The Invisible Man - HG Wells

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Invisible Matten by H. G. Wells, Chapter one, The
Strange Man's Arrival. The Stranger came early in February one
wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow,
the last snowfall of the year, over the down, Walking
from Bramblehurst Railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau

(00:22):
in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from
head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt
hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny
tip of his nose. The snow had piled itself against
his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to
the burden he carried. He staggered into the coach and
horses more dead than alive, and flung his portmanteau down

(00:44):
a fire. He cried, in the name of human charity,
a room and a fire. He stamped and shook the
snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Missus
Hall into her guest parlor to strike his bargain. And
with that much introduction, that and a couple of sovereigns
flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in
the inn. Missus Hall lit the fire and left him

(01:06):
there while she went to prepare him a meal with
her own hands. A guest to stop at iping in
the winter time was an unheard of piece of luck,
let alone a guest who was no haggler, and she
resolved to show herself worthy of her good fortune. As
soon as the bacon was well under way, and Milly
her lymphatic aid had been brisked up a bit by
a few deftly chosen expressions of contempt, she carried the cloth,

(01:29):
plates and glasses into the parlor and began to lay
them with the utmost igler. Although the fire was burning
up briskly. She was surprised to see that her visitor
still wore his hat and coat, standing with his back
to her and staring out of the window at the
falling snow in the yard. His gloved hands were clasped
behind him, and he seemed to be lost in thought.

(01:50):
She noticed that the melting snows that still sprinkled his
shoulders dripped upon her carpet. Can I take your hat
and coat, sir, she said, and give them a good
dry in the kitchen, No, he said, without turning. She
was not sure she had heard him, and was about
to repeat her question. He turned his head and looked

(02:12):
at her over his shoulder. I prefer to keep them on,
he said, with emphasis, and she noticed that he wore
big blue spectacles with sidelights, and had a bush side
whisker over his coat collar that completely hid his cheeks
and face. Very well, sir, she said, as you like.
In a bit, the room will be warmer. He made

(02:34):
no answer and had turned his face away from her again,
and missus Hall, feeling that her conversational advances were ill timed,
laid the rest of the table things in a quick
staccato and whisked out of the room. When she returned,
he was still standing there like a man of stone,
his back hunched, his collar turned up, his dripping hat
brim turned down, hiding his face and ears completely. She

(02:58):
put down the eggs and bacon with conscer dable emphasis
and called, rather than said, to him, your lunch is served.
Her Thank you, he said at the same time, and
did not stir until she was closing the door. Then
he swung round and approached the table with a certain
eager quickness. As she went behind the bar to the kitchen,

(03:19):
she heard a sound repeated at regular intervals cherk, cherk, cherk.
It went the sound of a spoon being rapidly whisked
around a basin. That girl, she said there, I'd clean
forgot it, it's her being so long. And while she
herself finished mixing the mustard, she gave Milly a few
verbal stabs for her excessive slowness. She had cooked the

(03:40):
ham and eggs, laid the table, and done everything while
Milly help indeed, had only succeeded in delaying the mustard
and him a new guest and wanting to stay. Then
she filled the mustard pot, and putting it with a
certain stateliness upon a golden black tea tray, carried it
into the parlor. She rapped and entered promptly. As she

(04:03):
did so, her visitor moved quickly, so that she got
but a glimpse of a white object disappearing behind the table.
It would seem he was picking something from the floor.
She rapped down the mustard pot on the table. Then
she noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off
and put over a chair in front of the fire,
and a pair of wet boots threatened rust to her

(04:24):
steel fender. She went to these things resolutely. I suppose
I may have them to dry now, she said, in
a voice that brooked no denial. Leave the hat, said
her visitor in a muffled voice, and turning she saw
he had raised his head and was sitting and looking
at her. For a moment she stood gaping at him,

(04:45):
too surprised to speak. He held a white cloth. It
was a serviette he had brought with him over the
lower part of his face, so that his mouth and
jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason of
his muffled voice. But it was not that which startled
missus Hall. It was the fact that all his forehead
above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage,

(05:07):
and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap
of his face exposed, excepting only his pink peaked nose.
It was bright, pink and shiny, just as it had
been at first. He wore a dark brown velvet jacket
with a high black linen lined collar, turned up about
his neck. The thick black hair escaping as it could

(05:28):
below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails
and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. This muffled
and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated,
that for a moment she was rigid. He did not
remove the serviette, but remained holding it, as she saw now,

(05:49):
with a brown gloved hand and regarding her with his
inscrutable blue glasses. Leave the hat, he said, speaking very
distinctly through the white cloth. Her nerves began to recover
from the shock that they had received. She placed the
hat on the chair again by the fire. I I
didn't know, sir, she began that, and she stopped, embarrassed.

(06:13):
Thank you, he said, dryly, glancing from her to the door,
then at her again. I'll have them nicely dried, so
at once, she said, and carried his clothes out of
the room. She glanced at his white swathed head and
blue goggles again as she was going out of the door,
but his napkin was still in front of his face.
She shivered a little as she closed the door behind her,

(06:34):
and her face was eloquent of her surprising perplexity. I
never she whispered. There. She went quite softly to the
kitchen and was too preoccupied to ask merely what she
was messing about with now. When she got there, the
visitor sat and listened to her retreating feet. He glanced

(06:56):
inquiringly at the window before he removed his serviette and
was resumed his meal. He took a mouthful, glanced suspiciously
at the window, took another mouthful, then rose, and, taking
the serviette in his hand, walked across the room and
pulled the blind down to the top of the white
muslin that obscured the lower panes. This left the room
in a twilight. This done, he returned with an easier

(07:21):
air to the table than his meal. The poor soles
had an accident, or an operation or something, said missus Hall.
What a turn, then, bandages did give me? To be sure,
she put on some more coal, unfolded the clothes horse,
and extended the traveler's coat upon this, and they goggles
while he looked more like a diving helmet than a

(07:41):
human man. She hung his muffler on a corner of
the horse, and holding that handkerchief over his mouth all
the time talking through it. Perhaps his mouth was hurt too,
Maybe she turned round as one who suddenly remembers. Bless
my soul alive, she said, going off at a tangent.
Ain't you done them tat as yet? Milly when missus

(08:05):
Hall went to clear away the stranger's lunch, her idea
that his mouth must also have been cut or disfigured
in the accident she supposed him to have suffered was confirmed,
for he was smoking a pipe, and all the time
that she was in the room, he never loosened the
silk muffler he had wrapped around the lower part of
his face to put the mouthpiece to his lips. Yet
it was not forgetfulness, for she saw he glanced at

(08:26):
it as it smolded out. He sat in the corner
with his back to the window blind and spoke, now,
having eaten and drunk, and being comfortably warmed through with
less aggressive brevity than before. The reflection of the fire
lent a kind of red animation to his big spectacles
that they had lacked. Hitherto, I have some luggage, she
said at Bramblehurst's station, and he asked her how he

(08:50):
could have its sent. He bowed his bandaged head quite
politely in acknowledgment of her explanation to morrow. He said,
there is no speedier delivery, and seemed quite disappointed when
she answered no. Was she quite sure no man with
a trap could go over missus Hall nothing loth, answered
his questions and developed a conversation. It's a steep road

(09:13):
by the down, sir, she said, in answer to the
question about a trap, and then, snatching at an opening,
said it was there. A carriage was up settled a
year ago or more. A gentleman killed besides his coachman. Accidents, sir,
happen in a moment, don't they. But the visitor was
not to be drawn so easily they do, he said,
through his muffler, eyeing her quietly through his impenetrable glasses.

(09:38):
But they take long enough to get well, don't they.
There was my sister's son, Tom Jest cut his arm
with a scythe and tumbled on it in the ayfield,
and blessed me. He was three months tied up her.
You hardly believe it. It's regular given a dread of
a scythe sir, I can quite understand that, said the visitor.
He was afraid one time that he'd have to have

(09:58):
an operation. He was that, sir. The visitor laughed abruptly,
a bark of a laugh that he seemed to bite
and kill in his mouth. Was he? He said, he was, sir,
And no laughing matter to them, as had for doing
for him, as I had my sister being took up
with her little one so much. There was bandages to do, sir,
and bandages to undo. So that if I might be

(10:20):
so bold as to say, sir, will you get me
some matches? Said the visitor quite abruptly. My pipe is out,
missus Hall was pulled up suddenly. It was certainly rude
of him. After telling him all she had done, she
gasped at him for a moment, and then remembered the
two sovereigns, and she went for the matches. Thanks, he

(10:43):
said concisely as she put them down, and turned his
shoulder upon her and stared out of the window again.
It was altogether too discouraging. Evidently he was sensitive on
the topic of operations and bandages. She did not make
so bold as to say, however, after all, but his
snubbing way had irritated her, and Milly had a hot

(11:03):
time of it that afternoon. The visitor remained in the
parlor until four o'clock, without giving the ghost of an
excuse for an intrusion. For the most part, he was
quite still during that time, As it would seem he
sat in the growing darkness, smoking in the firelight, perhaps dozing.
Once or twice. A curious listener might have heard him

(11:25):
at the coals, and for the space of five minutes
he was audible, pacing the room. He seemed to be
talking to himself. Then the arm chair creaked as he
sat down again. Chapter two, Mister Teddy Henfrey's first impressions.

(11:47):
At four o'clock, when it was fairly dark and Missus
Hall was screwing up her courage to go in and
ask her visitor if he would take some tea, Teddy Henfrey,
the clock dropper, came into the bar. My sakes, Missus
Hall said he but this is terrible weather for thin boots.
The snow outside was falling faster. Missus Hall agreed, and

(12:07):
then noticed he had his bag with him. Now you're here,
mister Teddy said she. I'd be glad if you'd give
the old clock in the par a bit of a
look tis going, and it strikes well and hearty. But
the hour hand won't do nothing but point at six
and leading the way, She went across to the parlor
door and rapped and entered her visitors. She saw as

(12:28):
she opened the door was seated in the arm chair
before the fire, dozing, it would seem, with his bandaged
head drooping on one side. The only light in the
room was the red glow from the fire, which lit
his eyes like adverse railway signals, but left his downcast
face in darkness, and the scanty vestiges of the day
that came in through the open door. Everything was ruddy,

(12:49):
shadowy and indistinct to her, though more so since she
had just been lighting the bar lamp and her eyes
were dazzled. But for a second it seemed to her
that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth
wide open, a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the
whole of the lower portion of his face. It was
the sensation of a moment, the white bound head, the

(13:10):
monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it. Then
he stirred, started up in his chair, put up his hand.
She opened the door wide so that the room was lighter,
and she saw him more clearly with the muffler held
up to his face, just as she had seen him
hold the serviette before the shadows, she fancied had tricked her.

(13:33):
Would you mind, sir, this manner coming to look at
the clock, sir, she said, recovering from the momentary shock.
Look at the clock, he said, staring round in a
drowsing manner and speaking over his head, and then getting
more fully awake. Certainly, Missus Hall went away to get
a lamp, and he rose and stretched himself. Then came

(13:55):
the light, and mister Teddy Henfry, entering, was confronted by
this bandaged person. He was, he says, taken aback good afternoon,
said the stranger, regarding him as mister Henfrey says, with
a vivid sense of the dark spectacles like a lobster.
I hope, said mister Henfrey. That it's no intrusion. Uh, none, whatever,

(14:19):
said the stranger, though I understand, he said, turning to
missus Hall, that this room is really to be mine
for my own private use, I thought, sir, said Missus Hall,
you'd prefer the clock, certainly, said the stranger. Certainly, but
as a rule I like to be alone and undisturbed.
But I'm really glad to have the clock, seemed to

(14:40):
he said, seeing a certain hesitation in mister Henfrey's manner,
very glad. Mister Henfrey had intended to apologize and withdraw,
but this anticipation reassured him. The stranger turned round with
his back to the fireplace and put his hands behind
his back, and presently he said, when the clock mending
is over, I think I should like to have some tea,

(15:03):
But not till the clock mending is over. Missus Hall
was about to leave the room. She made no conversational
advances this time, because she did not want to be
snubbed in front of mister Henry. When her visitor asked
her if she had made any arrangements about his boxes
at Bramblehurst, she told him she had mentioned the matter
to the postman and that the carrier could bring them

(15:24):
over on the morrow. You are certain that that is
the earliest, he said. She was certain, with a marked coldness.
I should explain, he added, what I was really too
cold and fatigued to do before that. I am an
experimental investigator, indeed, sir, said Missus Hall. Much impressed. And

(15:46):
my baggage contains apparatus and appliances very useful things. Indeed
they are, sir, said Missus Hall, and I am very
naturally anxious to get on with my inquiries. Of course, Sir,
my reason for coming to iping he proceeded with a
certain deliberation of manner was a desire for solitude. I

(16:07):
do not wish to be disturbed in my work. In
addition to my work, an accident, I thought as much,
said Missus Hall to herself. An accident necessitates a certain retirement.
My eyes are sometimes so weak and painful that I
have shut myself up in the dark for hours together.
Lock myself up sometimes now and then, not at present, certainly,

(16:32):
but at such times the slightest disturbance, the entry of
a stranger into the room, is a source of excruciating
annoyance to me. It is well these things should be understood, certainly, sir,
said missus Hall. And if I might make so bold
as to ask that, I think is all, said the stranger,
with that quietly irresistible air of finality he could assume

(16:54):
at will. Missus Hall reserved her question and sympathy for
a better occasion. After Missus Hall had left the room,
he remained standing in front of the fire glaring. So
mister Henry puts it at the clock mending. Mister Henfrey
not only took off the hands of the clock and
the face, but extracted the works, and he tried to

(17:17):
work in a slow and quiet and unassuming manner as possible.
He worked with the lamp close to him, and the
green shade threw a brilliant light upon his hands and
upon the frame and wheels, and left the rest of
the room shadowy. When he looked up, colored patches swam
in his eyes. Being constitutionally of a curious nature, he
had removed the works a quite unnecessary proceeding, with the

(17:41):
idea of delaying his departure and perhaps falling into conversation
with the stranger. But the stranger stood there, perfectly, silent
and still, so still it got on Henfrey's nerves. He
felt alone in the room and looked up, and there,
gray and dim was the bandaged head and huge blue lenses,
staring fixedly, with a mist of green spots drifting in

(18:04):
front of them. It was so uncanny to Henfrey that
for a minute they remained staring blankly at one another.
Then Henry looked down again, very uncomfortable position. One would
like to say something, should he remark that the weather
was very cold for the time of the year. He
looked up, as if to take aim with that introductory

(18:25):
shot the weather. He began, why don't you finish and go?
Said the rigid figure, evidently in a state of painfully
suppressed rage. All you've got to do is fix the
hour hand on its axle. You're simply humbugging, certainly, sir.
One minute more I overlooked, and mister Henry finished and went.

(18:47):
But he was feeling excessively annoyed. Damn it, said mister
Henfrey to himself, trudging down the village through the thawing snow.
A man must do o'clock at times? Surely? And again
can't a man look at you? Ugly? And yet again
seemingly not? If the police was wanting you, you wouldn't
be more wrapped and bandaged. At Gleaston's corner he saw Hall,

(19:11):
who had recently married the stranger's hostess at the Coach
and Horses, and who now drove the iping conveyance when
occasional people required it to cid abridge junction, coming towards him.
On his return from that place, Hall had evidently been
stopping a bit at Ciderbridge, to judge by his driving,
How do Teddy, he said, passing You've got a rumman

(19:33):
up at home, said Teddy Hall, very socially pulled up?
Was that? He said, rum looking customer stopping at the
coach and horses, said Teddy, my sakes, and he proceeded
to give Hall a vivid description of his grotesque guest.
Looks a bit like a disguise, don't it. I'd like
to see a man's face if I had him stopping

(19:54):
in my place, said Henry. But women are that trustful
when strangers are concerned. He's took your rooms and he
ain't even given a name. Hall, You don't say so,
said Hall, who was a man of sluggish apprehension. Yes,
said Teddy. By the week. Wherever he is, you can't
get rid of him under the week. And he's got
a lot of luggage coming tomorrow, so he says, let's

(20:15):
hope it won't be stones in boxes. Howl. He told
Hall how his aunt at Hastings had been swindled by
a stranger with empty portmanteau. Altogether, he left Hall vaguely suspicious.
Get up, old girl, said Hall. I suppose I must
see about this. Teddy trudged on his way with his
mind considerably relieved, instead of seeing about it. However, Hall,

(20:40):
on his return was severely rated by his wife On
the length of time he had spent in Ciderbridge, and
his mild inquiries were answered snappishly and in a manner
not to the point. But the seed of suspicion Teddy
had sown germinated in the mind of mister Hall. In
spite of these discouragements. You win don't know anything, said
mister Hall. Resolved to ascertain more about the personality of

(21:01):
his guests at the earliest possible opportunity, and after the
stranger had gone to bed, which he did about half
past nine, mister Hall went very aggressively into the parlor
and looked very hard at his wife's furniture, just to
show that the stranger wasn't master there, and scrutinized closely
and a little contentiously a sheet of mathematical computations the

(21:21):
stranger had left. When retiring for the night, he instructed
Missus Hall to look very closely at the stranger's luggage
when it came the next day. You mind your own business,
hall said Missus Hall, and I'll mind mine. She was
all the more inclined to snap it Hall, because the
stranger was undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger, and

(21:44):
she was by no means assured about him in her
own mind. In the middle of the night, she woke
up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips that came
trailing after it at the end of interminable necks, and
with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she
subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.

(22:07):
End of Chapter two, Chapter three, The thousand and one Bottles.
So it was that on the twenty ninth day of February,
at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell
out of infinity into Iping village. Next day his luggage
arrived through the slush, and very remarkable luggage it was.

(22:28):
There were a couple of trunks, indeed such as a
rational man might need. But in addition there were a
box of books, big fat books, of which some were
just in an incomprehensible handwriting, and a dozen or more crates,
boxes and cases containing objects packed in straw. As it
seemed a haul tugging with a casual curiosity at the

(22:49):
straw glass bottles, the stranger, muffled in hat, coat, gloves
and wrapper, came out impatiently to meet Fearnside's cart, while Hall,
who was having a word or so of gossip preparatory
to helping them in out. He came, not noticing Fearnside's dog,
who was sniffing in a diletant spirit at Hall's legs.

(23:10):
Come along with those boxes, he said, I've been waiting
long enough, and he came down the steps towards the
tail of the cart, as if to lay hands on
the smaller crate. No sooner had fear Inside's dog caught
sight of him, however, than it began to bristle and
growl savagely, and when he rushed down the steps, it
gave an undecided hop, and then sprang straight at his hand. Whew,

(23:33):
cried Hall, jumping back, for he was no hero with dogs,
and fear Inside howled lie down and snatched his whip.
They saw the dog's teeth had slipped the hand, heard
a kick, saw the dog excute a flanking jub and
get home on the stranger's leg, and heard the rip
of his trousering. Then the finer end of fear Inside's

(23:53):
whip reached his property, and the dog, yelping with dismay,
retreated under the wheels of the wagon. All the business
of a swift half minute. No one spoke, Everyone shouted.
The stranger glanced swiftly at his torn glove and at
his leg, made as if he would stoop to the latter,
then turned and rushed swiftly up the steps into the inn.

(24:15):
They heard him go headlong across the passage and up
the uncarpeted steps to his bedroom. You brute, you, said Fearnside,
climbing off the wagon with his whip in his hand,
while the dog watched him through the wheel. Come here,
said Fearnside. You'd better Hall had stood gaping. He was bit,
said Hall, I'd better go to see to him, and

(24:35):
he trotted after the stranger. He met missus Hall in
the passage. Carriers dug he said, bitten. He went straight upstairs,
and the stranger's door, being ajar, he pushed it open
and was entering without any ceremony, Being of a naturally
sympathetic turn of mind. The blind was down and the
room dim. He caught a glimpse of a most singular thing,

(24:58):
what seemed handless arm waving towards him, and a face
of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the
face of a pale pansy. Then he was struck violently
in the chest, hurled back, and the door slammed in
his face and locked. It was so rapid that he
gave him no time to observe a waving of indecipherable shapes,

(25:19):
a blow, and a concussion. There he stood on the
dark little landing, wondering what it might have been that
he had seen. A couple of minutes later he rejoined
the little group that had formed outside the coach and horses.
There was fear inside, telling about it all over again
for the second time. There was missus Hall saying his
dog didn't have no business to bite her guests. There

(25:40):
was Huckster, the general dealer from over the road, interrogative,
and Sandy Wedges from the forge judicial, besides women and children,
all of them saying fatuities. I wouldn't let him bite me.
I knows it hasn't right to have such dogs. What
are he biten for? Then? And so forth, Miss Hall,

(26:00):
staring at them from the steps and listening, found it
incredible that he had seen anything so very remarkable happen
at says, besides, his vocabulary was altogether too limited to
express his impressions. He don't want no help, He says
he said, in answer to his wife's inquiry, we'd better
be taken of his luggage in yourtabit quterized at once,

(26:21):
said mister Huckster, especially if it's all inflamed, I'd shoot,
and That's what I'd do, said her lady in the group.
Suddenly the dog began growling again. Come along, cried an
angry voice in the doorway, and there stood the muffled stranger,
with his collar turned up and his hat brim bent down.
The sooner you get those things in, the better I'll
be pleased. It is stated by an anonymous bystander that

(26:44):
his trousers and gloves had been changed. Was you urt, sir,
said fearnside. I'm rare sorry that I'd not a bit,
said the stranger. Never broke the skin. Hurry up with
those things, he then swore to himself, said mister Hall
asserts directly. The first crate was in in accordance with
his directions, carried into the parlor. The stranger flung himself

(27:07):
upon it with extraordinary eagerness and began to unpack it,
scattering the straw with an utter disregard of missus Hall's carpet,
and from it, he began to produce bottles, little fat
bottles containing powders, small and slender bottles containing colored and
white fluids, fluted blue bottles, labeled poison, bottles with round
bodies and slender necks, large green glass bottles, large white

(27:30):
glass bottles, bottles with glass stoppers and frosted labels, bottles
with fine corks, bottles with bungs, bottles with wooden caps,
wine bottles, salad oil bottles, putting them in rows on
the chiffonnier, on the mantle, on the table, under the window,
round the floor, on the bookshelf, everywhere. The chemist's shop
in Bramblehurst could not boast half so many. Quite a sight.

(27:53):
It was. Crate after crate yielded bottles, until all six
were empty and the table high with straw. The only
things that came out of these crates beside the bottles
were a number of test tubes and a carefully packed balance,
And directly the crates were unpacked. The stranger went to
the window and set to work, not troubling in the
least about the litter of straw, the fire which had

(28:15):
gone out, the box of books outside, nor for the
trunks and other luggage that had gone upstairs. When missus
Hall took his dinner to him, he was already so
absorbed in his work pouring little drops out of the
bottles in test tubes, that he did not hear her
until she had swept away the bulk of the straw
and put the tray on the table with some little emphasis,

(28:35):
perhaps seeing the state that her floor was in. Then
he half turned his head and immediately turned it away again.
But she saw he had removed his glasses. They were
beside him on the table, and it seemed to her
that his eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow. He put on
his spectacles again, and then turned and faced her. She

(28:55):
was about to complain of the straw on the floor
when he anticipated her. I wish you wouldn't come in
without knocking, he said, in the tone of abnormal exasperation
that seemed so characteristic of him. I noted, but seemingly
perhaps you did. But in my investigations, my really very
urgent and necessary investigations, the slightest disturbance the jar of

(29:17):
a door. I must ask you, certainly, sir, you can
turn the lock if you're like that, You know, any
time a very good idea, said the stranger. This straw, sir,
If I can be so bold as to remark, don't
if the straw makes trouble, put it down in the bill.
And he mumbled at her words suspiciously like curses. He

(29:42):
was so odd standing there, so aggressive and explosive, bottle
in one hand and test tube in the other, that
Missus Hall was quite alarmed. But she was a resolute woman,
in which case I should like to know her. What
you consider a shilling? Put down a shilling. Surely a
shilling's enough, So be it, said missus Hall, taking up
the tablecloth and beginning to spread it over the table.

(30:05):
If you're satisfied, of course, he turned and sat down
with his coat collar to water. All the afternoon he
worked with the door locked, and, as missus Hall testifies,
for the most part, in silence. But once there was
a concussion and a sound of bottles ringing together as
though the table had been hit, and the smash of
a bottle it flung violently down, and then a rapid

(30:28):
pacing athwart the room. Fearing something was the matter, she
went to the door and listened, not caring to knock.
I can't go on, he was raving, I can't go
on three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand. The huge multitude
cheated all my life. It may take me patience, patience

(30:48):
indeed full fool. There was a noise of hob nails
on the bricks in the bar, and missus Hall had
very reluctantly to leave the rest of his soliloquy. When
she returned, the room was silent again, save for the
faint crepitation of his chair and the occasional clink of
a bottle. It was all over. The stranger had resumed

(31:10):
his work. When she took in his tea, she saw
broken glass in the corner of the room, under the
concave mirror, and a golden stain that had been carelessly wiped.
She called attention to it. Put it down in the bill,
snapped her visitor. For God's sake, don't worry me if
there's damage done. Put it down in the bill, and

(31:31):
he went on ticking a list in the exercise book
before him. I'll tell you something, said Fernside mysteriously. It
was late in the afternoon, and they were in a
little beer shop of eyepink hanger. Well, said Teddy Henry.
This chap, you're speaking of what my dog bit. Well,
he's black leastways his legs are I seed, through the

(31:52):
terear of his trousers and the tear of his glove.
You'd have expected a sort of pinky to show, wouldn't you. Well,
there wasn't none, just blackness. I tell you he's as
black as my hat, my sex, said Henfrey. It's a
rummy case altogether. Why his nose is as pink as paint,
that's true, said Vernside. I knows that, and I tell
you why. I'm thinking that man's a pie bold teddy,

(32:14):
black here and white there in patches, and he's ashamed
of it. He's a kind of art breed, and the
colors come off patchy instead of mixing. I've heard of
such things before, and it's the common way with horses,
as anyone can see. Chapter four, mister Cuss interviews the Stranger.

