Notesale: Turn your study into money

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TePoetGtnegEoko TeIvsbeMn b H G Wls
h rjc uebr Bo f h niil a, y
...
Yumycp i,gv i aa o
lot o etitos htovr
o a oy t ie t wy r
r-s i udrtetrso tePoetGtnegLcneicue
eue t ne h em f h rjc uebr ies nldd
wt ti eoko oln a wwgtnegnt
ih hs Bo r nie t w
...
e

Tte TeIvsbeMn
il: h niil a
Ato:H G Wls
uhr
...
G
...
TdyHnrysfrtIpesos
r ed efe' is mrsin
Tetosn adoeBtls
h huad n n ote
M
...
Toa Mre
r hms avl
M
...
Mre dsusshsRsgain
r avl icse i einto
A Pr Soe
t ot tw
TeMnwowsrnig
h a h a unn
I te"ol Ciktr"
n h Jly rcees

XI
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D
...
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
...
"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
...
And with that much introduction, that and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the
table, he took up his quarters in the inn
...
Hall lit the fire and left him there while she went to prepare him a meal with her own hands
...
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
...
His gloved hands were
clasped behind him, and he seemed to be lost in thought
...
"Can I take your hat and coat, sir?" she said, "and give them a good
dry in the kitchen?"
"No," he said without turning
...

He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder
...

"Very well, sir," she said
...
In a bit the room will be warmer
...
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
...
She put down the eggs and
bacon with considerable emphasis, and called rather than said to him, "Your lunch is served, sir
...
Then he swung round
and approached the table with a certain eager quickness
...
Chirk, chirk, chirk,
it went, the sound of a spoon being rapidly whisked round a basin
...
"There! I clean forgot
it
...
She had cooked the ham and eggs, laid the table, and done everything, while
Millie (help indeed!) had only succeeded in delaying the mustard
...

She rapped and entered promptly
...
It would seem he was picking something from the floor
...
She went to
these things resolutely
...

"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
...

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
...
Hall
...
It was bright, pink, and shiny just as it had been at first
...
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
...

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
...

Her nerves began to recover from the shock they had received
...
"I didn't know, sir," she began, "that—" and she stopped embarrassed
...

"I'll have them nicely dried, sir, at once," she said, and carried his clothes out of the room
...
She shivered a little as she closed the door behind her, and her face was eloquent of her surprise
and perplexity
...
"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
...
He glanced inquiringly at the window before he removed his
serviette, and resumed his meal
...
This left the room in a twilight
...

"The poor soul's had an accident or an op'ration or somethin'," said Mrs
...
"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 holding that handkerchief over his mouth all the time
...
Perhaps his
mouth was hurt too—maybe
...
"Bless my soul alive!" she said, going off at a tangent;
"ain't you done them taters yet, Millie?"
When Mrs
...
Yet it was not forgetfulness, for she saw he glanced at it as it
smouldered out
...
The reflection of the
fire lent a kind of red animation to his big spectacles they had lacked hitherto
...
He
bowed his bandaged head quite politely in acknowledgment of her explanation
...

"There is no speedier delivery?" and seemed quite disappointed when she answered, "No
...
Hall, nothing loath, answered his questions and developed a conversation
...
A gentleman killed, besides his coachman
...
"They do," he said through his muffler, eyeing her quietly
through his impenetrable glasses
...
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
...

It's regular given me a dread of a scythe, sir
...

"He was afraid, one time, that he'd have to have an op'ration—he was that bad, sir
...
"Was he?" he said
...
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
...
So that if I may make so
bold as to say it, sir—"
"Will you get me some matches?" said the visitor, quite abruptly
...
"
Mrs
...
It was certainly rude of him, after telling him all she had done
...
She went for the matches
...
It was altogether too discouraging
...
She did not "make so bold as to say," however, after all
...

The visitor remained in the parlour until four o'clock, without giving the ghost of an excuse for an intrusion
...

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
...
Then the armchair creaked as he sat down
again
...
TEDDY HENFREY'S FIRST IMPRESSIONS

At four o'clock, when it was fairly dark and Mrs
...
"My sakes! Mrs
...

Mrs
...
"Now you're here, Mr
...
'Tis going, and it strikes well and hearty; but the
hour-hand won't do nuthin' but point at six
...

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
...
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
...
It was the sensation of a moment: the white-bound
head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it
...
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
...


"Would you mind, sir, this man a-coming to look at the clock, sir?" she said, recovering from the momentary
shock
...
"
Mrs
...
Then came the light, and Mr
...
He was, he says, "taken aback
...
Henfrey says, with a vivid sense of the dark
spectacles—"like a lobster
...
Henfrey, "that it's no intrusion
...
"Though, I understand," he said turning to Mrs
...
"
"I thought, sir," said Mrs
...

"But I'm really glad to have the clock seen to," he said, seeing a certain hesitation in Mr
...

"Very glad
...
Henfrey had intended to apologise and withdraw, but this anticipation reassured him
...
"And presently," he
said, "when the clock-mending is over, I think I should like to have some tea
...
"
Mrs
...
Henfrey—when her visitor asked her if she had made any arrangements
about his boxes at Bramblehurst
...
"You are certain that is the earliest?" he said
...

"I should explain," he added, "what I was really too cold and fatigued to do before, that I am an experimental
investigator
...
Hall, much impressed
...
"
"Very useful things indeed they are, sir," said Mrs
...

"And I'm very naturally anxious to get on with my inquiries
...
"
"My reason for coming to Iping," he proceeded, with a certain deliberation of manner, "was
...
I do not wish to be disturbed in my work
...
Hall to herself
...
My eyes—are sometimes so weak and painful that I have to shut myself
up in the dark for hours together
...
Sometimes—now and then
...
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
...
Hall
...
Mrs
...

After Mrs
...
Henfrey puts it, at
the clock-mending
...
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
...
When he looked up, coloured patches swam in his eyes
...
But the stranger stood
there, perfectly silent and still
...
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
...
Then Henfrey looked down again
...
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
...

"Why don't you finish and go?" said the rigid figure, evidently in a state of painfully suppressed rage
...
You're simply humbugging—"
"Certainly, sir—one minute more
...
Henfrey finished and went
...
"Damn it!" said Mr
...
"
And again, "Can't a man look at you?—Ugly!"
And yet again, "Seemingly not
...
"
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
...
"'Ow do, Teddy?" he said, passing
...

Hall very sociably pulled up
...

"Rum-looking customer stopping at the 'Coach and Horses,'" said Teddy
...
"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
...
He's took your rooms and he ain't even given a name, Hall
...

"Yes," said Teddy
...
Whatever he is, you can't get rid of him under the week
...
Let's hope it won't be stones in boxes, Hall
...
Altogether
he left Hall vaguely suspicious
...
"I s'pose I must see 'bout this
...

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
...
Hall in spite of these
discouragements
...
Hall, resolved to ascertain more about the
personality of his guest at the earliest possible opportunity
...
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
...
Hall
to look very closely at the stranger's luggage when it came next day
...
Hall, "and I'll mind mine
...
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
...


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
...

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
...
Out he came, not noticing Fearenside's dog, who was sniffing in a dilettante spirit at Hall's
legs
...
"I've been waiting long enough
...

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
...

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
...
It was all
the business of a swift half-minute
...
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
...

"You brute, you!" said Fearenside, climbing off the waggon with his whip in his hand, while the dog watched
him through the wheel
...
"
Hall had stood gaping
...
"I'd better go and see to en," and he trotted after the stranger
...
Hall in the passage
...
"
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
...
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
...
It
was so rapid that it gave him no time to observe
...
There he stood on the dark little landing, wondering what it might be that he had seen
...
" There
was Fearenside telling about it all over again for the second time; there was Mrs
...

Mr
...
Besides, his vocabulary was altogether too limited to express his impressions
...
"We'd better be a-takin' of his
luggage in
...
Huxter; "especially if it's at all inflamed
...

Suddenly the dog began growling again
...
"The sooner you get those things in the better I'll be pleased
...

"Was you hurt, sir?" said Fearenside
...
"Never broke the skin
...
"
He then swore to himself, so Mr
...


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
...
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
...
Quite a sight it was
...

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
...
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
...
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
...
She was about to complain of the straw on the floor when he
anticipated her
...

"I knocked, but seemingly—"
"Perhaps you did
...
You can turn the lock if you're like that, you know
...
"
"A very good idea," said the stranger
...
If the straw makes trouble put it down in the bill
...

He was so odd, standing there, so aggressive and explosive, bottle in one hand and test-tube in the other, that
Mrs
...
But she was a resolute woman
...
Surely a shilling's enough?"
"So be it," said Mrs
...
"If you're
satisfied, of course—"

He turned and sat down, with his coat-collar toward her
...
Hall testifies, for the most part in silence
...
Fearing "something was the
matter," she went to the door and listened, not caring to knock
...
"I can't go on
...
Patience! Patience indeed!
...
Hall had very reluctantly to leave the rest of
his soliloquy
...
It was all over; the stranger had resumed work
...
She called attention to it
...
"For God's sake don't worry me
...

"I'll tell you something," said Fearenside, mysteriously
...

"Well?" said Teddy Henfrey
...
Well—he's black
...
I seed through the
tear of his trousers and the tear of his glove
...
Just blackness
...
"
"My sakes!" said Henfrey
...
Why, his nose is as pink as paint!"
"That's true," said Fearenside
...
And I tell 'ee what I'm thinking
...

Black here and white there—in patches
...
He's a kind of half-breed, and the colour's
come off patchy instead of mixing
...
And it's the common way with horses, as
any one can see
...
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
...

There were a number of skirmishes with Mrs
...

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
...
Hall sagely, "when the artisks are beginning to come
...
He may be a bit
overbearing, but bills settled punctual is bills settled punctual, whatever you'd like to say
...
He worked, as Mrs
...
Some days he would come down early and
be continuously busy
...
Communication with the world beyond the village he had none
...
He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity
...
Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor
tail of what she heard
...
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
...

It was inevitable that a person of so remarkable an appearance and bearing should form a frequent topic in
such a village as Iping
...
Mrs
...
When questioned, she explained very carefully that he was an "experimental investigator," going
gingerly over the syllables as one who dreads pitfalls
...
" 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
...
This idea sprang from the
brain of Mr
...
No crime of any magnitude dating from the middle or end of February was
known to have occurred
...
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
...
But he detected nothing
...
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
...

That had the advantage of accounting for everything straight away
...
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
...

But whatever they thought of him, people in Iping, on the whole, agreed in disliking him
...
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
...
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
...

Cuss, the general practitioner, was devoured by curiosity
...
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
...
Hall did not
know his guest's name
...
Hall—an assertion which was quite unfounded—"but I
didn't rightly hear it
...

Cuss rapped at the parlour door and entered
...
"Pardon my
intrusion," said Cuss, and then the door closed and cut Mrs
...

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 carried his hat in his hand
...
Then she heard the stranger laughing quietly, and
then his footsteps came across the room
...
The parlour door
slammed, and the place was silent again
...
"Am I mad?" Cuss began abruptly, as he entered the
shabby little study
...

"That chap at the inn—"
"Well?"
"Give me something to drink," said Cuss, and he sat down
...
"Went in," he gasped, "and began to demand a subscription
for that Nurse Fund
...

Sniffed
...
He said yes
...
Kept on sniffing
all the time; evidently recently caught an infernal cold
...
Bottles—chemicals—everywhere
...
Would he subscribe? Said he'd consider it
...
Said he was
...
'A damnable long research,' said
he, blowing the cork out, so to speak
...
And out came the grievance
...
He had been given a prescription, most valuable prescription—what
for he wouldn't say
...
Dignified sniff and
cough
...
He'd read it
...
Put it down; turned his head
...
Swish, rustle
...
Saw a flicker, and
there was the prescription burning and lifting chimneyward
...
So! Just at that point, to illustrate his story, out came his arm
...
Lord! I thought, that's a deformity! Got a cork arm, I suppose, and has
taken it off
...
What the devil keeps that sleeve up and open, if
there's nothing in it? There was nothing in it, I tell you
...
I could see
right down it to the elbow, and there was a glimmer of light shining through a tear of the cloth
...
Then he stopped
...
"
"Well?"
"That's all
...
'I was saying,'
said he, 'that there was the prescription burning, wasn't I?' Interrogative cough
...
'
"'It's an empty sleeve, is it? You saw it was an empty sleeve?' He stood up right away
...
He
came towards me in three very slow steps, and stood quite close
...
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
...
'Certainly,' I said
...
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
...
I looked at it
...
'Well?' said I, clearing my throat, 'there's nothing in it
...
I was beginning to feel frightened
...
He extended it straight
towards me, slowly, slowly—just like that—until the cuff was six inches from my face
...
"
Bunting began to laugh
...
" "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
...
He turned round in a helpless way and took
a second glass of the excellent vicar's very inferior sherry
...
And there wasn't an arm! There wasn't the ghost of an arm!"
Mr
...
He looked suspiciously at Cuss
...
He
looked very wise and grave indeed
...
Bunting with judicial emphasis, "a most remarkable

story
...
It
occurred in the small hours of Whit Monday, the day devoted in Iping to the Club festivities
...
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 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
...

Mr
...
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
...

At that he returned to his bedroom, armed himself with the most obvious weapon, the poker, and descended
the staircase as noiselessly as possible
...
Bunting came out on the landing
...
There was a faint shimmer of light
in the hall, but the study doorway yawned impenetrably black
...
Bunting's tread, and the slight movements in the study
...
Then came an imprecation, and a match was struck
and the study was flooded with yellow light
...
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
...
He stood there in the hall undecided what to do, and Mrs
...
One thing kept Mr
...

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
...
Bunting was nerved to abrupt action
...
Bunting
...

Bunting, fiercely, and then stooped amazed
...

Yet their conviction that they had, that very moment, heard somebody moving in the room had amounted to a
certainty
...
Bunting went across the room and looked
behind the screen, while Mr
...
Then Mrs
...
Bunting looked up the chimney and probed it with the poker
...
Bunting scrutinised the waste-paper basket and Mr
...

Then they came to a stop and stood with eyes interrogating each other
...
Bunting
...
Bunting
...
Bunting
...

"Of all the strange occurrences—"
There was a violent sneeze in the passage
...

"Bring the candle," said Mr
...
They both heard a sound of bolts being hastily shot
back
...
He is certain that nothing went out of the
door
...
As it did so, the candle Mrs
...
It was a minute or more before they entered the kitchen
...
They refastened the back door, examined the kitchen, pantry, and scullery thoroughly,
and at last went down into the cellar
...

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
...
Hall
and Mrs
...
Their business there was of a private
nature, and had something to do with the specific gravity of their beer
...
Hall found she had forgotten to bring down a bottle of sarsaparilla from their joint-room
...

On the landing he was surprised to see that the stranger's door was ajar
...

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
...
Teddy Henfrey
...
Hall shot
these bolts overnight
...

