man’s revolver cracked and the looking-glass at the back of the parlour
starred and came smashing and tinkling down.

As the barman entered the room he saw Marvel, curiously crumpled up and
struggling against the door that led to the yard and kitchen. The door
flew open while the barman hesitated, and Marvel was dragged into the
kitchen. There was a scream and a clatter of pans. Marvel, head down,
and lugging back obstinately, was forced to the kitchen door, and the
bolts were drawn.

Then the policeman, who had been trying to pass the barman, rushed in,
followed by one of the cabmen, gripped the wrist of the invisible hand
that collared Marvel, was hit in the face and went reeling back. The
door opened, and Marvel made a frantic effort to obtain a lodgment
behind it. Then the cabman collared something. “I got him,” said the
cabman. The barman’s red hands came clawing at the unseen. “Here he
is!” said the barman.

Mr. Marvel, released, suddenly dropped to the ground and made an
attempt to crawl behind the legs of the fighting men. The struggle
blundered round the edge of the door. The voice of the Invisible Man
was heard for the first time, yelling out sharply, as the policeman
trod on his foot. Then he cried out passionately and his fists flew
round like flails. The cabman suddenly whooped and doubled up, kicked
under the diaphragm. The door into the bar-parlour from the kitchen
slammed and covered Mr. Marvel’s retreat. The men in the kitchen found
themselves clutching at and struggling with empty air.

“Where’s he gone?” cried the man with the beard. “Out?”

“This way,” said the policeman, stepping into the yard and stopping.

A piece of tile whizzed by his head and smashed among the crockery on
the kitchen table.

“I’ll show him,” shouted the man with the black beard, and suddenly a
steel barrel shone over the policeman’s shoulder, and five bullets had
followed one another into the twilight whence the missile had come. As
he fired, the man with the beard moved his hand in a horizontal curve,
so that his shots radiated out into the narrow yard like spokes from a
wheel.

A silence followed. “Five cartridges,” said the man with the black
beard. “That’s the best of all. Four aces and a joker. Get a lantern,
someone, and come and feel about for his body.”

CHAPTER XVII.
DR. KEMP’S VISITOR

Dr. Kemp had continued writing in his study until the shots aroused
him. Crack, crack, crack, they came one after the other.

“Hullo!” said Dr. Kemp, putting his pen into his mouth again and
listening. “Who’s letting off revolvers in Burdock? What are the asses
at now?”

He went to the south window, threw it up, and leaning out stared down
on the network of windows, beaded gas-lamps and shops, with its black
interstices of roof and yard that made up the town at night. “Looks
like a crowd down the hill,” he said, “by ‘The Cricketers,’” and
remained watching. Thence his eyes wandered over the town to far away
where the ships’ lights shone, and the pier glowed—a little
illuminated, facetted pavilion like a gem of yellow light. The moon in
its first quarter hung over the westward hill, and the stars were clear
and almost tropically bright.

After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote
speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last
over the time dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled
down the window again, and returned to his writing desk.

It must have been about an hour after this that the front-door bell
rang. He had been writing slackly, and with intervals of abstraction,
since the shots. He sat listening. He heard the servant answer the
door, and waited for her feet on the staircase, but she did not come.
“Wonder what that was,” said Dr. Kemp.

He tried to resume his work, failed, got up, went downstairs from his
study to the landing, rang, and called over the balustrade to the
housemaid as she appeared in the hall below. “Was that a letter?” he
asked.

“Only a runaway ring, sir,” she answered.

“I’m restless to-night,” he said to himself. He went back to his study,
and this time attacked his work resolutely. In a little while he was
hard at work again, and the only sounds in the room were the ticking of
the clock and the subdued shrillness of his quill, hurrying in the very
centre of the circle of light his lampshade threw on his table.

It was two o’clock before Dr. Kemp had finished his work for the night.
He rose, yawned, and went downstairs to bed. He had already removed his
coat and vest, when he noticed that he was thirsty. He took a candle
and went down to the dining-room in search of a syphon and whiskey.

Dr. Kemp’s scientific pursuits have made him a very observant man, and
as he recrossed the hall, he noticed a dark spot on the linoleum near
the mat at the foot of the stairs. He went on upstairs, and then it
suddenly occurred to him to ask himself what the spot on the linoleum
might be. Apparently some subconscious element was at work. At any
rate, he turned with his burden, went back to the hall, put down the
syphon and whiskey, and bending down, touched the spot. Without any
great surprise he found it had the stickiness and colour of drying
blood.

He took up his burden again, and returned upstairs, looking about him
and trying to account for the blood-spot. On the landing he saw
something and stopped astonished. The door-handle of his own room was
blood-stained.

He looked at his own hand. It was quite clean, and then he remembered
that the door of his room had been open when he came down from his
study, and that consequently he had not touched the handle at all. He
went straight into his room, his face quite calm—perhaps a trifle more
resolute than usual. His glance, wandering inquisitively, fell on the
bed. On the counterpane was a mess of blood, and the sheet had been
torn. He had not noticed this before because he had walked straight to
the dressing-table. On the further side the bedclothes were depressed
as if someone had been recently sitting there.

Then he had an odd impression that he had heard a low voice say, “Good
Heavens!—Kemp!” But Dr. Kemp was no believer in voices.

He stood staring at the tumbled sheets. Was that really a voice? He
looked about again, but noticed nothing further than the disordered and
blood-stained bed. Then he distinctly heard a movement across the room,
near the wash-hand stand. All men, however highly educated, retain some
superstitious inklings. The feeling that is called “eerie” came upon
him. He closed the door of the room, came forward to the
dressing-table, and put down his burdens. Suddenly, with a start, he
perceived a coiled and blood-stained bandage of linen rag hanging in
mid-air, between him and the wash-hand stand.

He stared at this in amazement. It was an empty bandage, a bandage
properly tied but quite empty. He would have advanced to grasp it, but
a touch arrested him, and a voice speaking quite close to him.

“Kemp!” said the Voice.

“Eh?” said Kemp, with his mouth open.

“Keep your nerve,” said the Voice. “I’m an Invisible Man.”

Kemp made no answer for a space, simply stared at the bandage.
“Invisible Man,” he said.

“I am an Invisible Man,” repeated the Voice.

The story he had been active to ridicule only that morning rushed
through Kemp’s brain. He does not appear to have been either very much
frightened or very greatly surprised at the moment. Realisation came
later.

“I thought it was all a lie,” he said. The thought uppermost in his
mind was the reiterated arguments of the morning. “Have you a bandage
on?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the Invisible Man.

“Oh!” said Kemp, and then roused himself. “I say!” he said. “But this
is nonsense. It’s some trick.” He stepped forward suddenly, and his
hand, extended towards the bandage, met invisible fingers.

He recoiled at the touch and his colour changed.

“Keep steady, Kemp, for God’s sake! I want help badly. Stop!”

The hand gripped his arm. He struck at it.

“Kemp!” cried the Voice. “Kemp! Keep steady!” and the grip tightened.

A frantic desire to free himself took possession of Kemp. The hand of
the bandaged arm gripped his shoulder, and he was suddenly tripped and
flung backwards upon the bed. He opened his mouth to shout, and the
corner of the sheet was thrust between his teeth. The Invisible Man had
him down grimly, but his arms were free and he struck and tried to kick
savagely.

“Listen to reason, will you?” said the Invisible Man, sticking to him
in spite of a pounding in the ribs. “By Heaven! you’ll madden me in a
minute!

“Lie still, you fool!” bawled the Invisible Man in Kemp’s ear.

Kemp struggled for another moment and then lay still.

“If you shout, I’ll smash your face,” said the Invisible Man, relieving
his mouth.

“I’m an Invisible Man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am
an Invisible Man. And I want your help. I don’t want to hurt you, but
if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don’t you remember me,
Kemp? Griffin, of University College?”

“Let me get up,” said Kemp. “I’ll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet
for a minute.”

He sat up and felt his neck.

“I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible.
I am just an ordinary man—a man you have known—made invisible.”

“Griffin?” said Kemp.

“Griffin,” answered the Voice. A younger student than you were, almost
an albino, six feet high, and broad, with a pink and white face and red
eyes, who won the medal for chemistry.”

“I am confused,” said Kemp. “My brain is rioting. What has this to do
with Griffin?”

“I _am_ Griffin.”

Kemp thought. “It’s horrible,” he said. “But what devilry must happen
to make a man invisible?”

“It’s no devilry. It’s a process, sane and intelligible enough—”

“It’s horrible!” said Kemp. “How on earth—?”

“It’s horrible enough. But I’m wounded and in pain, and tired ... Great
God! Kemp, you are a man. Take it steady. Give me some food and drink,
and let me sit down here.”

Kemp stared at the bandage as it moved across the room, then saw a
basket chair dragged across the floor and come to rest near the bed. It
creaked, and the seat was depressed the quarter of an inch or so. He
rubbed his eyes and felt his neck again. “This beats ghosts,” he said,
and laughed stupidly.

