The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance
“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 attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes,
fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my forehead
against the glass.
“It was only by a frantic effort of will that I dragged myself back to
the apparatus and completed the process.
“I slept during the forenoon, pulling the 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. 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 to find the room empty. One of the
younger men rushed to the window at once, flung it up 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 concluded I had not answered them,
that their imagination had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary
elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and
watched these four people—for the old lady came in, glancing
suspiciously about her like a cat, trying to understand the riddle of
my behaviour.
“The old man, so far as I could understand his _patois_, 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 about my arrival, although I found
subsequently that they had bolted the front door. The old lady peered
into the cupboard and under the bed, and one of the young men pushed up
the register and stared up the chimney. One of my fellow lodgers, a
coster-monger who shared the opposite room with a butcher, appeared on
the landing, and he was called in and told incoherent things.
“It occurred to me that the radiators, if they fell into the hands of
some acute well-educated person, would give me away too much, and
watching my opportunity, I came into the room and tilted one of the
little dynamos off its fellow on which it was standing, and smashed
both apparatus. Then, while they were trying to explain the smash, I
dodged out of the room and went softly downstairs.
“I went into one of the sitting-rooms and waited until they came down,
still speculating and argumentative, all a little disappointed at
finding no ‘horrors,’ and all a little puzzled how they stood legally
towards me. Then I slipped up again with a box of matches, fired my
heap of paper and rubbish, put the chairs and bedding thereby, led the
gas to the affair, by means of an india-rubber tube, and waving a
farewell to the room left it for the last time.”
“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 things I
had now impunity to do.”
CHAPTER XXI.
IN OXFORD STREET
“In going downstairs the first time I found an unexpected 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 men 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 concussion and was hit violently behind, and turning saw a man
carrying a basket of soda-water syphons, 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 let go
incontinently, and I swung the whole weight into the air.
“But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public house, made a sudden
rush for this, and his extending fingers took me with excruciating
violence under the ear. I let the whole down with a smash on the
cabman, and then, with shouts and the clatter 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 cab-man’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 to 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 in 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 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.
“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 ago as it is possible to imagine. This
invisibility indeed! The one thought that possessed me was—how was I 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 past the
Museum and so get into the quiet district. I was now cruelly chilled,
and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered as
I ran. At the northward corner of the Square a little white dog ran out
of the Pharmaceutical Society’s offices, and incontinently made for me,
nose down.
“I 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 vision. 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 looking along the street
saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square, red shirts, 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 too,
hesitated, and turned tail, running back to Bloomsbury 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 detectives, with the sharpness of surprise in his
voice, and pointed straight to 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-eyed enough to follow the movement, and
before I was well down the steps and upon the pavement, he had
recovered from his momentary astonishment and was shouting out that the
feet had gone over the wall.