Mr. Heelas, Mr. Kemp’s nearest neighbour among the villa
holders, was asleep in his summer house when the siege of Kemp’s house
began. Mr. Heelas was one of the sturdy minority who refused to believe
“in all this nonsense” about an Invisible Man. His wife, however, as he
was subsequently to be reminded, did. He insisted upon walking about his
garden just as if nothing was the matter, and he went to sleep in the afternoon
in accordance with the custom of years. He slept through the smashing of
the windows, and then woke up suddenly with a curious persuasion of something
wrong. He looked across at Kemp’s house, rubbed his eyes and looked
again. Then he put his feet to the ground, and sat listening. He
said he was damned, but still the strange thing was visible. The house
looked as though it had been deserted for weeks after a violent riot.
Every window was broken, and every window, save those of the belvedere study,
was blinded by the internal shutters.
“I could have sworn it was all right” he looked at his
watch “twenty minutes ago.”
He became aware of a measured concussion and the clash of
glass, far away in the distance. And then, as he sat open-mouthed, came a
still more wonderful thing. The shutters of the drawing-room window were
flung open violently, and the housemaid in her outdoor hat and garments,
appeared struggling in a frantic manner to throw up the sash. Suddenly a
man appeared beside her, helping her Dr. Kemp! In another moment the
window was open, and the housemaid was struggling out; she pitched forward and
vanished among the shrubs. Mr. Heelas stood up, exclaiming vaguely and
vehemently at all these wonderful things. 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. He vanished behind a laburnum, and appeared again clambering
over a fence that abutted on the open down. In a second he had tumbled
over and was running at a tremendous pace down the slope towards Mr. Heelas.
“Lord!” cried Mr. Heelas, struck with an idea; “it’s that
Invisible Man brute! It’s right, after all!”
With 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. There was a slamming of
doors, a ringing of bells, and the voice of Mr. Heelas bellowing like a
bull. “Shut the doors, shut the windows, shut everything! the Invisible
Man is coming!” Instantly the house was full of screams and directions, and
scurrying feet. 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. In another moment Kemp had ploughed through the
asparagus, and was running across the tennis lawn to the house.
“You can’t come in,” said Mr. Heelas, shutting the
bolts. “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, seeing
his efforts were useless, he ran along the veranda, vaulted the end, and went
to hammer at the side door. Then he ran round by the side gate to the
front of the house, and so into the hill-road. And Mr. 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. At that
Mr. Heelas fled precipitately upstairs, and the rest of the chase is beyond his
purview. But as he passed the staircase window, he heard the side gate
slam.
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 it well, for a man out of training, and though his face
was white and wet, his wits were cool to the last. 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.
For the first time in his life Kemp discovered that the
hill-road was indescribably vast and desolate, and that the beginnings of the
town far below at the hill foot were strangely remote. Never had there
been a slower or more painful method of progression than running. All the
gaunt villas, sleeping in the afternoon sun, looked locked and barred; no doubt
they were locked and barred by his own orders. 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. A tram was just arriving at the hill foot.
Beyond that was the police station. Was that footsteps he heard behind
him? Spurt.
The people below were staring at him, one or two were
running, and his breath was beginning to saw in his throat. The tram was
quite near now, and the “Jolly Cricketers” was noisily barring its doors.
Beyond the tram were posts and heaps of gravel the drainage works. He
had a transitory idea of jumping into the tram and slamming the doors, and then
he resolved to go for the police station. 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. The tram driver and his helper arrested
by the sight of his furious haste stood staring with the tram horses
unhitched. Further on the astonished features of navvies appeared above
the mounds of gravel.
His pace broke a little, and then he heard the swift pad of
his pursuer, and leapt forward again. “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. Then
abandoning the idea of the police station he turned into a little side street,
rushed by a greengrocer’s cart, hesitated for the tenth of a second at the door
of a sweetstuff shop, and then made for the mouth of an alley that ran back
into the main Hill Street again. 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. Out he shot
into Hill Street again, three hundred yards from the tram-line end, and
immediately he became aware of a tumultuous vociferation and running people.