“That’s better. Thank Heaven, you’re getting sensible!”

“Or silly,” said Kemp, and knuckled his eyes.

“Give me some whiskey. I’m near dead.”

“It didn’t feel so. Where are you? If I get up shall I run into you?
_There_! all right. Whiskey? Here. Where shall I give it to you?”

The chair creaked and Kemp felt the glass drawn away from him. He let
go by an effort; his instinct was all against it. It came to rest
poised twenty inches above the front edge of the seat of the chair. He
stared at it in infinite perplexity. “This is—this must be—hypnotism.
You have suggested you are invisible.”

“Nonsense,” said the Voice.

“It’s frantic.”

“Listen to me.”

“I demonstrated conclusively this morning,” began Kemp, “that
invisibility—”

“Never mind what you’ve demonstrated!—I’m starving,” said the Voice,
“and the night is chilly to a man without clothes.”

“Food?” said Kemp.

The tumbler of whiskey tilted itself. “Yes,” said the Invisible Man
rapping it down. “Have you a dressing-gown?”

Kemp made some exclamation in an undertone. He walked to a wardrobe and
produced a robe of dingy scarlet. “This do?” he asked. It was taken
from him. It hung limp for a moment in mid-air, fluttered weirdly,
stood full and decorous buttoning itself, and sat down in his chair.
“Drawers, socks, slippers would be a comfort,” said the Unseen, curtly.
“And food.”

“Anything. But this is the insanest thing I ever was in, in my life!”

He turned out his drawers for the articles, and then went downstairs to
ransack his larder. He came back with some cold cutlets and bread,
pulled up a light table, and placed them before his guest. “Never mind
knives,” said his visitor, and a cutlet hung in mid-air, with a sound
of gnawing.

“Invisible!” said Kemp, and sat down on a bedroom chair.

“I always like to get something about me before I eat,” said the
Invisible Man, with a full mouth, eating greedily. “Queer fancy!”

“I suppose that wrist is all right,” said Kemp.

“Trust me,” said the Invisible Man.

“Of all the strange and wonderful—”

“Exactly. But it’s odd I should blunder into _your_ house to get my
bandaging. My first stroke of luck! Anyhow I meant to sleep in this
house to-night. You must stand that! It’s a filthy nuisance, my blood
showing, isn’t it? Quite a clot over there. Gets visible as it
coagulates, I see. It’s only the living tissue I’ve changed, and only
for as long as I’m alive.... I’ve been in the house three hours.”

“But how’s it done?” began Kemp, in a tone of exasperation. “Confound
it! The whole business—it’s unreasonable from beginning to end.”

“Quite reasonable,” said the Invisible Man. “Perfectly reasonable.”

He reached over and secured the whiskey bottle. Kemp stared at the
devouring dressing gown. A ray of candle-light penetrating a torn patch
in the right shoulder, made a triangle of light under the left ribs.
“What were the shots?” he asked. “How did the shooting begin?”

“There was a real fool of a man—a sort of confederate of mine—curse
him!—who tried to steal my money. _Has_ done so.”

“Is _he_ invisible too?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“Can’t I have some more to eat before I tell you all that? I’m
hungry—in pain. And you want me to tell stories!”

Kemp got up. “_You_ didn’t do any shooting?” he asked.

“Not me,” said his visitor. “Some fool I’d never seen fired at random.
A lot of them got scared. They all got scared at me. Curse them!—I
say—I want more to eat than this, Kemp.”

“I’ll see what there is to eat downstairs,” said Kemp. “Not much, I’m
afraid.”

After he had done eating, and he made a heavy meal, the Invisible Man
demanded a cigar. He bit the end savagely before Kemp could find a
knife, and cursed when the outer leaf loosened. It was strange to see
him smoking; his mouth, and throat, pharynx and nares, became visible
as a sort of whirling smoke cast.

“This blessed gift of smoking!” he said, and puffed vigorously. “I’m
lucky to have fallen upon you, Kemp. You must help me. Fancy tumbling
on you just now! I’m in a devilish scrape—I’ve been mad, I think. The
things I have been through! But we will do things yet. Let me tell
you—”

He helped himself to more whiskey and soda. Kemp got up, looked about
him, and fetched a glass from his spare room. “It’s wild—but I suppose
I may drink.”

“You haven’t changed much, Kemp, these dozen years. You fair men don’t.
Cool and methodical—after the first collapse. I must tell you. We will
work together!”

“But how was it all done?” said Kemp, “and how did you get like this?”

“For God’s sake, let me smoke in peace for a little while! And then I
will begin to tell you.”

But the story was not told that night. The Invisible Man’s wrist was
growing painful; he was feverish, exhausted, and his mind came round to
brood upon his chase down the hill and the struggle about the inn. He
spoke in fragments of Marvel, he smoked faster, his voice grew angry.
Kemp tried to gather what he could.

“He was afraid of me, I could see that he was afraid of me,” said the
Invisible Man many times over. “He meant to give me the slip—he was
always casting about! What a fool I was!

“The cur!

“I should have killed him!”

“Where did you get the money?” asked Kemp, abruptly.

The Invisible Man was silent for a space. “I can’t tell you to-night,”
he said.

He groaned suddenly and leant forward, supporting his invisible head on
invisible hands. “Kemp,” he said, “I’ve had no sleep for near three
days, except a couple of dozes of an hour or so. I must sleep soon.”

“Well, have my room—have this room.”

“But how can I sleep? If I sleep—he will get away. Ugh! What does it
matter?”

“What’s the shot wound?” asked Kemp, abruptly.

“Nothing—scratch and blood. Oh, God! How I want sleep!”

“Why not?”

The Invisible Man appeared to be regarding Kemp. “Because I’ve a
particular objection to being caught by my fellow-men,” he said slowly.

Kemp started.

“Fool that I am!” said the Invisible Man, striking the table smartly.
“I’ve put the idea into your head.”

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE INVISIBLE MAN SLEEPS

Exhausted and wounded as the Invisible Man was, he refused to accept
Kemp’s word that his freedom should be respected. He examined the two
windows of the bedroom, drew up the blinds and opened the sashes, to
confirm Kemp’s statement that a retreat by them would be possible.
Outside the night was very quiet and still, and the new moon was
setting over the down. Then he examined the keys of the bedroom and the
two dressing-room doors, to satisfy himself that these also could be
made an assurance of freedom. Finally he expressed himself satisfied.
He stood on the hearth rug and Kemp heard the sound of a yawn.

“I’m sorry,” said the Invisible Man, “if I cannot tell you all that I
have done to-night. But I am worn out. It’s grotesque, no doubt. It’s
horrible! But believe me, Kemp, in spite of your arguments of this
morning, it is quite a possible thing. I have made a discovery. I meant
to keep it to myself. I can’t. I must have a partner. And you.... We
can do such things ... But to-morrow. Now, Kemp, I feel as though I
must sleep or perish.”

Kemp stood in the middle of the room staring at the headless garment.
“I suppose I must leave you,” he said. “It’s—incredible. Three things
happening like this, overturning all my preconceptions—would make me
insane. But it’s real! Is there anything more that I can get you?”

“Only bid me good-night,” said Griffin.

“Good-night,” said Kemp, and shook an invisible hand. He walked
sideways to the door. Suddenly the dressing-gown walked quickly towards
him. “Understand me!” said the dressing-gown. “No attempts to hamper
me, or capture me! Or—”

Kemp’s face changed a little. “I thought I gave you my word,” he said.

Kemp closed the door softly behind him, and the key was turned upon him
forthwith. Then, as he stood with an expression of passive amazement on
his face, the rapid feet came to the door of the dressing-room and that
too was locked. Kemp slapped his brow with his hand. “Am I dreaming?
Has the world gone mad—or have I?”

He laughed, and put his hand to the locked door. “Barred out of my own
bedroom, by a flagrant absurdity!” he said.

He walked to the head of the staircase, turned, and stared at the
locked doors. “It’s fact,” he said. He put his fingers to his slightly
bruised neck. “Undeniable fact!

“But—”

He shook his head hopelessly, turned, and went downstairs.

He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the
room, ejaculating. Now and then he would argue with himself.

“Invisible!” he said.

“Is there such a thing as an invisible animal? ... In the sea, yes.
Thousands—millions. All the larvae, all the little nauplii and
tornarias, all the microscopic things, the jelly-fish. In the sea there
are more things invisible than visible! I never thought of that before.
And in the ponds too! All those little pond-life things—specks of
colourless translucent jelly! But in air? No!

“It can’t be.

“But after all—why not?

“If a man was made of glass he would still be visible.”

