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

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

"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."