NOVEL-The Invisible Man CH3 The Thousand And One Bottles (Summary)

CH3 THE THOUSAND AND INE BOTTLES 

SUMMARY

The mail carrier, Fearenside, brings Griffin's luggage to the inn, and Griffin goes outside to oversee the delivery. Fearenside's dog bites Griffin, tearing his glove and trousers. Griffin goes to his room to change. When Mr. Hall checks on Griffin, he sees something that seems like "a handless arm waving towards him" and a face with odd spots. Something strikes Mr. Hall in the chest, then forcefully pushes him out the door, giving him a concussion. He wonders what it is he has just seen.

Unable to find words to describe his impressions, Mr. Hall rejoins the group without telling anyone what he has observed. Griffin reappears and oversees the delivery of his crates into the parlor. He unpacks each crate, revealing that they are filled with bottles, test tubes, and a scale. He immediately starts working without even cleaning up the packing straw he has carelessly thrown on the floor.

Deeply absorbed in his work, Griffin does not initially hear Mrs. Hall when she delivers his dinner. She sees him with his glasses off and thinks his "eye sockets were extraordinarily hollow." He bristles at the interruption and chides her for coming in without knocking in a "tone of abnormal exasperation that seemed so characteristic of him." He tells her to add any charges for the extra work of cleaning the straw to his bill.

Griffin spends the rest of the afternoon working in the parlor with the door locked. He works mostly in silence, but at one point Mrs. Hall hears the sounds of clanging and breaking glass, rapid pacing, and Griffin talking to himself. He sounds angry and cries out that he "can't go on" and was cheated, among other things. When she later brings him his tea, he tells her to put the cleanup for the broken glass on his bill and orders her not to bother him.

When Fearenside and Henfrey meet up later at a local beer shop, Fearenside confides he saw the stranger's legs when the dog ripped his trousers, and they were black. He declares that the "marn's a piebald ... a kind of half-breed."