The Invisible Man
Page 11
"Good heavens!" said Kemp, reading eagerly an incredulous account of the events in Iping of the previous afternoon, that have already been described. Over the leaf the report in the morning paper had been re-printed.
He re-read it. "Ran through the streets striking right and left. Jaffers insensible. Mr. Huxter in great pain—still unable to describe what he saw. Painful humiliation—vicar. Woman ill with terror. Windows smashed. This extraordinary story probably a fabrication. Too good not to print—cum grano."[2]
He dropped the paper and stared blankly in front of him. "Probably a fabrication!"
He caught up the paper again, and re-read the whole business.
"But when does the Tramp come in?[3] Why the deuce was he chasing a tramp?"
He sat down abruptly on the surgical couch.
"He's not only invisible," he said, "but he's mad! Homicidal!…"
When dawn came to mingle its pallor with the lamplight and cigar-smoke of the dining-room, Kemp was still pacing up and down, trying to grasp the incredible.
He was altogether too excited to sleep. His servants, descending sleepily, discovered him, and were inclined to think that over-study had worked this ill on him. He gave them extraordinary but quite explicit instructions to lay breakfast for two in the belvedere study, and then to confine themselves to the basement and ground floor. Then he continued to pace the dining-room until the morning's paper came. That had much to say and little to tell, beyond the confirmation of the evening before, and a very badly written account of another remarkable tale from Port Burdock. This gave Kemp the essence of the happenings at the "Jolly Cricketers," and the name of Marvel. "He has made me keep with him twenty-four hours," Marvel testified. Certain minor facts were added to the Iping story, notably the cutting of the village telegraph wire. But there was nothing to throw light on the connection between the Invisible Man and the tramp—for Mr. Marvel had supplied no information about the three books or the money with which he was lined. The incredulous tone had vanished, and a shoal of reporters and inquirers were already at work elaborating the matter.
Kemp read every scrap of the report, and sent his housemaid out to get every one of the morning papers she could. These also he devoured.
"He is invisible!" he said. "And it reads like rage growing to mania![4] The things he may do! The things he may do! And he's upstairs free as the air. What on earth ought I to do?
"For instance, would it be a breach of faith if—No."
He went to a little untidy desk in the corner, and began a note. He tore this up half written, and wrote another. He read it over and considered it. Then he took an envelope and addressed it to "Colonel Adye, Port Burdock."
The Invisible Man awoke even as[5] Kemp was doing this. He awoke in an evil temper, and Kemp, alert for every sound, heard his pattering feet rush suddenly across the bedroom overhead. Then a chair was flung over and the washhand-stand tumbler smashed. Kemp hurried upstairs and rapped eagerly.
Chapter XIX
Certain First Principles
"What's the matter?" asked Kemp, when the Invisible Man admitted him.
"Nothing," was the answer.
"But, confound it! The smash?"
"Fit of temper," said the Invisible Man. "Forgot this arm; and it's sore."
"You're rather liable to[1] that sort of thing."
"I am."
Kemp walked across the room and picked up the fragments of broken glass. "All the facts are out about you," said Kemp, standing up with the glass in his hand. "All that happened in Iping and down the hill. The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows you are here."
The Invisible Man swore.
"The secret's out. I gather it was a secret. II don't know what your plans are, but, of course, I'm anxious to help you."
The Invisible Man sat down on the bed.
"There's breakfast upstairs," said Kemp, speaking as easily as possible, and he was delighted to find his strange guest rose willingly. Kemp led the way up the narrow staircase to the belvedere.
"Before we can do anything else," said Kemp, "I must understand a little more about this invisibility of yours." He had sat down, after one nervous glance out of the window, with the air of a man who has talking to do. His doubts of the sanity of the entire business flashed and vanished again as he looked across to where Griffin sat at the breakfast-table, a headless, handless dressing-gown, wiping unseen lips on a miraculously held serviette.
"It's simple enough—and credible enough," said Griffin, putting the serviette aside.
"No doubt to you, but—" Kemp laughed.
