Invisible hand

“ Kemp walked across the room and picked up the fragments of broken glass. "All the facts are out about you," said Kemp, standing up with the glass in his hand; "all that happened in Iping, and down the hill. The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows you are here."
The Invisible Man swore. ”

“ This was the moment when, before the sun, which, like him, was going hence, and before the whole of great nature, which, with invisible hands lifts blind man into vast, pure, unknown regions, I pressed the likeness of his Guido, [52] which I had hitherto withheld from him, to my beloved scholar's heart ”

“ Marvel, and put his hand to his ear. He caught hold of his books. “I must be getting on, I think,” he said. He edged in a curious way along the seat away from his interlocutor. “But you was just a-going to tell me about this here Invisible Man!” protested the mariner. Mr. Marvel seemed to consult with himself. “Hoax,” said a Voice. “It’s a hoax,” said Mr. Marvel.
“But it’s in the paper,” said the mariner.
“Hoax all the same,” said Marvel. “I know the chap that started the lie. There ain’t no Invisible Man whatsoever—Blimey.” ”

“ There is the materialization which, though tangible, is not visible to ordinary physical sight. Of this nature are the unseen hands which so often clasp one’s arm or stroke one’s face at a séance, which sometimes carry physical objects through the air or make raps upon the table—though of course both these latter phenomena may easily be produced without a materialized hand at all. ”

“ My strength had returned. I sat up and listened and heard a whispering. I sprang to my feet and as noiselessly as possible began to detach the connections of my apparatus, and to distribute it about the room, so as to destroy the suggestions of its arrangement. Presently the knocking was renewed and voices called, first my landlord’s, and then two others. To gain time I answered them. The invisible rag and pillow came to hand and I opened the window and pitched them out on to the cistern cover. As the window opened, a heavy crash came at the door. ”

“ He extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye" said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. ”

“ He lay quiet for a moment "If you struggle any more," said the voice, "I shall throw the flint at your head."
"It 's a fair do," said Mr. Thomas Marvel, sitting up, taking his wounded toe in hand and fixing his eye on the third missile. "I don't understand it. Stones flinging themselves. Stones talking. Put yourself down. Rot away. I 'm done."
The third flint fell.
"It 's very simple," said the voice. "I 'm an invisible man." ”

“ If our supposition that the Invisible Man’s refuge was the Hintondean thickets, then we must suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied out again bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteed is to me at least overwhelming.
Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter. It occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards from Lord Burdock’s lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate struggle—the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. ”

“ and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch. ”

“ So you see I am not shut out from the region of the beautiful, though my hand cannot perceive the brilliant colors in the sunset or on the mountain, or reach into the blue depths of the sky.
Physics tells me that I am well off in a world which knows neither color nor sound, but is made in terms of size, shape, and inherent qualities; for at least every object appears to my fingers standing solidly right side up, and is not an inverted image on the retina which, I understand, your brain is at infinite though unconscious labor to set back on its feet. ”

“ Your eye is merely a machine. It catches certain colours. Which in turn are merely rates of vibration. There is nothing to matter but force, Harry; if we could get down deep enough and know a few laws, we could transmute it.”
“What has it to do with the occult?”
“Merely a fact. The eye machine catches only certain vibration speeds of energy. There are undoubtedly any number of speeds; the eye cannot see them.”
“Then this would account for the Blind Spot?”
“Exactly. A localised spot, a condition, a combination of phenomena, anything entering it becomes invisible.” ”

“ When her side is turned towards us, we see her as a straight line; when the end containing her eye or mouth—for with us these two organs are identical—is the part that meets our eye, then we see nothing but a highly lustrous point; but when the back is presented to our view, then— being only sub-lustrous, and, indeed, almost as dim as an inanimate object—her hinder extremity serves her as a kind of Invisible Cap. ”

“ The Invisible Man had him down grimly, but his arms were free and he struck and tried to kick savagely.
“Listen to reason, will you?” said the Invisible Man, sticking to him in spite of a pounding in the ribs. “By Heaven! you’ll madden me in a minute!
“Lie still, you fool!” bawled the Invisible Man in Kemp’s ear.
Kemp struggled for another moment and then lay still.
“If you shout, I’ll smash your face,” said the Invisible Man, relieving his mouth.
“I’m an Invisible Man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an Invisible Man. ”

“ He reached out his hands, but he could not see them. He could feel his hands and arms and body; he stamped his feet on the grass and knew they were there, but in some strange way they had become invisible. ”

“ The bandages concealing them from view then fell off, and to my agonized sight were disclosed objects that struck me as strangely familiar. There is something about fingers, a marked individuality, I never forget. No two persons’ hands are alike. And in these fingers, in their excessive whiteness, round knuckles, and blue veins, I read a likeness whose prototype, struggle how I would, I could not recall. Gradually the hand moved upwards, and, reaching the throat, the fingers set to work at once to remove the wrappings. ”

“ The hand is the channel through which life passes. It reveals to the physician all the mysteries of our organism. It exhales more than any other part of our bodies the nervous fluid, or that unknown substance, which for want of another term we style will. The eye can discover the mood of our soul but the hand betrays at the same time the secrets of the body and those of the soul. We can acquire the faculty of imposing silence on our eyes, on our lips, on our brows, and on our forehead; but the hand never dissembles and nothing in our features can be compared to the richness of its expression. ”