He rapped at the stranger's door
...
He rapped again; then pushed the door wide open
and entered
...
The bed, the room also, was empty
...
His big slouch hat even was cocked jauntily
over the bed-post
...
"George! You gart whad a wand?"
At that he turned and hurried down to her
...
'E's not in uz room, 'e en't
...
"
At first Mrs
...

Hall, still holding the bottle, went first
...
And what's 'e doin' 'ithout 'is
close, then? 'Tas a most curious business
...

Mrs
...
Someone sneezed on the staircase
...
She, going on first, was under the
impression that Hall was sneezing
...
"Of all the
curious!" she said
...
But in another moment he was beside her
...

"Cold," she said
...
"
As she did so, a most extraordinary thing happened
...
It was exactly as if a hand had
clutched them in the centre and flung them aside
...

Hall's face
...
Hall, seemed to take aim at her for a moment, and charged at her
...
The door slammed violently and was locked
...

Mrs
...
Hall's arms on the landing
...
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
...
Hall
...
I've read in papers of en
...
"
"Take a drop more, Janny," said Hall
...
"
"Lock him out," said Mrs
...
"Don't let him come in again
...
With them
goggling eyes and bandaged head, and never going to church of a Sunday
...
He's put the sperits into the furniture
...
To think it should rise up against me now!"
"Just a drop more, Janny," said Hall
...
"
They sent Millie across the street through the golden five o'clock sunshine to rouse up Mr
...
Mr
...
Would

Mr
...
Wadgers, and very resourceful
...
"Arm darmed if thet ent witchcraft," was the view of Mr
...
"You
warnt horseshoes for such gentry as he
...
They wanted him to lead the way upstairs to the room, but he didn't seem
to be in any hurry
...
Over the way Huxter's apprentice came out and began
taking down the shutters of the tobacco window
...
Mr
...
The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government
asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action
...

Sandy Wadgers
...
A door onbust is
always open to bustin', but ye can't onbust a door once you've busted en
...
He came down stiffly and slowly,
staring all the time; he walked across the passage staring, then stopped
...
Then he entered the parlour, and suddenly, swiftly, viciously, slammed the
door in their faces
...
They stared at one another
...
Wadgers, and left the alternative unsaid
...
Hall
...
"
It took some time to bring the landlady's husband up to that pitch
...
" So that brief
interview terminated
...

All that time he must have fasted
...
"Him and his 'go to the devil' indeed!" said Mrs
...
Presently came an imperfect rumour of
the burglary at the vicarage, and two and two were put together
...
Shuckleforth, the magistrate, and take his advice
...
How the stranger occupied
himself is unknown
...


The little group of scared but curious people increased
...
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
...
He could see nothing, but gave reason for supposing that he did, and others
of the Iping youth presently joined him
...
The gentlemen wore blue jerseys, the ladies
white aprons and quite fashionable hats with heavy plumes
...
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
...
In the corner by the fireplace lay the fragments of half a dozen
smashed bottles, and a pungent twang of chlorine tainted the air
...

About noon he suddenly opened his parlour door and stood glaring fixedly at the three or four people in the
bar
...
Hall," he said
...
Hall
...
Hall appeared after an interval, a little short of breath, but all the fiercer for that
...
She
had deliberated over this scene, and she came holding a little tray with an unsettled bill upon it
...

"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
...
"That's what I want to know
...
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
...

"And I'd thank you kindly, sir, if you'd keep your swearing to yourself, sir," said Mrs
...

The stranger stood looking more like an angry diving-helmet than ever
...
Hall had the better of him
...

"Look here, my good woman—" he began
...
Hall
...
"

"Remittance indeed!" said Mrs
...

"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
...

"I wonder where you found it," said Mrs
...

That seemed to annoy the stranger very much
...
"What do you mean?" he said
...
Hall
...
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
...
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
...
I'll show you
...
" Then he
put his open palm over his face and withdrew it
...
"Here," he
said
...
Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face,
accepted automatically
...
The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor
...
He took off his hat, and with a violent
gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages
...
A flash of horrible anticipation
passed through the bar
...
Then off they came
...
Mrs
...
Everyone began to move
...
Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps
...
They saw Mrs
...
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
...

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
...
Everyone seemed eager to talk at once, and the result was Babel
...
Hall, who was picked up in a state of collapse
...
"O Bogey!" "What's he been doin', then?" "Ain't hurt the girl, 'as 'e?" "Run at en
with a knife, I believe
...
I don't mean no manner of speaking
...
" "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
...
I saw her
skirts whisk, and he went after her
...
Back he comes with a knife in uz hand and a
loaf; stood just as if he was staring
...
Went in that there door
...
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
...
Bobby Jaffers,
the village constable, and then the wary Mr
...
They had come now armed with a warrant
...
"'Ed or no 'ed," said Jaffers, "I got to 'rest
en, and 'rest en I will
...
Hall marched up the steps, marched straight to the door of the parlour and flung it open
...
"
Jaffers marched in
...
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
...

"What the devil's this?" came in a tone of angry expostulation from above the collar of the figure
...
Jaffers
...

Abruptly he whipped down the bread and cheese, and Mr
...
Off came the stranger's left glove and was slapped in Jaffers' face
...
He got a sounding kick on the shin that made him shout, but he kept his grip
...
A chair stood
in the way, and went aside with a crash as they came down together
...

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
...
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
...
"It's no

good," he said, as if sobbing for breath
...
Jaffers got up also and produced a pair
of handcuffs
...

"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
...
Then he said something about his shin, and stooped down
...

"Why!" said Huxter, suddenly, "that's not a man at all
...
Look! You can see down his
collar and the linings of his clothes
...

"I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation
...
It's a confounded
nuisance, but I am
...

Several other of the men folks had now entered the room, so that it was closely crowded
...
"Who ever heard the likes of that?"
"It's strange, perhaps, but it's not a crime
...
"No doubt you are a bit difficult to see in this light, but I got a
warrant and it's all correct
...
There's a house been broke into
and money took
...

"I hope so, sir; but I've got my instructions
...
I'll come
...
"
"It's the regular thing," said Jaffers
...

"Pardon me," said Jaffers
...
Then he sprang up again and flung off his coat
...
He gripped at the waistcoat; it

struggled, and the shirt slipped out of it and left it limp and empty in his hand
...

"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
...
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
...
"Hold him! Shut the door! Don't let him
loose! I got something! Here he is!" A perfect Babel of noises they made
...
The others, following incontinently, were jammed for a moment in the
corner by the doorway
...
Phipps, the Unitarian, had a front tooth broken, and Henfrey
was injured in the cartilage of his ear
...
He felt a muscular
chest, and in another moment the whole mass of struggling, excited men shot out into the crowded hall
...

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
...
Only
then did his fingers relax
...
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
...

But Jaffers lay quite still, face upward and knees bent, at the foot of the steps of the inn
...
Yet the voice was indisputable
...
It grew to a climax, diminished again, and died
away in the distance, going as it seemed to him in the direction of Adderdean
...
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
...
THOMAS MARVEL

You must picture Mr
...
His figure inclined to embonpoint;
his short limbs accentuated this inclination
...

Mr
...
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
...
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
...
Thomas Marvel hated roomy shoes, but then he hated
damp
...
So he put the four shoes in a graceful group on the turf and looked at them
...
He was not at all startled by a voice behind him
...

"They are—charity boots," said Mr
...

"I've worn worse—in fact, I've worn none
...
I've
been cadging boots—in particular—for days
...
They're sound enough, of course
...
And if you'll believe me, I've raised nothing
in the whole blessed country, try as I would, but them
...
But it's just my promiscuous luck
...
And then
they treat you like this
...
"And pigs for people
...
Thomas Marvel
...
"
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
...
"Where are yer?" said Mr
...
He saw a stretch of empty downs with the wind swaying the remote greenpointed furze bushes
...
Marvel
...

"None of your ventriloquising me," said Mr
...
"Where are yer?
Alarmed, indeed!"
"Don't be alarmed," repeated the Voice
...
Thomas Marvel
...

"Are yer buried?" said Mr
...

There was no answer
...
Thomas Marvel stood bootless and amazed, his jacket nearly thrown off
...

"Peewit, indeed!" said Mr
...
"This ain't no time for foolery
...
"So help me," said Mr
...
"It's the drink! I might ha' known
...
"You keep your nerves steady
...
Marvel, and his face grew white amidst its patches
...
He remained staring about him, rotating slowly backwards
...

"Of course you did
...
Marvel, closing his eyes and clasping his hand on his brow with a tragic gesture
...
"Don't be a fool,"
said the Voice
...
Marvel
...
It's fretting about them blarsted boots
...
Or it's spirits
...
"Listen!"
"Chump," said Mr
...

"One minute," said the Voice, penetratingly, tremulous with self-control
...
Thomas Marvel, with a strange feeling of having been dug in the chest by a finger
...
Thomas Marvel, rubbing the back of his neck
...
"Then I'm going to throw flints at you till you think differently
...
Whizz came a flint, apparently out of the air, and missed Mr
...
Mr
...
He was too amazed to dodge
...
Mr
...
Then he
started to run, tripped over an unseen obstacle, and came head over heels into a sitting position
...
"Am I
imagination?"
Mr
...
He lay quiet for a
moment
...
"
"It's a fair do," said Mr
...
"I don't understand it
...
Stones talking
...
Rot away
...
"
The third flint fell
...
"I'm an invisible man
...
Marvel, gasping with pain
...
I'm beat
...
"I'm invisible
...
"
"Anyone could see that
...
Now then
...
How are you hid?"
"I'm invisible
...
And what I want you to understand is this—"
"But whereabouts?" interrupted Mr
...

"Here! Six yards in front of you
...
You'll be telling me next you're just thin air
...
You're looking through me
...
Vox et—what is it?—jabber
...
You see?
Invisible
...
Invisible
...
"
"Let's have a hand of you," said Marvel, "if you are real
...
Marvel's face was astonishment
...
"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're quite right, and it's not quite assimilated into the system
...
Marvel
...
"
"Of course, all this isn't half so wonderful as you think
...
Thomas Marvel
...
And besides—"
"I tell you, the whole business fairly beats me," said Mr
...

"What I want to say at present is this: I need help
...
I was
wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent
...
And I saw you—"
"Lord!" said Mr
...

"I came up behind you—hesitated—went on—"
Mr
...

"—then stopped
...
This is the man for me
...
And—"
"Lord!" said Mr
...
"But I'm all in a tizzy
...
I've left them long enough
...
"
"Look here," said Mr
...
"I'm too flabbergasted
...
And leave me go
...
And you've pretty near broken my toe
...
Empty downs, empty
sky
...
And then comes a voice
...
"
Mr
...

"I've chosen you," said the Voice
...
You have to be my helper
...
An invisible man is a man of power
...

"But if you betray me," he said, "if you fail to do as I direct you—" He paused and tapped Mr
...
Mr
...
"I don't want to betray you," said Mr
...
"Don't you go a-thinking that, whatever you do
...
(Lord!) Whatever you want done, that I'm most
willing to do
...
MARVEL'S VISIT TO IPING

After the first gusty panic had spent itself Iping became argumentative
...
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
...
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
...
Iping was gay with bunting, and
everybody was in gala dress
...
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
...

Haysman's meadow was gay with a tent, in which Mrs
...
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
...
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
...
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
...
He was a short, stout
person in an extraordinarily shabby top hat, and he appeared to be very much out of breath
...
His mottled face was apprehensive, and he moved with a sort of reluctant
alacrity
...
" 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
...
Huxter remarked the same thing
...
Huxter, appeared to undergo a severe internal struggle before he could induce himself to
enter the house
...
Huxter to turn to the left and open the
door of the parlour
...
Huxter heard voices from within the room and from the bar apprising the man of his
error
...

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
...
He stood looking about him for some
moments, and then Mr
...
The stranger, after some hesitation, leant against one of the gate-posts,
produced a short clay pipe, and prepared to fill it
...
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
...
Huxter saw over the canisters of the tobacco window, and the singularity of the man's behaviour
prompted him to maintain his observation
...
Then he vanished into the yard
...
Huxter, conceiving he was witness of some petty larceny, leapt round his counter and ran out
into the road to intercept the thief
...
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
...

"Stop, thief!" cried Huxter, and set off after him
...
Huxter's sensations were vivid but brief
...
He saw the village flags and
festivities beyond, and a face or so turned towards him
...
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
...
The world seemed to
splash into a million whirling specks of light, and subsequent proceedings interested him no more
...
Marvel first came into view of Mr
...

At that precise moment Mr
...
Bunting were in the parlour
...
Hall's permission, making a thorough examination of
the Invisible Man's belongings
...
The stranger's scattered garments had been removed by Mrs
...
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
...
"Now, at any rate, we shall learn something
...


"Diary," repeated Cuss, sitting down, putting two volumes to support the third, and opening it
...
Bother!—cypher
...
"
The vicar came round to look over his shoulder
...
"I'm—dear me! It's all cypher, Bunting
...
Bunting
...
Cuss
...
Now the Greek I thought you—"
"Of course," said Mr
...
"
"I'll find you a place
...
Bunting, still wiping
...
"
He coughed, put on his glasses, arranged them fastidiously, coughed again, and wished something would
happen to avert the seemingly inevitable exposure
...
And then something did happen
...

Both gentlemen started violently, looked round, and were relieved to see a sporadically rosy face beneath a
furry silk hat
...

"No," said both gentlemen at once
...
Bunting
...
Cuss, irritably
...
"Right you are," said the intruder in the former voice
...

"A sailor, I should judge," said Mr
...
"Amusing fellows, they are
...
A nautical term,
referring to his getting back out of the room, I suppose
...
"My nerves are all loose to-day
...
"
Mr
...
"And now," he said with a sigh, "these books
...

"One thing is indisputable," said Bunting, drawing up a chair next to that of Cuss
...
I cannot of course believe in this
absurd invisibility story—"
"It's incredible," said Cuss—"incredible
...
I don't
know if you have ever seen a really good conjuror—"
"I won't argue again," said Cuss
...
And just now there's these books—Ah!
here's some of what I take to be Greek! Greek letters certainly
...
Mr
...
Suddenly he became aware of a strange feeling at the nape of his neck
...
The feeling was a curious pressure, the
grip of a heavy, firm hand, and it bore his chin irresistibly to the table
...

"I'm sorry to handle you so roughly," said the Voice, "but it's unavoidable
...

"Since when did you learn to invade the private rooms of a man in misfortune?" and the concussion was
repeated
...
"The windows are fastened and I've taken the key out of the door
...
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
...
"Yes," said Mr
...
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
...
"Here's the poker, you see
...
Where is it? No—don't rise
...
Now, just at present,
though the days are quite warm enough for an invisible man to run about stark, the evenings are quite chilly
...
"

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
...
Huxter was
watching Mr
...
Hall and Teddy
Henfrey discussing in a state of cloudy puzzlement the one Iping topic
...

"Hul-lo!" said Teddy Henfrey
...