His meditation became profound. The bulk of three cigars had passed
into the invisible or diffused as a white ash over the carpet before he
spoke again. Then it was merely an exclamation. He turned aside, walked
out of the room, and went into his little consulting-room and lit the
gas there. It was a little room, because Dr. Kemp did not live by
practice, and in it were the day’s newspapers. The morning’s paper lay
carelessly opened and thrown aside. He caught it up, turned it over,
and read the account of a “Strange Story from Iping” that the mariner
at Port Stowe had spelt over so painfully to Mr. Marvel. Kemp read it
swiftly.

“Wrapped up!” said Kemp. “Disguised! Hiding it! ‘No one seems to have
been aware of his misfortune.’ What the devil _is_ his game?”

He dropped the paper, and his eye went seeking. “Ah!” he said, and
caught up the _St. James’ Gazette_, lying folded up as it arrived. “Now
we shall get at the truth,” said Dr. Kemp. He rent the paper open; a
couple of columns confronted him. “An Entire Village in Sussex goes
Mad” was the heading.

“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
reprinted.

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_!”

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? Why the deuce was he chasing a tramp?”

He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench. “He’s not only invisible,”
he said, “but he’s mad! Homicidal!”

When dawn came to mingle its pallor with the lamp-light 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
connexion 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!
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 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 wash-hand 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 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 slave. 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, nor 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_, Kemp,
_hair_, Kemp, _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 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. 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 in 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_ ... Anyone, 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 around 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 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 Röntgen 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 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 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.”

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 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
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 syphons, 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 a butcher boy, who
luckily did not turn to see the nothingness that shoved him aside, and
dodged behind the cab-man’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 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 now 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 someone. ‘Feet!
Look! Feet running!’

“Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was pouring along
after the Salvation Army, and this blow 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
upon 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 Tavistock 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.”

CHAPTER XXII.
IN THE EMPORIUM

“So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air about
me—and if it settled on me it would betray me!—weary, cold, painful,
inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced of my invisible
quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no
refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could
confide. To have told my secret would have given me away—made a mere
show and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I was half-minded to accost some
passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy. But I knew too clearly the
terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke. I made no plans in
the street. My sole object was to get shelter from the snow, to get
myself covered and warm; then I might hope to plan. But even to me, an
Invisible Man, the rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and
bolted impregnably.

“Only one thing could I see clearly before me—the cold exposure and
misery of the snowstorm and the night.

“And then I had a brilliant idea. I turned down one of the roads
leading from Gower Street to Tottenham Court Road, and found myself
outside Omniums, the big establishment where everything is to be
bought—you know the place: meat, grocery, linen, furniture, clothing,
oil paintings even—a huge meandering collection of shops rather than a
shop. I had thought I should find the doors open, but they were closed,
and as I stood in the wide entrance a carriage stopped outside, and a
man in uniform—you know the kind of personage with ‘Omnium’ on his
cap—flung open the door. I contrived to enter, and walking down the
shop—it was a department where they were selling ribbons and gloves and
stockings and that kind of thing—came to a more spacious region devoted
to picnic baskets and wicker furniture.

“I did not feel safe there, however; people were going to and fro, and
I prowled restlessly about until I came upon a huge section in an upper
floor containing multitudes of bedsteads, and over these I clambered,
and found a resting-place at last among a huge pile of folded flock
mattresses. The place was already lit up and agreeably warm, and I
decided to remain where I was, keeping a cautious eye on the two or
three sets of shopmen and customers who were meandering through the
place, until closing time came. Then I should be able, I thought, to
rob the place for food and clothing, and disguised, prowl through it
and examine its resources, perhaps sleep on some of the bedding. That
seemed an acceptable plan. My idea was to procure clothing to make
myself a muffled but acceptable figure, to get money, and then to
recover my books and parcels where they awaited me, take a lodging
somewhere and elaborate plans for the complete realisation of the
advantages my invisibility gave me (as I still imagined) over my
fellow-men.

“Closing time arrived quickly enough. It could not have been more than
an hour after I took up my position on the mattresses before I noticed
the blinds of the windows being drawn, and customers being marched
doorward. And then a number of brisk young men began with remarkable
alacrity to tidy up the goods that remained disturbed. I left my lair
as the crowds diminished, and prowled cautiously out into the less
desolate parts of the shop. I was really surprised to observe how
rapidly the young men and women whipped away the goods displayed for
sale during the day. All the boxes of goods, the hanging fabrics, the
festoons of lace, the boxes of sweets in the grocery section, the
displays of this and that, were being whipped down, folded up, slapped
into tidy receptacles, and everything that could not be taken down and
put away had sheets of some coarse stuff like sacking flung over them.
Finally all the chairs were turned up on to the counters, leaving the
floor clear. Directly each of these young people had done, he or she
made promptly for the door with such an expression of animation as I
have rarely observed in a shop assistant before. Then came a lot of
youngsters scattering sawdust and carrying pails and brooms. I had to
dodge to get out of the way, and as it was, my ankle got stung with the
sawdust. For some time, wandering through the swathed and darkened
departments, I could hear the brooms at work. And at last a good hour
or more after the shop had been closed, came a noise of locking doors.
Silence came upon the place, and I found myself wandering through the
vast and intricate shops, galleries, show-rooms of the place, alone. It
was very still; in one place I remember passing near one of the
Tottenham Court Road entrances and listening to the tapping of
boot-heels of the passers-by.

“My first visit was to the place where I had seen stockings and gloves
for sale. It was dark, and I had the devil of a hunt after matches,
which I found at last in the drawer of the little cash desk. Then I had
to get a candle. I had to tear down wrappings and ransack a number of
boxes and drawers, but at last I managed to turn out what I sought; the
box label called them lambswool pants, and lambswool vests. Then socks,
a thick comforter, and then I went to the clothing place and got
trousers, a lounge jacket, an overcoat and a slouch hat—a clerical sort
of hat with the brim turned down. I began to feel a human being again,
and my next thought was food.

“Upstairs was a refreshment department, and there I got cold meat.
There was coffee still in the urn, and I lit the gas and warmed it up
again, and altogether I did not do badly. Afterwards, prowling through
the place in search of blankets—I had to put up at last with a heap of
down quilts—I came upon a grocery section with a lot of chocolate and
candied fruits, more than was good for me indeed—and some white
burgundy. And near that was a toy department, and I had a brilliant
idea. I found some artificial noses—dummy noses, you know, and I
thought of dark spectacles. But Omniums had no optical department. My
nose had been a difficulty indeed—I had thought of paint. But the
discovery set my mind running on wigs and masks and the like. Finally I
went to sleep in a heap of down quilts, very warm and comfortable.

“My last thoughts before sleeping were the most agreeable I had had
since the change. I was in a state of physical serenity, and that was
reflected in my mind. I thought that I should be able to slip out
unobserved in the morning with my clothes upon me, muffling my face
with a white wrapper I had taken, purchase, with the money I had taken,
spectacles and so forth, and so complete my disguise. I lapsed into
disorderly dreams of all the fantastic things that had happened during
the last few days. I saw the ugly little Jew of a landlord vociferating
in his rooms; I saw his two sons marvelling, and the wrinkled old
woman’s gnarled face as she asked for her cat. I experienced again the
strange sensation of seeing the cloth disappear, and so I came round to
the windy hillside and the sniffing old clergyman mumbling ‘Earth to
earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ at my father’s open grave.

“‘You also,’ said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards the
grave. I struggled, shouted, appealed to the mourners, but they
continued stonily following the service; the old clergyman, too, never
faltered droning and sniffing through the ritual. I realised I was
invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had their grip on me.
I struggled in vain, I was forced over the brink, the coffin rang
hollow as I fell upon it, and the gravel came flying after me in
spadefuls. Nobody heeded me, nobody was aware of me. I made convulsive
struggles and awoke.

“The pale London dawn had come, the place was full of a chilly grey
light that filtered round the edges of the window blinds. I sat up, and
for a time I could not think where this ample apartment, with its
counters, its piles of rolled stuff, its heap of quilts and cushions,
its iron pillars, might be. Then, as recollection came back to me, I
heard voices in conversation.

“Then far down the place, in the brighter light of some department
which had already raised its blinds, I saw two men approaching. I
scrambled to my feet, looking about me for some way of escape, and even
as I did so the sound of my movement made them aware of me. I suppose
they saw merely a figure moving quietly and quickly away. ‘Who’s that?’
cried one, and ‘Stop there!’ shouted the other. I dashed around a
corner and came full tilt—a faceless figure, mind you!—on a lanky lad
of fifteen. He yelled and I bowled him over, rushed past him, turned
another corner, and by a happy inspiration threw myself behind a
counter. In another moment feet went running past and I heard voices
shouting, ‘All hands to the doors!’ asking what was ‘up,’ and giving
one another advice how to catch me.

“Lying on the ground, I felt scared out of my wits. But—odd as it may
seem—it did not occur to me at the moment to take off my clothes as I
should have done. I had made up my mind, I suppose, to get away in
them, and that ruled me. And then down the vista of the counters came a
bawling of ‘Here he is!’

