty. ‘Damn the boys!’ he said. He went to stare up and down
the street. He came in again in a minute, kicked the door to with his
foot spitefully, and went muttering back to the house door.
“I came forward to follow him, and at the noise of my movement he
stopped dead. I did so too, startled by his quickness of ear. He
slammed the house door in my face.
“I stood hesitating. Suddenly I heard his quick footsteps returning,
and the door reopened. He stood looking about the shop like one who was
still not satisfied. Then, murmuring to himself, he examined the back
of the counter and peered behind some fixtures. Then he stood doubtful.
He had left the house door open and I slipped into the inner room.
“It was a queer little room, poorly furnished and with a number of big
masks in the corner. On the table was his belated breakfast, and it was
a confoundedly exasperating thing for me, Kemp, to have to sniff his
coffee and stand watching while he came in and resumed his meal. And
his table manners were irritating. Three doors opened into the little
room, one going upstairs and one down, but they were all shut. I could
not get out of the room while he was there; I could scarcely move
because of his alertness, and there was a draught down my back. Twice I
strangled a sneeze just in time.
“The spectacular quality of my sensations was curious and novel, but
for all that I was heartily tired and angry long before he had done his
eating. But at last he made an end and putting his beggarly crockery on
the black tin tray upon which he had had his teapot, and gathering all
the crumbs up on the mustard stained cloth, he took the whole lot of
things after him. His burden prevented his shutting the door behind
him—as he would have done; I never saw such a man for shutting
doors—and I followed him into a very dirty underground kitchen and
scullery. I had the pleasure of seeing him begin to wash up, and then,
finding no good in keeping down there, and the brick floor being cold
on my feet, I returned upstairs and sat in his chair by the fire. It
was burning low, and scarcely thinking, I put on a little coal. The
noise of this brought him up at once, and he stood aglare. He peered
about the room and was within an ace of touching me. Even after that
examination, he scarcely seemed satisfied. He stopped in the doorway
and took a final inspection before he went down.
“I waited in the little parlour for an age, and at last he came up and
opened the upstairs door. I just managed to get by him.
“On the staircase he stopped suddenly, so that I very nearly blundered
into him. He stood looking back right into my face and listening. ‘I
could have sworn,’ he said. His long hairy hand pulled at his lower
lip. His eye went up and down the staircase. Then he grunted and went
on up again.
“His hand was on the handle of a door, and then he stopped again with
the same puzzled anger on his face. He was becoming aware of the faint
sounds of my movements about him. The man must have had diabolically
acute hearing. He suddenly flashed into rage. ‘If there’s anyone in
this house—’ he cried with an oath, and left the threat unfinished. He
put his hand in his pocket, failed to find what he wanted, and rushing
past me went blundering noisily and pugnaciously downstairs. But I did
not follow him. I sat on the head of the staircase until his return.
“Presently he came up again, still muttering. He opened the door of the
room, and before I could enter, slammed it in my face.
“I resolved to explore the house, and spent some time in doing so as
noiselessly as possible. The house was very old and tumble-down, damp
so that the paper in the attics was peeling from the walls, and rat
infested. Some of the door handles were stiff and I was afraid to turn
them. Several rooms I did inspect were unfurnished, and others were
littered with theatrical lumber, bought second-hand, I judged, from its
appearance. In one room next to his I found a lot of old clothes. I
began routing among these, and in my eagerness forgot again the evident
sharpness of his ears. I heard a stealthy footstep and, looking up just
in time, saw him peering in at the tumbled heap and holding an
old-fashioned revolver in his hand. I stood perfectly still while he
stared about open-mouthed and suspicious. ‘It must have been her,’ he
said slowly. ‘Damn her!’
“He shut the door quietly, and immediately I heard the key turn in the
lock. Then his footsteps retreated. I realised abruptly that I was
locked in. For a minute I did not know what to do. I walked from door
to window and back, and stood perplexed. A gust of anger came upon me.
But I decided to inspect the clothes before I did anything further, and
my first attempt brought down a pile from an upper shelf. This brought
him back, more sinister than ever. That time he actually touched me,
jumped back with amazement and stood astonished in the middle of the
room.
“Presently he calmed a little. ‘Rats,’ he said in an undertone, fingers
on lips. He was evidently a little scared. I edged quietly out of the
room, but a plank creaked. Then the infernal little brute started going
all over the house, revolver in hand and locking door after door and
pocketing the keys. When I realised what he was up to I had a fit of
rage—I could hardly control myself sufficiently to watch my
opportunity. By this time I knew he was alone in the house, and so I
made no more ado, but knocked him on the head.”
“Knocked him on the head?” exclaimed Kemp.
“Yes—stunned him—as he was going downstairs. Hit him from behind with a
stool that stood on the landing. He went downstairs like a bag of old
boots.”
“But—I say! The common conventions of humanity—”
“Are all very well for common people. But the point was, Kemp, that I
had to get out of that house in a disguise without his seeing me. I
couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. And then I gagged him with
a Louis Quatorze vest and tied him up in a sheet.”
“Tied him up in a sheet!”
“Made a sort of bag of it. It was rather a good idea to keep the idiot
scared and quiet, and a devilish hard thing to get out of—head away
from the string. My dear Kemp, it’s no good your sitting glaring as
though I was a murderer. It had to be done. He had his revolver. If
once he saw me he would be able to describe me—”
“But still,” said Kemp, “in England—to-day. And the man was in his own
house, and you were—well, robbing.”
“Robbing! Confound it! You’ll call me a thief next! Surely, Kemp,
you’re not fool enough to dance on the old strings. Can’t you see my
position?”
“And his too,” said Kemp.
The Invisible Man stood up sharply. “What do you mean to say?”
Kemp’s face grew a trifle hard. He was about to speak and checked
himself. “I suppose, after all,” he said with a sudden change of
manner, “the thing had to be done. You were in a fix. But still—”
“Of course I was in a fix—an infernal fix. And he made me wild
too—hunting me about the house, fooling about with his revolver,
locking and unlocking doors. He was simply exasperating. You don’t
blame me, do you? You don’t blame me?”
“I never blame anyone,” said Kemp. “It’s quite out of fashion. What did
you do next?”
“I was hungry. Downstairs I found a loaf and some rank cheese—more than
sufficient to satisfy my hunger. I took some brandy and water, and then
went up past my impromptu bag—he was lying quite still—to the room
containing the old clothes. This looked out upon the street, two lace
curtains brown with dirt guarding the window. I went and peered out
through their interstices. Outside the day was bright—by contrast with
the brown shadows of the dismal house in which I found myself,
dazzlingly bright. A brisk traffic was going by, fruit carts, a hansom,
a four-wheeler with a pile of boxes, a fishmonger’s cart. I turned with
spots of colour swimming before my eyes to the shadowy fixtures behind
me. My excitement was giving place to a clear apprehension of my
position again. The room was full of a faint scent of benzoline, used,
I suppose, in cleaning the garments.