Mr
...
"That ain't right," he said, and came round from behind the bar
towards the parlour door
...
Their eyes considered
...
Whiffs of an unpleasant chemical odour met them, and there was a
muffled sound of conversation, very rapid and subdued
...

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
...

"What the dooce?" exclaimed Henfrey, sotto voce
...
Hall, sharply, again
...
Please don't—interrupt
...
Henfrey
...
Hall
...

"I heerd'n," said Hall
...

They remained listening
...
"I can't," said Mr
...
"
"What was that?" asked Henfrey
...
"Warn't speaking to us, wuz he?"
"Disgraceful!" said Mr
...

"'Disgraceful,'" said Mr
...
"I heard it—distinct
...

"Mr
...
"Can you hear—anything?"

Silence
...

"Sounds like throwing the table-cloth about," said Hall
...
Hall appeared behind the bar
...
This aroused Mrs
...
"What yer listenin' there for, Hall?" she asked
...
Hall was obdurate
...
So Hall and Henfrey, rather crestfallen, tiptoed back to the bar, gesticulating to explain to her
...
Then she insisted on Hall keeping silence,
while Henfrey told her his story
...
"I heerd'n say 'disgraceful'; that I did," said Hall
...
Hall," said Henfrey
...
Hall
...
Teddy Henfrey
...
Hall
...

Everyone stood listening intently
...
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
...
"Yap!" cried
Huxter
...

Simultaneously came a tumult from the parlour, and a sound of windows being closed
...
They saw
someone whisk round the corner towards the road, and Mr
...
Down the street people were standing astonished or running towards
them
...
Huxter was stunned
...
Marvel vanishing by the corner of the
church wall
...
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
...
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
...

As he went down, the rush from the direction of the village green came round the corner
...
He was astonished to see the lane empty
save for three men sprawling absurdly on the ground
...
The two were then kicked, knelt on, fallen over, and cursed by quite a number of over-hasty
people
...
Hall, who had been disciplined by
years of experience, remained in the bar next the till
...

Cuss appeared, and without glancing at her rushed at once down the steps toward the corner
...
"Don't let him drop that parcel
...
For the Invisible Man had handed over the books and bundle in
the yard
...
Cuss was angry and resolute, but his costume was defective, a sort of limp white
kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece
...
"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
...
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
...
He rose again and was hit severely behind the ear
...

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
...

In another moment Mr
...
"He's coming back, Bunting!" he said, rushing in
...
Bunting was standing in the window engaged in an attempt to clothe himself in the hearth-rug and a West
Surrey Gazette
...

"Invisible Man," said Cuss, and rushed on to the window
...

"Good heavens!" said Mr
...
He heard a frightful struggle
in the passage of the inn, and his decision was made
...

From the moment when the Invisible Man screamed with rage and Mr
...
Possibly the Invisible Man's
original intention was simply to cover Marvel's retreat with the clothes and books
...

You must figure the street full of running figures, of doors slamming and fights for hiding-places
...
You must figure an appalled couple caught dismally in a swing
...
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
...
Gribble
...
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
...

But it was the best part of two hours before any human being ventured out again into the desolation of Iping
street
...
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
...
His rubicund face
expressed consternation and fatigue; he appeared to be in a spasmodic sort of hurry
...

"If you give me the slip again," said the Voice, "if you attempt to give me the slip again—"
"Lord!" said Mr
...
"That shoulder's a mass of bruises as it is
...
"
"I didn't try to give you the slip," said Marvel, in a voice that was not far remote from tears
...
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
...
He blew out his cheeks, and his eyes were eloquent of despair
...
It's lucky for some of them they cut and ran when they did! Here am I
...

"It's all about
...

The despair of Mr
...

"Go on!" said the Voice
...
Marvel's face assumed a greyish tint between the ruddier patches
...

"The fact is," said the Voice, "I shall have to make use of you
...
"
"I'm a miserable tool," said Marvel
...

"I'm the worst possible tool you could have," said Marvel
...

"I'm not over strong," he repeated
...
That little business—I pulled it through, of course—but bless you! I could have
dropped
...
"
"I'll stimulate you
...
I wouldn't like to mess up your plans, you know
...
"
"You'd better not," said the Voice, with quiet emphasis
...

"It ain't justice," he said; "you must admit
...

Mr
...

"It's devilish hard," said Mr
...

This was quite ineffectual
...

"What do I make by it?" he began again in a tone of unendurable wrong
...
"I'll see to you all right
...

You'll do it all right
...
Respectfully—but it is so—"
"If you don't shut up I shall twist your wrist again," said the Invisible Man
...
"
Presently two oblongs of yellow light appeared through the trees, and the square tower of a church loomed

through the gloaming
...
Go
straight through and try no foolery
...
"
"I know that," sighed Mr
...
"
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
...
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
...
The bundle had been abandoned in the pine-woods
beyond Bramblehurst, in accordance with a change in the plans of the Invisible Man
...
Marvel sat on the
bench, and although no one took the slightest notice of him, his agitation remained at fever heat
...

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
...

Mr
...
"Very," he said
...

"Quite," said Mr
...

The mariner produced a toothpick, and (saving his regard) was engrossed thereby for some minutes
...
Marvel's dusty figure, and the books beside him
...
Marvel he had heard a sound like the dropping of coins into a pocket
...
Marvel's appearance with this suggestion of opulence
...

"Books?" he said suddenly, noisily finishing with the toothpick
...
Marvel started and looked at them
...
"Yes, they're books
...

"I believe you," said Mr
...

"And some extra-ordinary things out of 'em," said the mariner
...
Marvel
...


"There's some extra-ordinary things in newspapers, for example," said the mariner
...
"
"In this newspaper," said the mariner
...
Marvel
...
Marvel with an eye that was firm and deliberate; "there's a story
about an Invisible Man, for instance
...
Marvel pulled his mouth askew and scratched his cheek and felt his ears glowing
...
"Ostria, or America?"
"Neither," said the mariner
...
"
"Lord!" said Mr
...

"When I say here," said the mariner, to Mr
...
"
"An Invisible Man!" said Mr
...
"And what's he been up to?"
"Everything," said the mariner, controlling Marvel with his eye, and then amplifying, "every—blessed—thing
...

"Iping's the place he started at," said the mariner
...
Marvel
...
And where he came from, nobody don't seem to know
...
' And it says in this paper that the evidence is extra-ordinary strong—extra-ordinary
...
Marvel
...
There is a clergyman and a medical gent witnesses—saw 'im all right
and proper—or leastways didn't see 'im
...
It was then ob-served that his head was invisible
...

J
...
Jaffers
...
"
"Lord!" said Mr
...
"It sounds most astonishing
...
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
...


"Didn't go Back by any chance?" asked Marvel
...
"Why!—ain't it enough?"
"Quite enough," said Marvel
...
"I should think it was enough
...
Marvel, anxious
...
"No, thank Heaven, as one might say, he didn't
...
"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
...
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
...
Marvel
...
"
"You're right," said the mariner
...
"
All this time Mr
...
He seemed on the point of some great resolution
...

He looked about him again, listened, bent towards the mariner, and lowered his voice: "The fact of it is—I
happen—to know just a thing or two about this Invisible Man
...
"
"Oh!" said the mariner, interested
...
Marvel
...
"
"Indeed!" said the mariner
...
Marvel behind his hand
...
"
"Indeed!" said the mariner
...
Marvel eagerly in a confidential undertone
...
"Ow!" he said
...
His face was eloquent of physical suffering
...

"What's up?" said the mariner, concerned
...
Marvel, and put his hand to his ear
...
"I must be getting on,
I think," he said
...
"But you was just agoing to tell me about this here Invisible Man!" protested the mariner
...
Marvel seemed to consult with
himself
...
"It's a hoax," said Mr
...

"But it's in the paper," said the mariner
...
"I know the chap that started the lie
...
"
"But how 'bout this paper? D'you mean to say—?"
"Not a word of it," said Marvel, stoutly
...
Mr
...
"Wait a bit," said the mariner, rising and
speaking slowly, "D'you mean to say—?"
"I do," said Mr
...

"Then why did you let me go on and tell you all this blarsted stuff, then? What d'yer mean by letting a man
make a fool of himself like that for? Eh?"
Mr
...
The mariner was suddenly very red indeed; he clenched his hands
...
Marvel
...
Marvel was suddenly whirled about and started marching off in a curious
spasmodic manner
...
"Who's moving on?" said Mr
...
He was
receding obliquely with a curious hurrying gait, with occasional violent jerks forward
...

"Silly devil!" said the mariner, legs wide apart, elbows akimbo, watching the receding figure
...
Marvel retorted incoherently and, receding, was hidden by a bend in the road, but the mariner still stood
magnificent in the midst of the way, until the approach of a butcher's cart dislodged him
...
"Full of extra-ordinary asses," he said softly to himself
...

And that was a vision of a "fist full of money" (no less) travelling without visible agency, along by the wall at
the corner of St
...
A brother mariner had seen this wonderful sight that very morning
...
Our mariner was in the mood to believe anything, he declared, but that was a
bit too stiff
...

The story of the flying money was true
...
And it had, though no man
had traced it, invariably ended its mysterious flight in the pocket of that agitated gentleman in the obsolete silk
hat, sitting outside the little inn on the outskirts of Port Stowe
...


CHAPTER XV
THE MAN WHO WAS RUNNING

In the early evening time Dr
...
It
was a pleasant little room, with three windows—north, west, and south—and bookshelves covered with
books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope,
glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents
...
Kemp's solar lamp was
lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up because there was no offence of
peering outsiders to require them pulled down
...
Kemp was a tall and slender young man, with flaxen hair
and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the
Royal Society, so highly did he think of it
...
For a minute perhaps he sat, pen in mouth, admiring the rich golden colour above the crest,
and then his attention was attracted by the little figure of a man, inky black, running over the hill-brow
towards him
...

"Another of those fools," said Dr
...
"Like that ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with the
''Visible Man a-coming, sir!' I can't imagine what possesses people
...
"
He got up, went to the window, and stared at the dusky hillside, and the dark little figure tearing down it
...
Kemp, "but he doesn't seem to be getting on
...
"
"Spurted, sir," said Dr
...

In another moment the higher of the villas that had clambered up the hill from Burdock had occulted the
running figure
...

"Asses!" said Dr
...

But those who saw the fugitive nearer, and perceived the abject terror on his perspiring face, being
themselves in the open roadway, did not share in the doctor's contempt
...
He looked neither to the right nor the left, but his
dilated eyes stared straight downhill to where the lamps were being lit, and the people were crowded in the
street
...
All he passed stopped and began staring up the road and down, and interrogating one another with an
inkling of discomfort for the reason of his haste
...

People screamed
...

They were shouting in the street before Marvel was halfway there
...
He heard it and made one last desperate spurt
...

"The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!"

CHAPTER XVI
IN THE "JOLLY CRICKETERS"

The "Jolly Cricketers" is just at the bottom of the hill, where the tram-lines begin
...

"What's the shouting about!" said the anaemic cabman, going off at a tangent, trying to see up the hill over the
dirty yellow blind in the low window of the inn
...
"Fire, perhaps," said the barman
...
It was held half open by a strap
...
"He's coming
...
"Who's coming? What's the row?" He went to the door, released the
strap, and it slammed
...

"Lemme go inside," said Marvel, staggering and weeping, but still clutching the books
...

Lock me in—somewhere
...
I give him the slip
...
"
"You're safe," said the man with the black beard
...
What's it all about?"
"Lemme go inside," said Marvel, and shrieked aloud as a blow suddenly made the fastened door shiver and
was followed by a hurried rapping and a shouting outside
...

Marvel began to make frantic dives at panels that looked like doors
...
For Gawd's sake—!"
"Here you are," said the barman
...
" And he held up the flap of the bar
...
Marvel rushed behind the bar as the summons outside was repeated
...
"Please don't open the door
...
"I guess it's
about time we saw him
...
The policeman had been standing on the settee staring out, craning to see who was at the door
...
"It's that," he said
...
Marvel, stared at the smashed window, and came round to the two other men
...
"I wish I had my truncheon," said the policeman, going irresolutely to the
door
...
There's no stopping him
...

"Draw the bolts," said the man with the black beard, "and if he comes—" He showed a revolver in his hand
...
"
"I know what country I'm in," said the man with the beard
...
Draw the bolts
...

"Very well," said the man with the black beard, and stooping down, revolver ready, drew them himself
...

"Come in," said the bearded man in an undertone, standing back and facing the unbolted doors with his pistol
behind him
...
Five minutes afterwards when a second cabman
pushed his head in cautiously, they were still waiting, and an anxious face peered out of the bar-parlour and
supplied information
...
"He's going round—prowling
round
...
"
"Good Lord!" said the burly barman
...
The bar-parlour door slammed and they heard the key turn
...
The yard door—"
He rushed out of the bar
...
"The yard door was open!" he said, and his fat
underlip dropped
...

"He's not in the kitchen," said the barman
...
And they don't think he's come in
...

"I'm out of frocks," said the barman
...
And even as he did so the flap of the bar was shut down and
the bolt clicked, and then with a tremendous thud the catch of the door snapped and the bar-parlour door
burst open
...
The bearded man's revolver cracked and the looking-glass at the back of the parlour starred
and came smashing and tinkling down
...
The door flew open while the barman hesitated, and Marvel was dragged into the
kitchen
...
Marvel, head down, and lugging back obstinately, was

forced to the kitchen door, and the bolts were drawn
...
The
door opened, and Marvel made a frantic effort to obtain a lodgment behind it
...
"I got him," said the cabman
...
"Here he is!"
said the barman
...
Marvel, released, suddenly dropped to the ground and made an attempt to crawl behind the legs of the
fighting men
...
The voice of the Invisible Man was heard
for the first time, yelling out sharply, as the policeman trod on his foot
...
The cabman suddenly whooped and doubled up, kicked under the diaphragm
...
Marvel's retreat
...

"Where's he gone?" cried the man with the beard
...

A piece of tile whizzed by his head and smashed among the crockery on the kitchen table
...
As he fired,
the man with the beard moved his hand in a horizontal curve, so that his shots radiated out into the narrow
yard like spokes from a wheel
...
"Five cartridges," said the man with the black beard
...
Four aces and
a joker
...
"

CHAPTER XVII
DR
...
Kemp had continued writing in his study until the shots aroused him
...

"Hullo!" said Dr
...
"Who's letting off revolvers in
Burdock? What are the asses at now?"
He went to the south window, threw it up, and leaning out stared down on the network of windows, beaded
gas-lamps and shops, with its black interstices of roof and yard that made up the town at night
...
Thence his eyes wandered over
the town to far away where the ships' lights shone, and the pier glowed—a little illuminated, facetted pavilion
like a gem of yellow light
...

After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote speculation of social conditions of the

future, and lost itself at last over the time dimension, Dr
...

