"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 lodgings 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 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 the 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, 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 not
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 some
one. 'Feet! Look! Feet running!' Everybody in the road, except my
three pursuers, was pouring along after the Salvation Army, and this
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 on 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 Travistock 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."
