"H.G. Wells - The Invisible Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

Mrs. Hall, feeling that her conversational advances were ill- timed,
laid the rest of the table things in a quick staccato and whisked out
of the room. When she returned he was still standing there like a
man of stone, his back hunched, his collar turned up, his dripping
hat-brim turned down, hiding his face and ears completely. She put
down the eggs and bacon with considerable emphasis, and called rather
than said to him, "Your lunch is served, sir."
"Thank you," he said at the same time, and did not stir until she was
closing the door. Then he swung round and approached the table.
As she went behind the bar to the kitchen she heard a sound repeated
at regular intervals. Chirk, chirk, chirk, it went, the sound of a
spoon being rapidly whisked round a basin. "That girl!" she said.
"There! I clean forgot it. It's her being so long!" And while she
herself finished mixing the mustard, she gave Millie a few verbal
stabs for her excessive slowness. She had cooked the ham and eggs,
laid the table, and done everything, while Millie (help indeed!) had
only succeeded in delaying the mustard. And him a new guest and
wanting to stay! Then she filled the mustard pot, and, putting it
with a certain stateliness upon a gold and black tea-tray, carried it
into the parlour.
She rapped and entered promptly. As she did so her visitor moved
quickly, so that she got but a glimpse of a white object disappearing
behind the table. It would seem he was picking something from the
floor. She rapped down the mustard pot on the table, and then she
noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off and put over a chair
in front of the fire. A pair of wet boots threatened rust to her
steel fender. She went to these things resolutely. "I suppose I may
have them to dry now," she said in a voice that brooked no denial.
"Leave the hat," said her visitor in a muffled voice, and turning she
saw he had raised his head and was sitting looking at her.
For a moment she stood gaping 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
his 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 shiny 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
blue glasses. "Leave the hat," he said, speaking very distinctly
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,"