The Greatest Science Fiction Novels & Stories by H. G. Wells. Герберт Уэллс

been broke 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.”

      “It’s the regular thing,” said Jaffers.

      “No handcuffs,” stipulated the stranger.

      “Pardon me,” said Jaffers.

      Abruptly the figure sat down, and before any one could realise was was being done, the slippers, socks, and trousers had been kicked off under the table. Then he sprang up again and flung off his coat.

      “Here, stop that,” said Jaffers, suddenly realising what was happening. He gripped at the waistcoat; it struggled, and the shirt slipped out of it and left it limply and empty in his hand. “Hold him!” said Jaffers, 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 shirtsleeve planted a shrewd blow in Hall’s face that stopped his open-armed advance, and sent him backward into old Toothsome the sexton, and in another moment the garment was lifted up and 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!” 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 moment in the corner 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 Huxter in the mêlée, and prevented their coming together. He felt a muscular chest, and in another moment the whole mass of struggling, excited men shot 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 — 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, and fell over the constable’s prostrate body. Halfway across the road a woman screamed as something pushed by her; a dog, kicked apparently, yelped and ran howling into Huxter’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 a gust scatters dead leaves.

      But Jaffers lay quite still, face upward and knees bent, at the foot of the steps of the inn.

      CHAPTER VIII

       IN TRANSIT

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      The eighth chapter is exceedingly brief, and relates 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 as of a man coughing, sneezing, and then swearing savagely to himself; and looking, beheld nothing. Yet the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes 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 Adderdean. 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 tranquillity vanished; he got up hastily, and hurried down the steepness of the hill towards the village, as fast as he could go.

      CHAPTER IX

       MR. THOMAS MARVEL

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      You must picture Mr. Thomas Marvel as a person of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure inclined to embonpoint; 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.

      Mr. Thomas Marvel was sitting with his feet in a ditch by the roadside over the down towards Adderdean, about a mile and a half out of Iping. His feet, save for socks of irregular openwork, 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 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-soled for damp. Mr. 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 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.

      “They are — charity boots,” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, with his head on one side regarding them distastefully; “and which is the ugliest pair in the whole blessed universe, I’m darned if I know!”

      “H’m,” said the Voice.

      “I’ve worn worse — in fact, I’ve worn none. But none so owdacious ugly — if you’ll allow the expression. I’ve been cadging boots — in particular — for days. Because I was sick of them. They’re 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, try as I would, but them. Look at ‘em! And a good country for boots, too, in a general way. But it’s just my promiscuous luck. I’ve got my boots in this country ten years or more. And then they treat you like this.”

      “It’s a beast of a country,” said the Voice. “And pigs for people.”

      “Ain’t it?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel. “Lord! But them boots! It beats it.”

      He turned his head over his shoulder to 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 are yer?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel over his shoulder and coming on all fours. He saw a stretch of empty downs with the wind swaying the remote green-pointed furze bushes.

      “Am I drunk?” said Mr. Marvel. “Have I had visions? Was I talking to myself? What the — “

      “Don’t be alarmed,” said a Voice.

      “None