The Invisible Man

by H.G. Wells

the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the "Coach and Horses" more dead than alive, and flung his portmanteau down.

"And they goggles! Why, he looked more like a divin' helmet than a human man!"

The reflection of the fire lent a kind of red animation to his big spectacles they had lacked hitherto.

laughed abruptly, a bark of a laugh that he seemed to bite and kill in his mouth.

The only light in the room was the red glow from the fire—which lit his eyes like adverse railway signals, but left his downcast face in darkness—and the scanty vestiges of the day that came in through the open door.

It was the sensation of a moment: the white-bound head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it.

She was certain, with a marked coldness.

My eyes—are sometimes so weak and painful that I have to shut myself up in the dark for hours together. Lock myself up. Sometimes—now and then.

He felt alone in the room and looked up, and there, grey and dim, was the bandaged head and huge blue lenses staring fixedly, with a mist of green spots drifting in front of them. It was so uncanny to Henfrey that for a minute they remained staring blankly at one another.

jumping back, for he was no hero with dogs,

It was all the business of a swift half-minute. No one spoke, everyone shouted.

He caught a glimpse of a most singular thing, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the face of a pale pansy.

his vocabulary was altogether too limited to express his impressions.

he mumbled at her—words suspiciously like curses.

"This chap you're speaking of, what my dog bit. Well—he's black. Leastways, his legs are. I seed through the tear of his trousers and the tear of his glove. You'd have expected a sort of pinky to show, wouldn't you? Well—there wasn't none. Just blackness. I tell you, he's as black as my hat." "My sakes!" said Henfrey. "It's a rummy case altogether. Why, his nose is as pink as paint!"

There were a number of skirmishes with Mrs. Hall on matters of domestic discipline, but in every case until late April, when the first signs of penury began, he over-rode her by the easy expedient of an extra payment.

he chose the loneliest paths and those most overshadowed by trees and banks. His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the penthouse of his hat, came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness

Such children as saw him at nightfall dreamt of bogies, and it seemed doubtful whether he disliked boys more than they disliked him, or the reverse; but there was certainly a vivid enough dislike on either side.

going gingerly over the syllables as one who dreads pitfalls.

"if he chooses to show enself at fairs he'd make his fortune in no time,"

Yet another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything straight away.

Sniffed venomously. I didn't flinch, though I'm hanged if that bandaged knob of his, and those blinkers, aren't enough to unnerve any one, coming quietly up to you.

"When I hit his cuff," said Cuss, "I tell you, it felt exactly like hitting an arm. And there wasn't an arm! There wasn't the ghost of an arm!"

Mrs. Bunting, it seems, woke up suddenly in the stillness that comes before the dawn, with the strong impression that the door of their bedroom had opened and closed.

heard quite distinctly a fumbling going on at his study desk down-stairs, and then a violent sneeze.

At that sound Mr. Bunting was nerved to abrupt action. Gripping the poker firmly, he rushed into the room, closely followed by Mrs. Bunting. "Surrender!" cried Mr. Bunting, fiercely, and then stooped amazed. Apparently the room was perfectly empty.

went noiselessly down into the cellar. Their business there was of a private nature, and had something to do with the specific gravity of their beer.

his wife's voice coming out of the depth of the cellar, with that rapid telescoping of the syllables and interrogative cocking up of the final words to a high note, by which the West Sussex villager is wont to indicate a brisk impatience.

The bed-clothes gathered themselves together, leapt up suddenly into a sort of peak, and then jumped headlong over the bottom rail. It was exactly as if a hand had clutched them in the centre and flung them aside. Immediately after, the stranger's hat hopped off the bed-post, described a whirling flight in the air through the better part of a circle, and then dashed straight at Mrs. Hall's face.

The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.

were stretching a string of union-jacks and royal ensigns (which had originally celebrated the first Victorian Jubilee) across the road.

pored through his dark glasses upon his paper or chinked his dirty little bottles, and occasionally swore savagely at the boys, audible if invisible, outside the windows.

The stranger stood looking more like an angry diving-helmet than ever.

"And before I take any bills or get any breakfasts, or do any such things whatsoever, you got to tell me one or two things I don't understand, and what nobody don't understand, and what everybody is very anxious to understand.

It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors,

People down the village heard shouts and shrieks, and looking up the street saw the "Coach and Horses" violently firing out its humanity.

down came three or four bottles from the chiffonnier and shot a web of pungency into the air of the room.

That's no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?"

"Who ever heard the likes of that?" "It's strange, perhaps, but it's not a crime. Why am I assaulted by a policeman in this fashion?"

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.

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.

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.

his big toes were broad, and pricked like the ears of a watchful dog.

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 was irradiated by the dawn of a great amazement.

The down was desolate, east and west, north and south; the road with its shallow ditches and white bordering stakes, ran smooth and empty north and south, and, save for that peewit, the blue sky was empty too.

He was too amazed to dodge. Whizz it came, and ricochetted from a bare toe into the ditch. Mr. Thomas Marvel jumped a foot and howled aloud. Then he started to run, tripped over an unseen obstacle, and came head over heels into a sitting position.

"You 'aven't been eatin' bread and cheese?" he asked, holding the invisible arm. "You're quite right, and it's not quite assimilated into the system."

An invisible man is a man of power." He stopped for a moment to sneeze violently.

Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.