In the early evening time Doctor Kemp was sitting in his study in
the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. It was a pleasant
little room, with three windows, north, west, and south, and
bookshelves crowded with books and scientific publications, and a
broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope,
glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered
bottles of reagents. Doctor Kemp's solar lamp was lit, albeit the
sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up
because there was no offence of peering outsiders to require them
pulled down. Doctor Kemp was a tall and slender young man, with
flaxen hair and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon
would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society, 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 colour
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 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 round a corner, with his
''Visible Man a-coming, sir!' I can't imagine what possesses people.
One might think we were in the thirteenth century."
He got up, went to the window, and stared at the dusky hillside
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 villas that had clambered up
the hill from Burdock had occulted 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 round on his heel
and walking back to his writing-table.
But those who saw the 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. By 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 downhill to where the lamps were being lit, and
the people were crowded in the street. And his ill-shaped mouth fell
apart, and a glairy 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 dog playing in the road
yelped and ran under a gate, and as they still wondered 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 in
the street before Marvel was halfway there. They were bolting into
houses and slamming the doors behind them, 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! The Invisible Man."