(32:35):
I have told the circumstances of the Stranger's arrival in
Iping with a certain fullness of detail, in order that
the curious impression he created may be understood by the reader.
But accepting two odd incidents, the circumstances of his stay
until the extraordinary day of the club festival may be
passed over very cursorily. There were a number of skirmishes

(32:55):
with missus Hall on matters of domestic discipline, but in
every case until late eighth, when the first signs of
penury began, he overwrote her by the easy expedient of
an extra payment. Hall did not like him, and whenever
he dared, he talked of the advisability of getting rid
of him. But he showed his dislike chiefly by concealing

(33:16):
it ostentatiously and avoiding his visitor as much as possible.
Wait till the summer, said missus Hall, sagely, when the
artists are beginning to come. Then we'll see. He may
be a bit overbearing, but Bill's settled punctual. Is Bill
settled punctual? Whatever you'd like to say. The stranger did

(33:36):
not go to church, and indeed made no difference between
Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked,
as Missus Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would
come down early and be continuously busy. On others he
would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together,
smoke sleep in the armchair by the fire, communication with

(33:58):
the world beyond the village, he had none. His temper
continued very uncertain. For the most part. His manner was
that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and
once or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken
in spasmodic gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic
irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to

(34:20):
himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him. But
though missus Hall listened conscientiously, as she could make neither
head nor tail of what she heard. He rarely went
abroad by daylight, but at twilight he would go out,
muffled up invisibly, whether the weather were cold or not,
and he chose the loneliest paths and those most overshadowed

(34:40):
by trees and banks. His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged
face under the penthouse of his hat came with a
disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness upon one or two
home going laborers, and Teddy Henry, tumbling out of the
scarlet coat one night at half past nine, was scared
shamefully by the stranger's skull like head. He was walking,
hat in hand lit by the sudden light of the

(35:02):
opened inn door. Such children as saw him at nightfall
dreamt of bogies. And it seemed doubtful whether he disliked
boys more than they disliked him, or the reverse, But
there was certainly a vivid enough dislike on either side.
It was inevitable that a person of so remarkable an
appearance and bearing should form a frequent topic in such

(35:24):
a village as iping opinion was greatly divided about his occupation.
Missus Hall was sensitive on the point. When questioned, she
explained very carefully that he was an experimental investigator, going
gingerly over the syllables as one who dreads pitfalls. When
asked what an experimental investigator was, she would say, with

(35:45):
a touch of superiority, that most educated people knew such
things as that, and would thus explain that he'd discovered things.
Her visitor had had an accident, she said, which temporarily
discolored his face and hands, and being of a sensitive disposition,
he was averse to any public notice of the fact.
Out of her hearing, there was a view largely entertained

(36:07):
that he was a criminal trying to escape from justice
by wrapping himself up so as to conceal himself altogether
from the eye of the police. This idea sprang from
the brain of mister Teddy Henfrey. No crime of any
magnitude dating from the middle or end of February was
known to have occurred. Elaborated in the imagination of mister Gould,
the probationary assistant in the National School. This theory took

(36:28):
the form that the stranger was an anarchist in disguise
preparing explosives, and he resolved to undertake such detective operations
as his time permitted. These consisted, for the most part,
in looking very hard at the stranger whenever they met,
or in asking people who had never seen the stranger
leading questions about him, but he detected nothing. Another school

(36:51):
of opinion followed mister Fernside and either accepted the Piebald
view or some modification of it, as for instance, Silas Durgan,
who was heard to assert, if he chose to show
himself at fairs, he'll make his fortune in no time,
and being a bit of a theologian, compared the stranger
to the man with the one talent. Yet another view
explained the entire man by regarding the stranger as a

(37:12):
harmless lunatic that had the advantage of accounting for everything
straight away. Between these main groups there were waverers and compromises.
Sussex folk have few superstitions, and it was only after
the events of early April that the thought of the
supernatural was first whispered in the village. Even then it
was only credited among the womenfolk. But whatever they thought

(37:37):
of him, people in iping on the whole agreed in
disliking him. His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible
to an urban brain worker, was an amazing thing to
these quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they surprised now
and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that swept him
upon them round quiet corners, the inhuman bludgeoning of all

(37:59):
tense of advances of curiosity, the taste for twilight that
led to the closing of doors, the pulling of blinds,
the extinction of candles and lamps. Who could agree with
such goings on, they drew aside as he passed down
the village, and when he had gone by, young humorists
would go up with coat collars and down with hat brims,
and go pacing nervously after him, in imitation of his

(38:21):
occult bearing. There was a song popular at that time
called the Bogie Man. Miss Satchell sang it in the
schoolroom concert in aid of the church lamps, and thereafter,
whenever one of the two villages were gathered together and
the stranger appeared, a bar or so of this tune,
more or less sharp or flat, was whistled in the
midst of them. Also, belated little children would call bogie

(38:45):
Man after him and make off tremulously elated. Cuss the
general practitioner was devoured by curiosity. The bandages excited his
professional interest. The report of the thousand and one bottles
aroused his jealous regard. All through April and May he
coveted an opportunity of talking to the stranger, and at last,

(39:07):
towards whitsuntide, he could stand it no longer, but hit
upon the subscription list for a village nurse as an excuse.
He was surprised to find that mister Hall did not
know his guest's name. He give a name, said missus Hall,
an assertion which was quite unfounded. But I didn't rightly
hear it. She thought it seemed so silly, not to

(39:27):
know the man's name. Cuss rapped at the parlor door
and entered. There was a fairly audible imprecation from within.
Pardon my intrusion, said Cuss, and then the door closed
and cut missus Hall off from the rest of the conversation.
She could hear the murmur of voices for the next
ten minutes. Then a cry of surprise, a stirring of feet,

(39:51):
a chair flung aside, a bark of laughter. Quick steps
to the door, and Cuss appeared, his face white, his
eyes staring over his shoulder. He left the door open
behind him, and without looking at her, strode across the
hall and went down the steps, and she heard his
feet hurrying along the road. He carried his hat in
his hand. She stood behind the door, looking at the

(40:13):
open door of the parlor. Then she heard the stranger
laughing quietly, and his footsteps came across the room. She
could not see his face where she stood. The parlor
door slammed and the place was silent again. Cuss went
straight up to the village to bunting the vicar. Am
I mad, Cuss began abruptly as he entered the shabby

(40:33):
little study. Do I look like an insane person. What's happened,
said the vicar, putting the ammonite on the loose sheets
of his forthcoming salmon the chap at the inn. Well,
give me something to drink, said cuss, and he sat down.
When his nerves had been steadied by a glass of
cheap sherry, the only drink the good vicar had available.

(40:57):
He told him of the interview he had just had.
Went in. He gasped and began to demand a subscription
for that nurse fund. He'd stuck his hands in his
pockets as I came in, and he sat down lumpily
in his chair, sniffed. I told him I'd heard he
took an interest in scientific things. He said yes, sniffed again,
kept on sniffing all the time, evidently recently caught an

(41:19):
infernal cold. When no wonder wrapped up like that, I
developed the nurse idea, and all the while kept my
eyes open. Bottles chemicals everywhere, balance test tubes in stands,
and a smell of evening primrose. Would he subscribe? Said
he'd considered him. Asked him point blank what he researching?

(41:40):
Said he was a long research got quite cross, a
damnable long research said, he blowing the cork out so
to speak, Oh, said I, and out came the grievance.
The man was just on the boil, and my question
boiled him over. He had been given a prescription, a
most valuable prescription, although what for he wouldn't say. Was
it medical? Damn you? What are you fishing? After I apologized,

(42:05):
dignified sniff and cough, he resumed he'd read it five ingredients,
put it down, turned his head, draft of air from window,
lifted the paper swish rustle. He was working in a
room with an open fireplace. He saw saw a flicker,
and there was the prescription burning and lifting chimneywood rushed
towards it, just as it whisked up the chimney. So,

(42:29):
just at that point, to illustrate his story, out came
his arm. Well, no hand, just an empty sleeve. Lord.
I thought, that's a deformity. Got a cork arm, I suppose,
and has taken it off. Then I thought, there's something
odd in that. What the devil keeps the sleeve up

(42:50):
and open if there's nothing in it? There was nothing
in it, I tell you, nothing down it right down
to the joint. I could see right down it to
the elbow, and there was a glimmer of light shining
in through a tear of cloth. Good God, I said.
Then he stopped, stared at me with those black goggles
of his, and then at his sleeve. Well that's all.

(43:14):
He never said a word, just glared and put his
sleeve back in his pocket. Quietly, I was saying, said
he that there was the prescription burning, wasn't I interrogative? Cough?
How the devil said, I can you move an empty
sleeve like that? Empty sleeve? Yes, said I, an empty sleeve.

(43:38):
It's an empty sleeve, is it? You saw it as
an empty sleeve? He stood up right away. I stood
up too. He came towards me in three very slow steps,
and stood quite close sniffed venomously. I didn't flinch, though
I'm hanged if that bandage knob of his and those
blinkers aren't enough to unnerve anyone coming quietly up to you.

(43:59):
You said it was an empty sleeve, he said, certainly,
I said, At staring and saying nothing, A bare faced man,
unspectacled starts scratch. Then very quietly he pulled his sleeve
out of his pocket again and raised his arm towards me,
as though he would show it to me again. He
did it very, very slowly. I looked at it. Seemed

(44:22):
an age, well, said I, clearing my throat. There's nothing
in it. I had to say something. I was beginning
to feel frightened. I could see right down it. He
extended it straight towards me, slowly, slowly, just like that,
until the cuff was six inches from my face. Queer
thing to see an empty sleeve come at you like that.

(44:43):
And then well, something exactly like a finger and thumb.
It felt nipped my nose bunting. Began to laugh. There
wasn't anything there, said Cuss, his voice running up into
a shriek at the there. It's all very well for
you to laugh, but I tell you, I was so startled.
I hit his cuff hard and turned around and cut

(45:05):
out of the room. I left him. Cuss stopped. There
was no mistaking the sincerity of his panic. He turned
round in a helpless way and took a second glass
of the excellent Vicars very inferior sherry. When I hit
his cuff, said Cuss, I tell you, it felt exactly
like hitting an arm. And there wasn't an arm. There

(45:27):
wasn't the ghost of an arm. Mister Bunting thought it over.
He looked suspiciously at cuss. It's a most remarkable story,
he said. He looked very wise and grave. Indeed, it's really,
said mister Bunting, with judicial emphasis, a most remarkable story.

(45:52):
End of Chapter four, Chapter five, The burglary at the Vicarage.
The facts of the burglary at the Vicarage came to
us chiefly through the medium of the vicar and his wife.
It occurred in the small hours of whit Monday, the
day devoted in iping to the club festivities. Missus Bunting,

(46:14):
it seems, woke up suddenly, in the stillness that comes
before the dawn, with the strong impression that the door
of their bedroom had opened and closed. She did not
arouse her husband at first, but sat up in bed listening.
She then distinctly heard the pad pad of bare feet
coming out of the adjoining dressing room and walking along
the passage towards the staircase. As soon as she felt

(46:36):
assured of this, she roused the reverend mister Bunting as
quietly as possible. He did not strike a light, but
putting on his spectacles her dressing gown and his bath slippers.
He went out on to the landing to listen. He
heard quite distinctly a fumbling going on at his study
desk downstairs, and then a violent sneeze. At that he

(46:56):
returned to his bedroom, armed himself with the most obvious weapon,
the poker, and descended the staircase as noiselessly as possible.
Mister Bunting came out on the landing. The hour was
about four and the ultimate darkness of the night was past.
There was a faint shimmer of light in the hall,
but the study doorway yawned impenetrably black. Everything was still

(47:18):
except the faint creaking of the stairs under mister Bunting's tread,
and the slight movements in the study. Then something snapped.
The drawer was open, and there was a rustle of papers.
Then came in an imprecation, and a match was struck,
and the study was flooded with yellow light. Mister Bunting
was now in the hall, and through the crack in
the door he could see the desk and the open drawer,

(47:39):
and a candle burning on the desk, but the robber
he could not see. He stood there in the hall
undecided what to do, and Missus Bunting, her face white
and intent, crept slowly downstairs after him. One thing kept
mister Bunting's courage, the persuasion that this burglar was a
resident in the village. They heard the chink of money

(48:00):
and realized that the robber had found the housekeeping reserve
of gold two pounds ten in half sovereigns altogether. At
that sound, mister Bunting was nerved to abrupt action. Gripping
the poker firmly, he rushed into the room, closely followed
by Missus Bunting. Surrender, cried mister Bunting fiercely, and then
stooped amazed. Apparently the room was perfectly empty, yet their

(48:24):
conviction that they had that very moment heard someone moving
in the room had amounted to a certainty. For half
a minute, perhaps they stood gaping. Then Missus Bunting went
across the room and looked behind the screen, while mister Bunting,
by a kindred impulse, peered under the desk. Then Missus
Bunting turned back the window curtains, and mister Bunting looked
up the chimney and probed it with the poker. Then

(48:44):
Missus Bunting scrutinized the waste paper pocket and mister Bunting
opened the lid of the coalscuttle. Then they came to
a stop and stood with eyes interrogating each other. I
could have sworn, said mister Bunting. The candle, said Missus Bunting,
who lit the candle? The drawer, said mister Bunting, And
the money's gone. She went hastily to the doorway Off

(49:08):
all the strange occurrences. There was a violent sneeze in
the passage. They rushed out, and as they did so,
the kitchen door slammed. Bring the candle, said mister Bunting,
and led the way. They both heard a sound of
bolts being hastily shot back. As he opened the kitchen door,
he saw through the scullery that the back door was
just opening, and the faint light of early dawn displayed

(49:30):
the dark masses of the garden beyond. He's certain that
nothing went out of the door. It opened, stood open
for a moment, and then closed with a slam. As
it did so, the candle Missus Bunting was carrying from
the study flickered and flared. It was a moment or
more before they entered the kitchen, the place was empty.

(49:51):
They refastened the back door, examined the kitchen, pantry and
scullery thoroughly, and at last went down into the cellar.
There was not a soul to be found in the
ha search as they would. Daylight found the vicar and
his wife, a quaintly costumed little couple, still marveling about
on their own ground floor by the unnecessary light of

(50:11):
her guttering candle. Chapter six. The Furniture that Went Mad.
Now it happened that in the early hours of whit Monday,
before Milly was hunted out for the day, mister Hall
and Missus Hall both rose and went noiselessly down into
the cellar. Their business there was of a private nature

(50:34):
and had something to do with the specific gravity of
their beer. They had hardly entered the cellar when Missus
Hall found she had forgotten to bring down a bottle
of sasparilla from their joint room. As she was the
expert and principal operator in this affair, Hall, they properly
went upstairs for it. On the landing, he was surprised
to see that the stranger's door was a jarm. He

(50:56):
went on into his own room and found the bottle
as he had been directed. But returning with the bottle,
he noticed that the bolts of the front door had
been shot back, that the door was in fact simply
on the latch, And with a flash of inspiration, he
connected this with the stranger's room upstairs and the suggestions
of mister Teddy Henry. He distinctly remembered holding the candle
while missus Hall shot these bolts over night. At the sight,

(51:19):
he stopped gaping, then, with the bottle still in his hand,
went upstairs again. He rapped at the stranger's door. There
was no answer. He rapped again, then pushed the door
wide open and entered. It was as he had expected
the bed the room also was empty, and what was
stranger even to his heavy intelligence. On the bedroom chair

(51:42):
and along the rail of the bed were scattered the garments,
the only garments so far as he knew, and the
bandages of their guest. His big slouch hat even was
cocked jauntily over the bed post. As Hall stood there,
he heard his wife's voice coming out of the depth
of the cellar. With that rapid test scoping of the
syllables and interrogative cocking up of the final words to

(52:03):
have high note by which the West Sussex villager is
wont to indicate a brisk impatience. George, you go why
want at that? He turned and hurried down to it. Janny,
he staid over the rail of the cellar steps, TuS
the truth. Why every says he's not in his roomy
end and the front door is unbolted. At first Missus

(52:24):
Hall did not understand, and as soon as she did
she resolved to see the empty room for herself. Hall,
still holding the bottle, went first. If he ain't there,
he said, his clothes are? And what was he doing
without his clothes? Then to the most curious business. As
they came up the cellar steps, they both it was
afterwards ascertained, fancied. They heard the front door open and shut,

(52:46):
but seeing it closed and nothing there, neither said a
word to the other about it. At the time. Missus
Hall passed her husband in the passage and ran on
first upstairs. Someone sneezed on the staircase. Hall, following six
steps behind, thought that he heard her sneeze. She going
on first, was under the pression that Hall was sneezing.
She flung open the door and stood regarding the room

(53:09):
of all A curious she said, she heard a sniff
close behind her head, as it seemed in turning, was
surprised to see Hall a dozen feet off on the
topmost stair, But in another moment he was beside her.
She bent forward and put her hand on the pillow,
and then under the clothes cold she said, he's been
up this hour or more. As she did so, a

(53:31):
most extraordinary thing happened. The bedclothes gathered themselves together, leaped
suddenly into a sort of peak, and then jumped headlong
over the bottom rail. It was exactly as if a
hand had clutched them in the center and flung them aside.
Immediately after, the Stranger's hat hopped off the bedpost described
a whirling flight in the air through the better part
of a circle, and then dashed straight at missus Hall's face.

(53:54):
Then as swiftly came the sponge from the washstand, and
then the chair, flinging the Stranger's coat and trousers carelessly,
as and laughing dryly in a voice singularly like the
Strangers turned itself up with its four legs at Missus
Hall seemed to take aim at her for a moment,
and then charged at her. She screamed and turned, and
then the chair legs came gently but firmly against her

(54:16):
back and impelled her and Hall out of the room.
The door slammed violently and was locked. The chair and
bed seemed to be executing a dance of triumph for
a moment, then abruptly everything was still. Missus Hall was
left almost in a fainting condition in mister Hall's arms
on the landings. It was with the greatest difficulty that

(54:37):
mister Hall and Milly, who had been roused by her
scream of alarm, succeeded in getting her down stairs and
implying the rectitives customary in such cases. Tis spirits, said
missus Hall. I noticed spirits. I read in papers and
tables and chairs, leaping and dancing. Take a drop more, Jenny,
said Hall. Twell, steady, lock him out, said missus Hall.

(55:00):
Don't let him come in again. I half guessed I
might have known, with them goggling eyes and bandaged head,
and never going to church of a Sunday and all
day bottles morn. It's right for anyone to have he's
put the spirits into the furniture, my good old furniture.
Twas in that chair my very dear poor mother used
to sit when I was a little girl, to think
it should rise up against me. Now, just to drop more,

(55:23):
Janny said, Hall, your nerves is all upset. They sent
Millie across the street through the golden five o'clock sunshine
to rouse up mister Sandy Wadgers, the blacksmith. Mister Hall's compliments,
and the furniture upstairs was behaving most extraordinary. Would mister
Wadgers come round? He was a knowing man, was mister Watchers,
and very resourceful. He took quite a grave view of

(55:46):
the case. I am damned if that in witchcraft was
the view of mister Sandy Wadgers. You want oars shoes
for such gentry as he. He came round, greatly concerned.
They want him to lead the way upstairs to the room,
but he didn't seem to be in any hurry. He
preferred to talk in the passage over the way. Huckster's

(56:08):
apprentice came out and began taking down the shutters of
the tobacco window. He was called over to join the discussion.
Mister Huxton naturally followed over. In the course of a
few minutes, the Anglo Saxon genius for parliamentary Government asserted itself.
There was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.
Let's have the facts first, insisted mister Sandy Wadgers. Let's

(56:30):
be sure we be acting perfectly right in busting that
their door open. A door onbust is always open to busting,
but you can't onbust the door once you've busted in.
And suddenly, and most wonderfully, the door of the room
upstairs opened of its own accord, And as they looked
up in amazement, they saw descending the stairs the muffled
figure of the stranger, staring more blankly and blankly than

(56:52):
ever before, with those unreasonably large blue glass eyes of his.
He came down, stiffly and slowly, staring all the time.
He walked across the passage, staring, and then stopped. Look there,
he said, And their eyes followed the direction of his
gloved finger, and saw a bottle of sasparilla hard by
the cellar door. Then he entered the parlor and suddenly, swiftly,

(57:15):
viciously slammed the door in their faces. Not a word
was spoken until the last echoes of the slam had
died away. They stared at one another. Well, if that
don't lick everything, said mister Wadgers, and left the alternative unsaid.
I'd go in and ask about it, said Wadgers to

(57:36):
mister Hall, I'd demand an explanation. It took some time
to bring the landlady's husband up to that pitch. At
last he rapped, opened the door and got as far
as excuse me, go to the devil, said the stranger,
in a tremendous voice, and shut that door after you.
Or so. That brief interview terminated Chapter seven, The Unveiling

(58:03):
of the Stranger. The stranger went into the little parlor
of the Coach and Horses about half past five in
the morning, and there he remained until near midday, the
blinds down, the door shut, and none after Haul's repulse
venturing near him all that time. He must have fasted thrice.

(58:23):
He rang his bell, the third time furiously and continuously,
but no one answered him. M And as go to
the devil, indeed, said missus Hall. Presently came an imperfect
rumor of the burglary at the vicarage, and two and
two were put together. Hall, assisted by wadgers, went off
to find mister Shuckleforth, the magistrate, and take his advice.

(58:45):
No one ventured upstairs. How the stranger occupied himself is
unknown now. And then he would stride violently up and down,
and twice came an outburst of curses, a tearing of paper,
and a violent smashing of bottles. The little group of
sc gared but curious people increased. Missus Huckster came over
some gay young fellow's respondent in black, ready made jackets

(59:06):
and pek paper ties. For it was whit Monday joined
the group with confused interrogations. Young Archie Harker distinguished himself
by going up the yard and trying to peep under
the window blinds. He could see nothing, but gave reason
for supposing that he did, and others of the iping
youth presently joined him. It was the finest of all

(59:27):
possible whit mondays. And down the village street stood a
row of nearly a dozen booths, a shooting gallery, and
on the grass by the forge were three yellow and
chocolate wagons, and some picturesque strangers of both sexes putting
up a coconut sigh. A gentleman wore blue jerseys, the
ladies white aprons, and quite fashionable hats with heavy plumes.

(59:49):
Wadger of the Purple Fawn, and mister Jaggers, the cobbler
who also sold old second hand ordinary bicycles, were stretching
a string of Union Jack's and Royal ensigns, which had
originally celebrated the first Victorian Jubilee across the road and inside,
in the artificial darkness of the parlor, into which only
one thin jet of sunlight penetrated. The stranger, hungry, we

(01:00:12):
must suppose, and fearful, hidden in his uncomfortable hot trappings,
poured through his dark glasses upon his paper, or chinked
his dirty little bottles, and occasionally swore savagely at the boys. Audible,
if invisible outside the windows. In the corner by the
fireplace lay the fragments of half a dozen smashed bottles,
and a pungent twang of chlorine tainted the air. So

(01:00:34):
much we know from what was heard at the time
and from what was subsequently seen in the room. At noon,
he suddenly opened his parlor door and stood glaring fixedly
at the three or four people in the bar, Missus Hall,
he said. Somebody went sheepishly and called for Missus Hall.
Missus Hall appeared after an interval, a little short of breath,

(01:00:56):
but all the fiercer for that Hall was still out.
She had deliberated over this scene, and she came holding
a little tray with an unsettled bill upon it. Is
it your bill you're wanting, sir? She said? Why wasn't
my breakfast laid? Why haven't you prepared my meals? And
answered my bell? Do you think I live without eating?
Why isn't my bill paid? Said missus Hall. That's what

(01:01:19):
I want to know. I told you three days ago
I was awaiting a remittance. I told you three days
ago I wasn't gonna await no remittances. You can't grumble
if your breakfast waits a bit, if my bill's been
waiting these five days, can you? The stranger swore briefly
but vividly, Nah nar from the bar, and I'd thank

(01:01:41):
you kindly, sir, if you'd keep your swearing to yourself, sir,
said Missus Hall. The stranger stood, looking more like an
angry diving helmet than ever it was universally felt in
the bar that Missus Hall had the better of him.
His next words showed as much. Look here, my good woman,
he began. Don't good woman me, said missus Hall. I've

(01:02:04):
told you my remittance hasn't come. Remittance indeed, said missus Hall. Still,
I daresay in my pocket you told me three days
ago that you hadn't anything but a sovereign's worth of
silver upon you. Well, I've found some more ullo from
the bar. I wonder where you found it, said missus Hall.

(01:02:25):
That seemed to annoy the stranger very much. He stamped
his foot. What do you mean, he said that, I
wonder where you found it, said missus Hall. And before
I take any bills, or get any breakfast, or do
any such things whatsoever, you've got to tell me two
things I don't understand, and what nobody don't understand, and
what everybody is very anxious to understand. I want to

(01:02:46):
know what you've been doing to my chair upstairs. And
I want to know how tis your room was empty,
and how you got in again. Them as stops in
this house comes in by the doors, that's the roll
of the house, and that you didn't do. And what
I want to know is how you did come in,
and I want to know. Suddenly the stranger raised his
gloved hands, clenched, stamped his foot, and said stop, with

(01:03:07):
such extraordinary violence that he silenced her instantly. You don't understand,
he said, who I am or what I am? I'll
show you. By Heaven, I'll show you. Then he put
his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The
center of his face became a black cavity. Here, he said.
He stepped forward and handed Missus Hall something, which she

(01:03:30):
staring at his metamorphosed face, except automatically. Then when she
saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it and
staggered back the nose. It was the Stranger's nose, pink
and shining, rolled on the floor. Then he removed his spectacles,
and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his

(01:03:52):
hat and with a violent gesture, tore at his whiskers
and bandages. For a moment they resisted him, a flash
of horrible anti disipation passed through the bar. Oh my god,
said someone. Then off they came. It was worse than anything.
Missus Hall, standing open mouthed and horror struck, shrieked at

(01:04:14):
what she saw and made for the door of the house.
Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements,
tangible horrors, but nothing. The bandages and false hair flew
across the passage into their bar, making a hobbledehoy jump
to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps.

(01:04:35):
For the man who stood there, shouting some incoherent explanation,
was a solid, gesticulating figure up to the coat collar
of him, and then nothingness, no visible thing at all.
People down the village heard shouts and shrieks, and looking
up the street, saw the coach and horses violently firing
out its humanity. Then they saw missus Hall fall down

(01:04:58):
and mister Teddy Henfrey jump to avoid tumbling over her.
And then they heard the frightful screams of Milly, who
emerging suddenly from the kitchen at the noise of the tumult,
had come across the headless stranger from behind. These increased
suddenly forthwith everyone all down the street. The sweet stuff seller,
cocoanut shy proprietor and his assistant, the swingman, little boys

(01:05:22):
and girls, rustic dandies, smart wrenches, smocked elders and apron
gypsies began running towards the inn, and in a miraculously
short space of time, a crowd of perhaps forty people
and rapidly increasing swayed and hooted and inquired and exclaimed
and suggested in front of Missus Hall's establishment. Everyone seemed

(01:05:43):
eager to talk at once, and the result was babel.
A small group supported Missus Hall, who was picked up
in a state of collapse. There was a conference and
the incredible evidence of a vociferous eyewitness. Oh bogey, what's
he been doing? Then? Ain't hurt the girl? As he
run at an with a knife. I believe no head,
I tell ye. It didn't mean no manner of speaking.

