The Invisible Man

by Герберт Уэллс

  "How long did it take?" asked Kemp.

  "Three or four hours—the cat. The bones and sinews and the fat were the last to go, and the tips of the coloured hairs. And, as I say, the back of the eye, tough, iridiscent stuff it is, wouldn't go at all.

  "It was night outside long before the business was over, and nothing was to be seen but the dim eyes and the claws. I stopped the gas-engine, felt for and stroked the beast, which was still insensible, released its fastenings, and then, being tire, left it sleeping on the invisible pillow and went to bed. I found it hard to sleep. I lay awake thinking weak, aimless stuff, going over the experiment again and again, or dreaming feverishly of things growing misty and vanishing about me until everything, the ground I stood on, vanished, and so I came to that sickly, falling nightmare one gets. About two the cat began miaowing about the room. I tried to hush it by talking to it, and then I decided to turn it out. I remember the shock I had striking the light—there were just the round eyes shining green—and nothing round them. I would have given it milk, but I hadn't any. It wouldn't be quiet, it just sat down and miaowed at the door. I tried to catch it, with an idea of putting it out of the window, but it wouldn't be caught, it vanished. It kept on miaowing in different parts of the room. At last I opened the window and made a bustle. I suppose it went out at last. I never saw nor heard any more of it.

  "Then—Heaven knows why—I fell thinking of my father's funeral again, and the dismal, windy hillside, until the day had come. I found sleep was hopeless, and, locking my door after me, wandered out into the morning streets."

  "You don't mean to say there's an Invisible Cat at large in the world?" said Kemp.

  "If it hasn't been killed," said the Invisible Man. "Why not?"

  "Why not?" said Kemp. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

  "It's very probably been killed," said the Invisible Man. "It was alive four days after, I know, and down a grating in Great Tichfield Street, because I saw a crowd round the place trying to see whence the miaowing came."

  He was silent for the best part of a minute. Then he resumed abruptly: "I remember that morning before the change very vividly.

  "I must have gone up Great Portland Street—for I remember the barracks in Albany Street and the horse soldiers coming out, and at last I found myself sitting in the sunshine and feeling very ill and strange on the summit of Primrose Hill. It was a sunny day in January—one of those sunny, frosty days that came before the snow this year. My weary brain tried to formulate the position, to plot out a plan of action.

  "I was surprised to find, now that my prize was within my grasp how inconclusive its attainment seemed. As a matter of fact I was worked out, the intense stress of nearly four years' continuous work left me incapable of any strenght or feeling. I was apathetic, and I tried in vain to recover the enthusiasm of my first inquiries, the passion of discovery that had enabled me to compass even the downfall of my father's gray hairs.[4] Nothing seemed to matter. I saw pretty clearly this was a transient mood, due to overwork and want of sleep, and that either by drugs or rest it would be possible to recover my energies.

  "All I could think clearly was that the thing had to be carried through; the fixed idea still ruled me. And soon, for the money I had was almost exhausted, I looked about me at the hillside with children playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world. After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed… Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the rlabbiness out of a man."

  "It's the devil," said Kemp. "It's the pal?olithic in a bottle."

  "I awoke vastly invigorated and rather irritable. You know?"

  "I know the stuff."

  "And there was some one rapping at the door. It was my landlord with threats and inquiries, an old Polish Jew in a long gray coat and greasy slippers. I had been tormenting a cat in the night, he was sure—the old woman's tongue had been busy. He insisted on knowing all about it. The laws of this country against vivisection were very severe—he might be liable.[5] I denied the cat. Then the vibration of the little gas-engine could be felt all over the house, he said. That was true, certainly. He edged round me into the room, peering about over his German silver spectacles, and a sudden dread came into my mind that he might carry away something of my secret. I tried to keep between him and the concentrating apparatus I had arranged, and that only made him more curious. What was I doing? Why was I always alone and secretive? Was it legal? Was it dangerous? I paid nothing but the usual rent. His had always been a most respectable house—in a disreputable neighbourhood. Suddenly my temper gave way. I told him to get out. He began to protest, to jabber of his right of entry. In a moment I had him by the collar—something ripped—and he went spinning out into his own passage. I slammed and locked the door and sat down quivering.

  "He made a fuss outside, which I disregarded, and after a time he went away.

  "But this brought matters to a crisis. I did not know what he would do, nor even what he had the power to do. To move to fresh apartments would have meant delay—altogether I had barely twenty pounds left in the world, for the most part in a bank—and I could not afford that. Vanish! It was irresistible. Then there would be an inquiry, the sacking of my room.

  "At the thought of the possibility of my work being exposed or interrupted at its very climax, I became angry and active. I hurried out with my three books of notes, my cheque book—the tramp has them now—and directed them from the nearest Post Office to a house of call for letters and parcels[6] in Great Portland Street. I tried to go out noiselessly. Coming in, I found my landlord going quietly upstairs—he had heard the door close, I suppose. You would have laughed to see him jump aside on the landing as I came tearing after him. He glared at me as I went by him, and I made the house quiver with the slamming of my door, I heard him come shuffling up to my door, hesitate, and go down. I set to work upon my preparations forthwith.

  "It was all done that evening and night. While I was still sitting under the sickly, drowsy influence of the drugs that decolourise blood, there came a repeated knocking at the door. It ceased, footsteps went away and returned, and the knocking was resumed. There was an attempt to push something under the door—a blue paper. Then in a fit of irritation I rose, and went and flung the door wide open. 'Now then?' said I.

  "It was the landlord, with a notice of ejectment or something. He held it out to me, saw something odd about my hands, I expect, and lifted his eyes to my face.

  "For a moment he gaped. Then he gave a sort of inarticulate cry, dropped candle and writ together, and went blundering down the dark passage to the stairs.

  "I 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 like grim death.[7] 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 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 hun
gry. 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 to 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 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. Some one 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[8] 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 existence.

  "The old man, so far as I could understand his polyglot,[9] agreed with the old lady that I was a vivisectionist. The sons protested in garbled English that I was an electrician, and appealed to[10] the dynamos and radiators. They were all nervous against my arrival,[11] 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 incoherent things.

  "It occurred to me that the peculiar radiators I had, if they fell into the hands of some acute, well-educated person, would give me away too much, and, watching my opportunity, il 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 of the room and went softly downstairs.

  "I went into one of the sitting-rooms and waited until they came down, still speculative and argumentative, 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, put fhe 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 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 exultation. 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 concussion, 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 let 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 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,[1] 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 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 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.

  "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,[2] 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,[3] 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[4] in my flight. I made off up the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, intending to strike north beyond the Museum,[5] 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 westward corner of the squ
are 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 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 looking along the street saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square, red jerseys and the banner of the Salvation Army[6] 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 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.'