Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the
big navvy, screamed sharply. “Looky there!”
she said, and thrust out a wrinkled finger.
And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint
and transparent as though it was made of glass, so
that veins and arteries and bones and nerves could
be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp
and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as
they stared.
“Hullo!” cried the constable. “Here’s
his feet a-showing!”
And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and
creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his
body, that strange change continued. It was like
the slow spreading of a poison. First came the
little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb,
then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then
the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, and then
growing rapidly dense and opaque. Presently they
could see his crushed chest and his shoulders, and
the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.
When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand
erect, there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground,
the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty.
His hair and brow were white—not grey with
age, but white with the whiteness of albinism—and
his eyes were like garnets. His hands were clenched,
his eyes wide open, and his expression was one of
anger and dismay.
“Cover his face!” said a man. “For
Gawd’s sake, cover that face!” and three
little children, pushing forward through the crowd,
were suddenly twisted round and sent packing off again.
Someone brought a sheet from the “Jolly Cricketers,”
and having covered him, they carried him into that
house. And there it was, on a shabby bed in a
tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd
of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded,
betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of
all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most
gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in
infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.
So ends the story of the strange and evil experiments
of the Invisible Man. And if you would learn
more of him you must go to a little inn near Port
Stowe and talk to the landlord. The sign of the
inn is an empty board save for a hat and boots, and
the name is the title of this story. The landlord
is a short and corpulent little man with a nose of
cylindrical proportions, wiry hair, and a sporadic
rosiness of visage. Drink generously, and he will
tell you generously of all the things that happened
to him after that time, and of how the lawyers tried
to do him out of the treasure found upon him.
“When they found they couldn’t prove who’s
money was which, I’m blessed,” he says,
“if they didn’t try to make me out a blooming
treasure trove! Do I look like a Treasure
Trove? And then a gentleman gave me a guinea
a night to tell the story at the Empire Music ’All—just
to tell ’em in my own words—barring
one.”
