Thousand and One Bottles
So it was that on the ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this stranger appeared in Iping. Next day the strange man’s luggage arrived-and very remarkable luggage it was. There were a couple of trunks indeed, but in addition there were a box of books-big, fat books-and a dozen or more crates, boxes, and cases, containing objects packed in straw, as it seemed to Hall, glass bottles.
The stranger, muffled in hat, coat, gloves, and wrapper, came out impatiently to meet the cart.
“Come along with those boxes,” he said. “I’ve been waiting long enough.”
Fearenside’s dog caught sight of him, and began to bristle and growl savagely, and when he rushed down the steps it sprang straight at his hand.
“Whup!” cried Hall, jumping back, for he was no hero with dogs, and Fearenside howled, “Lie down!” and snatched his whip.
They saw the dog’s teeth had slipped the hand, heard a kick, and heard the rip of the stranger’s trousers. Then the dog retreated under the wheels of the waggon. It was all the business of some seconds. No one spoke, everyone shouted. The stranger glanced swiftly at his torn glove and at his leg, then turned and rushed swiftly up the steps into the inn. They heard him go to his bedroom.
Mr. Hall met Mrs. Hall in the passage.
“Carrier’s dog,” he said, “bit the stranger.”
He went straight upstairs, and the stranger’s door being ajar, he pushed it open and was entering without any ceremony.
The curtain was down and the room dim. He noticed something strange, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white. Then he was struck violently in the chest, hurled back, and the door slammed and locked. It was so rapid that it gave him no time to observe. He was wondering what it might be that he had seen.
A 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.