“I sprang to my feet, whipped a chair off the counter, and sent it
whirling at the fool who had shouted, turned, came into another round a
corner, sent him spinning, and rushed up the stairs. He kept his
footing, gave a view hallo, and came up the staircase hot after me. Up
the staircase were piled a multitude of those bright-coloured pot
things—what are they?”

“Art pots,” suggested Kemp.

“That’s it! Art pots. Well, I turned at the top step and swung round,
plucked one out of a pile and smashed it on his silly head as he came
at me. The whole pile of pots went headlong, and I heard shouting and
footsteps running from all parts. I made a mad rush for the refreshment
place, and there was a man in white like a man cook, who took up the
chase. I made one last desperate turn and found myself among lamps and
ironmongery. I went behind the counter of this, and waited for my cook,
and as he bolted in at the head of the chase, I doubled him up with a
lamp. Down he went, and I crouched down behind the counter and began
whipping off my clothes as fast as I could. Coat, jacket, trousers,
shoes were all right, but a lambswool vest fits a man like a skin. I
heard more men coming, my cook was lying quiet on the other side of the
counter, stunned or scared speechless, and I had to make another dash
for it, like a rabbit hunted out of a wood-pile.

“‘This way, policeman!’ I heard someone shouting. I found myself in my
bedstead storeroom again, and at the end of a wilderness of wardrobes.
I rushed among them, went flat, got rid of my vest after infinite
wriggling, and stood a free man again, panting and scared, as the
policeman and three of the shopmen came round the corner. They made a
rush for the vest and pants, and collared the trousers. ‘He’s dropping
his plunder,’ said one of the young men. ‘He _must_ be somewhere here.’

“But they did not find me all the same.

“I stood watching them hunt for me for a time, and cursing my ill-luck
in losing the clothes. Then I went into the refreshment-room, drank a
little milk I found there, and sat down by the fire to consider my
position.

“In a little while two assistants came in and began to talk over the
business very excitedly and like the fools they were. I heard a
magnified account of my depredations, and other speculations as to my
whereabouts. Then I fell to scheming again. The insurmountable
difficulty of the place, especially now it was alarmed, was to get any
plunder out of it. I went down into the warehouse to see if there was
any chance of packing and addressing a parcel, but I could not
understand the system of checking. About eleven o’clock, the snow
having thawed as it fell, and the day being finer and a little warmer
than the previous one, I decided that the Emporium was hopeless, and
went out again, exasperated at my want of success, with only the
vaguest plans of action in my mind.”

CHAPTER XXIII.
IN DRURY LANE

“But you begin now to realise,” said the Invisible Man, “the full
disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter—no covering—to get
clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and
terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with
unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”

“I never thought of that,” said Kemp.

“Nor had I. And the snow had warned me of other dangers. I could not go
abroad in snow—it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too, would
make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man—a bubble. And
fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy
glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad—in the London air—I
gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I
did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from
that cause also. But I saw clearly it could not be for long.

“Not in London at any rate.

“I went into the slums towards Great Portland Street, and found myself
at the end of the street in which I had lodged. I did not go that way,
because of the crowd halfway down it opposite to the still smoking
ruins of the house I had fired. My most immediate problem was to get
clothing. What to do with my face puzzled me. Then I saw in one of
those little miscellaneous shops—news, sweets, toys, stationery,
belated Christmas tomfoolery, and so forth—an array of masks and noses.
I realised that problem was solved. In a flash I saw my course. I
turned about, no longer aimless, and went—circuitously in order to
avoid the busy ways, towards the back streets north of the Strand; for
I remembered, though not very distinctly where, that some theatrical
costumiers had shops in that district.

“The day was cold, with a nipping wind down the northward running
streets. I walked fast to avoid being overtaken. Every crossing was a
danger, every passenger a thing to watch alertly. One man as I was
about to pass him at the top of Bedford Street, turned upon me abruptly
and came into me, sending me into the road and almost under the wheel
of a passing hansom. The verdict of the cab-rank was that he had had
some sort of stroke. I was so unnerved by this encounter that I went
into Covent Garden Market and sat down for some time in a quiet corner
by a stall of violets, panting and trembling. I found I had caught a
fresh cold, and had to turn out after a time lest my sneezes should
attract attention.

“At last I reached the object of my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little
shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel robes,
sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs. The
shop was old-fashioned and low and dark, and the house rose above it
for four storeys, dark and dismal. I peered through the window and,
seeing no one within, entered. The opening of the door set a clanking
bell ringing. I left it open, and walked round a bare costume stand,
into a corner behind a cheval glass. For a minute or so no one came.
Then I heard heavy feet striding across a room, and a man appeared down
the shop.

“My plans were now perfectly definite. I proposed to make my way into
the house, secrete myself upstairs, watch my opportunity, and when
everything was quiet, rummage out a wig, mask, spectacles, and costume,
and go into the world, perhaps a grotesque but still a credible figure.
And incidentally of course I could rob the house of any available
money.

“The man who had just entered the shop was a short, slight, hunched,
beetle-browed man, with long arms and very short bandy legs. Apparently
I had interrupted a meal. He stared about the shop with an expression
of expectation. This gave way to surprise, and then to anger, as he saw
the shop empty. ‘Damn the boys!’ he said. He went to stare up and down
the street. He came in again in a minute, kicked the door to with his
foot spitefully, and went muttering back to the house door.

“I came forward to follow him, and at the noise of my movement he
stopped dead. I did so too, startled by his quickness of ear. He
slammed the house door in my face.

“I stood hesitating. Suddenly I heard his quick footsteps returning,
and the door reopened. He stood looking about the shop like one who was
still not satisfied. Then, murmuring to himself, he examined the back
of the counter and peered behind some fixtures. Then he stood doubtful.
He had left the house door open and I slipped into the inner room.

“It was a queer little room, poorly furnished and with a number of big
masks in the corner. On the table was his belated breakfast, and it was
a confoundedly exasperating thing for me, Kemp, to have to sniff his
coffee and stand watching while he came in and resumed his meal. And
his table manners were irritating. Three doors opened into the little
room, one going upstairs and one down, but they were all shut. I could
not get out of the room while he was there; I could scarcely move
because of his alertness, and there was a draught down my back. Twice I
strangled a sneeze just in time.

“The spectacular quality of my sensations was curious and novel, but
for all that I was heartily tired and angry long before he had done his
eating. But at last he made an end and putting his beggarly crockery on
the black tin tray upon which he had had his teapot, and gathering all
the crumbs up on the mustard stained cloth, he took the whole lot of
things after him. His burden prevented his shutting the door behind
him—as he would have done; I never saw such a man for shutting
doors—and I followed him into a very dirty underground kitchen and
scullery. I had the pleasure of seeing him begin to wash up, and then,
finding no good in keeping down there, and the brick floor being cold
on my feet, I returned upstairs and sat in his chair by the fire. It
was burning low, and scarcely thinking, I put on a little coal. The
noise of this brought him up at once, and he stood aglare. He peered
about the room and was within an ace of touching me. Even after that
examination, he scarcely seemed satisfied. He stopped in the doorway
and took a final inspection before he went down.

“I waited in the little parlour for an age, and at last he came up and
opened the upstairs door. I just managed to get by him.

“On the staircase he stopped suddenly, so that I very nearly blundered
into him. He stood looking back right into my face and listening. ‘I
could have sworn,’ he said. His long hairy hand pulled at his lower
lip. His eye went up and down the staircase. Then he grunted and went
on up again.

“His hand was on the handle of a door, and then he stopped again with
the same puzzled anger on his face. He was becoming aware of the faint
sounds of my movements about him. The man must have had diabolically
acute hearing. He suddenly flashed into rage. ‘If there’s anyone in
this house—’ he cried with an oath, and left the threat unfinished. He
put his hand in his pocket, failed to find what he wanted, and rushing
past me went blundering noisily and pugnaciously downstairs. But I did
not follow him. I sat on the head of the staircase until his return.

“Presently he came up again, still muttering. He opened the door of the
room, and before I could enter, slammed it in my face.

“I resolved to explore the house, and spent some time in doing so as
noiselessly as possible. The house was very old and tumble-down, damp
so that the paper in the attics was peeling from the walls, and rat
infested. Some of the door handles were stiff and I was afraid to turn
them. Several rooms I did inspect were unfurnished, and others were
littered with theatrical lumber, bought second-hand, I judged, from its
appearance. In one room next to his I found a lot of old clothes. I
began routing among these, and in my eagerness forgot again the evident
sharpness of his ears. I heard a stealthy footstep and, looking up just
in time, saw him peering in at the tumbled heap and holding an
old-fashioned revolver in his hand. I stood perfectly still while he
stared about open-mouthed and suspicious. ‘It must have been her,’ he
said slowly. ‘Damn her!’

