I have told the circumstances of the stranger’s arrival in
Iping with a certain fulness of detail, in order that the curious impression he
created may be understood by the reader. But excepting two odd incidents,
the circumstances of his stay until the extraordinary day of the club festival
may be passed over very cursorily. There were a number of skirmishes with
Mrs. Hall on matters of domestic discipline, but in every case until late
April, when the first signs of penury began, he over-rode her by the easy expedient
of an extra payment. Hall did not like him, and whenever he dared he
talked of the advisability of getting rid of him; but he showed his dislike
chiefly by concealing it ostentatiously, and avoiding his visitor as much as
possible. “Wait till the summer,” said Mrs. Hall sagely, “when the
artisks are beginning to come. Then we’ll see. He may be a bit
overbearing, but bills settled punctual is bills settled punctual, whatever
you’d like to say.”
The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference
between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as
Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and
be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room,
fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by the
fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none.
His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was that of a
man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once or twice things
were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic gusts of violence. He
seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of
talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall
listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she
heard.
He rarely went abroad by daylight, but at twilight he would
go out muffled up invisibly, whether the weather were cold or not, and he chose
the loneliest paths and those most overshadowed by trees and banks. His
goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the penthouse of his hat,
came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness upon one or two
home-going labourers, and Teddy Henfrey, tumbling out of the “Scarlet Coat” one
night, at half-past nine, was scared shamefully by the stranger’s skull-like
head (he was walking hat in hand) lit by the sudden light of the opened inn
door. Such children as saw him at nightfall dreamt of bogies, and it
seemed doubtful whether he disliked boys more than they disliked him, or the
reverse; but there was certainly a vivid enough dislike on either side.
It was inevitable that a person of so remarkable an
appearance and bearing should form a frequent topic in such a village as
Iping. Opinion was greatly divided about his occupation. Mrs. Hall
was sensitive on the point. When questioned, she explained very carefully
that he was an “experimental investigator,” going gingerly over the syllables
as one who dreads pitfalls. When asked what an experimental investigator
was, she would say with a touch of superiority that most educated people knew
such things as that, and would thus explain that he “discovered things.”
Her visitor had had an accident, she said, which temporarily discoloured his face
and hands, and being of a sensitive disposition, he was averse to any public
notice of the fact.
Out of her hearing there was a view largely entertained that
he was a criminal trying to escape from justice by wrapping himself up so as to
conceal himself altogether from the eye of the police. This idea sprang
from the brain of Mr. Teddy Henfrey. No crime of any magnitude dating
from the middle or end of February was known to have occurred. Elaborated
in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant in the National
School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in
disguise, preparing explosives, and he resolved to undertake such detective
operations as his time permitted. These consisted for the most part in
looking very hard at the stranger whenever they met, or in asking people who
had never seen the stranger, leading questions about him. But he detected
nothing.
Another school of opinion followed Mr. Fearenside, and
either accepted the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for instance,
Silas Durgan, who was heard to assert that “if he choses to show
enself at fairs he’d make his fortune in no time,” and being a bit of a
theologian, compared the stranger to the man with the one talent. Yet
another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a
harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything
straight away.
Between these main groups there were waverers and
compromisers. Sussex folk have few superstitions, and it was only after the
events of early April that the thought of the supernatural was first whispered
in the village. Even then it was only credited among the women folk.
But whatever they thought of him, people in Iping, on the
whole, agreed in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have
been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these
quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they surprised now and
then, the headlong pace after nightfall that swept him upon them round quiet corners,
the inhuman bludgeoning of all tentative advances of curiosity, the taste for
twilight that led to the closing of doors, the pulling down of blinds, the
extinction of candles and lamps who could agree with such goings on?
They drew aside as he passed down the village, and when he had gone by, young
humourists would up with coat-collars and down with hat-brims, and go pacing
nervously after him in imitation of his occult bearing. There was a song
popular at that time called “The Bogey Man”. Miss Statchell sang it at
the schoolroom concert (in aid of the church lamps), and thereafter whenever
one or two of the villagers were gathered together and the stranger appeared, a
bar or so of this tune, more or less sharp or flat, was whistled in the midst of
them. Also belated little children would call “Bogey Man!” after him, and
make off tremulously elated.
Cuss, the general practitioner, was devoured by
curiosity. The bandages excited his professional interest, the report of
the thousand and one bottles aroused his jealous regard. All through
April and May he coveted an opportunity of talking to the stranger, and at
last, towards Whitsuntide, he could stand it no longer, but hit upon the
subscription-list for a village nurse as an excuse. He was surprised to
find that Mr. Hall did not know his guest’s name. “He give a name,” said
Mrs. Hall an assertion which was quite unfounded “but I didn’t rightly hear
it.” She thought it seemed so silly not to know the man’s name.
Cuss rapped at the parlour door and entered. There was
a fairly audible imprecation from within. “Pardon my intrusion,” said
Cuss, and then the door closed and cut Mrs. Hall off from the rest of the
conversation.