“I began a systematic search of the place. I should judge the hunchback
had been alone in the house for some time. He was a curious person.
Everything that could possibly be of service to me I collected in the
clothes storeroom, and then I made a deliberate selection. I found a
handbag I thought a suitable possession, and some powder, rouge, and
sticking-plaster.
“I had thought of painting and powdering my face and all that there was
to show of me, in order to render myself visible, but the disadvantage
of this lay in the fact that I should require turpentine and other
appliances and a considerable amount of time before I could vanish
again. Finally I chose a mask of the better type, slightly grotesque
but not more so than many human beings, dark glasses, greyish whiskers,
and a wig. I could find no underclothing, but that I could buy
subsequently, and for the time I swathed myself in calico dominoes and
some white cashmere scarfs. I could find no socks, but the hunchback’s
boots were rather a loose fit and sufficed. In a desk in the shop were
three sovereigns and about thirty shillings’ worth of silver, and in a
locked cupboard I burst in the inner room were eight pounds in gold. I
could go forth into the world again, equipped.
“Then came a curious hesitation. Was my appearance really credible? I
tried myself with a little bedroom looking-glass, inspecting myself
from every point of view to discover any forgotten chink, but it all
seemed sound. I was grotesque to the theatrical pitch, a stage miser,
but I was certainly not a physical impossibility. Gathering confidence,
I took my looking-glass down into the shop, pulled down the shop
blinds, and surveyed myself from every point of view with the help of
the cheval glass in the corner.
“I spent some minutes screwing up my courage and then unlocked the shop
door and marched out into the street, leaving the little man to get out
of his sheet again when he liked. In five minutes a dozen turnings
intervened between me and the costumier’s shop. No one appeared to
notice me very pointedly. My last difficulty seemed overcome.”
He stopped again.
“And you troubled no more about the hunchback?” said Kemp.
“No,” said the Invisible Man. “Nor have I heard what became of him. I
suppose he untied himself or kicked himself out. The knots were pretty
tight.”
He became silent and went to the window and stared out.
“What happened when you went out into the Strand?”
“Oh!—disillusionment again. I thought my troubles were over.
Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose,
everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did,
whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to
fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me. I could
take my money where I found it. I decided to treat myself to a
sumptuous feast, and then put up at a good hotel, and accumulate a new
outfit of property. I felt amazingly confident; it’s not particularly
pleasant recalling that I was an ass. I went into a place and was
already ordering lunch, when it occurred to me that I could not eat
unless I exposed my invisible face. I finished ordering the lunch, told
the man I should be back in ten minutes, and went out exasperated. I
don’t know if you have ever been disappointed in your appetite.”
“Not quite so badly,” said Kemp, “but I can imagine it.”
“I could have smashed the silly devils. At last, faint with the desire
for tasteful food, I went into another place and demanded a private
room. ‘I am disfigured,’ I said. ‘Badly.’ They looked at me curiously,
but of course it was not their affair—and so at last I got my lunch. It
was not particularly well served, but it sufficed; and when I had had
it, I sat over a cigar, trying to plan my line of action. And outside a
snowstorm was beginning.
“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless
absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a
crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt
of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment.
I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt
invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to
enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of
place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of
woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for
politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport.
What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a
swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!”
He paused, and his attitude suggested a roving glance at the window.
“But how did you get to Iping?” said Kemp, anxious to keep his guest
busy talking.
“I went there to work. I had one hope. It was a half idea! I have it
still. It is a full blown idea now. A way of getting back! Of restoring
what I have done. When I choose. When I have done all I mean to do
invisibly. And that is what I chiefly want to talk to you about now.”
“You went straight to Iping?”
“Yes. I had simply to get my three volumes of memoranda and my
cheque-book, my luggage and underclothing, order a quantity of
chemicals to work out this idea of mine—I will show you the
calculations as soon as I get my books—and then I started. Jove! I
remember the snowstorm now, and the accursed bother it was to keep the
snow from damping my pasteboard nose.”
“At the end,” said Kemp, “the day before yesterday, when they found you
out, you rather—to judge by the papers—”
“I did. Rather. Did I kill that fool of a constable?”
“No,” said Kemp. “He’s expected to recover.”
“That’s his luck, then. I clean lost my temper, the fools! Why couldn’t
they leave me alone? And that grocer lout?”
“There are no deaths expected,” said Kemp.
“I don’t know about that tramp of mine,” said the Invisible Man, with
an unpleasant laugh.
“By Heaven, Kemp, you don’t know what rage _is_! ... To have worked for
years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling
purblind idiot messing across your course! ... Every conceivable sort
of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.
“If I have much more of it, I shall go wild—I shall start mowing ’em.
“As it is, they’ve made things a thousand times more difficult.”
“No doubt it’s exasperating,” said Kemp, drily.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE PLAN THAT FAILED
“But now,” said Kemp, with a side glance out of the window, “what are
we to do?”
He moved nearer his guest as he spoke in such a manner as to prevent
the possibility of a sudden glimpse of the three men who were advancing
up the hill road—with an intolerable slowness, as it seemed to Kemp.
“What were you planning to do when you were heading for Port Burdock?
_Had_ you any plan?”
“I was going to clear out of the country. But I have altered that plan
rather since seeing you. I thought it would be wise, now the weather is
hot and invisibility possible, to make for the South. Especially as my
secret was known, and everyone would be on the lookout for a masked and
muffled man. You have a line of steamers from here to France. My idea
was to get aboard one and run the risks of the passage. Thence I could
go by train into Spain, or else get to Algiers. It would not be
difficult. There a man might always be invisible—and yet live. And do
things. I was using that tramp as a money box and luggage carrier,
until I decided how to get my books and things sent over to meet me.”
“That’s clear.”
“And then the filthy brute must needs try and rob me! He _has_ hidden
my books, Kemp. Hidden my books! If I can lay my hands on him!”
“Best plan to get the books out of him first.”
“But where is he? Do you know?”
“He’s in the town police station, locked up, by his own request, in the
strongest cell in the place.”
“Cur!” said the Invisible Man.
“But that hangs up your plans a little.”
“We must get those books; those books are vital.”
“Certainly,” said Kemp, a little nervously, wondering if he heard
footsteps outside. “Certainly we must get those books. But that won’t
be difficult, if he doesn’t know they’re for you.”
“No,” said the Invisible Man, and thought.