“He shut the door quietly, and immediately I heard the key turn in the
lock. Then his footsteps retreated. I realised abruptly that I was
locked in. For a minute I did not know what to do. I walked from door
to window and back, and stood perplexed. A gust of anger came upon me.
But I decided to inspect the clothes before I did anything further, and
my first attempt brought down a pile from an upper shelf. This brought
him back, more sinister than ever. That time he actually touched me,
jumped back with amazement and stood astonished in the middle of the
room.

“Presently he calmed a little. ‘Rats,’ he said in an undertone, fingers
on lips. He was evidently a little scared. I edged quietly out of the
room, but a plank creaked. Then the infernal little brute started going
all over the house, revolver in hand and locking door after door and
pocketing the keys. When I realised what he was up to I had a fit of
rage—I could hardly control myself sufficiently to watch my
opportunity. By this time I knew he was alone in the house, and so I
made no more ado, but knocked him on the head.”

“Knocked him on the head?” exclaimed Kemp.

“Yes—stunned him—as he was going downstairs. Hit him from behind with a
stool that stood on the landing. He went downstairs like a bag of old
boots.”

“But—I say! The common conventions of humanity—”

“Are all very well for common people. But the point was, Kemp, that I
had to get out of that house in a disguise without his seeing me. I
couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. And then I gagged him with
a Louis Quatorze vest and tied him up in a sheet.”

“Tied him up in a sheet!”

“Made a sort of bag of it. It was rather a good idea to keep the idiot
scared and quiet, and a devilish hard thing to get out of—head away
from the string. My dear Kemp, it’s no good your sitting glaring as
though I was a murderer. It had to be done. He had his revolver. If
once he saw me he would be able to describe me—”

“But still,” said Kemp, “in England—to-day. And the man was in his own
house, and you were—well, robbing.”

“Robbing! Confound it! You’ll call me a thief next! Surely, Kemp,
you’re not fool enough to dance on the old strings. Can’t you see my
position?”

“And his too,” said Kemp.

The Invisible Man stood up sharply. “What do you mean to say?”

Kemp’s face grew a trifle hard. He was about to speak and checked
himself. “I suppose, after all,” he said with a sudden change of
manner, “the thing had to be done. You were in a fix. But still—”

“Of course I was in a fix—an infernal fix. And he made me wild
too—hunting me about the house, fooling about with his revolver,
locking and unlocking doors. He was simply exasperating. You don’t
blame me, do you? You don’t blame me?”

“I never blame anyone,” said Kemp. “It’s quite out of fashion. What did
you do next?”

“I was hungry. Downstairs I found a loaf and some rank cheese—more than
sufficient to satisfy my hunger. I took some brandy and water, and then
went up past my impromptu bag—he was lying quite still—to the room
containing the old clothes. This looked out upon the street, two lace
curtains brown with dirt guarding the window. I went and peered out
through their interstices. Outside the day was bright—by contrast with
the brown shadows of the dismal house in which I found myself,
dazzlingly bright. A brisk traffic was going by, fruit carts, a hansom,
a four-wheeler with a pile of boxes, a fishmonger’s cart. I turned with
spots of colour swimming before my eyes to the shadowy fixtures behind
me. My excitement was giving place to a clear apprehension of my
position again. The room was full of a faint scent of benzoline, used,
I suppose, in cleaning the garments.

“I began a systematic search of the place. I should judge the hunchback
had been alone in the house for some time. He was a curious person.
Everything that could possibly be of service to me I collected in the
clothes storeroom, and then I made a deliberate selection. I found a
handbag I thought a suitable possession, and some powder, rouge, and
sticking-plaster.

“I had thought of painting and powdering my face and all that there was
to show of me, in order to render myself visible, but the disadvantage
of this lay in the fact that I should require turpentine and other
appliances and a considerable amount of time before I could vanish
again. Finally I chose a mask of the better type, slightly grotesque
but not more so than many human beings, dark glasses, greyish whiskers,
and a wig. I could find no underclothing, but that I could buy
subsequently, and for the time I swathed myself in calico dominoes and
some white cashmere scarfs. I could find no socks, but the hunchback’s
boots were rather a loose fit and sufficed. In a desk in the shop were
three sovereigns and about thirty shillings’ worth of silver, and in a
locked cupboard I burst in the inner room were eight pounds in gold. I
could go forth into the world again, equipped.

“Then came a curious hesitation. Was my appearance really credible? I
tried myself with a little bedroom looking-glass, inspecting myself
from every point of view to discover any forgotten chink, but it all
seemed sound. I was grotesque to the theatrical pitch, a stage miser,
but I was certainly not a physical impossibility. Gathering confidence,
I took my looking-glass down into the shop, pulled down the shop
blinds, and surveyed myself from every point of view with the help of
the cheval glass in the corner.

“I spent some minutes screwing up my courage and then unlocked the shop
door and marched out into the street, leaving the little man to get out
of his sheet again when he liked. In five minutes a dozen turnings
intervened between me and the costumier’s shop. No one appeared to
notice me very pointedly. My last difficulty seemed overcome.”

He stopped again.

“And you troubled no more about the hunchback?” said Kemp.

“No,” said the Invisible Man. “Nor have I heard what became of him. I
suppose he untied himself or kicked himself out. The knots were pretty
tight.”

He became silent and went to the window and stared out.

“What happened when you went out into the Strand?”

“Oh!—disillusionment again. I thought my troubles were over.
Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose,
everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did,
whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to
fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me. I could
take my money where I found it. I decided to treat myself to a
sumptuous feast, and then put up at a good hotel, and accumulate a new
outfit of property. I felt amazingly confident; it’s not particularly
pleasant recalling that I was an ass. I went into a place and was
already ordering lunch, when it occurred to me that I could not eat
unless I exposed my invisible face. I finished ordering the lunch, told
the man I should be back in ten minutes, and went out exasperated. I
don’t know if you have ever been disappointed in your appetite.”

“Not quite so badly,” said Kemp, “but I can imagine it.”

“I could have smashed the silly devils. At last, faint with the desire
for tasteful food, I went into another place and demanded a private
room. ‘I am disfigured,’ I said. ‘Badly.’ They looked at me curiously,
but of course it was not their affair—and so at last I got my lunch. It
was not particularly well served, but it sufficed; and when I had had
it, I sat over a cigar, trying to plan my line of action. And outside a
snowstorm was beginning.

“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless
absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a
crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt
of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment.
I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt
invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to
enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of
place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of
woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for
politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport.
What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a
swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!”

He paused, and his attitude suggested a roving glance at the window.

“But how did you get to Iping?” said Kemp, anxious to keep his guest
busy talking.

“I went there to work. I had one hope. It was a half idea! I have it
still. It is a full blown idea now. A way of getting back! Of restoring
what I have done. When I choose. When I have done all I mean to do
invisibly. And that is what I chiefly want to talk to you about now.”

“You went straight to Iping?”

“Yes. I had simply to get my three volumes of memoranda and my
cheque-book, my luggage and underclothing, order a quantity of
chemicals to work out this idea of mine—I will show you the
calculations as soon as I get my books—and then I started. Jove! I
remember the snowstorm now, and the accursed bother it was to keep the
snow from damping my pasteboard nose.”

“At the end,” said Kemp, “the day before yesterday, when they found you
out, you rather—to judge by the papers—”

“I did. Rather. Did I kill that fool of a constable?”

“No,” said Kemp. “He’s expected to recover.”

“That’s his luck, then. I clean lost my temper, the fools! Why couldn’t
they leave me alone? And that grocer lout?”

“There are no deaths expected,” said Kemp.

“I don’t know about that tramp of mine,” said the Invisible Man, with
an unpleasant laugh.

“By Heaven, Kemp, you don’t know what rage _is_! ... To have worked for
years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling
purblind idiot messing across your course! ... Every conceivable sort
of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.

“If I have much more of it, I shall go wild—I shall start mowing ’em.

“As it is, they’ve made things a thousand times more difficult.”

“No doubt it’s exasperating,” said Kemp, drily.

CHAPTER XXIV.
THE PLAN THAT FAILED

“But now,” said Kemp, with a side glance out of the window, “what are
we to do?”

He moved nearer his guest as he spoke in such a manner as to prevent
the possibility of a sudden glimpse of the three men who were advancing
up the hill road—with an intolerable slowness, as it seemed to Kemp.

“What were you planning to do when you were heading for Port Burdock?
_Had_ you any plan?”

“I was going to clear out of the country. But I have altered that plan
rather since seeing you. I thought it would be wise, now the weather is
hot and invisibility possible, to make for the South. Especially as my
secret was known, and everyone would be on the lookout for a masked and
muffled man. You have a line of steamers from here to France. My idea
was to get aboard one and run the risks of the passage. Thence I could
go by train into Spain, or else get to Algiers. It would not be
difficult. There a man might always be invisible—and yet live. And do
things. I was using that tramp as a money box and luggage carrier,
until I decided how to get my books and things sent over to meet me.”

