Section 13

“T shut the door, locked it, and went to the
looking-glass. Then I understood his terror... .
My face was white—like white stone.
“ But it was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night of racking anguish, sickness, and fainting. I set my teeth, though my skin was presently afire, all my body afire, but I lay there Tike grim death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I chloroformed it. Lucky it _ was I lived alone and untended in my room. There were times when I sobbed, and groaned, and talked. But I stuck to it... . I became insensible, and woke languid in the darkness.
“ The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself, and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching
jue ct ees THE INVISIBLE MAN
them grow clearer and thinner as the day*went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder: of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I gritted my teeth and stayed there to the end... . At last only the dead tips of the finger- nails remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers. |
“I struggled up. At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared_at nothing in my shaving-glass—at nothing, save where an attentuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my forehead to the glass.
“Tt was only by a foutic effort of will that I dragged myself back to the apparatus, and com pleted the process.
“ I slept during the forenoon, pulling a sheet over _ my eyes to shut out the light, and about midday I was awakened again by a knocking. 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.
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AT THE HOUSE IN GREAT PORTLAND 8ST. [51
Someone had charged it with the idea of smashing the lock. But the stout bolts I had screwed up some days before stopped him. That startled me—made me angry. I began to tremble and do things hurriedly.
“I tossed together some loose paper, straw, packing-paper, and so forth, in the middle of the room, and turned on the gas. Heavy blows began to rain upon the door. I could not find the matches.
I beat my hands on the wall with rage. I turned down the gas again, stepped out of the window on the cistern cover, very softly lowered the sash, and sat down, secure and invisible, but quivering with anger, to watch events. They split a panel, I saw, and in another moment they had broken away the staples of the bolts and stood in the open doorway. It was the landlord and his two step-sons—sturdy young men of three or four-and-twenty. Behind them fluttered the old hag of a woman from © downstairs,
“You may imagine their astonishment at finding the room empty. One of the younger men rushed to the window at once, flung it open and stared out. His staring eyes, and thick-lipped, bearded face — came a foot from my face. I was half-minded to hit his silly countenance, but I arrested my doubled fist.
* He stared right through me. So did the others as they joined him. The old man went and peered under the bed, and then they all made a rush for the cupboard. They had to argue about it at length in Yiddish and Cockney English. They con- cluded I had not answered them, that their imagina- tion had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary .
152 ‘THE INVISIBLE MAN
elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four people—tfor the old lady came in, glancing suspiciously about her like a cat—trying to understand the riddle of my existence.
“The old man, so far as I could understand his polyglot, agreed with the old lady that I was a vivisectionist. The sons protested in garbled English that I was an electrician, and appealed to the dynamos and radiators. They were. all nervous against my arrival, although I found subsequently that they had bolted the front door, The old lady peered into the cupboard and under the bed. One of my fellow-lodgers, a costermonger, who shared the opposite room with a butcher, appeared on the landing, and he was called in, and told mcoherent things.
*“It occurred to me that the peculiar radiators I had, if they tell into the hands of some acute, well- educated person, would give me away too much, and, watching my opportunity, I descended from the window-sill into the room and dodging the old woman tilted one of the little dynamos off its. fellow on which it was standing, and smashed both apparatus. How scared they were! ... Then, while they were trying to explain the smash, I slipped out ot the room and went softly downstairs.
“I went into one of the sitting-rooms and waited until they came down, still speculative and argu- mentative, all a little disappointed at finding no _ ‘horrors,’ and all a little puzzled how they stood - legally towards me. As soon as they had gone on down to the basement, I slipped up again with a box of matches, fired my heap of paper and rubbish,
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AT THE HOUSE IN. GREAT PORTLAND ST. 153 put the chairs and bedding thereby, led the gas to the affair by means of an indiarubber tube——”
* You fired the house? ” exclaimed Kemp.
** Fired the house! It was the only way to cover my trail, and no doubt it was insured. . . . I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful ana I se now impunity to do.
21 In Oxford Street
‘3 r going downstairs the first time I found an un-
expected difficulty because I could not see my feet; indeed, I stumbled twice, and there was an unaccustomed clumsiness in gripping the bolt. By not looking down, however, I managed to walk on the level passably well.
“ My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap them on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.
** But hardly had I emerged upon Great Portland Street, however (my lodging was close to the big draper’s shop there) when I heard a clashing con- cussion, and was hit violently behind, and turning, saw a man carrying a basket of soda-water siphons, and looking in amazement at his burden. Although the blow had really hurt me, I found something so irresistible in his astonishment that I laughed aloud. ‘The devil’s in the basket,’ I said, and suddenly twisted it out of his hand. He left go incontinently, and I swung the whole weight up into the air.
“But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public-house, made a sudden rush for this, and his extended fingers took me with excruciating violence under the ear. I let the whole down with a smash
134
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IN OXFORD STREET 155
on the cabman, and then, with shouts and the clatier of feet about me, people coming out of shops, vehicles pulling up, I realised what I had done for myself, and cursing my folly, backed against a shop window and prepared to dodge out of the confusion. In a moment I should be wedged into a crowd and inevitably discovered. I pushed by a butcher boy, who luckily did not turn to see the nothingness that shoved him aside, and dodged behind the cabman’s four-wheeler. -I do not know how they settled the business. I hurried straight across the road, which was happily clear, and hardly heeding which way I went in the fright of detection the incident had given me, plunged into the afternoon throng of Oxford Street.