Kemp tried to think of something to keep the talk going, but the
Invisible Man resumed of his own accord.
“Blundering into your house, Kemp,” he said, “changes all my plans. For
you are a man that can understand. In spite of all that has happened,
in spite of this publicity, of the loss of my books, of what I have
suffered, there still remain great possibilities, huge possibilities—”
“You have told no one I am here?” he asked abruptly.
Kemp hesitated. “That was implied,” he said.
“No one?” insisted Griffin.
“Not a soul.”
“Ah! Now—” The Invisible Man stood up, and sticking his arms akimbo
began to pace the study.
“I made a mistake, Kemp, a huge mistake, in carrying this thing through
alone. I have wasted strength, time, opportunities. Alone—it is
wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a
little, and there is the end.
“What I want, Kemp, is a goal-keeper, a helper, and a hiding-place, an
arrangement whereby I can sleep and eat and rest in peace, and
unsuspected. I must have a confederate. With a confederate, with food
and rest—a thousand things are possible.
“Hitherto I have gone on vague lines. We have to consider all that
invisibility means, all that it does not mean. It means little
advantage for eavesdropping and so forth—one makes sounds. It’s of
little help—a little help perhaps—in housebreaking and so forth. Once
you’ve caught me you could easily imprison me. But on the other hand I
am hard to catch. This invisibility, in fact, is only good in two
cases: It’s useful in getting away, it’s useful in approaching. It’s
particularly useful, therefore, in killing. I can walk round a man,
whatever weapon he has, choose my point, strike as I like. Dodge as I
like. Escape as I like.”
Kemp’s hand went to his moustache. Was that a movement downstairs?
“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”
“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan,
Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. _Why_ killing?”
“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know
there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man.
And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror.
Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must
take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must
issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper
thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he
must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”
“Humph!” said Kemp, no longer listening to Griffin but to the sound of
his front door opening and closing.
“It seems to me, Griffin,” he said, to cover his wandering attention,
“that your confederate would be in a difficult position.”
“No one would know he was a confederate,” said the Invisible Man,
eagerly. And then suddenly, “Hush! What’s that downstairs?”
“Nothing,” said Kemp, and suddenly began to speak loud and fast. “I
don’t agree to this, Griffin,” he said. “Understand me, I don’t agree
to this. Why dream of playing a game against the race? How can you hope
to gain happiness? Don’t be a lone wolf. Publish your results; take the
world—take the nation at least—into your confidence. Think what you
might do with a million helpers—”
The Invisible Man interrupted—arm extended. “There are footsteps coming
upstairs,” he said in a low voice.
“Nonsense,” said Kemp.
“Let me see,” said the Invisible Man, and advanced, arm extended, to
the door.
And then things happened very swiftly. Kemp hesitated for a second and
then moved to intercept him. The Invisible Man started and stood still.
“Traitor!” cried the Voice, and suddenly the dressing-gown opened, and
sitting down the Unseen began to disrobe. Kemp made three swift steps
to the door, and forthwith the Invisible Man—his legs had
vanished—sprang to his feet with a shout. Kemp flung the door open.
As it opened, there came a sound of hurrying feet downstairs and
voices.
With a quick movement Kemp thrust the Invisible Man back, sprang aside,
and slammed the door. The key was outside and ready. In another moment
Griffin would have been alone in the belvedere study, a prisoner. Save
for one little thing. The key had been slipped in hastily that morning.
As Kemp slammed the door it fell noisily upon the carpet.
Kemp’s face became white. He tried to grip the door handle with both
hands. For a moment he stood lugging. Then the door gave six inches.
But he got it closed again. The second time it was jerked a foot wide,
and the dressing-gown came wedging itself into the opening. His throat
was gripped by invisible fingers, and he left his hold on the handle to
defend himself. He was forced back, tripped and pitched heavily into
the corner of the landing. The empty dressing-gown was flung on the top
of him.
Halfway up the staircase was Colonel Adye, the recipient of Kemp’s
letter, the chief of the Burdock police. He was staring aghast at the
sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary sight of
clothing tossing empty in the air. He saw Kemp felled, and struggling
to his feet. He saw him rush forward, and go down again, felled like an
ox.
Then suddenly he was struck violently. By nothing! A vast weight, it
seemed, leapt upon him, and he was hurled headlong down the staircase,
with a grip on his throat and a knee in his groin. An invisible foot
trod on his back, a ghostly patter passed downstairs, he heard the two
police officers in the hall shout and run, and the front door of the
house slammed violently.
He rolled over and sat up staring. He saw, staggering down the
staircase, Kemp, dusty and disheveled, one side of his face white from
a blow, his lip bleeding, and a pink dressing-gown and some
underclothing held in his arms.
“My God!” cried Kemp, “the game’s up! He’s gone!”
CHAPTER XXV.
THE HUNTING OF THE INVISIBLE MAN
For a space Kemp was too inarticulate to make Adye understand the swift
things that had just happened. They stood on the landing, Kemp speaking
swiftly, the grotesque swathings of Griffin still on his arm. But
presently Adye began to grasp something of the situation.
“He is mad,” said Kemp; “inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of
nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened to such
a story this morning of brutal self-seeking.... He has wounded men. He
will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a panic.
Nothing can stop him. He is going out now—furious!”
“He must be caught,” said Adye. “That is certain.”
“But how?” cried Kemp, and suddenly became full of ideas. “You must
begin at once. You must set every available man to work; you must
prevent his leaving this district. Once he gets away, he may go through
the countryside as he wills, killing and maiming. He dreams of a reign
of terror! A reign of terror, I tell you. You must set a watch on
trains and roads and shipping. The garrison must help. You must wire
for help. The only thing that may keep him here is the thought of
recovering some books of notes he counts of value. I will tell you of
that! There is a man in your police station—Marvel.”
“I know,” said Adye, “I know. Those books—yes. But the tramp....”
“Says he hasn’t them. But he thinks the tramp has. And you must prevent
him from eating or sleeping; day and night the country must be astir
for him. Food must be locked up and secured, all food, so that he will
have to break his way to it. The houses everywhere must be barred
against him. Heaven send us cold nights and rain! The whole
country-side must begin hunting and keep hunting. I tell you, Adye, he
is a danger, a disaster; unless he is pinned and secured, it is
frightful to think of the things that may happen.”
“What else can we do?” said Adye. “I must go down at once and begin
organising. But why not come? Yes—you come too! Come, and we must hold
a sort of council of war—get Hopps to help—and the railway managers. By
Jove! it’s urgent. Come along—tell me as we go. What else is there we
can do? Put that stuff down.”