He glanced up the street towards the hill. Hardly a
dozen yards off ran a huge navvy, cursing in fragments and slashing viciously
with a spade, and hard behind him came the tram conductor with his fists
clenched. Up the street others followed these two, striking and
shouting. Down towards the town, men and women were running, and he
noticed clearly one man coming out of a shop-door with a stick in his hand.
“Spread out! Spread out!” cried some one. Kemp suddenly grasped the
altered condition of the chase. He stopped, and looked round,
panting. “He’s close here!” he cried. “Form a line across ”
He was hit hard under the ear, and went reeling, trying to
face round towards his unseen antagonist. He just managed to keep his
feet, and he struck a vain counter in the air. Then he was hit again
under the jaw, and sprawled headlong on the ground. In another moment a
knee compressed his diaphragm, and a couple of eager hands gripped his throat,
but the grip of one was weaker than the other; he grasped the wrists, heard a
cry of pain from his assailant, and then the spade of the navvy came whirling
through the air above him, and struck something with a dull thud. He felt
a drop of moisture on his face. The grip at his throat suddenly relaxed,
and with a convulsive effort, Kemp loosed himself, grasped a limp shoulder, and
rolled uppermost. He gripped the unseen elbows near the ground.
“I’ve got him!” screamed Kemp. “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. And there
was no shouting after Kemp’s cry only a sound of blows and feet and heavy
breathing.
Then came a mighty effort, and the Invisible Man threw off a
couple of his antagonists and rose to his knees. Kemp clung to him in
front like a hound to a stag, and a dozen hands gripped, clutched, and tore at
the Unseen. The tram conductor suddenly got the neck and shoulders and
lugged him back.
Down went the heap of struggling men again and rolled
over. There was, I am afraid, some savage kicking. Then suddenly a
wild scream of “Mercy! Mercy!” that died down swiftly to a sound like
choking.
“Get back, you fools!” cried the muffled voice of Kemp, and
there was a vigorous shoving back of stalwart forms. “He’s hurt, I tell
you. 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. Behind him a constable
gripped invisible ankles.
“Don’t you leave go of en,” cried the big navvy, holding a
blood-stained spade; “he’s shamming.”
“He’s not shamming,” said the doctor, cautiously raising his
knee; “and I’ll hold him.” His face was bruised and already going red; he
spoke thickly because of a bleeding lip. He released one hand and seemed
to be feeling at the face. “The mouth’s all wet,” he said. And
then, “Good God!”
He stood up abruptly and then knelt down on the ground by
the side of the thing unseen. There was a pushing and shuffling, a sound
of heavy feet as fresh people turned up to increase the pressure of the
crowd. People now were coming out of the houses. The doors of the
“Jolly Cricketers” stood suddenly wide open. Very little was said.
Kemp felt about, his hand seeming to pass through empty
air. “He’s not breathing,” he said, and then, “I can’t feel his
heart. His side ugh!”
Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the big
navvy, screamed sharply. “Looky there!” she said, and thrust out a
wrinkled finger.
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. It grew clouded and opaque even as they stared.
“Hullo!” cried the constable. “Here’s his feet
a-showing!”
And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping
along his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change
continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison. First came
the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones
and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, and
then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Presently they could see his
crushed chest and his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered
features.
When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect,
there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a
young man about thirty. His hair and brow were white not grey with age,
but white with the whiteness of albinism and his eyes were like garnets.
His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his expression was one of
anger and dismay.
“Cover his face!” said a man. “For Gawd’s sake, cover
that face!” and three little children, pushing forward through the crowd, were
suddenly twisted round and sent packing off again.
Someone brought a sheet from the “Jolly Cricketers,” and
having covered him, they carried him into that house. And there it was,
on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of
ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that
Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most
gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange
and terrible career.
No comments:
Post a Comment