“That’s clear.”

“And then the filthy brute must needs try and rob me! He _has_ hidden
my books, Kemp. Hidden my books! If I can lay my hands on him!”

“Best plan to get the books out of him first.”

“But where is he? Do you know?”

“He’s in the town police station, locked up, by his own request, in the
strongest cell in the place.”

“Cur!” said the Invisible Man.

“But that hangs up your plans a little.”

“We must get those books; those books are vital.”

“Certainly,” said Kemp, a little nervously, wondering if he heard
footsteps outside. “Certainly we must get those books. But that won’t
be difficult, if he doesn’t know they’re for you.”

“No,” said the Invisible Man, and thought.

Kemp tried to think of something to keep the talk going, but the
Invisible Man resumed of his own accord.

“Blundering into your house, Kemp,” he said, “changes all my plans. For
you are a man that can understand. In spite of all that has happened,
in spite of this publicity, of the loss of my books, of what I have
suffered, there still remain great possibilities, huge possibilities—”

“You have told no one I am here?” he asked abruptly.

Kemp hesitated. “That was implied,” he said.

“No one?” insisted Griffin.

“Not a soul.”

“Ah! Now—” The Invisible Man stood up, and sticking his arms akimbo
began to pace the study.

“I made a mistake, Kemp, a huge mistake, in carrying this thing through
alone. I have wasted strength, time, opportunities. Alone—it is
wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a
little, and there is the end.

“What I want, Kemp, is a goal-keeper, a helper, and a hiding-place, an
arrangement whereby I can sleep and eat and rest in peace, and
unsuspected. I must have a confederate. With a confederate, with food
and rest—a thousand things are possible.

“Hitherto I have gone on vague lines. We have to consider all that
invisibility means, all that it does not mean. It means little
advantage for eavesdropping and so forth—one makes sounds. It’s of
little help—a little help perhaps—in housebreaking and so forth. Once
you’ve caught me you could easily imprison me. But on the other hand I
am hard to catch. This invisibility, in fact, is only good in two
cases: It’s useful in getting away, it’s useful in approaching. It’s
particularly useful, therefore, in killing. I can walk round a man,
whatever weapon he has, choose my point, strike as I like. Dodge as I
like. Escape as I like.”

Kemp’s hand went to his moustache. Was that a movement downstairs?

“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”

“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan,
Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. _Why_ killing?”

“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know
there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man.
And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror.
Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must
take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must
issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper
thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he
must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”

“Humph!” said Kemp, no longer listening to Griffin but to the sound of
his front door opening and closing.

“It seems to me, Griffin,” he said, to cover his wandering attention,
“that your confederate would be in a difficult position.”

“No one would know he was a confederate,” said the Invisible Man,
eagerly. And then suddenly, “Hush! What’s that downstairs?”

“Nothing,” said Kemp, and suddenly began to speak loud and fast. “I
don’t agree to this, Griffin,” he said. “Understand me, I don’t agree
to this. Why dream of playing a game against the race? How can you hope
to gain happiness? Don’t be a lone wolf. Publish your results; take the
world—take the nation at least—into your confidence. Think what you
might do with a million helpers—”

The Invisible Man interrupted—arm extended. “There are footsteps coming
upstairs,” he said in a low voice.

“Nonsense,” said Kemp.

“Let me see,” said the Invisible Man, and advanced, arm extended, to
the door.

And then things happened very swiftly. Kemp hesitated for a second and
then moved to intercept him. The Invisible Man started and stood still.
“Traitor!” cried the Voice, and suddenly the dressing-gown opened, and
sitting down the Unseen began to disrobe. Kemp made three swift steps
to the door, and forthwith the Invisible Man—his legs had
vanished—sprang to his feet with a shout. Kemp flung the door open.

As it opened, there came a sound of hurrying feet downstairs and
voices.

With a quick movement Kemp thrust the Invisible Man back, sprang aside,
and slammed the door. The key was outside and ready. In another moment
Griffin would have been alone in the belvedere study, a prisoner. Save
for one little thing. The key had been slipped in hastily that morning.
As Kemp slammed the door it fell noisily upon the carpet.

Kemp’s face became white. He tried to grip the door handle with both
hands. For a moment he stood lugging. Then the door gave six inches.
But he got it closed again. The second time it was jerked a foot wide,
and the dressing-gown came wedging itself into the opening. His throat
was gripped by invisible fingers, and he left his hold on the handle to
defend himself. He was forced back, tripped and pitched heavily into
the corner of the landing. The empty dressing-gown was flung on the top
of him.

Halfway up the staircase was Colonel Adye, the recipient of Kemp’s
letter, the chief of the Burdock police. He was staring aghast at the
sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary sight of
clothing tossing empty in the air. He saw Kemp felled, and struggling
to his feet. He saw him rush forward, and go down again, felled like an
ox.

Then suddenly he was struck violently. By nothing! A vast weight, it
seemed, leapt upon him, and he was hurled headlong down the staircase,
with a grip on his throat and a knee in his groin. An invisible foot
trod on his back, a ghostly patter passed downstairs, he heard the two
police officers in the hall shout and run, and the front door of the
house slammed violently.

He rolled over and sat up staring. He saw, staggering down the
staircase, Kemp, dusty and disheveled, one side of his face white from
a blow, his lip bleeding, and a pink dressing-gown and some
underclothing held in his arms.

“My God!” cried Kemp, “the game’s up! He’s gone!”

CHAPTER XXV.
THE HUNTING OF THE INVISIBLE MAN

For a space Kemp was too inarticulate to make Adye understand the swift
things that had just happened. They stood on the landing, Kemp speaking
swiftly, the grotesque swathings of Griffin still on his arm. But
presently Adye began to grasp something of the situation.

“He is mad,” said Kemp; “inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of
nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened to such
a story this morning of brutal self-seeking.... He has wounded men. He
will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a panic.
Nothing can stop him. He is going out now—furious!”

“He must be caught,” said Adye. “That is certain.”

“But how?” cried Kemp, and suddenly became full of ideas. “You must
begin at once. You must set every available man to work; you must
prevent his leaving this district. Once he gets away, he may go through
the countryside as he wills, killing and maiming. He dreams of a reign
of terror! A reign of terror, I tell you. You must set a watch on
trains and roads and shipping. The garrison must help. You must wire
for help. The only thing that may keep him here is the thought of
recovering some books of notes he counts of value. I will tell you of
that! There is a man in your police station—Marvel.”

“I know,” said Adye, “I know. Those books—yes. But the tramp....”

“Says he hasn’t them. But he thinks the tramp has. And you must prevent
him from eating or sleeping; day and night the country must be astir
for him. Food must be locked up and secured, all food, so that he will
have to break his way to it. The houses everywhere must be barred
against him. Heaven send us cold nights and rain! The whole
country-side must begin hunting and keep hunting. I tell you, Adye, he
is a danger, a disaster; unless he is pinned and secured, it is
frightful to think of the things that may happen.”

“What else can we do?” said Adye. “I must go down at once and begin
organising. But why not come? Yes—you come too! Come, and we must hold
a sort of council of war—get Hopps to help—and the railway managers. By
Jove! it’s urgent. Come along—tell me as we go. What else is there we
can do? Put that stuff down.”

In another moment Adye was leading the way downstairs. They found the
front door open and the policemen standing outside staring at empty
air. “He’s got away, sir,” said one.

“We must go to the central station at once,” said Adye. “One of you go
on down and get a cab to come up and meet us—quickly. And now, Kemp,
what else?”

“Dogs,” said Kemp. “Get dogs. They don’t see him, but they wind him.
Get dogs.”

“Good,” said Adye. “It’s not generally known, but the prison officials
over at Halstead know a man with bloodhounds. Dogs. What else?”

“Bear in mind,” said Kemp, “his food shows. After eating, his food
shows until it is assimilated. So that he has to hide after eating. You
must keep on beating. Every thicket, every quiet corner. And put all
weapons—all implements that might be weapons, away. He can’t carry such
things for long. And what he can snatch up and strike men with must be
hidden away.”

“Good again,” said Adye. “We shall have him yet!”

“And on the roads,” said Kemp, and hesitated.

“Yes?” said Adye.

“Powdered glass,” said Kemp. “It’s cruel, I know. But think of what he
may do!”

Adye drew the air in sharply between his teeth. “It’s unsportsmanlike.
I don’t know. But I’ll have powdered glass got ready. If he goes too
far....”

“The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,” said Kemp. “I am as sure he
will establish a reign of terror—so soon as he has got over the
emotions of this escape—as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only
chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood
be upon his own head.”