In another moment Adye was leading the way downstairs. They found the
front door open and the policemen standing outside staring at empty
air. “He’s got away, sir,” said one.
“We must go to the central station at once,” said Adye. “One of you go
on down and get a cab to come up and meet us—quickly. And now, Kemp,
what else?”
“Dogs,” said Kemp. “Get dogs. They don’t see him, but they wind him.
Get dogs.”
“Good,” said Adye. “It’s not generally known, but the prison officials
over at Halstead know a man with bloodhounds. Dogs. What else?”
“Bear in mind,” said Kemp, “his food shows. After eating, his food
shows until it is assimilated. So that he has to hide after eating. You
must keep on beating. Every thicket, every quiet corner. And put all
weapons—all implements that might be weapons, away. He can’t carry such
things for long. And what he can snatch up and strike men with must be
hidden away.”
“Good again,” said Adye. “We shall have him yet!”
“And on the roads,” said Kemp, and hesitated.
“Yes?” said Adye.
“Powdered glass,” said Kemp. “It’s cruel, I know. But think of what he
may do!”
Adye drew the air in sharply between his teeth. “It’s unsportsmanlike.
I don’t know. But I’ll have powdered glass got ready. If he goes too
far....”
“The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,” said Kemp. “I am as sure he
will establish a reign of terror—so soon as he has got over the
emotions of this escape—as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only
chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood
be upon his own head.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE WICKSTEED MURDER
The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp’s house in a state
of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp’s gateway was violently
caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken, and
thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human
perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can
imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up the hill and on
to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and despairing at his
intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated and weary, amid the
thickets of Hintondean, to piece together again his shattered schemes
against his species. That seems the most probable refuge for him, for
there it was he re-asserted himself in a grimly tragical manner about
two in the afternoon.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that time, and
what plans he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically exasperated
by Kemp’s treachery, and though we may be able to understand the
motives that led to that deceit, we may still imagine and even
sympathise a little with the fury the attempted surprise must have
occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned astonishment of his Oxford
Street experiences may have returned to him, for he had evidently
counted on Kemp’s co-operation in his brutal dream of a terrorised
world. At any rate he vanished from human ken about midday, and no
living witness can tell what he did until about half-past two. It was a
fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for him it was a fatal
inaction.
During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the
countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a
legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp’s drily
worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible antagonist, to be
wounded, captured, or overcome, and the countryside began organising
itself with inconceivable rapidity. By two o’clock even he might still
have removed himself out of the district by getting aboard a train, but
after two that became impossible. Every passenger train along the lines
on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and
Horsham, travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost
entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port
Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out
in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads and fields.
Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at every
cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keep
indoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had
broken up by three o’clock, and the children, scared and keeping
together in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp’s proclamation—signed
indeed by Adye—was posted over almost the whole district by four or
five o’clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all the
conditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the Invisible Man
from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulness and for a
prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. And so swift and
decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt and universal was
the belief in this strange being, that before nightfall an area of
several hundred square miles was in a stringent state of siege. And
before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror went through the whole
watching nervous countryside. Going from whispering mouth to mouth,
swift and certain over the length and breadth of the country, passed
the story of the murder of Mr. Wicksteed.
If our supposition that the Invisible Man’s refuge was the Hintondean
thickets, then we must suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied
out again bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon. We
cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had the iron
rod in hand before he met Wicksteed is to me at least overwhelming.
Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter. It
occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards from Lord
Burdock’s lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate struggle—the
trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteed received, his
splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made, save in a
murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the theory of
madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man of forty-five or
forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive habits and
appearance, the very last person in the world to provoke such a
terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the Invisible Man used
an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. He stopped this quiet
man, going quietly home to his midday meal, attacked him, beat down his
feeble defences, broke his arm, felled him, and smashed his head to a
jelly.
Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing before he
met his victim—he must have been carrying it ready in his hand. Only
two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear on the
matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not in Mr.
Wicksteed’s direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred yards out
of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl to the effect
that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the murdered man
“trotting” in a peculiar manner across a field towards the gravel pit.
Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing something on the
ground before him and striking at it ever and again with his
walking-stick. She was the last person to see him alive. He passed out
of her sight to his death, the struggle being hidden from her only by a
clump of beech trees and a slight depression in the ground.
Now this, to the present writer’s mind at least, lifts the murder out
of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that Griffin had
taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention
of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then have come by and noticed this
rod inexplicably moving through the air. Without any thought of the
Invisible Man—for Port Burdock is ten miles away—he may have pursued
it. It is quite conceivable that he may not even have heard of the
Invisible Man. One can then imagine the Invisible Man making
off—quietly in order to avoid discovering his presence in the
neighbourhood, and Wicksteed, excited and curious, pursuing this
unaccountably locomotive object—finally striking at it.
No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his middle-aged
pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which
Wicksteed’s body was found suggests that he had the ill luck to drive
his quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the
gravel pit. To those who appreciate the extraordinary irascibility of
the Invisible Man, the rest of the encounter will be easy to imagine.
But this is pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts—for stories of
children are often unreliable—are the discovery of Wicksteed’s body,
done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung among the
nettles. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin, suggests that in the
emotional excitement of the affair, the purpose for which he took it—if
he had a purpose—was abandoned. He was certainly an intensely
egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first
victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long
pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever
scheme of action he had contrived.
After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck across
the country towards the downland. There is a story of a voice heard
about sunset by a couple of men in a field near Fern Bottom. It was
wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever and again it
shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove up across the middle
of a clover field and died away towards the hills.
That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learnt something of the
rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. He must have found houses
locked and secured; he may have loitered about railway stations and
prowled about inns, and no doubt he read the proclamations and realised
something of the nature of the campaign against him. And as the evening
advanced, the fields became dotted here and there with groups of three
or four men, and noisy with the yelping of dogs. These men-hunters had
particular instructions in the case of an encounter as to the way they
should support one another. But he avoided them all. We may understand
something of his exasperation, and it could have been none the less
because he himself had supplied the information that was being used so
remorselessly against him. For that day at least he lost heart; for
nearly twenty-four hours, save when he turned on Wicksteed, he was a
hunted man. In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in the
morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and malignant,
prepared for his last great struggle against the world.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE SIEGE OF KEMP’S HOUSE
Kemp read a strange missive, written in pencil on a greasy sheet of
paper.
“You have been amazingly energetic and clever,” this letter ran,
“though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against
me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a
night’s rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in
spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only
beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This
announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under
the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is
under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the
Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with
the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for
the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He
may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on
armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take
precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar
box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then
off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death
fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is to die.”
