At The House In Great Portland Street

: The Invisible Man

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 silen , and then he resumed abruptly:



"I had left the Chesilstowe cottage 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; 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 him. 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 house, 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 pavement, 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

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, for 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 places. I did not

feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world

into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put

it down to the general inanity of things. 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 cypher 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 those Roentgen vibrations--I

don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet

they are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos, and these 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 in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, 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 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 woke while she was still misty, and miaowed

dismally, and someone came knocking. It was an old woman from

downstairs, who suspected me of vivisecting--a drink-sodden old

creature, with only a white 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, and that faint ghastly stinging of

chloroform in the air. She had to be satisfied at last and went

away again."



"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 part of the eye, tough, iridescent 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,

and then, being tired, 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 over and over 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 when

striking a 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. Then it began 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 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 sleeping 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!" 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

Titchfield 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. I remember the barracks in Albany

Street, and the horse soldiers coming out, and at last I found 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 strength of 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 grey hairs. 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 flabbiness out of

a man."



"It's the devil," said Kemp. "It's the palaeolithic in a bottle."



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



"I know the stuff."



"And there was someone rapping at the door. It was my landlord

with threats and inquiries, an old Polish Jew in a long grey 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 in this country against vivisection

were very severe--he might be liable. 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 very 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 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 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 floor, 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 my 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. 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 fingernails 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 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."