She could hear the murmur of voices for the next ten
minutes, then a cry of surprise, a stirring of feet, a chair flung aside, a
bark of laughter, quick steps to the door, and Cuss appeared, his face white,
his eyes staring over his shoulder. He left the door open behind him, and
without looking at her strode across the hall and went down the steps, and she
heard his feet hurrying along the road. He carried his hat in his
hand. She stood behind the door, looking at the open door of the
parlour. Then she heard the stranger laughing quietly, and then his footsteps
came across the room. She could not see his face where she stood.
The parlour door slammed, and the place was silent again.
Cuss went straight up the village to Bunting the
vicar. “Am I mad?” Cuss began abruptly, as he entered the shabby little
study. “Do I look like an insane person?”
“What’s happened?” said the vicar, putting the ammonite on
the loose sheets of his forth-coming sermon.
“That chap at the inn ”
“Well?”
“Give me something to drink,” said Cuss, and he sat down.
When his nerves had been steadied by a glass of cheap sherry
the only drink the good vicar had available he told him of the interview he
had just had. “Went in,” he gasped, “and began to demand a subscription
for that Nurse Fund. He’d stuck his hands in his pockets as I came in,
and he sat down lumpily in his chair. Sniffed. I told him I’d heard
he took an interest in scientific things. He said yes. Sniffed
again. Kept on sniffing all the time; evidently recently caught an
infernal cold. No wonder, wrapped up like that! I developed the
nurse idea, and all the while kept my eyes open. Bottles chemicals everywhere.
Balance, test-tubes in stands, and a smell of evening primrose. Would he
subscribe? Said he’d consider it. Asked him, point-blank, was he
researching. Said he was. A long research? Got quite
cross. ’A damnable long research,’ said he, blowing the cork out, so to
speak. ‘Oh,’ said I. And out came the grievance. The man was just
on the boil, and my question boiled him over. He had been given a
prescription, most valuable prescription what for he wouldn’t say. Was
it medical? ‘Damn you! What are you fishing after?’ I
apologised. Dignified sniff and cough. He resumed. He’d read
it. Five ingredients. Put it down; turned his head. Draught
of air from window lifted the paper. Swish, rustle. He was working
in a room with an open fireplace, he said. Saw a flicker, and there was
the prescription burning and lifting chimneyward. Rushed towards it just
as it whisked up the chimney. So! Just at that point, to illustrate
his story, out came his arm.”
“Well?”
“No hand just an empty sleeve. Lord! I
thought, that’s a deformity! Got a cork arm, I suppose, and has
taken it off. Then, I thought, there’s something odd in that. What
the devil keeps that sleeve up and open, if there’s nothing in it? There
was nothing in it, I tell you. Nothing down it, right down to the
joint. I could see right down it to the elbow, and there was a glimmer of
light shining through a tear of the cloth. ‘Good God!’ I said. Then
he stopped. Stared at me with those black goggles of his, and then at his
sleeve.”
“Well?”
“That’s all. He never said a word; just glared, and
put his sleeve back in his pocket quickly. ‘I was saying,’ said he, ’that
there was the prescription burning, wasn’t I?’ Interrogative cough. ‘How
the devil,’ said I, ‘can you move an empty sleeve like that?’ ‘Empty sleeve?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘an empty sleeve.’
“‘It’s an empty sleeve, is it? You saw it was an empty
sleeve?’ He stood up right away. I stood up too. He came towards me
in three very slow steps, and stood quite close. Sniffed
venomously. I didn’t flinch, though I’m hanged if that bandaged knob of
his, and those blinkers, aren’t enough to unnerve any one, coming quietly up to
you.
“‘You said it was an empty sleeve?’ he said.
‘Certainly,’ I said. At staring and saying nothing a barefaced man,
unspectacled, starts scratch. Then very quietly he pulled his sleeve out
of his pocket again, and raised his arm towards me as though he would show it
to me again. He did it very, very slowly. I looked at it.
Seemed an age. ‘Well?’ said I, clearing my throat, ‘there’s nothing in
it.’
“Had to say something. I was beginning to feel
frightened. I could see right down it. He extended it straight
towards me, slowly, slowly just like that until the cuff was six inches from
my face. Queer thing to see an empty sleeve come at you like that!
And then ”
“Well?”
“Something exactly like a finger and thumb it felt nipped
my nose.”
Bunting began to laugh.
“There wasn’t anything there!” said Cuss, his voice running
up into a shriek at the “there.” “It’s all very well for you to laugh,
but I tell you I was so startled, I hit his cuff hard, and turned around, and
cut out of the room I left him ”
Cuss stopped. There was no mistaking the sincerity of
his panic. He turned round in a helpless way and took a second glass of
the excellent vicar’s very inferior sherry. “When I hit his cuff,” said
Cuss, “I tell you, it felt exactly like hitting an arm. And there wasn’t
an arm! There wasn’t the ghost of an arm!”
Mr. Bunting thought it over. He looked suspiciously at
Cuss. “It’s a most remarkable story,” he said. He looked very wise
and grave indeed. “It’s really,” said Mr. Bunting with judicial emphasis,
“a most remarkable story.”
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