It must have been about an hour after this that the front-door bell rang
...
He sat listening
...
"Wonder what that was," said Dr
...

He tried to resume his work, failed, got up, went downstairs from his study to the landing, rang, and called
over the balustrade to the housemaid as she appeared in the hall below
...

"Only a runaway ring, sir," she answered
...
He went back to his study, and this time attacked his work
resolutely
...

It was two o'clock before Dr
...
He rose, yawned, and went
downstairs to bed
...
He took a
candle and went down to the dining-room in search of a syphon and whiskey
...
Kemp's scientific pursuits have made him a very observant man, and as he recrossed the hall, he noticed
a dark spot on the linoleum near the mat at the foot of the stairs
...
Apparently some subconscious
element was at work
...
Without any great surprise he found it had the stickiness and
colour of drying blood
...
On the landing he saw something and stopped astonished
...

He looked at his own hand
...
He
went straight into his room, his face quite calm—perhaps a trifle more resolute than usual
...
On the counterpane was a mess of blood, and the sheet had been
torn
...
On the further side
the bedclothes were depressed as if someone had been recently sitting there
...
Kemp
was no believer in voices
...
Was that really a voice? He looked about again, but noticed nothing
further than the disordered and blood-stained bed
...
All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings
...
He closed the door of the room, came forward to the dressing-table,
and put down his burdens
...

He stared at this in amazement
...
He would
have advanced to grasp it, but a touch arrested him, and a voice speaking quite close to him
...

"Eh?" said Kemp, with his mouth open
...
"I'm an Invisible Man
...
"Invisible Man," he said
...

The story he had been active to ridicule only that morning rushed through Kemp's brain
...
Realisation came later
...
The thought uppermost in his mind was the reiterated arguments of the
morning
...

"Yes," said the Invisible Man
...
"I say!" he said
...
It's some trick
...

He recoiled at the touch and his colour changed
...
Stop!"
The hand gripped his arm
...

"Kemp!" cried the Voice
...

A frantic desire to free himself took possession of Kemp
...
He opened his mouth to shout,
and the corner of the sheet was thrust between his teeth
...

"Listen to reason, will you?" said the Invisible Man, sticking to him in spite of a pounding in the ribs
...

Kemp struggled for another moment and then lay still
...

"I'm an Invisible Man
...
I really am an Invisible Man
...
I
don't want to hurt you, but if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must
...
"I'll stop where I am
...
"
He sat up and felt his neck
...
I am just an ordinary man—a man you
have known—made invisible
...

"Griffin," answered the Voice
...
"
"I am confused," said Kemp
...
What has this to do with Griffin?"
"I am Griffin
...
"It's horrible," he said
...
It's a process, sane and intelligible enough—"
"It's horrible!" said Kemp
...
But I'm wounded and in pain, and tired
...
Take it
steady
...
"
Kemp stared at the bandage as it moved across the room, then saw a basket chair dragged across the floor
and come to rest near the bed
...
He
rubbed his eyes and felt his neck again
...

"That's better
...

"Give me some whiskey
...
"
"It didn't feel so
...
Whiskey? Here
...
He let go by an effort; his instinct was all
against it
...
He stared at it in
infinite perplexity
...
You have suggested you are invisible
...

"It's frantic
...
"
"I demonstrated conclusively this morning," began Kemp, "that invisibility—"
"Never mind what you've demonstrated!—I'm starving," said the Voice, "and the night is chilly to a man
without clothes
...

The tumbler of whiskey tilted itself
...
"Have you a dressinggown?"
Kemp made some exclamation in an undertone
...
"This do?" he asked
...
It hung limp for a moment in mid-air, fluttered weirdly,

stood full and decorous buttoning itself, and sat down in his chair
...
"And food
...
But this is the insanest thing I ever was in, in my life!"
He turned out his drawers for the articles, and then went downstairs to ransack his larder
...
"Never mind knives,"
said his visitor, and a cutlet hung in mid-air, with a sound of gnawing
...

"I always like to get something about me before I eat," said the Invisible Man, with a full mouth, eating
greedily
...

"Trust me," said the Invisible Man
...
But it's odd I should blunder into your house to get my bandaging
...
You must stand that! It's a filthy nuisance, my blood showing, isn't it?
Quite a clot over there
...
It's only the living tissue I've changed, and only for
as long as I'm alive
...
"
"But how's it done?" began Kemp, in a tone of exasperation
...
"
"Quite reasonable," said the Invisible Man
...
"
He reached over and secured the whiskey bottle
...
A ray of
candle-light penetrating a torn patch in the right shoulder, made a triangle of light under the left ribs
...
"How did the shooting begin?"
"There was a real fool of a man—a sort of confederate of mine—curse him!—who tried to steal my money
...
"
"Is he invisible too?"
"No
...
And you want me to tell
stories!"
Kemp got up
...

"Not me," said his visitor
...
A lot of them got scared
...
Curse them!—I say—I want more to eat than this, Kemp
...
"Not much, I'm afraid
...
He bit the end
savagely before Kemp could find a knife, and cursed when the outer leaf loosened
...

"This blessed gift of smoking!" he said, and puffed vigorously
...
You
must help me
...
The things I
have been through! But we will do things yet
...
Kemp got up, looked about him, and fetched a glass from his
spare room
...
"
"You haven't changed much, Kemp, these dozen years
...
Cool and methodical—after the
first collapse
...
We will work together!"
"But how was it all done?" said Kemp, "and how did you get like this?"
"For God's sake, let me smoke in peace for a little while! And then I will begin to tell you
...
The Invisible Man's wrist was growing painful; he was feverish,
exhausted, and his mind came round to brood upon his chase down the hill and the struggle about the inn
...
Kemp tried to gather what he could
...
"He
meant to give me the slip—he was always casting about! What a fool I was!
"The cur!
"I should have killed him!"
"Where did you get the money?" asked Kemp, abruptly
...
"I can't tell you to-night," he said
...
"Kemp," he said,
"I've had no sleep for near three days, except a couple of dozes of an hour or so
...
"
"Well, have my room—have this room
...
Ugh! What does it matter?"
"What's the shot wound?" asked Kemp, abruptly
...
Oh, God! How I want sleep!"
"Why not?"
The Invisible Man appeared to be regarding Kemp
...

Kemp started
...
"I've put the idea into your head
...
He examined the two windows of the bedroom, drew up the blinds and opened the
sashes, to confirm Kemp's statement that a retreat by them would be possible
...
Then he examined the keys of the bedroom and
the two dressing-room doors, to satisfy himself that these also could be made an assurance of freedom
...
He stood on the hearth rug and Kemp heard the sound of a yawn
...
But I am worn out
...
It's horrible! But believe me, Kemp, in spite of your arguments of this morning, it is quite
a possible thing
...
I meant to keep it to myself
...
I must have a partner
...
We can do such things
...
Now, Kemp, I feel as though I must sleep or perish
...
"I suppose I must leave you," he said
...
Three things happening like this, overturning all my preconceptions—would make me
insane
...

"Good-night," said Kemp, and shook an invisible hand
...
Suddenly the
dressing-gown walked quickly towards him
...
"No attempts to
hamper me, or capture me! Or—"
Kemp's face changed a little
...

Kemp closed the door softly behind him, and the key was turned upon him forthwith
...
Kemp slapped his brow with his hand
...
"Barred out of my own bedroom, by a flagrant absurdity!"
he said
...
"It's fact," he said
...
"Undeniable fact!
"But—"
He shook his head hopelessly, turned, and went downstairs
...
Now and then he would
argue with himself
...

"Is there such a thing as an invisible animal?
...
Thousands—millions
...
In the sea there are more things invisible than
visible! I never thought of that before
...

"But after all—why not?
"If a man was made of glass he would still be visible
...
The bulk of three cigars had passed into the invisible or diffused as a white
ash over the carpet before he spoke again
...
He turned aside, walked out
of the room, and went into his little consulting-room and lit the gas there
...

Kemp did not live by practice, and in it were the day's newspapers
...
He caught it up, turned it over, and read the account of a "Strange Story from
Iping" that the mariner at Port Stowe had spelt over so painfully to Mr
...
Kemp read it swiftly
...
"Disguised! Hiding it! 'No one seems to have been aware of his misfortune
...
"Ah!" he said, and caught up the St
...
"Now we shall get at the truth," said Dr
...
He rent the paper open; a couple of
columns confronted him
...

"Good Heavens!" said Kemp, reading eagerly an incredulous account of the events in Iping, of the previous
afternoon, that have already been described
...

He re-read it
...
Jaffers insensible
...
Huxter in great pain—still
unable to describe what he saw
...
Woman ill with terror! Windows smashed
...
Too good not to print—cum grano!"
He dropped the paper and stared blankly in front of him
...
"But when does the Tramp come in? Why the
deuce was he chasing a tramp?"
He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench
...

He was altogether too excited to sleep
...
He gave them extraordinary but quite explicit instructions
to lay breakfast for two in the belvedere study—and then to confine themselves to the basement and groundfloor
...
That had much to say and
little to tell, beyond the confirmation of the evening before, and a very badly written account of another
remarkable tale from Port Burdock
...
"He has made me keep with him twenty-four hours," Marvel testified
...
But there was nothing to
throw light on the connexion between the Invisible Man and the Tramp; for Mr
...
The incredulous tone had vanished
and a shoal of reporters and inquirers were already at work elaborating the matter
...
These also he devoured
...
"And it reads like rage growing to mania! The things he may do! The things he may
do! And he's upstairs free as the air
...
"
He went to a little untidy desk in the corner, and began a note
...
He read it over and considered it
...
"
The Invisible Man awoke even as Kemp was doing this
...
Then a chair was flung
over and the wash-hand stand tumbler smashed
...


CHAPTER XIX
CERTAIN FIRST PRINCIPLES

"What's the matter?" asked Kemp, when the Invisible Man admitted him
...

"But, confound it! The smash?"
"Fit of temper," said the Invisible Man
...
"
"You're rather liable to that sort of thing
...
"
Kemp walked across the room and picked up the fragments of broken glass
...
The
world has become aware of its invisible citizen
...
"
The Invisible Man swore
...
I gather it was a secret
...
"
The Invisible Man sat down on the bed
...
Kemp led the way up the narrow staircase to the belvedere
...
"
He had sat down, after one nervous glance out of the window, with the air of a man who has talking to do
...

"It's simple enough—and credible enough," said Griffin, putting the serviette aside and leaning the invisible
head on an invisible hand
...

"Well, yes; to me it seemed wonderful at first, no doubt
...
But we will do great things
yet! I came on the stuff first at Chesilstowe
...
You know I dropped medicine and took up physics? No; well, I did
...
"
"Ah!"
"Optical density! The whole subject is a network of riddles—a network with solutions glimmering elusively
through
...
This is
worth while
...

"As though knowing could be any satisfaction to a man!
"But I went to work—like a slave
...
Fools, common men, even
common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of
molecular physics
...
"
"Phew!" said Kemp
...
I can understand that thereby you could spoil a
valuable stone, but personal invisibility is a far cry
...
"But consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light
...
If it neither reflects nor refracts nor
absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible
...
If it did not absorb any
particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box
...
A glass box would
not be so brilliant, nor so clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and
reflection
...
Some kinds of glass

would be more visible than others, a box of flint glass would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass
...
And if you put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you
put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to
glass is only slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way
...
And for precisely the same reason!"
"Yes," said Kemp, "that is pretty plain sailing
...
If a sheet of glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a
powder, it becomes much more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque white powder
...
In the
sheet of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is reflected or refracted by each grain it
passes through, and very little gets right through the powder
...
The powdered glass and water have much the same refractive index; that is, the
light undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one to the other
...
And if you will consider only a
second, you will see also that the powder of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index could
be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no refraction or reflection as the light passed from
glass to air
...
"But a man's not powdered glass!"
"No," said Griffin
...
Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent fibres,
and it is white and opaque only for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque
...
And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen
fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact
the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are all made up of
transparent, colourless tissue
...
For the most part the fibres
of a living creature are no more opaque than water
...
"Of course, of course! I was thinking only last night of the sea larvae and all
jelly-fish!"
"Now you have me! And all that I knew and had in mind a year after I left London—six years ago
...
I had to do my work under frightful disadvantages
...
I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit
...
I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my
work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow
...
And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology
...

The Invisible Man rose and began pacing the little study
...
I remember that night
...
It came suddenly, splendid and complete in my mind
...
In all my great moments I have been alone
...
It was overwhelming
...
'I could be invisible!' I
repeated
...
And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of
all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom
...
You
have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial
college, might suddenly become—this
...
Anyone, I tell you, would have flung himself
upon that research
...
The infinite details! And the exasperation! A professor, a provincial professor, always prying
...
And the students, the
cramped means! Three years I had of it—
"And after three years of secrecy and exasperation, I found that to complete it was impossible—impossible
...

"Money," said the Invisible Man, and went again to stare out of the window
...
"I robbed the old man—robbed my father
...
"

CHAPTER XX
AT THE HOUSE IN GREAT PORTLAND STREET

For a moment Kemp sat in silence, staring at the back of the headless figure at the window
...

"You are tired," he said, "and while I sit, you walk about
...
"
He placed himself between Griffin and the nearest window
...
It was last December
...
The room was soon full of the appliances I had bought with his money; the work was going on
steadily, successfully, drawing near an end
...
I went to bury him
...
I remember the funeral, the cheap hearse, the scant ceremony, the windy frost-bitten
hillside, and the old college friend of his who read the service over him—a shabby, black, bent old man with a
snivelling cold
...
Every way the roads ran out at last
into the desecrated fields and ended in rubble heaps and rank wet weeds
...

"I did not feel a bit sorry for my father
...

The current cant required my attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my affair
...
Our eyes met
...
She was a very ordinary person
...
I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out
from the world into a desolate place
...
Re-entering my room seemed like the recovery of reality
...
There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and waiting
...

"I will tell you, Kemp, sooner or later, all the complicated processes
...
For the
most part, saving certain gaps I chose to remember, they are written in cypher in those books that tramp has
hidden
...
We must get those books again
...
No, not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know
that these others of mine have been described
...
I needed two little dynamos,
and these I worked with a cheap gas engine
...
It was
the strangest thing in the world to see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, and then to watch it fade
like a wreath of smoke and vanish
...
I put my hand into the emptiness, and there was the thing as solid as
ever
...
I had a little trouble finding it again
...
I heard a miaow behind me, and turning, saw a lean white cat, very
dirty, on the cistern cover outside the window
...
'Everything ready for you,' I
said, and went to the window, opened it, and called softly
...
All my food was in a cupboard in the corner of the room
...
The invisible rag upset her a
bit; you should have seen her spit at it! But I made her comfortable on the pillow of my truckle-bed
...
"

"And you processed her?"
"I processed her
...
"
"Failed!"
"In two particulars
...