Kemp read this letter twice, “It’s no hoax,” he said. “That’s his
voice! And he means it.”
He turned the folded sheet over and saw on the addressed side of it the
postmark Hintondean, and the prosaic detail “2d. to pay.”
He got up slowly, leaving his lunch unfinished—the letter had come by
the one o’clock post—and went into his study. He rang for his
housekeeper, and told her to go round the house at once, examine all
the fastenings of the windows, and close all the shutters. He closed
the shutters of his study himself. From a locked drawer in his bedroom
he took a little revolver, examined it carefully, and put it into the
pocket of his lounge jacket. He wrote a number of brief notes, one to
Colonel Adye, gave them to his servant to take, with explicit
instructions as to her way of leaving the house. “There is no danger,”
he said, and added a mental reservation, “to you.” He remained
meditative for a space after doing this, and then returned to his
cooling lunch.
He ate with gaps of thought. Finally he struck the table sharply. “We
will have him!” he said; “and I am the bait. He will come too far.”
He went up to the belvedere, carefully shutting every door after him.
“It’s a game,” he said, “an odd game—but the chances are all for me,
Mr. Griffin, in spite of your invisibility. Griffin _contra mundum_ ...
with a vengeance.”
He stood at the window staring at the hot hillside. “He must get food
every day—and I don’t envy him. Did he really sleep last night? Out in
the open somewhere—secure from collisions. I wish we could get some
good cold wet weather instead of the heat.
“He may be watching me now.”
He went close to the window. Something rapped smartly against the
brickwork over the frame, and made him start violently back.
“I’m getting nervous,” said Kemp. But it was five minutes before he
went to the window again. “It must have been a sparrow,” he said.
Presently he heard the front-door bell ringing, and hurried downstairs.
He unbolted and unlocked the door, examined the chain, put it up, and
opened cautiously without showing himself. A familiar voice hailed him.
It was Adye.
“Your servant’s been assaulted, Kemp,” he said round the door.
“What!” exclaimed Kemp.
“Had that note of yours taken away from her. He’s close about here. Let
me in.”
Kemp released the chain, and Adye entered through as narrow an opening
as possible. He stood in the hall, looking with infinite relief at Kemp
refastening the door. “Note was snatched out of her hand. Scared her
horribly. She’s down at the station. Hysterics. He’s close here. What
was it about?”
Kemp swore.
“What a fool I was,” said Kemp. “I might have known. It’s not an hour’s
walk from Hintondean. Already?”
“What’s up?” said Adye.
“Look here!” said Kemp, and led the way into his study. He handed Adye
the Invisible Man’s letter. Adye read it and whistled softly. “And
you—?” said Adye.
“Proposed a trap—like a fool,” said Kemp, “and sent my proposal out by
a maid servant. To him.”
Adye followed Kemp’s profanity.
“He’ll clear out,” said Adye.
“Not he,” said Kemp.
A resounding smash of glass came from upstairs. Adye had a silvery
glimpse of a little revolver half out of Kemp’s pocket. “It’s a window,
upstairs!” said Kemp, and led the way up. There came a second smash
while they were still on the staircase. When they reached the study
they found two of the three windows smashed, half the room littered
with splintered glass, and one big flint lying on the writing table.
The two men stopped in the doorway, contemplating the wreckage. Kemp
swore again, and as he did so the third window went with a snap like a
pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering
triangles into the room.
“What’s this for?” said Adye.
“It’s a beginning,” said Kemp.
“There’s no way of climbing up here?”
“Not for a cat,” said Kemp.
“No shutters?”
“Not here. All the downstairs rooms—Hullo!”
Smash, and then whack of boards hit hard came from downstairs.
“Confound him!” said Kemp. “That must be—yes—it’s one of the bedrooms.
He’s going to do all the house. But he’s a fool. The shutters are up,
and the glass will fall outside. He’ll cut his feet.”
Another window proclaimed its destruction. The two men stood on the
landing perplexed. “I have it!” said Adye. “Let me have a stick or
something, and I’ll go down to the station and get the bloodhounds put
on. That ought to settle him! They’re hard by—not ten minutes—”
Another window went the way of its fellows.
“You haven’t a revolver?” asked Adye.
Kemp’s hand went to his pocket. Then he hesitated. “I haven’t one—at
least to spare.”
“I’ll bring it back,” said Adye, “you’ll be safe here.”
Kemp, ashamed of his momentary lapse from truthfulness, handed him the
weapon.
“Now for the door,” said Adye.
As they stood hesitating in the hall, they heard one of the first-floor
bedroom windows crack and clash. Kemp went to the door and began to
slip the bolts as silently as possible. His face was a little paler
than usual. “You must step straight out,” said Kemp. In another moment
Adye was on the doorstep and the bolts were dropping back into the
staples. He hesitated for a moment, feeling more comfortable with his
back against the door. Then he marched, upright and square, down the
steps. He crossed the lawn and approached the gate. A little breeze
seemed to ripple over the grass. Something moved near him. “Stop a
bit,” said a Voice, and Adye stopped dead and his hand tightened on the
revolver.
“Well?” said Adye, white and grim, and every nerve tense.
“Oblige me by going back to the house,” said the Voice, as tense and
grim as Adye’s.
“Sorry,” said Adye a little hoarsely, and moistened his lips with his
tongue. The Voice was on his left front, he thought. Suppose he were to
take his luck with a shot?
“What are you going for?” said the Voice, and there was a quick
movement of the two, and a flash of sunlight from the open lip of
Adye’s pocket.
Adye desisted and thought. “Where I go,” he said slowly, “is my own
business.” The words were still on his lips, when an arm came round his
neck, his back felt a knee, and he was sprawling backward. He drew
clumsily and fired absurdly, and in another moment he was struck in the
mouth and the revolver wrested from his grip. He made a vain clutch at
a slippery limb, tried to struggle up and fell back. “Damn!” said Adye.
The Voice laughed. “I’d kill you now if it wasn’t the waste of a
bullet,” it said. He saw the revolver in mid-air, six feet off,
covering him.
“Well?” said Adye, sitting up.
“Get up,” said the Voice.
Adye stood up.
“Attention,” said the Voice, and then fiercely, “Don’t try any games.
Remember I can see your face if you can’t see mine. You’ve got to go
back to the house.”
“He won’t let me in,” said Adye.
“That’s a pity,” said the Invisible Man. “I’ve got no quarrel with
you.”
Adye moistened his lips again. He glanced away from the barrel of the
revolver and saw the sea far off very blue and dark under the midday
sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the Head, and the
multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet. His
eyes came back to this little metal thing hanging between heaven and
earth, six yards away. “What am I to do?” he said sullenly.
