Select Conversations with an Uncle and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
A man arrives outside the inn; it’s a one horse town; and he’s brought some things he needs carried up by the porters. He is well wrapped up, perhaps with a touch of a cold. Will it be possible for his things to be retrieved at the earliest moment? The landlady, who cannot turn down the prospect of cash in the slack season, says that of course it can be arranged, but it cannot be done right now. The cart is away, and the porters are not to be seen. Will you wait a moment, just a moment, young man, and await your materials one day longer?
Her guest is all impatience. He snaps at her. He slams doors. Because he never removes his coverings, the servants and the practical rural people gossip. They gossip relentlessly. He must be a strange one. Perhaps a terrible medical condition. Possibly an accident – I know many who have had bad accidents, of course I do. Is this man terribly mutilated? He must be badly wounded. It’s obvious. And did any of you ever actually catch his name?
Eventually his crates are found and brought and the man brusquely has them unloaded. In them are three large notebooks, bound volumes, and many glass bottles, retorts and philtres. He is an experimental researcher, of course, as all the world knows. The rustics pretend to understand. And he has his scientific work to pursue. He storms about in his study at odd hours. He tears up pieces of paper. He works feverishly but when the fit is not on him, he seems to laze about. No one ever sees his eyes, concealed behind mirrored glasses. No one ever sees his face.
But they keep all trying, don’t they? They all keep trying to intrigue and gossip and get into the stranger’s room, into his business. If his door is not locked, they go in without knocking. If he is out, they snoop and skulk around. And they slowly discover that things are not well. Not well for the stranger, nor for the village all about them. Money goes missing. Houses are broken into. A few people think they’ve seen a ghost.
Might all of this have ended well had the people not interfered? We do not know. It seems unlikely, somehow.
The scepticism of their new visitor mounts. He’s behind on his bills. The people form a deputation. They will see him out or set him right. Instead, they’re met with violence – inexplicable violence, violence that has no earthly nor physical basis. It seems to come from nowhere. The man it seems was not crippled; he is not deformed. He is invisible. Escaping from his clothes – the only thing that betrays his existence to onlooking eyes – he disappears. The people give chase. They run after a disappearing figure and are thrown to the floor, their legs swept from under them. They collapse into the dirt, beaten about the face and upper body.
And the invisible man now vanishes from view, but only for a moment. Fleeing the village, he meets another man on the road, a tramp, who the invisible man terrorises into becoming his agent. He must recover his notebooks, the invisible man. He must continue his experiments, the ones that have granted him his reflective, refractive powers.
When, eventually, the invisible man meets a fellow scientist, a doctor, he cannot wait to tell him the whole story. How he was a poor researcher whose work on optics gave him a blinding insight into reflective properties. How he hid his researches from everyone – from greedy superiors who wanted him to publish so they could commercialise and steal his credit, from all manner of people who might beat him to market. The invisible man talks about his experimenting on animals, of stealing money from his late father, of all the fame and glory that would be his. Of experimenting, finally, upon himself, and fleeing from his pursuing landlords before torching the place where he once lived.
He could do so much with this great gift, this discovery of his. He could do so much. If only a catalogue of misfortunes – the unexpected necessities of being theoretically unseeable – did not befall the invisible man from the moment he first set an unshod foot out into an unknowing world.