The Invisible Man

“I slept during the forenoon, pulling a sheet over my eyes to shut out the light, and about midday I was awakened again by a knocking. My strength had returned. I sat up and listened and heard a whispering. I sprang to my feet, and as noiselessly as possible began to detach the connections of my apparatus, and to distribute it about the room so as to destroy the suggestions of its arrangement. Presently the knocking was renewed and voices called, first my landlord’s and then two others. To gain time I answered them. The invisible rag and pillow came to hand, and I opened the window and pitched them out on to the cistern cover. As the window opened a heavy crash came at the door. Some one had charged it with the idea of smashing the lock. But the stout bolts I had screwed up some days before stopped him. That startled me—made me angry. I began to tremble and do things hurriedly.

“I tossed together some loose paper, straw, packing–paper, and so forth, in the middle of the room, and turned on the gas. Heavy blows began to rain upon the door. I could not find the matches. I beat my hands on the wall with rage. I turned down the gas again, stepped out of the window on the cistern cover, very softly lowered the sash, and sat down, secure and invisible, but quivering with anger, to watch events. They split a panel, I saw, and in another moment they had broken away the staples of the bolts and stood in the open doorway. It was the landlord and his two step–sons—sturdy young men of three or four–and–twenty. Behind them fluttered the old hag of a woman from downstairs.

“You may imagine their astonishment at finding the room empty. One of the younger men rushed to the window at once, flung it open and stared out. His staring eyes, and thick–lipped, bearded face came a foot from my face. I was half–minded[8] to hit his silly countenance, but I arrested my doubled fist.

“He stared right through me. So did the others as they joined him. The old man went and peered under the bed, and then they all made a rush for the cupboard. They had to argue about it at length in Yiddish and Cockney English. They concluded I had not answered them, that their imagination had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four people—for the old lady came in, glancing suspiciously about her like a cat—trying to understand the riddle of my existence.

“The old man, so far as I could understand his polyglot,[9] agreed with the old lady that I was a vivisectionist. The sons protested in garbled English that I was an electrician, and appealed to[10] the dynamos and radiators. They were all nervous against my arrival,[11] although I found subsequently that they had bolted the front door. The old lady peered into the cupboard and under the bed. One of my fellow–lodgers, a costermonger, who shared the opposite room with a butcher, appeared on the landing, and he was called in, and told incoherent things.

“It occurred to me that the peculiar radiators I had, if they fell into the hands of some acute, well–educated person, would give me away too much, and, watching my opportunity, il descended from the window–sill into the room and dodging the old woman tilted one of the little dynamos off its fellow on which it was standing, and smashed both apparatus. How scared they were!… Then, while they were trying to explain the smash, I slipped out of the room and went softly downstairs.

“I went into one of the sitting–rooms and waited until they came down, still speculative and argumentative, all a little disappointed at finding no ’horrors’ and all a little puzzled how they stood legally towards me. As soon as they had gone on down to the basement, I slipped up again with a box of matches, fired my heap of paper and rubbish, put fhe chairs and bedding thereby, led the gas to the affair by means of an indiarubber tube—”

“You fired the house?” exclaimed Kemp.

“Fired the house! It was the only way to cover my trail, and no doubt it was insured… I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

CHAPTER XXI IN OXFORD STREET

In going downstairs the first time I found an unexpected difficulty because I could not see my feet; indeed, I stumbled twice, and there was an unaccustomed clumsiness in gripping the bolt. By not looking down, however, I managed to walk on the level passably well.

“My mood, I say, was one of exultation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap them on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.