“What am _I_ to do?” asked the Invisible Man. “You will get help. The
only thing is for you to go back.”
“I will try. If he lets me in will you promise not to rush the door?”
“I’ve got no quarrel with you,” said the Voice.
Kemp had hurried upstairs after letting Adye out, and now crouching
among the broken glass and peering cautiously over the edge of the
study window sill, he saw Adye stand parleying with the Unseen. “Why
doesn’t he fire?” whispered Kemp to himself. Then the revolver moved a
little and the glint of the sunlight flashed in Kemp’s eyes. He shaded
his eyes and tried to see the source of the blinding beam.
“Surely!” he said, “Adye has given up the revolver.”
“Promise not to rush the door,” Adye was saying. “Don’t push a winning
game too far. Give a man a chance.”
“You go back to the house. I tell you flatly I will not promise
anything.”
Adye’s decision seemed suddenly made. He turned towards the house,
walking slowly with his hands behind him. Kemp watched him—puzzled. The
revolver vanished, flashed again into sight, vanished again, and became
evident on a closer scrutiny as a little dark object following Adye.
Then things happened very quickly. Adye leapt backwards, swung around,
clutched at this little object, missed it, threw up his hands and fell
forward on his face, leaving a little puff of blue in the air. Kemp did
not hear the sound of the shot. Adye writhed, raised himself on one
arm, fell forward, and lay still.
For a space Kemp remained staring at the quiet carelessness of Adye’s
attitude. The afternoon was very hot and still, nothing seemed stirring
in all the world save a couple of yellow butterflies chasing each other
through the shrubbery between the house and the road gate. Adye lay on
the lawn near the gate. The blinds of all the villas down the hill-road
were drawn, but in one little green summer-house was a white figure,
apparently an old man asleep. Kemp scrutinised the surroundings of the
house for a glimpse of the revolver, but it had vanished. His eyes came
back to Adye. The game was opening well.
Then came a ringing and knocking at the front door, that grew at last
tumultuous, but pursuant to Kemp’s instructions the servants had locked
themselves into their rooms. This was followed by a silence. Kemp sat
listening and then began peering cautiously out of the three windows,
one after another. He went to the staircase head and stood listening
uneasily. He armed himself with his bedroom poker, and went to examine
the interior fastenings of the ground-floor windows again. Everything
was safe and quiet. He returned to the belvedere. Adye lay motionless
over the edge of the gravel just as he had fallen. Coming along the
road by the villas were the housemaid and two policemen.
Everything was deadly still. The three people seemed very slow in
approaching. He wondered what his antagonist was doing.
He started. There was a smash from below. He hesitated and went
downstairs again. Suddenly the house resounded with heavy blows and the
splintering of wood. He heard a smash and the destructive clang of the
iron fastenings of the shutters. He turned the key and opened the
kitchen door. As he did so, the shutters, split and splintering, came
flying inward. He stood aghast. The window frame, save for one
crossbar, was still intact, but only little teeth of glass remained in
the frame. The shutters had been driven in with an axe, and now the axe
was descending in sweeping blows upon the window frame and the iron
bars defending it. Then suddenly it leapt aside and vanished. He saw
the revolver lying on the path outside, and then the little weapon
sprang into the air. He dodged back. The revolver cracked just too
late, and a splinter from the edge of the closing door flashed over his
head. He slammed and locked the door, and as he stood outside he heard
Griffin shouting and laughing. Then the blows of the axe with its
splitting and smashing consequences, were resumed.
Kemp stood in the passage trying to think. In a moment the Invisible
Man would be in the kitchen. This door would not keep him a moment, and
then—
A ringing came at the front door again. It would be the policemen. He
ran into the hall, put up the chain, and drew the bolts. He made the
girl speak before he dropped the chain, and the three people blundered
into the house in a heap, and Kemp slammed the door again.
“The Invisible Man!” said Kemp. “He has a revolver, with two
shots—left. He’s killed Adye. Shot him anyhow. Didn’t you see him on
the lawn? He’s lying there.”
“Who?” said one of the policemen.
“Adye,” said Kemp.
“We came in the back way,” said the girl.
“What’s that smashing?” asked one of the policemen.
“He’s in the kitchen—or will be. He has found an axe—”
Suddenly the house was full of the Invisible Man’s resounding blows on
the kitchen door. The girl stared towards the kitchen, shuddered, and
retreated into the dining-room. Kemp tried to explain in broken
sentences. They heard the kitchen door give.
“This way,” said Kemp, starting into activity, and bundled the
policemen into the dining-room doorway.
“Poker,” said Kemp, and rushed to the fender. He handed the poker he
had carried to the policeman and the dining-room one to the other. He
suddenly flung himself backward.
“Whup!” said one policeman, ducked, and caught the axe on his poker.
The pistol snapped its penultimate shot and ripped a valuable Sidney
Cooper. The second policeman brought his poker down on the little
weapon, as one might knock down a wasp, and sent it rattling to the
floor.
At the first clash the girl screamed, stood screaming for a moment by
the fireplace, and then ran to open the shutters—possibly with an idea
of escaping by the shattered window.
The axe receded into the passage, and fell to a position about two feet
from the ground. They could hear the Invisible Man breathing. “Stand
away, you two,” he said. “I want that man Kemp.”
“We want you,” said the first policeman, making a quick step forward
and wiping with his poker at the Voice. The Invisible Man must have
started back, and he blundered into the umbrella stand.
Then, as the policeman staggered with the swing of the blow he had
aimed, the Invisible Man countered with the axe, the helmet crumpled
like paper, and the blow sent the man spinning to the floor at the head
of the kitchen stairs. But the second policeman, aiming behind the axe
with his poker, hit something soft that snapped. There was a sharp
exclamation of pain and then the axe fell to the ground. The policeman
wiped again at vacancy and hit nothing; he put his foot on the axe, and
struck again. Then he stood, poker clubbed, listening intent for the
slightest movement.
He heard the dining-room window open, and a quick rush of feet within.
His companion rolled over and sat up, with the blood running down
between his eye and ear. “Where is he?” asked the man on the floor.
“Don’t know. I’ve hit him. He’s standing somewhere in the hall. Unless
he’s slipped past you. Doctor Kemp—sir.”
Pause.
“Doctor Kemp,” cried the policeman again.
The second policeman began struggling to his feet. He stood up.
Suddenly the faint pad of bare feet on the kitchen stairs could be
heard. “Yap!” cried the first policeman, and incontinently flung his
poker. It smashed a little gas bracket.
He made as if he would pursue the Invisible Man downstairs. Then he
thought better of it and stepped into the dining-room.
“Doctor Kemp—” he began, and stopped short.
