He stood up abruptly, and then knelt down on the ground by the side of the thing unseen. There was a pushing and shuffling, a sound of heavy feet as fresh people came to increase the pressure of the crowd. Men were coming out of the houses. The doors of the “Jolly Cricketers” stood suddenly wide open. Very little was said. Kemp felt about, his hand seeming to pass through empty air. “He’s not breathing,” he said, and then, “I can’t feel his heart. His side—ugh!”

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, every one saw, faint and transparent, as though 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.[8]

“Hallo!” cried the constable. “Here’s his feet a–showing!”

And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet, and creeping slowly along his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change to visible fleshliness continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison. First came the little white veins tracing a hazy gray 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 gray 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!” cried a man. “For Gawd’s, sake cover that face!”

Some one 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.

THE EPILOGUE

So ends the story of the strange and evil experiment 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 protrusion, 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”[1] 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?[2] And then a gentleman gave me a guinea a night to tell the story at the Empire Music ’All—just tell ’em in my own words—barring one.”

And if you want to cut off the flow of his reminiscences abruptly, you can always do so by asking if there weren’t three manuscript books in the story. He admits there were, and proceeds to explain with asseverations that everybody thinks he has ’em. But, bless you! he hasn’t. “The Invisible Man it was took ’em off to hide ’em when I cut and ran for Port Stowe. It’s that Mr. Kemp put people on with the idea[3] of my having ’em.”

He subsides into a pensive state, watches you furtively, bustles nervously with glasses, and presently leaves the bar.

He is a bachelor man—his tastes were ever bachelor, and there are no women–folk in the house. Outwardly he buttons—it is expected of him—but in his more vital privacies, in the matter of braces, for example, he still turns to string. He conducts his house without enterprise, but with eminent decorum. His movements are slow, and he is a great thinker. But he has a reputation for wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village, and his knowledge of the roads of the South of England would beat Cobbett.[4]