The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in a
state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp's gateway was
violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken,
and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human
perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can
imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up the hill and
on to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and despairing
at his intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated and weary,
amid the thickets of Hintondean, to piece together again his
shattered schemes against his species. That seems the most probable
refuge for him, for there it was he re-asserted himself in a grimly
tragical manner about two in the afternoon.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that
time, and what plans he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically
exasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able to
understand the motives that led to that deceit, we may still imagine
and even sympathise a little with the fury the attempted surprise
must have occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned astonishment
of his Oxford Street experiences may have returned to him, for
evidently he had 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 county, 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.
We can know nothing of the details of the 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.
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 to flood for a time
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 as to
the way they should support one another in the case of an encounter.
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.