“Doctor Kemp’s a hero,” he said, as his companion looked over his
shoulder.
The dining-room window was wide open, and neither housemaid nor Kemp
was to be seen.
The second policeman’s opinion of Kemp was terse and vivid.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE HUNTER HUNTED
Mr. Heelas, Mr. Kemp’s nearest neighbour among the villa holders, was
asleep in his summer house when the siege of Kemp’s house began. Mr.
Heelas was one of the sturdy minority who refused to believe “in all
this nonsense” about an Invisible Man. His wife, however, as he was
subsequently to be reminded, did. He insisted upon walking about his
garden just as if nothing was the matter, and he went to sleep in the
afternoon in accordance with the custom of years. He slept through the
smashing of the windows, and then woke up suddenly with a curious
persuasion of something wrong. He looked across at Kemp’s house, rubbed
his eyes and looked again. Then he put his feet to the ground, and sat
listening. He said he was damned, but still the strange thing was
visible. The house looked as though it had been deserted for
weeks—after a violent riot. Every window was broken, and every window,
save those of the belvedere study, was blinded by the internal
shutters.
“I could have sworn it was all right”—he looked at his watch—“twenty
minutes ago.”
He became aware of a measured concussion and the clash of glass, far
away in the distance. And then, as he sat open-mouthed, came a still
more wonderful thing. The shutters of the drawing-room window were
flung open violently, and the housemaid in her outdoor hat and
garments, appeared struggling in a frantic manner to throw up the sash.
Suddenly a man appeared beside her, helping her—Dr. Kemp! In another
moment the window was open, and the housemaid was struggling out; she
pitched forward and vanished among the shrubs. Mr. Heelas stood up,
exclaiming vaguely and vehemently at all these wonderful things. He saw
Kemp stand on the sill, spring from the window, and reappear almost
instantaneously running along a path in the shrubbery and stooping as
he ran, like a man who evades observation. He vanished behind a
laburnum, and appeared again clambering over a fence that abutted on
the open down. In a second he had tumbled over and was running at a
tremendous pace down the slope towards Mr. Heelas.
“Lord!” cried Mr. Heelas, struck with an idea; “it’s that Invisible Man
brute! It’s right, after all!”
With Mr. Heelas to think things like that was to act, and his cook
watching him from the top window was amazed to see him come pelting
towards the house at a good nine miles an hour. There was a slamming of
doors, a ringing of bells, and the voice of Mr. Heelas bellowing like a
bull. “Shut the doors, shut the windows, shut everything!—the Invisible
Man is coming!” Instantly the house was full of screams and directions,
and scurrying feet. He ran himself to shut the French windows that
opened on the veranda; as he did so Kemp’s head and shoulders and knee
appeared over the edge of the garden fence. In another moment Kemp had
ploughed through the asparagus, and was running across the tennis lawn
to the house.
“You can’t come in,” said Mr. Heelas, shutting the bolts. “I’m very
sorry if he’s after you, but you can’t come in!”
Kemp appeared with a face of terror close to the glass, rapping and
then shaking frantically at the French window. Then, seeing his efforts
were useless, he ran along the veranda, vaulted the end, and went to
hammer at the side door. Then he ran round by the side gate to the
front of the house, and so into the hill-road. And Mr. Heelas staring
from his window—a face of horror—had scarcely witnessed Kemp vanish,
ere the asparagus was being trampled this way and that by feet unseen.
At that Mr. Heelas fled precipitately upstairs, and the rest of the
chase is beyond his purview. But as he passed the staircase window, he
heard the side gate slam.
Emerging into the hill-road, Kemp naturally took the downward
direction, and so it was he came to run in his own person the very race
he had watched with such a critical eye from the belvedere study only
four days ago. He ran it well, for a man out of training, and though
his face was white and wet, his wits were cool to the last. He ran with
wide strides, and wherever a patch of rough ground intervened, wherever
there came a patch of raw flints, or a bit of broken glass shone
dazzling, he crossed it and left the bare invisible feet that followed
to take what line they would.
For the first time in his life Kemp discovered that the hill-road was
indescribably vast and desolate, and that the beginnings of the town
far below at the hill foot were strangely remote. Never had there been
a slower or more painful method of progression than running. All the
gaunt villas, sleeping in the afternoon sun, looked locked and barred;
no doubt they were locked and barred—by his own orders. But at any rate
they might have kept a lookout for an eventuality like this! The town
was rising up now, the sea had dropped out of sight behind it, and
people down below were stirring. A tram was just arriving at the hill
foot. Beyond that was the police station. Was that footsteps he heard
behind him? Spurt.
The people below were staring at him, one or two were running, and his
breath was beginning to saw in his throat. The tram was quite near now,
and the “Jolly Cricketers” was noisily barring its doors. Beyond the
tram were posts and heaps of gravel—the drainage works. He had a
transitory idea of jumping into the tram and slamming the doors, and
then he resolved to go for the police station. In another moment he had
passed the door of the “Jolly Cricketers,” and was in the blistering
fag end of the street, with human beings about him. The tram driver and
his helper—arrested by the sight of his furious haste—stood staring
with the tram horses unhitched. Further on the astonished features of
navvies appeared above the mounds of gravel.
His pace broke a little, and then he heard the swift pad of his
pursuer, and leapt forward again. “The Invisible Man!” he cried to the
navvies, with a vague indicative gesture, and by an inspiration leapt
the excavation and placed a burly group between him and the chase. Then
abandoning the idea of the police station he turned into a little side
street, rushed by a greengrocer’s cart, hesitated for the tenth of a
second at the door of a sweetstuff shop, and then made for the mouth of
an alley that ran back into the main Hill Street again. Two or three
little children were playing here, and shrieked and scattered at his
apparition, and forthwith doors and windows opened and excited mothers
revealed their hearts. Out he shot into Hill Street again, three
hundred yards from the tram-line end, and immediately he became aware
of a tumultuous vociferation and running people.
He glanced up the street towards the hill. Hardly a dozen yards off ran
a huge navvy, cursing in fragments and slashing viciously with a spade,
and hard behind him came the tram conductor with his fists clenched. Up
the street others followed these two, striking and shouting. Down
towards the town, men and women were running, and he noticed clearly
one man coming out of a shop-door with a stick in his hand. “Spread
out! Spread out!” cried some one. Kemp suddenly grasped the altered
condition of the chase. He stopped, and looked round, panting. “He’s
close here!” he cried. “Form a line across—”
He was hit hard under the ear, and went reeling, trying to face round
towards his unseen antagonist. He just managed to keep his feet, and he
struck a vain counter in the air. Then he was hit again under the jaw,
and sprawled headlong on the ground. In another moment a knee
compressed his diaphragm, and a couple of eager hands gripped his
throat, but the grip of one was weaker than the other; he grasped the
wrists, heard a cry of pain from his assailant, and then the spade of
the navvy came whirling through the air above him, and struck something
with a dull thud. He felt a drop of moisture on his face. The grip at
his throat suddenly relaxed, and with a convulsive effort, Kemp loosed
himself, grasped a limp shoulder, and rolled uppermost. He gripped the
unseen elbows near the ground. “I’ve got him!” screamed Kemp. “Help!
