“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.
“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!’
“Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was
pouring along after the Salvation Army, and this blow 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
rushing 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.
“Twice I doubled round corners, thrice I crossed the road
and came back upon 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
Crusoe’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
hereabouts. 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 little 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 unaccountable curses ringing in their
ears. Then came something silent and quiet against 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 and 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 my lodging
burning; my clothes, my apparatus, all my resources indeed, except my
cheque-book and the three volumes of memoranda that awaited me in Great
Portland Street, were there. Burning! I had burnt my boats if ever
a man did! The place was blazing.”
The Invisible Man paused and thought. Kemp glanced
nervously out of the window. “Yes?” he said. “Go on.”
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