* I tried to get into the stream of people, but they were too thick for me, and in a moment my heels were being trodden upon. I took the gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me forcibly under the shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a convulsive movement, and found myself behind the hansom. A happy thought saved me, and as. this drove slowly along I followed on its immediate — wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my adventure, and not only trembling but shivering. It was a bright day in January, and I was stark naked, and the thin slime of mud that covered the road was near freezing. Foolish as it seems to me now, I had not reckoned that, transparent or not, I was still amenable to the weather and all its
consequences.
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156 THE INVISIBLE MAN
“ Then suddenly a bright idea came into my head. I ran round and got into the cab. 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 since as it is possible to imagine. This invisibility, indeed! The one thought that possessed me now was how to get out of the scrape I was in?
“We crawled past Mudie’s, and there a tall woman, with five or six yellow-labelled books, hailed my cab, and I sprang out just in time to escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight. I made off up the roadway to Bloomsbury Square,
intending to strike north beyond the Museum, and.
so get into the quiet district. I was now cruelly chilled, and the strangeness of my situation so un- -nerved me that I whimpered as I ran, At the westward corner of the square a little white dog ran out of the’ Pharmaceutical Society’s offices, and incontinently made for me, nose down.
“T had never realised it before, but the nose is -
to the mind of a dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceive the scent of a.man moving as men perceive his visible appearance. This brute began barking and leaping, showing, as it seemed to me only too plainly, that he was aware of me. I crossed Great Russell Street, glancing over my shoulder as I did so, and went some way along Montague Street before I realised what I was
- running towards.
“Then I became aware of a blare of music, and
IN OXFORD STREET 157 ‘ looking along the street saw a number of people — advancing out of Russell Square, red jerseys and the banner of the Salvation Army to the fore. Such a crowd, chanting in the roadway and scoffing on the pavement, I could not hope to penetrate, and dreading to go back and farther from home again, and, deciding on the spur of the moment, I ran up the white steps of a house facing the Museum railings, and stood there until the crowd should have passed. Happily the dog stopped at the noise of the band, hesitated, and turned tail, running back to Blooms- bury Square again. ~ “On came the band, bawling with unconscious | irony some hymn about ‘ When shall we see His face?’ and it seemed an interminable time to me | before the tide of the crowd washed along the pavement by me. Thud, thud, thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for the moment I did not notice two urchins stopping at the railings by me. “ See ’em,’ said one. ‘ See what?’ said the other. ‘ Why—them footmarks—bare. Like what you makes in mud.’
**I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and were gaping at the muddy footmarks I had left behind me, up the newly whitened steps.’ The passing people elbowed and jostled them, but their confounded intelligence was arrested. ‘ Thud, thud, thud, when, thud, shall we see, thud, His face, thud, thud.’ ‘ There’s a barefoot man gone up them steps, or I don’t know nothing,’ said one. ‘And he | ain’t never come down again. And his foot was _a-bleeding.’
“The thick of the crowd had already passed. ‘Looky there, Ted,’ quoth the younger of the
158 THE INVISIBLE MAN \
detectives with the sharpness of surprise in his vied! and pointed straight at my feet. I looked down and saw at once the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in splashes of mud. For a moment I was paralysed. |
*** Why, that’s rum!?® said the elder. ‘ Dashed rum! It’s just like the ghost of a foot, ain’t it?* He hesitated and advanced with outstretched hand. A man pulled up short to see what he was catching, and then a girl. In another moment he would have touched me. Then I saw what to do.: I made a step, the boy started back with an exclamation, and with a rapid movement I swung myself over into the portico of the next house. But the smaller boy was sharp enough to follow the movement, and before 1 was well down the steps and upon the pave- ment he had recovered from his momentary astonish- ment, and was shouting out that the feet had gone over the wall.
“They rushed round and saw my new footmarks flash into being on the lower step and upon the pavement. .
** * What’s up? ° asked someone.
** Feet! Look! Feet running! *
a8 Everybody in the road, except my three pursuets, was pouring along after the Salvation Army, and this flow not only impeded me but them. There was an eddy of surprise and interrogation. At the
_ cost of bowling over one young fellow I got through, ‘and in another moment I was running headlong round the circuit of Russell Square, with six or seven astonished people following my footmarks. There was no time for explanation, or else the whole host would have been after me.
IN OXFORD STREET ee Goa, **'Twice I doubled round corners, thrice I crossed _ the road and came back on my tracks, and then as" my feet grew hot and dry the damp impressions began to fade. At last I had a breathing space, and rubbed my feet clean with my hands, and so got away altogether. The last I saw of the chase was a little group of a dozen people, perhaps, studying with infinite perplexity a slowly drying footprint that had resulted from a puddle in Tavistock Square, a footprint as isolated and incomprehensible to them as Crusge’ s solitary discovery.
This running warmed me to a certain extent, and I went on with a better courage through the maze of less frequented roads that runs thereabout. My back had now become very stiff and sore, my tonsils were painful from the cabman’s fingers, and _ the skin of my neck had been scratched by his nails;
my feet hurt exceedingly, and I was lame from a
httle cut on one foot. 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 unaccount- able curses ringing in their ears.. ‘Then came some- thing silent-and quiet upon 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. ** Then came men and boys running, first one then — others, and shouting as they ran. It was a fire. They ran in the direction of my lodging, and looking back _ down a street I saw a mass of black smoke streaming up above the roofs and telephone wires. It was, I
160 THE INVISIBLE MAN . . felt assured, my lodging that was burning; “my clothes, apparatus, all my resources, indeed, except my cheque-book and the three volumes of memo- randa that awaited me in Great Portland Street, were there. Burning! I had burnt my boats—if ever a man did! The place was blazing.”