(01:06:05):
I meant man without a head, nonsense to some gunjuring
trick fetched off his rapin he did. In its struggles
to see in through the open door, the crowd formed
itself into a straggling wedge, with the more venturous Apex
nearest the inn. He stood for a moment. I heard
the girl scream, and he turned. I saw her skirts

(01:06:27):
whisk and he went after. He didn't take ten seconds back.
He comes with a knife in his hand and a
loaf stood just as if he were staring not a
moment ago when in that there door, I tell ye,
he ain't got no head at all. You just missed
an There was a disturbance behind, and the speaker stopped
to step aside for a little procession that was marching

(01:06:48):
very resolutely towards the house. First mister Hall, very red
and determined. Then mister Bobby Jaffers, the village constable. Then
the wary mister Wadgers. They had come, now armed with
a warrant. People shouted conflicting information of the recent circumstances.
Ed or no, ed, said Jaffers. I got a restin,

(01:07:10):
and restin I will. Mister Hall marched up the steps,
marched straight to the door of the parlor and flung
it open. Constable, he said, do your duty. Jaffers marched
in Hall, next, Wadgers. Last they saw in the dim
light the headless figure facing them, with a gnawed crust
of bed in one gloved hand and a chunk of

(01:07:32):
cheese in the other. That's him, said Hall, what's the
devil's This came in a tone of angry expostulation from
above the collar of the figure. You're a damned rum customer,
mister said mister Jaffers but ed or no ed the
warrants his body and duty's duty keep off, said the figure,
starting back abruptly, he whipped down the bread and cheese,

(01:07:54):
and mister Hall just grasped the knife on the table
in time to save it. Off came the strangers left
gloves and were slapped in Jaffer's face. In another moment, Jaffers,
cutting short some statement concerning a warrant, had gripped him
by the handless wrist and caught his invisible throat. He
got a sounding kick on the shin that made him shout,
but kept his grip. Hall sent the knife sliding along

(01:08:16):
the table to Wadgers, who acted as goalkeeper for the offensive,
so to speak, and then stepped forward as Jaffers and
the stranger swayed and staggered towards him, clutching and hitting
in a chair, stood in the way and went aside
with a crash as they came down together. Get the feet,
said Jaffers, between his teeth. Mister Hall, endeavoring to act

(01:08:36):
on instructions, received a sounding kick in the ribs that
disposed of him for a moment, and mister Wadgers, seeing
the decapitated stranger, had rolled over and got the upper
side of Jaffers, retreated towards the door, knife in hand,
and so collided with mister Huckster and the citabridge carter
coming to the rescue of order. At the same moment,
down came three or four bottles from the chiffonnier and

(01:08:58):
shot a web of pungency in the air of the room.
I'll surrender, cried the stranger, though he had Jaffers down,
and in another moment he stood up, panting, a strange figure,
headless and handless, for he had pulled off his right
glove now as well as his left. It's no good,
he said, as if sobbing for breath. It was the
strangest thing in the world to hear that voice, coming

(01:09:20):
as if out of empty space. But the Sussex peasants
are perhaps the most matter of fact people under the sun.
Jaffers got up also and produced a pair of handcuffs.
Then he stared, I say, said Jaffers, brought up short
by a dim realization of the incongruity of the whole business.
Darn it can't use him, as I can see the

(01:09:43):
stranger ran his arm down his waistcoat, and as if
by a miracle, the buttons to which his empty sleeve
pointed became undone. Then he said something about his shin
and stooped down. He seemed to be fumbling with his
shoes and socks. Why, said huckster suddenly, that's not a
man at all all, it's just empty clothes. Look, you

(01:10:03):
can see down his collar in the linings of his clothes.
I could put my arm. He extended his hand. It
seemed to meet something in mid air, and he drew
it back with a sharp exclamation. I wish you'd keep
your fingers out of my eye, said the aerial voice,
in a tone of savage expostulation. The fact is I
am all here, head, hands, legs, and all the rest.

(01:10:24):
But it happens I'm invisible. It's a confounded nuisance. But
I am. There's no reason why I should be poched
to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in iping. Is it?
The suit of clothes, now all unbuttoned and hanging loosely
upon its unseen supports stood up arms akimbo. Several other
of the men folks now entered the room, so that

(01:10:46):
it was closely crowded. Invisible, eh, said Huckster, ignoring the
stranger's abuse. Whoever heard the likes of that? It's strange perhaps,
but it's not a crime. Why am I assaulted by
a policeman in this fashion? Ah, that's a different matter,
said Jaafers. No doubt, you're a bit difficult to see
in this light. But I got a warrant and it's

(01:11:07):
all correct. What I'm after ain't no invisibility. Is burglary
as a house being broken into and money took well,
and circumstances certainly point stuff and nonsense, said the invisible man.
I hope so, sir, But I've got my instructions. Well,
said the stranger. I'll come, I'll come, But no handcuffs.

(01:11:30):
It's the regular thing, said Chaffers. No handcuffs, stipulated the stranger.
Pardon me, said Chaffers. Abruptly. The figure sat down, and
before anyone could realize what was being done, the slippers,
socks and trousers being kicked off under the table. Then
he sprang up again and flung off his coat. Here
stop that, said Jaffers. Suddenly realizing what was happening, he

(01:11:52):
gripped at the waistcoat. It struggled, and the shirt slipped
out off it and left it limply and empty in
his hand. Hold him, said Jaffer as loudly. Once he
gets the things off, hold him, cried everyone, and there
was a rush at the fluttering white shirt, which was
now all that was visible of the stranger. The shirt
sleeves planted a shrewd blow in Hall's face that stopped
his opened armed advance and sent him backward into old

(01:12:15):
tutsum the sexton, and in another moment the garment was
lifted up became convulsed and vacantly flapping about the arms,
even as a shirt that is being thrust over a
man's head. Jaffers clutched at it and only helped to
pull it off. He was struck in the mouth, out
of the air, and incontinently threw his truncheon and smote
Teddy Henfrey savagely upon the crown of his head. Look Out,

(01:12:36):
said everybody, fencing at random and hitting at nothing. Hold him,
shut the door, don't let him loose. I got something here.
He is a perfect babel of noises. They made. Everybody,
it seemed, was being hit all at once, and sandy
wadgers knowing as ever, and his wits sharpened by a
frightful blow in the nose, reopened the door and led
the rout. The others following incontinently were jammed for a

(01:12:59):
moment in the court by the doorway. The hitting continued.
Phipps the Unitarian had a front tooth broken, and Henfrey
was injured in the cartilage of his ear. Jaffers was
struck under the jaw, and turning caught at something that
intervened between him and Huckster in the melee and prevented
their coming together. He felt a muscular chest, and in
another moment the whole mass of struggling, excited men shot

(01:13:21):
out into the crowded hall. I got him, shouted, Jaffers,
choking and reeling through them all and wrestling with purple
face and swelling veins against his unseen enemy. Men staggered
right and left, as the extraordinary conflict swayed swiftly towards
the house door and went spinning down the half dozen
steps of the inn. Jaffers cried in a strangled voice,

(01:13:43):
holding tight nevertheless and making play with his knee, spun
around and fell heavily undermost with his head on the gravel.
Only then did his fingers relax. There were excited cries
of hold him invisible, and so forth, and a young fellow,
a stranger in the place whose name did not come
to light, rushed in at once, caught something, missed his hold,

(01:14:03):
and fell over the constable's prostrate body. Half way across
the road, a woman screamed as something pushed by her.
A dog kicked, apparently yelped, and ran howling into Huckster's yard.
And with that the transit of the invisible man was accomplished.
For a space people stood amazed and gesticulating, and then
came panic and scattered them abroad through the village as

(01:14:24):
a gust scatters dead leaves, but chaffers lay quite still,
face upward and knees bent at the foot of the
steps of the inn. End of chapter seven. Chapter eight.
In transit. The eighth chapter is exceedingly brief and relates

(01:14:45):
that Gibbons, the amateur naturalist of the district, while lying
out on the spacious open downs without a soul within
a couple of miles of him, as he thought and
almost dozing, heard close to him the sound of a
man coughing, sneezing, and then swearing savagely to himself, and
looking beheld nothing. Yet the voice was indisputable. It continued

(01:15:09):
to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguished the
swearing of a cultivated man. It grew to a climax,
diminished again, and died away in the distance, going, as
it seemed to him, in the direction of Adadein. It
lifted to a spasmodic sneeze and ended. Gibbons had heard
nothing of the morning's occurrences, but the phenomenon was so
striking and disturbing that his philosophical tranquility vanished. He got

(01:15:33):
up hastily and hurried down the steepness of the hill
towards the village as fast as he could go. Chapter nine.
Mister Thomas Marvel. You must picture mister Thomas Marvel as
a person of copious flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion,

(01:15:55):
a licorice ample fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentric.
His figure inclined to en bompois. His short limbs accentuated
this inclination. He wore a furry silk hat and the
frequent substitution of twine and shoelaces for buttons apparent at
critical points of his costume, marked a man essentially bachelor.

(01:16:18):
Mister Thomas Marvel was sitting with his feet in a
ditch by the roadside over the down towards Anderdean, about
a mile and a half out of Iping. His feet,
save for socks of irregular open work, were bare. His
big toes were broad and pricked, like the ears of
a watchful dog. In a leisurely manner. He did everything
in a leisurely manner. He was contemplating trying on a

(01:16:41):
pair of boots. They were the soundest boots he had
come across for a long time, but too large for him,
whereas the ones he had were in dry weather, a
very comfortable fit, but too thin sold for damp. Mister
Thomas Marvel hated roomy shoes, but then he hated damp.
He had never properly thought out which he hated most.
And it was a pleasant day, and there was nothing

(01:17:02):
better to do. So he put the four shoes in
a graceful group on the turf and looked at them,
and seeing them there among the grass and springing agrimony,
it suddenly occurred to him that both pairs were exceedingly
ugly to see, he was not at all startled by
a voice behind him. They're boots, anyhow, said the voice.

(01:17:22):
They are charity boots, said mister Thomas Marvel, with his
head on one side, regarding them distastefully. And which is
the ugliest pair in this whole blessed universe. I'm darned
if I know, hum, said the voice. I've worn worse.
In fact, I've worn none, but none so audacious ugly,
if you'll allow the expression. I've been catching boots in
particular for days because I was sick of them. They're

(01:17:45):
sound enough, of course, but a gentleman on tramp sees
such a thundering lot of his boots. And if you'll
believe me, I've raised nothing in the whole blessed country
our try as I would, but them look at them.
And a good country for boots too, in a general way.
But it's just my promiscuous luck. I get my boots
in this country ten years or more, and they treat
you like this. It's a beast of a country, said

(01:18:05):
the voice. And pigs for people, ain't it, said mister
Thomas Marvel. Lord, but them boots. It beats it. He
turned his head over to his shoulder at the right
to look at the boots of his interlocutor with a
view to comparisons, and lo Where the boots of his
interlocutor should have been were neither legs nor boots. He
was irradiated by the dawn of a great amazement. Where

(01:18:28):
are ye, said mister Thomas Marvel, over his shoulder, and
coming on all fours, he saw a stretch of empty downs,
with the wind swaying and remote, green pointed furze bushes.
Am I drunk? Said mister Marvel. Have I had visions?
Was I talking to myself? What the Don't be alarmed,
said a voice. None of your ventraloquizing me, said mister

(01:18:49):
Thomas Marvel, rising sharply to his feet. Where are ye alarmed? Indeed,
don't be alarmed, repeated the voice. You'll be alarmed in
a minute, you silly fool, said mister Thomas Marvel. Where
are ye? Let me get my mark on yer? Are
ye buried? Said mister Thomas Marvel. After an interval, there

(01:19:11):
was no answer. Mister Thomas Marvel stood bootless and amazed,
his jacket nearly thrown off peeweat, said a Peewitt, very
remote Peewit, indeed, said mister Thomas Marvel. This ain't no
time for foolery. The down was desolate east and west,
north and south. The road, with its shallow ditches and
white bordering stakes, ran smooth and empty north and south.

(01:19:31):
And save for that peewit, the blue sky was empty too.
So help me, said mister Thomas Marvel, shuffling his coat
on to his shoulders. Again. It's the drink. I might
have known. It's not the drink, said the voice. You
keep your nerves steady, oh, said mister Marvel, and his
face grew white amidst its patches. It's the drink, his

(01:19:52):
lips repeated, noiselessly. He remained staring about him, rotating slowly backwards.
He could have swore I heard a voice, he whispered.
Of course you did. It's there again, said mister Marvel,
closing his eyes and clasping his hand on his brow
with a tragic gesture. He was suddenly taken by the
collar and shaken violently, and left more dazed than ever.

(01:20:14):
Don't be a fool, said the voice. I'm off my
bloomin chump, said mister Marvel. It's no good. It's fretting
about them blasted boots. I'm off my blessed bloom in chump,
or it's spirits. Neither one thing nor the other, said
the voice. Listen, chump, said mister Marvel. One minute, said

(01:20:35):
the voice, penetratingly tremulous with self control, Well, said mister
Thomas Marvel, with a strange feeling of having been dug
in the chest by a finger. You think I'm just imagination,
Just imagination, What else can you be, said mister Thomas Marvel,
rubbing the back of his neck. Very well, said the voice,

(01:20:56):
in a tone of relief. Then I'm going to throw
flints at you until you think differently. But what are yer?
The voice made no answer. Whiz came a flint, apparently
out of the air, and missed mister Marvell's shoulder by
a hair's breadth. Mister Marvell, turning, saw a flint jerk
up into the air, trace a complicated path, hang for
a moment, then fling at his feet with almost invisible rapidity.

(01:21:20):
He was too amazed to dodge. Whizz It came and
ricocheted from a bare toe into the ditch. Mister Thomas
Marvell jumped a foot and howled aloud. Then he started
to run, tripped over an unseen obstacle, and came head
overheeled into a sitting position. Now, said the voice, as
a third stone curved upward and hung in the air
above the tramp, am I imagination? Mister Marvel, by way

(01:21:44):
of reply, struggled to his feet and was immediately rolled
over again. He lay quiet for a moment. If you
struggle any more, said the voice, I shall throw the
flint at your head. It's a fair ado, said mister
Thomas Marvel, sitting up, taking his wounded toe in hand
and fixing his eye on the third missile. I don't
understand it. Stones flinging themselves, stones talking, Put yourself down,

(01:22:09):
rot away. I'm done. The third flint fell. It's very simple,
said the voice. I'm an invisible man. Tell us something
I don't know, said mister Marvel, gasping with pain. Where
you've hit? How you I? I don't know. I'm beat,
that's all, said the voice. I'm invisible. That's what I

(01:22:30):
want you to understand. Anyone could see that. There's no
need for you to be so confounded impatient mister. Now,
then give us a notion. How are you hid. I'm invisible.
That's the great point. And what I want you to
understand is this, But whereabouts interrupted, mister Marvel? Here six

(01:22:50):
yards in front of you. Oh come, I ain't blind.
You'll be telling me next you're just thin air. I'm
not one of your ignorant tramps. Yes, I am thin air.
You're looking through me? What ain't any stuff? Do you? Voxett? Oh?
Why is it? Jabber? Is that it? I'm just a
human being, solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too.

(01:23:14):
But I'm invisible. You see invisible? Simple idea? Invisible? What
reel like? Yes? Real? Let's have a hand of you,
said Marvel. If you are a real, won't be so
darn out of the way like then? Lord, he said,
how you made me jump? Gripping me like that? He

(01:23:36):
felt the hand that had closed round his wrist with
his disengaged fingers, and his fingers went timorously up the arm,
patted a muscular chest, and explored a bearded face. Marvel's
face was astonishment. I'm dashed, he said, if this don't
be cock fighting, most remarkable. And there I can see
a rabbit clean through you are a mile away, not

(01:23:56):
a bit of you visible, except he scrutinized the apparently
empty space. Keenly, you haven't been eating bread and cheese,
he asked, holding the invisible arm. You're quite right, and
it's not quite assimilated into the system, ah, said mister Marvel,
A sort of ghostly though. Of course, all this isn't

(01:24:17):
half wonderful as you think. It's quite wonderful enough for
my modest ones, said mister Thomas Marvel. Oh you manage it.
Oh the deuce? Is it done? It's too long a story.
And besides, I tell you, the old business fairly beats me,
said mister Marvel. What I want to say at present
is this. I need help. I have come to that.

(01:24:40):
I came upon you suddenly. I was wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent,
I could have murdered. And I saw you, Lord, said
mister Marvel. I came up behind you, hesitated, went on.
Mister Marvell's expression was eloquent. Then stopped here, I said,

(01:25:00):
is an outcast like myself? This is the man for me?
So I turned back and came to you. You and Lord,
said mister Marvel. But I'm all in a tizzy. I ask,
how is it? And what you may be requiring in
the way of help invisible. I want you to help
me get clothes and shelter, and then with other things.

(01:25:23):
I've left them long enough. If you won't, well, but
you will. Must look here, said mister Marvel. I'm too flabbergasted.
Don't knock me about any more and leave me go.
I must steady a bit, and you've pretty near broken
my toe. It's also unreasonable. Empty down's empty sky, nothing

(01:25:43):
visible for miles except the bosom of nature. And then
comes a voice, a voice out of heaven and stones
and a fist. Lord, pull yourself together, said the voice,
for you have to do the job I've chosen for you.
Mister Marvel blew out his cheeks and his eyes were round.
I've chosen you, said the voice. You are the only man,

(01:26:05):
except some of those fools down there, who knows there
is such a thing as an invisible man. You have
to be my helper, help me, and I will do
great things for you. An invisible man is a man
of power. He stopped for a moment to sneeze violently.
But if you betray me, he said, if you fail
to do as I direct you, he paused and tapped

(01:26:27):
mister Marvell's shoulder smartly. Mister Marvell gave a yelp of
terror at the touch. I don't want to betray you,
said mister Marvell, edging away from the direction of the fingers.
Don't you go a think in that wherever you do.
All I want to do is help you. Just tell
me what I got to do to hoard Whatever you
want done, that I'm most willing to do. Chapter ten,

(01:26:50):
mister Marvell's visit to Iping. After the first gusty panic
had spent itself, Iping became argumentative. Skepticism suddenly reared its head,
rather nervous, skepticism not at all assured of its back,
but skepticism none the less. It is so much easier

(01:27:10):
not to believe in an invisible man, and those who
had actually seen him dissolve into air or felt the
strength of his arm could be counted on the fingers
of two hands. And of those witnesses, mister Wadgers was
presently missing, having retired impregnably behind the bolts and bars
of his own house, and Jaffers was lying stunned in
the parlor of the coach and horses. Great and strange

(01:27:31):
ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and
women than smaller, more tangible considerations. Iping was gay with Bunting,
and everybody was in gala dress, whit Monday had been
looked forward to for a month or more. By the afternoon,
even those who believed in the unseen were beginning to
resume their little amusements in a tentative fashion, and on

(01:27:54):
the supposition that he had gone quite away, and with
the skeptics he was already adjessed. But people, skeptics and
believers alike, were remarkably sociable All that day. Hayesman's meadow
was gay, with a tent in which Missus Bunting and
other ladies were preparing tea, while without the Sunday school
children ran races and played games under the noisy guidance

(01:28:15):
of the Curate and the Missus Cuss and Sackbut no
doubt there was a slight uneasiness in the air, but people,
for the most part had the sense to conceal whatever
imaginative qualms they experienced. On the village Green an inclined
string down which, clinging the while to a pulley swung handle,
one could be hurled violently against a sack at the
other end, came in for considerable favour among the adolescent,

(01:28:38):
as also did the swings and the coconut shies. There
was also promenading, and the steam organ attached to a
small roundabout, filled the air with a plungent flavor of
oil and with equally pungent music. Members of the club
who had attended church in the morning were splendid in
badges of pink and green, and some of the gayer
mind it had adorned their bowler hats with brilliant colored

(01:28:59):
flowers of river. Old Fletcher, whose conceptions of holiday making
were severe, was visible through the jasmine about his window
or through the open door, whichever way you chose to look,
poised delicately on a plank, supported on two chairs, and
whitewashing the ceiling of his front room. About four o'clock
a stranger entered the village from the direction of the Downs.

(01:29:21):
He was a short, stout person in an extraordinarily shabby
top hat, and he appeared to be very much out
of breath. His cheeks were alternately limp and tightly puffed.
His mottled face was apprehensive, and he moved with a
sort of reluctant alacrity. He turned the corner of the
church and directed his way to the Coach and Horses,

(01:29:42):
among others. Old Fletcher remembered seeing him, and indeed the
old gentleman was so struck by his peculiar agitation that
he inadvertently allowed a quantity of whitewash to run down
the brush into the sleeve of his coat. Whilst regarding him.
This stranger, to the perceptions of the proprietor of the
Coconut Shy, appeared to be took talking to himself, and
mister Huxter remarked the same thing. He stopped at the

(01:30:05):
foot of the Coach and Horses steps, and, according to
mister Huckster, appeared to undergo a severe internal struggle before
he could induce himself to enter the house. Finally, he
marched up the steps and was seen by mister Huxter
to turn to the left and open the door of
the parlor. Mister Huckster heard voices from within the room
and from the bar, apprising the man of his error.

(01:30:26):
That room's private said hall, and the stranger shut the
door clumsily and went into the bar. In the course
of a few minutes, he reappeared, wiping his lips with
the back of his hand, with an air of quiet
satisfaction that somehow impressed mister Huckster, as he assumed he
stood looking about him for some moments, and then mister
Huckster saw him walk in an oddly furtive manner towards

(01:30:48):
the gates of the yard upon which the parlor window opened.
The stranger, after some hesitation, leant against one of the
gate posts, produced a short clay pipe, and prepared to
fill it. His finger trembled while doing so. He lit
it clumsily and folded his arms began to smoke in
a languid attitude, an attitude which his occasional glances up

(01:31:09):
the yard altogether belied. All this, mister Huxter saw over
the canisters of the tobacco window, and the singularity of
the man's behavior prompted him to maintain his observation. Presently,
the stranger stood up abruptly and put his pipe in
his pocket. Then he vanished into the yard forthwith mister Huckster,

(01:31:30):
conceiving he was witness of some petty larceny, leaped around
his counter and ran out into the road to intercept
the thief. As he did so, mister Marvel reappeared his
hat askew a big bundle in a blue tablecloth in
one hand, and three books tied together as it proved afterwards,
with the vicar's braces in the other. Directly he saw Huckster.
He gave a sort of gasp, and, turning sharply to

(01:31:52):
the left, began to run. Stop thief, cried Huxter, and
set off after him. Mister Huxter's sensations were vivid but brief.
He saw the man just before him, and spurting briskly
for the church corner and the hill road, he saw
the village flags and festivities beyond, and a face or
so turned towards him. He bawled stop again. He had

(01:32:13):
hardly gone ten strides before his shin was caught in
some mysterious fashion, and he was no longer running, but
flying with inconceivable rapidity through the air. He saw the
ground suddenly close to his face. The world seemed to
splash into a million whirling specks of light, and subsequent
proceedings interested him no more. End of chapter ten, Chapter

(01:32:38):
eleven in the Coach and Horses, Now in order to
clearly understand what had happened in the inn, it is
necessary to go back to the moment when mister Marvell
first came into view of mister Huckster's window. At that
precise moment, mister Cuss and mister Bunting were in the parlor.
They were seriously investigating the strange occurrences of the morning,

(01:33:00):
and were, with mister Hall's permission, making a thorough examination
of the invisible man's belongings. Jaffers had partially recovered from
his fall and had gone home in charge of his
sympathetic friends. The stranger's scattered garments had been removed by
Missus Hall, and the room tidied up, and on the
table under the window where the stranger had been wont

(01:33:21):
to work, Cuss had hit almost at once on three
big books in manuscript labeled diary. Diary, said Cus, putting
the three books on the table. Now, at any rate
we shall learn something. The vicar stood with his hands
on the table, Diary repeated Cus, sitting down, putting two
volumes to support the third and opening it hum no

(01:33:45):
name on the fly leaf, bother cipher and figures. The
vicar came round to look over his shoulder, Cuss turned
the pages over with a face suddenly disappointed. I'm dear me,
it's all cipher hunting. There are no diagrams, asked mister Bunting,
no illustrations throwing light. See for yourself, said mister Cuss.

(01:34:08):
Some of it's mathematical, and some of its Russian or
some such language, to judge by the letters, and some
of its Greek. Now the Greek, I thought you, of course,
said mister Bunting, taking out and wiping his spectacles, and
feeling suddenly very uncomfortable, for he had no Greek left
in his mind worth talking about. Yes, the Greek, of course,

(01:34:29):
may furnish a clue. I'll find you a place. I'd
rather glance through the volumes first, said mister Bunting, still
wiping a general impression, first, Cuss, and then you know,
we can go looking for clues. He coughed, put on
his glasses, arranged them fastidiously, coughed again, and wished something

(01:34:49):
would happen to avert the seemingly inevitable exposure. Then he
took the volume Cuss handed him in a leisurely manner,
and then something did happen. The door opened suddenly, both
gentlemen started violently, looked around, and were relieved to see
a sporadically rosy face beneath the furry's hillk hat Tap

(01:35:10):
asked the face and stood staring. No, said both gentlemen
at once. Over the other side, my man, said mister Bunting,
And please shut that door, said mister Cuss irritably. All right,
said the intruder, as it seemed, in a low voice,
curiously different from the huskiness of its first inquiry. Right

(01:35:31):
you are, said the intruder in the former voice. Stand clear,
and he vanished and closed the door. A sailor, I
should judge, said mister Bunting, amusing fellows. They are stand clear.
Indeed an aautical term referring to his getting back out
of the room. I suppose I dare say so, said Cuss.

(01:35:53):
My nerves are all loose to day. It made me
quite jump the door opening like that. Mister Bunting smiled
as if he had not jumped. And now he said,
with a sigh, these books someone sniffed as he did. So.
One thing is indisputable, said Bunting, drawing a chair up

(01:36:13):
next to that of mister Cuss. There certainly have been
very strange things happening at Iping during the last few days,
very strange. I cannot, of course, believe in this absurd
invisibility story. It's incredible, said Cus. Incredible, but the fact
remains that I saw. I certainly saw right down his sleeve.

(01:36:35):
But did you Are you sure suppose a mirror? For instance?
Hallucinations are so easily produced. I don't know if you've
ever seen a really good conjuror. I won't argue again,
said Cus. We've thrashed that out, Bunting. And just now
there's these books. Ah, here's some of what I take

(01:36:56):
to be Greek Greek letters. Certainly, he pointed to the
middle of the page. Mister Bunting flushed slightly and brought
his face nearer, apparently finding some difficulty with his glasses. Suddenly,
he became aware of a strange feeling at the nape
of his neck. He tried to raise his head and
encountered an immovable resistance. The feeling was a curious pressure,

(01:37:20):
the grip of a heavy, firm hand, and it bore
his chin irresistibly to the table. Don't move, little men,
whispered a voice, or I'll brain you both. Mister Bunting
looked into the face of Cuss close to his own,
and each saw a horrified reflection of his own, sickly astonishment.

(01:37:41):
I'm sorry to handle you so roughly, said the voice,
but it's unavoidable. Since when did you learn to pry
into an investigator's private memoranda? Said the voice, and two
chins struck the table simultaneously, and two sets of teeth rattled.
Since when did you learn to invade the private rooms

(01:38:02):
of a man in misfortune? And the concussion was repeated.
Where have they put my clothes? Listen? Said the voice.
The windows are fastened, and I've taken the key out
of the door. I am a fairly strong man, and
I have the poker handy. Besides being invisible, There's not

(01:38:23):
the slightest doubt that I could kill you both and
get away quite easily if I wanted to. Do you
understand very well? If I let you go, would you
promise not to try any nonsense and do what I
tell you? The vicar and the doctor looked at one another,
and the doctor pulled a face. Yes, said mister Bunting,

(01:38:44):
and the doctor repeated it. Then the pressure on the
next relaxed and the doctor and the vicar sat up,
both very red in the face and wriggling their heads.
Please keep sitting where you are, said the invisible man.
Here's the poker, you see when I came into this room,
continued the invisible Man, after presenting the poker to the

(01:39:05):
tip of the nose of each of his visitors. I
did not expect to find it occupied, and I expected
to find, in addition to my books of memoranda, an
outfit of clothing. Where is it, No, don't rise, I
can see it's gone now. Just at present. Though the
days are quite warm enough for an invisible man to
run about stark, the evenings are quite chilly. I want

(01:39:28):
clothing and other accommodation, and I must also have those
three books. Chapter twelve, The Invisible Man loses his temper.
It is unavoidable that at this point the narrative should
break off again for a certain, very painful reason that

(01:39:49):
will presently be apparent. While these things were going on
in the parlor, and while mister Huckster was watching mister
Marvell smoking his pipe against the gate not a dozen
yards away, mister Hall and Teddy Henry were discussing in
a state of cloudy puzzlement the one eyping topic. Suddenly
there came a violent thud against the door of the parlor,

(01:40:10):
a sharp cry, and then silence. Ullo, said Teddy, Henry
ullo from the tap. Mister Hall took things in slowly,
but surely that ain't right, he said, and came round
from behind the bar towards the parlor door. He and
Teddy approached the door together with intent faces, their eyes

(01:40:34):
considered somewhat wrong, said Hall, and Henry nodded agreement. Whiffs
of an unpleasant chemical odor met them. There was a
muffled sound of conversation, very rapid and subdued. You are
right there, asked Hall, rapping. The muttered conversation ceased abruptly
for a moment silence. Then the conversation was resumed in

(01:40:57):
hissing whispers, then a sharp cry of no, no, you don't.
There came a sudden motion and the oversetting of a chair,
a brief struggle, silence again what the deuce, exclaimed Henry
sotto vatching you all right there, asked mister Hall, sharply.

