The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance
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