“ It came to rest poised twenty inches above the front edge of the seat of the chair. He stared at it in infinite perplexity. “This is—this must be—hypnotism. You have suggested you are invisible.”
“Nonsense,” said the Voice.
“It’s frantic.”
“Listen to me.”
“I demonstrated conclusively this morning,” began Kemp, “that invisibility—”
“Never mind what you’ve demonstrated!—I’m starving,” said the Voice, “and the night is chilly to a man without clothes.”
“Food?” said Kemp.
The tumbler of whiskey tilted itself. “Yes,” said the Invisible Man rapping it down. “Have you a dressing-gown?” ”

“ Why dream of playing a game against the race? How can you hope to gain happiness? Don’t be a lone wolf. Publish your results; take the world—take the nation at least—into your confidence. Think what you might do with a million helpers—”
The Invisible Man interrupted—arm extended. “There are footsteps coming upstairs,” he said in a low voice.
“Nonsense,” said Kemp.
“Let me see,” said the Invisible Man, and advanced, arm extended, to the door. ”

“ When in the dark I lay my hand on a surface, or grasp a ball of three inches diameter, in either case the same parts of the hand receive the impression: but out of the different contraction of the hand in the two cases my Understanding constructs the form of the body whose contact caused the feeling, and confirms its construction by leading me to move my hand over the body. If one born blind handles a cubical body, the sensations of his hand are quite uniform on all sides and in all directions,—only the corners press upon a smaller part of his skin. ”

“ The blind man’s voice rises weak and uncertain, his fingers move mechanically, searching for the notes of a prelude, or an interlude of days long passed.
His long, deformed hands, with knots upon the phalanges of the first three fingers, and with the nails of his thumbs depressed and white in colour, resemble somewhat the hands of a decrepit monkey; the backs are of the unhealthy colour of decayed fruit, a mixture of pink, yellow and blue shades; the palms show a net-work of lines and furrows, and between the fingers the skin is blistered. ”

“ It had a plastic power to reincarnate itself at will, and imitate human forms and colors, under certain circumstances, and it gave partial proof of this by showing a hand, an arm, or a foot undistinguishable from one of flesh and blood. On one occasion the human form entire had been displayed, been touched, and had then dissolved into invisibility and intangibility before him. ”

“ And so, shivering, scared, and sniffing with the first intimations of a cold, and with the bruises in the small of my back growing upon my attention, I drove slowly along Oxford Street and past Tottenham Court Road. My mood was as different from that in which I had sallied forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to imagine. This invisibility indeed! ”

“ Much of nature, all moving things, would be invisible to us. If I moved my arm, it would disappear, to reappear again when I held it still. It would be a usual occurrence to have somebody suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear from our midst, or to see only a part of a body. ”

“ I saw in time a blind man approaching me, and fled limping, for I feared his subtle intuitions. Once or twice accidental collisions occurred and I left people amazed, with unaccountable curses ringing in their ears. Then came something silent and quiet against my face, and across the Square fell a thin veil of slowly falling flakes of snow. I had caught a cold, and do as I would I could not avoid an occasional sneeze. And every dog that came in sight, with its pointing nose and curious sniffing, was a terror to me. ”

“ They were bolting into houses and slamming the doors behind them, with the news. He heard it and made one last desperate spurt. Fear came striding by, rushed ahead of him, and in a moment had seized the town.
"The Invisible Man is coming! The Invisible Man!" ”

“ Then if I want to make a house, or a tree, or a stone, invisible, all I need to do is to deflect the light-rays around it in such a way that they will curve around and avoid it instead of ever striking it. ”

“ They could hear the Invisible Man breathing. "Stand away, you two," he said. "I want that man Kemp."
"We want you," said the first policeman, making a quick step forward and wiping with his poker at the Voice. The Invisible Man must have started back, and he blundered into the umbrella stand. Then, as the policeman staggered with the swing of the blow he had aimed, the Invisible Man countered with the axe, the helmet crumpled like paper, and the blow sent the man spinning to the floor at the head of the kitchen stairs. ”

“ And inside, in the artificial darkness of the parlour, into which only one thin jet of sunlight penetrated, the stranger, hungry we must suppose, and fearful, hidden in his uncomfortable hot wrappings, 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. ”

“ In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand. Whatever touches me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark, and that touch is my reality. You might as well say that a sight which makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have accumulated by means of touch. ”

“ This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. ”

“ The windows are fastened and I’ve taken the key out of the door. I am a fairly strong man, and I have the poker handy—besides being invisible. There’s not the slightest doubt that I could kill you both and get away quite easily if I wanted to—do you understand? ”

“ If both eyes be armed with prisms with their angle towards the right, we pass our hand to the right of all objects when we try rapidly to touch them. And this illusory sense of their position lasts until a new association is fixed, when on removing the prisms a contrary illusion at first occurs. Passive or unintentional changes in the position of the eyeballs seem to be no more kept account of by the mind than prisms are; so we spontaneously make no allowance for them in our perception of distance and movements. ”

“ But perhaps only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? ”