(01:41:18):
Again the vicar's voice answered with a curious jerking intonation. Cool, cool,
quite right, Please don't interrupt, odd, said mister Henfrey. Odd
said mister Hall says, don't interrupt, said Henfrey. Are you hurt?

(01:41:39):
And said Hall? And a sniff said Henfrey. They remained listening.
The conversation was rapid and subdued. I can't, said mister Bunting,
his voice rising, I tell you, sir, I will not.
What was that, asked Henfrey. Says ye, winner it where

(01:42:00):
speaking to us? Was he disgraceful, said mister Bunting. Within disgraceful,
said mister Henfrey. I heard it distinct? Who's that speaking now,
asked Henfrey. Mister cusse, I suppose, said Haul. Can you
hear anything? Silence? The sounds within indistinct and perplexing, sounds

(01:42:25):
like throwing the tablecloth about, said Hall. Missus Hall appeared
behind the bar. Hall made gestures of silence and invitation.
This aroused Missus Hall's wifely opposition. What's your lessening there? For? Hall?
Ain't you nothing better to do? Busy day like this?
Hall tried to convey everything by grimaces and dumb show,

(01:42:47):
but Missus Hall was obdurate. She raised her voice, so
Hall and Henfrey, rather crestfallen, tiptoed back to the bar
gesticulating to explain to her. At first she refused, used
to see anything in what they had heard at all.
Then she insisted on Hall keeping silence while Henfrey told
her his story. She was inclined to think the whole

(01:43:08):
business nonsense. Perhaps they were just moving the furniture about.
I heard and say disgraceful that I did, said Hall.
I heard that, Missus Hall, said Henfrey. Like as not
began Missus Hall sh said, mister Teddy Henry. Didn't I
hear the window? What window, asked Missus Hall. Parlor window,

(01:43:31):
said Henfrey. Everyone stood listening intently. Missus Hall's eyes directed
straight before her saw without seeing the brilliant oblong of
the inn door, the road white and vivid, and Huckster's
shop front blistering in the June sun. Abruptly, Huckster's door
opened and Huckster appeared, eyes staring with excitement, arms gesticulating.

(01:43:54):
Yap cried Hunter, stop thief, and he run obliquely across
the oblong towards the yard and vanished. Simultaneously came a
tumult from the parlor and a sound of windows being closed. Hall, Henfrey,
and the human contents of the tap rushed out at
once pell mell into the street. They saw someone whisker

(01:44:14):
around the corner towards the road, and mister Huckster executing
a complicated leap in the air that ended on his
face and shoulder. Down the street. People were standing astonished
or running towards them. Mister Huckster was stunned. Henry stopped
to discover this, but Hall and the two laborers from
the tap rushed at once to the corner, shouting incoherent things,

(01:44:36):
and saw mister Marvell vanishing by the corner of the
church wall. They appeared to have jumped to the impossible
conclusion that this was the invisible man suddenly become visible
and set off at once along the lane in pursuit.
But Hall had hardly run a dozen yards before he
gave a loud shout of astonishment and went flying headlong sideways,
clutching one of the laborers and bringing him to the ground.

(01:44:58):
He had been charged, just as one charges a man
at football. The second laborer came round in a circle,
stared and conceiving that Hall had tumbled over of his
own accord, turned to resume the pursuit, only to be
tripped by the ankle, just as Huckster had been. Then,
as the first labourer struggled to his feet, he was
kicked sideways by a blow that might have felled an ox.

(01:45:21):
As he went down the rush from the direction of
the village Green came round the corner. The first to
appear was the proprietor of the Cocoanut Shy, a burly
man in blue Jersey. He was astonished to see the
lane empty save for three men sprawling absurdly on the ground.
And then something happened to his rearmost foot, and he
went headlong and rolled sideways, just in time to graze

(01:45:43):
the feet of his brother and partner following headlong. The
two were then kicked, knelt on, fallen over, and cursed
by quite a number of over hasty people. Now, when
Hall and Henfrey and the labourers ran out of the house,
Missus Hall, who had been disciplined by years of experience,
remained in the bar next to the till. And suddenly

(01:46:04):
the parlor door was opened and mister Cuss appeared, and
without glancing at her, rushed at once down the steps
round the corner. Hold him, he cried, don't let him
drop that parcel he knew nothing of the existence of Marvel,
for the invisible man had handed over the books and
bundle in the yard. The face of mister Cuss was

(01:46:25):
angry and resolute, but his costume was defective, a sort
of limp white kilt that could only have passed muster
in Greece. Hold him, he bawled. He's got my trousers,
and every stitch of the vicar's clothes tend to him
in a minute, he cried to Henry. As he passed
the prostrate huckster, and coming round the corner to join

(01:46:46):
the tumult, was promptly knocked off his feet into an
indecorous sprawl. Somebody in full flight trod heavily on his finger.
He yelled, struggled to regain his feet, was knocked against
and thrown on all fours again, and became aware that
he was involved not in a capture but a rout.
Everyone was running back to the village. He rose again

(01:47:08):
and was hit severely behind the ear. He staggered and
set off back to the coach and horses, forthwith leaping
over the deserted huckster, who was now sitting up on
his way behind him. As he was half way up
the inn steps, he heard a sudden yell of rage,
rising sharply out of the confusion of cries, and a
sounding smack in someone's face. He recognized the voice as

(01:47:31):
that of the Invisible Man, and the note was that
of a man suddenly infuriated by a painful blow. In
another moment, mister Cuss was back in the parlor. He's
coming back, Bunting, he said, rushing in. Save yourself. Mister
Bunting was standing in the window, engaged in an attempt
to clothe himself in the hearth rug and a West

(01:47:52):
Surrey gazette. Who's coming, he said, so startled that his
costume narrowly escaped disintegration. Invisible Man, said Cuss, and rushed
on at to the window. We'd better clear out from here.
He's fighting mad mad. In another moment, he was out
in the yard. Good heavens, said mister Bunting, hesitating between

(01:48:13):
two horrible alternatives. He heard a frightful struggle in the
passage of the inn, and his decision was made. He
clambered out of the window, adjusted his costume hastily, and
fled up the village as fast as his fat little
legs would carry him. From the moment when the Invisible
Man screamed with rage and mister Bunting made his memorable

(01:48:35):
flight up the village, it became impossible to give a
consecutive account of affairs in Iping. Possibly the Invisible Man's
original intention were simply to cover Marvel's retreat with the
clothes and books, but his temper at no time very good,
seems to have gone completely. At some chance blow and
forthwith he set to smiting and overthrowing. For the mere

(01:48:56):
satisfaction of hurting, you must figure the street full of running,
figures of doors slamming, and fights for hiding places. You
must figure the tumult suddenly striking on the unstable equilibrium
of old Fletcher's planks and two chairs with cataclysmic results.
You must figure an appalled couple caught dismally in a swing.

(01:49:18):
And then the whole tumultuous rush has passed, and the
Iping street, with its gourds and flags, is deserted, save
for the still raging, unseen and littered with cocoanuts, overthrown canvas, screens,
and the scattered stock in trade of a sweet stuff's tall.
Everywhere there is a sound of closing shutters and shoving bolts,
and the only visible humanity is an occasional flitting eye

(01:49:41):
under a raised eyebrow in the corner of a windowpane.
The invisible man amused himself for a little while by
breaking all the windows in the coach and horses, and
then he thrust a street lamp through the parlor window
of Missus Gribble. He it must have been who cut
the telegraph wire to Addeddeton, just beyond Higgins's cottage on

(01:50:02):
the Aderdean Road. And after that, as his peculiar qualities allowed,
he passed out of human perceptions altogether, and he was
neither heard, seen, nor felt in Iping any more. He
vanished absolutely. But it was the best part of two
hours before any human being ventured out again into the

(01:50:23):
desolation of an Iping Street. End of chapter twelve. Chapter thirteen,
mister Marvel discusses his resignation. When the dust was gathering
and Iping was just beginning to peep timorously forth again
upon the shattered wreckage of its bank holiday, A short,

(01:50:44):
thick set man in a shabby silk hat was marching
painfully through the twilight behind the beech woods on the
road to Bramblehurst. He carried three books, bound together by
some sort of ornamental elastic ligature, and a bundle wrapped
in a blue tablecloth. His rubicund face expressed consternation and fatigue.

(01:51:05):
He appeared to be in some sort of spasmodic hurry.
He was accompanied by a voice other than his own,
and ever and again he winced under the touch of
unseen hands. If you give me the slip again, said
the voice. If you attempt to give me the slip again, Lord,
said mister Marvell. That shoulder's a mass of bruises as

(01:51:27):
it is. On my honor, said the voice. I will
kill you. I didn't try to give you the slip,
said Marvel, in a voice that was not far remote
from tears. I swear I didn't. I didn't know the
blessed turning. That was all how the devil was I
to know the blessed turning? As it is, I've been
knocked about. You'll get knocked about a great deal more

(01:51:49):
if you don't mind, said the voice, and mister Marvell
abruptly became silent. He blew out his cheeks, and his
eyes were eloquent of despair. It's bad enough to let
those floundering yokels explode my little secret without your cutting
off with my books. It's lucky for some of them.
They cut and ran when they did. Here am I

(01:52:12):
No one knew I was invisible? And now what am
I to do? What am I to do? Asked Marvel
sotto vo. She it's all about. It will be in
the papers. Everybody will be looking for me, every one
on their guard. The voice broke off into vivid curses
and ceased. The despair of mister Marvell's face deepened and

(01:52:35):
his pace slackened. Go on, said the voice. Mister Marvell's
face assumed a grayish tint between the ruddier patches. Don't
drop those books, stupid, said the voice, sharply, overtaking him.
The fact is, said the voice. I shall have to
make use of you. You're a poor tool, but I must.

(01:52:57):
O'm a miserable tool, said Marvel. You are, said the voice.
I'm the worst possible tool you could have, said Marvel.
I'm not strong, he said, after a discouraging silence. I'm
not over strong, he repeated. No, and my heart's weak.

(01:53:20):
That little business I pulled it through, of course, but
bless you, I could have dropped. Well, I haven't the
nerve and strength for the sort of thing you want.
I'll stimulate you. I wish you wouldn't. I wouldn't like
to mess up your plans, you know, but I might
out of sheer funk and misery. You'd better not, said

(01:53:44):
the voice, with quiet emphasis. I wish I was dead,
said Marvel. He ain't justice, he said, you must admit
it seems to me I've a perfect right Get on,
said the voice. Mister Marvell mended his pace, and for
a time they went in silence again. It's devilish, horrid,

(01:54:06):
said mister Marple. This was quite ineffectual. He tried another tack.
What do I make by it? He began, and again
in a tone of unendurable wrong. Oh, shut up, said
the voice, with sudden, amazing vigor. I'll see to you,
all right. You do what you're told. You'll do it
all right. You're fallen all that, but you'll do I

(01:54:29):
tell you, sir, I'm not the man for it, respectfully,
but it is so. If you don't shut up, I
shall twist your wrist again, said the invisible man. I
want to think presently. Two oblongs of yellow light appeared
through the trees, and the square tower of a church
loomed through the gloaming. I shall keep my hand on

(01:54:52):
your shoulder, said the voice all through the village. Go
straight through, and try no foolery. It'll be the worse
for you if you do. Oh he know that, sighed
mister Marvel. Oh he know all that. The unhappy looking
figure in the obsolete silk hat passed up the street
of the little village with his burdens and vanished into

(01:55:14):
the gathering darkness beyond the lights of the windows. Chapter fourteen.
At Port Stowe, ten o'clock the next morning found mister Marvel, unshaven,
dirty and travel stained, sitting with the books beside him,
and his hands deep in his pockets, looking very weary,

(01:55:37):
nervous and uncomfortable, and inflating his cheeks at infrequent intervals,
on the bench outside a little inn on the outskirts
of Port Stow. Beside him were the books, but now
they were tied with string. The bundle had been abandoned
in the pine woods beyond Bramblehurst in accordance with a
change of plans in the Invisible Man. Mister Marvel sat

(01:55:58):
on the bench and although no one took the slightest
notice of him. His agitation remained at fever heat. His
hands would go ever and again to his various pockets
with a curious, nervous fumbling. When he had been sitting
for the best part of an hour, however, an elderly
mariner carrying a newspaper came out of the inn and
sat down beside him. Pleasant day, said the mariner. Mister

(01:56:23):
Marvell glanced about him with something very like terror. Very,
he said, just seasonable weather for the time of year,
said the mariner, taking no denial, quite, said mister Marvel.
The mariner produced a toothpick, and, saving his regard, was
engrossed thereby for some minutes. His eyes, meanwhile, were at

(01:56:45):
liberty to examine mister Marvell's dusty figure and the books
beside him. As he had approached mister Marvell, he had
heard a sound like the dropping of coins into a pocket.
He was struck by the contrast of mister Marvell's appearance
with this sudden suggestion of opulence. Thence his mind wandered
back again to a topic that had taken a curiously
firm hold of his imagination. Books. He said, suddenly noisily

(01:57:09):
finishing with a tuthpick. Mister Marvel started and looked at them. Oh, yes,
he said, Yes, they're books. There are some extraordinary things
in books, said the mariner. We believe you, said mister Marvel.
And some extraordinary things out of them, said the mariner. True. Likewise,

(01:57:30):
said mister Marvel. He eyed his interlocutor, and then glanced
about him. There's some extraordinary things in newspapers, for example,
said the mariner. There are in this newspaper, said the mariner. Ah,
said mister Marvel. There's a story, said the mariner, fixing

(01:57:50):
mister Marvel with an eye that was firm and deliberate.
There's a story about an invisible man, for instance. Mister
Marvel pulled his mouth askew and scratched his cheek, and
felt his ears glowing. What will they be writing next,
he asked, faintly. Austria or America? Neither, said the mariner. Here, lord,

(01:58:15):
said mister Marvel. Starting when I say here, said the mariner,
said mister Marvel's intense relief. I don't, of course mean
here in this place, I mean hereabouts. An invisible man,
said mister Marvel. And what's he been up to? Everything,
said the mariner, controlling Marvel with his eye, and then

(01:58:37):
amplifying every blessed thing. I ain't seen a paper these
four days, said Marvel. Iping's the place he started at,
said the mariner. Indeed, said mister Marvel, he started there,
and where he came from. Nobody don't seem to know here.
It is peculiar story from Iping. And it says in

(01:59:00):
this paper that the evidence is extraordinarily strong. Extraordinary, lord,
said mister Marvel. But then it's an extraordinary story. There
was a clergyman and a medical gent. Witnesses saw him
all right and proper at least ways didn't see him.
He was staying it as at the coach and horses,
and don't no one seemed to being aware of his misfortune.

(01:59:23):
Aware of his misfortune, it says, until in an altercation
at the inn. It says his bandages on his head
was torn off. Was then observed that his head was invisible.
Attempts were at once made to secure him, but casting
off his garments. It says. He succeeded in escaping, but
not until after a desperate struggle in which he had

(01:59:44):
inflicted serious injuries. It says on her worthy and able, constable,
mister J. A. Jaffers, pretty straight story, eh, names and everything, Lord,
said mister Marvel, looking nervously about him, trying to count
the money in his pockets by his unaided sense of touch,
and full of a strange novel idea. It sounds most astonishing,

(02:00:10):
don't it extraordinary? I call it? Never a tell of
invisible men? Before I haven't, but nowadays when he hears
such a lot of extraordinary things. That that all he did,
asked Marvel, trying to seem at his ease. It's enough,
ain't it? Said the Mariner. Didn't go back by any chance,

(02:00:33):
asked Marvel. Just escaped, and that's all, eh all, said
the Mariner. Why ain't it enough? Quite enough? Said Marvel.
I should think it was enough, said the Mariner. I
should think it was enough. He didn't have any pals.
You don't say he had any pals, does it, asked

(02:00:54):
mister Marvel. Anxious, ain't one of U sawt enough for you?
Asked the Mariner. No, thank heaven, as one say he didn't.
He nodded his head slowly. It makes me regular uncomfortable
the bare thought of that chap running about the country.
He is at present at large, and from certain evidence,

(02:01:14):
it is supposed that he has taken took I suppose
they mean the road to port Stow. You see, we're
right in it, none of your American wonderers this time.
And just think of the things he might do. Where'd
ye be if he took a drop over and above
and had a fancy to go for you? Supposing he

(02:01:35):
wants to rob, who can prevent him? He can tresp us,
he can burgle, He could walk through the cordon of
a policeman as easy as me. Or you could give
the slip to a blind man, easier for the easier.
Blind chapsk here uncommon sharp, I'm told, And wherever there
was liquor, he fancied. He's got a tremendous advantage, certainly,

(02:01:56):
said mister Marvell. And well you're right, said the mariner.
He has. All of this time, mister Marvell had been
glancing about him, intently, listening for faint footfalls, trying to
detect imperceptible movements. He seemed on the point of some
great resolution. He coughed behind his hand. He looked about

(02:02:21):
him again, listened, bent towards the Mariner, and lowered his voice.
The fact of it is. I happen to know just
a thing or two about this invisible man from private sources, Oh,
said the mariner. Interested you, Yes, said mister Marvel. Me indeed,

(02:02:44):
said the mariner. And may I ask you will be astonished,
said mister Marvel behind his hand. It's tremendous, indeed, said
the mariner. The fact is, began mister Marvell eagerly, in
a confidential undertone. Suddenly his expression changed marvelously. Oh, he said.

(02:03:04):
He rose stiffly in his seat. His face was eloquent
of physical softening. Wow, he said, what's up, said the mariner.
Concerned toothache, said mister Marvell, and put his hand to
his ear. He caught hold of his books. I must
be getting on, I think, he edged in a curious

(02:03:25):
way along the seat, away from his interlocutor. But you
was just gonna tell me about this here, invisible, ma'am,
protested the mariner. Mister Marvel seemed to consult it himself. Hoax,
said a voice. It's a hoax, said mister Marvel. But
it's in the paper, said the mariner. Hoax all the same,

(02:03:46):
said Marvel. I know the chat that started to lie.
There ain't no invisible man whatsoever bloy me? But how
about this paper? Do you mean to say not a
word of it? Said Marvel, stoutly. The mariner stared the
paper in hand. Mister Marvel jerkily faced about. Wait a bit,

(02:04:08):
said the mariner, rising and speaking slowly. Do you mean
to say I do? Said mister Marvel. Then why do
you let me go on and tell you all this
blasted stuff? Then what do you mean by letting a
man make a fool of himself like that? For hey,
mister Marvel blew out his cheeks. The mariner was suddenly
very red. Indeed, he clenched his hands. I've been talking here,

(02:04:31):
there's ten minutes, he said, And you, your little pot bellied,
leathery faced son of an old boot, couldn't have the
elementary manners. Don't you come bandying words with me? Said
mister Marvel, bandying words. I've a drolly good mind. Come up,
said a voice, and mister Marvel was suddenly whirled about

(02:04:51):
and started marching off in a curious, spasmodic manner. You'd
better move on, said the mariner. Who's moving on, said
mister Marvel. He was receding obliquely with a curious, hurrying
gait with occasional violent jerks forward. Somewhere along the road.
He began a muttered monolog protests and recriminations. Silly devil,

(02:05:14):
said the mariner, legs wide apart, elbows akimbo, watching the
receding figure. I'll show you, you silly ass, hoaxing me.
It's here on the paper, mister Marvel retorted incoherently, And
receding was hidden by a bend in the road, But
the mariner still stood magnificent in the midst of the
way until the approach of a butcher's cart dislodged him.

(02:05:37):
Then he turned himself towards Portstow. Full of extraordinary asses,
he said softly to himself, just take me down a bit.
That was his silly game. It's on the paper. And
there was another extraordinary thing he was presently to hear
that had happened quite close to him, And that was
a vision of a fistful of money, no less, traveling

(02:05:59):
without visible aid along by the wall at the corner
of Saint Michael's Lane. A brother Mariner had seen this
wonderful sight that very morning. He had snatched at the
money forthwith and had been knocked headlong, and when he
got to his feet, the butterfly money had vanished. Our
mariner was in the mood to believe anything, he declared,
but that was a bit too stiff. Afterwards, however, he

(02:06:22):
began to think things over, the story of the flying
money was true, and all about that neighborhood, even from
the August London and Country Banking Company, from the tills
of shops and inns doors, standing that sunny weather entirely open,
money had been quietly and dexterously making off that day
in handfuls and rulo, floating quietly along by walls and

(02:06:44):
shady places, dodging quickly from the approaching eyes of men.
And it had, though no man had traced it, invariably
ended its mysterious flight in the pocket of that agitated
gentleman in the obsolete silk hat, sitting outside the little
end on the outskirt of Port Stow. It was ten
days after, and indeed only when the Burdock story was

(02:07:06):
already old, that the mariner collated these facts and began
to understand how near he had been to the wonderful
invisible man. Chapter fifteen. The man who was running in
the early evening time, Doctor Kemp was sitting in his
study in the Belvidere on the hill overlooking Birdock. It

(02:07:28):
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 underneath the north window
a microscope, glass lips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered
bottles of reagents. Doctor Kemp's solar lamp was lit, albeit

(02:07:50):
the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and
his blinds were up because there was no offense of
peering outsiders to require them pulled down. Doctor Kemp was
a tall and slender young man, with flaxen hair and
a mustache almost white, and the work he was upon
would earn him he hoped the fellowship of the Royal Society,

(02:08:10):
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 color 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

(02:08:33):
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 doctor Kemp, like that ass
who ran into me this morning around a corner with
visible man a coming, Sir, I can't imagine what possesses people.

(02:08:53):
One might think we were in the thirteenth century. He
got up, went to the window and stared at the
dusky hillsie and the dark little figure tearing down it.
He seems in a confounded hurry, said doctor 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 doctor Kemp. In another moment, the higher of the

(02:09:16):
villas that had clambered up the hill from Burdock had
occluded 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 doctor Kemp, swinging around on his heel and walking
back to his writing table. But those who saw the

(02:09:37):
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. 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 down hill,

(02:09:59):
to where the lamps were being and the people were
crowded in the street. And his ill shaped mouth fell apart,
and a glary 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

(02:10:21):
dog playing in the road yelped and ran under a gate.
And as they still wandered, 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

(02:10:42):
in the street before Marvel was halfway there. They were
bolting into houses and slamming the doors behind them. And
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 Invisible Man, Chapter sixteen. In The Jolly Cricketers.

(02:11:09):
The Jolly Cricketers is just at the bottom of the
hill where the tram lines begin. The barman leant his
fat red arms on the counter and talked of horses
with an anemic cabman, while a black bearded man in
a gray snapped up biscuit and cheese, drank burton, and
conversed in American with a policeman off duty. What's the

(02:11:29):
shouting about, said the anemic cabman, going off at a tangent,
trying to see up the hill over the dirty yellow
blind in the low window of the inn. Somebody ran
by outside fire perhaps, said the barman. Footsteps approached, running heavily.
The door was pushed open violently, and Marvel weeping and disheveled,

(02:11:49):
his hat gone, the neck of his coat torn open,
rushed in, made a convulsive turn and attempted to shut
the door. It was half held open by a trap coming.
He bawled, his voice shrieking with terror. He's coming, the
visible man after me. For God's sake, help help, help

(02:12:10):
shut the doors, said the policeman, who's coming. What's the row?
He went to the door, released the strap and it slammed.
The American closed the other door. Let me go inside,
said Marvel, staggering and weeping, but still clutching the books.
Let me go inside. Lock me in somewhere. I tell
you he's after me. I gave him the slip. He

(02:12:32):
said he'd kill me, and he will. You're safe, said
the man with the black beard. The doors shut. What's
it all about? Let me go inside, said Marvel, and
shrieked aloud as a blow suddenly made the fastened door
shiver and was followed by a hurried rapping and a
shouting outside. Hello, cried the policeman. Who's there. Mister Marvel

(02:12:54):
began to make frantic dives at panels that looked like doors.
He'll kill me. He's got a knife or something. For
God's sake, here you are, said the barman. Come in here,
and he held up the flap of the bar. Mister
Marvel rushed behind the bar as the summon's outside was repeated.
Don't open the door, he screamed, please don't open the door.

(02:13:15):
Where shall I eide this? This invisible man then asked
the man with the black beard, with one hand behind him. Oh, yes,
it's about time we saw him. The window of the
inn was suddenly smashed in, and there was a screaming
and running to and fro in the street. The policeman
had been standing on the settee staring out, craning to

(02:13:36):
see who was at the door. He got down with
raised eyebrows. It's that, he said. The barman stood in
front of the bar parlor, which was now locked on.
Mister Marvel stared at the smashed window and came around
to the other two men. Everything was suddenly quiet. I
wish I had my truncheon, said the policeman, going irresolutely

(02:13:59):
to the door. Once we open in he comes, there's
no stop in him. Don't you be in too much
hurry about that door, said the anemic cabman. Actionously, draw
the bolts, said the man with a black beard, And
if he comes, he showed a revolver in his hand.
That won't do, said the policeman. That's murder. I know

(02:14:22):
what country I'm in, said the man with the beard.
I'm going to let off at his legs. Draw the bolts.
Not with that blinking fingering off behind me, said the barman,
craning over the blind. Very well, said the man with
a black beard, and stooping down revolver already drew himself. Barman,
cabman and policeman faced about. Come in, said the bearded

(02:14:44):
man in an undertone, standing back and facing the unbolted
doors with his pistol behind him. No one came in.
The door remained closed five minutes afterwards, when a second
cabman pushed his head in cautiously. They were still waiting,
and an anxious face peered out of the bar parlor
and supplied information. Are all the doors of the house shut,

(02:15:06):
asked Marvel. He's going round, prowling round. He's as artful
as the devil. Good lord, said the burly barman. There's
the back. Just watch them doors, I say. He looked
about him helplessly. The bar parlor door slammed, and they
heard the key turn. There's the yard door and the
private door. The yard door, he rushed out of the bar.

