LITMIR.BIZ

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couple of minutes after, he rejoined the little group that had formed outside the “Coach and Horses.” There was Fearenside telling about it all over again for the second time; there was Mrs. Hall saying his dog didn’t have the right to bite her guests; besides women and children, all of them saying fatuities.

      Mr. Hall, staring at them from the steps and listening, found it incredible that he had seen anything so very remarkable happen upstairs. Besides, his vocabulary was too limited to express his impressions.

      “He doesn’t want to get help, he says,” he said in answer to his wife’s inquiry.

      “I’d shoot the dog, that’s what I’d do,” said a lady in the group.

      Suddenly the dog began growling again.

      “Come along!” cried an angry voice in the doorway, and there stood the muffled stranger with his collar turned up. “The sooner you get those things in the better!”

      His trousers and gloves had been changed.

      “Were you hurt, sir?” said Fearenside. “I’m sorry the dog-”

      “Not a bit,” said the stranger. “Never mind. Hurry up with those things.”

      He then swore to himself, so Mr. Hall asserts.

      The first crate was carried into the parlour, and the stranger began to unpack it, scattering the straw on Mrs. Hall’s carpet. And from it he began to take bottles-little fat bottles containing powders, small and slender bottles containing coloured and white fluids, fluted blue bottles labeled “Poison”, bottles with round bodies and slender necks, large green-glass bottles, large white-glass bottles, bottles with corks, bottles with bungs, bottles with wooden caps, wine bottles, salad-oil bottles-putting them in rows on the chiffonnier, on the mantel, on the table under the window, round the floor, on the bookshelf-everywhere. Quite a sight it was! Crate after crate yielded bottles. Besides the bottles were test-tubes and a carefully packed balance.

      And directly the crates were unpacked, the stranger went to the window and set to work, not troubling about the box of books outside, nor for the trunks and other luggage that had gone upstairs.

      When Mrs. Hall took his dinner in to him, he was already so absorbed in his work, pouring little drops out of the bottles into test-tubes, that he did not hear her. Then he half turned his head and immediately turned it away again. But she saw he had removed his glasses; they were beside him on the table, and it seemed to her that his eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow. He put on his spectacles again, and then turned and faced her. She was about to complain of the straw on the floor when he anticipated her.

      “I wish you wouldn’t come in without knocking,” he said in the tone of abnormal exasperation.

      “I knocked, but seemingly-”

      “Perhaps you did. But in my investigations-my really very urgent and necessary investigations-the slightest disturbance, the jar of a door-I must ask you-”

      “Certainly, sir. You can turn the lock if you’re like that, you know. Any time.”

      “A very good idea,” said the stranger.

      “This straw, sir, if I might remark-”

      “Don’t. If the straw makes trouble put it down in the bill.”

      And he mumbled at her-words suspiciously like curses.

      He was so odd, standing there, so aggressive and explosive, bottle in one hand and test-tube in the other, that Mrs. Hall was quite alarmed. But she was a resolute woman.

      “In which case, I should like to know, sir, what you consider-”

      “A shilling-put down a shilling. Surely a shilling is enough?”

      “So be it,” said Mrs. Hall, taking up the table-cloth and beginning to spread it over the table.

      He turned and sat down, with his coat-collar toward her.

      All the afternoon he worked with the door locked and, as Mrs. Hall testifies, for the most part in silence. But once there was a smash of a bottle and then a rapid pacing athwart the room. She went to the door and listened.

      “I can’t go on,” he was raving. “I can’t go on. Three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand! Cheated! All my life it may take me!.. Patience! Patience indeed!.. Fool! fool!”

      There was a noise in the bar, and Mrs. Hall had very reluctantly to leave. When she returned the room was silent again. It was all over; the stranger had resumed work.

      When she took in his tea she saw broken glass in the corner of the room under the mirror, and a golden stain that had been carelessly wiped. She drew attention to it.

      “Put it down in the bill,” snapped her visitor. “For God’s sake don’t worry me. If there’s damage done, put it down in the bill!”

* * *

      “I’ll tell you something,” said Fearenside, mysteriously. It was late in the afternoon, and they were in the little beer-shop.

      “Well?” said Teddy Henfrey.

      “This chap you’re speaking of, what my dog bit. Well-he’s black. Leastways, his legs are. I saw through the tear of his trousers and the tear of his glove. Well-there wasn’t none. Just blackness. I tell you, he’s as black as my hat.”

      “Oh God!” said Henfrey. “But his nose is pink!”

      “That’s true,” said Fearenside. “I know that. And I tell you what I think. That man is piebald, Teddy. Black here and white there-in patches. And he’s ashamed of it. I’ve heard of such things before. And it’s the common way with horses, as any one can see.”

      Chapter IV

      Mr. Cuss Interviews the Stranger

      I have told the circumstances of the stranger’s arrival in Iping, in order that the curious impression he created may be understood by the reader. Hall did not like him, and he talked of getting rid of him; but he avoided his visitor as much as possible.

      “Wait till the summer,” said Mrs. Hall sagely, “when the artists will come. Then we’ll see.”

      The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, smoke, and sleep in the armchair by the fire. His temper was very uncertain. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could not understand what she heard.

      He rarely went out by daylight, but at twilight he would went out invisibly, whether the weather were cold or not, and he chose the loneliest paths. His spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under his hat frightened labourers. Children as saw him at nightfall dreamt of devils, and it seemed doubtful whether he disliked boys more than they disliked him.

      It was inevitable that a person of so remarkable an appearance should form a frequent topic in such a village as Iping. Opinion was greatly divided about his occupation. When questioned, Mrs. Hall explained very carefully that he was an “experimental investigator.” When asked what her investigator did, she would say with superiority that most educated people knew such things as that, and would thus explain that he “discovered things.” Her visitor had had an accident, she said, which temporarily discoloured his face and hands.

      But some people said that he was a criminal trying to escape from justice by wrapping himself up so as to conceal himself altogether from the eye of the police. This idea sprang from the brain of Mr. Teddy Henfrey. Mr. Gould, the teacher, said that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives.

      Another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of explaining everything.

      But whatever the people in Iping thought of him, they, on the whole, agreed in disliking him. His irritability was an amazing thing to these quiet villagers. The frantic gesticulations, the headlong pace

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