CHAPTER XXVI.
THE WICKSTEED MURDER

The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp’s house in a state
of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp’s gateway was violently
caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken, and
thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human
perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can
imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up the hill and on
to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and despairing at his
intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated and weary, amid the
thickets of Hintondean, to piece together again his shattered schemes
against his species. That seems the most probable refuge for him, for
there it was he re-asserted himself in a grimly tragical manner about
two in the afternoon.

One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that time, and
what plans he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically exasperated
by Kemp’s treachery, and though we may be able to understand the
motives that led to that deceit, we may still imagine and even
sympathise a little with the fury the attempted surprise must have
occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned astonishment of his Oxford
Street experiences may have returned to him, for he had evidently
counted on Kemp’s co-operation in his brutal dream of a terrorised
world. At any rate he vanished from human ken about midday, and no
living witness can tell what he did until about half-past two. It was a
fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for him it was a fatal
inaction.

During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the
countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a
legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp’s drily
worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible antagonist, to be
wounded, captured, or overcome, and the countryside began organising
itself with inconceivable rapidity. By two o’clock even he might still
have removed himself out of the district by getting aboard a train, but
after two that became impossible. Every passenger train along the lines
on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and
Horsham, travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost
entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port
Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out
in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads and fields.

Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at every
cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keep
indoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had
broken up by three o’clock, and the children, scared and keeping
together in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp’s proclamation—signed
indeed by Adye—was posted over almost the whole district by four or
five o’clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all the
conditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the Invisible Man
from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulness and for a
prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. And so swift and
decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt and universal was
the belief in this strange being, that before nightfall an area of
several hundred square miles was in a stringent state of siege. And
before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror went through the whole
watching nervous countryside. Going from whispering mouth to mouth,
swift and certain over the length and breadth of the country, passed
the story of the murder of Mr. Wicksteed.

If our supposition that the Invisible Man’s refuge was the Hintondean
thickets, then we must suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied
out again bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon. We
cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had the iron
rod in hand before he met Wicksteed is to me at least overwhelming.

Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter. It
occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards from Lord
Burdock’s lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate struggle—the
trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteed received, his
splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made, save in a
murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the theory of
madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man of forty-five or
forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive habits and
appearance, the very last person in the world to provoke such a
terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the Invisible Man used
an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. He stopped this quiet
man, going quietly home to his midday meal, attacked him, beat down his
feeble defences, broke his arm, felled him, and smashed his head to a
jelly.

Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing before he
met his victim—he must have been carrying it ready in his hand. Only
two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear on the
matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not in Mr.
Wicksteed’s direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred yards out
of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl to the effect
that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the murdered man
“trotting” in a peculiar manner across a field towards the gravel pit.
Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing something on the
ground before him and striking at it ever and again with his
walking-stick. She was the last person to see him alive. He passed out
of her sight to his death, the struggle being hidden from her only by a
clump of beech trees and a slight depression in the ground.

Now this, to the present writer’s mind at least, lifts the murder out
of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that Griffin had
taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention
of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then have come by and noticed this
rod inexplicably moving through the air. Without any thought of the
Invisible Man—for Port Burdock is ten miles away—he may have pursued
it. It is quite conceivable that he may not even have heard of the
Invisible Man. One can then imagine the Invisible Man making
off—quietly in order to avoid discovering his presence in the
neighbourhood, and Wicksteed, excited and curious, pursuing this
unaccountably locomotive object—finally striking at it.

No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his middle-aged
pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which
Wicksteed’s body was found suggests that he had the ill luck to drive
his quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the
gravel pit. To those who appreciate the extraordinary irascibility of
the Invisible Man, the rest of the encounter will be easy to imagine.

But this is pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts—for stories of
children are often unreliable—are the discovery of Wicksteed’s body,
done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung among the
nettles. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin, suggests that in the
emotional excitement of the affair, the purpose for which he took it—if
he had a purpose—was abandoned. He was certainly an intensely
egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first
victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long
pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever
scheme of action he had contrived.

After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck across
the country towards the downland. There is a story of a voice heard
about sunset by a couple of men in a field near Fern Bottom. It was
wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever and again it
shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove up across the middle
of a clover field and died away towards the hills.

That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learnt something of the
rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. He must have found houses
locked and secured; he may have loitered about railway stations and
prowled about inns, and no doubt he read the proclamations and realised
something of the nature of the campaign against him. And as the evening
advanced, the fields became dotted here and there with groups of three
or four men, and noisy with the yelping of dogs. These men-hunters had
particular instructions in the case of an encounter as to the way they
should support one another. But he avoided them all. We may understand
something of his exasperation, and it could have been none the less
because he himself had supplied the information that was being used so
remorselessly against him. For that day at least he lost heart; for
nearly twenty-four hours, save when he turned on Wicksteed, he was a
hunted man. In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in the
morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and malignant,
prepared for his last great struggle against the world.

CHAPTER XXVII.
THE SIEGE OF KEMP’S HOUSE

Kemp read a strange missive, written in pencil on a greasy sheet of
paper.

“You have been amazingly energetic and clever,” this letter ran,
“though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against
me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a
night’s rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in
spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only
beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This
announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under
the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is
under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the
Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with
the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for
the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He
may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on
armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take
precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar
box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then
off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death
fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is to die.”

Kemp read this letter twice, “It’s no hoax,” he said. “That’s his
voice! And he means it.”

He turned the folded sheet over and saw on the addressed side of it the
postmark Hintondean, and the prosaic detail “2d. to pay.”

He got up slowly, leaving his lunch unfinished—the letter had come by
the one o’clock post—and went into his study. He rang for his
housekeeper, and told her to go round the house at once, examine all
the fastenings of the windows, and close all the shutters. He closed
the shutters of his study himself. From a locked drawer in his bedroom
he took a little revolver, examined it carefully, and put it into the
pocket of his lounge jacket. He wrote a number of brief notes, one to
Colonel Adye, gave them to his servant to take, with explicit
instructions as to her way of leaving the house. “There is no danger,”
he said, and added a mental reservation, “to you.” He remained
meditative for a space after doing this, and then returned to his
cooling lunch.

He ate with gaps of thought. Finally he struck the table sharply. “We
will have him!” he said; “and I am the bait. He will come too far.”

He went up to the belvedere, carefully shutting every door after him.
“It’s a game,” he said, “an odd game—but the chances are all for me,
Mr. Griffin, in spite of your invisibility. Griffin _contra mundum_ ...
with a vengeance.”

He stood at the window staring at the hot hillside. “He must get food
every day—and I don’t envy him. Did he really sleep last night? Out in
the open somewhere—secure from collisions. I wish we could get some
good cold wet weather instead of the heat.

“He may be watching me now.”

He went close to the window. Something rapped smartly against the
brickwork over the frame, and made him start violently back.

“I’m getting nervous,” said Kemp. But it was five minutes before he
went to the window again. “It must have been a sparrow,” he said.

Presently he heard the front-door bell ringing, and hurried downstairs.
He unbolted and unlocked the door, examined the chain, put it up, and
opened cautiously without showing himself. A familiar voice hailed him.
It was Adye.

“Your servant’s been assaulted, Kemp,” he said round the door.

“What!” exclaimed Kemp.

“Had that note of yours taken away from her. He’s close about here. Let
me in.”

Kemp released the chain, and Adye entered through as narrow an opening
as possible. He stood in the hall, looking with infinite relief at Kemp
refastening the door. “Note was snatched out of her hand. Scared her
horribly. She’s down at the station. Hysterics. He’s close here. What
was it about?”

Kemp swore.

“What a fool I was,” said Kemp. “I might have known. It’s not an hour’s
walk from Hintondean. Already?”

“What’s up?” said Adye.

“Look here!” said Kemp, and led the way into his study. He handed Adye
the Invisible Man’s letter. Adye read it and whistled softly. “And
you—?” said Adye.

“Proposed a trap—like a fool,” said Kemp, “and sent my proposal out by
a maid servant. To him.”

Adye followed Kemp’s profanity.

“He’ll clear out,” said Adye.

“Not he,” said Kemp.

A resounding smash of glass came from upstairs. Adye had a silvery
glimpse of a little revolver half out of Kemp’s pocket. “It’s a window,
upstairs!” said Kemp, and led the way up. There came a second smash
while they were still on the staircase. When they reached the study
they found two of the three windows smashed, half the room littered
with splintered glass, and one big flint lying on the writing table.
The two men stopped in the doorway, contemplating the wreckage. Kemp
swore again, and as he did so the third window went with a snap like a
pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering
triangles into the room.

“What’s this for?” said Adye.

“It’s a beginning,” said Kemp.

“There’s no way of climbing up here?”

“Not for a cat,” said Kemp.

“No shutters?”

“Not here. All the downstairs rooms—Hullo!”