(02:15:30):
In a minute he reappeared with a carving knife in
his hand. The yard door was open, he said, and
his fat under lip dropped. He may be in the
house now, said the first cabman. He's not in the kitchen,
said the barman. There's two women there, and I've stabbed
every inch of it with his little beef slicer, and
they don't think he's come in. They haven't noticed. Have

(02:15:51):
you fastened it, asked the first cabman. I'm out of frocks,
said the barman. The man with the beard replaced his revolver,
and even as he did so, the flap of the
bar was shut down and the bolt clicked, and then
with a tremendous thud, the catch of the door snapped
and the bar parlor door pursed open. The heard Marvel
squeal like a caught leverage, and forthwith they were clambering

(02:16:13):
over the bar to his rescue. The bearded man's revolver cracked,
and the looking glass at the back of the parlor
starred and came smashing and tinkling down. As the barman
entered the room, he saw Marvel curiously crumpled up and
struggling against the door that led to the yard and kitchen.
The door flew open while the barman hesitated and Marvel

(02:16:33):
was dragged into the kitchen. There was a scream and
a clatter of hands. Marvel, head down and lugging back obstinately,
was forced to the kitchen door, and the bolts were drawn.
Then the policeman, who had been trying to pass the barman,
rushed in, followed by one of the cabin grabbed the
wrist of the invisible hand that collared. Marvel, was hit

(02:16:54):
in the face and went reeling back. The door opened,
and Marvel made a frantic effort to obtain a lodgment
behind him. Then the cabman collared. Something I got him,
said the cabman. The barman's red hands came clawing at
the unseen. Here he is, said the barman. Mister Marvell, released,
suddenly dropped to the ground and made an attempt to

(02:17:15):
crawl behind the legs of the fighting men. The struggle
blundered around the edge of the door. The voice of
the invisible man was heard for the first time, yelling
out sharply as the policeman trod on his foot. Then
he cried out passionately, and his fists flew round like flails.
The cabman suddenly whooped and doubled up, kicked under the diaphragm.
The door into the bar parlor from the kitchen slammed

(02:17:38):
and covered mister Marvell's retreat. The men in the kitchen
found themselves clutching at and struggling with empty air. Where
is he gone, cried the man with a beard. Out
this way, said the policeman, stepping into the garden, stopping.
A piece of tile whizzed by his head and smashed
among the crockery on the kitchen table. I'll show him,

(02:18:00):
shouted the man with the black beard. And suddenly a
steel barrel shone over the policeman's shoulder, and five bullets
had followed one another into the twilight. Whence the missile
had come. As he fired, the man with the beard
moved his hand in a horizontal curve so that his
shots radiated out into the narrow yard like spokes from
a wheel. A silence followed five cartridges, said the man

(02:18:22):
with a black beard. That's the best of all four aces,
and a joker. Get a lantern, someone uncomme and feel
about for his body. Chapter seventeen, Doctor Kemp's visitor. Doctor
Kemp had continued writing in his study until the shots

(02:18:43):
aroused him. Crack, crack, crack. They came one after another. Hallo,
said doctor Kemp, putting his pen into his mouth again
and listening. Who's letting revolvers off in Burdock? What are
the asses at now? He went to the south window,
threw it up, and leaning up, stared down on the
network of windows, beaded gas lamps and shops with its

(02:19:04):
black interstices of roof and yard that made up the
town at night. Looked like a crowd down the hill,
he said, by the cricketers, and remained watching. Thence his
eyes wandered over the town to far away, where the
ship's lights shone, and the piered lowed a little illuminated
faceted pavilion like a gem of yellow light. The moon

(02:19:24):
in his first quarter hung over the westward hill, and
the stars were clear and almost tropically bright. After five minutes,
during which his mind had traveled into a remote speculation
of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at
last over the time dimension, doctor Kemp roused himself with
a sigh, pulled down the window again, and returned to

(02:19:45):
his writing desk. It must have been about an hour
after this that the front door bell rang. He had
been writing slightly, and with intervals of abstraction. Since the shots,
he sat listening. He heard the servant answer the door,
and waited for her feet on the staircase, but she
did not come. Wonder what that was, said doctor Kemp.

(02:20:08):
He tried to resume his work, failed, got up, went
downstairs from his study to the landing rang and called
over the balustrade to the housemaid as she appeared in
the hall below. Was that a letter, he asked, Only
a runaway ring, sir, she answered, I'm restless to night,
he has said to himself. He went back to his

(02:20:28):
study and this time attacked his work resolutely. In a
little while he was hard at work again, and the
only sounds in the room were the ticking of the
clock and the subdued shrillness of his quill hurrying in
the very center of the circle of light. His lamp
shade threw on his table. It was two o'clock before
doctor Kemp had finished his work for the night. He rose, yawned,

(02:20:50):
and went downstairs to bed. He had already removed his
coat and vest when he noticed that he was thirsty.
He took a candle and went down to the dining
room in search of a siphon and whish Doctor Kemp's
scientific pursuits have made him a very observant man, and
as he recrossed the hall he noticed a dark spot
on the linoleum near the mat at the foot of

(02:21:11):
the stairs. He went on upstairs, and then it suddenly
occurred to him to ask himself what the spot on
the linonium might be. Apparently some subconscious element was at work.
At any rate, he turned with his burden, went back
to the hall, put down the siphon and whiskey, and
bending down, touched the spot. Without any great surprise, he

(02:21:33):
found it had the stickiness and color of drying blood.
He took up his burden again and returned upstairs. Looking
about him and trying to account for the blood spot
on the landing, he saw something and stopped, astonished. The
door handle of his own room was blood stained. He
looked at his own hand, it was quite clean, and

(02:21:54):
then he remembered the door of his room had been
open when he came down from his study, and that
consequently he had not touched the handle at all. He
went straight into his room, his face quite calm, perhaps
a trifle more resolute than usual. His glance wandering inquisitively
fell on the bed. On the counterpane was a mess
of blood, and the sheet had been torn. He had

(02:22:15):
not noticed this before because he had walked straight to
the dressing table on the further side. The bedclothes were depressed,
as if someone had recently been sitting there. Then he
had an odd impression that he heard a low voice say, good,
Heaven's Kemp. But doctor Kemp was no believer in voices.
He stood staring at the tumbled sheets. Was that really

(02:22:38):
a voice? He looked about again, but noticed nothing further
than the disordered and blood stained bed. Then he distinctly
heard a movement across the room near the wash handstand.
All men, however highly educated, retained some superstitious inklings. The
feeling that is called eerie came upon him. He closed

(02:22:59):
the door the room, came forward to the dressing table
and put down his burdens. Suddenly, with a start, he
perceived a coiled and blood stained bandage of linen rag
hanging in mid air between him and the washhand stand.
He stared at this in amazement. It was an empty bandage,
a bandage properly tied, but quite empty. He would have

(02:23:22):
advanced to grasp it, but a touch arrested him, and
a voice speaking quite close to him. Kemp said the voice, Eh,
said Kemp, with his mouth open. Keep your nerve, said
the voice, I am an invisible man. Kemp made no
answer for a space, simply stared at the bandage. Invisible man,

(02:23:43):
he said, I am an invisible man, repeated the voice.
The story he had been active to ridicule only that
morning rushed through Kemp's brain. He does not appear to
have been either very much frightened or very greatly surprised
at the moment. Realization came later. I thought it was

(02:24:03):
all a lie, he said. The thought uppermost in his
mind was the reiterated arguments of the morning. Have you
a bandage, John, he asked, Yes, said the invisible man. Oh,
said Kemp, and then roused himself. I say, he said,
but this is nonsense. It's some trick. He stepped forward.

(02:24:24):
Suddenly in his hand extended towards the bandage, met invisible fingers.
He recoiled at the touch, and his color changed. Keep steady, Kemp,
for God's sake, I want help badly stop. The hand
gripped his arm. He struck at it. Kemp cried the voice, Kemp,
keep steady, and the grip tightened. A frantic desire to

(02:24:46):
free himself took possession of Kemp. The hand of the
bandaged arm gripped his shoulder, and he was suddenly tripped
and flung backwards upon the bed. He opened his mouth
to shout, and the corner of the sheet was thrust
between his teeth. The invisible man had him down grimly,
but his arms were free, and he struck and tried
to kick savagely. Listen to reason, will you, said the

(02:25:07):
invisible man, sticking to him, in spite of a pounding
in the ribs. By Heaven, you'll madden me in a minute.
Lie still, you fool, bawled the invisible man in Kemp's ear.
Kemp struggled for another moment and then lay still. If
you shout, I'll smash your face, said the invisible man,
relieving his mouth. I'm an invisible man. It's no foolish

(02:25:29):
and no magic. I really am an invisible man, and
I want your help. I don't want to hurt you,
but if you behave like a frantic rustic I must.
Don't you remember me, Kemp gryffin of University College. Let
me get up, said Kemp. I'll stop where I am
and let me see it. Quiet for a minute, he
sat up and felt his neck. I am Gryffin of

(02:25:52):
University College, and I have made myself invisible. I am
just an ordinary man, a man you have known, made invisible, Gryffin,
said Kemp. Gryffin answered the voice, A younger student than
you were, almost an albino, six feet high and broad,
with a pink and white face and red eyes, who
won the medal for chemistry. I am confused, said Kemp.

(02:26:17):
My brain is writing. What has this to do with Griffin?
I am Griffin. Kemp thought. It's horrible, he said, but
what devilry must happen to make a man invisible? It's
no devilry. It's a process, sane and intelligible enough. It's horrible,
said Kemp. How on earth it's horrible enough. But I

(02:26:40):
am wounded and in pain and tired. Great God, Kemp,
you are a man. Take it steady, Give me some
food and drink, and let me sit down here. Kemp
stared at the bandage as it moved across the room,
then saw a basket chair dragged across the floor and
come to rest near the bed. It creaked, and the
sea twas depressed by the quarter of an inch or so.

(02:27:03):
He rubbed his eyes and felt his neck again. This
beats ghosts, he said, and laughed stupidly. That's better, Thank Heaven.
You're getting sensible or silly, said Kemp, and knuckled his eyes.
Give me some whiskey. I'm near dead. It didn't feel
so Where are you? If I get up, I run
into you? There? All right? Whisky here? Where shall I

(02:27:28):
give it to you? The chair creaked, and Kemp felt
the glass drawn away from him. He let go by
an effort. His instinct was all against it. It came
to rest poised twenty inches above the front edge of
the seat of the chair. He stared at it in
infinite perplexity. This is this must be hypnotism. You have

(02:27:49):
suggested you are invisible. Nonsense, said the voice. It's frantic.
Listen to me, I demonstrated conclusively this morning, began Kemp.
That invisibility. Never mind what you've demonstrated. I'm starving, said
the voice. And the night is chilly to a man
without clothes food, said Kemp. The tumbler of whiskey tilted itself, Yes,

(02:28:12):
said the invisible man, wrapping it down. Have you a
dressing gown? Kemp made some exclamation in an undertone. He
walked to a wardrobe and produced a robe of dingy'scarlet.
This do, he asked? It was taken from him. It
hung limp for a moment in mid air, fluttered weirdly,
stood full and decorously, buttoning itself, and sat down in

(02:28:32):
his chair. Drawers, socks, slippers would be a comfort, said
the unseen Curtly, and food anything, but this is the
insanest thing I was ever in in my life. He
turned out his drawers for the articles, and then went
downstairs to ransack his larder. He came back with some
cold cutlets and bread, pulled up a light table, and

(02:28:53):
placed them before his guest. Never mind knives, said his visitor,
and a cutlet hung in mid air with a sound
of invisible, said Kemp, and sat down on a bedroom chair.
I always like to get something about me before I eat,
said the invisible man, with a full mouth, eating greedily.
Queer fancy. I suppose that wrist is all right, said Kemp.

(02:29:16):
Trust me, said the invisible man. I've all the strange
and wonderful, exactly, But it's odd I should blunder into
your house to get my bandaging, my first stroke of luck. Anyhow,
I meant to sleep in this house to night. You
must stand that it's a filthy nuisance. My blood showing,
Isn't it quite a clot? Over there? Gets visible as
it coagulates. You see, it's the only living tissue I've changed,

(02:29:38):
and only for as long as I'm alive. I've been
in the house three hours. But how's it done? Began
Kemp in a tone of exasperation. Confound it the whole business.
It's unreasonable from beginning to end. Quite reasonable, said the
invisible man, perfectly reasonable. He reached over and secured the
whiskey bottle. Kemp stared at the devouring d A ray

(02:30:01):
of candle light penetrating a torn patch in the right
shoulder made a triangle of light under the left ribs.
Where are the shots? He asked? How did the shooting begin?
There was a real fool of a man, a sort
of confederate of mine. Curse him who tried to steal
my money has done so? Is he invisible too? No? Well,

(02:30:22):
can't I have some more to eat before I tell
you all that I'm hungry in pain, and you want
me to tell stories, Kemp got up. You didn't do
any shooting, he asked, Not me, said his visitor. Some
fool i'd never seen fired at random. A lot of
them got scared. They all got scared at me. Curse them.
I say, I want more to eat than this, Kemp.

(02:30:43):
I'll see what there is to eat downstairs, said Kemp.
Not much, I'm afraid. After he had done eating, and
he had made a heavy meal, the invisible man demanded
a cigar. He bit the end savagely before Kemp could
find a knife, and cursed. When the outer leaf loosened,
it was strange to see him smoking. His mouth and
throat phananx and narrows became visible as a sort of

(02:31:04):
whirling smoke cast this blessed gift of smoking, he said,
and puffed vigorously. I am lucky to have fallen upon you, Kemp.
You must help me. Fancy tumbling on you just now.
I'm in a devilish scrape. I've been mad. I think
the things I've been through, But we will do things yet.
Let me tell you he helped himself to more whiskey
and soda. Kemp got up, looked about him, and fetched

(02:31:26):
a glass from his spare room. It's wild, but I
suppose I may drink. You haven't changed much, Kemp, these
dozen years. You fair men don't cool and methodical. After
the first collapse, I must tell you. We will work together.
But how was it all done? Said Kemp? And how
did you get like this? For God's sake, let me
smoke in peace for a little while, and then I

(02:31:47):
will begin to tell you. But the story was not
told that night. The Invisible Man's wrist was growing painful.
He was feverish, exhausted, and his mind came round to
brood upon his chase down the hill and the struggle
about the ear. He spoke in fragments of marvel. He
smoked faster, his voice grew angry. Kemp tried to gather
what he could. He was afraid of me. I could

(02:32:09):
see that he was afraid of me, said the invisible man.
Many times over. He meant to give me the slip.
He was always casting about. What a fool I was
the cur I should have killed him. Where did you
get the money, asked Kemp abruptly. The Invisible Man was
silent for a space. I can't tell you to night,
he said. He groaned suddenly and leant forward, supporting his

(02:32:32):
invisible head on invisible hands. Kemp he said, I've had
no sleep for near three days, except a couple of
dozes an hour. I must sleep soon. Well, I have
my room, have this room, But how can I sleep?
If I sleep, he will get away? Ugh, what does
it matter? What's the shot wound? Asked Kemp abruptly, nothing,
scratch and blood? Oh God, how I want sleep? Why not?

(02:32:57):
The invisible man appeared to be regarding Kemp. Because I've
a particular objection to being caught by my fellow men,
he said slowly. Kemp started fool that I am, said
the invisible man, striking the table smartly. I've put the
idea into your head. End of Chapter seventeen. Chapter eighteen,

(02:33:20):
The invisible man sleeps. Exhausted and wounded. As the invisible
man was, he refused to accept Kemp's word that his
freedom should be respected. He examined the two windows of
the bedroom, drew up the blinds, and opened the sashes
to confirm Kemp's statement that a retreat by them would
be possible outside the night was very quiet and still,

(02:33:41):
and the new moon was settling over the down Then
he examined the keys of the bedroom and the two
dressing room doors to satisfy himself that these also could
be made an assurance of freedom. Finally, he expressed himself satisfied.
He stood on the hearth rug and Kemp heard the
sound of a yawn. I'm sorry, said the invisible man

(02:34:01):
if I cannot tell you all that I have done tonight,
but I am worn out. It's grotesque, no doubt, it's horrible.
But believe me, Kemp, in spite of your arguments of
this morning, it is quite a possible thing. I have
made a discovery. I meant to keep it to myself.
I can't. I must have a partner and you we

(02:34:22):
can do such things. But tomorrow now, Kemp, I feel
as though I must sleep or perish. Kemp stood in
the middle of the room, staring at the headless garment.
I suppose I must leave you, he said. It's incredible.
Three things happening like this, overturning all my preconceptions would

(02:34:43):
make me insane, but it's real. Is there anything more
that I can get? You? Only bid me good night,
said Griffin. Good night, said Kemp, and shook an invisible hand.
He walked sideways to the door. Suddenly the dressing gown
walked quickly towards him. Understand me, said the dressing gown.
No attempts to hamper me or capture me or Kemp's

(02:35:06):
face changed a little. I thought, I gave you my word,
he said. Kemp closed the door softly behind him, and
the key was turned upon him forthwith. Then, as he
stood with an expression of passive amazement on his face,
the rapid feet came to the door of the dressing room,
and that too was locked. Kemp slapped his brow with
his hand. Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad?

(02:35:28):
Or have I? He laughed, and put his hand to
the locked door. Barred out of my own bedroom by
a flagrant absurdity, he said. He walked to the head
of the staircase, turned and stared at the locked doors.
It's fact, he said. He put his fingers to his
slightly bruised neck. Undeniable fact. But he shook his head hopelessly,

(02:35:53):
turned and went downstairs. He lit the dining room lamp,
got out a cigar, and began pacing the ROOMA jack
now and then he would argue with himself. Invisible, He said,
is there such a thing as an invisible animal in
the sea? Yes, thousands millions, or the larvae, or the
little knopoly i and toneras, or the microscopic things like jellyfish.

(02:36:18):
In the sea. There are more things invisible than visible,
or I never thought of that before. And in the
ponds too, or those little pond life things, specks of
colorless translucent jelly. But in air, no, it can't be.
But after all, why not if a man was made
of glass, he would still be visible. His meditation became profound.

(02:36:41):
The bulk of three cigars had passed into the invisible
or diffused as a white ash over the carpet before
he spoke again. Then it was merely an exclamation. He
turned aside, walked out of the room, and went into
his little consulting room and lit the gas. There. It
was a little room because doctor Kemp did not live practice,
and in it were the day's newspapers. The morning's paper

(02:37:04):
lay carelessly opened and thrown aside. He caught it up,
turned it over and read the account of a strange
story from Iping that the mariner at Port Stow had
spelt over so painfully to mister Marvel. Kemp read it
swiftly wrapped up, said Kemp, disguised hiding it. No one
seems to have been aware of his misfortune. What the

(02:37:25):
devil is his game? He dropped the paper and his
eye went seeking. Ah, he said. He caught up the
Saint James's Gazette, lying folded up as it arrived. Now
we shall get at the truth, said doctor Kemp. He
rent the paper open. A couple of columns confronted him.
An entire village in Sussex goes mad? Was the heading.

(02:37:47):
Good Heavens, said Kemp, reading eagerly, an incredulous account of
the events in iping of the previous afternoon that have
already been described. Over the leaf, the report in the
morning paper had been reprinted. He re read. Ran through
the streets, striking left and right, jaffers insensible, mister Huckster
in great pain, still unable to describe what he saw,

(02:38:08):
painful humiliation, vicar woman ill with terror, windows smashed. This
extraordinary story, probably a fabrication, too good not to print,
cum Grano. He dropped the paper and stared blankly in
front of him, Probably a fabrication, He caught up the
paper again and re read the whole business. But when

(02:38:32):
does the tramp coming? Why the deuce was he chasing
a tramp? He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench.
He's not only invisible, he said, but he's mad, homicidal.
When dawn came to mingle its power with the lamp
light and cigar smoke of the dining room, Kemp was
still pacing up and down, trying to grasp the incredible.

(02:38:54):
He was altogether too excited to sleep. His servants, descending sleepily,
discovered him and were inclined to think that overstudy had
worked this ill on him. He gave them extraordinary but
quite explicit instructions to lay breakfast for two in the
belvedere study, and then to confine themselves to the basement
and ground floor. Then he continued to pace the dining

(02:39:15):
room until the morning's paper came that had much to
say and little to tell beyond the confirmation of the
evening before and a very badly written account of another
remarkable tale from Port Burdock. This gave Kemp the essence
of the happenings at the Jolly Cricketers, and the name
of Marvel he has made me keep with him twenty
four hours. Marvel testified. Certain minor facts were added to

(02:39:37):
the iping story, notably the cutting of the village telegraph wire,
but there was nothing to throw light on the connection
between the Invisible Man and the tramp, For mister Marvel
had supplied no information about the three books or the
money with which he was lined. The incredulous tone had vanished,
and a shoal of reporters and inquirers were already at
work elaborating the matter. Kemp read every scrap of the

(02:39:59):
report and sent his housemaid out to get every one
of the morning papers she could. These also he devoured.
He is invisible, he said, and it reads like rage
growing to mania. The things he may do, the things
he may do, And upstairs he's free as air. What
on earth ought I to do? For instance? Would it

(02:40:20):
be a breach of faith? If no? He went to
a little untidy desk in the corner and began a note.
He tore this up, half written, and wrote another. He
read it over and considered it. Then he took an
envelope and addressed it to Colonel adye Port Burdock. The
Invisible Man awoke even as Kemp was doing this. He

(02:40:42):
awoke in an evil temper, and Kemp, alert for every sound,
heard his pattering feet rush suddenly across the bedroom overhead.
Then a chair was flung over and the wash handstand
tumbler smashed. Kemp hurried upstairs and rapped eagerly, Chapter nineteen,

(02:41:02):
Certain First Principles. What's the matter, asked Kemp, when the
invisible Man admitted him nothing was the answer, but confound
it the smash fit of temper, said the invisible Man
forgot this arm, and it's sore. You're rather liable to
that sort of thing, I am. Kemp walked across the

(02:41:24):
room and picked up the fragments of broken glass. All
the facts are out about you, said Kemp, standing up
with the glass in his hand. All that happened in
iping and down the hill. The world has become aware
of its invisible citizen, but no one knows you are here.
The invisible Man swore, the secret's out. I gather it
was a secret. I don't know what your plans are,

(02:41:46):
but of course I'm anxious to help you. The Invisible
Man sat down on the bed. There's breakfast upstairs, said Kemp,
speaking as easily as possible, and he was delighted to
find his strange guest rose willingly. Kemp led the way
to the narrow staircase to the Belvidere. Before we can
do anything else, said Kemp, I must understand a little

(02:42:08):
more about this invisibility of yours. He had sat down
after one nervous glance out of the window with the
air of a man who has talking to do. His
doubts of the sanity of the entire business flashed and
vanished again as he looked across to where Griffin sat
at the breakfast table, a headless, handless dressing gown, wiping
unseen lips on a miraculously held serviette. It's simple enough

(02:42:31):
and credible enough, said Griffin, putting the serviette aside and
leaning the invisible head on an invisible hand. No doubt
to you, but Kemp laughed. Well, yes to me, it
seemed wonderful at first, no doubt. But now great God,
but we will do great things. Yet. I came on
the stuff first at Cheslestone, Cheslestone. I went there after

(02:42:54):
I left London, you know, I dropped medicine and took
up physics. No, well, I did light fascinated me er
optical density. The whole subject is a network of riddles,
a network with solutions, glimmering elusively through and being but
two and twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said, I
will devote my life to this. This is worth while.

(02:43:17):
Do you know what fools we are? Two and twenty fools? Then?
Are fools? Now, said Kemp, as though knowing could be
any satisfaction to a man. But I went to work
like a slave, and I had hardly worked and thought
about the matter six months before light came through one
of the meshes. Suddenly, blindingly, I found a general principle
of pigments and refraction, a formula, a geometrical expression involving

(02:43:41):
four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not
know anything of what some general expression may mean to
the student of molecular physics. In the books, the books
that Tramp has hidden, there are marvels, miracles. But this
was not a method. It was an idea that might
lead to a method by way which it will be
possible without changing any other property of matter, except in

(02:44:03):
some instances colors to lower the refractive index of a
substance solid or liquid to that of air, so far
as all practical purposes are concerned. Phew, said Camp. That's odd,
but still I don't quite see. I can understand that
thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but personal invisibility
is a far cry. Precisely, said Griffin, But consider visibility

(02:44:28):
depends on the action of the visible bodies on light.
Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it,
or it does all these things. If it neither reflects,
nor refracts, nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible.
You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the
color absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest
or the red part of the light to you. If

(02:44:48):
it did not absorb any particular part of the light,
but reflected it all, then it would be a shining
white box. Silver. A diamond box would neither absorb much
of the light nor reflect much from the general surface,
but just here and there, where the surfaces were favorable,
the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you
would get a brilliant appearance of flashing reflections on translucencies,
a sort of skeleton of light. A glass box would

(02:45:11):
not be so brilliant, not so clearly visible as a
diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection.
You see that from certain points of view you could
see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would
be more visible than others. A box of flint glass
would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass.
A box of very thin common glass would be hard
to see in a bad light because it would absorb

(02:45:32):
hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And
if you put a sheet of common white glass in water,
still more, if you put it in some denser liquid
than water, it would vanish almost altogether. Because light passing
from water to glass is only slightly reflected or reflected,
or indeed affected in any way. It is almost as
invisible as a jet of coal, gas or hydrogen is

(02:45:52):
in air. And for precisely the same reason, yes, said Kemp,
that is pretty plain sailing. And here is another fact
you will know to be true. If a sheet of
glass is smashed camp and then beaten into a powder,
it becomes much more visible. While it is in the air.
It becomes at least an opaque white powder. This is
because the powdering multiplies the surfaces of the glass at

(02:46:14):
which refraction or reflexion occur. In the sheet of glass,
there are only two surfaces and the powder. The light
is reflected or refracted by each grain that passes through,
and very little gets right through the powder. But if
the white powdered glass is put into water, it forth
with vanishes. The powdered glass and water have much the
same refractive index. That is, the light undergoes very little
refraction or reflexion in passing from one to the other.

(02:46:36):
You make the glass invisible by putting it into a
liquid of nearly the same refractive index. A transparent thing
becomes invisible if it is put in any medium of
almost the same refractive index. And if you will consider
only a second, you will see also that the powder
of glass might be made to vanish in air, if
its refractive index could be made the same as that
of air. For then there will be no refraction or

(02:46:56):
reflexion as the light passed from glass to air. Yes, yes,
said Kemp, But a man's not powdered glass, No, said Griffin,
he's more transparent. Nonsense that from a doctor, how one forgets?
Have you already forgotten your physics? In ten years. Just

(02:47:16):
think of all the things that are transparent and seem
not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up
of transparent fibers, and it is white and opaque only
for the same reason that a powder of glass is
white and opaque. Oil white paper fill up the instances
between the particles with oil, so that there is no
longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it
becomes as transparent as glass. Are not only paper, but cotton, fiber, linen, fiber,

(02:47:40):
wool fiber, woody fiber, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp hair,
Kemp nails, and nerves, camps. In fact, the whole fabric
of a man, except the red of his blood and
the black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent,
colorless tissue, so little surfaces to make us visible one
to the other. For the most part. The fibers of
a living manner no more a paque than water. Great Heavens,

(02:48:04):
said Kemp. Of course, of course, I was thinking only
last night of the sea larvae and all jelly fish.
Now you have me and all that I knew and
had in mind a year after I left London six
years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had
to do my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor
was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief

(02:48:26):
of ideas. He was always prying, and you know the
knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not
publish and let him share my credit. I went on working.
I got nearer and nearer to making my formula in
an experiment a reality. I told no living soul, because
I meant to flash my work upon the world with
crushing effect and become famous. At a blow, I took

(02:48:49):
up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps,
and suddenly, but by design, not by accident, I made
a discovery in physiology. Yees, you know the red coloring
matter of blood. It can be made white, colorless, and
remain with all the functions it has. Now Kemp gave

(02:49:09):
a cry of credulous amazement. The invisible man rose and
began pacing a little study. You may well exclaim. I
remember that night. It was late at night. In the daytime,
one was bothering with the gaping silly students. And I
worked then sometimes till dawn. It came suddenly splendid and
complete in my mind. I was alone the laboratory of still,

(02:49:31):
with the tall lights burning brightly and silently. In all
my great moments I have been alone. One could make
an animal a tissue transparent. One could make it invisible,
all except the pigments. I could be invisible, I said,
suddenly realizing what it meant to be an albino. With
such knowledge it was overwhelming. I left the filtering I

(02:49:54):
was doing and went and stared out of the great
window at the stars. I could be invisible, I repeated.
To do such a thing would be to transcend magic.
And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of
all that invisibility might mean to a man, the mystery,
the power, the freedom, drawbacks. I saw none. You have

(02:50:16):
only to think, and I, a shabby, poverty struck hemmed
in demonstrator teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly
become this. I ask you, Kemp, if you any one,
I tell you would have flung himself upon that research.
And I worked three years, and every mountain of difficulty
I toiled over showed another from its summit, the infinite

(02:50:38):
details and the exasperation A professor, a provincial professor, always
prying when you were going to publish this work of yours,
with his everlasting question and the students the cramped means
three years I had of it, and after three years
of secrecy an exasperation, I found that to complete it
was impossible. Impossible, how asked Kemp. Money, said the invisible man,

(02:51:04):
and went again to stare out of the window. He
turned round abruptly. I robbed the old man, robbed my father.
The money was not his, and he shot himself. End
of Chapter nineteen, Chapter twenty. At the house in Great

(02:51:25):
Portland Street. For a moment, Kemp sat in silence, staring
at the back of the headless figure at the window.
Then he started, struck by a thought. Rose took the
invisible man's arm and turned him away from the outlook.
You are tired, he said, and while I sit you

(02:51:46):
walk about. Have my chair. He placed himself between Griffin
and the nearest window. For a space, Griffin sat silent,
then he resumed abruptly. I had left the Chesilstowe Cottage already,
he said. When that happened, it was last December. I
had taken a room in London, a large, unfurnished room,

(02:52:09):
with a big, ill mannaged lodging house in a slum
near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of
the appliances that I had bought with his money, and
the work was going on steadily, successfully, drawing near an end.
I was like a man emerging from a thicket and
suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy. I went to bury him.
My mind was still on this research, and I did

(02:52:31):
not lift a finger to save his character. I remember
the funeral, the chief hears, the scant ceremony, the windy,
frost bitten hillside, and the old college friend of his
who read the service over him, a shabby, black, bent
old man with a snivering cold. I remember walking back
to the empty house, through the place that had once

(02:52:52):
been a village, and was now patched and tinkered by
the jerry builders, into the ugly likeness of a town.
Every way the roads ran out at last into the
desecrated fields and ended in rubble heaps and rank, wet weeds.
I remembered myself as a gaunt black figure going along
the slippery, shiny pavement on the strange sense of detachment
I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of

(02:53:15):
the place. I did not feel a bit sorry for
my father. He seemed to me to be the victim
of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant required my
attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my affair.
But going along the high Street, my old life came
back to me for a space for I met the
girl I had known ten years since our eyes met.

