The Invisible Man By H.G. Wells Chapter 20, Part One At the House in Great Portland Street

The Invisible Man

By H.G. Wells

Chapter 20,

Part One

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 Roentgen vibrations--I

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

they are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos, and these I

worked with a cheap gas engine. My first experiment was with a bit

of white wool fabric. It was the strangest thing in the world to

see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, and then to

watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish.

"I could scarcely believe I had done it. I put my hand into the

emptiness, and there was the thing as solid as ever. I felt it

awkwardly, and threw it on the floor. I had a little trouble

finding it again.

"And then came a curious experience. I heard a miaow behind me, and

turning, saw a lean white cat, very dirty, on the cistern cover

outside the window. A thought came into my head. 'Everything ready

for you,' I said, and went to the window, opened it, and called

softly. She came in, purring--the poor beast was starving--and

I gave her some milk. All my food was in a cupboard in the

corner of the room. After that she went smelling round the room,

evidently with the idea of making herself at home. The invisible

rag upset her a bit; you should have seen her spit at it! But I

made her comfortable on the pillow of my truckle-bed. And I gave

her butter to get her to wash."

"And you processed her?"

"I processed her. But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp! And

the process failed."

"Failed!"

"In two particulars. These were the claws and the pigment stuff,

what is it?--at the back of the eye in a cat. You know?"

"_Tapetum_."

"Yes, the _tapetum_. It didn't go. After I'd given the stuff to

bleach the blood and done certain other things to her, I gave the

beast opium, and put her and the pillow she was sleeping on, on the

apparatus. And after all the rest had faded and vanished, there

remained two little ghosts of her eyes."

"Odd!"

"I can't explain it. She was bandaged and clamped, of course--so

I had her safe; but she woke while she was still misty, and miaowed

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

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

creature, with only a white cat to care for in all the world. I

whipped out some chloroform, applied it, and answered the door.

'Did I hear a cat?' she asked. 'My cat?' 'Not here,' said I, very

politely. She was a little doubtful and tried to peer past me into

the room; strange enough to her no doubt--bare walls, uncurtained

windows, truckle-bed, with the gas engine vibrating, and the

seethe of the radiant points, and that faint ghastly stinging of

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

away again."

"How long did it take?" asked Kemp.

"Three or four hours--the cat. The bones and sinews and the fat

were the last to go, and the tips of the coloured hairs. And, as I

say, the back part of the eye, tough, iridescent stuff it is,

wouldn't go at all.

"It was night outside long before the business was over, and nothing

was to be seen but the dim eyes and the claws. I stopped the gas

engine, felt for and stroked the beast, which was still insensible,

and then, being tired, left it sleeping on the invisible pillow and

went to bed. I found it hard to sleep. I lay awake thinking weak

aimless stuff, going over the experiment over and over again, or

dreaming feverishly of things growing misty and vanishing about me,

until everything, the ground I stood on, vanished, and so I came to

that sickly falling nightmare one gets. About two, the cat began

miaowing about the room. I tried to hush it by talking to it, and

then I decided to turn it out. I remember the shock I had when

striking a light--there were just the round eyes shining green--and

nothing round them. I would have given it milk, but I hadn't any. It

wouldn't be quiet, it just sat down and miaowed at the door. I tried

to catch it, with an idea of putting it out of the window, but it

wouldn't be caught, it vanished. Then it began miaowing in different

parts of the room. At last I opened the window and made a bustle. I

suppose it went out at last. I never saw any more of it.

"Then--Heaven knows why--I fell thinking of my father's funeral

again, and the dismal windy hillside, until the day had come. I

found sleeping was hopeless, and, locking my door after me,

wandered out into the morning streets."

"You don't mean to say there's an invisible cat at large!" said

Kemp.

"If it hasn't been killed," said the Invisible Man. "Why not?"

"Why not?" said Kemp. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

"It's very probably been killed," said the Invisible Man. "It

was alive four days after, I know, and down a grating in Great

Titchfield Street; because I saw a crowd round the place, trying

to see whence the miaowing came."

He was silent for the best part of a minute. Then he resumed

abruptly:

"I remember that morning before the change very vividly. I must have

gone up Great Portland Street. I remember the barracks in Albany

Street, and the horse soldiers coming out, and at last I found the

summit of Primrose Hill. It was a sunny day in January--one of those

sunny, frosty days that came before the snow this year. My weary

brain tried to formulate the position, to plot out a plan of action.

"I was surprised to find, now that my prize was within my grasp, how

inconclusive its attainment seemed. As a matter of fact I was worked

out; the intense stress of nearly four years' continuous work left

me incapable of any strength of feeling. I was apathetic, and I

tried in vain to recover the enthusiasm of my first inquiries,

the passion of discovery that had enabled me to compass even the

downfall of my father's grey hairs. Nothing seemed to matter. I saw

pretty clearly this was a transient mood, due to overwork and want

of sleep, and that either by drugs or rest it would be possible to

recover my energies.

"All I could think clearly was that the thing had to be carried

through; the fixed idea still ruled me. And soon, for the money I

had was almost exhausted. I looked about me at the hillside, with

children playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all

the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world.

After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of

strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed.

Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of

a man."

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

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

"I know the stuff."

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

with threats and inquiries, an old Polish Jew in a long grey coat

and greasy slippers. I had been tormenting a cat in the night, he

was sure--the old woman's tongue had been busy. He insisted on

knowing all about it. The laws in this country against vivisection

were very severe--he might be liable. I denied the cat. Then the

vibration of the little gas engine could be felt all over the

house, he said. That was true, certainly. He edged round me into

the room, peering about over his German-silver spectacles, and a

sudden dread came into my mind that he might carry away something

of my secret. I tried to keep between him and the concentrating

apparatus I had arranged, and that only made him more curious. What

was I doing? Why was I always alone and secretive? Was it legal?

Was it dangerous? I paid nothing but the usual rent. His had always

been a most respectable house--in a disreputable neighbourhood.

Suddenly my temper gave way. I told him to get out. He began to

protest, to jabber of his right of entry. In a moment I had him by

the collar; something ripped, and he went spinning out into his own

passage. I slammed and locked the door and sat down quivering.

"He made a fuss outside, which I disregarded, and after a time he

went away.

"But this brought matters to a crisis. I did not know what he

would do, nor even what he had the power to do. To move to fresh

apartments would have meant delay; altogether I had barely twenty

pounds left in the world, for the most part in a bank--and I

could not afford that. Vanish! It was irresistible. Then there

would be an inquiry, the sacking of my room.

"At the thought of the possibility of my work being exposed or

interrupted at its very climax, I became very angry and active. I

hurried out with my three books of notes, my cheque-book--the tramp

has them now--and directed them from the nearest Post Office to a

house of call for letters and parcels in Great Portland Street. I

tried to go out noiselessly. Coming in, I found my landlord going

quietly upstairs; he had heard the door close, I suppose. You would

have laughed to see him jump aside on the landing as 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.