บทที่ บทที่ 26 · THE WICKSTEED MURDER

. THE WICKSTEED MURDER

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 the 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.