(02:53:39):
Something moved me to turn back and talk to her.
She was a very ordinary person. It was all like
a dream that visit to the old places. I did
not feel then that I was lonely, that I had
come out from the world into a desolate place. I
appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down
to the general inanity of things. Re Entering my room

(02:54:02):
seemed like the recovery of reality. They were the things
I knew and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments
arranged and waiting, And now there was scarcely a difficulty
left beyond the planning of details. I will tell you
camp sooner or later. All the complicated processes we need
not go into that now. For the most part, saving

(02:54:22):
certain gaps, I chose to remember they are written in
cipher in those books. The tramp has hidden. We must
hunt him down. We must get those books again. But
the essential phase was to place the transparent object, whose
refractive index was to be lowered between two radiating centers
of a sort of ethereal vibration of which I will
tell you more fully later. No, not those oilcan vibrations.

(02:54:44):
I don't know that these others of mine have been
described yet. They are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos,
and these I worked with a cheap gas engine. My
first experiment was with a bit of white wool fabric.
It was the strangest thing in the world. To see
it in the flicker of the flashes, soft and white,
and then to watch it fade like a wreath of
smoke and vanish. I could scarcely believe I had done it.

(02:55:08):
I put my hand into the emptiness, and there was
the thing, as solid as ever. I felt it awkwardly
and threw it on the floor. I had a little
trouble finding it again, and then came a curious experience.
I heard her meow behind me, and turning saw a
lean white cat, very dirty on the cistern cover outside
the window. A thought came into my head. Everything ready

(02:55:32):
for you, I said, and I went to the window,
opened it and called softly. She came in, purring. The
poor beast was starving, and I gave her some milk.
All my food was in a cupboard in the corner
of the room. After that she went smelling round the room,
evidently with the idea of making herself at home. The
invisible rag upset her a bit. Who should have seen

(02:55:53):
a spit at it? But I made her comfortable on
the pillow of my truckle bed, and I gave her
butter to get her to wakh and you processed her.
I processed her. But giving drugs to a cat is
no joke, kemp. And the process failed failed in two particulars.

(02:56:13):
These were the claws and the pigment stuff. What is
it at the back of the eye in a cat?
You know? Tap heatum, Yes, the tap eatum. It didn't go.
After I'd given the stuff to bleach the blood and
done certain other things to her, I gave the beast
opium and put her in the little pillow she was
sleeping on on the apparatus. And after all the rest

(02:56:34):
that faded and vanished. There remained two little ghosts of
her eyes. Odd. I can't explain it. She was bandaged
and clamped, of course, so I had her safe. But
she woke while she was still misty, and meowed dismally,
and someone came knocking. It was an old woman from
downstairs who suspected me of vivisecting a drink sodden old

(02:56:55):
creature with only a white cat to care for in
all the world. I whipped, had some chloroform, applied it
and answered the door. Did I hear a cat? She asked,
My cat? Not here, said I, very politely. She was
a little doubtful, and tried to peer past me into
the room, strange enough to her, no doubt, bare walls,

(02:57:16):
uncurtained windows, truckle bed, with the gas engine vibrating, and
the seethe of the radiant points, and that faint, ghastly
stinging of chloroform in the air. She had to be
satisfied at last and went away again. How long did
it take, asked Ken? Three or four hours? The cat,
the bones and sign news and the fat were the

(02:57:36):
last to go, and the tips of the colored hairs,
and as I say, the back part of the eye
tough iridescent stuff that it is wouldn't go at all.
It was night outside long before the business was over,
and nothing was to be seen but the dim eyes
and the claws. I stopped the gas engine, felt for
and stroked the beast, which was still insensible, and then,

(02:57:57):
being tired, left it sleeping on the envinsible pillow and
went to bed. I found it hard to sleep. I
lay awake, thinking weak, aimless stuff, going over the experiment
over and over again, or dreaming feverishly of things growing
misty and vanishing about me, until everything the ground I
stood on vanished, and so I came to that sickly
falling nightmare. One gets about two. The cat began meowing

(02:58:21):
about the room. I tried to hush it by talking
to it, and then I decided to turn it out.
I remember the shock when I had striking a light.
They were just the round eyes, shining green, and nothing
round them. I would have given it milk, but I
hadn't any. It wouldn't be quiet. It just sat down
and meowed at the door. I tried to catch it,

(02:58:42):
with the idea of putting it out of the window,
but it wouldn't be caught. It vanished then it began
meowing in different parts of the room. At last I
opened the window and made a bustle. I suppose it
went out. At last I never saw any more of it. Then,
Heaven knows why I fell thinking my father's funeral again
in the dismal, windy hillside until the day had come

(02:59:05):
I found sleeping, was hopeless and locking my door after
me wandered out into the morning streets. You don't mean
to say there's an invisible cast at large, said Kemp.
If it hasn't been killed, said the invisible man. Why not?
Why not? Said Kemp. I didn't mean to interrupt. It's

(02:59:25):
very probably been killed. It was alive. Four days afterwards,
I know, and down a grating in Great Titchfield Street
because I saw a crowd round the place trying to
see whence the me owing came. He was silent for
the best part of a minute, then he resumed abruptly.
I remember that morning before the change very vividly. I
must have gone up Great Portland Street. I remember the

(02:59:47):
barracks in Albany Street and the horse soldiers coming out,
And at last I found the summit of Primrose Hill.
It was a sunny day, in January, one of those sunny,
frosty days that come before the snow this year, my
weary brain tried to formulate the position, to plot out
a plan of action. I was surprised to find now
that the prize was within my grasp, how inconclusive its

(03:00:10):
attainment seemed. As a matter of fact, I was worked out.
The intense stress of nearly four years continuous work left
me incapable of any strength or feeling. I was apathetic,
and I tried in vain to recover the enthusiasm of
my first inquiries, the passion of discovery that had enabled
me to compass even the downfall of my father's gray hairs.

(03:00:30):
Nothing seemed to matter. I saw pretty clearly this was
a transient mood due to overwork and want of sleep,
and that either by drugs or rest, it would be
possible to recover my energies. All I could think clearly
was that the thing had to be carried through. The
fixed idea still ruled me, and soon for the money
I had was almost exhausted. I looked about me at

(03:00:52):
the hillside, with children playing and girls watching them, and
tried to think of all the fantastic advantages an invisible
man would have in the world. After a time, I
crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine,
and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed.
Strychnine is a grand tonic kenp to take the flabbiness
out of a man. It's the devil, said kepis the

(03:01:14):
Paleolithic in a bottle. I awoke vastly invigorated and rather irritable.
You know, I know the stuff. And there was someone
rapping at the door. It was my landlord, with threats
and inquiries, an old Polish jew in a long gray
coat and greasy slippers. I had been tormenting a cat
in the night. He was sure the old woman's tongue

(03:01:36):
had been busy. He insisted on knowing all about it.
The laws in this country against vivisection were very severe.
He might be liable. I denied the cat. Then the
vibration of the little gas engine could be felt all
over the house. He said, that was true. Certainly. He
edged around me into the room, peering about over his
German silver spectacles, and a sudden dread came into my

(03:01:59):
mind that he might to carry away something of my secret.
I tried to keep between him and the concentrating apparatus
I had arranged, and that only made him more curious.
What was I doing? Why was I always alone and secretive?
Was it legal? Was it dangerous? I paid nothing but
the usual rent. His had always been a most respectable
house in a disreputable neighborhood. Suddenly my temper gave way.

(03:02:23):
I told him to get out. He began to protest,
to jabber of his right of entry. In a moment
I had him by the collar. Something ripped and he
went spinning out into his own passage. I slammed and
locked the door and sat down quivering. He made it
fuss outside, which I disregarded, and after time he went away.
But this brought matters to a crisis. I did not

(03:02:46):
know what he would do, nor even what he had
power to do. To move to fresh apartments would have
meant delay Altogether. I had barely twenty pounds left in
the world, for the most part in a bank, and
I could not afford that vanish, who was irri resistible.
Then there would be an inquiry. The sacking of my room.
At the thought of the possibility of my work being

(03:03:07):
exposed or interrupted, its very climax. I became angry and active.
I hurried out with my three books of notes, my
check book. The tramp has them now and directed them
from the nearest post office to a house of call
for letters and parcels in Great Portland Street. I tried
to go out noiselessly. Coming in, I found my landlord
going quietly upstairs. He had heard the door close. I

(03:03:29):
suppose you would have laughed to see him jump aside
on the landing as I came tearing up after him.
He glad me As I went by him, and I
made the house quiver with my slamming of the door.
I heard him come shuffling up to my floor, hesitate,
and go down. I set to work upon my preparations forthwith.
It was all done that evening and night. While I

(03:03:51):
was still sitting under the sickly drowsy influence of the
drugs that decolorized blood, there came a repeated knocking at
the door. It ceased, footsteps went away and returned, and
the knocking was resumed. There was an attempt to push
something under the door, a blue paper. Then, in a
fit of irritation, I arose and went and flung the
door wide open. Now, then I said it was my landlord,

(03:04:14):
with a notice of ejectment or something. He held it
out to me. Saw something odd about my hands, I expected,
and lifted his eyes to my face. For a moment
he gaped. Then he gave a sort of inarticulate cry,
dropped candle and writ together, and went blundering down the
dark passage to the stairs. I shut the door, locked it,
and went to the looking glass. Then I understood his terror.

(03:04:39):
My face was white like white stone, but it was
all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night
of racking, anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth,
though my skin was presently a fire. All my body afire.
But I lay there like grim death. I understood now
how it was that the cat had howled until I
chloroformed it. Lucky it was. I lived alone and untended

(03:05:02):
in my room. There were times when I sobbed and
groaned and talked, but I stuck to it. I became
insensible and woke languid in the darkness. The pain had passed.
I thought I was killing myself, and I did not care.
I shall never forget that dawn and the strange horror
of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass,

(03:05:23):
and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day
went by, until at last I could see the sickly
disorder of my room through them. Though I closed my
transparent eyelids, my limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished,
and the little white nerves went last. I gritted my
teeth and stayed there to the end. At last, only

(03:05:46):
the dead tips of the finger nails remained pallid and white,
and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers.
I struggled up. At first, I was as incapable as
a swathed infant, stepping with limbs I could not see.
I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared
at nothing in my shaving glass, at nothing save where

(03:06:07):
an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes,
fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the
table and press my forehead against the glass. It was
only by frantic effort of will that I dragged myself
back to the apparatus and completed the process. I slept
during the forenoon, pulling the sheet over my eyes to
shut out the light, and about mid day I was

(03:06:29):
awakened again by a knocking. My strength had returned. I
sat up and listened and heard a whispering. I sprang
to my feet, and as noiselessly as possible, began to
datch the connections of my apparatus and to distribute it
about the room, so as to destroy the suggestions of
its arrangement. Presently, the knocking was renewed, and voices called,
first my landlords, and then two others. To gain time,

(03:06:53):
I answered them. The invisible rag and pillow came to hand,
and I opened the window and pitched them out onto
the cistern cuff. As the window opened, a heavy crash
came at the door. Some one had charged it with
the idea of smashing the lock, but the stout bolts
I had screwed up some days before stopped him. That
startled me made me angry. I began to tremble and

(03:07:15):
do things hurriedly. I tossed together some loose paper, straw,
packing paper, and so forth in the middle of the room,
and turned on the gas. Heavy blows began to rain
upon the door. I could not find the matches. I
beat my hands on the wall. With rage, I turned
the gas again, stepped out of the window on the
cistern cover. They softly lowered the sash and sat down,

(03:07:36):
secure and invisible, but quivering with anger to watch events.
They split a panel I saw, and in another moment
they had broken away the staples of the bolts and
stood in the open doorway. It was the landlord and
his two step sons, sturdy young men of three or four,
and twenty behind them fluttered the old hag of a
woman from downstairs. You may imagine their astonishment to find

(03:07:58):
the room empty. One of the younger men rushed to
the window at once, flung it up and stared out
his staring eyes and thick lipped, bearded face came afoot
from my face. I was half minded to hit his
silly countenance, but I arrested my doubled fist. He stared
right through me, so did the others, as they joined him.
The old man went and peered under the bed, and

(03:08:20):
they all made a rush for the cupboard. They had
to argue about it in length in Yiddish and cogny English.
They concluded I had not answered them, that their imagination
had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation took the
place of my anger as I sat outside the window
and watched these four people. For the old lady came in,
glancing suspiciously about like a cat, trying to understand the

(03:08:43):
riddle of my behavior. The old man, so far as
I could understand his patois, agreed with the old lady
that I was a vivisectionist. The sons protested in garbled
English that I was an electrician, and appealed to the
dynamos and radiators. They were all nervous about my arrival,
although I found subsequently that they had bolted the front door.

(03:09:05):
The old lady peered into the cupboard and under the bed,
and one of the young men pushed up the register
and stared up the chimney. One of my fellow lodgers,
a costermonger who shared the opposite room with a butcher,
appeared on the landing, and he was called in and
told incoherent things. It occurred to me that the radiators,
if they fell into the hands of some acute, well

(03:09:25):
educated person, would give me away too much, And watching
my opportunity, I came into the room and tilted one
of the little dynamos off its fellow on which it
was standing and smashed both apparatus. Then, while they were
trying to explain the smash, I dodged out of the
room and went softly downstairs. I went into one of
the sitting rooms and waited until they came down, still

(03:09:46):
speculating an argumentative, all a little disappointed at finding no horrors,
and all a little puzzled how they stood legally towards me.
Then I slipped up again with a box of matches,
fired my heap of paper and rubbish, put the ch
and bedding, thereby led the gas to the affair by
the means of an India rubber tube, and waving a
farewell to the room, left it for the last time.

(03:10:09):
You fired the house, exclaimed Kemp. Fired the house. It
was the only way to cover my trail, and no
doubt it was inshored. I slipped the bolts of the
front door quietly and went out into the street. I
was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize
the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was

(03:10:30):
already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful
things I now had impunity to do end of Chapter
twenty Chapter twenty one in Oxford Street. In going downstairs
the first time, I found an unexpected difficulty because I
could not see my feet. Indeed, I stumbled twice, and

(03:10:53):
there was an unaccustomed clumsiness in gripping the bolt. By
not looking down. However, I managed to walk on the
level pass well. My mood, I say, was one of exultation.
I felt as a seeing man might do with padded
feet and noiseless clothes in a city of the blind.
I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people,

(03:11:15):
to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray,
and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage. But hardly had
I emerged upon Great Portland Street, however, my lodging was
close to the Big Draper's shop there when I heard
a clashing concussion and was hit violently behind and turning
saw a man carrying a basket of soda water siphons

(03:11:35):
and looking in amazement at his burden. Although the blow
had really hurt me, I found something so irresistible in
his astonishment that I laughed aloud. The devil's in the basket.
I said, and suddenly twisted it out of his hand.
He let go incontinently, and I swung the whole weight
into the air. But a fool of a cabman standing

(03:11:55):
outside a public house made a sudden rush for this,
and his extending fingers took me with excrewciating violence under
the ear. I let the hole down with a smash
on the cabman, and then with shouts and the clatter
of feet about me, people coming out of shops, vehicles
pulling up. I realized what I had done for myself,
and cursing my folly backed against a shop window and
prepared dodge out of the confusion. In a moment, I

(03:12:18):
should be wedged into a crowd, and inevitably discovered. I
pushed by a butcher boy, who luckily did not turn
to see the nothingness that shoved him aside, and dodged
behind the cabman's four wheeler. I do not know how
they settled the business. I hurried straight across the road,
which was happily clear and hardly heeding, which when I
went in the fright of detection the incident had given

(03:12:39):
me plunged into the afternoon throng of Oxford Street. I
tried to get into the stream of people, but they
were too thick for me, and in a moment my
heels were being trodden upon. I took to the gutter,
the roughness of which I found painful to my feet,
and forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me
forcibly under the shoulder blade, reminding me that I was

(03:13:00):
already bruised severely. I staggered out of the way of
the cab, avoided a perambulator by a convulsive movement, and
found myself behind the hansom. A happy thought saved me,
and as this drove slowly along, I followed in its
immediate wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my adventure,
and not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright

(03:13:21):
day in January, and I was stark naked, and the
thin slime of mud that covered the road was freezing. Foolish,
as it seems to me now, I had not reckoned that.
Transparent or not, I was still amenable to the weather
and all its consequences. Then suddenly a bright idea came
into my head. I ran round and got into the cab,
and so shivering, scared and sniffing with the first intimations

(03:13:44):
of a cold, and with the bruises in the small
of my back growing upon my attention. I drove slowly
along Oxford Street and passed Tottenham Court Road. My mood
was as different from that in which I had sallied
forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to imagine
this in visibility. Indeed, the one thought that possessed me
was how was I to get out of the scrape

(03:14:05):
I was in. We crawled past Moody's, and there a
tall woman with five or six yellow labeled books hailed
my cab, and I sprang out just in time to
escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight.
I made off up the roadway to Bloomsbery Square, intending
to strike north past the museum and so get into
the quiet district. I was now cruelly chilled, and the

(03:14:27):
strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered.
As I ran. At the northward corner of the square,
a little white dog ran out of the Pharmaceutical Society's
offices and incontinently made for me nose down. I had
never realized it before, but the nose is to the
mind of a dog what the eye is to the
mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceived the scent of

(03:14:49):
a man moving as men perceive his vision. This brute
began barking and leaping, showing, as it seemed to me,
only too plainly, that he was aware of me. I
crossed Great Russell Street, glancing over my shoulder as I
did so, and went somewhere along Montague Street before I
realized what I was running towards. Then I became aware
of a blair of music, and looking along the street,

(03:15:10):
saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square,
red shirts and the banner of the Salvation Army to
the fore. Such a crowd chanting in the roadway and
scoffing on the pavement, I could not hope to penetrate,
and dreading to go back and further from home again,
and deciding on the spur of the moment, I ran
up the white steps of a house facing the museum railings,
and stood there until the crowd should have passed. Happily,

(03:15:33):
the dog stopped at the noise of the band, too, hesitated,
and turned tail, running back to Bloomsbury Square again. On
came the band bawling with unconscious irony, some hymn about
when shall we see his face? And it seemed an
interminable time to me before the tide of the crowd
washed along the pavement. But by me third third thud

(03:15:54):
came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for the
moment I did not notice two urchins stopping at the rain.
Me see em, said one, see what, said the other?
Why them footmarks? Bear? Look what he makes in mud.
I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and
were gaping at the muddy footmarks I had left behind

(03:16:16):
me up the newly whitened steps. The passing people elbowed
and jostled them, but their confounded intelligence was arrested. Third, third, third,
when thud, shall we see thud his face? Thud, thud?
There's a bare footman gone at them steps or I
don't know, nahing, said one. And he ain't never come
down again, and his foot was a bleedin'. The thick

(03:16:37):
of the crowd had already passed. Look here, ted quoth
one of the younger of the detectives, with a sharpness
of surprise in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet.
I looked down and saw at once the dim suggestion
of their outline sketched in splashes of mud. For a
moment I was paralyzed. Why that's rum, said the elder

(03:16:57):
dashed rum. It's like the gust of a foot, ain't it.
He hesitated and advanced with outstretched hand. A man pulled
up short to see what he was catching, and then
a girl. In another moment, he would have touched me.
Then I saw what to do. I made a step.
The boy started back with an exclamation, and with a
rapid movement, I swung myself over into the portico of

(03:17:18):
the next house. But the smaller boy was sharp eyed
enough to follow the movement, and before I was well
down the steps and upon the pavement, he had recovered
from his momentary astonishment and was shouting out that the
feet had gone over the wall. They rushed round and
saw my new footmarks flash into being upon the lower
step and upon the pavement. What's up? Asked some one?

(03:17:39):
Fat look fat running. Everybody in the road except my
three pursuers, was pouring along after the Salvation army, and
this blow not only impeded me but them. There was
an eddy of surprise and interrogation at the cost of
bowling over one young fellow. I got through, and in
another moment I was rushing headlong round the circuit of
Russell Square, with six or seven astonished people following my footmarks.

(03:18:04):
There was no time for explanations, or else the whole
host would have been after me. Twice, I doubled round corners, thrice,
I crossed the road and came back upon my tracks.
And then, as my feet grew hot and dry, the
damp impressions began to fade. At last I had her
breathing space, and rubbed my feet clean with my hands,
and so got away altogether. The last I saw of

(03:18:24):
the chase was a little group of a dozen people,
perhaps studying with infinite perplexity a slowly drying footprint that
had resulted from a puddle in Tavistock Square, a footprint
as isolated and incomprehensible to them a scrusoe's solitary discovery.
This running warmed me to a certain extent, and I
went on with a better courage to the maze of

(03:18:45):
less frequented roads that runs hereabouts. My back had now
become very stiff and sore, my tonsils were painful from
the cabman's fingers, and the skin of my neck had
been scratched by his nails. My feet hurt exceedingly, and
I was lame for a little cut on one foot.
I saw in time a blind ban approaching me and fled,
limping for I feeled his subtle intuitions. Once or twice,

(03:19:09):
accidental collisions occurred, and I left people amazed with unaccountable
curses ringing in their ears. And then something silent and
quiet against my face, and across the square fell a
thin veil of slowly falling flakes of snow. I had
caught a cold, and do as I would, I could
not avoid an occasional sneeze, and every dog that came
in sight, with its pointed nose and curious sniffing, was

(03:19:31):
a terror to me. Then came men and boys, running,
first one and then others, and shouting as they ran.
It was a fire. They ran in the direction of
my lodging, and looking back down a street, I saw
a mass of black smoke streaming up above roofs and
telephone wires. It was my lodging, burning my clothes, my apparatus,
all my resources, indeed, except my check book, and the

(03:19:52):
three volumes of memoranda that awaited me in Great Portland
Street were there burning. I had burnt my boats. If
ever a man did, the place was blazing. The invisible
man paused and thought, Kemp glanced nervously out of the window. Yes,
he said, go on chapter twenty two in the Emporium.

(03:20:19):
So last January, with the beginning of a snow storm
in the air about me, and if it settled on
me it would betray me. Weary, cold, painful, inexpressibly wretched,
and still, but half convinced of my invisible quality, I
began this new life to which I am committed. I
had no refuge, no appliances. No human being in the

(03:20:40):
world in whom I could confide to have told my
secret would have given me away, made a mere show
and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I was half minded to
accost some passer by and throw myself upon his mercy.
But I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty
my advances would evoke. I made no plans in the street.

(03:21:00):
My sole object was to get shelter from the snow,
to get myself covered and warm. Then I might hope
to plan. But even to me an invisible man, the
rows of London houses stood latched, barred and bolted impregnably.
Only one thing could I see clearly before me, the cold,
exposure and misery of the snow storm and night. And

(03:21:23):
then I had a brilliant idea. I turned down one
of the roads leading from Gower Street to Tottenham Court
Road and found myself outside Omium's, a big establishment where
everything is to be bought, you know the place, meat, grocery, linen, furniture, clothing, oil, paintings,
even a huge, meandering collection of shops rather than a shop.
I thought I should find the doors open, but they

(03:21:45):
were closed. And as I stood in the wide entrance,
a carriage stopped outside, and a man in uniform you know,
the kind of personage with Omnium on his cap, flung
open the door. I contrived to enter, and walking down
the shop it was a department where they were selling
ribbons and gloves and stockings in that kind of thing,
came to a more spacious region, diverted to picnic baskets

(03:22:05):
and wicker furniture. I did not feel safe there, however,
people were going to and fro, and I prowled restlessly
until I came about a huge section in an upper
floor containing multitudes of bedsteads, and over these I clambered
and found a resting place at last, among a huge
pile of folded flock mattresses. The place was already lit
up and agreeably warm, and I decided to remain where

(03:22:28):
I was, keeping a cautious eye on the two or
three sets of shopmen and customers who were meriandering through
the place until closing time came. Then I should be able,
I thought, to rob the place for food and clothing,
and disguised prowl through it and examine its resources, perhaps
sleep on some of the bedding. That seemed an acceptable plan.
My idea was to procure clothing, to make myself a

(03:22:50):
muffled but acceptable figure, to get money, and then to
recover my books and parcels where they awaited me, take
a lodging somewhere, and elaborate plans for the complete realization
of the advantages of my life. Visibility gave me, as
I still imagined over my fellow men. Closing time arrived
quickly enough. It could not have been more than an

(03:23:10):
hour after I took up my position on the mattress.
Before I noticed the blinds of the windows being drawn
and customers being marched doorward. And then a number of
brisk young men began with remarkable alacrity to tidy up
the goods that remained disturbed. I left my lair as
the crowds diminished and prowled cautiously out into the less
desolate parts of the shop. I was really surprised to

(03:23:31):
observe how rapidly the young men and women whipped away
the goods displayed for sale during the day. All the
boxes of goods, the hanging fabrics, the festoons of lace,
the boxes of sweets in the grocery section, the displays
of this and that were being whipped down, folded up,
slapped into tidy receptacles, and everything that could not be
taken down and put away had sheets of some coarse
stuff like sacking flung over them. Finally, all the chairs

(03:23:55):
were turned up on the counters, leaving the floor clear.
Directly each of these young people had done, he or
she made promptly for the door with such an expression
of animation as I have rarely observed in a shop assistant. Before.
Then came a lot of youngsters scattering sawdust and carrying
pails and brooms. I had dodged to get out of
the way, and as it was my ankle got stung

(03:24:16):
with the sawdust. For some time, wandering through the swathed
and darkened apartments, I could hear the brooms at work,
and at last, a good hour or more after the
shop had been closed, came a noise of locking doors.
Silence came upon the place, and I find myself wandering
through the vast and intricate shops, galleries, showrooms of the
place alone. It was very still. In one place. I

(03:24:38):
remember passing near one of the Tottenham Court Road entrances
and listening to the tapping of boot heels of the
passers by. My first visit was to the place where
I had seen stockings and gloves for sale. It was
dark and I had the devil of a hunt after matches,
which I found at last in the drawer of the
little cash desk. Then I had to get a candle.
I had to tear down wrappings and ransack a number

(03:24:59):
of boxes and drawers, but at last I managed to
turn out what I sought. The box label called them
Lamb's wool pants and Lamb's wool vests. Then socks, a
thick comforter. And then I went to the clothing place
and got trousers, a lounge jacket, an overcoat, and a
slouch hat, a clerical sort of hat with the brim
turned down. I began to feel a human being again,

(03:25:21):
and my next thought was food. Upstairs was a refreshment department,
and there I got cold meat. There was coffee still
in the urn, and I lit the gas and warmed
it up again, and altogether I did not do badly. Afterwards,
prowling through the place in search of blankets, I had
to put up at last with a heap of down quilts.
I came upon a grocery section with a lot of

(03:25:41):
chocolate and candied fruits more than was good for me, indeed,
and some white burgundy. And near that was a toy department,
and I had a brilliant idea. I found some artificial noses,
dummy noses, you know, and I thought of dark spectacles,
but omniums had no optical department. My nose had been
a difficulty. Indeed, I had thought of paint. But the

(03:26:02):
discovery set my mind running on wigs and masks and
the like. Finally I went asleep in a heap of
down quilts, very warm and comfortable. My last thoughts before
sleeping were the most agreeable I had had since the change.
I was in a state of physical serenity, and that
was reflected in my mind. I thought that I should
be able to slip out unobserved in the morning, with

(03:26:22):
my clothes upon me, muffling my face with a white
wrapper I had taken, purchased with the money I had taken,
spectacles and so forth, and so complete my disguise. I
lapsed into disorderly dreams of all the fantastic things that
had happened during the last few days. I saw the
ugly little jew of a landlord vociperating in his rooms.
I saw his two sons marveling, and the wrinkled old
woman's gnarled face as she asked for her cat. I

(03:26:45):
experienced again the strange sensation of seeing the cloth disappear.
And so I came round the windy hillside, and the
sniffing old clergyman mumbling earth to earth, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust. At my father's open grave, you also
said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards
the grave. I struggled shouted, appealed to the mourners, but

(03:27:06):
they continued stonily following the service. The old clergyman too,
never faltering, droning and sniffling through the ritual. I realized
I was invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had their
grip on me. I struggled in vain. I was forced
over the brink. The coffin rang hollow as I fell
upon it, and the gravel came flying after me in spadefuls.