You know?"
"Tapetum
...
It didn't go
...
And after all
the rest had faded and vanished, there remained two little ghosts of her eyes
...
She was bandaged and clamped, of course—so I had her safe; but she woke while she
was still misty, and miaowed dismally, and someone came knocking
...
I whipped out some chloroform, applied it, and answered the door
...
'My
cat?' 'Not here,' said I, very politely
...
She had to be satisfied
at last and went away again
...

"Three or four hours—the cat
...
And, as I say, the back part of the eye, tough, iridescent stuff it is, wouldn't go at all
...
I stopped the gas engine, felt for and stroked the beast, which was still insensible, and then, being
tired, left it sleeping on the invisible pillow and went to bed
...
I lay awake thinking
weak aimless stuff, going over the experiment over and over again, or dreaming feverishly of things growing
misty and vanishing about me, until everything, the ground I stood on, vanished, and so I came to that sickly
falling nightmare one gets
...
I tried to hush it by talking to
it, and then I decided to turn it out
...
I would have given it milk, but I hadn't any
...
I tried to catch it, with an idea of putting it out of the
window, but it wouldn't be caught, it vanished
...
At last I
opened the window and made a bustle
...
I never saw any more of it
...
I found sleeping was hopeless, and, locking my door after me, wandered out into the
morning streets
...

"If it hasn't been killed," said the Invisible Man
...
"I didn't mean to interrupt
...
"It was alive four days after, I know, and down a
grating in Great Titchfield Street; because I saw a crowd round the place, trying to see whence the miaowing
came
...
Then he resumed abruptly:
"I remember that morning before the change very vividly
...
I
remember the barracks in Albany Street, and the horse soldiers coming out, and at last I found the summit of
Primrose Hill
...
My weary brain tried to formulate the position, to plot out a plan of action
...
As
a matter of fact I was worked out; the intense stress of nearly four years' continuous work left me incapable
of any strength of feeling
...
Nothing
seemed to matter
...

"All I could think clearly was that the thing had to be carried through; the fixed idea still ruled me
...
I looked about me at the hillside, with children playing and girls
watching them, and tried to think of all the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world
...
Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man
...
"It's the palaeolithic in a bottle
...
You know?"
"I know the stuff
...
It was my landlord with threats and inquiries, an old Polish Jew
in a long grey coat and greasy slippers
...
He insisted on knowing all about it
...
I denied the cat
...
That was true, certainly
...
I tried to keep between him and the concentrating apparatus I had arranged, and that
only made him more curious
...
His had always been a most respectable house—in a
disreputable neighbourhood
...
I told him to get out
...
In a moment I had him by the collar; something ripped, and he went spinning out
into his own passage
...

"He made a fuss outside, which I disregarded, and after a time he went away
...
I did not know what he would do, nor even what he had the power to
do
...
Vanish! It was irresistible
...


"At the thought of the possibility of my work being exposed or interrupted at its very climax, I became very
angry and active
...
I tried to go out noiselessly
...
You would have laughed to see him jump aside on the landing as I came tearing after
him
...
I heard
him come shuffling up to my floor, hesitate, and go down
...

"It was all done that evening and night
...
It ceased, footsteps went away and
returned, and the knocking was resumed
...
Then in a fit of irritation I rose and went and flung the door wide open
...

"It was my landlord, with a notice of ejectment or something
...

"For a moment he gaped
...
I shut the door, locked it, and went to the looking-glass
...
My face was white—like white stone
...
I had not expected the suffering
...
I set
my teeth, though my skin was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like grim death
...
Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my
room
...
But I stuck to it
...

"The pain had passed
...
I shall never forget that dawn, and the
strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and
thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I
closed my transparent eyelids
...
I gritted my teeth and stayed there to the end
...

"I struggled up
...
I was
weak and very hungry
...
I had to hang on to the table and press
my forehead against the glass
...

"I slept during the forenoon, pulling the sheet over my eyes to shut out the light, and about midday I was
awakened again by a knocking
...
I sat up and listened and heard a whispering
...
Presently the knocking was
renewed and voices called, first my landlord's, and then two others
...
The
invisible rag and pillow came to hand and I opened the window and pitched them out on to the cistern cover
...
Someone had charged it with the idea of smashing
the lock
...
That startled me, made me
angry
...


"I tossed together some loose paper, straw, packing paper and so forth, in the middle of the room, and
turned on the gas
...
I could not find the matches
...
I turned down the gas again, stepped out of the window on the cistern cover, very
softly lowered the sash, and sat down, secure and invisible, but quivering with anger, to watch events
...
It was the landlord and his two step-sons, sturdy young men of three or four and twenty
...

"You may imagine their astonishment to find the room empty
...
His staring eyes and thick-lipped bearded face came a foot from my face
...
He stared right through me
...
The old man went and peered under the bed, and then they all made a rush
for the cupboard
...
They concluded I had
not answered them, that their imagination had deceived them
...

"The old man, so far as I could understand his patois, agreed with the old lady that I was a vivisectionist
...
They
were all nervous about my arrival, although I found subsequently that they had bolted the front door
...
One of my fellow lodgers, a coster-monger who shared the opposite room with a
butcher, appeared on the landing, and he was called in and told incoherent things
...
Then, while they were trying to
explain the smash, I dodged out of the room and went softly downstairs
...
Then I
slipped up again with a box of matches, fired my heap of paper and rubbish, put the chairs and bedding
thereby, led the gas to the affair, by means of an india-rubber tube, and waving a farewell to the room left it
for the last time
...

"Fired the house
...
I slipped the bolts of
the front door quietly and went out into the street
...
My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and
wonderful things I had now impunity to do
...
By not looking down,
however, I managed to walk on the level passably well
...
I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless
clothes, in a city of the blind
...

"But hardly had I emerged upon Great Portland Street, however (my lodging was close to the big draper's
shop there), when I heard a clashing concussion and was hit violently behind, and turning saw a man carrying
a basket of soda-water syphons, and looking in amazement at his burden
...
'The devil's in the basket,' I said,
and suddenly twisted it out of his hand
...

"But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public house, made a sudden rush for this, and his extending
fingers took me with excruciating violence under the ear
...
In a moment I should be wedged into a crowd and inevitably discovered
...
I do not know how they settled the business
...

"I tried to get into the stream of people, but they were too thick for me, and in a moment my heels were being
trodden upon
...
I staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a convulsive movement, and
found myself behind the hansom
...
And not only trembling, but shivering
...
Foolish as it seems to me now, I had not reckoned that, transparent or not, I was still amenable to
the weather and all its consequences
...
I ran round and got into the cab
...
My mood was as different
from that in which I had sallied forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to imagine
...

"We crawled past Mudie's, and there a tall woman with five or six yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and
I sprang out just in time to escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight
...
I was now
cruelly chilled, and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered as I ran
...

"I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing
man
...
This brute began barking and
leaping, showing, as it seemed to me, only too plainly that he was aware of me
...

"Then I became aware of a blare of music, and looking along the street saw a number of people advancing
out of Russell Square, red shirts, and the banner of the Salvation Army to the fore
...
Happily the dog stopped at the
noise of the band too, hesitated, and turned tail, running back to Bloomsbury Square again
...
Thud,
thud, thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for the moment I did not notice two urchins
stopping at the railings by me
...
'See what?' said the other
...

Like what you makes in mud
...
The passing people elbowed and jostled them, but their confounded
intelligence was arrested
...
' 'There's a
barefoot man gone up them steps, or I don't know nothing,' said one
...

And his foot was a-bleeding
...
'Looky there, Ted,' quoth the younger of the detectives, with the
sharpness of surprise in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet
...
For a moment I was paralysed
...
'Dashed rum! It's just like the ghost of a foot, ain't it?' He hesitated and
advanced with outstretched hand
...
In
another moment he would have touched me
...
I made a step, the boy started back with
an exclamation, and with a rapid movement I swung myself over into the portico of the next house
...

"They rushed round and saw my new footmarks flash into being on the lower step and upon the pavement
...
'Feet! Look! Feet running!'
"Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was pouring along after the Salvation Army, and this blow
not only impeded me but them
...
At the cost of bowling over
one young fellow I got through, and in another moment I was rushing headlong round the circuit of Russell
Square, with six or seven astonished people following my footmarks
...

"Twice I doubled round corners, thrice I crossed the road and came back upon my tracks, and then, as my
feet grew hot and dry, the damp impressions began to fade
...
The last I saw of the chase was a little group of a
dozen people perhaps, studying with infinite perplexity a slowly drying footprint that had resulted from a
puddle in Tavistock Square, a footprint as isolated and incomprehensible to them as Crusoe's solitary
discovery
...
My back had now become very stiff and sore, my tonsils were painful
from the cabman's fingers, and the skin of my neck had been scratched by his nails; my feet hurt exceedingly
and I was lame from a little cut on one foot
...
Once or twice accidental collisions occurred and I left people amazed, with
unaccountable curses ringing in their ears
...
I had caught a cold, and do as I would I could not
avoid an occasional sneeze
...

"Then came men and boys running, first one and then others, and shouting as they ran
...
They ran
in the direction of my lodging, and looking back down a street I saw a mass of black smoke streaming up
above the roofs and telephone wires
...
Burning! I had burnt my boats—if ever a man did! The place was blazing
...
Kemp glanced nervously out of the window
...
"Go on
...
I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in
whom I could confide
...
Nevertheless, I was half-minded to accost some passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy
...
I made no plans in the street
...
But even
to me, an Invisible Man, the rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and bolted impregnably
...

"And then I had a brilliant idea
...
I had thought I should find the doors open, but they were closed, and as I stood
in the wide entrance a carriage stopped outside, and a man in uniform—you know the kind of personage with
'Omnium' on his cap—flung open the door
...

"I did not feel safe there, however; people were going to and fro, and I prowled restlessly about until I came
upon a huge section in an upper floor containing multitudes of bedsteads, and over these I clambered, and
found a resting-place at last among a huge pile of folded flock mattresses
...
Then I should be
able, I thought, to rob the place for food and clothing, and disguised, prowl through it and examine its
resources, perhaps sleep on some of the bedding
...
My idea was to procure
clothing to make myself a muffled but acceptable figure, to get money, and then to recover my books and
parcels where they awaited me, take a lodging somewhere and elaborate plans for the complete realisation of
the advantages my invisibility gave me (as I still imagined) over my fellow-men
...
It could not have been more than an hour after I took up my position on
the mattresses before I noticed the blinds of the windows being drawn, and customers being marched
doorward
...
I left my lair as the crowds diminished, and prowled cautiously out into the less desolate
parts of the shop
...
All the boxes of goods, the hanging fabrics, the festoons of lace,
the boxes of sweets in the grocery section, the displays of this and that, were being whipped down, folded
up, slapped into tidy receptacles, and everything that could not be taken down and put away had sheets of
some coarse stuff like sacking flung over them
...
Directly each of these young people had done, he or she made promptly for the door with
such an expression of animation as I have rarely observed in a shop assistant before
...
I had to dodge to get out of the way, and as it
was, my ankle got stung with the sawdust
...
And at last a good hour or more after the shop had been
closed, came a noise of locking doors
...
It was very still; in one place I
remember passing near one of the Tottenham Court Road entrances and listening to the tapping of boot-heels
of the passers-by
...
It was dark, and I had the
devil of a hunt after matches, which I found at last in the drawer of the little cash desk
...
I had to tear down wrappings and ransack a number of boxes and drawers, but at last I managed to
turn out what I sought; the box label called them lambswool pants, and lambswool vests
...
I began to feel a human being again, and my next
thought was food
...
There was coffee still in the urn, and I lit
the gas and warmed it up again, and altogether I did not do badly
...
And near
that was a toy department, and I had a brilliant idea
...
But Omniums had no optical department
...
But the discovery set my mind running on wigs and masks and the like
...

"My last thoughts before sleeping were the most agreeable I had had since the change
...
I thought that I should be able to slip out unobserved in
the morning with my clothes upon me, muffling my face with a white wrapper I had taken, purchase, with the
money I had taken, spectacles and so forth, and so complete my disguise
...
I saw the ugly little Jew of a landlord
vociferating in his rooms; I saw his two sons marvelling, and the wrinkled old woman's gnarled face as she

asked for her cat
...

"'You also,' said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards the grave
...
I realised I was invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had
their grip on me
...
Nobody heeded me, nobody was aware of me
...

"The pale London dawn had come, the place was full of a chilly grey light that filtered round the edges of the
window blinds
...
Then, as recollection came back
to me, I heard voices in conversation
...
I scrambled to my feet, looking about me for some way of escape, and even as I did
so the sound of my movement made them aware of me
...
'Who's that?' cried one, and 'Stop there!' shouted the other
...
He yelled and I bowled him over,
rushed past him, turned another corner, and by a happy inspiration threw myself behind a counter
...

"Lying on the ground, I felt scared out of my wits
...
I had made up my mind, I suppose, to get away in
them, and that ruled me
...
He kept his footing, gave a
view hallo, and came up the staircase hot after me
...

"That's it! Art pots
...
The whole pile of pots went headlong, and I heard shouting and footsteps
running from all parts
...
I made one last desperate turn and found myself among lamps and
ironmongery
...
Down he went, and I crouched down behind the counter and began
whipping off my clothes as fast as I could
...
I heard more men coming, my cook was lying quiet on the other side of the counter,
stunned or scared speechless, and I had to make another dash for it, like a rabbit hunted out of a wood-pile
...
I found myself in my bedstead storeroom again, and at the
end of a wilderness of wardrobes
...
They made a rush for the vest and pants, and collared the trousers
...
'He must be somewhere here
...

"I stood watching them hunt for me for a time, and cursing my ill-luck in losing the clothes
...

"In a little while two assistants came in and began to talk over the business very excitedly and like the fools
they were
...

Then I fell to scheming again
...
I went down into the warehouse to see if there was any chance of packing and
addressing a parcel, but I could not understand the system of checking
...
"

CHAPTER XXIII
IN DRURY LANE

"But you begin now to realise," said the Invisible Man, "the full disadvantage of my condition
...
I
was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again
...

"Nor had I
...
I could not go abroad in snow—it would settle
on me and expose me
...

And fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity
...
I
did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from that cause also
...

"Not in London at any rate
...
I did not go that way, because of the crowd halfway down it opposite to the still smoking ruins of the
house I had fired
...
What to do with my face puzzled me
...
I realised that problem was solved
...
I turned about, no longer aimless, and went—circuitously in order to avoid the busy ways,
towards the back streets north of the Strand; for I remembered, though not very distinctly where, that some
theatrical costumiers had shops in that district
...
I walked fast to avoid being
overtaken
...
One man as I was about to

pass him at the top of Bedford Street, turned upon me abruptly and came into me, sending me into the road
and almost under the wheel of a passing hansom
...
I was so unnerved by this encounter that I went into Covent Garden Market and sat down for
some time in a quiet corner by a stall of violets, panting and trembling
...