"Well, yes, to me it seemed wonderful at first, no doubt. But now, Great God!… But we will do great things yet! I came on the stuff[2] first at Chesilstowe."
"Chesilstowe?"
"I went there after I left London. You know I dropped medicine and took up physics? No; well, I did. Light fascinated me."
"Ah!"
"Optical density! The whole subject is a network of riddles—a network with solutions glimmering elusively through. And being but two-and-twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said: 'I will devote my life to this. This is worth while.' You know what fools we are at two-and-twenty?"
"Fools then or fools now," said Kemp.
"As though knowing could be any satisfaction to a man!
"But I went to work—like a nigger. And I had hardly worked and thought about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions. Fools, common men—even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books—the books that tramp has hidden—there are marvels, miracles! But this was not a method, it was an idea that might lead to a method by which it would be possible without changing any other property of matter—except in some instances colours—to lower the refractive index of a substance,[3] solid or liquid, to that of air, so far as all practical purposes are concerned."
"Phew!" said Kemp. "That's odd! But still I don't see quite… I can understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but personal invisibility is a far cry."
"Precisely," said Griffin. "But consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Let me put the elementary facts to you as if you did not know. It will make my meaning clearer. You know quite well that either a body absorbs light or it reflects or refracts it or does all these things. If it neither reflects or refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where the surfaces are favourable the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies. A sort of skeleton of light. A glass box would not be so brilliant, not so clearly visible as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points of view you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others—a box of flint glass would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very thin, common glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or reflected, or, indeed, affected in any way. It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in air. And for precisely the same reason!"
"Yes," said Kemp, "that is plain sailing. Any schoolboy nowadays knows all that."
"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly the same refractive index, a transparent thing becomes invisible if it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index could be made the same as that of air. For then there would be no refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."
"Yes, yes," said Kemp. "But a man's not powdered glass!"
"No," said Griffin. "He's more transparent!"
"Nonsense!"
"That's from a doctor! How one forgets! Have you already forgotten your physics in ten years? Just think of all the things that are transparent and seem not to be so! Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up the interstices between the particles with oil, so that there is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp; in fact, the whole fabric of a man, except the red of his blood and the dark pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue—so little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part, the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water."
"Of course, of course!" cried Kemp. "I was thinking only last night of the sea larv? and jelly-fish!"
"Now you have me![4] And all that I knew and had in mind a year after I left London—six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to do my work under frightful disadvantages. Hobbema, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a thief of ideas—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would[5] not publish and let him share my credit. I went on working; I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment—a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps, and suddenly—not by design, but by accident—I made a discovery in physiology."
"Yes?"
"You know the red colouring matter of blood—it can be made white—colourless—and remain with all the functions it has now!"
Kemp gave a cry of incredulous amazement.
The Invisible Man rose and began pacing the little study. "You may well exclaim.[6] I remember that night. It was late at night—in the daytime one was bothered with the gaping, silly students—and I worked there sometimes till dawn. It came suddenly, splendid and complete, into my mind. I was alone, the laboratory was still, with the tall lights burning brightly and silently… 'One could make an animal—a tissue—transparent! One could make it invisible! All except the pigments. I could be Invisible,' I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge. It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was doing, and went and stared out of the great window at the stars. 'I could be Invisible,' I repeated.
"To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that Invisibility might mean to a man. The mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in[7] demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this, I ask you, Kemp, if you… Any one, I tell you, would have flung himself upon that research. And I worked three years, and every mountain of difficulty I toiled over showed another from its summit. The infinite details! And the exasperation! A professor, a provincial professor, always prying. 'When are you going to publish this work of yours?' was his everlasting question. And the students, the cramped means! Three years I had of it—
"And after three years of secrecy and trouble, I found that to complete it was impossible—impossible."
"How?" asked Kemp.
"Money," said the Invisible Man, and went again to stare out of the window.
He turned round abruptly. "I robbed the old man—robbed my father.
"The money was not his, and he shot himself."
