The Invisible Man

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Title: The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance

Author: H. G. Wells

Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5230]
Most recently updated: October 16, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5230

Credits: Andrew Sly

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVISIBLE MAN: A GROTESQUE ROMANCE ***

[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 o