الفصل الفصل 28 · THE HUNTER HUNTED

. THE HUNTER HUNTED

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.

THE EPILOGUE

So ends the story of the strange and evil experiments of the Invisible

Man. And if you would learn more of him you must go to a little inn

near Port Stowe and talk to the landlord. The sign of the inn is an

empty board save for a hat and boots, and the name is the title of this

story. The landlord is a short and corpulent little man with a nose of

cylindrical proportions, wiry hair, and a sporadic rosiness of visage.

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.

“When they found they couldn’t prove whose money was which, I’m

blessed,” he says, “if they didn’t try to make me out a blooming

treasure trove! Do I _look_ like a Treasure Trove? And then a gentleman

gave me a guinea a night to tell the story at the Empire Music

’All—just to tell ’em in my own words—barring one.”

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. He admits there were and proceeds to explain, with

asseverations that everybody thinks _he_ has ’em! But bless you! he

hasn’t. “The Invisible Man it was took ’em off to hide ’em when I cut

and ran for Port Stowe. It’s that Mr. Kemp put people on with the idea

of _my_ having ’em.”

And then he subsides into a pensive state, watches you furtively,

bustles nervously with glasses, and presently leaves the bar.

He is a bachelor man—his tastes were ever bachelor, and there are no

women folk in the house. Outwardly he buttons—it is expected of him—but

in his more vital privacies, in the matter of braces for example, he

still turns to string. He conducts his house without enterprise, but

with eminent decorum. His movements are slow, and he is a great

thinker. 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 on Sunday mornings, every Sunday morning, all the year round, while

he is closed to the outer world, and every night after ten, he goes

into his bar parlour, bearing a glass of gin faintly tinged with water,

and having placed this down, he locks the door and examines the blinds,

and even looks under the table. 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 covers are

weather-worn and tinged with an algal green—for once they sojourned in

a ditch and some of the pages have been washed blank by dirty water.

The landlord sits down in an armchair, fills a long clay pipe

slowly—gloating over the books the while. Then he pulls one towards him

and opens it, and begins to study it—turning over the leaves backwards

and forwards.

His brows are knit and his lips move painfully. “Hex, little two up in

the air, cross and a fiddle-de-dee. 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. “Full of secrets,”

he says. “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.

So he lapses into a dream, the undying wonderful dream of his life. 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. And none other will know

of them until he dies.