"At last I reached the object of my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a
window full of tinsel robes, sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs
...
I peered
through the window and, seeing no one within, entered
...
I
left it open, and walked round a bare costume stand, into a corner behind a cheval glass
...
Then I heard heavy feet striding across a room, and a man appeared down the shop
...
I proposed to make my way into the house, secrete myself upstairs,
watch my opportunity, and when everything was quiet, rummage out a wig, mask, spectacles, and costume,
and go into the world, perhaps a grotesque but still a credible figure
...

"The man who had just entered the shop was a short, slight, hunched, beetle-browed man, with long arms
and very short bandy legs
...
He stared about the shop with an expression
of expectation
...
'Damn the boys!' he
said
...
He came in again in a minute, kicked the door to with his foot
spitefully, and went muttering back to the house door
...
I did so too, startled by
his quickness of ear
...

"I stood hesitating
...
He stood looking
about the shop like one who was still not satisfied
...
Then he stood doubtful
...

"It was a queer little room, poorly furnished and with a number of big masks in the corner
...
And his table manners were irritating
...
I could not get out
of the room while he was there; I could scarcely move because of his alertness, and there was a draught
down my back
...

"The spectacular quality of my sensations was curious and novel, but for all that I was heartily tired and angry
long before he had done his eating
...
His burden prevented his shutting the door behind him—as he would
have done; I never saw such a man for shutting doors—and I followed him into a very dirty underground
kitchen and scullery
...
It
was burning low, and scarcely thinking, I put on a little coal
...
He peered about the room and was within an ace of touching me
...
He stopped in the doorway and took a final inspection before he went down
...
I just managed
to get by him
...
He stood looking back right
into my face and listening
...
His long hairy hand pulled at his lower lip
...
Then he grunted and went on up again
...

He was becoming aware of the faint sounds of my movements about him
...
He suddenly flashed into rage
...
He put his hand in his pocket, failed to find what he wanted, and rushing past me went
blundering noisily and pugnaciously downstairs
...
I sat on the head of the staircase
until his return
...
He opened the door of the room, and before I could enter,
slammed it in my face
...
The house was
very old and tumble-down, damp so that the paper in the attics was peeling from the walls, and rat infested
...
Several rooms I did inspect were
unfurnished, and others were littered with theatrical lumber, bought second-hand, I judged, from its
appearance
...
I began routing among these, and in my
eagerness forgot again the evident sharpness of his ears
...
I stood
perfectly still while he stared about open-mouthed and suspicious
...

'Damn her!'
"He shut the door quietly, and immediately I heard the key turn in the lock
...
I
realised abruptly that I was locked in
...
I walked from door to
window and back, and stood perplexed
...
But I decided to inspect the clothes
before I did anything further, and my first attempt brought down a pile from an upper shelf
...
That time he actually touched me, jumped back with amazement and stood
astonished in the middle of the room
...
'Rats,' he said in an undertone, fingers on lips
...
I
edged quietly out of the room, but a plank creaked
...
When I realised what he was up
to I had a fit of rage—I could hardly control myself sufficiently to watch my opportunity
...
"
"Knocked him on the head?" exclaimed Kemp
...
Hit him from behind with a stool that stood on the landing
...
"
"But—I say! The common conventions of humanity—"
"Are all very well for common people
...
I couldn't think of any other way of doing it
...
"

"Tied him up in a sheet!"
"Made a sort of bag of it
...
My dear Kemp, it's no good your sitting glaring as though I
was a murderer
...
He had his revolver
...
And the man was in his own house, and you were—well,
robbing
...
Can't you see my position?"
"And his too," said Kemp
...
"What do you mean to say?"
Kemp's face grew a trifle hard
...
"I suppose, after all," he said
with a sudden change of manner, "the thing had to be done
...
But still—"
"Of course I was in a fix—an infernal fix
...
He was simply exasperating
...
"It's quite out of fashion
...
Downstairs I found a loaf and some rank cheese—more than sufficient to satisfy my hunger
...
This looked out upon the street, two lace curtains brown with dirt guarding
the window
...
Outside the day was bright—by contrast with the
brown shadows of the dismal house in which I found myself, dazzlingly bright
...
I turned with spots of colour
swimming before my eyes to the shadowy fixtures behind me
...
The room was full of a faint scent of benzoline, used, I suppose, in
cleaning the garments
...
I should judge the hunchback had been alone in the house for some
time
...
Everything that could possibly be of service to me I collected in the clothes
storeroom, and then I made a deliberate selection
...

"I had thought of painting and powdering my face and all that there was to show of me, in order to render
myself visible, but the disadvantage of this lay in the fact that I should require turpentine and other appliances
and a considerable amount of time before I could vanish again
...
I could
find no underclothing, but that I could buy subsequently, and for the time I swathed myself in calico dominoes
and some white cashmere scarfs
...
In a desk in the shop were three sovereigns and about thirty shillings' worth of silver, and in a locked
cupboard I burst in the inner room were eight pounds in gold
...

"Then came a curious hesitation
...
I was grotesque to the theatrical pitch, a stage miser, but I was certainly not a physical impossibility
...

"I spent some minutes screwing up my courage and then unlocked the shop door and marched out into the
street, leaving the little man to get out of his sheet again when he liked
...
No one appeared to notice me very pointedly
...
"
He stopped again
...

"No," said the Invisible Man
...
I suppose he untied himself or kicked
himself out
...
"
He became silent and went to the window and stared out
...
I thought my troubles were over
...
So I thought
...
I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish
...
I could take my money where I found it
...
I felt amazingly confident; it's not
particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass
...
I finished ordering the lunch, told the
man I should be back in ten minutes, and went out exasperated
...
"
"Not quite so badly," said Kemp, "but I can imagine it
...
At last, faint with the desire for tasteful food, I went into another place
and demanded a private room
...
'Badly
...
It was not particularly well served, but it sufficed; and
when I had had it, I sat over a cigar, trying to plan my line of action
...

"The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a
cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city
...
That afternoon it seemed all disappointment
...
No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them
when they are got
...
What was I to do? And for this I had become a
wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!"
He paused, and his attitude suggested a roving glance at the window
...


"I went there to work
...
It was a half idea! I have it still
...
A way of
getting back! Of restoring what I have done
...
When I have done all I mean to do invisibly
...
"
"You went straight to Iping?"
"Yes
...
Jove! I remember the snowstorm now, and the accursed bother
it was to keep the snow from damping my pasteboard nose
...
Rather
...
"He's expected to recover
...
I clean lost my temper, the fools! Why couldn't they leave me alone? And that grocer
lout?"
"There are no deaths expected," said Kemp
...

"By Heaven, Kemp, you don't know what rage is!
...
Every conceivable sort
of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me
...

"As it is, they've made things a thousand times more difficult
...


CHAPTER XXIV
THE PLAN THAT FAILED

"But now," said Kemp, with a side glance out of the window, "what are we to do?"
He moved nearer his guest as he spoke in such a manner as to prevent the possibility of a sudden glimpse of
the three men who were advancing up the hill road—with an intolerable slowness, as it seemed to Kemp
...
But I have altered that plan rather since seeing you
...
Especially as my secret was

known, and everyone would be on the lookout for a masked and muffled man
...
My idea was to get aboard one and run the risks of the passage
...
It would not be difficult
...
And do things
...
"
"That's clear
...
Hidden my books! If
I can lay my hands on him!"
"Best plan to get the books out of him first
...
"
"Cur!" said the Invisible Man
...
"
"We must get those books; those books are vital
...
"Certainly we must get
those books
...
"
"No," said the Invisible Man, and thought
...

"Blundering into your house, Kemp," he said, "changes all my plans
...

In spite of all that has happened, in spite of this publicity, of the loss of my books, of what I have suffered,
there still remain great possibilities, huge possibilities—"
"You have told no one I am here?" he asked abruptly
...
"That was implied," he said
...

"Not a soul
...

"I made a mistake, Kemp, a huge mistake, in carrying this thing through alone
...
Alone—it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is
the end
...
I must have a confederate
...

"Hitherto I have gone on vague lines
...


It means little advantage for eavesdropping and so forth—one makes sounds
...
Once you've caught me you could easily imprison me
...
This invisibility, in fact, is only good in two cases: It's useful in getting away, it's
useful in approaching
...
I can walk round a man, whatever weapon
he has, choose my point, strike as I like
...
Escape as I like
...
Was that a movement downstairs?
"And it is killing we must do, Kemp
...
"I'm listening to your plan, Griffin, but I'm not agreeing, mind
...
The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we
know there is an Invisible Man
...
Yes;
no doubt it's startling
...
A Reign of Terror
...
He must issue his orders
...
And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them
...

"It seems to me, Griffin," he said, to cover his wandering attention, "that your confederate would be in a
difficult position
...
And then suddenly, "Hush!
What's that downstairs?"
"Nothing," said Kemp, and suddenly began to speak loud and fast
...

"Understand me, I don't agree to this
...
Publish your results; take the world—take the nation at least—into
your confidence
...
"There are footsteps coming upstairs," he said in a low voice
...

"Let me see," said the Invisible Man, and advanced, arm extended, to the door
...
Kemp hesitated for a second and then moved to intercept him
...
"Traitor!" cried the Voice, and suddenly the dressing-gown opened, and
sitting down the Unseen began to disrobe
...
Kemp flung the door open
...

With a quick movement Kemp thrust the Invisible Man back, sprang aside, and slammed the door
...
In another moment Griffin would have been alone in the belvedere study, a prisoner
...
The key had been slipped in hastily that morning
...

Kemp's face became white
...
For a moment he stood
lugging
...
But he got it closed again
...
His throat was gripped by invisible fingers, and
he left his hold on the handle to defend himself
...
The empty dressing-gown was flung on the top of him
...

He was staring aghast at the sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary sight of clothing
tossing empty in the air
...
He saw him rush forward, and go
down again, felled like an ox
...
By nothing! A vast weight, it seemed, leapt upon him, and he was
hurled headlong down the staircase, with a grip on his throat and a knee in his groin
...

He rolled over and sat up staring
...

"My God!" cried Kemp, "the game's up! He's gone!"

CHAPTER XXV
THE HUNTING OF THE INVISIBLE MAN

For a space Kemp was too inarticulate to make Adye understand the swift things that had just happened
...
But
presently Adye began to grasp something of the situation
...
He is pure selfishness
...
I have listened to such a story this morning of brutal self-seeking
...
He will
kill them unless we can prevent him
...
Nothing can stop him
...
"That is certain
...
"You must begin at once
...
Once he gets away, he may go through the
countryside as he wills, killing and maiming
...
You
must set a watch on trains and roads and shipping
...
You must wire for help
...
I will tell
you of that! There is a man in your police station—Marvel
...
Those books—yes
...
"
"Says he hasn't them
...
And you must prevent him from eating or sleeping; day and
night the country must be astir for him
...
The houses everywhere must be barred against him
...
I tell you, Adye, he is a danger, a disaster;
unless he is pinned and secured, it is frightful to think of the things that may happen
...
"I must go down at once and begin organising
...
By Jove! it's urgent
...
What else is there we can do? Put that stuff
down
...
They found the front door open and the policemen
standing outside staring at empty air
...

"We must go to the central station at once," said Adye
...
And now, Kemp, what else?"
"Dogs," said Kemp
...
They don't see him, but they wind him
...
"
"Good," said Adye
...
Dogs
...
After eating, his food shows until it is assimilated
...
You must keep on beating
...
And put all weapons—all
implements that might be weapons, away
...
And what he can snatch up and
strike men with must be hidden away
...
"We shall have him yet!"
"And on the roads," said Kemp, and hesitated
...

"Powdered glass," said Kemp
...
But think of what he may do!"
Adye drew the air in sharply between his teeth
...
I don't know
...
If he goes too far
...
"I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror—so soon
as he has got over the emotions of this escape—as I am sure I am talking to you
...
He has cut himself off from his kind
...
"

CHAPTER XXVI
THE WICKSTEED MURDER

The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in a state of blind fury
...
No one knows where he went nor what

he did
...

That seems the most probable refuge for him, for there it was he re-asserted himself in a grimly tragical
manner about two in the afternoon
...
No doubt he
was almost ecstatically exasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able to understand the
motives that led to that deceit, we may still imagine and even sympathise a little with the fury the attempted
surprise must have occasioned
...
At any rate he vanished from human ken about midday, and no living witness
can tell what he did until about half-past two
...

During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the countryside were busy
...
By two o'clock even he might still have removed himself out of
the district by getting aboard a train, but after two that became impossible
...
And in a great circle of twenty miles
round Port Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out in groups of three and
four, with dogs, to beat the roads and fields
...
Kemp's
proclamation—signed indeed by Adye—was posted over almost the whole district by four or five o'clock in
the afternoon
...
And so swift and decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt and universal was
the belief in this strange being, that before nightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringent
state of siege
...
Going from whispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length and breadth of the
country, passed the story of the murder of Mr
...

If our supposition that the Invisible Man's refuge was the Hintondean thickets, then we must suppose that in
the early afternoon he sallied out again bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon
...

Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter
...
Everything points to a desperate struggle—the trampled
ground, the numerous wounds Mr
...
Indeed the theory of madness is almost
unavoidable
...
Wicksteed was a man of forty-five or forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive
habits and appearance, the very last person in the world to provoke such a terrible antagonist
...
He stopped this quiet
man, going quietly home to his midday meal, attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm,

felled him, and smashed his head to a jelly
...
Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear on the
matter
...
Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a
couple of hundred yards out of his way
...
Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing something on the ground before him and striking at
it ever and again with his walking-stick
...
He passed out of her sight
to his death, the struggle being hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight depression in the
ground
...
We
may imagine that Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention of using it
in murder
...

Without any thought of the Invisible Man—for Port Burdock is ten miles away—he may have pursued it
...
One can then imagine the Invisible
Man making off—quietly in order to avoid discovering his presence in the neighbourhood, and Wicksteed,
excited and curious, pursuing this unaccountably locomotive object—finally striking at it
...
To those who appreciate the
extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, the rest of the encounter will be easy to imagine
...
The only undeniable facts—for stories of children are often unreliable—are the
discovery of Wicksteed's body, done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung among the nettles
...
He was certainly an intensely egotistical and
unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some
long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever scheme of action he had
contrived
...
Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck across the country towards the downland
...
It was wailing
and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever and again it shouted
...
It drove
up across the middle of a clover field and died away towards the hills
...
He must have found houses locked and secured; he may have loitered about railway stations
and prowled about inns, and no doubt he read the proclamations and realised something of the nature of the
campaign against him
...
These men-hunters had particular instructions in the
case of an encounter as to the way they should support one another
...
We may
understand something of his exasperation, and it could have been none the less because he himself had
supplied the information that was being used so remorselessly against him
...
In the night, he must
have eaten and slept; for in the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and malignant,
prepared for his last great struggle against the world
...