(03:27:27):
Nobody heeded me, nobody's aware of me. I made convulsive
struggles and awoke. The pale London dawn had come. The
place was full of a chilly gray light that filtered
around the edges of the window blinds. I sat up,
and for a time I could not think where this
ample apartment, with its counters, its piles of rolled stuff,
its help of quilts and cushions, its iron pillars, might be. Then,

(03:27:50):
as recollection came back to me, I heard voices in conversation. Then,
far down the place, in the brighter light of some
department which had already raised its blinds, I saw two
men approaching. I scrambled to my feet, looking about me
for some way of escape, and even as I did so,
the sound of my movement made them aware of me.
I suppose they saw merely a figure moving quietly and
quickly away. Who's that? Cried one? And stop there, cried

(03:28:14):
the other. I dashed around a corner and came full
tilt a face's figure, mind you, on a lanky lad
of fifteen. He yelled, and I bowled him over, rushed
past him, turned another corner, and by happy inspiration, threw
myself behind a counter. In another moment, feet went running past,
and I heard voices shouting, all hands to the doors,
asking what was up, and giving another advice how to

(03:28:35):
catch me lying on the ground. I felt scared out
of my wits, But odd as it may seem, it
did not occur to me at that moment to take
off my clothes as I should have done. I had
made up my mind I suppose to get away in them,
and that ruled me. And then down the vista of
the counters came a bawling of here he is. I
sprang to my feet, whipped a chair off the counter

(03:28:56):
and sent it whirling at the fool who had shouted. Turned,
came into another round a corner, sent him spinning and
rushed up the stairs. He kept his footing, gave a
view Halloo, and came up the staircase hot after me.
Up the staircase were piled a multitude of those bright
colored pot things. What are they? Art pots, suggested Kemp.
That's it art pots. Well. I turned at the top

(03:29:18):
step and swung round, plucked one out of a pile,
and smashed it on his silly head. As he came
at me. The whole pile of pots went headlong, and
I heard shouting and footsteps running from all parts. I
made a mad rush for the refreshment place, and there
was a man in white, like a man cook, who
took up the chase. I made one last desperate turn
and found myself among lamps and iron mungery. I went

(03:29:39):
behind the counter of this and waited for my cook,
And as he bolted in at the head of the chase,
I doubled him up with a lamp. Down he went,
and I crouched down behind the counter and began whipping
off my clothes as fast as I could. Coat, jacket, trousers,
shoes were all right, but a lambs will vest fits
a man like a skin. I heard more men coming.
My cook was lying quiet on the other side of
the counter, stuck und or scared speechless, and I had

(03:30:02):
to make another dash for it, like a rabbit hunted
out of a woodpile. This way policemen. I heard someone shouting,
and I found myself in my bedsteads storeroom again, and
at the end of a wilderness of wardrobes. I rushed
among them, went flat, got rid of my vest after
infinite wriggling, and stood a free man again, panting and scared.
As the policemen and three of the shopmen came round

(03:30:23):
the corner, they made a rush for the vest and
pants and collared the trousers. He's dropping his plunder, said
one of the young men. He must be somewhere here,
But they did not find me all the same. I
stood watching them hunt for me for a time and
cursing my ill luck in losing the clothes. Then I
went into the refreshment room, drank a little milk I

(03:30:44):
found there, and sat down by the fire to consider
my position. In a while, two assistants came in and
began to talk over the business, very excitedly, and like
the fools they were, I heard a magnified account of
my depredations and other specky relations as to my whereabouts.
Then I fell to scheming again. The insurmountable difficulty of

(03:31:05):
the place, especially now it was alarmed, was to get
any plunder out of it. I went down into the
warehouse to see if there was any chance of packing
and addressing a parcel, but I could not understand the
system of checking. About eleven o'clock the snow. Having thought
as it fell, and the day being finer and a
little warmer than the previous one, I decided that the
emporium was hopeless and went out again, exasperated my want

(03:31:28):
of success, with only the vaguest plans of action in
my mind. End of Chapter twenty two, Chapter twenty three
in Dreary Lane. But you begin now to realize, said
the invisible man, the full disadvantage of my condition. I
had no shelter, no covering, to get clothing, was to

(03:31:50):
forego all my advantage to make myself a strange and
terrible thing. I was fasting for to eat, to fill
myself with unassimilated matter, would be become grotesquely visible. Again.
I never thought of that, said Kemp, nor had I,
and the snow had warned me of other dangers. I
could not go abroad in snow. It would settle on

(03:32:11):
me and expose me. Rain too, would make me a
water outline, a glistening surface of a man, a bubble
and fog. I should be like a fainter bubble in
a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover,
as I went abroad in the London air, I gathered
dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin.

(03:32:31):
I did not know how long it would be before
I should come visible from that cause also, but I
saw clearly it could not be for long, not in
London at any rate. I went into the slums towards
Great Portland Street and found myself at the end of
the street in which I had lodged. I did not
go that way because of the crowd. Halfway down it opposite,
Still looking at the smoking ruins of the house I

(03:32:52):
had fired, my most immediate problem was to get clothing.
What to do with my face puzzled me. Then I
saw or one of those little miscellaneous shops news sweet toys, stationary,
Belated Christmas, tom Fulu and so forth, and a ray
of masks and noses. I realized the problem was solved.
In a flash, I saw my course. I turned about,

(03:33:13):
no longer aimless, and went securitously in order to avoid
their busy ways towards the back streets north of the strand,
for I remembered, though not very distinctly, ware that some
theatrical costumiers had shops in that district. The day was cold,
with a nipping wind down the northward running streets. I

(03:33:34):
walked fast to avoid being overtaken. Every crossing was a danger,
every passenger a thing to wash alertly. One man I
was about to pass him at the top of Bedford Street,
turned upon me abruptly and came into me, sending me
into the road and almost under the wheel of a
passing hansom. The verdict of the cab rank was that
he had some sort of stroke. I was so unnerved

(03:33:55):
by this encounter that I went into Covent Garden Market
and sat down for some time in a quiet corner
by a stall of violets, panting and trembling. I found
I had caught a fresh cold and had to turn
out after time lest my sneezes should attract attention. At last,
I reached the object of my quest a dirty, flyblown

(03:34:16):
little shop in a byway near Drury Lane, with a
window full of tinsel, robes, sham, jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes,
and theatrical photographs. The shop was old fashioned and low
and dark, and the house rose above it for four stories,
dark and dismal. I peered through the window, and, seeing
no one within, entered. The opening of the door set

(03:34:36):
a clanking bell ringing. I left it open and walked
around a bare costume, stand into a corner behind a
cheval glass. For a minute or two, no one came.
Then I heard heavy feet striding across a room, and
a man appeared down the shop. My plans were now
perfectly definite. I proposed to make my way into the house,
secrete myself upstairs, watched my opportunity, and when everything was quiet,

(03:35:01):
rummage out a wig, masked spectacles and costume and go
into the world, perhaps a grotesque, but still a credible figure.
And incidentally, of course, I could rob the house of
any available money. The man who had just entered the
shop was a short, slight hunched, beetle browed man with
long arms and very short bandy legs. Apparently I had

(03:35:22):
interrupted a meal. He stared about the sharp with an
expression of expectation. This gave way to surprise and then
to anger as he saw the shop empty. Damn the boys,
he said. He went a stare up and down the street.
He came in again in a minute, kicked the door
too with his foot spitefully, and went muttering back to
the house door. I came forward to follow him, and

(03:35:44):
at the noise of my movement, he stopped dead. I
did so, too, Startled by his quickness of ear, he
slammed the house door in my face. I stood hesitating.
Suddenly I heard his quick footsteps returning, and the door reopened.
He stood looking about the shop like one who was
still not satisfied. Then murmuring to himself, he examined the

(03:36:07):
back of the counter and peered behind some fixtures. Then
he stood doubtful. He had left the house door open,
and I slipped into the inner room. It was a
queer little room, poorly furnished, and with a number of
big masks. In the corner. On the table was his
belated breakfast, and it was confoundedly exasperating for me Kemp

(03:36:27):
to have to sniff his coffee and stand watching while
he came in and resumed his meal, and his table
manners were irritating. Three doors opened into the little room,
one going upstairs and one down, but they were all shut.
I could not get out of the room while he
was there. I could scarcely move because of his alertness,
and there was a draft down my back. Twice I

(03:36:49):
strangled a sneeze just in time. The spectacular quality of
my sensations was curious and novel. But for all that,
I was heartily tired and angry long before he had
done his ear. But at last he made an end,
and putting his beggarly crockery on the black tin tray
upon which he had his teapot, and gathering all the
crumbs up on the mustard stained cloth, he took the

(03:37:10):
whole lot of things after him. His burden prevented his
shutting the door behind him, as he would have done.
I had never seen such a man for shutting doors,
and I followed him into a very dirty underground kitchen
and scullery. I had the pleasure of seeing him begin
to wash up, and then finding no good in keeping
down there, and the brick floor being coal on my feet,

(03:37:32):
I returned upstairs and sat in his chair by the fire.
It was burning low, and scarcely, thinking I put on
a little coal. The noise of this brought him up
at once, and he stood a glare. He peered about
the room and was within an ace of touching me.
Even after that examination, he scarcely seemed satisfied. He stopped
in the doorway and took a final inspection before he

(03:37:54):
went down. I waited in the little parlor for an age,
and at last he came up unopened the upstairs door.
I just managed to get by him on the staircase.
He stopped suddenly, so that I very nearly blundered into him.
He stood looking right back into my face and listening.
I could have sworn, he said. His long, hairy hand

(03:38:15):
pulled at his lower lip. His eye went up and
down the staircase. Then he grunted and went on up again.
His hand was on the handle of a door, and
then he stopped again, with the same puzzled anger on
his face. He was becoming aware of the faint sounds
of my movements about him. The man must have had
diabolically acute hearing. He suddenly flashed into rage. If there's

(03:38:39):
any one in this house, he cried with an oath,
and left the threat unfinished. He put his hand in
his pocket, failed to find what he wanted, and, rushing
past me, went blundering noisily and pugnaciously downstairs. But I
did not follow him. I sat on the head of
the staircase until his return. Presently he came up again,

(03:38:59):
still muttering. He opened the door of the room, and
before I could enter, slammed it in my face. I
resolved to explore the house, and spent some time in
doing it so as noiselessly as possible. The house was
very old and tumble down, damp, so that the paper
in the attics was peeling from the walls, and rat infested.

(03:39:19):
Some of the door handles were stiff, and I was
afraid to turn them. Several rooms I did inspect were unfurnished,
and others were littered with theatrical lumber brought second hand,
I judged from its appearance. In one room next to his,
I found a lot of old clothes. I began rooting
among these, and in my eagerness forgot again the evident
sharpness of his ears. I heard a stealthy footstep, and

(03:39:43):
looking up just in time, saw him peering in at
the tumbled heap and holding an old fashioned revolver in
his hand. I stood perfectly still while he stared about,
open mouthed and suspicious. It must have been her, he said, slowly,
damn her. He shut the door quiet and immediately I
heard the key turn in the lock. Then his footsteps retreated.

(03:40:05):
I realized abruptly that I was locked in for a moment.
I did not know what to do. I walked from
door to window and back and stood perplexed. A gust
of anger came upon me, but I decided to inspect
the clothes before I did anything further, and my first
attempt brought down a pile from an upper shelf. This
brought him back, more sinister than ever. That time he

(03:40:29):
actually touched me, jumped back with amazement, and stood astonished
in the middle of the room. Presently he calmed, A
little rats, he said, in an undertone, fingers on lips.
He was evidently a little scared. I edged quietly out
of the room, but a plank creaked. Then the infernal
little brute started going all over the house, revolver in

(03:40:52):
hand and locking door after door and pocketing the keys.
When I realized what he was up to, I had
a fit of rage. I could hardly control myself sufficiently
to watch my opportunity. By this time I knew he
was alone in the house, and so I made no
more ado, but knocked him on the head. Knocked him
on the head, exclaimed Kemp. Yes, stunned him as he

(03:41:15):
was going downstairs, hit him from behind with a stool
that stood on the landing. He went downstairs like a
bag of old boots. But I say, the common conventions
of humanity are all very well for common people. But
the point was, Kemp, that I had to get out
of that house in a disguise without his seeing me,

(03:41:35):
and I couldn't think of another way of doing it.
And then I gagged him with a Louis Cator's vest
and tied him up in a sheet. Tied him up
in a sheet, I made a sort of bag of it.
It was rather a good idea to keep the idiot
scared and quiet, and a devilish hard thing to get
out of head away from the string. My dear Kemp,

(03:41:55):
it's no good you sitting glaring at me as though
I was a murderer. It had to be done. He
had his revolver, if once he saw me he would
be able to describe me. But still, said Kemp, in
England to day, and the man was in his own house,
and you were well, robbing, robbing, confound it. You'll call
me a thief next, surely, Kemp, you're not fool enough

(03:42:18):
to dance on the old strings. Can't you see my position?
And here's too, said Kemp. The invisible man stood up sharply.
What do you mean to say? Kemp's frace grew a
trifle hard. He was about to speak, and checked himself.
I suppose, after all, he said, with a sudden change
of manner, the thing had to be done. You were

(03:42:39):
in a fix. But still, of course I was in
a fix, an infernal fix. And he made me wild too,
hunting me about the house, falling about with his revolver,
locking and unlocking doors. He was simply exasperating. You don't
blame me, do you? You don't blame me. I never
blame any one, said Kemp. It's quite out of fashion.

(03:43:00):
What did you do next? I was hungry downstairs. I
found a loaf and some rank cheese, more than sufficient
to satisfy my hunger. I took some brandy and water,
and then went up past my impromptu bag. He was
lying quite still, to the room containing the old clothes.
This looked out upon the street. Two lace curtains, brown

(03:43:20):
with dirt, guarding the window. I went and peered out
through their interstices. Outside, the day was bright, by contrast
with the brown shadows of the dismal house in which
I found myself dazzlingly bright. A brisk traffic was going
by fruit carts, a handsome a four wheeler with a
pile of boxes, a fishmonger's cart. I turned, with spots

(03:43:41):
of color swimming before my eyes, to the shadowy fixtures
behind me. My excitement was giving place to a clear
apprehension of my position. Again. The room was full of
a faint scent of benzoline, used I supposed in cleaning
the garments. I began a systematic search of the place
I should judge them. The hunchback had been alone in the

(03:44:01):
house for some time. He was a curious person. Everything
that could possibly be of service to me I collected
in the clothes storeroom. Then I made a deliberate selection.
I found a handbag. I thought a suitable possession, and
some powder, rouge and sticking plaster. I had thought of
painting and powdering my face and all that there was
to show of me, in order to render myself visible.

(03:44:23):
But the disadvantage of this lay in the fact that
I should require turpentine and other appliances, and a considerable
amount of time before I could vanish again. Finally, I
chose a mask of the better type, slightly grotesque, but
not more so than many human beings. Dark glasses, grayish whiskers,
and a wig. I could find no underclothing, but that

(03:44:43):
I could buy. Subsequently, and for the time, I swathed
myself in calico dominoes and some white cashmere scarves. I
could find no socks, but the hunchback's boots were rather
a loose fit and sufficed. In a desk in the
shop were three sovereigns at about thirty shillings worth of silk,
and in a locked cupboard I burst in in the
inner room were eight pounds in gold. I could go

(03:45:06):
forth into the world again equipped. Then came a curious hesitation,
with my appearance really credible. I tried myself with a
little bedroom looking glass, inspecting myself from every point of
view to discover any forgotten chink. But it all seemed sound.
I was grotesque to the theatrical pitch, a stage miser,

(03:45:28):
but I was certainly not a physical impossibility. Gaining confidence,
I took my looking glass down into the shop, pulled
down the shop blinds, and surveyed myself from every point
of view with the help of the cheval glass in
the corner. I spent some moments screwing up my courage,
and then unlocked the shop door and marched out into
the street, leaving the little man to get out of

(03:45:50):
his sheet again when he liked. And five minutes a
dozen turnings intervened between me and the costumious shop. No
one appeared to notice me. Very pointedly, I last difficulty
seemed overcome. He stopped again, and you troubled. No more
about the hunchback, said Kemp. No said the invisible man,

(03:46:10):
Nor have I heard what became of him. I suppose
he untied himself or kicked himself out. The knots were
pretty tight. He became silent and went to the window
and stared out what happened when he went out into
the strand. Oh, disillusionment again, I thought my troubles were over. Practically,
I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose,

(03:46:32):
everything save to give away my secret. So I thought
whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing
to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments
and vanish. No person could hold me. I could take
my money where I found it. I decided to treat
myself to a sumptuous feast and then put up at
a good hotel and accumulate a new outfit of property.

(03:46:55):
I felt amazingly confident. It's not particularly pleasant recalling that
I was an ass. I went into a place and
was already ordering lunch when it occurred to me that
I could not eat unless I exposed my invisible face.
I finished ordering the lunch, told the man I should
be back in ten minutes, and went out, exasperating. I
don't know if you have ever been disappointed in your appetite.

(03:47:18):
Not quite so badly, said Kemp, But I can imagine it.
I could have smashed the silly devils at last. Faint
with the desire for tasteful food, I went into another
place and demanded a private room. I am disfigured, I said, badly.
They looked at me curiously, but of course it was
not their affair, and so at last I got my lunch.

(03:47:38):
I was not particularly well served, but it sufficed. And
when I had it, I sat over a cigar, trying
to plan my line of action, and outside a snow
storm was beginning. The more I thought it over Kemp,
the more I realized what a helpless, absurdity and invisible
man was in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded,
civilized city. Before I made this mad experiment, I had

(03:48:02):
dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment.
I went over the heads of the things a man
reckons desirable, No doubt, invisibility made it possible to get them,
but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they
are got ambition. What is the good of pride of
place when you cannot appear there? What is the good

(03:48:23):
of the love of a woman when her name must
needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for
the blaggardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was
I to do? And for this I had become a
wrapped up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man.
He paused, and his attitude suggested a roving glance at

(03:48:45):
the window. But how did you get to Iping? Said Kemp,
anxious to keep his guest busy talking. I went there
to work. I had one hope it was a half idea.
I have it still. It is a full blown idea now,
a way of getting back, of restoring what I have
done when I choose, when I have done all I

(03:49:06):
mean to do invisibly. And that is what I chiefly
want to talk to you about. Now. You went straight
to Iping. Yes, I had simply to get my three
volumes of memoranda, and my check book, my luggage and underclothing,
order a quantity of chemicals to work out this idea
of mine. I will show you the calculations as soon
as I get my books. And then I started. Jove,

(03:49:28):
I remember the snowstorm now and the accursed bother. It
was to keep the snow from damping my pasteboard nose
at the end, said Kemp. The day before yesterday, when
they found you out, you rather to judge by the
papers I did? Rather? Did I kill that fool of
a constable? No, said Kemp. He's expected to recover. That's

(03:49:51):
his luck. Then I clean lost my temper. The fools.
Why couldn't they leave me alone? And that grosser lout
There are no oh, deaths expected, said Kemp. I don't
know about that tramp of mine, said the invisible man,
with an unpleasant laugh. By heaven, Kemp, you don't know
what rage is to have worked for years, to have

(03:50:12):
planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling, purblind
idiot messing across your course. Every conceivable sort of silly
creature that has ever been created has been sent to
cross me. If I have much more of it, I
shall go wild. I shall stop mowing em as it is.
They've made things a thousand times more difficult. No doubt

(03:50:33):
it's exasperating, said Kemp dryly, end of chapter twenty three,
Chapter twenty four. The plan that failed. But now, said Kemp,
with a side glance out of the window, what are
we to do? He moved near his guest as he spoke,
in such a manner as to prevent the possibility of

(03:50:55):
a sudden glimpse of the three men who were advancing
up the hill road with an intolerable slowness. It seemed
to Kemp, What were you planning to do when you
were heading for Port Burdock? Had you any plan? I
was going to clear out of the country, but I
have altered that plan rather since seeing you. I thought
it would be wise, now that the weather is hot

(03:51:15):
and invisibility possible, to make for the south, especially as
my secret was known and everybody would be on the
lookout for a masked and muffled man. You have a
line of steamers from here to France. My idea was
to get a board one and run the risks of
the passage. Thence I could go by train into Spain
or Elsecat to Algiers. It would not be difficult there

(03:51:36):
a man might always be invisible and yet live and
do things. I was using that tramp as a money
box and luggage carrier until I decided how to get
my books and things sent over to meet me. That's clear,
and then the filthy brute must needs try to rob me.
He has hidden my books, Kep, hidden my books. If
I can lay my hands on him, best plan to

(03:51:58):
get the books out of him first. But where is he?
Do you know? He's in the town police station, locked
up by his own request. In strongest selling the place,
cur said the invisible man. But that hangs up your
plans a little. We must get those books. Those books
are vital, certainly, said Kemp, a little nervously, wondering if

(03:52:19):
he heard footsteps outside. Certainly we must get those books.
But that won't be difficult if he doesn't know they're
for you. No, said the invicible man, and thought Kemp
tried to think of something to keep the talk going,
but the invisible Man resumed of his own accord. Blundering
into your house, Kemp, changes all my plans for you
are a man that can understand. In spite of all

(03:52:41):
that has happened, in spite of this publicity, of the
loss of my books, of what I have suffered, there
still remain great possibilities, huge possibilities. You have told no
one that I am here, he asked abruptly. Camp hesitated,
that was implied, he said, no one insisted Griffin, not
a soul. Ah. Now the invisible Man stood up, and,

(03:53:05):
sticking his arms, Akimbo began to pace the study. I
made a mistake, Kemp, A huge mistake in carrying this
thing through alone. I have wasted strength, time, opportunities alone.
It is wonderful, how little a man can do alone,
to rob a little, to hurt a little, And there
is the end. What I want, Kemp, is a goalkeeper,

(03:53:26):
a helper, and a hiding place, an arrangement whereby I
can sleep and eat and rest in peace and unsuspected.
I must have a confederate, with a confederate, with food
and rest. A thousand things are possible. Hitherto I have
gone on vague lines. We have to consider all that
invisibility means, all that it does not mean. It means

(03:53:47):
little advantage for eavesdropping and so forth. One makes sounds.
It's of little help, A little help perhaps in housebreaking
and so forth. Once you have caught me, you could
easily imprison me. But on the other hand, I am
hard to catch. This Invisibility, in fact, is only good
in two cases. Is useful in getting away, It's useful
in approaching. It's particularly useful therefore, in killing. I can

(03:54:10):
walk round a man, whatever weapon he has, choose my point,
strike as I like, dodge, as I like escape, as
I like. Kemp's hand went to his mustache. Was that
a movement downstairs? And it is killing? We must do, Kemp.
It is killing we must do, repeated Kemp. I am
listening to your plan, Griffin, but I'm not agreeing. Mind

(03:54:34):
why killing, not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The
point is they know there is an invisible man as
well as we know there is an invisible man. And
that invisible man, Kemp, must now establish a reign of terror. Yes,
no doubt, it's startling, but I mean it, a reign

(03:54:56):
of terror. He must take some town like your Burdock
and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders.
He can do that in a thousand ways. Scraps of
paper thrust under doors would suffice and all who disobey
his orders, he must kill and kill all who would
defend them. Humph, said Kemp, no longer listening to Griffin,
but to the sound of his front door opening and closing.

(03:55:19):
It seems to me, Griffin, he said, to cover his
wandering attention, that your confederate would be in a difficult position.
No one would know he was a confederate, said the
invisible man eagerly, And then suddenly, hush, what's that downstairs? Nothing,
said Kemp, and suddenly began to speak loud and fast.
I don't agree to this griffin, he said, understand me.

