"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 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. I 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 and leaning the invisible head
on an invisible hand.
"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 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, 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.
Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does
all these things. If it neither reflects nor 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 were 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 pretty plain
sailing."
"And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a
sheet of glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it
becomes much more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last
an opaque white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the
surfaces of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In
the sheet of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the
light is reflected or refracted by each grain it passes through, and
very little gets right through the powder. But if the white powdered
glass is put into water, it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass
and water have much the same refractive index; that is, the light
undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one
to the other.
"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 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, hair, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole
fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black 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."
"Great Heavens!" cried Kemp. "Of course, of
course! I was thinking only last night of the sea larvae and all
jelly-fish!"
"Now you have me! 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. Oliver, my professor,
was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of
ideas,--he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the
scientific world. I simply would 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,--to
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. I remember that night. It was late at
night, --in the daytime one was bothered with the gaping, silly
students,-- and I worked then 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. In all my
great moments I have been alone. '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 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 exasperation, 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."
