The Invisible Man Read online

  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 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.

  III

  The Thousand and One Bottles

  So it was that on the 29th 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 have, 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 waggon, 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, every one 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 an’ 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, than?’ 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 for 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 labelled 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 towards 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 glass 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 beershop of Iping Hanger.

  ‘Well?’ said Teddy Henfrey.

  ‘This chap you’re speaking of, what my darg 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 harrses, as any one can see.’

  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 in April, when the first signs of penury began, he overrode 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 mainly 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 likes 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, or sleep in the arm-chair 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. 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 day, but at twilight he would go out muffled up invisibly, whether the weather was 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 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 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 chose 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 the 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 humorists 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 Satchell 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.