"You have been amazingly energetic and clever," this letter ran, "though what you stand to gain by it I cannot
imagine
...
For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night's rest
...
The game is
only beginning
...
This announces the first day of the Terror
...
I am Invisible Man
the First
...
The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example
—a man named Kemp
...
He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get
guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming
...
Death starts from the pillar box by midday
...
Death starts
...

To-day Kemp is to die
...
"That's his voice! And he means it
...
to pay
...
He rang for his housekeeper, and told her to go round the house at once, examine all the fastenings
of the windows, and close all the shutters
...
From a locked drawer
in his bedroom he took a little revolver, examined it carefully, and put it into the pocket of his lounge jacket
...
"There is no danger," he said, and added a mental reservation,
"to you
...

He ate with gaps of thought
...
"We will have him!" he said; "and I am the
bait
...
"
He went up to the belvedere, carefully shutting every door after him
...
Griffin, in spite of your invisibility
...
with a
vengeance
...
"He must get food every day—and I don't envy him
...
I wish we could get some
good cold wet weather instead of the heat
...
"
He went close to the window
...

"I'm getting nervous," said Kemp
...
"It must have

been a sparrow," he said
...
He unbolted and unlocked the door,
examined the chain, put it up, and opened cautiously without showing himself
...
It
was Adye
...

"What!" exclaimed Kemp
...
He's close about here
...
"
Kemp released the chain, and Adye entered through as narrow an opening as possible
...
"Note was snatched out of her hand
...
She's down at the station
...
He's close here
...

"What a fool I was," said Kemp
...
It's not an hour's walk from Hintondean
...

"Look here!" said Kemp, and led the way into his study
...
Adye
read it and whistled softly
...

"Proposed a trap—like a fool," said Kemp, "and sent my proposal out by a maid servant
...
"
Adye followed Kemp's profanity
...

"Not he," said Kemp
...
Adye had a silvery glimpse of a little revolver half out of
Kemp's pocket
...
There came a second smash while
they were still on the staircase
...
The two men stopped in
the doorway, contemplating the wreckage
...

"What's this for?" said Adye
...

"There's no way of climbing up here?"
"Not for a cat," said Kemp
...
All the downstairs rooms—Hullo!"
Smash, and then whack of boards hit hard came from downstairs
...
"That must

be—yes—it's one of the bedrooms
...
But he's a fool
...
He'll cut his feet
...
The two men stood on the landing perplexed
...
"Let me have a stick or something, and I'll go down to the station and get the bloodhounds put on
...

"You haven't a revolver?" asked Adye
...
Then he hesitated
...
"
"I'll bring it back," said Adye, "you'll be safe here
...

"Now for the door," said Adye
...

Kemp went to the door and began to slip the bolts as silently as possible
...
"You must step straight out," said Kemp
...
He hesitated for a moment, feeling more comfortable with his back
against the door
...
He crossed the lawn and
approached the gate
...
Something moved near him
...

"Well?" said Adye, white and grim, and every nerve tense
...

"Sorry," said Adye a little hoarsely, and moistened his lips with his tongue
...
Suppose he were to take his luck with a shot?
"What are you going for?" said the Voice, and there was a quick movement of the two, and a flash of sunlight
from the open lip of Adye's pocket
...
"Where I go," he said slowly, "is my own business
...
He drew
clumsily and fired absurdly, and in another moment he was struck in the mouth and the revolver wrested from
his grip
...
"Damn!" said Adye
...
"I'd kill you now if it wasn't the waste of a bullet," it said
...

"Well?" said Adye, sitting up
...

Adye stood up
...
Remember I can see your face if you
can't see mine
...
"

"He won't let me in," said Adye
...
"I've got no quarrel with you
...
He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver and saw the sea far off very
blue and dark under the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the Head, and the
multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet
...
"What am I to do?" he said sullenly
...
"You will get help
...
"
"I will try
...

Kemp had hurried upstairs after letting Adye out, and now crouching among the broken glass and peering
cautiously over the edge of the study window sill, he saw Adye stand parleying with the Unseen
...
Then the revolver moved a little and the glint of the sunlight
flashed in Kemp's eyes
...

"Surely!" he said, "Adye has given up the revolver
...
"Don't push a winning game too far
...
"
"You go back to the house
...
"
Adye's decision seemed suddenly made
...
Kemp watched him—puzzled
...
Then things happened very
quickly
...
Kemp did not hear the sound of the shot
...

For a space Kemp remained staring at the quiet carelessness of Adye's attitude
...
Adye lay on the lawn near the gate
...
Kemp scrutinised the surroundings of the house for a glimpse of the revolver, but it had
vanished
...
The game was opening well
...
This was followed by a silence
...
He went to the
staircase head and stood listening uneasily
...
Everything was safe and quiet
...
Adye lay motionless over the edge of the gravel just as he had fallen
...

Everything was deadly still
...
He wondered what his
antagonist was doing
...
There was a smash from below
...
Suddenly the house
resounded with heavy blows and the splintering of wood
...
He turned the key and opened the kitchen door
...
He stood aghast
...
The shutters had been driven in with an axe, and
now the axe was descending in sweeping blows upon the window frame and the iron bars defending it
...
He saw the revolver lying on the path outside, and then the little weapon
sprang into the air
...
The revolver cracked just too late, and a splinter from the edge of the
closing door flashed over his head
...
Then the blows of the axe with its splitting and smashing consequences, were
resumed
...
In a moment the Invisible Man would be in the kitchen
...
It would be the policemen
...
He made the girl speak before he dropped the chain, and the three people blundered into the
house in a heap, and Kemp slammed the door again
...
"He has a revolver, with two shots—left
...
Shot him
anyhow
...
"
"Who?" said one of the policemen
...

"We came in the back way," said the girl
...

"He's in the kitchen—or will be
...
The girl stared
towards the kitchen, shuddered, and retreated into the dining-room
...
They heard the kitchen door give
...

"Poker," said Kemp, and rushed to the fender
...
He suddenly flung himself backward
...
The pistol snapped its penultimate
shot and ripped a valuable Sidney Cooper
...

At the first clash the girl screamed, stood screaming for a moment by the fireplace, and then ran to open the
shutters—possibly with an idea of escaping by the shattered window
...
They could hear the
Invisible Man breathing
...
"I want that man Kemp
...


The Invisible Man must have started back, and he blundered into the umbrella stand
...
But the second policeman, aiming behind the axe with his poker, hit something soft that
snapped
...
The policeman wiped
again at vacancy and hit nothing; he put his foot on the axe, and struck again
...

He heard the dining-room window open, and a quick rush of feet within
...
"Where is he?" asked the man on the floor
...
I've hit him
...
Unless he's slipped past you
...
"
Pause
...

The second policeman began struggling to his feet
...
Suddenly the faint pad of bare feet on the
kitchen stairs could be heard
...
It smashed a
little gas bracket
...
Then he thought better of it and stepped into
the dining-room
...

"Doctor Kemp's a hero," he said, as his companion looked over his shoulder
...

The second policeman's opinion of Kemp was terse and vivid
...
Heelas, Mr
...
Mr
...
His wife, however, as he was subsequently to be reminded, did
...
He slept through the smashing of the windows, and then woke up
suddenly with a curious persuasion of something wrong
...
Then he put his feet to the ground, and sat listening
...
The house looked as though it had been deserted for weeks—after a violent riot
...

"I could have sworn it was all right"—he looked at his watch—"twenty minutes ago
...
And then, as he
sat open-mouthed, came a still more wonderful thing
...
Suddenly a man appeared beside her, helping her—Dr
...
Mr
...
He saw Kemp
stand on the sill, spring from the window, and reappear almost instantaneously running along a path in the
shrubbery and stooping as he ran, like a man who evades observation
...
In a second he had tumbled over
and was running at a tremendous pace down the slope towards Mr
...

"Lord!" cried Mr
...
Heelas to think things like that was to act, and his cook watching him from the top window was
amazed to see him come pelting towards the house at a good nine miles an hour
...
Heelas bellowing like a bull
...
He ran himself to shut the French windows that opened on the veranda; as he did so Kemp's
head and shoulders and knee appeared over the edge of the garden fence
...

"You can't come in," said Mr
...
"I'm very sorry if he's after you, but you can't come
in!"
Kemp appeared with a face of terror close to the glass, rapping and then shaking frantically at the French
window
...
Then he ran round by the side gate to the front of the house, and so into the hillroad
...
Heelas staring from his window—a face of horror—had scarcely witnessed Kemp vanish, ere
the asparagus was being trampled this way and that by feet unseen
...
Heelas fled precipitately
upstairs, and the rest of the chase is beyond his purview
...

Emerging into the hill-road, Kemp naturally took the downward direction, and so it was he came to run in his
own person the very race he had watched with such a critical eye from the belvedere study only four days
ago
...
He ran with wide strides, and wherever a patch of rough ground intervened, wherever there came a
patch of raw flints, or a bit of broken glass shone dazzling, he crossed it and left the bare invisible feet that
followed to take what line they would
...
Never had there been a slower or
more painful method of progression than running
...
But at any rate they might
have kept a lookout for an eventuality like this! The town was rising up now, the sea had dropped out of sight
behind it, and people down below were stirring
...
Beyond that was the
police station
...


The people below were staring at him, one or two were running, and his breath was beginning to saw in his
throat
...
Beyond the tram
were posts and heaps of gravel—the drainage works
...
In another moment he had passed the
door of the "Jolly Cricketers," and was in the blistering fag end of the street, with human beings about him
...
Further on the astonished features of navvies appeared above the mounds of gravel
...
"The Invisible
Man!" he cried to the navvies, with a vague indicative gesture, and by an inspiration leapt the excavation and
placed a burly group between him and the chase
...
Two or
three little children were playing here, and shrieked and scattered at his apparition, and forthwith doors and
windows opened and excited mothers revealed their hearts
...

He glanced up the street towards the hill
...
Up the
street others followed these two, striking and shouting
...
"Spread out!
Spread out!" cried some one
...
He stopped, and
looked round, panting
...
"Form a line across—"
He was hit hard under the ear, and went reeling, trying to face round towards his unseen antagonist
...
Then he was hit again under the jaw, and
sprawled headlong on the ground
...
He felt a drop of moisture on his face
...

He gripped the unseen elbows near the ground
...
"Help! Help—hold! He's
down! Hold his feet!"
In another second there was a simultaneous rush upon the struggle, and a stranger coming into the road
suddenly might have thought an exceptionally savage game of Rugby football was in progress
...

Then came a mighty effort, and the Invisible Man threw off a couple of his antagonists and rose to his knees
...
The tram conductor suddenly got the neck and shoulders and lugged him back
...
There was, I am afraid, some savage kicking
...

"Get back, you fools!" cried the muffled voice of Kemp, and there was a vigorous shoving back of stalwart
forms
...
Stand back!"
There was a brief struggle to clear a space, and then the circle of eager faces saw the doctor kneeling, as it

seemed, fifteen inches in the air, and holding invisible arms to the ground
...

"Don't you leave go of en," cried the big navvy, holding a blood-stained spade; "he's shamming
...
" His face was bruised and
already going red; he spoke thickly because of a bleeding lip
...
"The mouth's all wet," he said
...
There was a pushing
and shuffling, a sound of heavy feet as fresh people turned up to increase the pressure of the crowd
...
The doors of the "Jolly Cricketers" stood suddenly wide open
...

Kemp felt about, his hand seeming to pass through empty air
...
His side—ugh!"
Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the big navvy, screamed sharply
...

And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it was made of glass, so that
veins and arteries and bones and nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp and prone
...

"Hullo!" cried the constable
...
It was like the slow spreading of a poison
...
Presently they could see his crushed chest and his
shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered features
...
His hair and brow were white—not grey with age, but
white with the whiteness of albinism—and his eyes were like garnets
...

"Cover his face!" said a man
...

Someone brought a sheet from the "Jolly Cricketers," and having covered him, they carried him into that
house
...


THE EPILOGUE

So ends the story of the strange and evil experiments of the Invisible Man
...
The sign of the inn is an empty board
save for a hat and boots, and the name is the title of this story
...
Drink generously, and he
will tell you generously of all the things that happened to him after that time, and of how the lawyers tried to
do him out of the treasure found upon him
...
"
And if you want to cut off the flow of his reminiscences abruptly, you can always do so by asking if there
weren't three manuscript books in the story
...
"The Invisible Man it was took 'em
off to hide 'em when I cut and ran for Port Stowe
...
Kemp put people on with the idea of my
having 'em
...

He is a bachelor man—his tastes were ever bachelor, and there are no women folk in the house
...
He conducts his house without enterprise, but with eminent decorum
...
But he has a reputation for wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village,
and his knowledge of the roads of the South of England would beat Cobbett
...
And
then, being satisfied of his solitude, he unlocks the cupboard and a box in the cupboard and a drawer in that
box, and produces three volumes bound in brown leather, and places them solemnly in the middle of the
table
...
The landlord sits down in an armchair, fills a long
clay pipe slowly—gloating over the books the while
...

His brows are knit and his lips move painfully
...
Lord!
what a one he was for intellect!"
Presently he relaxes and leans back, and blinks through his smoke across the room at things invisible to other
eyes
...
"Wonderful secrets!"
"Once I get the haul of them—Lord!"
"I wouldn't do what he did; I'd just—well!" He pulls at his pipe
...
And though Kemp has fished unceasingly,
no human being save the landlord knows those books are there, with the subtle secret of invisibility and a
dozen other strange secrets written therein
...


Edo tePoetGtnegEoko TeIvsbeMn b H G Wls
n f h rjc uebr Bo f h niil a, y
...
t o 53-
...
uebr
...

Cetn tewrsfo pbi dmi piteiin masta n
raig h ok rm ulc oan rn dtos en ht o
oeon aUie Sae cprgti teewrs s teFudto
n ws
ntd tts oyih n hs ok, o h onain
(n yu)cncp addsrbt i i teUie Sae wtot
ad o! a oy n itiue t n h ntd tts ihu
priso adwtotpyn cprgtrylis Seilrls
emsin n ihu aig oyih oate
...
rjc
Gtnegi argsee taeak admyntb ue i yu
uebr s
eitrd rdmr, n a o e sd f o
cag frteeok,uls yurcieseii priso
...
Yumyueti eokfrnal ayproe
ue s ey ay
o a s hs Bo o ery n ups
sc a ceto o drvtv wrs rprs promne ad
uh s rain f eiaie ok, eot, efracs n
rsac
...
Rdsrbto i
rcial NTIG ih ulc oan Bos
eitiuin s
sbett tetaeaklcne epcal cmeca
ujc o h rdmr ies, seily omril
rdsrbto
...
e/ies)
tp/gtnegntlcne
...
eea em f s n eitiuig rjc uebr-m
eetoi wrs
lcrnc ok
1A B raigo uigaypr o ti PoetGtnegt

...
f o o o ge o bd y l
tetrso ti areet yums caeuigadrtr o dsry
h em f hs gemn, o ut es sn n eun r eto
alcpe o PoetGtnegt eetoi wrsi yu pseso
...