Smash, and then whack of boards hit hard came from downstairs.
“Confound him!” said Kemp. “That must be—yes—it’s one of the bedrooms.
He’s going to do all the house. But he’s a fool. The shutters are up,
and the glass will fall outside. He’ll cut his feet.”

Another window proclaimed its destruction. The two men stood on the
landing perplexed. “I have it!” said Adye. “Let me have a stick or
something, and I’ll go down to the station and get the bloodhounds put
on. That ought to settle him! They’re hard by—not ten minutes—”

Another window went the way of its fellows.

“You haven’t a revolver?” asked Adye.

Kemp’s hand went to his pocket. Then he hesitated. “I haven’t one—at
least to spare.”

“I’ll bring it back,” said Adye, “you’ll be safe here.”

Kemp, ashamed of his momentary lapse from truthfulness, handed him the
weapon.

“Now for the door,” said Adye.

As they stood hesitating in the hall, they heard one of the first-floor
bedroom windows crack and clash. Kemp went to the door and began to
slip the bolts as silently as possible. His face was a little paler
than usual. “You must step straight out,” said Kemp. In another moment
Adye was on the doorstep and the bolts were dropping back into the
staples. He hesitated for a moment, feeling more comfortable with his
back against the door. Then he marched, upright and square, down the
steps. He crossed the lawn and approached the gate. A little breeze
seemed to ripple over the grass. Something moved near him. “Stop a
bit,” said a Voice, and Adye stopped dead and his hand tightened on the
revolver.

“Well?” said Adye, white and grim, and every nerve tense.

“Oblige me by going back to the house,” said the Voice, as tense and
grim as Adye’s.

“Sorry,” said Adye a little hoarsely, and moistened his lips with his
tongue. The Voice was on his left front, he thought. Suppose he were to
take his luck with a shot?

“What are you going for?” said the Voice, and there was a quick
movement of the two, and a flash of sunlight from the open lip of
Adye’s pocket.

Adye desisted and thought. “Where I go,” he said slowly, “is my own
business.” The words were still on his lips, when an arm came round his
neck, his back felt a knee, and he was sprawling backward. He drew
clumsily and fired absurdly, and in another moment he was struck in the
mouth and the revolver wrested from his grip. He made a vain clutch at
a slippery limb, tried to struggle up and fell back. “Damn!” said Adye.
The Voice laughed. “I’d kill you now if it wasn’t the waste of a
bullet,” it said. He saw the revolver in mid-air, six feet off,
covering him.

“Well?” said Adye, sitting up.

“Get up,” said the Voice.

Adye stood up.

“Attention,” said the Voice, and then fiercely, “Don’t try any games.
Remember I can see your face if you can’t see mine. You’ve got to go
back to the house.”

“He won’t let me in,” said Adye.

“That’s a pity,” said the Invisible Man. “I’ve got no quarrel with
you.”

Adye moistened his lips again. He glanced away from the barrel of the
revolver and saw the sea far off very blue and dark under the midday
sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the Head, and the
multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet. His
eyes came back to this little metal thing hanging between heaven and
earth, six yards away. “What am I to do?” he said sullenly.

“What am _I_ to do?” asked the Invisible Man. “You will get help. The
only thing is for you to go back.”

“I will try. If he lets me in will you promise not to rush the door?”

“I’ve got no quarrel with you,” said the Voice.

Kemp had hurried upstairs after letting Adye out, and now crouching
among the broken glass and peering cautiously over the edge of the
study window sill, he saw Adye stand parleying with the Unseen. “Why
doesn’t he fire?” whispered Kemp to himself. Then the revolver moved a
little and the glint of the sunlight flashed in Kemp’s eyes. He shaded
his eyes and tried to see the source of the blinding beam.

“Surely!” he said, “Adye has given up the revolver.”

“Promise not to rush the door,” Adye was saying. “Don’t push a winning
game too far. Give a man a chance.”

“You go back to the house. I tell you flatly I will not promise
anything.”

Adye’s decision seemed suddenly made. He turned towards the house,
walking slowly with his hands behind him. Kemp watched him—puzzled. The
revolver vanished, flashed again into sight, vanished again, and became
evident on a closer scrutiny as a little dark object following Adye.
Then things happened very quickly. Adye leapt backwards, swung around,
clutched at this little object, missed it, threw up his hands and fell
forward on his face, leaving a little puff of blue in the air. Kemp did
not hear the sound of the shot. Adye writhed, raised himself on one
arm, fell forward, and lay still.

For a space Kemp remained staring at the quiet carelessness of Adye’s
attitude. The afternoon was very hot and still, nothing seemed stirring
in all the world save a couple of yellow butterflies chasing each other
through the shrubbery between the house and the road gate. Adye lay on
the lawn near the gate. The blinds of all the villas down the hill-road
were drawn, but in one little green summer-house was a white figure,
apparently an old man asleep. Kemp scrutinised the surroundings of the
house for a glimpse of the revolver, but it had vanished. His eyes came
back to Adye. The game was opening well.

Then came a ringing and knocking at the front door, that grew at last
tumultuous, but pursuant to Kemp’s instructions the servants had locked
themselves into their rooms. This was followed by a silence. Kemp sat
listening and then began peering cautiously out of the three windows,
one after another. He went to the staircase head and stood listening
uneasily. He armed himself with his bedroom poker, and went to examine
the interior fastenings of the ground-floor windows again. Everything
was safe and quiet. He returned to the belvedere. Adye lay motionless
over the edge of the gravel just as he had fallen. Coming along the
road by the villas were the housemaid and two policemen.

Everything was deadly still. The three people seemed very slow in
approaching. He wondered what his antagonist was doing.

He started. There was a smash from below. He hesitated and went
downstairs again. Suddenly the house resounded with heavy blows and the
splintering of wood. He heard a smash and the destructive clang of the
iron fastenings of the shutters. He turned the key and opened the
kitchen door. As he did so, the shutters, split and splintering, came
flying inward. He stood aghast. The window frame, save for one
crossbar, was still intact, but only little teeth of glass remained in
the frame. The shutters had been driven in with an axe, and now the axe
was descending in sweeping blows upon the window frame and the iron
bars defending it. Then suddenly it leapt aside and vanished. He saw
the revolver lying on the path outside, and then the little weapon
sprang into the air. He dodged back. The revolver cracked just too
late, and a splinter from the edge of the closing door flashed over his
head. He slammed and locked the door, and as he stood outside he heard
Griffin shouting and laughing. Then the blows of the axe with its
splitting and smashing consequences, were resumed.

Kemp stood in the passage trying to think. In a moment the Invisible
Man would be in the kitchen. This door would not keep him a moment, and
then—

A ringing came at the front door again. It would be the policemen. He
ran into the hall, put up the chain, and drew the bolts. He made the
girl speak before he dropped the chain, and the three people blundered
into the house in a heap, and Kemp slammed the door again.

“The Invisible Man!” said Kemp. “He has a revolver, with two
shots—left. He’s killed Adye. Shot him anyhow. Didn’t you see him on
the lawn? He’s lying there.”

“Who?” said one of the policemen.

“Adye,” said Kemp.

“We came in the back way,” said the girl.

“What’s that smashing?” asked one of the policemen.

“He’s in the kitchen—or will be. He has found an axe—”

Suddenly the house was full of the Invisible Man’s resounding blows on
the kitchen door. The girl stared towards the kitchen, shuddered, and
retreated into the dining-room. Kemp tried to explain in broken
sentences. They heard the kitchen door give.

“This way,” said Kemp, starting into activity, and bundled the
policemen into the dining-room doorway.

“Poker,” said Kemp, and rushed to the fender. He handed the poker he
had carried to the policeman and the dining-room one to the other. He
suddenly flung himself backward.

“Whup!” said one policeman, ducked, and caught the axe on his poker.
The pistol snapped its penultimate shot and ripped a valuable Sidney
Cooper. The second policeman brought his poker down on the little
weapon, as one might knock down a wasp, and sent it rattling to the
floor.

At the first clash the girl screamed, stood screaming for a moment by
the fireplace, and then ran to open the shutters—possibly with an idea
of escaping by the shattered window.

The axe receded into the passage, and fell to a position about two feet
from the ground. They could hear the Invisible Man breathing. “Stand
away, you two,” he said. “I want that man Kemp.”

“We want you,” said the first policeman, making a quick step forward
and wiping with his poker at the Voice. The Invisible Man must have
started back, and he blundered into the umbrella stand.

Then, as the policeman staggered with the swing of the blow he had
aimed, the Invisible Man countered with the axe, the helmet crumpled
like paper, and the blow sent the man spinning to the floor at the head
of the kitchen stairs. But the second policeman, aiming behind the axe
with his poker, hit something soft that snapped. There was a sharp
exclamation of pain and then the axe fell to the ground. The policeman
wiped again at vacancy and hit nothing; he put his foot on the axe, and