Chapter XX
At The House In Great Portland Street
For a moment Kemp sat in silence, staring at the back of the headless figure at the window. Then he started, struck by a thought, rose, took the Invisible Man's arm, and turned him away from the outlook.
"You are tired," he said, "and while I sit you walk about. Have my chair."
He placed himself between Griffin and the nearest window.
For a space Griffin sat silent, and then he resumed abruptly:
"I had left the Chesilstowe College already," he said, "when that happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a large unfurnished room in a big, ill-managed lodging-house in a slum near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances I had bought with his money, and the work was going on steadily, successfully, drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a thicket, and suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy. I went to bury my father. My mind was still on this research, and I did not lift a finger to save his character. I remember the funeral, the cheap hearse, the scant ceremony, the windy, frost-bitten hillside, and the old college friend of his who read the service over him—a shabby, black, bent old man with a snivelling cold.
"I remember walking back to the empty home through the place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town. Every way the roads ran out at last into the desecrated fields and ended in rubble heaps and rank, wet weeds. I remember myself as a gaunt, black figure, going along the slippery, shiny side-walk, and the strange sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of the place…
"I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant[1] required my attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my affair.
"But going along the High Street my old life came back to me for a space, I met the girl I had known ten years since. Our eyes met…
"Something moved me to turn back and talk to her. She was a very ordinary person.
"It was all like a dream, that visit to the old place. I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolation. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of life.[2] Re-entering my room seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and waiting. And now there was scarcely a difficulty left, beyond the planning of details.
"I will tell you, Kemp, sooner or later, all the complicated processes. We need not go into that now. For the most part, saving certain gaps I chose to remember, they are written in cipher in those books that tramp has hidden. We must hunt him down. We must get those books again. But the essential phase was to place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered, between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I will tell you more fully later. No—not these Rontgen vibrations; I don't know that these others of mine have been described, yet they are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos—principally, and thes
e I worked with a cheap gas-engine… My first experiment was with a bit of white wool fabric. It was the strangest thing in the world to see it soft and white in the flicker of the flashes, and then to watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish.
"I could scarcely believe I had done it. I put my hand into the emptiness and there was the thing as solid as ever. I felt it awkwardly, and threw it on the floor. I had a little trouble finding it again.
"And then came a curious experience, I heard a miaow behind me, and, turning, saw a lean white cat, very dirty, on the cistern cover outside the window. A thought came into my head. 'Everything ready for you,' I said, and went to the window, opened it, and called softly. She came in, purring—the poor beast was starving— and I gave her some milk. All my food was in a cupboard in the corner of the room. After that she went smelling round, the room, evidently with the idea of making herself at home. The invisible rag upset her a bit; you should have seen her spit at it! But I made her comfortable on the pillow of my truckle-bed, and I gave her butter to get her to wash."
"And you processed her?"
"I processed her. But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp! And the process failed."
"Failed?"
"In two particulars. These were the claws and the pigment stuff—what is it? At the back of the eye in a cat. You know?"
"Tapetum."
"Yes, the tapetum. It didn't go. After I'd given the stuff to bleach the blood and done certain other things to her, I gave the beast opium, and put her and the pillow she was sleeping on, on the apparatus. And after all the rest had faded and vanished, there remained the two little ghosts of her eyes."
"Odd."
"I can't explain it. She was bandaged and clamped of course—so I had her safe but she awoke while she was still misty, and miaowed dismally, and some one came knocking. It was an old woman from downstairs, who suspected me of vivisecting—a drink-sodden old creature, with only a cat to care for in all the world. I whipped out some chloroform, applied it, and answered the door. 'Did I hear a cat?' she asked. 'My cat? 'Not here,' said I, very politely. She was a little doubtful, and tried to peer past me into the room—strange enough to her, no doubt, bare walls, uncurtained windows, truckle-bed, with the gas-engine vibrating, and the seethe of the radiant points,[3] and that faint stinging of chloroform in the air. She had to be satisfied at last, and went away again."