1B "rjc Gtneg i argsee taeak I myol b

...
t a ny e
ue o o ascae i aywywt a eetoi wr b pol wo
sd n r soitd n n a ih n lcrnc ok y epe h
aret b budb tetrso ti areet Teeaeafw
ge o e on y h em f hs gemn
...
e
prgah1Cblw Teeaealto tig yucnd wt Poet
aarp
...
hr r
o f hns o a o ih rjc
Gtnegt eetoi wrsi yuflo tetrso ti areet
uebr-m lcrnc ok f o olw h em f hs gemn
adhl peev fe ftr acs t PoetGtnegt eetoi
n ep rsre re uue ces o rjc uebr-m lcrnc
wrs Seprgah1Eblw
ok
...
eo
...
h rjc uebr ieay rhv onain "h onain
o PLF,on acmiaincprgti tecleto o Poet
r GA) ws
oplto oyih n h olcin f rjc
Gtnegt eetoi wrs Nal alteidvda wrsi te
uebr-m lcrnc ok
...
I a
olcin r n h ulc oan n h ntd tts
f n
idvda wr i i tepbi dmi i teUie Sae adyuae
niiul ok s n h ulc oan n h ntd tts n o r
lctdi teUie Sae,w d ntcamargtt peetyufo
oae n h ntd tts e o o li
ih o rvn o rm
cpig dsrbtn,promn,dslyn o cetn drvtv
oyn, itiuig efrig ipaig r raig eiaie
wrsbsdo tewr a ln a alrfrne t PoetGtneg
ok ae n h ok s og s l eeecs o rjc uebr
aermvd O cus,w hp ta yuwl spottePoet
r eoe
...
Yucnesl cml wt tetrso ti areetb
h ok
o a aiy opy ih h em f hs gemn y
keigti wr i tesm fra wt isatce fl Poet
epn hs ok n h ae omt ih t tahd ul rjc
Gtnegt Lcnewe yusaei wtotcag wt ohr
...
h oyih as f h lc hr o r oae lo oen
wa yucnd wt ti wr
...
I yuaeotieteUie Sae,cek
osat tt f hne
f o r usd h ntd tts hc
telw o yu cutyi adto t tetrso ti areet
h as f or onr n diin o h em f hs gemn
bfr dwlaig cpig dslyn,promn,dsrbtn o
eoe onodn, oyn, ipaig efrig itiuig r
cetn drvtv wrsbsdo ti wr o ayohrPoet
raig eiaie ok ae n hs ok r n te rjc
Gtnegt wr
...

tts
1E Uls yuhv rmvdalrfrne t PoetGtneg

...
h olwn etne ih cie ik o r te meit
acs t,tefl PoetGtnegt Lcnems apa poiety
ces o h ul rjc uebr-m ies ut per rmnnl
weee aycp o aPoetGtnegt wr (n wr o wihte
hnvr n oy f
rjc uebr-m ok ay ok n hc h
prs "rjc Gtneg apas o wt wihteprs "rjc
hae Poet uebr" per, r ih hc h hae Poet
Gtneg i ascae)i acse,dslyd promd vee,
uebr" s soitd s cesd ipae, efre, iwd
cpe o dsrbtd
oid r itiue:
Ti eoki frteueo ayn ayhr a n cs adwt
hs Bo s o h s f noe nwee t o ot n ih
ams n rsrcin wasee
...
uebr
...
f n niiul rjc uebr-m lcrnc ok s eie
fo tepbi dmi (osntcnanantc idctn ta i i
rm h ulc oan de o oti
oie niaig ht t s
pse wt priso o tecprgthle) tewr cnb cpe
otd ih emsin f h oyih odr, h ok a e oid
addsrbtdt ayn i teUie Sae wtotpyn ayfe
n itiue o noe n h ntd tts ihu aig n es
o cags I yuaerdsrbtn o poiigacs t awr
r hre
...

truh1E7o oti priso frteueo tewr adte
hog
...
r

1E9

...
f n niiul rjc uebr-m lcrnc ok s otd
wt tepriso o tecprgthle,yu ueaddsrbto
ih h emsin f h oyih odr or s n itiuin
ms cml wt bt prgah 1E1truh1E7adayadtoa
ut opy ih oh aarps
...
n n diinl
trsipsdb tecprgthle
...

emsin f h oyih odr on t h einn f hs ok
1E4 D ntuln o dtc o rmv tefl PoetGtnegt

...

ok r n te ok soitd ih rjc uebr-m
1E5 D ntcp,dsly prom dsrbt o rdsrbt ti

...
ih
atv lnso imdaeacs t tefl trso tePoet
cie ik r meit ces o h ul em f h rjc
Gtnegt Lcne
uebr-m ies
...
o a ovr o n itiue hs ok n n iay
cmrse,mre u,nnrpitr o poreayfr,icuigay
opesd akd p oporeay r rpitr om nldn n
wr poesn o hpretfr
...
uebr
...
Ayatraefra ms icuetefl PoetGtnegt
om
n lent omt ut nld h ul rjc uebr-m
Lcnea seiidi prgah1E1
ies s pcfe n aarp
...
o o hre
e o ces o iwn, ipaig
promn,cpigo dsrbtn ayPoetGtnegt wrs
efrig oyn r itiuig n rjc uebr-m ok
uls yucml wt prgah1E8o 1E9
nes o opy ih aarp
...

1E8 Yumycag araoal fefrcpe o o poiig

...
h e s
oe t teonro tePoetGtnegt taeak bth
wd o h we f h rjc uebr-m rdmr, u e
hsare t dnt rylisudrti prgaht te
a ged o oae oate ne hs aarp o h
PoetGtnegLtrr AcieFudto
...
oat amns hud e lal akd s uh n
sn t tePoetGtnegLtrr AcieFudto a te
et o h rjc uebr ieay rhv onain t h
adesseiidi Scin4 "nomto aotdntost
drs pcfe n eto , Ifrain bu oain o
tePoetGtnegLtrr AcieFudto
...
o ut eur uh
sr o eun r
dsryalcpe o tewrspsesdi apyia mdu
eto l ois f h ok osse n
hscl eim
addsotnealueo adalacs t ohrcpe o
n icniu l s f n l ces o te ois f
PoetGtnegt wrs
rjc uebr-m ok
...
,
ul eud f n

mnypi frawr o arpaeetcp,i adfc i te
oe ad o
ok r
elcmn oy f
eet n h
eetoi wr i dsoee adrpre t yuwti 9 dy
lcrnc ok s icvrd n eotd o o ihn 0 as
o rcito tewr
...

1E9 I yuws t cag afeo dsrbt aPoetGtnegt

...
otc h
Fudto a stfrhi Scin3blw
onain s e ot n eto
eo
...

1F1 PoetGtnegvlner adepoesepn cnieal

...
Dsieteeefrs PoetGtnegt eetoi
olcin
ept hs fot, rjc uebr-m lcrnc
wrs adtemdu o wihte myb soe,mycnan
ok, n h eim n hc hy a e trd a oti
"eet, sc a,btntlmtdt,icmlt,iacrt o
Dfcs" uh s u o iie o nopee ncuae r
crutdt,tasrpinerr,acprgto ohritleta
orp aa rncito ros
oyih r te nelcul
poet ifigmn,adfcieo dmgdds o ohrmdu,a
rpry nrneet
eetv r aae ik r te eim
cmue vrs o cmue cdsta dmg o cno b ra b
optr iu, r optr oe ht aae r ant e ed y
yu eupet
or qimn
...
IIE ARNY ICAMR F AAE
xet o h Rgt
o Rpaeeto Rfn"dsrbdi prgah1F3 tePoet
f elcmn r eud ecie n aarp
...
YUARETA YUHV N RMDE FRNGIEC,SRC
es
O GE HT O AE O EEIS O ELGNE TIT
LAIIY BEC O WRAT O BEC O CNRC ECP TOE
IBLT, RAH F ARNY R RAH F OTAT XET HS
POIE I PRGAHF
...

AAE
1F3 LMTDRGTO RPAEETO RFN -I yudsoe a

...
I yu
rte xlnto o h esn o eevd h ok rm
f o
rcie tewr o apyia mdu,yums rtr temdu wt
eevd h ok n
hscl eim o ut eun h eim ih
yu witnepaain Tepro o ett ta poie yuwt
or rte xlnto
...
I yurcie tewr eetoial,tepro o ett
eud
f o eevd h ok lcrncly h esn r niy
poiigi t yumycos t gv yuascn opruiyt
rvdn t o o a hoe o ie o
eod potnt o
rcietewr eetoial i le o arfn
...

1F4 Ecp frtelmtdrgto rpaeeto rfn stfrh

...
, hs ok s rvdd o o A-S, IH O TE
WRATE O AYKN,EPESO IPID ICUIGBTNTLMTDT
ARNIS F N ID XRS R MLE, NLDN U O IIE O
WRATE O MRHNIIIYO FTESFRAYPROE
ARNIS F ECATBLT R INS O N UPS
...
oe tts o o lo icamr f eti mle
wrate o teecuino lmtto o crantpso dmgs
arnis r h xlso r iiain f eti ye f aae
...
h naiiy r nnocaiiy f n
poiino ti areetsalntvi termiigpoiin
...
NENT
o ge o nenf n od h onain h
taeakonr ayaeto epoe o teFudto,ayn
rdmr we, n gn r mlye f h onain noe
poiigcpe o PoetGtnegt eetoi wrsi acrac
rvdn ois f rjc uebr-m lcrnc ok n codne
wt ti areet adayvlner ascae wt tepouto,
ih hs gemn, n n outes soitd ih h rdcin
pooinaddsrbto o PoetGtnegt eetoi wrs
rmto n itiuin f rjc uebr-m lcrnc ok,
hrls fo allaiiy cssadepne,icuiglglfe,
ames rm l iblt, ot n xess nldn ea es
ta aiedrcl o idrcl fo ayo tefloigwihyud
ht rs iety r niety rm n f h olwn hc o o
o cuet ocr ()dsrbto o ti o ayPoetGtnegt
r as o cu: a itiuin f hs r n rjc uebr-m
wr,()atrto,mdfcto,o adtoso dltost ay
ok b leain oiiain r diin r eein o n
PoetGtnegt wr,ad()ayDfc yucue
rjc uebr-m ok n c n eet o as
...
nomto bu h iso f rjc uebr-m
PoetGtnegt i snnmu wt tefe dsrbto o
rjc uebr-m s yoyos ih h re itiuin f
eetoi wrsi frasraal b tewds vreyo cmues
lcrnc ok n omt edbe y h iet ait f optr
icuigoslt,od mdl-gdadnwcmues I eit
nldn boee l, ideae n e optr
...

epe n l ak f ie
Vlner adfnnilspott poievlner wt te
outes n iaca upr o rvd outes ih h
assac te ne,i ciia t rahn PoetGtnegt'
sitne hy ed s rtcl o ecig rjc uebr-ms
gasadesrn ta tePoetGtnegt cleto wl
ol n nuig ht h rjc uebr-m olcin il
rmi fel aalbefrgnrtost cm
...

T lanmr aottePoetGtnegLtrr AcieFudto
o er oe bu h rjc uebr ieay rhv onain
adhwyu efrsaddntoscnhl,seScin 3ad4
n o or fot n oain a ep e etos
n
adteFudto wbpg a ht:/w
...
r
...
nomto bu h rjc uebr ieay rhv
Fudto
onain
TePoetGtnegLtrr AcieFudto i annpoi
h rjc uebr ieay rhv onain s
o rft
51c()euainlcroainognzdudrtelw o te
0()3 dctoa oprto raie ne h as f h
saeo Msispiadgatdtxeep sau b teItra
tt f issip n rne a xmt tts y h nenl
RvneSrie TeFudto' ENo fdrltxietfcto
eeu evc
...
Is51c()lte i pse a
ubr s 46251
t 0()3 etr s otd t
ht:/ga
...
Cnrbtost tePoetGtneg
tp/plfogfnriig
otiuin o h rjc uebr
Ltrr AcieFudto aetxddcil t tefl etn
ieay rhv onain r a eutbe o h ul xet
pritdb US fdrllw adyu saeslw
...
eea as n or tt' as
TeFudto' picplofc i lctda 45 MlnD
...

Fibns A,972,btisvlner adepoesaesatrd
arak, K 91
...
t uies fie s oae t
89Nrh10 Ws,Sl Lk Ct,U 816 (0)5618,eal
0 ot 50 et at ae iy T 41, 81 9-87 mi
bsns@ga
...
Ealcnatlnsadu t dt cnat
uiesplfog
mi otc ik n p o ae otc
ifraincnb fuda teFudto' wbst adofca
nomto a e on t h onains e ie n fiil
pg a ht:/ga
...
GeoyB Nwy
r rgr
...
r

Scin4 IfrainaotDntost tePoetGtneg
eto
...
ay ml oain
(1t $,0)aepriual ipratt mitiigtxeep
$ o 500 r atclry motn o anann a xmt
sau wt teIS
tts ih h R
...
Cmlac rqieet aentuiomadi tksa
tts
opine eurmns r o nfr n t ae
cnieal efr,mc pprokadmn fe t me adke u
osdrbe fot uh aewr n ay es o et n ep p
wt teerqieet
...
T
hr e ae o eevd rte ofrain f opine
o
SN DNTOSo dtrietesau o cmlac fray
ED OAIN r eemn h tts f opine o n
priua saevstht:/ga
...

prah s ih fes o oae
Itrainldntosaegaeul acpe,btw cno mk
nentoa oain r rtfly cetd u e ant ae
aysaeet cnenn txteteto dntosrcie fo
n ttmns ocrig a ramn f oain eevd rm
otieteUie Sae
...
as ln wm u ml tf
...
oain r cetd n
ubr f te
wy icuigicuigcek,oln pyet adcei cr
as nldn nldn hcs nie amns n rdt ad
dntos T dnt,pes vst ht:/ga
...
o oae lae ii: tp/plfogdnt

Scin5 GnrlIfrainAotPoetGtnegt eetoi
eto
...

PoesrMcalS Hr i teoiiao o tePoetGtnegt
rfso ihe
...
Frtit yas h poue addsrbtdPoet
ih noe
o hry er, e rdcd n itiue rjc
Gtnegt eok wt ol aloentoko vlnerspot
uebr-m Bos ih ny
os ewr f oute upr
...

uls acprgtntc i icue
...

Ms pol sata orWbst wihhstemi P sac fclt:
ot epe tr t u e ie hc a h an G erh aiiy
ht:/w
...
e
tp/wwgtnegnt
Ti Wbst icue ifrainaotPoetGtnegt,
hs e ie nlds nomto bu rjc uebr-m
icuighwt mk dntost tePoetGtnegLtrr
nldn o o ae oain o h rjc uebr ieay
AcieFudto,hwt hl poueornweok,adhwt
rhv onain o o ep rdc u e Bos n o o
sbciet orealnwlte t ha aotnweok

---