The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp’s house
in a state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp’s gateway was
violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken, and
thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human
perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one
can imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up the hill and on to
the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and despairing at his intolerable
fate, and sheltering at last, heated and weary, amid the thickets of
Hintondean, to piece together again his shattered schemes against his
species. That seems to most probable refuge for him, for there it was he
re-asserted himself in a grimly tragical manner about two in the afternoon.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that
time, and what plans he devised. 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. Perhaps
something of the stunned astonishment of his Oxford Street experiences may have
returned to him, for he had evidently counted on Kemp’s co-operation in his
brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished from human
ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did until about
half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for
him it was a fatal inaction.
During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over
the countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a
legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp’s drily worded
proclamation, he was presented as a tangible antagonist, to be wounded, captured,
or overcome, and the countryside began organising itself with inconceivable
rapidity. 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. Every passenger train along the lines on a great
parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and Horsham, travelled
with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost entirely suspended.
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.
Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at
every cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keep indoors
unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had broken up by three
o’clock, and the children, scared and keeping together in groups, were hurrying
home. Kemp’s proclamation signed indeed by Adye was posted over almost
the whole district by four or five o’clock in the afternoon. It gave
briefly but clearly all the conditions of the struggle, the necessity of
keeping the Invisible Man from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant
watchfulness and for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements.
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. And
before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror went through the whole watching
nervous countryside. 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. Wicksteed.
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. We cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had
the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteed is to me at least overwhelming.
Of course we can know nothing of the details of that
encounter. It occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards
from Lord Burdock’s lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate struggle
the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteed received, his
splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made, save in a murderous
frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the theory of madness is
almost unavoidable. Mr. 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. Against him it
would seem the Invisible Man used an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of
fence. 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.
Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing
before he met his victim he must have been carrying it ready in his
hand. Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear
on the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not in Mr.
Wicksteed’s direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred yards out of his
way. The other is the assertion of a little girl to the effect that,
going to her afternoon school, she saw the murdered man “trotting” in a
peculiar manner across a field towards the gravel pit. 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. She was the last
person to see him alive. 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.
Now this, to the present writer’s mind at least, lifts the
murder out of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that
Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention
of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then have come by and noticed this
rod inexplicably moving through the air. Without any thought of the
Invisible Man for Port Burdock is ten miles away he may have pursued
it. It is quite conceivable that he may not even have heard of the
Invisible Man. 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.
No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his
middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which
Wicksteed’s body was found suggests that he had the ill luck to drive his
quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the gravel
pit. To those who appreciate the extraordinary irascibility of the
Invisible Man, the rest of the encounter will be easy to imagine.
But this is pure hypothesis. 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. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin, suggests that in the
emotional excitement of the affair, the purpose for which he took it if he had
a purpose was abandoned. 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.
After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have
struck across the country towards the downland. There is a story of a
voice heard about sunset by a couple of men in a field near Fern Bottom.
It was wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever and again it
shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove up across the
middle of a clover field and died away towards the hills.
That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learnt something
of the rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. 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. And as the evening
advanced, the fields became dotted here and there with groups of three or four
men, and noisy with the yelping of dogs. These men-hunters had particular
instructions in the case of an encounter as to the way they should support one
another. But he avoided them all. 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.
For that day at least he lost heart; for nearly twenty-four hours, save when he
turned on Wicksteed, he was a hunted man. 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.
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