The Invisible Man Read online

  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 winter time 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 aid, 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 melted snow that still sprinkled his shoulders dropped 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 side-lights, and had a bushy 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 manner, 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 eagerness.

  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 whisked rapidly 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 some 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 gazing 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 the 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 the 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 shining, 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 blank glasses. ‘Leave the hat,’ he said, speaking indistinctly 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 blank 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 plunged the room in twilight. 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’ ’elmet 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 the tobacco 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 disappointed when she answered ‘No.’ ‘Was she quite sure? No man with a trap who would go over?’

  Mrs Hall, nothing loth, answered his questions and then 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 from behind his impenetrable glasses.

  ‘But they take long enough to get well, sir, don’t they? There was my sister’s son, Tom, jes
t 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 give me a dread of a scythe, sir.’

  ‘I can quite understand that,’ said the visitor.

  ‘We 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. Evidently he was sensitive on the topic of operations and bandages. She did not ‘make so bold as to say,’ 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 by 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 arm-chair creaked as he sat down again.

  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 arm-chair 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. 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 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 her momentary disorder.

  ‘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.’

  He 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 coolness.

  ‘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 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 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, dark 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 the 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 off feeling excessively annoyed. ‘Damn it!’ said Mr Henfrey to himself, trudging down the village throug
h the falling snow, ‘a man must do a clock at times, sure-ly.’

  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 wife’s 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.’