In the early evening time Dr. Kemp was sitting in his study
in the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. 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. Dr. 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. Dr. 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.
And his eye, presently wandering from his work, caught the
sunset blazing at the back of the hill that is over against his own. 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. He was a shortish
little man, and he wore a high hat, and he was running so fast that his legs
verily twinkled.
“Another of those fools,” said Dr. Kemp. “Like that
ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with the ’’Visible Man
a-coming, sir!’ I can’t imagine what possess people. One might think we
were in the thirteenth century.”
He got up, went to the window, and stared at the dusky
hillside, and the dark little figure tearing down it. “He seems in a
confounded hurry,” said Dr. Kemp, “but he doesn’t seem to be getting on.
If his pockets were full of lead, he couldn’t run heavier.”
“Spurted, sir,” said Dr. Kemp.
In another moment the higher of the villas that had
clambered up the hill from Burdock had occulted the running figure. He
was visible again for a moment, and again, and then again, three times between
the three detached houses that came next, and then the terrace hid him.
“Asses!” said Dr. Kemp, swinging round on his heel and
walking back to his writing-table.
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. By the man pounded, and as he ran he
chinked like a well-filled purse that is tossed to and fro. 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.
And his ill-shaped mouth fell apart, and a glairy foam lay on his lips, and his
breath came hoarse and noisy. 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.
And then presently, far up the hill, a dog playing in the
road yelped and ran under a gate, and as they still wondered something a wind a
pad, pad, pad, a sound like a panting breathing, rushed by.
People screamed. People sprang off the pavement:
It passed in shouts, it passed by instinct down the hill. They were
shouting in the street before Marvel was halfway there. They were bolting
into houses and slamming the doors behind them, with the news. He heard
it and made one last desperate spurt. Fear came striding by, rushed ahead
of him, and in a moment had seized the town.
“The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!”
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