Читать онлайн "The Invisible Man" - Уэллс Герберт Джордж - RuLit

For a moment she stood gazing at him, too surprised to speak.

He held a white cloth—it was a serviette he had brought with him—over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled voice. But it was not that which startled Mrs. Hall. It was the fact that all the forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose. It was bright pink, and shining, just as it had been at first. He wore a dark brown velvet jacket, with a high, black, linen–lined collar turned up about his neck. The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated that for a moment she was rigid.

He did not remove the serviette, but remained holding it, as she saw now, with a brown gloved hand, and regarding her with his inscrutable blank glasses. “Leave the hat,” he said, speaking indistinctly through the white cloth.

Her nerves began to recover from the shock they had received. She placed the hat on the chair again by the fire. “I didn’t know, sir,” she began, "that—" And she stopped, embarrassed.

“Thank you,” he said dryly, glancing from her to the door, and then at her again.

“I’ll have them nicely dried,[10] sir, at once,” she said, and carried his clothes out of the room. She glanced at his white–swathed head and blank goggles again as she was going out of the door; but his napkin was still in front of his face. She shivered a little as she closed the door behind her, and her face was eloquent of her surprise and perplexity.[11] “I never!” she whispered. “There!”[12] She went quite softly to the kitchen, and was too preoccupied to ask Millie what she was messing about with now,[13] when she got there.

The visitor sat and listened to her retreating feet. He glanced inquiringly at the window before he removed his serviette, and resumed his meal. He took a mouthful, glanced suspiciously at the window, took another mouthful; then rose and, taking the serviette in his hand, walked across the room and pulled the blind down to the top of the white muslin that obscured the lower panes. This plunged the room in twilight. He returned with an easier air to the table and his meal.

“The poor soul’s had an accident, or an op’ration or somethin’,” said Mrs. Hall. “What a turn them bandages did give me[14] to be sure!”

She put on some more coal, unfolded the clothe–horse, and extended the traveller’s coat upon this. “And they goggles! Why, he looked more like a divin’ ’elmet[15] than a human man!” She hung his muffler on a corner of the horse. “And holding that handkerchief over his mouth all the time. Talkin’ through it!… Perhaps his mouth was hurt too—maybe.”

She turned round, as one who suddenly remembers. “Bless my soul alive!”[16] she said, going off at a tangent, “ain’t you done them taters[17] yet, Millie?”

When Mrs. Hall went to clear away the stranger’s lunch her idea that his mouth must also have been cut or disfigured in the accident she supposed him to have suffered was confirmed, for he was smoking a pipe, and all the time that she was in the room he never loosened the silk muffler he had wrapped round the lower part of his face to put the mouthpiece to his lips. Yet it was not forgetfulness, for she saw he glanced at the tobacco as it smouldered out. He sat in the corner with his back to the window–blind, and spoke now, having eaten and drunk and being comfortably warmed through, with less aggressive brevity than before. The reflection of the fire lent a kind of red animation to his big spectacles they had lacked hitherto.

“I have some luggage,” he said, “at Bramblehurst Station,” and he asked her how he could have it sent. He bowed his bandaged head quite politely in acknowledgment of her explanation. “To–morrow!” he said. “There is no speedier delivery?” and seemed disappointed when she answered “No.” “Was she quite sure? No man with a trap who would go over?”[18]

Mrs. Hall, nothing loath, answered his questions, and then developed a conversation. “It’s a steep road by the down, sir,” she said, in answer to the question about a trap; and then snatching at an opening[19] said, “It was there a carriage was upsettled,[20] a year ago and more. A gentleman killed, besides his coachman. Accidents, sir, happen in a moment, don’t they?”

But the visitor was not to be drawn so easily.[21] “They do,” he said, through his muffler, eyeing her quietly from behind his impenetrable glasses.

“But they take long enough to get well, sir, don’t they? There was my sister’s son, Tom, jest[22] cut his arm with a scythe—tumbled on it in the ’ayfield—and bless me! he was three months tied up, sir. You’d hardly believe it. It’s regular[23] give me a dread of a scythe, sir.”

“I can quite understand that,” said the visitor.

“We was afraid, one time, that he’d have to have an op’ration, he was that bad, sir.”

The vistor laughed abruptly—a bark of a laugh[24] that he seemed to bite and kill in his mouth. “Was he?” he said.

“He was, sir. And no laughing matter to them as had the doing for him[25] as I had, my sister being took up with her little ones so much. There was bandages to do, sir, and bandages to undo. So that if I may make so bold as to say it, sir—”

“Will you get me some matches?” said the visitor quite abruptly. “My pipe is out.”

Mrs. Hall was pulled up suddenly. It was certainly rude of him after telling him all she had done. She gasped at him for a moment, and remembered the two sovereigns. She went for the matches.

“Thanks,” he said concisely, as she put them down, and turned his shoulder upon her and stared out of the window again. Evidently he was sensitive on the topic of operations and bandages. She did not “make so bold as to say,” after all. But his snubbing way had irritated her, and Millie had a hot time of it[26] that afternoon.

The visitor remained in the parlour until four o’clock, without giving the ghost of an excuse for an intrusion. For the most part he was quite still during that time: it would seem he sat in the growing darkness, smoking by the firelight—perhaps dozing.

Once or twice a curious listener might have heard him at the coals,[27] and for the space of five minutes he was audible pacing the room. He seemed to be talking to himself. Then the armchair creaked as he sat down again.

CHAPTER II

MR. TEDDY HENFREY’s FIRST IMPRESSIONS

At four o’clock, when it was fairly dark, and Mrs. Hall was screwing up her courage to go in and ask her visitor if he would take some tea, Teddy Henfrey, the clock–jobber,[1] came into the bar.

“My sakes,[2] Mrs. Hall,” said he, “but this is terrible weather for thin boots!” The snow outside was falling faster.

Mrs. Hall agreed, and then noticed he had his bag with him. “Now you’re here, Mr. Teddy,” said she, “I’d be glad if you’d give th’ old clock in the parlour a bit of a look. ’Tis going, and it strikes well and hearty, but the hour hand won’t do nothin’ but point at six.”

And leading the way, she went across to the parlour door and rapped and entered.

Her visitor, she saw, as she opened the door, was seated in the armchair before the fire, dozing, it would seem, with his bandaged head drooping on one side. The only light in the room was the red glow from the fire. Everything was ruddy, shadowy, and indistinct to her, the more so since she had just been lighting the bar lamp, and her eyes were dazzled. But for a second it seemed to her that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open, a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face. It was the sensation of a moment; the white–bound head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it. Then he stirred, started up in his chair, put up his hand. She opened the door wide so that the room was lighter, and she saw him more clearly, with the muffler held to his face, just as she had seen him hold the serviette before. The shadows, she fancied, had tricked her.