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_ The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in a
state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp's gateway was
violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken,
and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human
perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one
can imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up the
hill and on to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and
despairing at his intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated
and weary, amid the thickets of Hintondean, to piece together again
his shattered schemes against his species. That seems to most
probable refuge for him, for there it was he re-asserted himself in
a grimly tragical manner about two in the afternoon.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that time,
and what plans he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically
exasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able to
understand the motives that led to that deceit, we may still
imagine and even sympathise a little with the fury the attempted
surprise must have occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned
astonishment of his Oxford Street experiences may have returned to
him, for he had evidently counted on Kemp's co-operation in his
brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished from
human ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did
until about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for
humanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction.
During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the
countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a
legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp's
drily worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible
antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome, and the
countryside began organising itself with inconceivable rapidity.
By two o'clock even he might still have removed himself out of
the district by getting aboard a train, but after two that became
impossible. Every passenger train along the lines on a great
parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and Horsham,
travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost
entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port
Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting
out in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads and
fields.
Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at every
cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keep
indoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had
broken up by three o'clock, and the children, scared and keeping
together in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp's proclamation--signed
indeed by Adye--was posted over almost the whole district by four or
five o'clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all the
conditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the Invisible
Man from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulness
and for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. And
so swift and decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt
and universal was the belief in this strange being, that before
nightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringent
state of siege. And before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror
went through the whole watching nervous countryside. Going from
whispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length and
breadth of the country, passed the story of the murder of Mr.
Wicksteed.
If our supposition that the Invisible Man's refuge was the
Hintondean thickets, then we must suppose that in the early
afternoon he sallied out again bent upon some project that involved
the use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but the
evidence that he had the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteed
is to me at least overwhelming.
Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter.
It occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards
from Lord Burdock's lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate
struggle--the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteed
received, his splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made,
save in a murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the
theory of madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man of
forty-five or forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive
habits and appearance, the very last person in the world to provoke
such a terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the Invisible
Man used an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. He
stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal,
attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled
him, and smashed his head to a jelly.
Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing before
he met his victim--he must have been carrying it ready in his hand.
Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear
on the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not
in Mr. Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred
yards out of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl
to the effect that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the
murdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towards
the gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing
something on the ground before him and striking at it ever and
again with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see him
alive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle being
hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight
depression in the ground.
Now this, to the present writer's mind at least, lifts the murder
out of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that
Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any
deliberate intention of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then have
come by and noticed this rod inexplicably moving through the air.
Without any thought of the Invisible Man--for Port Burdock is ten
miles away--he may have pursued it. It is quite conceivable that
he may not even have heard of the Invisible Man. One can then
imagine the Invisible Man making off--quietly in order to avoid
discovering his presence in the neighbourhood, and Wicksteed,
excited and curious, pursuing this unaccountably locomotive
object--finally striking at it.
No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his
middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position
in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the
ill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of
stinging nettles and the gravel pit. To those who appreciate the
extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, the rest of the
encounter will be easy to imagine.
But this is pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts--for stories
of children are often unreliable--are the discovery of Wicksteed's
body, done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung among
the nettles. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin, suggests that
in the emotional excitement of the affair, the purpose for which
he took it--if he had a purpose--was abandoned. He was certainly
an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his
victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have
released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may
have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.
After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck
across the country towards the downland. There is a story of a
voice heard about sunset by a couple of men in a field near Fern
Bottom. It was wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever
and again it shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove up
across the middle of a clover field and died away towards the
hills.
That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learnt something of
the rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. He must have
found houses locked and secured; he may have loitered about
railway stations and prowled about inns, and no doubt he read the
proclamations and realised something of the nature of the campaign
against him. And as the evening advanced, the fields became dotted
here and there with groups of three or four men, and noisy with the
yelping of dogs. These men-hunters had particular instructions in
the case of an encounter as to the way they should support one
another. But he avoided them all. We may understand something of
his exasperation, and it could have been none the less because
he himself had supplied the information that was being used so
remorselessly against him. For that day at least he lost heart; for
nearly twenty-four hours, save when he turned on Wicksteed, he was
a hunted man. In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in
the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and
malignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world. _
Read next: Chapter XXVII - The Siege of Kemp's House
Read previous: Chapter XXV - The Hunting of the invisible Man
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