(03:55:39):
I don't agree to this. Why dream of playing a
game against the race. How can you hope to gain happiness?
Don't be a lone wolf. Publish your results. Take the world,
take the nation at least into your confidence. Think what
you might do with a million helpers. The invisible man interrupted,
arm extended. There are footsteps coming upstairs, he said in
a low voice. Nonsense, said Kemp. Let me see, said

(03:56:03):
the invisible man, and advanced. Arm extended to the door,
and then things happened very swiftly. Kemp hesitated for a
second and then moved to intercept him. The invisible man
started and stood still. Traitor cried the voice, and suddenly
the dressing gown opened, and, sitting down, the unseen began
to disrobe. Kemp made three swift steps to the door

(03:56:26):
and forthwith the invisible man. His legs had vanished, sprang
to his feet. With a shout, Kemp flung the door open.
As it opened, there came a sound of hurrying feet
downstairs and voices. With a quick movement, Kemp thrust the
invisible man back, sprang aside, and slammed the door. The
key was outside and ready. In another moment, Griffin would

(03:56:47):
have been alone in the belvedere study a prisoner, save
for one little thing. The key had been slipped in
hastily that morning. As Kemp slammed the door, it fell
noisily upon the carpet. Kemp's face became white. He tried
to grip the door handle with both hands. For a
moment he stood lugging. Then the door gave six inches,
but he got it closed again. The second time, it

(03:57:09):
was jerked a foot wide, and the dressing gown came
wedging itself into the opening. His throat was gripped by
invisible fingers, and he left his hold on the handle
to defend himself. He was forced back, tripped, and pitched
heavily into the corner of the landing. The empty dressing
gown was flung on top of him. Half Way up
the staircase was Colonel Adye, the recipient of Kemp's letter,

(03:57:31):
the chief of the Burdock Police. He was staring aghast
at the sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary
sight of the clothing tossing empty in the air. He
saw Kemp felled and struggling to his feet. He saw
him rush forward and go down again, felled like an ox.
Then suddenly he was struck violently by nothing. A vast weight,

(03:57:51):
it seemed, leaped upon him, and he was hurled headlong
down the staircase, with a grip on his throat and
a knee in his groin. An invisible foot trod on
his back. A ghostly pata passed downstairs. He heard the
two police officers in the hall shout and run, and
the front door of the house slammed violently. He rolled
over and sat up, staring. He saw staggering down the

(03:58:11):
staircase Kemp, dusty and disheveled, one side of his face
white from a blow, his lip bleeding, and a pink
dressing gown and some underclothing held in his arms. My God,
cried Kemp. The game's up, He's gone. Chapter twenty five,
The Hunting of the Invisible Man. For a space, Kemp

(03:58:34):
was too inarticulate to make aid I understand the swift
things that had just happened. They stood on the landing,
Kemp speaking swiftly, the grotesque swathings of Griffin still on
his arm. But presently aid I began to grip something
of the situation. He is mad, said Kemp. Inhuman, he
is pure selfishness. He thinks of nothing but his own advantage,

(03:58:55):
his own safety. I have listened to such a story
this morning of brutal self seeking. He has wounded men.
He will kill them. Unless we can prevent him, he
will create a panic. Nothing can stop him. He is
going out now, furious. He must be caught, said Adey.
That is certain, But how cried Kemp, and suddenly became
full of ideas. You must begin at once. You must

(03:59:18):
set every available man to work. You must prevent his
living this district. Once he gets away, he may go
through the countryside as he wills, killing and maiming. He
dreams of a reign of terror, a reign of terror.
I tell you must set a watch on trains and
roads and shipping. The garrison must help, you must wire
for help. The only thing that may keep him here
is the thought of recovering some books of notes he

(03:59:39):
counts of value. I will tell you of that. There
is a man in your police station marvel. I know,
said Ady, I know these books. Yes, But the tramp,
he says, he hasn't got his books. But he thinks
the tramp has, and you must prevent him from eating
or sleeping day and night. The country must be astir
for him. Food must be locked up and secured, all food,

(04:00:00):
so that he will have to break his way to it.
The houses everywhere must be barred against him. Heavens send
us cold knights and rain. The whole countryside must begin
hunting and keep hunting. I tell you, Adi, he is
a danger, a disaster unless he is pinned and secured.
It is frightful to think of the things that may happen.
What else can we do? Said Adi? I must go

(04:00:22):
down at once and begin organizing. But why not come? Yes,
you come too, Come and we must hold a sort
of council of war. Get hops to help, and the
railway managers. By jove, it's urgent. Come along. Tell me
as we go what else is there we can do?
Put that stuff down. In another moment, Adi was leaning
the way downstairs. They found the front door open and

(04:00:44):
the policeman standing outside staring at empty air. He's got away, sir,
said one. We must go to the central station at once,
said aid I. One of you go on down and
get a cab to come up and meet us quickly.
And now Kemp. What else, dogs, said Kep. Get dogs.
They don't see him, but they win him. Get dogs. Good,

(04:01:06):
said Adi. It's not generally known, but the prison officials
over at Halstead know a man with bloodhounds dogs. What
else bear in mind, said Kemp. His food shows after eating.
His food shows until it is assimilated, so that he
has to hide after eating. You must keep on beating
every thicket, every quiet corner, and put all weapons, all

(04:01:29):
implements that might be weapons away. He can't carry such
things for long, and what he can snatch up and
strike men with must be hidden away. Good again, said Adi.
We shall have him yet, and on the roads, said Kemp.
And hesitated, yes, said Adi. Powdered glass, said Kemp. It's cruel,
I know, but think of what he may do. Adi

(04:01:52):
drew the breath in sharply between his teeth. It's unsportsmanlike.
I don't know, but I'll have powdered glass got ready.
If he goes too far. The man's become inhuman, I
tell you, said Kemp. I am sure he will establish
a reign of terror so soon as he has got
over the emotions of this escape. As I am sure,

(04:02:12):
I am talking to you. Our only chance is to
be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind.
His blood be upon his own head. Chapter twenty six,
The Wixteed Murder. The Invisible Man seems to have rushed
out of Kemp's house in a state of blind fury.

(04:02:34):
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

(04:02:57):
his intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated and weary,
amid the thickets of Hinton, Dean to piece together again
his shattered schemes against his species. That seems to most
probable refuge for him, for there it was he reasserted
himself in a grimly tragical manner about two in the afternoon.

(04:03:18):
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 sympathize
a little with the fury the attempted surprise must have occasioned.

(04:03:39):
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 terrorized world. At any rate, he vanished from human
ken about mid day, 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

(04:04:02):
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 dryly worded proclamation,
he was presented as a tangible antagonist to be wounded, captured,

(04:04:22):
or overcome, and the countryside began organizing itself with inconceivable rapidity.
By two o'clock. Even he might still have removed himself
out of the district by getting a board a train,
but after two that became impossible. Every passenger train along
the lines on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton
and Horsham traveled with locked doors, and the goods traffic

(04:04:45):
was almost entirely suspended, and in a great circle of
twenty miles around 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
police Eastmen 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

(04:05:08):
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 Adai, 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,

(04:05:30):
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 two a

(04:05:51):
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 mister Wicksteed. If our supposition that
the invisible Man's refuge was the Hintondean thickets, we must
suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied out again,

(04:06:13):
bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon.
We cannot know what that 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

(04:06:37):
to a desperate struggle. The trampled ground, the numerous wounds
mister Wixteed 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.
Mister Wicksteed was a man of forty five or forty six,

(04:06:58):
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 defenses, broke

(04:07:20):
his arm, felt 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, seemed to bear on
the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit
was not in mister Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly

(04:07:42):
a couple of hundred yards out of his way. The
other is the assertion of a little girl to that
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.

(04:08:04):
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,

(04:08:28):
but without any deliberate intention of using it in murder.
Weiksteed 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

(04:08:49):
can then imagine the invisible man making off quietly in
order to avoid discovering his presence in the neighborhood, and
wig Steed, excited and curious, pursuing this unaccount be locomotive object,
finally striking at it. No doubt, the invisible man could
easily have distanced his middle aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances,

(04:09:10):
but the position in which Wigsted's body was found suggests
that he had 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.

(04:09:31):
The only undeniable facts for stories of children are often unreliable.
Of the discovery of Wicksteed's body done to death, and
of the bloodstained 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

(04:09:52):
was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the
sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful
at his feet heat 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 mister Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck across
the country towards the Downland. There is a story of

(04:10:15):
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 a 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

(04:10:36):
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 realized 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

(04:10:57):
yelping of dogs. These men hunt had peculiar 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, though remorselessly against him. For

(04:11:18):
that day at least he lost heart for nearly twenty
four hours saved 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. End of Chapter twenty six. Chapter twenty seven,

(04:11:42):
The Siege of Kemp's house. Kemp read a strange missive
written in pencil on a greasy sheet of paper. You
have been amazingly energetic and clever. This letter ran, though
what you stand again by it, I cannot imagine you
are against me For a whole day. You have chased me.

(04:12:02):
You have tried to rob me of a night's rest.
But I have had food in spite of you. I
have slept in spite of you. And the game is
only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing
for it but to start the terror. This announces the
first day of the terror. Port Burdock is no longer
under the Queen. Tell your colonel of police and the

(04:12:23):
rest of them, it is under me the terror. This
is day one of year one of the new Epoch,
the epoch of the Invisible Man. I am invisible man,
the first to begin with. The rule will be easy.
The first day there will be one execution. For the
sake of example, a man named Kemp, Death starts for

(04:12:46):
him to day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away,
get guards about him, put on armor. If he likes death.
The unseen death is coming. Let him take precautions. It
will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box.
By midday the letter will fall in as the postman
comes along. Then off the game begins. Death starts. Help him,

(04:13:09):
not my people. Let death fall upon you also. To
day Kemp is to die. Kemp read this letter twice.
It's no hoax, he said. That's his voice, and he
means it. He turned the folded sheet over and saw
on the addressed side of it the postmark Hinton Dean

(04:13:29):
and the prosaic detail two pence to pay. He got up, slowly,
leaving his lunch unfinished the letter had come by the
one o'clock post, and went into his study. He rang
for his housekeeper and told her to go round the
house at once, examining all the fastenings of the windows
and closing all the shutters. He closed the shutters of

(04:13:50):
his study himself from a lock straw in his bedroom,
he took a little revolver, examined it carefully, and put
it into the pocket of his lounge jacket. Wrote a
number of brief notes, one to Colonel Adye, gave them
to his servant to take with explicit instructions as to
her way of leaving the house. There is no danger,
he said, and added a mental reservation to you. He

(04:14:14):
remained meditative for a space after doing this, and then
returned to his cooling lunch. He ate with gaps of thought.
Finally he struck the table sharply. We will have him,
he said, and I am the bait. He will come
too far. He went up to the belvidere, carefully shutting
every door after him. It's a game, he said, an

(04:14:37):
odd game, but the chances are all for me, mister Griffin,
in spite of your invisibility, Gryffin contremundum with a vengeance.
He stood at the window, staring at the hot hillside.
He must get food every day, and I don't envy him.
Did he really sleep last night out in the open,
somewhere secure from collisions? I wish we could get some good, cold,

(04:15:01):
wet weather instead of the heat. He may be watching
me now. He went to close the window. Something rapped
smartly against the brickwork over the frame and made him
start violently back. I'm getting nervous, said Kemp. But it
was five minutes before he went to the window again.

(04:15:22):
It must have been a sparrow, he said. Presently, he
heard the front door bell ringing, and hurried downstairs. He
unbolted and unlocked the door, examined the chain, put it up,
and opened cautiously, without showing himself. A familiar voice hailed him.
It was aide. Your servant's been assaulted, Kemp, he said,

(04:15:42):
round the door, what exclaimed Kemp? Had that note of
yours taken away from her? He's close about here. Let
me in. Kemp released the chain and aid I entered
through as narrow an opening as possible. He stood in
the hall, looking with infinite relief at Kemp refastening the door.
Note was snatched out of her hand. Scared horribly, she's

(04:16:05):
down at the station hysterics. He's close here. What was
it about? Kemp swore? What a fool I was, said Kemp.
I might have known. It's not an hour's walk from
Hinton Dean already. What's up? Said ad I. Look here,
said Kemp, and led the way into his study. He

(04:16:26):
handed Ady the Invisible Man's letter. Adi read it and
whistled softly. And you, said ad I proposed a trap
like a fool, said Kemp, and sent my proposal out
by a maid servant to him. Ade I followed Kemp's profanity.
He'll clear out, said ad I. Not, he said Kemp.

(04:16:48):
A resounding smash of glass came from upstairs. Adi had
a silvery glimpse of a little revolver half out of
Kemp's pocket. It's a window upstairs, said Kemp, and led
the way up. There came a second smash while they
were still on the staircase. When they reached the study,
they found two of the three windows smashed, half the
room littered with splendid glass, and one big flint lying

(04:17:11):
on the writing table. The two men stopped in the doorway.
Contemplating the wreckage, Kemp swore again, and as he did so,
the third window went with a snap like a pistol,
hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering
triangles into the room. What's this for, said Adi. It's

(04:17:31):
a beginning, said Kemp. There's no way of climbing up here,
not for a cat, said Kemp. No shutters, not here
all the downstairs room. Hullo smash and then whack of
boards hit hard came from downstairs. Confound him, said Kemp.

(04:17:51):
That must be yes, it's one of the bedrooms. He's
going to do all the house. But he's a fool.
The shutters are up and the glass were four outside.
He'll cut his feet. Another window proclaimed its destruction. The
two men stood on the landing, perplexed. I have it,
said Ade, Let me have a stick or something. I'll

(04:18:12):
go down to the station and get their bloodhounds put on.
That ought to settle him. They're hard. By not ten minutes,
another window went the way of its fellows. You haven't
a revolver, asked ad I. Kemp's hand went to his pocket,
then he hesitated, I haven't one. At least to spare.
I'll bring it back, said Ade. You'll be safe here. Kemp,

(04:18:36):
ashamed of his momentary lapse from truthfulness, handed him the weapon.
Now for the door, said ad I. As they stood
hesitating in the hall, they heard one of the first
floor bedroom windows crack and clash. Kemp went to the
door and began to slip the bolts as silently as possible.
His face was a little paler than usual. You must

(04:18:58):
step straight out, said Kemp. In another moment, ad I
was on the doorstep and the bolts were dropping back
into the stables. He hesitated for a moment, feeling more
comfortable with his back against the door. Then he marched
upright and square down the steps. He crossed the lawn
and approached the gate. A little breeze seemed to ripple

(04:19:18):
over the grass. Something moved near him. Stop a bit,
said a voice, and ad I stopped dead, and his
hand tightened on the revolver. Well, said Ada, white and
grim and every nerve tense, oblige me by going back
to the house, said the voice, as tense and grim

(04:19:41):
as aide's sorry, said Ady a little hoarsely, and moistened
his lips with his tongue. The voice was on his
left front. He thought, supposed he were to take his
luck with a shot. What are you going for? Said
the voice, and there was a quick movement of the
two and a flash of sunlight from the open lip
of Ada's pocket. Ad I desisted and thought, where I go?

(04:20:06):
He said, slowly is my own business. The words were
still on his lips when an arm came round his neck.
His back fell to knee, and he was sprawling backward.
He drew clumsily and fired absurdly, and in another moment
he was struck in the mouth and the revolver rested
from his grip. He made a vain clutch at a
slippery limb, tried to struggle up and fell back. Damn,

(04:20:29):
said Ada. The voice laughed, I'd kill you now if
it wasn't the waist of a bullet, he said. He
saw the revolver in mid air six feet off, covering
him well, said ad. I sitting up, Get up, said
the voice. Ada stood up attention, said the voice, and

(04:20:49):
then fiercely. Don't try any games. Remember I can see
your face. If you can't see mine, You've got to
go back to the house. He won't let me in,
said ady. That's a pity, said the invisible man. I've
got no quarrel with you. Adai moistened his lips again.

(04:21:11):
He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver and
saw the sea far off, very blue and dark under
the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff
of the head, and the multitudinous town, and suddenly he
knew that life was very sweet. His eyes came back
to this little metal thing hanging between heaven and earth,
six yards away. What am I to do? He said, sullenly.

(04:21:34):
What am I to do? Asked the invisible man. You
will get help. The only thing is for you to
go back. I will try if he lets me in.
Will you promise not to rush the door. I've got
no quarrel with you, said the voice. Kemp had hurried
upstairs after letting Ade out, and now crouching among the

(04:21:56):
broken glass and peering cautiously over the edge of the
study window sill, he saw Adi stand parleying with the unseen.
Why doesn't he fire, whispered Kemp to himself. Then the
revolver moved a little, and the glint of the sunlight
flashed in Kemp's eyes. He shaded his eyes and tried
to see the source of the blinding beam. Surely, he said,

(04:22:17):
Adi has given up the revolver. Promise not to rush
the door. Adi was saying, don't push a winning game
too far. Give a man a chance. You go back
to the house. I tell you flatly, I will not
promise anything. Adi's decision seemed suddenly made. He turned towards
the house, walking slowly with his hands behind him. Kemp

(04:22:40):
watched him, puzzled. The revolver vanished, flashed again into sight,
vanished again, and became evident on a closer scrutiny as
a little dark object following Adi. Then things happened very quickly.
Aid I leapt backwards, swung around, clutched at this little object,
missed it, threw up his hands and fell forward on
his face, a little puff of blue in the air.

(04:23:02):
Kemp did not hear the sound of the shot. Adi writhed,
raised himself on one arm, fell forward, and lay still
for a space. Kemp remained staring at the quiet carelessness
of Ady's attitude. The afternoon was very hot, and still

(04:23:23):
nothing seemed stirring in all the world save a couple
of yellow butterflies chasing each other through the shrubbery between
the house and the road gate. Aid I lay on
the lawn near the gate. The blinds of all the
villas down the hill road were drawn, but in one
little green summer house was a white figure, apparently an
old man asleep. Kemp scrutinized the surroundings of the house

(04:23:44):
for a glimpse of the revolver, but it had vanished.
His eyes came back to Adi. The game was opening well.
Then came a ringing and knocking at the front door
that grew at last two months, but pursuant to Kemp's instructions,
the servant had locked themselves into their rooms. This was

(04:24:06):
followed by a silence. Kemp sat listening, and then began
peering cautiously out of the three windows one after another.
He went to the staircase head and stood listening uneasily.
He armed himself with his bedroom poker and went to
examine the interior fastenings of the ground floor windows. Again
everything was safe and quiet. He returned to the Belvidere

(04:24:30):
ad I lay motionless over the edge of the gravel,
just as he had fallen coming along the road. By
the villas with a house maid and two policemen. Everything
was deadly still. The three people seemed very slow in approaching.
He wondered what his antagonist was doing. He started, there
was a smash from below. He hesitated and went downstairs again.

(04:24:54):
Suddenly the house resounded with heavy blows and the splintering
of wood. He heard a smash and the destructive clang
of the iron fastenings of the shutters. He turned the
key and opened the kitchen door. As he did so,
the shutters split and splintering came flying inward. He stood aghast.
The window frame, save for one crossbar, was still intact,

(04:25:14):
but only little teeth of glass remained in the frame.
The shutters had been driven in with an axe, and
now the axe was descending in sweeping blows upon the
window frame and the iron bars defending it. Then suddenly
it leaped aside and vanished. He saw the revolver lying
on the path outside, and then the little weapon sprang
into the air. He dodged back. The revolver cracked just

(04:25:38):
too late, and a splinter from the edge of the
closing door flashed over his head. He slammed and locked
the door, and as he stood outside. He heard Griffin
shouting and laughing. Then the blows of the axe, with
its splitting and smashing consequences, were resumed. Kemp stood in
the passage, trying to think. In a moment, the invisible

(04:25:59):
man would be in the kitchen. This door would not
keep him a moment, and then a ringing came at
the front door. Again it would be the policeman. He
ran into the hall, put up the chain and drew
the bolts. He made the girl speak before he dropped
the chain, and the three people blundered into the house
in a heap, and Kemp slammed the door again. The
invisible man said Kemp, he has a revolver with two

(04:26:22):
shots left. He's killed ADEI shot him anyhow, didn't you
see him on the lawn? He's lying there? Who said
one of the policemen. A die, said Kemp. We came
in the back way, said the girl. What's that smashing?
Asked one of the policemen. He's in the kitchen, or
will be. He's found an axe. Suddenly the house was

(04:26:45):
full of the invisible Man's resounding blows on the kitchen door.
The girl stared towards the kitchen shuddered and retreated into
the dining room. Kemp tried to explain in broken sentences.
They heard the kitchen door. Give this way, said Kemp,
starting into activity, and bundled the policeman into the dining room.
Doorway poker, said Kemp, and rushed to the fender. He

(04:27:07):
handed the poker he had carried to the policeman and
the dining room one to the other. He suddenly flung
himself backward. Whoop, said one policeman ducked and caught the
axe on his poker. The pistol snapped his penultimate shot
and ripped a valuable Sidney Cooper. The second policeman brought
his poker down on the little weapon as one might
knock down a wasp, and sent it rattling to the floor.

(04:27:31):
At the first clash, the girl screamed, stood screaming for
a moment by the fireplace, and then ran to open
the shutters, possibly with an idea of escaping by the
shattered window. The axe receded into the passage and fell
to a position about two feet from the ground. They
could hear the invisible man breathing, stand away, you two,

(04:27:51):
I want that man, Kemp, we want you, said the
first policeman, making a quick step forward and wiping with
his poker at the voice. The invisible man must have
started back, and he blundered into the umbrella stand. Then,
as the policeman staggered with the swing of the blow
he had aimed, the invisible man countered with the axe.
The helmet crumbled like paper, and the blow sent the

(04:28:13):
man spinning to the floor at the head of the
kitchen stairs. But the second policeman, aiming behind the axe
with his poker, hid something soft that snapped. There was
a sharp exclamation of pain, and then the axe fell
to the ground. The policeman wiped again at vacancy and
hid nothing. He put his foot on the axe and
struck again. Then he stood poker clubbed, listening intent for

(04:28:37):
the slightest movement. He heard the dining room window open
and a quick rush of feet within. His companion rolled
over and sat up, with blood running down between his
eye and ear. Where is he asked the man on
the floor. Don't know I've hit him. He's standing somewhere
in the hall unless he slipped past you, Doctor Kemp.

(04:28:59):
Sir pause, Doctor Kemp, cried the policeman again. The second
policeman began struggling to his feet. He stood up. Suddenly,
the faint pad of bare feet on the kitchen stairs
could be heard. Yap, cried the first policeman, and incontinently
flung his poker. It smashed a little gas bracket. He

(04:29:23):
made as if he would pursue the invisible man downstairs.
Then he thought better of it and stepped into the
dining room. Doctor Kemp, he began, and stopped short. Doctor
Kemp's a hero, he said, as his companion looked over
his shoulder. The dining room window was wide open, and
neither housemaid nor Kemp was to be seen. The second

(04:29:46):
Policeman's opinion of Kemp was terse and vivid. Chapter twenty eight.
The Hunter hunted. Mister Helas, mister Kemp's nearest neighbor among
the villa holders, was asleep in his summer house when

(04:30:06):
the siege of Kemp's house began. Mister Helas 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 on
walking about his garden just as if nothing was the matter,
and he went asleep in the afternoon. In accordance with

(04:30:28):
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

(04:30:49):
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
a 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

(04:31:11):
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. Doctor Kemp
in another moment, the window was open and the housemaid
was struggling out. She pitched forward and vanished among the shrubs.

(04:31:34):
Mister Helas 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 had

(04:31:56):
butted on the open down. In a second he had
tumbled over and was running at a tremendous pace down
the slope towards mister Helas. Lord cried, mister Helas struck
with an idea. It's that invisible man, brute. It's right
after all with mister Helas. To think things like that

(04:32:17):
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 mister Helas 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

(04:32:37):
directions and scurrying feet. He ran himself to shut the
French windows that opened on the verandah. As he did so,
Kemp's head and shoulders and knee appeared over the edge
of the garden fence. In another moment, Kemp had plowed
through the asparagus and was running across the tennis lawn
to the house. You can't come in, said mister Helas,
shutting the bolts. I'm very sorry if he's after you,

(04:32:59):
but you can 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 verandah, vaulted the end and went
a hammer at the side door. Then he ran around
by the side gate to the front of the house
and so into the hill road. And mister Helas, staring

(04:33:21):
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 mister Helas fled
precipitately upstairs and the rest of the chases beyond his purview.
But as he passed the staircase window he heard the
side gate slam. Emerging into the hill road, Kemp naturally

(04:33:47):
took the downward direction, and so it was he came
to run in his own person the very race he
had washed 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

(04:34:10):
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.

(04:34:31):
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

(04:34:51):
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 p police station.
Was that footsteps he heard behind him spurret. The people
below were staring at him, One or two were running,
and his breath was beginning to soar in his throat.

(04:35:13):
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

(04:35:34):
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 leaped forward again the

(04:35:55):
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 green grocer's cart,
hesitated for the tenth of a second at the door
of a sweet stuff shop, and then made for the
mouth of an alley that ran back into the main

(04:36:17):
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

(04:36:41):
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

(04:37:02):
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 around, 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

(04:37:23):
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

(04:37:44):
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 loosened himself,
grasped a limp shoulder, and rolled uppermost. He gripped the
unseen elbows near the ground. I've got him, screamed Kemp,

(04:38:07):
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

(04:38:30):
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 to the heap of struggling
men again and rolled over. There was I am afraid

(04:38:52):
some savage kicking, and then suddenly a wild scream of mercy,
mercy that died down swiftly to a 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

(04:39:13):
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 in visible ankles. Don't you leave, goavin,
cried the big navvy, holding a blood stained spade. He's shamming.

(04:39:34):
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

(04:39:58):
on the ground by the side of the thing. Un
there was a pushing and shuffling, a sound of heavy
feet as fresh people turned up to increase the pressure
of the crowd. People were coming out of the houses.
Now the doors of the jolly cricketers stood suddenly wide open.
Very little was said. Kemp felt about his hand, seeming

(04:40:21):
to pass through empty air. He's not breathing, he said,
And then I can't feel his heart his side. Uugh. Suddenly,
an old woman, peering under the arm of the big navvy, screamed, sharply.
Lookye there, she said, and thrust out a wrinkled finger,

(04:40:43):
And looking where she pointed, every one saw faint and transparent,
as though it were 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. Hallo cried

(04:41:03):
the constable. Here is his feet are showing, and so slowly,
beginning at his hands and feet, and creeping along his
limbs to the vital centers of his body. That strange
change continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison.
First came the little white nerves, a hazy gray sketch

(04:41:24):
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 camp to stand erect, there lay,

(04:41:46):
naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken
body of a young man about thirty. His hair and
brow were white, not gray with age, but white with
the whiteness of albinism, and his eyes were like His
hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his expression
was one of anger and dismay. Cover's face, said a man,

(04:42:10):
For God's sake, cover that face. And three little children,
pushing forward through the crowd, were suddenly twisted round and
sent packing off again. Some one brought a sheet from
the jolly cricketers, and having covered him, they carried him
into the house. And there it was, on a shabby bed,
in a tawdry, ill lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd

(04:42:33):
of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied,
that Gryffin the first of all men to make himself invisible. Gryffin,
the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended
in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career. The epilog

(04:43:01):
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 Stow 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

(04:43:24):
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?

(04:43:44):
And then a gentleman gave me a guinea a night
to tell a story at the Empire Music all just
to tell him all 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

(04:44:05):
everybody thinks he hasn't, but bless you, he hasn't. The
invisible man it was took him off to Adam when
I cut and ran for Portstow. Is that mister Kemp
put people on with the idea of may avindom. And
then he subsides into a pensive state, watches you furtively,
bustles nervously with glasses, and presently leaves the bar. He

(04:44:27):
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 manner of braces, for examples, he still turns
to string. He conducts his house without enterprise, but with
eminent decorum. His movements are slow, and he is a

(04:44:48):
great thinker. But he has a reputation for wisdom and
for a respectable parsimoney in the village, and his knowledge
of the roads of the south of England would beat
Cobbet on Sunday mornings, every Sunday morning all the year
round while he is close to the outer world. And
every night after ten he goes into his bar parlor

(04:45:10):
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

(04:45:33):
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 arm chair fills a long clay pipe,
slowly gloating over the books the while. Then he pulls
one towards him and opens him and begins to study it,

(04:45:56):
turning over the leaves backwards and forwards. His brows are
knit and his lips move painfully. X A 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

(04:46:18):
room at things invisible to other eyes. Full of secrets,
he says, wonderful secrets. Once I get a whore of them. Short,
I wouldn't do what he did. I just well, He
pulls at his pipe, so he lapses into a dream,

(04:46:43):
the undying, wonderful dream of 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. End of the

(04:47:05):
Invisible Man by H. G. Wells