The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance

  CHAPTER XXVI

  THE WICKSTEED MURDER

  The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in astate of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp's gateway wasviolently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken,and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of humanperceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But onecan imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up thehill and on to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging anddespairing at his intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heatedand weary, amid the thickets of Hintondean, to piece together againhis shattered schemes against his species. That seems the mostprobable refuge for him, for there it was he re-asserted himself ina 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 ecstaticallyexasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able tounderstand the motives that led to that deceit, we may stillimagine and even sympathise a little with the fury the attemptedsurprise must have occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunnedastonishment of his Oxford Street experiences may have returned tohim, for he had evidently counted on Kemp's co-operation in hisbrutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished fromhuman ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he diduntil about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, forhumanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction.

  During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over thecountryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply alegend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp'sdrily worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangibleantagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome, and thecountryside began organising itself with inconceivable rapidity.By two o'clock even he might still have removed himself out ofthe district by getting aboard a train, but after two that becameimpossible. Every passenger train along the lines on a greatparallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and Horsham,travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almostentirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round PortBurdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently settingout in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads andfields.

  Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at everycottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keepindoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools hadbroken up by three o'clock, and the children, scared and keepingtogether in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp's proclamation--signedindeed by Adye--was posted over almost the whole district by four orfive o'clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all theconditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the InvisibleMan from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulnessand for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. Andso swift and decided was the action of the authorities, so promptand universal was the belief in this strange being, that beforenightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringentstate of siege. And before nightfall, too, a thrill of horrorwent through the whole watching nervous countryside. Going fromwhispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length andbreadth of the country, passed the story of the murder of Mr.Wicksteed.

  If our supposition that the Invisible Man's refuge was theHintondean thickets, then we must suppose that in the earlyafternoon he sallied out again bent upon some project that involvedthe use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but theevidence that he had the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteedis 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 yardsfrom Lord Burdock's lodge gate. Everything points to a desperatestruggle--the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteedreceived, his splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made,save in a murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed thetheory of madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man offorty-five or forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensivehabits and appearance, the very last person in the world to provokesuch a terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the InvisibleMan used an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. Hestopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal,attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felledhim, and smashed his head to a jelly.

  Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing beforehe met his victim--he must have been carrying it ready in his hand.Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bearon the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was notin Mr. Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundredyards out of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girlto the effect that, going to her afternoon school, she saw themurdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towardsthe gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuingsomething on the ground before him and striking at it ever andagain with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see himalive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle beinghidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slightdepression in the ground.

  Now this, to the present writer's mind at least, lifts the murderout of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine thatGriffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without anydeliberate intention of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then havecome by and noticed this rod inexplicably moving through the air.Without any thought of the Invisible Man--for Port Burdock is tenmiles away--he may have pursued it. It is quite conceivable thathe may not even have heard of the Invisible Man. One can thenimagine the Invisible Man making off--quietly in order to avoiddiscovering his presence in the neighbourhood, and Wicksteed,excited and curious, pursuing this unaccountably locomotiveobject--finally striking at it.

  No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced hismiddle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the positionin which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had theill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift ofstinging nettles and the gravel pit. To those who appreciate theextraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, the rest of theencounter will be easy to imagine.

  But this is pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts--for storiesof children are often unreliable--are the discovery of Wicksteed'sbody, done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung amongthe nettles. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin, suggests thatin the emotional excitement of the affair, the purpose for whichhe took it--if he had a purpose--was abandoned. He was certainlyan intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of hisvictim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may havereleased some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time mayhave flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.

  After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struckacross the country towards the downland. There is a story of avoice heard about sunset by a couple of men in a field near FernBottom. It was wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and everand again it shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove upacross the middle of a clover field and died away towards thehills.

  That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learnt something ofthe rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. He must havefound houses locked and secured; he may have loitered aboutrailway stations and prowled about inns, and no doubt he read theproclamations and realised something of the nature of the campaignagainst him. And as the evening advanced, the fields became dottedhere and there with groups of three or four men, and noisy with theyelping of dogs. These men-hunters had particular instructions inthe case of an encounter as to the way they should support oneanother. But he avoided them all. We may understand something ofhis exasperation, and it could have been none the less becausehe himself had supplied the information that was being used soremorselessly against him. For that day at least he lost heart; fornearly twenty-four hours, save when he turned on Wicksteed, he wasa hunted man. In the night, h
e must have eaten and slept; for inthe morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, andmalignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world.