“The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,”
said Kemp. “I am as sure he will establish
a reign of terror—so soon as he has got
over the emotions of this escape—as I am
sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is
to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind.
His blood be upon his own head.”
THE WICKSTEED MURDER
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.