Help—hold! He’s down! Hold his feet!”
In another second there was a simultaneous rush upon the struggle, and
a stranger coming into the road suddenly might have thought an
exceptionally savage game of Rugby football was in progress. And there
was no shouting after Kemp’s cry—only a sound of blows and feet and
heavy breathing.
Then came a mighty effort, and the Invisible Man threw off a couple of
his antagonists and rose to his knees. Kemp clung to him in front like
a hound to a stag, and a dozen hands gripped, clutched, and tore at the
Unseen. The tram conductor suddenly got the neck and shoulders and
lugged him back.
Down went the heap of struggling men again and rolled over. There was,
I am afraid, some savage kicking. Then suddenly a wild scream of
“Mercy! Mercy!” that died down swiftly to a sound like choking.
“Get back, you fools!” cried the muffled voice of Kemp, and there was a
vigorous shoving back of stalwart forms. “He’s hurt, I tell you. Stand
back!”
There was a brief struggle to clear a space, and then the circle of
eager faces saw the doctor kneeling, as it seemed, fifteen inches in
the air, and holding invisible arms to the ground. Behind him a
constable gripped invisible ankles.
“Don’t you leave go of en,” cried the big navvy, holding a
blood-stained spade; “he’s shamming.”
“He’s not shamming,” said the doctor, cautiously raising his knee; “and
I’ll hold him.” His face was bruised and already going red; he spoke
thickly because of a bleeding lip. He released one hand and seemed to
be feeling at the face. “The mouth’s all wet,” he said. And then, “Good
God!”
He stood up abruptly and then knelt down on the ground by the side of
the thing unseen. There was a pushing and shuffling, a sound of heavy
feet as fresh people turned up to increase the pressure of the crowd.
People now were coming out of the houses. The doors of the “Jolly
Cricketers” stood suddenly wide open. Very little was said.
Kemp felt about, his hand seeming to pass through empty air. “He’s not
breathing,” he said, and then, “I can’t feel his heart. His side—ugh!”
Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the big navvy, screamed
sharply. “Looky there!” she said, and thrust out a wrinkled finger.
And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint and transparent as
though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and
nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp and
prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they stared.
“Hullo!” cried the constable. “Here’s his feet a-showing!”
And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping along his
limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change continued.
It was like the slow spreading of a poison. First came the little white
nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and
intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess,
and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Presently they could see his
crushed chest and his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and
battered features.
When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay,
naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young
man about thirty. His hair and brow were white—not grey with age, but
white with the whiteness of albinism—and his eyes were like garnets.
His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his expression was one
of anger and dismay.
“Cover his face!” said a man. “For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!” and
three little children, pushing forward through the crowd, were suddenly
twisted round and sent packing off again.
Someone brought a sheet from the “Jolly Cricketers,” and having covered
him, they carried him into that house. And there it was, on a shabby
bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant
and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that
Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the
most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite
disaster his strange and terrible career.
THE EPILOGUE
So ends the story of the strange and evil experiments of the Invisible
Man. And if you would learn more of him you must go to a little inn
near Port Stowe and talk to the landlord. The sign of the inn is an
empty board save for a hat and boots, and the name is the title of this
story. The landlord is a short and corpulent little man with a nose of
cylindrical proportions, wiry hair, and a sporadic rosiness of visage.
Drink generously, and he will tell you generously of all the things
that happened to him after that time, and of how the lawyers tried to
do him out of the treasure found upon him.
“When they found they couldn’t prove whose money was which, I’m
blessed,” he says, “if they didn’t try to make me out a blooming
treasure trove! Do I _look_ like a Treasure Trove? And then a gentleman
gave me a guinea a night to tell the story at the Empire Music
’All—just to tell ’em in my own words—barring one.”
And if you want to cut off the flow of his reminiscences abruptly, you
can always do so by asking if there weren’t three manuscript books in
the story. He admits there were and proceeds to explain, with
asseverations that everybody thinks _he_ has ’em! But bless you! he
hasn’t. “The Invisible Man it was took ’em off to hide ’em when I cut
and ran for Port Stowe. It’s that Mr. Kemp put people on with the idea
of _my_ having ’em.”
And then he subsides into a pensive state, watches you furtively,
bustles nervously with glasses, and presently leaves the bar.
He is a bachelor man—his tastes were ever bachelor, and there are no
women folk in the house. Outwardly he buttons—it is expected of him—but
in his more vital privacies, in the matter of braces for example, he
still turns to string. He conducts his house without enterprise, but
with eminent decorum. His movements are slow, and he is a great
thinker. But he has a reputation for wisdom and for a respectable
parsimony in the village, and his knowledge of the roads of the South
of England would beat Cobbett.
And on Sunday mornings, every Sunday morning, all the year round, while
he is closed to the outer world, and every night after ten, he goes
into his bar parlour, bearing a glass of gin faintly tinged with water,
and having placed this down, he locks the door and examines the blinds,
and even looks under the table. And then, being satisfied of his
solitude, he unlocks the cupboard and a box in the cupboard and a
drawer in that box, and produces three volumes bound in brown leather,
and places them solemnly in the middle of the table. The covers are
weather-worn and tinged with an algal green—for once they sojourned in
a ditch and some of the pages have been washed blank by dirty water.
The landlord sits down in an armchair, fills a long clay pipe
slowly—gloating over the books the while. Then he pulls one towards him
and opens it, and begins to study it—turning over the leaves backwards
and forwards.
His brows are knit and his lips move painfully. “Hex, little two up in
the air, cross and a fiddle-de-dee. Lord! what a one he was for
intellect!”
Presently he relaxes and leans back, and blinks through his smoke
across the room at things invisible to other eyes. “Full of secrets,”
he says. “Wonderful secrets!”
“Once I get the haul of them—_Lord_!”
“I wouldn’t do what _he_ did; I’d just—well!” He pulls at his pipe.
So he lapses into a dream, the undying wonderful dream of his life. And
though Kemp has fished unceasingly, no human being save the landlord
knows those books are there, with the subtle secret of invisibility and
a dozen other strange secrets written therein. And none other will know
of them until he dies.
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